That’s the conference cycle, right?  Go to a conference or retreat, get all jazzed up, “meet God,” and then come home and change nothing.

Not this time.  This time is different.  Two weeks ago I was at Catalyst, and then last week I was in Chicago for Willow Creek’s Group Life Conference.  Catalyst inspired me, and Group Life taught me (and then inspired me).  And I’m never going to be the same again.

Real life has already set in.  In many ways I feel the same as I did before I left, but I’m determined to continue to seek the face of God, to continue to wake up early to spend time in prayer and in the Scriptures.  I’m determined to share the love of Jesus with others.

Plans I made have already been delayed, but I will continue to forge ahead.  And I MUST continue to seek God.

It’s not easy, but I want it.

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Main Session 5

Description: When community works—when it´s characterized by good health and a supportive environment—it can have a transformative effect on individuals, on churches, and within entire neighborhoods. Miles McPherson details the importance of a community–focused church, and the power of community to impact our entire culture.

Speaker’s Bio: Miles McPherson is the President of Miles Ahead, and is an internationally known speaker whose bold, down-to-earth, and humorous style has become his trademark. His relevant message challenges both the young and young-minded and often compels them to recalibrate their lives in light of the Gospel. McPherson achieved All-American honors in college football and went on to play as a defensive back for the San Diego Chargers. He earned an MDiv and is now Senior Pastor of The Rock Church in San Diego, where more than 11,000 people attend one of five weekend services. McPherson is the author of several books and articles, and in 2007 earned an Emmy Award for a documentary on methamphetamine.

Notes:

Before you and I were ever born, before your group was ever created, before your ministry was ever started, before the beginning of the world, God had a plan for you, and it was a lot more than a Bible study in a room.  God has something more for you than a Bible study in a room.

We moved into a new church building about 14 months ago.  Then the San Diego fires started.  We had this great new building, and we weren’t doing anything with it during the fires.  1/6 of the people in the area had been evacuated.  500,000 people were being evacuated.  We decided we had to open up the building as a shelter, but we didn’t have any supplies.  We sent out a text message, and for 13 hours people brought stuff in.  We had doctors and lawyers, clowns, rooms full of stuff, a petting zoo, and 12 evacuees.  Every evacuee had like 150 people serving them.  We had evacuees walking around shopping carts taking stuff to their cars.

So someone got this briliant idea, why don’t we become a distribution center.  Carloads started going out to the places where there were fires and distributing goods.  We sent out flyers telling people they could come stay at our church.

How come Christians are not lining up to to recruit people to run from the fire?  There are people going to hell, and our churches look like Christian country clubs

• Redefine your evangelism starting point as God’s response to a broken world.
  We define evangelism as going and telling someone what they should believe so they can be like us.  Lets squash that.  Let’s turn it around.  Let’s say that the Gospel is not propositional truth.  Romans 3:23 is true.  Jesus did rise from the dead.  That is true, but the Gospel is an experience with Jesus, an experience with a person.  So evangelism is sharing your relationship with Jesus with another person.
  Exodus 3 – I have seen the oppression of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry.
  Your community, your people are crying, and God has sent us to respond to the cries, not to huddle together.  We huddle together to get our marching orders.  If we fail to respond to the cries, we fail to serve our purpose.
  People are crying.  Sin brings death.  Death brings tears.  Whether they like they’re sin, whether they’re doing it intentionally, their sin will bring tears.
  We need to listen to their cries rather than tell them what to do.  If we don’t listen, we don’t know what to say.
  When Jesus said to remember Him, He said take communion, remember his pain.
• Identify God’s response to the brokenness of your own life.
  You know what the danger of walking with God for a long time is?  We get this feeling we are fixed.  We think if we teach others enough information, they can be fixed like us.
  I found a movie theater that charges $35, and then you can pay to use the bar, order food, etc.  They’re selling experience.
  What is your God experience?  Certainly God is working out something in your life.  If you don’t know that, if your group doesn’t know that forget evangelism, forget impacting anybody.  God is trying to transform you.  Forget being who God wants you to be.  Why is God doing this?  It’s not so you can be Joe Christian.
  1 Cor 1:3-4 – God comforts us in all tribulation, so that you may be able to comfort those in any trouble.
  Let the head stuff come later.  Let it be about life.  Your group is a breeding ground of people who are going through stuff.
• Identify and love the brokenness of those in your church.
  Find the brokenness that God has fixed in you and minister to those people.
  We have a 21 year old girl in our church who is on the street every single day ministering to the homeless.  She takes them to her house.  They sleep on her couch.  They sleep on her floor.  They sleep in her yard.  Why?  Because her heart is broken.
• Identify and love the brokennes in your community.
  Within 10 miles of our church, there are 12 abortion clinics, 17 bookstores, 34 drug treatment centers, 7 homeless shelters, 12 battered women shelters, 280 liquor stores, and 58 escort services and strip clubs.  Every one of these places exist because people are crying.  We need to be caring for these people.  The church is saying “We’re over here.  Jesus died for you.”  The only thing that travels faster than light is darkness running away.  Instead of trying to blast our message, why don’t we listen and open our hearts.  Why don’t we go to the bar and drive home drunk people.
  The people who started the ministries in our church are just turning around the healing that God has given them and offering it to others.
  The community is out there waiting to partner with you.  They really want it, but you have to initiate it.
• Reestablish your evangelistic priority
  The Church is the only institution God created that is designed for the people who aren’t in it yet.  When Jesus died he didn’t die for the righteous.  He died for the sinners.
  God gave you overflow for you to give away.  He didn’t give it to you for you.  God has not given you that big old house for you.  He gave it so you can bless somebody else.
  There’s a guy on a church that looks like Opie.  I found out the other day that he used to be in the Crips.  I told him I wanted him to take me into the hood and meet the people there.
  Let me tell you what will kill your ministry and your small group, keeping it to yourself.  Worry about pushing people, transparency, being transparent.  Let me tell you what won’t kill your ministry.  Doing exactly what God told you to do.

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Main Session 4

Description: Why do some community initiatives fly and others fall flat? Bill Donahue investigates how certain strategies flounder, the missing essentials that can lead to their failure, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. Or if you´ve made them already, learn how you can get back on your feet.

Speaker’s Bio: Bill Donahue’s passion for helping churches develop leaders through small groups led him to Willow Creek in 1992. Bill is currently the Executive Director of Group Life for the Willow Creek Association. Prior to that, he served on the staff of Willow Creek Community Church for six years, helping launch and develop the church-wide small group ministry. He was also leader of the Couples Ministry, Director of the Willow Creek Institute, and headed the Leadership Training Department. Bill has a Ph.D. in Adult Education from the University of North Texas, a Master’s in Biblical Studies from Dallas Seminary, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Princeton University. He and his wife, Gail, have two children, Ryan and Kinsley.

Bill is the co-author (with Russ Robinson) of Building a Church of Small Groups, The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Group Ministry and Walking the Small Group Tightrope.

Notes:

Good ideas, great strategies, and our best laid plans can turn out to be disasters.  Sometimes we think we’re being creative or revolutionary, but we just end up being stupid.

We have a saying around Willow Creek, the only thing worse than no drama is bad drama.

Sometimes we make decisions out of selfish resasons that stem from selfishness, pride or insecurity.  We recruit a willing person instead of waiting for the best person.  We’re looking for the next big idea instead of waiting for the still, small voice.  Paul told Timothy to look out for people who are rash, conceited and lovers off pleasure rather than lovers of God.

But sometimes we fail after doing things for the right reasons, and that’s harder.  We’ve prayed, we’ve worked hard, we just have to chalk it up to, “Well, it’s a fallen world, and it’s fallen on me.”

2 years after I became a Christian I decided to start a group.  I worked hard to make it work.  I had 3 other guys who were my core group.  Within 6 weeks, that group of 4 burst forth into the huge number of 1.  I did everything right.  We started on time, ended on time, didn’t do any small talk, we got down to business.  I realized what I had on my hand was a group of losers.  The Holy Spirit informed me that wasn’t the case.  I’ve often thought about writing a book, “How to turn your small group into a quiet time in just 6 sessions.”

What do we do when our group fails?  How do we learn from failure in ministry and leadership.

Four reasons things fail:

• An obsession with vision while ignoring reality
  You begin to evaluate, and you get around visionary people, get feedback.  You see how you’re doing after 6 months.  You start telling stories about success, but it’s all about the same person.  It’s like you’re trying to cultivate an orchard, and you focus on one tree.
  You ignore feedback.  Bonhoeffer: If you love your dream for community more than the community itself, it will fail.
• Implementing a strategy without building an infrastructure
  Campaigns can be amazing things.  A lot of people tried a 40 day approach to something to generate energy, but if it’s a strategy without a structure, it can be 40 days of purpose followed by 40 weeks of chaos.  You can’t just do that and slap a bunch of groups together.  No one knows why you gather, who to call if there’s a crisis.  People will just sit there week after week in a stupor.  It happens at the small group level as well.
• Empowering leaders without developing them
  Small group leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure that we get developed, to ask our leaders to provide it, to tell them where we feel weak and where we need help.
  Point Leaders, it is our responsibility to make sure that small group leaders are equipped.
  Sometimes you need a “grouper scooper” to clean up a mess in groups, but we probably caused it by not supporting our leaders.
  Groups can be led by 4 different things: process (like 12 step), values (gathering to pray for our kids in college), curriculum (tells you what to say, when to say it, etc.), and a leader.  I happen to think when you put all four together, you have a great thing, but the leader is the most important part.
• Launching groups that never really learn to become communities
  It was based on an assumption that if you place people in a circle, they know how to be a community.  You know that right?  That first meeting when everyone arrives and they’ve never experienced good community before in the past, and we say things like, “Be open.  Be vulnerable.”  Very few people who have grown up in our individualistic culture know how to live in redemptive community.
  We had to develop some group training material after developing our leader training material.  Part of what we have to train people to do is to learn how to have relationships again.
  Anyone can start a group, but who will help them become a community?  That’s you.  That’s your responsibility.

How you respond when you have failed really matters?

You have to admit that some of our failures are the result of something darker, pride, etc.  If this is the problem, we just need to own that.  Before God and all of those who are affected by it, we need to apologize.  If we’re willing to name reality, people are willing to respond and often with grace.  People just want us to own that.  They know we’re going to make mistakes.

That’s the easy part.  The harder part is often forgiving ourselves.  Our relationship with ourselves was fractured in the Fall.  We ask ourselves, is there really hope for me?  I failed again.  Why didn’t I follow up and pray for that person?  Why didn’t I call them?  Why am I a leader?  I shouldn’t be a leader.

What you want is the same thing that your people want.  If you feel desparate sometimes and need hope, that’s what your people need as well.  They need hope.  When people come together in groups with their battered souls and weary bodies, they ask themselves, “Is this the day I will find hope?  Maybe this is the day I will find wisdom, the strength to confront my addiction, that someone will show me love.  Will someone see my heart today?”  Jesus knew we needed community.  He called the 12 together, and it wasn’t just a good idea, it was a great idea, the best idea, that Jesus would come to be with us.  Christ is our hope, the anchor of our soul, and he wants us to be hope filled people.

Erwin McManus: Faith is about conviction, but hope is about confidence.

We need a theology of failure that says God can go back and redeem those failures.  The story of the Bible is a failure story into which God has stepped and redeemed it.

I needed to fail in that first group.  Sometimes when a leader is away, they learn to turn to Christ.  That’s the point.  There’s a ministry of absence, and sometimes we can only experience that in failure.  It teaches people that their trust must be in Jesus and not in a leader who was imperfect.

We think failure is fatal, but there is hope.  There is hope in Jesus Christ who is the anchor of our soul.  I want you to leave this conference hope-filled, not just hopeful.

A few weeks ago I started a small group.  You never know when God is going to show up.  We had been reading some material about expectations, about hope.  One of the men shared how he hoped God would redeem some of the mistakes he had made as a father.  He had that look in his eyes like, “I hope it will change.”  There was a guy across the circle who had his head down.  His son had leukemia for the last five years.  He struggled with alcohol.  He goes to an AA meeting at least once a day.  I watched another man share how he had struggled with a season of infertility.  Years ago they adopted a son, and later met the birth mother out of the blue.  And the adoptive family was worried they would lose their son, and was able to speak hope into the man’s life.  Two other men were quiet.  Another man got an e-mail from his daughter who had a friend killed in an accident a few months ago.  The e-mail said, “Thanks for teaching me to pray through hardship.”  A man across the circle, the CEO of a $100 million company has a daughter with chronic pain.  He looked across at a man and said that your son met my daughter at college and ministered to her.

I realized that people want and need to be connected to hope.  That’s your job.  That’s your priveledge and opportunity.

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Breakout D

Description: Leading leaders can become a lonely calling, but can it be less lonely when pursued within a synergetic team? Discover the Mosaic strategy of coaching and caring for small group leaders through the use of MPAC teams.

Speaker’s Bio: Dave Auda is a Pastor of Developers at Mosaic in Los Angeles, C.A. He has served in this dynamic community of faith, love, and hope for over 30 years. Dave has helped pioneer and champion Small Group communities since 1977. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California Baptist University, and a Master of Theological Studies from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He is husband to Tamra, and father to four daughters, Sarah, Ruthi, Rebekah, and Deborah. His superhero identity at Mosaic is “Adrenalin”. His ministry and life motto is “Excel still more!”

Notes:

Two of five core values at Mosaic: 1) Mission is why the Church exists. Love is the context for all mission.

Jesus accomplished a lot of things in his earthly ministry.

• Miraculous healing
• Raised the dead
• Fed the 5,000
• Obeyed the Father
• Taught/led a team
• Lived a life that we’re supposed to model
• Cast out demons

There are a lot of things that we can’t emulate instantly, but Luke 19:10 encapsulates why Jesus came, to seek and save the lost.  That was Jesus’ primary objective, and as he was working toward this, he obtained a lot of collateral blessing.

Living out the the Great Commandment and carrying out the Great Commission.  That’s why we have small groups.  That’s what we get a chance to be: life savers.  It’s exciting to sit at Starbucks and hear stories of transformed lives.

Today I want to talk a little bit about how we at Mosaic care for and mobilize our small group leaders.

We discovered that the Leader Standing Alone model didn’t work.  I was having too many conversations with good people who wanted to step down, to quit, to be let go.  There wasn’t commonality among the people who were saying this.  It wasn’t just one type of person/leader.

Leaders had different skills, and instead of trying to train an individual in multiple things, which they may not be good at, why don’t we just team together multiple people.

God reveals Himself as a team, different roles, aspects, same God.  Different approaches, same mission.

Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one.  A person standing alone can be attacked and be defeated, but two standing back to back can be attacked an conquered.  Three are even better because a triple braided cord is not easily broken.

This is just a model.  It is not normative.

There are things that core team coaching can accomplish that are superior to other models.

It minimizes burnout of coaches and small group leaders.  You’re not calling the coach to draw from a well that they don’t have, and it doesn’t require small group leaders to be coached by someone with whom they don’t connect.  It minimizes blind spots.

It maximizes spiritual gifts and strengths. As proverbs says, two is better than one and three is even better than two.

It expands the coaching capacity of each of the individual coaches.  In some models an isolated coach is expected to cast vision and mission to anywhere from 8-15 leaders.  In some contexts the numbers even go higher.  At Mosaic, we have a coaching team that oversees 25-35 small group leaders.

It’s a whole lot more fun to serve others with others than to serve others alone.

There are also some downsides to this model.

Like any type of relationship/bonding thing you do, there is a honeymoon period after a coaching core team comes together, but then they hit a reality wall.  All of the sudden there is conflict on the team.  They work together well on their best moments, but their best moments aren’t 24×7.  You have to help them work through these things.  At the other end of it you end up with a team of people that grow to depend on one another (interdependency, not codependency).

The styles of leadership are not evenly dispersed among the Body of Christ.  You don’t have an equal number of each leadership style within the community.  Generally speaking, you’ll have about 50% of your leaders who are pastors, about 40% who are assimilators, and maybe 10% who are catalysts.  A disclaimer in regards to catalysts: they don’t usually play well with others.  They’re your mavericks.  They’re self-motivated, self-driven, self-correcting and don’t have a lot of time to deal with people who aren’t.  They are going to be actively doing leading catalyzing, changing things.  Generally speaking, church leadership structures are not friendly, warm environments for catalytic leaders. Look in places that you wouldn’t think to look for catalytic leaders.  They might be leading your pre-school ministry, but probably not.  You want to look for leaders in other environments outside of church.  You want to look for marginalized, focused people who are trying to do something.  You want to look for zealots.  They may not be doing something actually significant, but they believe they are.  That’s why they’re doing it.

These core teams are used in all ministries, not just small groups.

Coaches meet with each other every other month, and with their small group leaders on the off months.

People rarely fit cleanly into one of the three categories, but there’s bleed over.  Sometimes you find the most catalytic person you can and help them develop their catalytic side.

Core team doesn’t only get involved when there’s a problem.  They’re also in a supportive role.

The small group leaders are trained through involvement in groups, developmental mentoring within small groups.  The supplemental level is that we provided a 101 class every other month.

Some of our groups are open-ended and continue to exist.  Some are semester groups.  Most are open, but some are closed (such as recovery groups).

We don’t force coaching on anyone, but people want it.

What are Mosaic’s qualifications for small group leaders?  Before we jsut launched 200 groups, I could answer this very well.  At Mosaic we have our volunteer staff process.  Most congregations have a membership process.  Everyone who comes to Mosaic is a member.  We’re here to love you, care for you, serve you, teach you, etc.  Once you’re in, if you want to move into the inner core, you come on volunteer staff.  They apply to that process.  It’s a rather rigorous process, but at the end of being commississioned, you have the keys of the kingdom.  You can be connected to any area of ministry at which you can be connected.  If you have not done that, there are still many areas of ministry that you can be connected, you just can’t take an oversight position over people.  What about small group leaders that aren’t on volunteer staff.  Basically, everyone can lead a small group based on relational influence.  You can have as many groups/clubs as you want based on how many people you can get to show up.  It’s a fairly low bar of training but a high bar of relational influence.  The only groups that we would post on our website or have on our kiosk at the small groups ministry table are groups that are led by people on volunteer staff.

What kind of a process of training or experience do you walk your core team members through?  I wish I could tell you that I have a 300 page highly structured manual.

Our coaches may or may not lead small groups.

The system is organic.  It’s like a marriage.  The division of roles and responsibilities isn’t set in stone.

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Breakout C

Description: A leader’s ability to ask great questions is key to a small group’s success. It leads to evocative storytelling, dynamic opinions, captivating discussions, and personal transparency. Learn the art of asking great questions, and the importance of listening to the answer.

Speaker’s Bio: Willow Creek’s key evangelism leader since 1992, Garry Poole is an innovator in seeker small groups and an outreach strategist. Passionate about reaching people for Christ, Garry and his team have trained thousands of leaders to launch seeker small groups in their own settings. His award-winning book, Seeker Small Groups, provides a detailed blueprint for facilitating small group discussions that assist spiritual seekers with investigating Christianity. He also wrote The Complete Book of Questions, a collection of 1001 conversation starters, and The Three Habits of Highly Contagious Christians, a small group discussion guide to equip believers in effectively sharing their faith. Garry is the primary author of Tough Questions, a best-selling series of seven study guides, along with a leader’s guide, designed to get small groups discussing answers to major objections to the Christian faith. He authored (with Lee Strobel) Experiencing the Passion of Jesus to accompany Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. In 2005, it became the first discussion guide ever to receive the prestigious Charles “Kip” Jordon Christian Book of the Year award. Garry lives in suburban Chicago and consults on seeker small groups at churches around the world.

Notes:

What are your expectations from this workshop?

Do you learn best by hearing yourself talk or hearing others talk? Studies show that if you remember what you say better than what others say.  If you are forced to articulate something you learn better.

At your table, decide which of these 2 questions you want your table to discuss: 1) What are the benefits of asking great questions? 2) What makes great questions great? (What are the dos and don’ts behind asking great questions?)

What makes great questions great? (My Group’s Answers:)

• Must be an open-ended question or make people think.
• A great question must be contextually appropriate.

Other groups’ answers to Question 1:

• It builds intimacy.
• Self-discovery and sense of achievement.
  A good question will go a little bit deeper than a yes or no answer.
• Builds relationships
• Used as an icebreaker
• Promotes authenticity
• Promotes better discussioni
• Helps people to discover something on their own.  It promotes critical thinking.
• Provide clarity
• Has an entry point for everyone in the group.
• Builds trust
• You can get to the root of an issue.
• It can weed out those who are interrogating you inauthentically.

Other groups’ answers to Question 2:

• Non-confrontational, non-embarrasing, non-judgmental
• Appropriate to the level of relationship
• A question that causes someone to have an epiphany
• Lead to truth
• Leads to more conversation/discussion, keeps conversation flowing
• Challenges beliefs that people come to the table with
• Ask open-ended questions

Gary had us ask another person questions for a few minutes.  Then we switched roles with that person.

• Learned a great deal about the person.
• Sometimes we ask a person questions so that we have the opportunity to tell the other person about ourselves.
• It went from being intimidating to interesting.  You weren’t sure what to ask.
• Sometimes asking questions isn’t about you; it’s about the other person.  It’s a way to serve the other person.
• If you keep asking questions, you don’t have to do much talking.  Great for introverts!
• Can be hard to ask questions of someone you know very well.  Forced to think “What don’t I know about this person?”  Better to do this than ask leading questions?
• If you ask open ended questions, the answer will lead you to other questions.
• Great to pair an extrovert with an introvert
• Can be riskier to ask a question of someone you know well.  You have to go somewhere.
• The person asking the questions gained the right to speak into the other person’s life.

People deeply want to be understood.  When evangelizing, don’t preach, ask questions and listen. Non-Christians want to talk if they can find a Christian who will listen.

Great questions build relationships, help people go deeper, provide clarity, build trust, make you a better listener, helps you learn what people are passionate about.

Hopefully this goes from intimidating to interesting and makes you think.

People are only going to answer questions that they are comfortable answering.

Allow people the space to take the time to risk.

Focusing on the speaker (rather than yourself) leads to learning.

The process of sharing sparked others.

The best questions are the ones you don’t know the answers to.

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Breakout B

Description: How do people come to Jesus in today’s postmodern culture? Over the last decade, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp have listened to the stories of two thousand postmodern people who have come to follow Jesus. While the stories are diverse and varied, certain common themes emerge, which they describe in their new book, I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus. Come hear Don give an overview of the “Five Thresholds” that most postmodern skeptics cross on their way to faith in Jesus.

Speaker’s Bio: Don Everts recently began serving as Minister of Outreach at Bonhomme Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, after working with university students for over 14 years as a campus staff worker and Area Director with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. A poet and preacher at heart, Don speaks at conferences and churches across the country inviting skeptics and believers alike to gaze at the person of Jesus and be thrilled. Don has written nine books, including Jesus with Dirty Feet, God in the Flesh, and the One Guy’s Head Series of postmodern apologetics. His latest book, co-authored with Doug Schaupp, is I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus.

My deepest hope for our time together is that I might be the bearer of stories of people who were once jaded and far from God but now know Jesus.

Notes:

Evangelism as we understood it didn’t work after the postmodern shifts in the early 90s.  Everyone in campus ministry was experimenting.

Doug Schaupp was one of the people who just started trying anything.  Over the next decade they saw around 2000 new believers come to Christ in a group of SoCal colleges.  But these weren’t just people who raised their hands.  They were people who went on to become foreign missionaries, lead inner city churches, etc.

They started asking questions about the postmodern path to faith.  People would tell their stories about how they came to faith.  They would tell the whole story.  They would do informal interviews with people who had made it the whole way?   What happened to you?

They found a surprising consensus among the people.  They didn’t come in with some academic theory or preconceptions.

• Mysterious
  How did God know them that well?  Every one of them you couldn’t have thought out ahead of time.
• Organic
  It tended to grow from small to medium to large.  It tended to progress in a certain way.
• There appeared consistent themes in the stories.  People went through similar stages.

They started writing some white papers on this.  They circulated them around the world to try to find out if this held true everywhere.  They expected not to.  They were skeptical.  These were people who were skeptical among everything.

Growth is organic

Parables

• Parable of the soils: How growth happens differently given the context
• Parable of the growing seed: How things grow
  Mark 4
  The farmer spreads seeds and then goes to sleep.  Then there’s green stuff.
  Growth is mysterious.  We don’t exactly understand why it happens.
  I used to think that people coming to Christ was psychological.  If you argue it just right, if you do it just right, people will come to faith.
  Jesus says it’s mysterious.  It’s soul deep.  It’s bone deep.  It involves the emotions and the body, and a bunch of other things, but it’s also mysterious.
  But, Jesus also says that workers gather the harvest once it’s ripe.  It grows over time.
  I used to think conversion is binary.  My most nuanced painting of someone was “you’re a Christian” or “you’re not a Christian.” If conversion is binary, then evangelism is awkward, because everytime we’re together, my only goal is to flip the switch, but Jesus says what are you talking about?  First there’s a little green, then there’s more green.  Then there comes a time when the harvest is right.  If conversion is organic, then evangelism gets to serve people where they’re at.
• Parable of the Mustard Seed: Exponential growth

That’s what we asked our friends, what was your story.

Five Thresholds

• Trusting a Christian
  I met with a guy named Matthew who grew up with an atheist and Hindu as parents, and he distrusted Christians.  But I met with him, and he trusted me.
  He didn’t understand why I would want to live among the poor and serve them with a pregnant wife and baby son.  I told him that’s what Jesus said we should do.  Somewhere in that conversation he became interested about Jesus.
• Wondering about Jesus
  I gave him a Bible and asked him to read Mark.  He came back and said, you know Christians are nothing like Jesus.  He loved Jesus.  People always do.  Jesus is much more interested than we are.  So I asked him if he would like to get together with me, so we met weekly to study the Scriptures.  After a while I felt like I was running in sand.  He was interested in Jesus, but he wasn’t open to change in his life.  Matthew told me one time: I’ve never met a Christian who has something I don’t have.  He was at this place where he was open to change.  He didn’t have any holy dissatisfaction.
  Two things happened in his life.  He started getting in fistfights with his roommate.  Second, I started sharing about my summer.  I came back with these intimate relationships with these poor people.  He told me that he had been thinking about what I was saying and said that he never had anything like that.  He finally became open to change in his life.  He became aware that Jesus might have something he was missing.
• Opening up to Change
  This was a subtle thing, but he would only get together with me when I initiated it.  He wasn’t seeking God actively.  He was just meandering.  He wasn’t seeking.  He wasn’t looking for final answers.
  We met to study one cold night, and I didn’t want to be there.  But he finally asked me, “How can you know?”  Out of sin and just wanting to go home I just said, I don’t know, why don’t you ask him?  He told me he didn’t believe in God.  I’ll be honest, that was just out of sin and wanted to go home.  I told him that if God wasn’t real, then he wouldn’t get an answer.
  I met with Matthew a while later, and he was acting strange, and finally he told me he got an answer.  God redeemed me not willing to be with him.
• Seeking after God
  (There was a subtle difference between people who were meandering towards God and those who were on a quest.)
  Somewhere in there he started seeking God.  I missed this.  It was somewhere over Christmas break.
• Entering the Kingdom
  (There came a moment when the harvest was ripe, when people wanted in, when they wanted Jesus as their Lord and Savior.)
  Finally he got baptized.

Matthew’s faith grew over time.  It’s always mysterious.  Story after story people shared, and people crossed these thresholds in this order.

• Trusting a Christian
  Moving from distrust to trust
  Skepticism is part of the DNA these days.  We’re not on a level playing field.  We’re in a hole.
  They don’t trust the Church, but they begin to trust one believer.
  We must avoid knee-jerk reactions to distrust.  It’s hard when someone distrusts you.
• Wondering about Jesus
  Moving from apathy to curiosity
  Some people still hate Jesus, but mostly they don’t care.  All they’ve done is interact with stereotypes and caricatures of Jesus.
  They became Jesus fans, and it’s okay to celebrate that.
  People think more globally.  They don’t ask the modernist question of “How does this affect me?” They ask “How does this affect the world?”
  We used to have people come over our house and weep about the environment.  You could dismiss that, but it’s not about individuality.  Perhaps that is the beginning of their regeneration, mourning corporate sin.
  If there’s someone who trusts you but isn’t interested in Jesus, keep talking about Him.
  Live Curiously – Matthew was interested in Jesus because he saw me do something strange.
  Most of the language we use doesn’t help clarify Jesus or help people understand Jesus.  We need to stop using Christian cliches.  After my first book I had someone write me and ask me if I was a Christian because I didn’t describe my relationship with Christ in cliched ways.  I actually used more biblical language.  We should not force non-Christians to stretch and strain and translate to understand what we’re saying.
• Opening up to Change
  Moving from closed to open
  This is the hardest threshold.  Most people get stuck here.  People don’t like change.
  One thing we recommend is patience and prayer.
  The other thing is to challenge as Jesus challenged.  He reached people where they were.  He touched the hurting.  He shoved those wallowing in self-pity.
• Seeking after God
  Moving from meandering to seeking
  I used to call every non-Christian a seeker, but then I realized that very few non-Christians are actually seeking.
  Many of them will ask questions, but they may not be actually seeking.  They ask questions because they have learned that it is a safe expected way to relate to a Christian, but it doesn’t mean they are seeking.  I used to have a friend who did this, and one day I asked him if this was just a game to him.  He said yes.
  People who are seeking don’t just want to have answers to questions.  They want to come to conclusions.
  There are ways we can help people:
  Live out the Kingdom of God in front of people.  This way it’s not just theoretical questions.  Invite people to see the Kingdom.  I don’t know why we don’t bring more non-Christians on mission trips.
  Part of living out the Kingdom is to model seeking.  I was studying John 1 with a buddy.  The first time we did it, I gave him pens and asked him to mark it up.  The Bible is a weird thing to non-Christians, two columns per page, onion paper, books with ribbons.  A little while in he asked me what I was doing.  I said I was studying the passage.  He assumed I already knew it.  I told him I did, but that the Scripture is so deep and I gain more from it each time.
  We need to create safe places for seeking.  Seeker service is a pair of words we’re all familiar with. It is possible to create places where it’s safe to seek.
  There’s a difference between guiding seekers but still doing church, whereas seeker sensitive is changing the content for them for it’s safe.  We find that that for people at threshold four, translating rather than stripping content is more helpful.
  How do you do apologetics these days.  Most apologists are from the modern era with solid concrete answers.  These days it’s about experience, subjective point of view, community, the globe, and skepticism.  When someone asks you a question, the last thing to do is answer the question, mostly because that’s not their real question or there are reasons behind it.
  ATTIC
  • Affirm – Mo matter how dumb, affirm their question.  Do you want them to ask more questions?  Affirm their first question.
  • Translate – Translate the question into your life.  Don’t just check the argument bank for the right answer.
  • Transparent – In your answer, be vulnerable, admit mystery.  Be honest about what you know and what you don’t.
  • Insert Yourself as a Case Study – Insert yourself as a case study.  If someone asks if there’s a difference between Buddhism and Christianity, don’t just make an argument, use an example from your own life.
  • Challenge – Challenge them in their own life
• Entering the Kingdom
  Lost to saved
  If someone is at the 5th threshold, it is appropriate to be urgent.  It is exhausting to seek, to hold up in the air your entire worldview.
  It is helpful when we are clear but don’t oversimplify.  There is a line, what will happen when I become a Christian.
  It’s unfair to people’s process if you make it all about people’s lives, but then oversimplify what Christianity about.
  James Choung’s book

It’s indicting if you have someone in your life who doesn’t trust a Christian.

I don’t know how this works with the model, but for people who are saved at a young age, there’s a process of backfilling that happens.  They have questions that they never asked because they didn’t have them.  They’re not centered on Jesus.  They may not trust Christians.  It’s confusing for them because they’re asking themselves if it took.

Relationships are messy. Projects are easy, so when it comes to evangelism we have a tendency to make people projects rather than relationships.  Person after person who have come to faith have said that it is because people have come alongside them.

This model:

Can help you ask questions of people that are appropriate.

Can help you figure out what type of “seeker” event your’e having.  People who just trust Christians need a different event than those who are seeking after God.  Are we having spiritual awakening types of events.  Alpha is great for people in steps 3-5.

There’s a fellowship in SoCal that’s well trained in these 5 steps.  WorldVision has an AIDS experience tent that the fellowship runs.  After the presentation they have a quick conversation with people.  They have 5 different color index cards representing the 5 different stages and ask people to fill it out.  They follow up based on what color card the person is on.

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Breakout A

Description: This generation doesn’t play church. Shattered and broken, this generation responds only to the unfiltered love of Jesus, delivered with authenticity via communities on mission. Willow’s Axis Community has seen more than 100 postmoderns come to faith in Christ over the last two year. Join a dialogue and gain insight on the breakthroughs that facilitated those transformations.

Speaker’s Bio: Jon Peacock has been on staff at Willow Creek Community Church for 4 years, first as a division leader with the Sports Ministry, then as a Community Pastor in Neighborhood Life. In the fall of 2006 Jon was hand-picked to lead the re-vitalized Axis Ministry. With the role Ministry Director of the Axis Community Jon provides strategic oversight, teaching, and the development of his staff. Jon was raised in the Chicago suburbs. His college experience included playing Division One baseball at both the University of Kentucky and Illinois State, where he excelled on the field and not so much in the classroom. He’s addicted to Americano’s and wakeboarding in the summer. Jon is married to Kelly Peacock, and as most say “he’s completely out-kicked his coverage”, Jon emphatically agrees.

Notes:

Without vision, people perish.

Without vision this generation will perish.  I think they already are.  I think we’re up against a huge mountain.

My dad was a senior pastor.  I grew up in a good church.  There were a lot of great things about it.  I went to college and played sports, and that’s when my life went in a whole other way.

I went back home and there was nothing for me at church.  I made a lot of bad choices as a freshman and there were no answers at church.  They didn’t speak my language, and they didn’t care about me.

Near the end of college I graduated, and God rescued me out of a lot of things.  I went back home and started a ministry with some friends for people our age.

What is your vision.  What are you driving towards?  What are our ministries moving towards.

The vision for Axis – Known by love, live by faith, and bring hope into a broken world.

What’s your vision?  Have you prayed through this, searched the Scriptures, thought about this?

You’ve got to know where you’re going.  You’ve got to have your destination figured out.  Otherwise you’ll confuse a lot of activity with progress.

“Current Reality” – this can be very painful.  Where is your church/ministry right now?

What is the current reality of the church and this generation (18-30) overall.

Americans in college/20s are least likely to attend church.  3 of 10 attend church weekly (compared with 4 of 10 for 30s and 5 of 10 for 40s and up).  There is a 42% dropoff between 18-25.  5x% by the age of 29.  That represents 8 million people.  If that doesn’t mess you up, we’ve got other issues.

52% of freshman entered college attending services, 29% of juniors.

Only 4% of those in their 20s are serving in their local church.  They feel overlooked.

College students are extremely prone to emotional disorders.  There are more counseling centers on campus than ever before.

We all have individual contextual things, but this is the reality for all of us.

Have you ever had one of these mornings where nothing works out?  About 6 months ago I woke up late, was totally dissheveled.  I’m a huge fan of the bean.  I drink a lot of coffee.  I wake up, run to the kitchen, make some coffee, about to run to the shower, get a shower, get my clothes on, get my hair done, go to get my coffee.  There is coffee everywhere.  It’s all over the counter, the floor, spilling over everywhere.

I let the coffee cool and then went over to look at what I had done.  I put cinammon in the grounds because I like that, but when you put too much cinnamon in the grounds it clogs the filter and overflows.

We were designed to receive the love of God.  He has this abundance of love that he wants to pour out on us.

God has key streams through which he wants to pour out his love. Those streams have been blocked. There’s too much cinnamon.

• Church (and by this I mean weekend church services)
  • Blocks to this stream
    • A polished, perfect program with no room for God to work.
    • Lack of trust – 20s just don’t trust.
    • Come and see – Come and check us out just doesn’t work anymore. Quit trying to impress them. They can get it on YouTube. They can go to the Coldplay concert. Admitting this is hard. I’m a big advocate for when the body comes together in a big group God will move in a way that he won’t with a group of 5.
  • Solutions
    • Trust – get people to trust the church. If you’re not careful your ministry can become toxic. Even people who are already Christians can question. Try to build trust within the senior leadership in your church. People have been burned by authority before.
• Family
  • Blocks
    • Person after person I meet is from a broken home. My retreat for Axis staff/volunteers had around 18 people. We had everyone sit around and share their lives. By the time it got around to me, there were only two other people besides myself (one of them being my wife) that came from a healthy home, Three of us. From 1960 to 1980 the divorce rate grew by 300%
    • Intergenerational discipling isn’t happening.
  • Solutions
    • Taking the time to hear people’s stories. This sounds so basic, but people need to be reminded of that. We get busy and don’t listen to people’s stories. When you uncover people’s brokenness, you can do something about it.
    • Intergenerational mentoring – maybe an eigth of our community expereinces this.
    • Encouraging people to seek reconciliation with their parents. Friends in Axis in AA say that the making amends step is the most powerful. This encourages people to take on a mentoring mindset rather than a victim mindset.
• Groups
  • Blocks
    • Facebook – Facebook can be a good tool, but it isn’t community. We’re not taking the mask off. You can be who you want to be instead of who you are
    • We create groups that are spiritual nurseries, spiritual care centers, but they’re not changing anything in the city.
    • Credibility – Church people have no credibility.  Pastors cheating on their wives, stealing money, etc.
  • Solutions
    • Mission – Train up leaders to mobilize their neighborhood. Want groups to be cause driven not care driven. When I say that to people, they think I’m cold, but when you have a community that’s wrapped around the Kingdom of God, they’re going to be cared for and experience more care than anyone else. People will reconcile their disagreements because they see that there’s too much at stake.
    • Empowering Leaders – High accountabilty, Low control. Remember 4% of 20s are involved in the church. Would you want to be involved in something that you have no voice in? Train them, don’t empower them before training them. I probably empower them to a fault. God’s teaching me not to do that. Make sure they’re on the right track before you empower them, but then do that. Get down in the trenches with your leaders and know their stories so that you can empower them

Audience Comment: Get in the schools. I substitute teach and see where the pain is, the drugs, the sex.

Audience Question: What do you teach?

Answer: Talk a lot about Jesus. Teach the Sermon on the Mount all of the time. We have to bring this generation into a much bigger story about subverting the kingdom of this world. Try to get people to understand the Bible. I talk about Jesus as much as I can. We’re doing a series called “Road Trip” based on three words of Jesus “Come follow me.”

Something that I’ve been thinking about over the last year is that when people come to faith we get excited, but we forget that they’re coming with this western worldview which is a problem sometimes. We take this western worldview and just tack on Christian behaviors.

Audience Question: What should I do with all of the people at my church that just want to be intellectual/traditional?

Answer: Don’t be afraid of the intellectual. Do you know what you believe and why you believe it? When I went to college, no one discipled me and taught me what I believe and why I believe it, so when I got hit with my first philosophy class it rocked me. Are we producing high school graduates that are firm in their faith?

Audience Comment: 20s want authenticity and see through hypocrisy.  Don’t try to sign people up for something; invite them.

One thing we all need to wrestle with every day: is the vision we are striving for alive in us.  Is it in our fibers is it part of what we are trying to become?

Audience Question: What are you using to empower and train your leaders to reach the people they have influence over and not make them feel like they are projects, not a bait-and-switch.

Answer: It’s hard and messy.  Get together with them.  I can’t meet with everyone.  It’s too big.  I have to be able to reproduce myself in other people.  One-on-ones are huge.  From a staff side, this is huge.  If you have a team, maybe that’s yourself, maybe that’s more than yourself.  You need to know your leaders, and they need to know you.  Meet with your leaders consistently.

One thing we do here is map things out from September to June.  You may do things different, but this is our ministry season, so we map it out.  What is this person trying to do.

Community Developer: Someone who is a little bit older who meets with them every other week.  That’s primarily soul care.

Check Ins: Day after phone conversations for people who are leading our communities.  We call them.  It can be 5 minutes or 30 minutes.  We ask what’s going on in their group.  We end those conversations by praying with them.  We didn’t have that last year, and it’s really going well.  It’s really helping a lot.

The Conversation: Once a month leadership follow up.  We get all of our leaders together in one room.  The focus is equipping and inspiring them.  It’s great.  We have food.  It’s something people want to be at.  We go through people’s highs (and lows?).  We have an equpping piece.  We break out into team time.  The four to six people who are leaders/apprentices in a group get together and make a 30 day plan.

Audience Question: Aren’t there different needs among married/single 20s?

Answer: Intentional community – When do you stop splicing things up?  Why can’t single and married people hang out?  Exchange among diversity.

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Main Session 3

Description: Author, speaker, and conference favorite Will Miller explores the barriers that keep community from optimum growth—and the tools needed to overcome them. With his unique blend of humor and insight, you´ll discover how hearts get wounded and how community is necessary to heal them.

Speaker’s Bio: Dr. Will Miller is from New York City and is an ordained minister, a hospital and police chaplain, and a psychotherapist. He has worked in community mental health centers and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. Will has served as a spokesman for the National Institute of Mental Health. He is one of the country’s foremost media and popular culture analysts, and has been profiled on NBC’s Dateline and in People Magazine.

Simultaneously, for 16 years, Will had a successful career as a stand-up comedian, opening for Aretha Franklin and hosting Nick-At-Nite. Currently, Dr. Miller is a therapist and campus minister at Purdue University where he lectures on media effects. He holds a Masters Degree and a Doctorate in Urban Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Columbia University.

Will’s books include Why We Watch: Killing The Gilligan Within; and Refrigerator Rights.

Notes:

There is a healthy suspicion and distance kept among police officers with shrinks.  Any intimation that they may not be handling their lives well has consequences for their jobs.  They don’t seem to have the same issues with chaplains.  Police have some of the highest rates of stress, suicide, etc. of any group in America.  They do what they do with remarkable focus.  When that radio crackles, their adrenaline ramps.  When they’re done, they get back in their car, and they can relax.  But they don’t know if it’s going to be 5 minutes or 2 hours before it happens again.  Most of us can look out at our weeks on Sunday night and figure out what parts of our weeks will be stressful.  Police can’t do that, and when your adrenaline isn’t managed, it whacks you out.  Part of the way that police cope is to wall themselves off in an exclusive community.

When you think about what’s happening in American culture.  We lead the world in stress related disorders. 1 in 4 Americans has a stress related disorders.  Stress is a generic term, but it means different things to different people.  You may not sleep well or get edgy or depressed.  Shrink talks about it in terms of mood.

Aren’t you related to people with whom you would have nothing to do if you weren’t related to them.  Why is it so hard to get over these idiosyncracies?  It’s because of American culture.  46 million Americans moved last year, 45 million the year before that, and 45 million the year before that.  Second, the average American watches 28 hours of TV per week.

Together these two facts have made us individualistic and self-reliant, and we have idolized those things.  “I can be who I wan’t to be.”  But you can’t.  You’re stuck within your gift set.  We have become timid to acknowledge the gifts that we lack.

The theology of the psychology in the Gospel is that all of our gifts together create the Body of Christ.

Questions:

• How much TV do you watch per week?
  Violence on TV is overblown.  I used to watch the three stooges and never thought that if I whacked my brother on the head with a hammer that it would go “boing.”
• How many hours/week do you spend in front of a computer?
• What is the total number of times you have moved in your life?

The premise of refrigerator rights:

What would happen if somebody you didn’t know very well started rummaging around through your refrigerator?  It would be weird.

What would happen if you didn’t know the person but we were related?  It might still be a bit strange but much less so.

Using that litmus test, think about the people occupying your life.  Think about the type of people you are trying to get to join small group.  Think about the people you see with regularity every day.  How many of these people have refrigerator rights in your house?  How many of them do you have refrigerator rights with.  Really the only definition of family that matters is the feeling that you belong.

Many times we feel like we belong to a church or congregation, but we it’s hard to get to belong with a small group because it becomes more real.

The way God made you is to be re-formed externally.  If you adjust your life-style, it will radiate back into the triage of healing and feeling better on the inside.

Often the problems within marriage are a leading challenge.  By the time they get to a therapist/pastor, they’re rarely there for a tune-up, and the story is all the same.  It was great in the beginning and got lousy later.  Very few think it sucked from the get-go.  Most marriages with problems are two people who just ground each other into powder.

What stunts community growth?  Trying to be the best me I can be. By being an other engaged person will come a particular you and other yous who gravitate towards me.

We’re having a hard time with our mood.  Mood is a big issue.  We have a lot of anger in our culture.  The difference between a sociopath and a neurotic is that a sociopath doesn’t care.  Neurotics have to endure stuff.  Basically neurotics just put up with it.  The greatest laboratory for America’s disorders is driving.

What stunts group growth is fear that we will have tempermental incompatibility.  That is cultural.  We have to get over that.

What is so hard about this?

Love is the voice that tries to cut through the noise of individuality.

Do you know what the psychological premise of crisis counseling is?  When people go through something you have a short window to get in.

I’ve got a right wing Republican brother and a flaming liberal sister, but when they get together, their relationship trumps that.

What stops small groups is the failure to understand and make the connection that our mobile lifestyle and our landing someplace and giving so much time to screens stunts community growth.

Small groups are hard because your pressing against habits that have been inculcated for years.  We know you know two things: that you have few friends with whom you have refrigerator rights and that you have unfulfilled stress in your life.  What you fail to understand is that this is what causes angst in your life.

In Mark 3 Jesus has become famous.  His family heard what he was doing and they went to take charge of him because they said he was out of his mind.  Jesus’ response, “Who are my mother and brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

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Compassion international mentors 1 million children around the world.

In 1991, Compassion International accepted me into their sponsorship program.

My neighborhood is characterized by high incidence of HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, etc.

I was able, alongside 500 others, to be discipled.

I can look back with humility at where I have come from.

My sponsor committed $1/day for 11 years.

After I finished my program, I had the opportunity to come to the United States.  I graduated in 2006 from college.  I am currently enrolled in an MBA program.

As I look back, with a mother who could not afford to put me into a middle school, I am very grateful to Compassion.  I am not unique among the 500.

If every child is given an opportunity, teh poverty that we see around the world can be something of the past.

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A former pastor who works for World Vision.

Nothing can bring lasting change in the world except the Church of Jesus Christ.

In Acts 2 it says that the people sold their possessions and gave to those in need.

World Vision is the largest Christian relief organization responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

If you talk to the experts, they’re going to say we’re not doing so well in the fight against AIDS.  There are over 11 million children who have been orphaned as a result of AIDS in the world.

But there are some encouraging things.  World Vision has raised up 60,000 workers in Africa to help them.

We have the army; they need training and supplies.

It would be incredible if every church, small group, and individual who is listening today would get involved.  That’s why we’ve partnered with the Willow Creek Association.

For about $700/year, you can supply the needs of a caregiver in Africa.

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