Better Than 10,000 Others
Our leadership has been working hard the past few months to answer the question “What can we do better than 10,000 others?”. At our last leadership meeting I believe God gave us some synergy around the following statement as an answer to that question: We make disciples and glorify God by……….”pursuing opportunities to love people like Jesus loves them.” If you remember me saying this is NOT a part of our vision framework that we will begin to work on first Tuesday in January. However, we should see and feel this in every part of our vision framework. Ths is the operating system running in the background of everything we do. So I would like for you to take some time between now and our next leadership meeting to reflect on this statement. More specifically I would like for you to post some thoughts on why you think this statement is true about Crosslink. You may want to give some examples too. I look forward to seeing your post.
Posted in Crosslink
December 31st, 2009 at 9:03 pm
My thought process at looking at Crosslink Community Church I see leadership, building teams to be an example of how Christ loves others. By example, those that we reach out to help are encouraged to be part of the team and to share their blessings with others that are hurting spiritualy and physicaly. I see our church with a unique vision of putting teams together through our life groups. I see our pastor of leading by design, not default. Of having a passion to break through growth barriers to explore proven ways to build bigger and better teams by multiplying our God sent leadership. By challenging our brothers and sisters in Christ always being in the word and stepping up to the next level, always looking at the DNA of our church. I like the Barnabas factor. Eventualy everything boils down to multiplying leaders. Without the ability to find and multiply new leaders, ministry will inevitably grind to a hault. I’ve seen in the community, when they see us wanting to provide a service they want to jump aboard too. It’s all about being on the right seat on the right bus. I see our church doing things better than 10,000 other churchs by leading by example. Ken challenged 2 weeks ago for people to tithe for the next 3 months. I pray that we will see great testimonies from this. I am excited about what 2010 is going to hold as we spread the name of Jesus and make him famous. Amen.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
What can we do better thank 10,000 other churches? Nothing… There will always be churches that perform the different tasks of ministry better than us. In fact, the question isn’t “What can we do better than 10,000 other churches?” but rather: “Who has God specifically called us to be?” What has God specifically called us to do? How are we going to accomplish that calling?
The problem with asking the question, “What can we do better than 10,000 other churches?” is that it’s based on a horizontal slop. There will always be churches or people that do things better, however better is not the issue; but rather obedience to the call of God on our lives and the church.
To transition to our vision framework, “pursuing opportunities to love people like Jesus loved them.” we have to ask the question, “How was Jesus loving them?” Was he showing love by merely healing an illness; delivering food; turning water into wine? No, Jesus was delivering those things to the people to prove that he was the Messiah. So how does that apply to us? Simple, see a need, pursue the reconciliation of that need and along the way, minister the gospel…. like Christ. So we do seek to minister to peoples needs, however with the intention to showing them the truth of the Gospel.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
I have been mulling over the statement, “pursuing opportunities to love people like Jesus loves them”. I believe that if we truly are a church that lives this out, there is no way that our church will not be successful.
I think that this statement, if it is the thing that we can do better than 10,000 others, needs to shape how we approach ministry. I think that we are pursuing avenues to love people as Christ loves them, but it needs to flow out of everything in our church. We are doing this by the tutoring, character development, life groups helping out needy families, etc.
Our people need to see that we love them where they are at, but that we want a more abundant life for them. That is how Christ views us. He loves us where we are at, but he wants us to grow and be more sanctified every day.
Those are some of my initial thoughts. I look forward to seeing everyone next week.
January 9th, 2010 at 1:49 am
What can we do better than 10,000 others? I believe we can do exactly what God calls us to do, because what he has called us too, no one else is going to do.
This starts with living out the one another’s of the bible. In part this is already being done by some in different groups and on different teams.
Our challenge is to spread the wealth so the entire congregation is included. When this is done we will reach the full redemptive potential that God desires for Crosslink.
January 11th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
I keep thinking about this and it occurs to me that we have dozens of opportunities everyday, but do we use them to glorify Christ? I constantly find myself thinking after the fact that I should have invited that person to Crosslink or offered to pray for them. We not only have to pursue opportunities to love people like Jesus, we need to FOLLOW THRU!!! I know I capitalized it but unless we do that as leadership and as a church then we have wasted the moments that God has provided for us.