All posts in Innovate 2006

Just Who Do You Think You Are Talking To?
Mark Beeson

In 1986, Mark and Shelia Beeson came to northern Indiana with a dream of planting a church. They had no congregation, no building. But they did have a vision. From its early days, when they met in a movie theater, Granger Community Church has grown to more than 6,000 under Mark’s leadership.

A dynamic speaker with more than “just a little energy” about touching hearts and reaching lives. Mark is considered one of the best storytellers in America today. And he’s not afraid to tackle issues the church considers “hands off.” If you let him, Mark will challenge you to consider how God can use you and your ministry to reach a changing culture in new and meaningful ways.
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Everyday you are moving toward or away from your goal. If you take steps you end up somewhere. You can’t take steps in an opposite direction. We need to move our feet in the direction that leads to life and the fulfillment of our destiny in Christ.

The longer we live, the longer we get to know ourselves. There are limitations on our life – there are things we cannot do. Do we know our limitations? Do we know what we can’t do?

There are lessons in life that we learn that clarify who we are and who we are not, and sometimes those lessons hurt.

Mark talked about when he was in college doing Judo and taking on a Judo master… ouch.

The more you know about yourself, the more honest and clear you can be, and the more you can relate to others. Some of us, sadly, don’t know enough to have an opinion. We need to study more and learn more to have an opinion that has value.

As we pursue innovation, we need to intentionally know who we are.  When you know who you’re not, you have clarity.

We need to know and understand the value of the mission and our own limitations, and leverage our gifts for the greater good. So many people are under-challenged and are waiting to leverage their gifts to be used for something of eternal value. They long to do great thing for a great mission to serve a great God.

We have to present the mission, the vision and invite them to join us.

Linear thinking is obsolete – people think in a matrix of images and pictures. We need to use images and pictures to reach our focused audience and try to help them ‘get it.’ Creativity and innovation support our vision and help us reach who we are trying to reach. We should never innovate for the sake of innovating.

We need to collaborate as a team to create a synergy of conversation and ideas that lead to creativity.

It is amazing to see what a team can do – it’s far greater than something one individual can accomplish alone.

If our life mission is to truly reach people, we will increase effectiveness if we build a team of people around us. We are the body and we all have unique parts and unique roles to play.

As the body of Christ, each church needs to be working in harmony, playing its part, finding their shape.

We all have experiences in life, and our challenge is to leverage them in a way that God can redeem them. Our shared experiences help us see things that we couldn’t see by ourselves.

We all have different perceptions, we all see different parts, but together we can see what really needs to happen.

We are all different parts of the body and if we think we’ve gotten ahold of ‘it’, we’ve undersold and underestimated it.

When we are united in love for Jesus Christ and lift Him up, the world is on its tiptoes watching – and the more we are united, the more we understand the value of team, the better we will truly reveal the full expression of what the church is to the world.

Different people (and different churches) reach different people. We have the same message, but a different way of communicating and interacting with it. We are all called and we are also limited. We need to know who we are and who we aren’t so we can FOCUS.

You have to know who you are before you can build a team so you can reach your focused audience.

Your focused audience is….

1 – a group of people with a past.

Many people have experienced rejection in their lives and in turn are moving in a direction that seemed like a good idea at the time… but in the end are empty. We have to  intrude with love and compassion and tell them that they don’t need to keep going the way they are going. We help them understand that their shame and guilt can’t hold them back. We are brining Good News – hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless.

2 – a group of people who don’t know their value.

People don’t know their value or that they have a future.

Mark used a great illustration about paper plates and china. We use paper plates when we don’t care, but we take great care of our china and only use it at special times.

Mark brought out the point that many of the people we are trying to reach have been treated like paper plates their whole lives – they’ve been used over and over again and discarded.

Our challenge is to innovate to communicate how truly valuable they really are.

Mark challenged us to look at the parables of Jesus (the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field) with the thought that we are the treasure – that we are so valuable to God that He did every thing to have us. Jesus emptied Himself of His glory and came in the flesh, fully man and fully God, was born to a peasant family and was the perfect sacrifice so we could be made new.

Jesus gave His life to have the treasure… you and me…and the people we are trying to reach.

3 – a group of people who need a translator.

The difficulty of translation is huge. It’s our job as communicators to ‘bail people out’ and translate the language in a way that they can understand.

Jesus didn’t have a halo when He was born, neither did Mary or Joseph, it’s a translation error we’ve created.

The problem oftentimes is, they we believe people actually get it and we need to understand that we live in a world that doesn’t speak “God.”

We have a translation error and we need to communicate effectively to the people we are trying to reach. Not everyone gets it, not everyone understands and we have to create and innovate so people can get it.

We need to leverage the energy of our culture and bring truth and insight.

We need to make the church a safe place for a dangerous message – a message that will change the direction and course of people’s lives.

What’s buzz? What’s worthy? What’s buzz worthy?
Tim Stevens

Tim joined Granger Community Church after serving nearly 10 years in various leadership positions, including executive management with Life Action Ministries. With a desire to make an impact in the local church, he develops the church’s vision and values and helps plan for the future.

He is instrumental in handling the day-to-day operations, hiring staff, completing major construction projects and developing Granger’s nationally recognized Children’s Center. You can hear Tim weekly on The Simply Strategic Show. He has also co-authored three books, including Simply Strategic Growth.

Tim’s blog.
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Buzz happens when you have a product people talk about. Buzz is people connecting. Buzz is what happens when normal people talk to others about your church and what you are doing without the approval of the board or elders!

The Blair Witch Project is a prime example of buzz at work. It profited over $248 million, purely on buzz, people thinking it was real.

Buzz is created by things that are unusual, outrageous, taboo, hilarious remarkable, or secretive. Anything rooted in emotion.

Tim talked about things that have created buzz this year: Warren Buffett giving his money away; Hezbollah; Mel Gibson’s DUI; the British terror plot. We all buzz about things.

Buzz simply lends momentum to the opportunity.

Tim talked about Granger’s PureSex series and buzz that was created throughout their community concerning what some thought was an edgy subject for church. ((Sidenote: my favorite part of their media coverage was when the reporter was asking a guy who he thought put up the billboards promoting the series, and when she told him it was a church he said, “really… which one?))

Granger’s average attendance prior to the series was around 5,000. The first weekend of the series (thanks to the buzz) was over 7,000! They figure they had a net gain of about 500 people as a result of the series.

Tim talked about the flywheel of buzz and the parts it’s made up of: IMPACT, LANGUAGE, BELIEFS, which ultimately lead to BUZZ.

The problem with many of our churches is that we aren’t making an impact.

Tim shared a gripping story about when he was growing up in Iowa and some boys triggered an explosion in a military bunker that was holding over 25,000 pounds of dynamite. The impact was physically and emotionally huge.

To have an impact means to have an immediate and strong affect on something or somebody.

Where is the church that’s impact is so loud that people can’t deny it?

How different would our communities be if our churches didn’t exist?

How are we helping the down-and-out’s out of poverty and the up-and-outs with busyness and issues with parenting and family?

Who is educating? Who is helping to create the values and morals?

We need to be thinking about the people in the community, not the people inside the church.

Is there an undeniable impact in our community that our church is making?

Impact only happens if you speak the right language.

Tim used an illustration from the movie National Treasure. The map looked differently depending on what filter they looked through.

Filters are important because we all have filters in place in our minds. People have filters when they come into our churches.

There is a filter that is strong in today’s society and throughout our entire culture and it’s the filter of pop culture. Pop culture is the language of today. We live in a media-driven world. TV, movies, music, books and everything else are forming people’s ideals. We need to leverage the language of pop culture to reach people.

Every church has a choice on what they do with pop culture…they IGNORE it, and say, “let us pray…” and create a safe haven, a church separate and ‘safe’ from the world. They SEPARE from it, and say “come ye apart from the world” and become rule-generators. They CONDEMN it and say, “go forth and boycott,” and create a militant political force. They EMBRACE it, say, “let’s party!” and they are no different from the world. OR, they LEVERAGE it, they proclaim, “Jesus is alive!” and they are effective.

We find movement through pop culture. If you look at TV, movies or music you can see that people are filled with a great spiritual hunger that is communicated through art.

Our challenge is to become cross-cultural missionaries. We need to be missionaries who indwell the culture around us and use the signs and symbols of our culture to reach people.

”The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” – John 1:14, The Message

Jesus lived in the culture of His day and used its symbols as an in-road to the message and built a bridge. We can’t afford to be out of touch with pop culture. Its impact on our communities is far-reaching.

We need to look at it and find out what it reveals… and use people’s response to it to connect people back to God.

1 – We need to use pop culture to appoint people with stories from the Bible.
2 – We need to look for pop culture examples to illustrate Biblical truth.
3 – We need to use secular images or songs to raise deep life issues to the surface of people’s thinking.

Using pop culture isn’t watering down the Gospel. We know that the Gospel is the Gospel; the truth is the truth. Truth produces life change and we need to use what people connect and relate with to bring out spiritual truth and ultimately, life change.

People don’t listen to us sometimes though… people can’t hear us because (1) there’s too much noise, (2) they don’t trust you because of other people’s failures, (3) and because they are connected…they have everything the need.

Buzz only happens if we are making an impact. Impact only happens if you are being understood and are speaking their language.

You can’t fake what you believe at you core.

Granger’s billboards added fuel to a buzz that was already there. Their own people were already talking about it. They were a tool to spark conversations.

Buzz will do nothing if you don’t deliver and don’t sustain it. It’s about doing effective ministry and introducing people to Christ. It’s creating services for people who don’t like church.

We need to focus on our core – it affects our language. Create the changes that make an impact and buzz will start.

It all boils down to us communicating to people that we care and that they matter… to us and to God. People can’t hear you unless they feel you care for their needs.

Is Anybody Listening?
Rob Wegner

Since 1992, Rob has passionately communicated the message of Christ at Granger’s midweek and weekend services and Core Class 401 – the final class in the church membership series. He has taught Purpose-Driven ® Church to church leaders throughout the world, including Sudan, India, and Slovakia. He’s also been a main session speaker at Saddleback’s Purpose-Driven Church Conference.

At Granger, he also oversees outreach ministries, which are expanding rapidly under his leadership and teaching. Since 2001, more than 150,000 people in India have come to know Jesus Christ as a result of church planting and growth training curricula that Rob has delivered to Indian pastors.
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There’s a tension we live with when it comes to communication. We know that communication matters. There’s a sense that we get our people at one hour, at most two, per week, and we have those important moments to communicate the message of Jesus to our culture – and there’s a lot of competition. Our competition is not each other. Our people are being bombarded every day with different messages.

Texas A& M Study: average American encounters 800 multimedia messages a day… email, snail mail, bumper sticker, magazines, radio, TV, news – all day, everyday. People are spending millions of dollars to get their messages into our people, and its working very well (i.e. kids and McDonald’s). They are working to get these messages that are counter to the Kingdom – how do we cut through the noise?

The stakes are so high. Every time we program a service or craft a message we need to realize we are up to bat and it’s the 9th inning for someone.

The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation – the question is, how do we cooperate with God in the church when it comes to communication.

There’s a shift in how we do communication. Maybe there’s some things that need to change.

Story causes people to lean in and listen. It’s a primary shaping-force when we are coming up with services and sermons.

Shifting from a linear presentation to an engaging conversation.

When we come to a message we need to make a shift from a linear presentation to an engaging conversation.

>> What’s your relationship with the audience?

One is content driven, the other is relationship oriented. There’s a big difference.

Our messages are a series of moves in a conversation. We don’t have a linear series of points in our conversations – it’s organic. We go from block of thought to block of thought.

Conversations are not linear. There’s a natural flow… you can go on for hours and hours.

>> What if instead of thinking how we can get from point a to point b, but we rather think about how we can move our people in symphony?

There’s a natural flow to moves.

A lot of us learned to think of communication in a linear way…

>> Engaging Conversations Happen When Three Stories Intersect.

My story – everyone’s story – God’s story

The goal is to bring three stories together – and the more they intersect, you create a catalytic moment.

1. My story. As a communicator, you are telling your story. That’s what makes it authentic and real. When it comes to telling your story you need vulnerability and humor.

Most people think the church is where people come and pretend they are better than they really are. They think we are fake or hypocrites. With humor and vulnerability, they learn there is permission to be a human being in church. There has been a disconnect from the ‘people on the stage’ and the people in the audience. Stories lend authenticity to make your stories real.

Vulnerability can make people uncomfortable, but we need to be open about our weaknesses because it celebrates God’s grace in our lives.

Stories endear the audience to the speaker.

2 – Their Story
This is where we find common ground with the issue, we find where the stories overlap.

Taper the story to your focus audience – Jesus was the master of this. Women at the well, He talked about water. Fisherman, fish. Farmers, seed. He looked at his audience, He paid attention to who he was talking to and he adjusted his message to the audience. He connected to the person who was immediately in front of him and told the story in a way that they could get it.

We need to get into our people’s lives. It can be hard. It’s easy to stay inside the holy huddle… and building relationships with unchurched can be difficult.

Your degree of relevancy is dependant on how invested you are in relationships with unchurched people.

When you are programming your services, put the name of a person on your whiteboard, describe the person you are trying to reach and do all that you can do to connect to them.

Let your people tell their stories. Real life people. Real stories.

Sometimes we need to get dirty to know the joy of being clean.

When new people walking into GCC, one of the first questions that they ask is, “is there anyone like me?”

We tell our story – we connect with their story and we connect with…

3 – God’s story.
There are three dimension’s to God’s story:

The historical dimension
We swim in a very deep, historical stream. We are a part of a historical movement of people who said, “Yes!” to the revolution. We need to help people get that God’s Story (the Bible) is a real story, with real people… it’s not just a self-help book, it’s real people who met with a real God in a real place and a real time.

Tell the Scripture as Story. We need to start with God’s story and see where it intersects with where we are it. How can it be communicated? Story? Video? Etc.

Many people have a systematic theological background, which is great, but we need to tell the Scripture as a story. Instead of being an esoteric thing, it’s a historical reality that we find beautiful enough that we orient our life around it and invite people to join in on it.

Begin the conversation, don’t end it. In the past, a good communicator was someone who ended the conversation. The pastor had the final word.  Great teaching leads to great questions. It leads to answers and questions.

Sean Penn, “When everything gets answered it’s fake. The mystery IS the truth.”

There are huge parts of life that go unresolved.

When you give the cliché and the pat answer, and  boil it down, there is a sense that things really aren’t like it. When you have an infinite God… there are infinite answers.

Become a story collector!  Find stories in metaphor. Find stories in other communicators.  Find stories in culture – this is what Jesus did.

The framework of all that Jesus taught on was the Kingdom of God. When he taught He used examples from everyday culture. He used things that people see.

We’ve got to find a way to let people know that the applause of Heaven is for them – when their lives are transformed by amazing grace. Jesus is inviting us to join… because we matter to God. No matter who you are, where you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve done… you matter to God. That’s our story. That’s their story. That’s God’s story.