God built me to be a leader. A personality profile I did once described me as a person who “cannot not lead.” But I also find that I’m a reluctant public leader. I’m really fine leading from the background and have done that all my life. This year is the first time I’ve ever been in the “Lead Pastor” role. It is a more public or “up front” kind of role.
What I love and cherish about Pantano Christian Church is that we are an empowering church. We share authority and responsibility. Tim Coop, our former Senior Pastor, never was jealous of the “pulpit” (We don’t have one!) and truly gave away his authority so others could lead. We are not a “top down” authority and control kind of church. Two of our guiding principles (pg. 36 of the Pathway Handbook) refer to this view of leadership and ministry (I’ve underlined the key words):
• Leaders are primarily servants who influence, encourage, equip and empower people to use their passions and gifts to serve others.
• A ministry approach that is permission-granting and entrepreneurial - that leans toward freedom, not control; risk, not safety; individuality and diversity, not sameness.
We are working on moving toward developing multi-sites, maybe as early as spring 2008. A multi-site is a location other than our Houghton Rd. campus. It would utilize our teaching via video. But every site must have a “face with the place” or the local site pastor. There needs to be a person people can connect with, a go to person and one who is leading and guiding the local team.
Most church members know the lead pastor and worship leader who are the “faces with the place” because they are on the stage every weekend. But we utilize a teaching team (Which I absolutely love!) and we rotate worship leaders in order to develop more leaders. We are beginning to hear folks say: “Who’s the worship pastor? “Where’s Carl?” “Does this ship have a captain?” We have structured ourselves in a way where there is no consistent public leader, which for some can result in a sense of insecurity or a lack of connectedness.
Carl Cherry, our worship pastor, and I are attempting to address that. We do not want to have to do it all or be on stage every week. We will resist being a personality driven church. But Carl and I are exploring ways we can be a more consistent face with the place. As you see us develop this we would welcome your feedback. By the way, check out Carl’s blog at http://carlcspot.blogspot.com/ I’ll see you this weekend!
Together to make the world different,
Glen
Dave White and I are preparing for our summer teaching series called “The Big Story - God’s Quest to Bless.” In ten weeks we will cover the big story from Genesis to Revelation. That’s right; I’ll actually be doing a message on Revelation! Anyway, two of my messages are mainly about Abraham and Moses. I’ve loved re-reading and studying these stories. Do you know what I realized - like I’ve never realized before? These two pillars of faith were a mess!
Abraham - he lies about his wife not being his wife to avoid a difficult situation. How many of us husbands could get away with that!? Okay, once and we chalk it up to a moment of weakness. But he does it twice! God calls him to go to Canaan when he lived in Ur. But he only gets to Haran and stays there 15 years before he finally gets around to obeying God. Now there is a bunch of incredible things about Abraham like his unselfishness with his nephew Lot, his rescue of Lot while risking everything, his obedience to God and more. In three different books of the Bible Abraham is called “a friend of God” - pretty cool!
My point? We are all a mixed bag of good stuff and bad stuff. We can praise God and be unselfish one moment and grumble against God and be very selfish in the next. We are a mixture of good and bad - blessing and cursing.
And then there’s Moses. To start, he’s a murderer (so was David and Paul). He killed an Egyptian and tried to hide his crime. When found out, he’s not even man enough to face up so he runs away. Then when God tells him he has a job for him (freeing a couple million slaves with no army from a hostile king), he tries to weasel out of it. We also see that he has an anger problem at times and is a work-a-holic that results in him neglecting his wife (his father-in-law steps in to confront that). Not a perfect model of a godly man. Yet we find in Deuteronomy 34:10-12 these words of memorial about Moses after he dies:
Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the LORD sent him to do in Egypt-to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
Not a bad epitaph! Again my point: what a mixture of good and bad. The encouragement to me is that God uses us in spite of the ugly stuff. He doesn’t give up on us (even if we give up on ourselves.) I’ll confess that at times I’m impatient, worried or anxious and even on occasion unkind. At times, I love unconditionally. I commit murder and adultery in my heart (per Jesus’ words). I work too much and I am sometimes lazy. I deeply love Jesus and attempt to follow him well. Sometimes I listen to voices that are not God’s voice. I’m a mixture of good and bad. And so are you. And God still loves us and uses us. That a big “wow!”
Broken and still used by God to make the world different;
Glen
We are well into our yearly strategic planning. As the staff met to begin the process, I shared what God was impressing on my heart. He has been speaking with absolute clarity to me on this and it is shaping what we did at Easter services, the sermon series after Easter (Honest Questions - Engaging Faith) and our discussion and work on adding new venues on site and multi-site options. What is God saying? Reach those we are not reaching. Pretty simple and yet so profound. It really is following the example of Jesus when he said “I have come to seek and save what was lost.”
Since summer we have been meeting with a great group of folks in Sierra Vista. There is a terrific group of leaders there who have contacted us and asked for help. They are currently doing Celebrate Recovery and have started life groups.
We are formally in an exploration stage with them. We are learning more about each other and in a sense we are “dating.” Soon, probably within weeks, we’ll move to the next level of “engagement.” That means that the folks in Sierra Vista truly want to be an extension or church plant of Pantano Christian Church. It means they truly own our mission, core values, vision, beliefs and guiding principles. It means they trust the Pantano leadership to guide them. It means they really like the Pantano “DNA” and want to see it reproduced in Sierra Vista.
When we become “engaged,” we enter what is formally called the preparation phrase. During this time we would set a start or launch date, confirm the site pastor (the face with the place) and begin to work toward gathering a critical mass of folks (about a 100) to launch. Then about 6 months out from launch we would enter the pre-launch phase when we nail down the teams, do training and do whatever it takes to launch well. I really believe we could launch with 300 in attendance.
I have the honor of leading a life group of potential site pastors and God is speaking to one family about Sierra Vista. If we are to continue to reproduce and expand the Kingdom of God, we must have prepared leaders. God is preparing some terrific folks to lead.
We continue to have requests to start sites on the Westside of Tucson, Sahuarita/Green Valley and Benson. May God continue to provide the vision, leaders and funding to see His church grow.
Together to make the world different,
Glen
From the staff and elders we wish you a blessed Easter celebration. Jesus’ presence made my world different and he continues to make all of our worlds different. The tomb of Jesus is empty! He’s alive!
Next week we start a new series called Honest Questions - Engaging Faith. There are many people who have given up on church and God because they have felt like the church would not allow them to question God or the Bible. They felt like they had to check their brains at the door. They felt condemned for even asking honest questions and being skeptical. So for many, they either stopped their search or went elsewhere to ask their questions.
In our Pathway Handbook on page 36 you’ll find a section called “Guiding Principles.” Guiding Principles here at PCC is how we go about life and ministry. The seventh bullet point says: “People at every level of faith & doubt are welcome in our community life and community property.” We want to be a safe place where all of us, including your leaders, can be honest with our questions and faith.
If we stay honest with our questions and struggles, it is then that we are truly engaging our faith. Faith is not the absence of questions; it is the staying in the game until we come to a point of experiencing God and knowing him. It is not answers we seek. It is God we seek. If we’ll be honest with our questions and engage it with our faith, it is then that we find God, even if we don’t get some or all of the answers.
In this series we are not going to attempt to provide air-tight irrefutable answers to the questions. I know that might frustrate some of us who are used to Christianity attempting to give complete answers to all questions. We will give some really helpful insights to these questions, but our goal is not to provide the once and for all answers. Our purpose is to invite you into the process and discussion of honest, genuine and transparent questioning. We want to give you permission to question and doubt. We want to grow as a people that can live with some ambiguity. We want to invite you to engage your faith in the midst of your questions and find God in the questioning.
This is a great series to invite those who have questions about God, faith, the Bible and the church. Each week we’ll have discussion questions that your family or life group can use to continue the weekend message discussion. If you want to join a life group, we’ve listed groups that are open on our web site. Join the conversations, ask the hard questions and engage your faith.
Together to make the world different,
Glen
