Tag: Messy Church

From the Archives: Next Generational Leadership

It’s actually been a while since my last blog post. In the last couple of months, I have had many ministry opportunities come my way which have kept me pretty busy (hence the radio silence), including taking up a bigger role in my home church. This evening, I was working on an assignment as part of my course of study at Metro Worship Academy and I was writing a book review on Lamar Boschman’s Future Worship. As I was getting distracted reading through my blog (and considering what it means when Boschman talks about the birth of a new worship culture), I came across this post on “Next Generational Leadership”. I was again struck by the relevance of what I wrote here last year to my current journey some months later. So I’m regurgitating this post because for me, it has taken on new meaning in a new context. Especially when I again see the great pool of talent in the generation of leaders that are coming after me.

I was off work today, recovering from a cold, and I spent a good deal of the day devouring Ross Parsley’s new book, Messy Church. Yesterday, I suggested that everyone should get a copy of it. See my post here.

I’m about halfway through the book and what Parsley is advocating is to see the church and its mission through an entirely new lens: the church, not as a well-oiled corporate machine, but as family, where life reigns over structure, relationship reigns over protocol. And where there is life, there is usually mess. But it’s okay for church to be messy.

I couldn’t agree more.

Part of the appeal of this book is that many of the lessons learnt were forged in the context of worship ministry, when Parsley was the worship pastor of New Life Church. It is interesting to see how worship ministry is often the place where a lot of the issues of church are often played out most sharply.

As I read this book, I saw a lot of my own philosophies of worship ministry being articulated, and articulated well.

In 2010, when I was one of the worship ministry leaders setting up a new satellite service planted by my then church, one of the things I was keen to do was to involve and grow the next generation of leaders. My co-leader and I decided to establish what we called a “Think Tank”, a group of emerging leaders in the worship ministry who would bring fresh and innovative ideas into worship ministry, but who would also get the opportunity to work alongside, and to glean from, more seasoned leaders. I even challenged some of them that in two years’ time, they could take over my job and I would remain to stand alongside them, rather than to lead them.

Parsley presses the need for a multigenerational approach to ministry, which he calls the “family worship table”. The key is to invite the younger generation to the table, because freshness and innovation lay with that generation. He says:

“The family worship table” was a way to describe our multigenerational approach that would help every age-group embrace people at different points on the age continuum….

The commitment to use Sundays as a gathering place for the “family worship table” began when I started thinking about how to integrate fresh faces and young hearts into the leadership of worship at New Life Church. We made a shift in our church to remain musically relevant, and I struggled to get people to understand what we were doing. New Life had always been a charismatic church theologically, but our style and culture had stagnated. We were thriving spiritually but hadn’t progressed in our expression artistically or musically…. The church continued to grow, and we built the foundations of a successful worship ministry with strong musicians and biblical teaching, but we weren’t moving culturally at the speed we needed to. I recruited some young college graduates to inject life into our ministry and help chart the course ahead….

Slowly, we began to change and experience genuine multigenerational worship. New Life was a thriving and healthy church, but as we began to change musically and artistically, the process uncovered some poor attitudes and selfishness in some who had been there for a while. Some of the family did not want to invite the kids to the table. They wanted them to stay at their own kids’ table.

Parsley goes on to make a pretty bold claim: “Young people create the culture of our tables, our churches, and our country… Our job as parents is to raise them – to influence them and give them our hearts”.

My own experience agrees with this statement. The older I get, and the longer I have been in worship ministry, the more I realise how “uncool” I’m becoming. Even using the word “uncool” betrays my lack of “coolness”. Young people interact and integrate with, and influence, culture in a way I can’t even begin to grasp. Some of the guys in our “Think Tank” were actually “back seat driving” our worship culture by telling me to listen to new songs and to deploy them in our worship sets. In the end, our ministry owed a lot to the young people for pushing us all forward.

However, we are often like Eliab (David’s older brother) and Saul. When Goliath stood there day after day, taunting the armies of Israel, Saul was paralysed, with no new strategies for victory. In comes David the young punk to deliver some cheese to his brothers. And Eliab tells him (with a great deal of indignation perhaps), “Shouldn’t you be back home looking after the sheep?” When David finally gets to confront Goliath, Saul gives his armour to David: ill-fitting, heavy and speaking of old methods and paradigms. Instead, David rejects the old, and launches an assault that is completely innovative (but birthed by God): a sling and a smooth-stone to the forehead of the giant.

Many of us who have been in the game a long time are reluctant to hand control over to the young, because in our minds, they are tempestuous upstarts who lack credible experience. If we let them play, we become like Saul, forcing old paradigms and old wineskins in the hope of somehow containing the new flow of the Spirit and the new wine.

By the way, anyone who thinks that we don’t need to keep renewing our worship expression stands on dangerously tenuous ground. We simply can’t keep singing the songs that are 20 years old and expect the next generation to connect with them. Personally, I love the songs of the 90s because they were the songs I was first taught as a young Christian. But stylistically, they mean nothing to the present generation. They simply make the church look old and weary. Of course, there can be space for blending of old and new (I often like to throw in an old song into every worship set) but if we don’t keep moving forward, as they say, we are actually moving backward.

Parsley goes on to say:

Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could take the maturity, wisdom and resources of age and put them together with the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of youth? Our churches would be an unstoppable force in our communities….

Creating opportunities for young and inexperienced leaders is one of the most effective tools we have to continue to make the church dynamic and relevant in our culture. Helping young leaders is extremely challenging because it demands accountability, it involves some risk, and it can be downright messy; but it is indispensable to a church that is committed to longevity.”

I don’t think the question we should ask is whether our young people are ready. If we ask that, we will always conclude that they are not. The question is whether the older generation is ready to stand alongside the youth, to nurture them, to father them, to guide them and to create safe spaces for them to take risks and push established boundaries.

So, this is a call for worship ministry leaders to participate in the “family worship table”, to build up the next generation of leaders of our churches and ministries.

Will it work? I believe that the results speak for themselves. New Life Church and Desperation Band, through Parsley’s leadership, remains one of the cutting edge forces in the worship landscape today, producing worship music that is relevant, edgy and yet congregation-friendly. And that sort of legacy can be ours too.

The Church as Family

I’ve just finished reading Messy Church and for the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of church as family.

We often like to think of the church in one of the following different ways: a corporate entity (with strict lines of authority, structures, rules and regulations), a movement (a group of people rallying behind an idea or cause), or an event (a gathering for a specific purpose at any one point in time). But the more I think about, the more I know it’s true that church is family.

So here are a few things I’ve gleaned as I’ve meditated on that concept:

1. Being a Multigenerational Church

I have already dealt with this point quite a bit in my previous post. There is a lot we can learn from the different generations. The wisdom and experience of the old must be matched to the freshness and innovation of the young.

The multigenerational mandate is found in Psalm 145:4, which calls one generation to commend God’s works to the next generation.

I want to take a moment to highlight another one of Ross Parsley’s points on this: if we don’t raise up the generation, then the current generation will die without a successor. On the other hand, if we grow the next generation, then the church will experience both success and succession.

Parsley says this:

It takes no skill or expertise for a church to grow older….

We don’t really have to work at growing the church older because it happens naturally. It happens automatically. People work together and live life together, and they grow old. All the hard work for a church is in continually reaching down to the next generation and including them in the life of the family.

Let’s make it a point to continually grow the next generation so that they can stand on our shoulders and reach higher than we could have ever done on our own!

2. Relational Accountability

I like this idea.

For a long time, I think the church has taught a very artificial form of “submission to authority”, almost as if submission is arbitrary because it is a command of God. During the Shepherding Movement of the 80s, this reached ludicrous heights when shepherds were able to dictate the minutest details of a believer’s life, from the clothes they wear to the people (I mean, person) they should marry.

It wasn’t even acceptable to question that authority because, as much as the command was a “stick”, the “carrot” was that if one remained under authority, one also remained under divine covering and protection.

Postmoderns completely abhor this “mindless follower” mentality.

Parsley makes this point:

I don’t believe in trying to create accountability. I believe in relationships where accountability is the by-product. If we try to set up accountability without relationship, we’ll be tempted to hide our failures. If we build relationships with those whom we love, we won’t want to lie. We’ll endure painful truth because love is at stake. Accountability without relationship can easily turn into empty legalism and broken rules. But relationships filled with love create the seedbed for honesty and integrity.

I’ve been in many accountability relationships, but I agree with Parsley completely. The ones where the other party speaks into your life the most is the one where relationship has come before accountability.

And I think we also need to allow the relationship to flow both ways. Just because I’m the more mature one doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from a younger person. On the contrary, we should, as Parsley suggests, “practise a leadership style that says we can’t learn everything from someone, but we can learn something from everyone”.

3. Grace the Basis of Authenticity

The last point I want to make is the importance of authenticity.

One of the things I’ve found about being in a family is that all your bad bits are there for your family to see. It’s pretty hard to hide stuff from your wife! Your family sees your inconsistency, your failures, your character flaws, your bad habits. We don’t like to display those things at church! Instead, we want to to portray consistency, successes, character strengths and good habits. Who we are in church is definitely not who are at home, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.

I like worship leaders like Carlos Whittaker. In a very public domain (such as his blog), he uses some pretty “colourful” language. I’m beginning to think that that’s okay.

I have a friend who is always telling me how in his church, it’s okay to be real. I love talking to this guy because what you see is what you get. And it makes me feel unguarded.

Even if being real jars our “good Christian sensibilities” sometimes, it creates a stronger sense of relationship and ultimately accountability and growth. It’s better in my view to lay all your cards on the table (as I say, to be “unguarded”), so that as a family of believers, we know what we are dealing with, we accept each other, and we challenge each other to grow.

To do this, we need to come back to the grace of God and realise that none of us are perfect, none of us could have been accepted by God, except through Christ’s sacrifice and blood that covers all our sins. But we also need to flip this on its head too, and realise that once we “in Christ”, we are made completely righteous.

This is how Martyn Lloyd-Jones puts it in his exposition of Romans:

Have you really seen yourself ‘in Christ’? …. You have been put there, you have been engrafted, you are in Him, and therefore you are constituted a righteous person. That is how God looks at you. God no longer looks at you as a sinner and as you were in Adam. That is the whole point of the Gospel, and you must never look at yourself as a sinner again. You are not a sinner, you are child of God. You are a child who fails, and who falls, but you are not a sinner any longer. For a Christian to call himself a ‘miserable sinner’ is to deny this entire argument. He was a ‘miserable sinner’, but he is now a righteous person; and when he fails and falls he does so in the realm of family, in the realm of love. But, thank God, he does not change his position; his standing is not changed, the relationship to God is not changed. Look at yourself always exclusively and entirely in Christ, even as, before, it was all entirely and exclusively in Adam.

I love that phrase: “when you fall, you fall in the realm of family, in the realm of love”. Just as God sees us as righteous in Christ, we need to start seeing each other in the same way. This requires us to embrace a revolution of grace in our churches.

My old church, with all its good qualities and all its flaws, was very much a family.

We’ve now been in Faith Community Church for about 5 months now, and even though it’s a larger church, I’m glad to say that there is still a strong sense of family and belonging. For this, I’m really grateful for a wonderful bunch of people in my cell group, who’ve really taken us in and involved us in their lives. We’re still in the honeymoon phase of course, but I’m glad to say that the foundations are there for the church to really be family through thick and thin.

Next Generational Leadership

I was off work today, recovering from a cold, and I spent a good deal of the day devouring Ross Parsley’s new book, Messy Church. Yesterday, I suggested that everyone should get a copy of it. See my post here.

I’m about halfway through the book and what Parsley is advocating is to see the church and its mission through an entirely new lens: the church, not as a well-oiled corporate machine, but as family, where life reigns over structure, relationship reigns over protocol. And where there is life, there is usually mess. But it’s okay for church to be messy.

I couldn’t agree more.

Part of the appeal of this book is that many of the lessons learnt were forged in the context of worship ministry, when Parsley was the worship pastor of New Life Church. It is interesting to see how worship ministry is often the place where a lot of the issues of church are often played out most sharply.

As I read this book, I saw a lot of my own philosophies of worship ministry being articulated, and articulated well.

In 2010, when I was one of the worship ministry leaders setting up a new satellite service planted by my then church, one of the things I was keen to do was to involve and grow the next generation of leaders. My co-leader and I decided to establish what we called a “Think Tank”, a group of emerging leaders in the worship ministry who would bring fresh and innovative ideas into worship ministry, but who would also get the opportunity to work alongside, and to glean from, more seasoned leaders. I even challenged some of them that in two years’ time, they could take over my job and I would remain to stand alongside them, rather than to lead them.

Parsley presses the need for a multigenerational approach to ministry, which he calls the “family worship table”. The key is to invite the younger generation to the table, because freshness and innovation lay with that generation. He says:

“The family worship table” was a way to describe our multigenerational approach that would help every age-group embrace people at different points on the age continuum….

The commitment to use Sundays as a gathering place for the “family worship table” began when I started thinking about how to integrate fresh faces and young hearts into the leadership of worship at New Life Church. We made a shift in our church to remain musically relevant, and I struggled to get people to understand what we were doing. New Life had always been a charismatic church theologically, but our style and culture had stagnated. We were thriving spiritually but hadn’t progressed in our expression artistically or musically…. The church continued to grow, and we built the foundations of a successful worship ministry with strong musicians and biblical teaching, but we weren’t moving culturally at the speed we needed to. I recruited some young college graduates to inject life into our ministry and help chart the course ahead….

Slowly, we began to change and experience genuine multigenerational worship. New Life was a thriving and healthy church, but as we began to change musically and artistically, the process uncovered some poor attitudes and selfishness in some who had been there for a while. Some of the family did not want to invite the kids to the table. They wanted them to stay at their own kids’ table.

Parsley goes on to make a pretty bold claim: “Young people create the culture of our tables, our churches, and our country… Our job as parents is to raise them – to influence them and give them our hearts”.

My own experience agrees with this statement. The older I get, and the longer I have been in worship ministry, the more I realise how “uncool” I’m becoming. Even using the word “uncool” betrays my lack of “coolness”. Young people interact and integrate with, and influence, culture in a way I can’t even begin to grasp. Some of the guys in our “Think Tank” were actually “back seat driving” our worship culture by telling me to listen to new songs and to deploy them in our worship sets. In the end, our ministry owed a lot to the young people for pushing us all forward.

However, we are often like Eliab (David’s older brother) and Saul. When Goliath stood there day after day, taunting the armies of Israel, Saul was paralysed, with no new strategies for victory. In comes David the young punk to deliver some cheese to his brothers. And Eliab tells him (with a great deal of indignation perhaps), “Shouldn’t you be back home looking after the sheep?” When David finally gets to confront Goliath, Saul gives his armour to David: ill-fitting, heavy and speaking of old methods and paradigms. Instead, David rejects the old, and launches an assault that is completely innovative (but birthed by God): a sling and a smooth-stone to the forehead of the giant.

Many of us who have been in the game a long time are reluctant to hand control over to the young, because in our minds, they are tempestuous upstarts who lack credible experience. If we let them play, we become like Saul, forcing old paradigms and old wineskins in the hope of somehow containing the new flow of the Spirit and the new wine.

By the way, anyone who thinks that we don’t need to keep renewing our worship expression stands on dangerously tenuous ground. We simply can’t keep singing the songs that are 20 years old and expect the next generation to connect with them. Personally, I love the songs of the 90s because they were the songs I was first taught as a young Christian. But stylistically, they mean nothing to the present generation. They simply make the church look old and weary. Of course, there can be space for blending of old and new (I often like to throw in an old song into every worship set) but if we don’t keep moving forward, as they say, we are actually moving backward.

Parsley goes on to say:

Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could take the maturity, wisdom and resources of age and put them together with the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of youth? Our churches would be an unstoppable force in our communities….

Creating opportunities for young and inexperienced leaders is one of the most effective tools we have to continue to make the church dynamic and relevant in our culture. Helping young leaders is extremely challenging because it demands accountability, it involves some risk, and it can be downright messy; but it is indispensable to a church that is committed to longevity.”

I don’t think the question we should ask is whether our young people are ready. If we ask that, we will always conclude that they are not. The question is whether the older generation is ready to stand alongside the youth, to nurture them, to father them, to guide them and to create save spaces for them to take risks and push established boundaries.

So, this is a call for worship ministry leaders to participate in the “family worship table”, to build up the next generation of leaders of our churches and ministries.

Will it work? I believe that the results speak for themselves. New Life Church and Desperation Band, through Parsley’s leadership, remains one of the cutting edge forces in the worship landscape today, producing worship music that is relevant, edgy and yet congregation-friendly. And that sort of legacy can be ours too.

Get this Book: Messy Church

I managed to get the e-version of Ross Parsley’s new book Messy Church from Amazon for free.  If the offer is still on, you should get it too!

I’ve been a big fan of Ross Parsley for ages.

I first came across Parsley in 1998 when I was on a mission trip to Singapore.  It was during this trip that I was first introduced to some of the principles of worship intercession.

What really helped me along the journey was an album I bought at the time called Shine Your Light Through the Window, which was recorded live at New Life Church with Parsley as the worship leader.

Back then, the wider Church was broadly coming to terms with spiritual warfare concepts and Ted Haggard (New Life’s then senior pastor) was one of the main players in the movement.

What I heard on the album was songs centred around God’s purposes for the nations interspersed with passionate and Scriptural ex-tempore prayers from high level intercessors.  It changed my understanding of worship, and how it was connected to prayer and God’s will for the nations, forever.  That album began a new journey for me in apostolic worship.

Years later, New Life experienced first hand the effects of Ted Haggard’s moral failure followed later by another tragedy of a gunman walking into the church auditorium and opening fire on the congregation.  Ross Parsley led the church as interim senior pastor through some of its darkest hours, out of which were birthed some of the greatest modern worship anthems of the church, including one of my favourite songs “Overcome”.

Some of the songs that came out of New Life (and the Desperation Band) when Ross Parsley oversaw the worship ministry was probably some of the best worship songs in recent times (in my opinion of course).

Parsley recently planted a new church called ONEChapel in Austin, Texas.

Messy Church contends that the church should be a family, and Parsley shows, from his experience as megachurch pastor and church planter, the implications of that paradigm shift in the life and culture of the congregation.

I’ve only started reading the book and I’m already hooked.  Get it if you can.