Ministry – Page 12 – John Markum

3 Leadership Principles I Wish I Could Ignore

Posted on June 25, 2011 by johnmarkum

Three simple principles have been bugging me lately in regards to being a church leader. Frankly, I wish these three principles were not true. I would like to find some savvy book from another more successful church leader or business person that will coddle my anxiety and tell me I’m wrong about this. Unfortunately, nearly all of my research and experience (not to mention what the Bible teaches) has lead to be even more sure of the following three points:

Nothing grows without change.
All change is painful.
The greater the change, the greater the pain.

Everything that grows changes. If it doesn’t, it becomes stationary and stagnant. And dies. Of course, not all change is good change. Something changing could mean that it is dying. Your heart rate going down, for instance, would be an example of bad change. But when drastic change becomes necessary for survival, we must choose to embrace the pain of change or lose ground:

A cancer patient accepts the chemo, or suffers the onslaught of the disease.
A businessman adjusts his product and services, or loses his marketability.
A married couple seeks counseling, or goes through the bitter agony of divorce.
A church shifts from doing ministry “like it’s always been”, or fails to reach a changing world.

I see these principles taking place in every single church I’ve ever known. Churches who have embraced change stay relevant to a shifting culture, but do so with great care and pain. Good people who have always been there still walk away. Internal and external pressures arise. And yet the church grows in number and closer to God at the same time. Marriages are healed. Families restored. People far from God awakened with life in Christ. The church becomes more equipped to reach their full potential in Christ. And they realize that no change they make will ever be the silver bullet. They will always be faced with new opportunities and challenges.

Other churches go to the extreme of imitating the world. Their change is usually a bad change, and they suffer the consequences of compromise. Sure, more people may come, but not usually. Because even the world is looking for something different than the world. And when they do get more people, they simply have a crowd, not a church. It almost never lasts.

Yet others still refusing to accept change have clung to a preference of what church used to be. They produce no new ideas. They focus on preserving their church rather than change their world. Gradually, many fall into complete irrelevance. Their baptismal waters are as stagnant as their vision.

I’ve made an observation that I wish I could ignore. Every season of growth in our church is marked by a season of personal pain for me. When I pray for God to expand our influence, to bring us more people far from God, to see more lives changed by the Gospel, I do so realizing that such a prayer will cost me. Because as much as I would like, I cannot avoid the pain of change. And neither can you.

And yet we should still ask God for it. Because it requires faith to step out into the pain of change. And God has already promised His grace to sustain us through it.

While growth only comes with pain, we get to see God move in new, incredible ways. God is bigger than my comfort zone. And He’s bigger than our greatest obstacles. And He’s bigger than the pain of change.

2 Timothy 2:3 “Endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.”

Blessings,

John

7 Things I Believe about the Next Generation

Posted on May 25, 2011 by johnmarkum

The following is a re-post from the blog of Pastor Perry Noble, the founder and lead pastor of NewSpring Church of Anderson, SC. As a pastor who is concerned about young adults and emerging generations of Christ-followers, I found this post very encouraging. I hope you do as well. Blessings…

I lead a discipleship group of about 10-12 young men and women who are in high school…I’ve done so for the past two years. Here are seven things I believe about the next generation (people who are 20 and younger)…

#1 – The next generation will see one of the greatest awakenings the world has ever seen…I really do believe the Lord is setting them up for it. (Which is why I believe the greatest investment in “missions” that the church can make today is the one to have a dynamic youth and children’s ministry!)

#2 – The way the next generation will view and do church will be different than the way we do it today. They will fully know and comprehend how to reach out to themselves…and our role as a church should be to fund it and not fight it (that line is borrowed from Andy Stanley)!

#3 – The next generation seems to be way more serious about their walk with Jesus than my generation has ever been.

#4 – I believe those of us who are “more mature” (OLDER) should seek out those who are in their teens and listen to their questions and frustrations about life and church without coming down on them. If we will listen and patiently explain things there could be way less tension between generations in the church. Might does not make right. And…the “mature” people should always be the first to step into a relationship with the next generation!

#5 – I fully believe that the next generation has no earthly idea what God wants to do in them and through them…and if we will teach them to be fully surrendered on a daily basis that our children and grandchildren will see God do things we didn’t even think were possible.

#6 – I believe the next generation is not content with borrowing the faith of their parents, they are asking questions and seeking to understand WHAT they believe and WHY they believe it…and them doing that is going to equip them to take the church to the next level (I Peter 3:15).

#7 – I believe the next generation is going to refuse to settle for the way things are…and that as their view of WHO God is begins to increase so will their expectation in regards to what He can do.

Of Heaven and Hell

Posted on May 23, 2011 by johnmarkum

It seems as if there are times in everyone’s life that are marked with concentrated periods of stress, trouble, and tough times. It always seems to come in waves:

First you fight with your spouse over finances and the lack of time you’ve spent together.
You get to work and find out that your hours are getting cut in half.
Because you’ve been moved from full-time to part-time you realize you now lose your company-paid benefits as well.
On the way home the car starts overheating.
You check the mail on your way in to see the familiar stack of bills, that seem to be constantly rising.
You share all of this info with your spouse who starts to cry.
She then tells you all of the problems in her day: house, kids, depleted savings account, etc…
A family member called her because her mother (5 states away) is in critical care at the hospital.
To top it off, she suspects that she’s also pregnant.

Sound familiar? This story is not entirely hypothetical. More than likely, you have your own lyrics to the same song. There’s an entire message I could preach here about God’s grace through life’s difficulties, and His faithfulness to see us through. Or I could talk about the fact that God is not putting us through the fires of life to burn us, but to forge our faith and promote us to another level of His blessings. All of that would be true.

Instead I want to share a story and a simple thought that I got once from an amazing man, pastor, father, and mentor in my life from years back when I was in high school. His name is Norwood Tadlock. I went to school with all three of his kids. I knew him as my Bible teacher at my Christian high school. His wife passed away while I was still a teenager. Making similar observations as I have above, he once pointed out to me:

For those of us who know Christ, this is as close as we will ever get to Hell.

That’s a relief. The Bible even tells us that compared to Heaven, our present sufferings are but “a light affliction that is working for us a far greater weight in glory!” God is not minimizing our pain. He is simply encouraging us that one day, all of this will seem very small in comparison to Heaven. But “brother Tadlock” didn’t stop there. He quickly made the opposite observation:

For those who do not know Christ, this is as close as they will ever get to Heaven.

Frightening. And not what God wants for them, either. These thoughts coming on the back of a week full of natural disasters, false prophets, hurting people within my church, hurting people outside of church, and trying to pastor others through this messy thing called life, make me think 2 things:

1) Heaven must be unimaginably amazing. I want everyone to go there.

2) Hell must be unimaginably terrible. I don’t want anyone to go there – not even my worst enemy.

Let’s stop trying to guess at the day that Jesus is coming for us since He said that “no one knows the day, nor the hour of the coming of the Son of man,” and let’s get passionate about seeing people far from God awakened with life in Christ. We have a world to change. Let’s “endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” and make a difference.

Blessings,

John