Tag: church services

Introducing Colossians & a Second Service?

Posted on September 15, 2008

We launched Colossians this past Sunday with standing room only. Had to pull out chairs from the coffeeshop and create a new row on the fly! It’s encouraging to see people in Austin coming to worship Christ, hear the gospel preached. Now, if we can just convert them to being the church! Two things we will do to make the second gathering less of a service and more of a stepping stone into community:

  • Partner Class: I ripped “Partner” off from the Austin Stone. I avoids the Country Club, consumeristic, elistist baggage of Southern Baptist Church “Membership”, while also giving us language to redefine what it means to be Spirit-led disciples who follow Jesus. The month of October we will have a home-based, weekly partner class that clearly explains the vision and practices of Austin City Life. We will do four weeks on: Vision, Gospel, Community, Mission. There will be no certificates handed out at the end of the class. People will become partners once their City Group leader has signed off on their active participation in the City Group, proof that they are partnering with us in the gospel for the city.
  • Plant Missional Disciples: The second service will be a missional expression, forged around some of our solid, missional core people, with the aim of treating the second service/gathering as an incubator for a new church, kind of like redeveloping a core team but in reverse. This service may be different from our first service in order to accomplish that goal.

I really struggled with how to introduce Colossians. Background only? Cover 1:1-2? Which themes to address in the letter? How to prepare our people to read a first centruy letter in community without giving them a lecture in hermeneutics? How to preach the gospel while covering a lot of mundane information? If you listen to the sermon or read the manuscript, feel free to give me your thoughts. I’m pretty happy with what I came up with, but know it can be improved upon. The most encouraging thing was that I had person after person come up to me and tell me how excited they are about Colossians! In the end, my hope is that Jesus is Lord.

Reasons for a Second Service

Posted on September 11, 2008

Here’s the other side of the coin in considering the addition of a second service:

1. Why turn away people from hearing the gospel of Christ? If more people will come to our gatherings to hear the gospel preached, who am I to turn them away? Jesus went out of his way to keep the unregenerate masses around to hear his sermon on the mount. He went out of his way to feed them and broke them into small groups to share his provision. Peter addressed thousands. Paul packed out houses with people falling out of windows (acts 20:9). As Jacob Vanhorn said, “The first century church didn’t get to put their finger in the dam when God added 1,000’s of new, clumsy believers. I don’t think we can either.” The challenge is to keep preaching the strong gospel of Jesus, and to not accommodate increased consumerism that people bring with them.

2. See the second service as another gathering of the church during which people can be discipled into gospel-centered missional community. Daniel Montgomery once asked me which form of the church was most pure, missional communities or Sunday gatherings? It was a loaded question. He avered that, if done well, both can be “pure” expressions of the church, and I tend to agree. The challenge, however, is to spend as much time recalibrating gatherings as we do recalibrating smaller communities. Austin City Life is in the process of trying to develop a more intentional “liturgy” whereby Sunday gatherings become more of a discipleship experience, not just a service. Missional, steady state, gospel-centered community should happen through public and private gatherings.

3. A second gathering will increase business for the coffeeshop in our building, enabling us to futher support local business. The unoffical slogan of Austin is “Keep Austin Wierd,” which is multivalent. One of the things it means is keep things indy, support local business. We like to do that when possible to be a blessing to our neighbors and city.

4. A second gathering will enable volunteers to serve and to worship every Sunday.

To Start or Not to Start a 2nd Service?

Posted on September 9, 2008

We are wrestling through whether or not to start a second service. For most people it’s a no brainer. If you have enough people, start a second service! Or, follow the 80/20 rule–if 80% of the seats filled, then start a second service because the other 20% will be intimidated by the lack of space. I don’t like either line of reasoning. Here’s why…

  1. Just because you max out seating capacity doesn’t mean your church is ready for more people. How many of the people in our services really get church the way we are trying to be the church? How many understand and embrace that we are trying to raise the problem of mission, solve it with the solution of the gospel, in the context of community? If they get it conceptually, how many of them are actually living this way practically? If there is a gap between concept and practice, is this a product of consumerism, poor leadership, or brevity of time? If there is a significant gap between our theoretical and functional ecclesiologies, then why add more people ignorant of your ecclesiology into a service that isn’t church to begin with?
  2. To start a second service is to commit more resources to an event, not a gospel-centered missional community. Will the demands of a second service so tax our spiritual, emotional, and physical resources that we end up reinforcing church-as-service, instead of church-as-gospel, missional community? Will a second service propagate discipleship anonymity, not missional church tenacity?
  3. Who cares about the 80/20 rule; it just reinforces individualistic comforts. I say “squeeze in”; meet your neighbor; love the church, swallow your individualism and take a bite out of community. Sit on the floor, just don’t fall out of a window.