Assorted Flavors

God continues to lead our church in a wonderful season of transition. Two recent sermons - The Power of One and Assorted Flavors - give a partial picture of what this transformation will look like. Learning to value and embrace Individuals and Individiuality as we help people connect to and grow in Christ. You can listen to the sermons online at www.rockag.org

***Below is a part of an email conversation I had with a friend that was spurred by a business article on Customer Service***

Great article and thought provoking questions to ask. Interesting to note how the very thing that businesses dread, financial downturn, is the very thing that can help them return to making the main thing the main thing.

In many ways I think churches face the same seasons and situations that bring them to the place to ask questions. I think the questions we must ask are different from the ones businesses must ask.
*Businesses at the heart are self motivated. That is the nature of business – to make a profit. . Obviously, customer satisfaction is a key component to business. Happy customers make return customers so it sounds good to have a slogan such as “customer’s first”, etc.
But the truth is the customer is not first, the business is first. All efforts to keep and retain customers and make them happy are driven by the unspoken goal of making the priority of the business, making a profit, first. It may appear selfless and not selfish driven
but the reality is the business world runs on profits. Nothing wrong with that in the business world; as long as there are ethics. We are suffering the consequences now of the selfish nature of business tippy toeing the border of ethics – financing homes people
couldn’t afford, loosening debt ratios, focusing on quantity rather than quality - All because of the driving need to keep the customer happy so they would continue to purchase which all means greater profits for the company which is the whole goal in the first place.
Obviously this is simplistic but I think all would agree that businesses fed off the lust for more they encouraged within the consumer with the effective marketing and advertising tools they utilized until finally we were eating our own young!
So businesses ask questions such as: 1. What can we do to get customer hits
2. How can we create a dissatisfaction in their current circumstance so that they will feel the need for our product to help?
3. How can we make our product look like the best way to satisfy the need they have
4. How can we keep them happy about their choice while we wait for them to be dissatisfied again so that we can start the process all over?
Thus as much as it may appear to be customer friendly it is still self centered, self motivated, self driven. Once again, this is not wrong in the business world unless taken to far.


*Churches are not supposed to run like businesses. If we are self motivated we are in error. On the flip side if we are “customer” motivated we are in error. We must be Christ focused and constantly asking what is Christ wanting us to do. What is Christ wanting us to be?
What is Christ wanting us to teach people?
-certainly these are not easy questions to answer. In fact I believe they are very difficult questions to answer because of the immense pressure we feel as humans to either please others or please ourselves. It can be very difficult to distinguish between the three at
times – pleasing Christ, pleasing ourselves, pleasing others. All of us of course want to feel like when we are pleasing ourselves we are pleasing God – it causes great discomfort to have to consider the alternative. Likewise I want to feel like when I am pleasing
people it is pleasing God – after all apparent success is much more self pleasing than apparent failure.

So to me the questions we must ask are:
1. What does Christ want us to be?
2. How can we effectively communicate that so that as many people as possible can fully understand it?
3. What are the God orchestrated steps, not mine or others, to take us to where He wants us?
4. Can I/we set aside our personal agendas, comfort, pride, preferences, opinions, desires, fears to follow?

I am convinced that Christ is leading us to an absolute transformation from within. To a people that are Experiencing Grace, Living life together and Sharing their faith outside the walls. This is a heart transformation not a program or budget one. This is deep waters, challenging the very fiber of who we are, why we do what we do, what we believe, what we value, what we will we deem “success” and “failure”.

Believers experiencing true freedom in Christ that manifests itself in authentic/transparent living with other believers producing a deep motivation of love to be the salt and light of the world is what I believe Christ is asking us to be. This places helping, challenging, equipping, releasing people to discover and fulfill their Eph. 2:10 good works over the benefit to our church or their own personal comfort.

For this I think we must rethink our measurement tools. Exactly what will those measurement tools be? For such a uniquely individual quest we are asking people to take it certainly raises some unique challenges.

This is why, at this season, I am simply asking our people to be willing to ask these questions that are very scary for some, frustrating to others, frivolous to still more, and exciting to others

I believe an unreached world is tired of seeing churches that despite what they say are still about themselves.

Darren

***I would love to hear comments & thoughts***