A Stone's Throw

You need to check out these clips from sermons by Ed Stetzer.  He is a missiologist that works for Lifeway.  Came through on my RSS reader yesterday and I thought I would share.  Make sure you watch both segments…they are both great!  Painful though.  Good preaching often does that, doesn’t it…sometimes the truth of God hurts!

He starts off with an amazing rant about people with a lack of the idea that they need to be on mission for Jesus…

If we [church leaders] disciple people through knowledge without action we’re training people to be puffed up gnostics.. . .Listen, I’m worn out–I am sick of knowledgeable, religious people not living on mission and then criticizing those who are. . . . I just think that what we need to have happen is that this knowledge-based needs to lead to an action life and they need to get off their “Blessed Assurance” and do something for Jesus!

and ends the first segment with this gem…

“The greatest sin in most churches is that we [pastors] have made it o.k. to sit there week after week and do nothing and call yourself a follower of Jesus.”

He does a little Ross Perot imitation and says this afterward in the second segment…good stuff…

The reality is, I don’t care if you have 5 purposes, if you rename yourself ‘missional,’ if you move into a house, or you ‘emerge’ into something else! I care that you have a Biblically driven church that is challenging people to be changed by the Gospel and then in doing so, they follow Jesus on His mission in the world!  I care less about the label and more about the lifestyle. Maybe we need to fight a little less about that and focus more on the calling that we have.

The irreducible minimum…

Disciples see what Jesus in doing and they join Him in doing it.  Is your church leading your people to join Jesus in His mission?…[Pastors] Go home and say “what am I going to say differently about my message so they’ll join Jesus on His mission.”

This message sure does go along with the message that I am preaching tomorrow @FPCarthage in our Outflow series.  We are going to be talking about the idea that Christ wants us to reach out to those people in our community.

In honor of March Madness with some really cool history thrown in for good measure…

This Day in Sports: Texas Westerns Starting Five Makes a Whole Lot of History – SportsCenter.com.

Just got the new book, Switch from the Heath Brothers. It is really good so far. Interesting article in Fast Company about making sure we catch problems early before they become even bigger problems.  Also a good lesson in making sure we read ALL of the fine print…

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Where are your brown M&Ms in your organization?

Business Advice From Van Halen | Fast Company.