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Saturday, November 29, 2008

This Scares The Hell Into the Devil

One side effect of pursuing excellence in church production is that common Christians become spectators who can contribute a percentage of their income to keep things going, but little more. We have raised the bar on how church is done so high that few believe they could ever do it themselves. The dark side of this endeavor is that we have lowered the bar of what it means to be a Christian so that simply showing up to the weekly one hour event with some regularity and a check book is all it takes.

My goal in life is to reverse this. I want to lower the bar of how church is done so that anyone can do it, and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple so that they will do it.

I will never forget meeting with an organic church made up of high school students. As we were all singing praises to the Lord I felt His pleasure. I asked the students to share the biggest church they had ever been to. Southern California has many mega-churches. Several were mentioned, ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 attendees.

“I think Satan is more intimidated by this little church of 15 kids than by any of those Godzilla-sized churches,” I said. They all snickered and looked around the room at one another with smiles, thinking that the old man had finally lost his mind.

I then showed them why I thought this way. I asked, “How many of you think you could start a church like one of those mega-churches?” No one raised a hand. I then asked, “How many of you think you could start a church like this one?” All raised their hands. The snickering stopped. It was one of those holy moments in life that are hard to forget. I then asked them to look around the room at all the raised hands, and I said, “I assure you, Satan is terrified by this. And he should be!”

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Cole,

I am a student at Asbury Theological Seminary and am working on my Masters in Leadership. My research and writing focus is Organic Leadership. I have used part of you writings to guide me in my research and am wondering if you would care to fill out a consent form as well as an online survey regarding my research.

Thanks,
Kaleb Heitzman
kaleb.heitzman@asburyseminary.edu
859.699.2521

flexa said...

Hello Neil, i´m from Brazil.
Nice text.

Glory to God

Anonymous said...

Hello Neil!
my name is filipe and i`m from Brazil.
Good Text brother!

Glory to God

Neil Cole said...

Kaleb, I am happy to help anyway I can. Unfortunately, I actually have a book released in February by that very title: Organic Leadership. So the bulk of my thoughts on that subject have yet to be published. I don't know what that does to your project, timing-wise, but I thought I should let you know. Just send me anything you want me to look at.

Anonymous said...

Hey Neil,

It would be awesome if you could take the survey. I've seen literature in a lot of areas about organic community and organic leadership but everyone has their own way of saying the same common things. The research is to draw out these commonalities. I have consent form for the research as well as a link for the survey. The link is

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=UtGAzVUaiL_2bvoxGjmRJZRQ_3d_3d

I will need to email the consent form. It's a word doc.

Thanks!