Page 1488 – Christianity Today (2024)

Ministry in the Digital Age Strategies and Best Practices for a Post-Website WorldBy David T. Bourgeois (IVP, 2013)

The Facts: This is a practical guide for ministry leaders who want to hone their thinking on digital strategy. Bourgeois draws on his considerable experience in the business, tech, and ministry world to offer a broad introduction to digital engagement for ministry leaders. Topics include social media, web analytics, privacy, and security.

The Slant: This is a very strong “all in one” resource, especially if you have not had a formal digital strategy in the past. Bourgeois’s clear explanations of various tools and digital philosophies are excellent. With that said, digital natives, or those leading organizations with up-to-date digital abilities, won’t find any of this to be breaking news. Yet it’s a worth-while resource, especially for novices. Even web veterans will find one or two practical takeaways or new best practices for online ministry.—Paul Pastor

Working Wonders

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work(Dutton, 2012)

There are no second-class Christians. We know that. We understand that God honors all vocations, not just ministry ones. It can still be a challenge, however, to help people who work outside the church see their callings as God’s work.

In Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Dutton, 2012) Tim Keller uses his customary insight and depth to tackle the topic, explaining God’s rich intentions for work. Keller demonstrates that work was started by God when he created the universe. Keller writes that work is for the keeping of the created order, a human necessity foundational for all societal advancements.

To see work this way is to empower people in their work whether they wear white or blue collars. Keller explains that work is designed to bring order out of chaos, and it repairs the fabric of the world. In short, it is the fulfillment of the command to subdue the earth.

It’s not all inspiration and good news though. Both the work and the workers are broken by sin. Keller addresses four main problems people encounter in their work: it becomes fruitless, pointless, selfish, or idolatrous. These are the experiences people so often think of when it comes to work, the fruitless toil and self-centered rat race. But there is hope.

Anyone who has read Keller’s previous books or heard his sermons knows he always bases his insights on the gospel. This book is no exception. Keller lays out how the gospel changes the broken reality of work by offering a new, alternative storyline. It provides a “new and rich conception of work as partnering with God in his love and care for the world.” The gospel provides a more sensitive moral compass and discernment into the human heart. And finally, the gospel changes our motives for work.

Every Good Endeavor belongs on the shelves of pastors. It also belongs in the hands of congregants where it will no doubt expand their minds and cultivate a deeper appreciation for the work God has called them to do.—Barnabas Piper

God Redeeming His Bride A Handbook for Church DisciplineBy Robert K. Cheong (Christian Focus, 2012)

The Facts: Books about church discipline don’t become bestsellers. It’s a messy topic, but absolutely necessary. Cheong encourages readers to enact discipline in a way that reflects God’s passionate love for his bride. In addition to providing a biblical and practical step-by-step guide for loving and restorative discipline, Cheong challenges readers to evaluate their own lives and to lead by example. Cheong offers hypothetical situations, case studies, and questions for reflection at the end of each chapter. He also includes appendices to guide readers through tough situations requiring discipline.

The Slant: Cheong covers an astounding range of scenarios and offers practical steps to follow. His working definition of church discipline: “God’s ongoing, redeeming working through his living Word and people as they fight the fight of faith together to exalt Christ and protect the purity of his bride.” Cheong attempts to inspire readers with a robust view of God’s passionate love for the church while challenging them to not flinch from recognizing the messiness of “gospel relationships.” Cheong believes that while we all need correcting from time to time, certain cases require intervention from church leaders. This book is filled with gracious wisdom forged in the fires of pastoral ministry. Most important it emphasizes God’s tenacious love for his bride.—Kevin Emmert

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors are no strangers to the concept of good things replacing God as the object of a worshiper's attention. But what does this look like when church itself is the "idol" a pastor is venerating?

Craig Groeschel and Kyle Idleman are familiar with the struggle. Each has written a new book on idolatry—Altar Ego by Groeschel and Gods at War by Idleman (both Zondervan, 2013). Leadership Journal correspondent Greg Taylor interviewed Groeschel (senior pastor of Edmond, Oklahoma based LifeChurch.tv and one of the creators of the YouVersion Bible app) and Idleman (teaching pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky) for a candid take on what happens when ministry begins to supplant God.

Your new books deal with idolatry versus Christ identity. What prompted you to address this topic?

Idleman: As I've spoken to different churches recently about what it means to be completely committed to Jesus, I have found that one of the chief problems is not lack of desire, but lack of alignment. There are many Christians, myself included, who want to totally commit to Jesus. The problem is that our lives are aligned around something or someone else. The best word for that is idolatry; we're replacing God, even while we're "totally" committing to discipleship. The challenge to follow Jesus is the challenge to find our identity in Christ. Idolatry sabotages that by replacing him with something or someone else.

Groeschel: My reason is similar. Deep down, we really don't know who God says we are. What I'm trying to do in Altar Ego is to help people lay down the false images they have of themselves and replace those with their identity in Christ. We all feel insecure, inadequate. I think we can grow to see beyond that. When we know who we are, we can live into God's true calling.

You both preach to thousands of people. You're insecure?

Idleman: Yeah, it's pretty easy to feel insecure, whether you're in front of three people or 3,000. I remember struggling with this in the first church I ever preached at. There were only like 30 people, but it was hard on me. I'd have old ladies tell me that I kept my hands in my pockets too long, and other people critique my delivery. It became overwhelming.

Groeschel: I don't know any pastors who don't battle with insecurity at one time or another. I've done this for 20 years, and I'm still overcoming my fears about what people think of me. Being a pastor can breed insecurity, and we have to find our identity in Christ just like anybody else.

There's also a special danger that pastors face in this area. Sometimes we'll start to find significance in results or in what people think about us, instead of in our identity and calling. We can get obsessed with the thoughts of others. That's the quickest way to forget who you really are.

Social media makes it even easier to get caught up with what people say or think about me. I can see what people are saying about a sermon on Twitter. I can count the "likes" of an Instagram picture. I can hope for comments on nuggets of Facebook wisdom. Before long we find ourselves managing our public persona instead of developing our private devotion to Christ.

Idleman: That's especially true for those of us who really feel our love for the congregation. We want to be liked by people, and when they do we interpret that liking as "doing a good job as a pastor." Then, if those feelings aren't there, we feel like we're failing, when in the big picture, we're not.

What does insecurity lead to for pastors?

Idleman: It leads to what Ed Stetzer calls "ministry p*rnography." We start lusting over what we don't have. When we become enthralled with what they are doing, and what we're not doing, it leads to competition. If it's hard for me to rejoice over what God is doing through a nearby congregation, that says something about me.

There is a ripple effect when the church takes God's place in our lives. Being a pastor can breed insecurity, and we have to find our identity in Christ, just like anybody else.

Groeschel: Insecurity can also influence us to take credit for things we're not really doing.

Once a singles ministry that my wife and I led dropped from 100 people down to four—and two of them were us. It haunted me until I realized that in that circ*mstance, I was trying to take blame for something that was bigger than I was.

The flip side of blaming ourselves for declines is then one day taking credit for the increases. I try to remember that I can't take credit for the growth, and I shouldn't blame myself for the decline. I can control what I do, but I can't control the results. Those fall to God alone. It doesn't matter how successful whatever your corner of the world is, there's another corner that you're not as successful in.

Let's go a little more directly at this: What happens when your church becomes your idol?

Groeschel: I have to speak from personal experience. In the early years of my ministry, my church was unquestionably an idol for me. Eventually I had to do two different rounds of counseling to break out of it. I was a workaholic; my whole identity had become wrapped around what I produced. Who I was—in God's view—was withering away. I had become a full-time pastor and part-time follower of Christ.

I've made a lot of progress, but I'm not 100 percent over that. I've had to ask honest questions about why I'm driven to minister in the first place. Am I driven to please God, or to accomplish something selfish? Am I driven to reach people, or to build a church that makes me feel good?

Idleman: We can worship the god of achievement, and put our hope in what we are able to accomplish. Ultimately that always leads to disappointment. As a preacher I constantly ask myself two questions: What does God want me to say? and How will the people respond? I get into trouble when I get those out of order.

When the first thing that I consider is how people will respond, that's idolatry. That's me putting the response of people ahead of my faithfulness to what God has called me to. I think most preachers can relate to that, constantly struggling with those two questions, but we have to have them in the right order.

Okay, what are some practical indicators that your church is becoming an idol?

Groeschel: If you don't take a regular day off, that's a real good sign. Or if your family resents the church. If you are not willing to openly listen to correction or criticism about your ministry or work habits, that's a sign. If your emotions rise and fall largely based on "results," that's another indicator.

Idleman: When our church becomes an idol, we pastors have a hard time giving ourselves to people who can't advance our "cause." Our calendars morph. We begin to schedule conversations only with people who we feel advance our cause of growing the church. Our questions of church members center on what they can give to the church. We begin to forget "the least of these." Eventually, we begin to get frustrated with people in the church; they seem like obstacles to our goals, rather than the people we're called to love and serve and pour our lives into. We start to act as if they're in our way.

Groeschel: Yes, like they are just tools to build "our vision" instead of people to love.

How do you break that mindset?

Groeschel: You have to be intentional. It's so easy to let the work of God replace your own intimacy with God. There were years I did that, and it's still a temptation. Starting with honesty about our weaknesses and vulnerabilities is vital. Through that we're able to say, I'm a Christian first—I'm a child of God first—not a pastor first.

My identity is not in my church calling. My identity is as a child of God, and I must really drive that into my heart, over and over again until I can really believe it and live out of it instead of the opposite.

Bill Hybels said it well: "The way I was doing God's work was destroying the work of God in me." When I first heard that, it pierced my heart. That was me. We have to fall in love with God's Word, be strengthened through prayer, have genuine Christian community where we are truly open and do life with others. Sometimes as pastors we let those life-changing basics slip.

Idleman: It's the Mary and Martha story. Martha was being distracted by doing many things, and Mary was choosing what is better by being with Jesus. We need to cultivate the determination and intentionality to constantly choose what is better.

How transparent are you with your churches about this? Do you publicly confess to them that you struggle with idolizing the church?

Idleman: I try to model repentance and brokenness by talking about my challenges or my struggles. But to me that's different than letting the church listen to me pray a prayer of repentance before I preach, or to see brokenness because I know I'm talking about something that God convicted me of personally before I got up there to preach on it.

I think it's more than just being honest with a story of something "unphotogenic" that happened in my home. I certainly think that can be good, but I think that we need to go further.

Groeschel: I was trained in seminary not to be transparent. They called it "guarding the pastor's mystique." That was one of the most dangerous teachings that the older generation passed along. It was wrong. If you are not being transparent, you are not going to reach this generation today. You have to be authentic. We have to struggle and be vulnerable in front of the congregation.

Let's move outside of the pastor's inner life. How does a pastor's church idolatry impact those close to you?

Idleman: There is a ripple effect when the church takes God's place in our lives. I talked about "alignment" before, and this comes back to that. It's like getting the top button on a shirt wrong … you get that one wrong and all the others are off; but if you get that one right all the others line up. When God isn't in his rightful place the rest of the buttons in our lives are not aligned.

I was trained in seminary not to be transparent. They called it "guarding the pastor's mystique." That was one of the most dangerous teachings that the older generation passed along.

Our families start to find that when attendance is up we are up, and when attendance is down we are down. This is why some people have such a hard time stepping away from being the pastor of a church. Their whole identity is found in their position. They own it … and the staff feel like they're being led by a dictator rather than a shepherd.

As Craig mentioned earlier, church idolatry brings out obsession with the numbers, which leads to competitive relationships with other churches and other leaders. We become consumed with our statistics at the cost of our people.

Groeschel: It's not uncommon to have family members resent the church because the church gets the best of their parent or spouse. Even when physically present with their family, he or she might not be emotionally present and engaged.

Idolatry can also alienate staff members because they feel they're seen as only a tool to help achieve the minister's goals instead of as people to love and develop.

Let's come back to where we started, to this idea of pastoral insecurity. What practical steps do you personally take to hang on to God's view of you?

Idleman: Well, this is a constant struggle for pastors. Insecurity for me isn't as much about how I perceive people viewing me, my personal insecurity comes more from my own view of me. Whichever you struggle with, the answer is to die to self. Then the challenge (since this is so internal) is to find how you're going to make that part of your life.

A few years ago, I was really struggling with this. I ended up going into the garage, grabbing a can of black spray paint, and painting the classic words from the Apostle Paul on my closet wall: I DIE DAILY. For me, every time I saw my indoor graffiti, it summed up my challenge.

Groeschel: To be honest, it's not easy to overcome people pleasing and focus solely on what God thinks. Social media can get to me, so one thing I do is avoid social media during ministry times. I may tweet something, but I won't look for retweets or comments. This keeps me more focused on God rather than being distracted by what people think.

As well, I have a routine before preaching of closing my eyes and reflecting on my moment of salvation. I think about where I was, the prayer I prayed, and how God changed me. Then I walk through different verses in my mind reminding myself of who I am in Christ. I am not who others think I am. I am who God says I am. I am his child. I am loved, secure, and accepted through Christ. I am filled with his Spirit, an overcomer by his blood and my testimony. I am called, set apart, and chosen. I can do everything he calls me to do.

To me, this kind of prayer matters most. If I am praying consistently as I minister, this reminds me that what I am doing is for God and from God. When my prayer life slips, it's so much easier to do things for the wrong reasons. A disciplined life of prayer helps me keep my eyes on Christ and off of the approval of people.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A friend of mine recently changed careers after being in pastoral ministry for nearly a decade. I asked him how his new job was going. "Really well," he said. "These days, people get mad at me only once or twice a year. When I was in pastoral ministry, it seemed like someone was mad at me every other day."

I understood. I can still see the parents of a teenager, in my office crying because their son was walking down the wrong path. They were desperate for help, expecting and even demanding that I intervene in their son's life. "Why doesn't this church offer a better youth group?" they screamed.

I remember an angry keyboardist, frustrated that our church's worship team was not using him "to his full potential." He expected a prominent role in the worship service, and his expectations were not being met. "I really think the worship here should better utilize people," he said.

I can picture a man offering to donate computer equipment to the church "but only if it was going to be well used." Another man gave $65,000 to the church but kept pulling on invisible strings, demanding that it be used as he directed. Three weeks later, after sleepless nights of wrestling with his demands and threats, I had our accountant write a check for $65,000, and I gave it back to the demanding donor.

These frontline stories of pastoral work are endless. How do we handle people's expectations, learn to get over them or live with them, or even learn from them? There are times when we even sense that these expectations come from God. What do we do then?

The key is to learn to listen to God and to let our vision flow from there. This often involves developing some thick skin, while still keeping our sensitivity to the real pain and needs of people. Every effective leader must learn to live with the very people who frustrate them until they no longer do. When you become a leader, you can never again get angry in public. The challenge is to stay balanced when criticized, to avoid taking the criticism personally yet to avoid becoming calloused or cynical. We are called to a paradox of personalities: sensitive but not easily offended, empathetic but not weak, flexible and yet filled with convictions.

You're not making me happy

The common theme running through all of the stories I related can be summed up best in a single word—disappointment. That's the root of all these unwarranted expectations, criticisms, and crises. Someone wants help and is not getting the help they want; someone needs a problem solved and the problem is not going away; someone is hurting and not getting any relief. It can all be summed up by the feeling of disappointment.

We shouldn't be surprised by any of this. We live in a fallen world, and it makes sense that if life is not working as it is supposed to work, people would turn to the church to relieve that sense of disappointment, to get help. Yet the reality is that neither a church nor a pastor can satisfy every person's disappointment.

I have known pastors who fall into this trap all too often. They wrongly believe that it is their job to make people happy. So they run themselves ragged trying to cater to the needs of people, or they push their staff to do this. It may sound strange, but there is a sense in which I can truthfully say that the church does not exist to help people. Our job is not to solve their problems or alleviate their disappointments. The primary reason the church exists is to worship God and to point people to Christ, the ultimate solution to their problems. Our work should draw attention to the one who has saved us, the one who has given us hope in place of our disappointment.

We do ourselves a disservice any time we position ourselves as the ultimate answer to people's problems.

In our well-meaning attempts to promote Christianity as the answer to everything, we sometimes overpromise when we present the gospel. We want churches to be happy places, so we end each service on a high note, giving the impression that happy feelings always come from church. Or we want to help everybody we meet, so we have churches filled with broad spectrums of ministries for every conceivable need, but we end up doing many things poorly rather than fewer things well. The answer to all of this is to strip down the gospel to its essence: mankind getting right with a holy God.

With that in mind, we may need to help people understand the following truths if we want to help them develop realistic, healthy expectations about the church and the role and abilities of those in leadership:

• Church will not always make you feel comfortable.
• Church will not be the answer to your every need.
• You will sometimes not like what happens at church.
• You might leave a service unhappy once in a while, particularly if you are seeing yourself in light of God's righteousness.
• If you are a single person, going to church will not guarantee you a spouse.
• Going to church will not guarantee that your children will not rebel.
• Going to church is not the answer to all your financial problems.
• You might not get along with everybody you meet at church.

Disappointment with God

If the ultimate solution to the disappointments our people experience is pointing them to Christ, letting him be the Great Physician in their lives, then once we have done this, disappointment takes on a different nuance. Now, if people are disappointed, they are ultimately disappointed with God.

For the teenager's parents crying in my office, so sad that their son is walking the wrong path, so desperate for help from the church, so expectant and even demanding that I intervene, the one who has really disappointed them is God. They prayed about the situation. They begged God to intervene. So where is God? He is the one they are upset with.

When people come to us with their frustration, sharing their pain and disappointment with us, we need to dig beneath the layer of the immediate concern. When those parents are crying in my office (and I am crying with them), what they are ultimately expressing is that they are frustrated that God allows people to make bad choices—in this case, their son.

The real work of a pastor is not to try to solve their problems, particularly when pathways to immediate solutions have already been suggested and are not being heeded. The answer is not to ratchet up the youth program, or to drop everything and help chase a rebellious teenage son, or to lock him in his room until he turns 30.

Rather, the real work of a pastor is to help give the parents a clearer sense of who God is, that God is good no matter what they are experiencing right now, that he desperately loves their son even to the point of allowing him to make poor choices. The real work of a pastor is to help people come to grips with God's goodness, even though we often do not understand his ways.

Picture the angry keyboardist, so frustrated that our church's worship team was not using him to his full potential, so hurt his expectations are not being met—his real disappointment is with God. Did the keyboardist not ask God to give him a greater ministry on the worship team? Why did God say no?

The wise church leader does not immediately cater to this man's demands and promise that he will be used more regularly on the worship team if that is not the best option. The wise leader will help this man see a righteous God contrasted with the prideful heart of man. Again, the ultimate work of a pastor is not to assuage this man's disappointment and solve his scheduling problem or his need to be in greater demand as a musician. It is to offer him a clearer sense of the character of God.

An Invitation to Lament

When you encounter people's unreasonable expectations of you as a leader, one very practical and biblical response is something we find modeled in the Psalms and in the ministry of Jeremiah and throughout much of the major and minor prophets of the Old Testament.

This response to disappointment, to unanswered questions and unresolved tension, to the pain and suffering people bring to us is inviting them to lament.

This means that when a person comes to you, and the problem cannot be solved, you point them to Jesus and invite them to honestly pour out their heart to the Lord. We know that God is the God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3). When we lament, we acknowledge that God is good and sovereign, yet life is not as we would like it to be.

We find validation for our grieving in our lamentation. We learn that our emotions are permitted, that it is right to express them, even when those emotions include anger at injustice. The biblical form of lamenting allows people to feel and express the discomfort and disappointment they experience living in an imperfect world.

When you invite people to lament, you are acknowledging that you, as a church leader, are with them in their journey, and you empathize with what they are going through. You do not try to cheer them up. You do not try to fix all their problems. You allow them to feel the hard truth, the raw emotion of the problem or circ*mstance. And you point them to God.

David cried out to God. So did Jesus, who prayed with "loud cryings and tears to the one who was able to save him from distress." God himself did this with Job. After Job had lost his family, his health, his housing, his reputation, and his livelihood, God did not wipe away every tear, at least not at first.

God did not try to make things all better. God did not offer Job any solutions to his problems. God did not crank up the ministries at the local church to help Job recover the things he had lost.

God simply pointed Job to the realities of the moment: that Job was a man, and that God was God. He allowed Job to lament, to call out in distress, and then God pointed him to facts that he could not fathom. It is perhaps the best example of pastoral ministry ever recorded.

Remember, seldom are your critics actually disappointed with you. They are usually disappointed with themselves, their lives, or God. You are simply a convenient target.

Wayne Cordeiro is founding pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, Hawaii. Reprinted by permission from Sifted, by Wayne Cordeiro and Francis Chan (David C. Cook, 2012).

How Do You Get People to Love God? by Francis Chan

It's hard to be a church leader. We try so hard to get people to love Jesus. And when they don't, we ask why—again and again. Why don't people serve more? Why don't they give more? Why don't they share their faith? Why do they keep looking at p*rnography? Why don't they get along with each other better?

When we see shortcomings, usually our response is to work harder. Or encourage them to work harder. Maybe we can craft the perfect sermon, or perhaps in this counseling session we can say the perfect thing. (And sometimes we do need to work harder, for sure.)

But usually we need to realize a simple and yet complex truth. The ultimate work of a pastor is God's doing. We can't make people do anything. Paul's commitment in Ephesians 3:14-19 is to pray harder, and to pray for a specific thing: that people would know the fullness of God, so that people can understand Christ's love for them.

That's a difficult concept to fully grasp. No matter how hard we work as church leaders, we will never be able to get people to love God. That work comes from God by the power of his Spirit. It's a supernatural exchange. God grants the love. If a person does not truly understand the depths of God's love, you will not be able to talk the person into it. This granting is something only God can do.

Imagine it this way. When my wife, Lisa, and I lived in Simi Valley, we often had people sharing our house with us. For some time, a young woman named Rochelle lived with us. She was single, and, like people in the Christian community are apt to do, Lisa and I tried as hard as we could to get Rochelle married off. Seriously—we introduced her to every single guy we could find. Rochelle didn't mind, and it proved fun for the whole family. Even our kids prayed that Rochelle would get married.

But no matter what we did, there was no way that we could "make" any two young people fall in love with each other. Eventually, Rochelle fell in love all by herself. She's now married, and the couple is expecting a baby.

The same idea is at work here—you can't make anyone fall in love with Jesus, either. When it comes to Jesus and people, you can only make the introduction.

I can only tell them that God, the Creator of the world, the only God that matters, loves them deeply. More than any other human being could. God loves you so much that he gave his son to die on a cross for you. It doesn't matter how messed up you are, how much you've rebelled against him, or even how indifferent you might be to matters of the cross; God still loves you deeply. Who does this? Who chooses to die in place of someone else? What an amazing God this is!

Yes, I can make this introduction, but nothing will happen until the Holy Spirit supernaturally gives a person the ability to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. He enables people to know something they can't know. You understand God's love in your inner being. Oh, how God loves us! And for people to understand this love, it comes only through prayer.

Prayer is the first and greatest work that we do.

—Francis Chan

Reprinted by permission from Sifted, by Wayne Cordeiro and Francis Chan (Cook, 2012).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

This was the largest capital campaign in our church's history, so my wife and I were asked to meet face-to-face with key leaders. As Karen and I drove to Caribou Coffee to meet a twenty-something couple in our church, I thought, This meeting may not be easy. Mark and Debbie care so passionately about social justice that they moved into the lowest-income apartment complex in our area, and they have the bedbug bites to prove their commitment. Now we'd be asking them to give, when much of their gift would go to build a new sanctuary for our suburban congregation.

We warmed up by asking what Mark and Donna thought about Sunday's sermon, in which our senior pastor kicked off the public phase of the campaign with a passionate message about God's call to Abram to "Go."

Mark was direct: "C'mon, just because God told Abram to go to a new land doesn't mean God is telling our church to buy a new building."

Hmmm. Raising money from Millennials is not going to be easy, I realized.

Modifying the traditional campaign

Church capital campaigns follow a pattern: private phase, public phase, advance-commitment night, commitment Sunday, etc. While this traditional pattern has been tested over decades, it's important to remember it was not designed by Millennials (people born roughly between 1980 and 2000). In fact, many campaigns essentially write off Millennials and assume the heavy giving will be done by Builders or Baby Boomers. This is not surprising, since Millennials have been criticized, as Drew Dyck wrote in Leadership Journal, as "restless, entitled, bloated self-esteem, desultory work patterns, twitter-sized attention spans—pick your pejorative."

But our church did not have that luxury: 80 percent of our adults are under age 40. Either Millennials got behind this campaign or we didn't have one.

So we assertively modified the traditional campaign. This led to animated conversations with our capital-campaign consultant. But that give-and-take made the campaign right for our Millennials. It made us appreciate our consultant all the more (because she was willing to adjust traditional approaches but wisely kept us from jettisoning too much). And it led to a campaign that exceeded our expectations. Here's what we learned.

1. Provide real help for people in real need.

Millennials' gift to the church, in my opinion, is their outward focus; they define greatness as serving others.

When our church bought a 50-year-old plastics factory and wanted to raise money to renovate it for a sanctuary, classrooms, and office, we got questions.

Some of our Baby Boomers worried, "Can we make a deserted factory beautiful enough to reflect our worship of God?"

Some of our Millennials worried, "Will we make our own church so nice that we hurt our ability to help people in Section 8 housing?"

Our campaign's tagline was "For the Lord, the Lost, and the Least," and Millennials were the most likely to ask about that final word.

We won over many Millennials by the undeniable fact that this factory was scrappy and that we purchased it at auction for a startlingly low price.

We also used the campaign to increase our giving to people in need. We said publicly: "We are not going to build this sanctuary on the backs of the poor and the trafficked. We are not going to ask our missionaries to live on less for the next two years. Instead, at the very time when we need every dollar for this building, we are going to boost our outward giving by 26 percent."

Millennials will dig deep as they see your church trying to "live simply so that others may simply live."

2. Dial down the hype.

Run each statement, fact, goal, or idea you plan to communicate through a brutal-honesty filter, because the Millennial generation is conditioned to distrust the institution and to question the inauthentic.

Millennials' gift to the church, in my opinion, is their outward focus. They define greatness as serving others.

For example, on our main campaign video, I didn't say, "In our rented facilities now, children's ministry is practically impossible." Instead, I said, "While not impossible to do now, it's kind of hard."

This feels counterintuitive, and you may feel you're lowering urgency, excitement, and the call to action. But authenticity is non-negotiable.

And because Millennials tend to be skeptical, it's impossible to communicate too clearly or too exactly where all the money is going.

3. Find ways for everyone to make the team.

Recently I heard a 40-something pastor mock the fact that Millennials grew up on soccer teams where at the end-of-year banquet, everyone got a trophy. But why not let that "everyone is special" dynamic work for you?

Most capital campaigns, to increase giving, create a culture of exclusivity. The private phase focuses on elite gatherings of major donors. That motivated Boomers—"I got on the elite team." It bothers Millennials. In our campaign, a few Millennials asked, "Are there secret meetings?"

So in our private phase, we insisted that gatherings include not just major givers but also major servers, people who give generously of their time.

We grew the private-phase invitation list to about a third of our entire congregation. And on advance-commitment night, we didn't restrict the event to our big givers. Instead, we invited anyone who was ready to make his or her commitment early.

Probably the simplest and best way to ensure that Millennials won't feel left out is to recruit some Millennials for your campaign leadership team.

4. Talk honestly about debt.

Debt is a fact of American life: for households with credit-card debt, the average is $15,799. But Millennials feel the vise grip of debt more painfully than most.

Average debt for graduating college seniors is more than $23,000, and recent graduates stumble in paying this back, when the only jobs they're finding are part-time, lower-paying, service-sector. Add in a car loan, and an occasional bad spending decision, and you understand why the most-common question I got during the campaign was, "I want to give, but I have a lot of debt to pay off. What should I do?"

So it's not enough to talk in glowing terms about faith and generosity and "not equal gifts but equal sacrifice." We have to talk about the realpolitik of debt.

My response to the reality of Millennials' debt and their calling to give was posted on our church blog. (See the sidebar accompanying this article.) Basically the issue is this:

Both paying off your debts and giving generously are important. Paying off your debts must be a high priority for your financial life. Having said that, I do not advise waiting until your debts are fully paid off before giving to God. You need to give for your spiritual health, for your connection to the church, and for your own dignity.

So I encouraged them to give something now. And over time, as they pay down debts, they will gain the freedom to give more.

We also asked Dawn, a thirty-something leader in our church, to give a testimony. She told how in the past year she and her husband had been hit by car repairs, an unexpected home repair, and medical bills, so they were not sure how they could give extra.

As they prayed about it, they discovered selling used boots and other items online. Many people told me they appreciated her story because it was their story, too.

5. Keep tech relational.

According to a MillennialDonors.com study, 71 percent of Millennials get information about a nonprofit through web searches. As a result, many people assume the best way to motivate the giving from Millennials is through technology. But in our experience, though tech is helpful, it will not replace relationship; you still need to schedule as many face-to-face meetings as time will allow. And as you do communicate via tech (we used our church website, blog, Facebook account, and Twitter, plus we built a campaign microsite and added online giving, which we didn't have before), don't think "impressive." Think "relationship building," which for Millennials means "authentic," "fun," "simple," and "sharing of stories."

In all our tech, we invited people to tell their stories of generosity and transformation. Some people wrote brief stories; others created YouTube videos.

Our church must be one of the few left in America that does not show videos in worship services, but we got huge wins with a 14-minute video that we showed after services one Sunday. On it Jeff and Kimberly, a Millennial couple, talked honestly about their marital separation and loss of a child, and how the church had walked with them through those crises.

In another video, "Generous Giraffe," (vimeo.com/31145505) our artists created a fun singalong for kids. One young family visited our church for the first time because they saw the video online.

6. Set the threshold low and the participation high.

We had a financial goal, but what we emphasized more was a participation goal: "We want 100 percent of our members and regular attenders to give." To increase participation, we did two things.

First, we ran a "one-fund campaign" (as our consultant astutely advised), in which the general fund and building fund and mission fund are combined. That way, every dollar someone has been giving, or starts to give, contributes to the whole ministry. It sets the threshold low so that everyone can participate.

Second, we took the traditional gifts chart—we need so many gifts of this amount, and so many of this amount, etc.—and shifted it downward: fewer of the really big gifts, and lots more of the really small gifts.

Many Millennials think, I don't have much to give. We said, "If every college student here gives $10 a week, that would yield over $150,000."

How did we do on participation? We hit 81 percent, a little lower than we'd hoped, but we were delighted that 72 commitments came from people who had never given to our church before.

7. Wrestle your demons to the mat (Millennials can tell if you haven't).

Millennials can read you as a leader. They may not do so perfectly, but in general, their radar picks up whether you are giving sacrificially, whether you are anxious and therefore pressuring people, and whether this campaign is primarily about you.

Though they tend to distrust institutions, they will trust a leader who is honest and unafraid to be in personal contact and who will let them ask hard questions. This is impossible to do, though, if you're still anxious about whether your church is going to reach its financial goal.

To get free from that anxiety, and as a result, to gain an inner freedom that you can extend to others, comes through prayer and hearing the Word of God. I must confess that we were already into the public phase of our campaign before I got there, primarily through hearing a sermon by our senior pastor.

It also took me time to break through to the freedom of giving sacrificially. I knew the campaign was coming, months beforehand, when the Lord spoke to me about giving a number that was, for me and my wife, radical. Money is inherently self-deceptive, though, so it took fasting and prayer and conversation before we finally could give that number with unity and joy.

But once I was free from anxiety and free to obey, what a freedom I felt to pastor! With the weak I could be tender and genuinely release them from any pressure to give; with the strong, I could challenge them boldly.

And when I saw the results from Commitment Sunday, I rejoiced. It's not true that Millennials do not want to commit. It may be that we seldom ask them in ways that release their passion: to belong to an authentic community that is making the world a better place and glorifying the one who is eternal.

Kevin A. Miller is associate rector of Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois.

This article first appeared in the November 2012 edition of Church Finance Today, a sister publication of Leadership Journal.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The official website for Brennan Manning announced Friday that the author had died.

He was 78 and passed away just a few days shy of his April 27 birthday.

BrennanManning.com said:

It is with mixed emotions that we must tell you that on Friday April 12, 2013, our Brother Brennan passed away.While he will be greatly missed we should all take comfort in the fact that he is resting in the loving arms of his Abba.

Sincerely

Art & Gerry Rubino

[Gerry is his sister]

Starting in 1970 with the publication of Gentle Revolutionaries, Manning wrote and published more than 20 books. His alcoholism in the context of being a Franciscan priest was the backdrop for much of his spiritual reflection. The Ragamuffin Gospel, published first in 1990, was his most well-known work. In 2011, his memoir, All is Grace, was published in which he talked about leaving the priesthood, his marriage, and later divorce.

Last fall, Hurricane Sandy severely damaged Manning’s residence in Belmar, NJ, according to his office manager, Art Rubino.

At the time, Rubino said:

My name is Art Rubino. My wife Gerry (Manning), Brennan’s sister, and I are Brennan’s care providers.While his physical health is good, he is almost totally blind and neurological issues have severely impaired his speech and ability to move about. He has a full-time Health Aide named Richard who Gerry and I feel is a gift from God. As many of you know, Belmar, NJ has been devastated by the recent storm. The home where Brennan lived is uninhabitable and he must find other accommodations. Much of our inventory was destroyed.

In January, 2013, this information was updated:

Due to complications brought on by Hurricane Sandy, Brennan had to be moved to an extended care facility where he could get the care and attention he needed. His neurological issues have gotten worse. Please continue to pray for him.

In 2004, then associate editor Agnieszka Maria Zielinska wrote a profile of Manning, including:

When I first meet Manning, my eyes are drawn to his thick black brows, which only recently have begun to turn white like the snowy hair on his head; his thin, almost absent, lips; and the deep creases around them. He is life-weary, but his intensely blue eyes are young with eternity. Looking down, I notice a whimsicality coming from the soul of a child. His light denim jeans are cheekily patched up with colorful squares. It’s as if to remind himself and me, “Don’t think I’m a saint. I’m a ragamuffin, you’re a ragamuffin, and God loves us anyway.” In his bestseller The Ragamuffin Gospel (Multnomah, 1990), he writes that “justification by grace through faith means that I know myself accepted by God as I am.” He explains, “Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology. It is an act of faith in the grace of God alone.” The jeans are a symbol, then, of faith. We sit down, and Manning tells me that there’s nothing he’d rather do than what he has done for 41 years: help sinners journey from self-hatred to self-acceptance.

He’s been there—or, to put it more accurately—he is there, traveling this road daily, never too far from a character he calls the Imposter. Everyone’s got one. It’s “the slick, sick, and subtle impersonator of my true self.” The persona craves to be liked, loved, approved, accepted, to fit in. “It’s the self that refuses to accept that my true self, centered in Christ, is really more likeable, more attractive, and more real than the fallen self.”

The Imposter has shadowed Manning all through his never-boring days: from Brooklyn, where he grew up; through one semester of journalism studies; through Korea, where he served with the Marines; the Catholic seminary—which he left after seven days because of the dreaded “rising at 5 a.m., chanting psalms in Latin with pantywaist 18-year-old postulants,” being ordered to eat beets (“which I hated”), and “stumbling up steps in an ankle-length robe unaware that I had to lift the hem”; through his service with the Franciscans in the United States and the Little Brothers of Jesus in Europe; to New Orleans, where he now lives.

Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

Hi, Urthlings –

We’ve resolved the commenting issue (fingers crossed), and are looking forward to your thoughtful feedback pouring back into Ur.

Fire away!

-Paul

Not only does CT monitor and report breaking religion news here on Gleanings, we also do our best to update previous blog posts as stories continue to develop.

We announce updates via Twitter; but in case you’re not one of the nearly 110,000 people following @CTmagazine (and honestly, why aren’t you?), here’s what you might have missed this week:

(Editor’s note: This is not a roundup of the new blogs we posted this week, so shouldn’t replace your daily reading!)

Rick Warren’s Son Dies from Suicide

Update: Warren announced via Twitter that his son committed suicide using an unregistered gun bought over the internet.

Margaret Thatcher Obits Overlook Her ‘Devout Christian Faith’

Iron Lady once gave a significant speech deemed the “Sermon on the Mound.”

Mental Health Problems More Common Among ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’

Update: New study finds link between risk of depression and lack of church attendance.

Christian Crackdown Moves Sudan Closer To ‘100 Percent’ Muslim

Update: President’s amnesty for political prisoners includes release of Christian woman.

Blasphemy Laws Now Making Headlines in … Europe

Update: After putting plan on hold for months, Russian lawmakers are moving forward on anti-defamation bill.

Southern Presbyterians Lose Third of Members, But Amicably

Update: Recent schism at Presbyterian church isn’t keeping two congregations from sharing space.

Job Security for Bible Experts Now in Short Supply

Update: Bad news for professors seeking tenure at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Christian Exodus from Syria Raises Hopes for Resurrection in Turkey

Update: Good news for Assyrian Christian refugees.

Libya Will Release Foreign Missionaries Jailed for Evangelism

Update: Four Egyptian Christians released in prisoner exchange.

An Arizona bill that could leave many employees of religious schools and daycares ineligible for unemployment benefits is on the verge of becoming law.

According to the Associated Press, “[Arizona] House Bill 2645 would allow religious organizations to avoid paying unemployment taxes for educational and day care workers. … Proponents argue that the proposed law is necessary after some state tax officials recently started interpreting the current religious exemption so that it only applies to church staff and not private school teachers.”

The debate over unemployment benefits for religious employees arose last year, after the state’s Department of Economic Security decided that religious “schools and child care centers did not qualify under the [existing] exemption because their mission statements were to provide general education or adult supervision.” Supporters of the bill say it is a return to the previous status quo, not a stripping away of benefits from employees.

The Arizona Daily Star reports that Wednesday’s vote in the Senate was a voice vote, but if the bill is approved after an upcoming roll-call vote, the bill will be passed on to the governor.

CT previously has reported on the topics of church finances and unemployment, including the loss of tax breaks for ministry leaders in Canada.

Update (April 23): The New York Times reports that Pennsylvania Judge Jeffrey Minehart has thrown out three of the seven murder charges in the case against Kermit Gosnell. Minehart “also granted a motion for acquittal in five charges of abuse of a corpse against Dr. Gosnell, who, according to prosecutors, killed fetuses that were alive after they were aborted by plunging scissors into their necks. Dr. Gosnell was also acquitted on one charge of infanticide.”

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The absence of reporting on the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell has outraged some pro-life groups, and they’re taking to social media to protest.

A so-called Facebook and Twitter “Tweetfest” that begins at noon today aims to break the “strange silence of the mainstream media regarding one of the most gruesome murder trials in American history.”

Sponsored by Operation Rescue, Priests for Life, Stand True, and AbortionWiki, the event encourages social media users to use #Gosnell to draw attention to the Gosnell case.

Gosnell “is accused of killing seven live babies at the Philadelphia Women’s Medical Society clinic and a woman who was administered too much anesthesia,” the Daily Mail reports. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Operation Rescue, one of the Tweetfest sponors, offers an extensive archive of past coverage of Gosnell, dating back to his original arraignment and grand jury report in 2011, and the trial (though readers should be warned that many of the articles contain graphic images of aborted fetuses).

CT previously weighed in on the case against Gosnell in 2011, arguing that the real scandal is not the stark charges against the doctor but something much more commonplace.

Update (April 16): Adventist Review reports that Adventist General Conference president Ted N.C. Wilson, told the church members gathered to celebrate the denomination’s 150th anniversary that it is a “very sad” anniversary.

“We should have been home by now!” Wilson said. “The Lord has wanted to come long before this. Why celebrate any more anniversaries when we could be in heaven?”

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(RNS) Over the past 150 years, Seventh-day Adventists have built one of Christianity’s most inventive and prosperous churches, all the while praying for the world to end as soon as possible.

A small band of believers has mushroomed to more than 17 million baptized members, including 1.2 million in the U.S. Nearly 8,000 Adventists schools dot dozens of countries. Hundreds of church-owned hospitals and clinics mend minds and bodies around the world.

You might expect Adventists to celebrate their success while marking their church’s 150th anniversary this May. There’s just one problem: the church wasn’t supposed to last this long.

Back in the 1860s, the founders of Seventh-day Adventism preached that Jesus would return – and soon. That’s why they called themselves “Adventists.” By Second-Coming standards, the church’s long life could be considered a dismal sign of failure.

“If you took a time machine and visited our founders in May 1863, they’d be disconcerted, to say the least, that we’re still here,” said David Trim, the church’s director of archives and research.

Current Adventists aren’t exactly excited about the anniversary, either.

“It’s almost an embarrassment to be celebrating 150 years,” said Lisa Beardsley-Hardy, the church’s director of education. “But it’s also an affirmation of faith in Christ’s return.”

Adventist leaders have slated May 18 – the Saturday before the 150th anniversary – as “a day of prayer, remembrance and recommitment to mission.” On May 21, Adventists will hold a small ceremony at church headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. Don’t expect balloons or birthday cake.

“In one kind of way it really is a sad event,” said Michael Ryan, a vice president at the church’s General Conference, its top governing body.

“We’re a church that by its name believes in the Second Coming of Christ, and we have been hopeful that long ago Christ would have come and taken the righteous to heaven and this world would have ended.”

But Jesus told Christians to occupy themselves until he returns – advice that Adventists take to heart.

Ryan, the church’s director of strategic planning, said he eagerly anticipates projects to open health centers in poverty-stricken communities and a 26-story hospital in Hong Kong. Besides worshipping on Saturday – the biblical seventh day when God rested – Adventists may be best known for their healthy lifestyles. Studies show they live about 10 years longer than their neighbors.

Of course, most Christian churches preach the Second Coming, and nearly half of Americans believe Jesus will return in the next 40 years, according to a 2010 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. But few American churches have been built on the ashes of apocalyptic dreams.

Adventism was founded in the aftermath the Great Disappointment, which dashed the hopes of some 50,000 followers who expected Jesus to arrive in 1844. Some had sold their possessions and let their fields lie fallow. The celestial letdown drove a few insane, crushed under the weight of what social psychologist Leon Festinger would later call “cognitive dissonance.”

But the movement did not disintegrate, as Festinger argued. Instead, early Adventists like James and Ellen White adjusted their beliefs. Something of divine import had happened in 1844, even if it wasn’t the Second Coming, they taught.

Meanwhile, Adventist leaders brought dejected believers together, feeding the hungry and bonding over their shared disappointment. While keeping their ears perked for Gabriel’s horn, Adventists also turned an eye to earthly time, setting Saturday as their Sabbath and preaching the value of healthy living.

Over time, Adventists’ social bonds and distinctive doctrines “led to the creation of a church which survives and prospers today as one of the fastest-growing denominations in Christendom,” writes Stephen O’Leary, a scholar at the University of Southern California.

When those doctrines sail against cultural winds – as when Adventists are forced to work on Saturday, or famous members back Creationism – church solidarity strengthens, scholars say.

Adventist growth is especially intense in Latin America and Africa, where people are attracted to the faith’s blend of ethereal optimism (Jesus is coming soon!) and earthly education (Eat your vegetables until he does.)

“It’s a religious movement whose belief system compensates for both human needs and human longings,” said Edwin Hernandez, a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Latino Religion.

But some Adventists worry that the church’s modern success may bring Adventism full circle: a movement haunted by the hereafter becomes preoccupied with the present.

Adventism thrives because of the urgency of its message, argues church historian George Knight. Countless missionaries have crossed the earth to warn of Jesus’ imminent arrival. “When that vision is gone,” Knight writes, “Adventism will become just another toothless denomination that happens to be a little more peculiar in some of its beliefs than others.”

But Adventist leaders say the apocalyptic pull is still strong at church headquarters, especially during planning sessions. “I see that in our education system,” said Beardsley-Hardy. “Not wanting to over-invest in building because Jesus is coming.”

Beardsley-Hardy said she feels the same tension in her personal life. Should she sock away extra money in her retirement account, she wonders, or gratify immediate needs?

As a child, Beardsley-Hardy said she was convinced that every passing thunderstorm heralded the Second Coming. Now 54, with two children and two grandchildren, she said that sense of urgency is returning.

“I’m getting back to waiting,” Beardsley-Hardy said. “But I’m kind of glad the Lord has tarried.”