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Check Yourself – Part 5

We’ve been talking on Conversatio Morum about developing the ability to gauge how you’re doing, how your team is doing, and how effective you are at accomplishing your task. We’ve described this as a Check Yourself mentality. We’ve talked about several different ways to measure this, and why it’s important. You can see all the posts here. The final thing I want to discuss with this is the need to experiment. By this, I don’t mean, make uninformed decisions. What I mean is that there are always things to improve, things to tweak, better ways of doing things. Continue reading “Check Yourself – Part 5”

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Catching Up

Mood:  don’t ask
Now Reading:  “Intimacy” by Henry Nouwen
Topic: Rantings of a lunatic
Hmmm…so this is interesting. It’s been a while since I have updated this thing. Well, I have told people that once i get internet then I will update. So i’m updating. This last season was truly strange and new. To catch you up. I graduated, started leading a d-house, got a new job, started dating an old friend (If you read this, you should know that your pretty great.), raised up new leaders for a new lifegroup, got accepted to ATS, and took in a, basically, homeless guy. That’s most of it. Well, that’s a good catcher upper.
Just got done with our leader’s retreat for all the lifegroup leaders and interns. It was refreshing and good. I’m glad it was so…hmmm…what’s a good word? Oh!! Yeah! Refreshing! You know what? I’m refreshed.
Seriously though, it was good. We got to meet with Jesus and not have to lead. It’s good to get away and not have to lead for a day or so. I look forward to doing it again sometime soon. I think my next retreat will be on my own. We need some away from everyone also. Anywho, so now we have internet. So hi

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Check Yourself – Part 4

The last few weeks on Conversatio Morum we talked about having a check yourself mentality, what that means and why it’s important. You can read about that here, here, and here. Today I’d like to talk about another way to gauge this for your entire group. The Purpose driven movement has been well received in large, and at the same time has been given a lot of flack from certain parts of the church. With that being said, I do think that Rick Warren gives some great and practical thoughts on ministry. Specifically, when looking at the Purpose Driven Church the 5 purposes in purpose driven church are thermometer to help gauge how your church as a whole is doing. [tweet that]

If you’re unfamiliar with the 5 purposes listed by Warren and Saddleback, they are:

  1. Fellowship
  2. Discipleship
  3. Worship
  4. Ministry
  5. Evangelism

You can pull these purposes out of Acts 2:42-47 so they are rooted in scripture. Now, the question is how you begin to utilize them as a measurement for health and effectiveness. When you begin to think of the 5 purposes as a thermometer they begin to make more sense in terms of a metric to show health. The best way to view this is that each thermometer should be at the same level as a good gauge of health. On the other side of this coin, if you have an imbalance, that’s a good indicator of lack of health. For example, if evangelism is at a 8 and everything else is at a 3, your situation is like growing a 3-year-old with steroids. [tweet that] Not the greatest picture of health.

So part of the goal is to have each of the thermometers be at the same level. The other part of the goal is to have them go higher. You don’t want each purpose to be at the same level and that level be 0. The goal is to continually be growing in each of these areas and, on a scale of 0-10, have them all be at a 10.

This is a common tool used by some of the most effective church’s in our nation. Does this seem like a helpful measurement tool for you? Can you see the advantage of utilizing this tool to determine the health and growth of your congregation?