Had lunch with Tony Balsamo today. (Don’t be put off by the scary photo, he’s as normal as I am!!!)His new church is now four weeks old and they’re averaging over 100 people on Sundays at Integrity Christian Fellowship’s first home in Yaphank.

The official public launch of the church won’t be till the spring, probably Easter Sunday. Here’s their website. Take a look around there and pray for them.
www.integrityfellowship.com

Sunday was the day to set the course for 2006, laying out what would be our emphasis for the the year. And it snowed, froze, was generally hazardous and most folks didn’t make it to service.

So here’s the abbreviated version. Our main goal for the year ahead is growth, which we want to see happening in two ways -

1. People being added to the family of God and to the church.

2. Those who are already part of Grace becoming stronger in their faith.

Since church growth comes from church health, here are four things that are necessary for us to function as a healthy church -

1. Grace needs to be a church where you either get well or get out
To be a Christian means to be becoming whole. There are two fundamental parts of a healthy church’s strategy: grace and grit. Some people call them affirmation and expectation. The unchurched are welcome and accepted right where they are, as they are. The only requirement is a willingness to get well, to grow toward the image of Christ (affirmation).
But God has not called us to be healed and then to sit. He has called us to be healed healers. So the second part of the strategy is to grow people, to demand that they be a responsible part of the family. If people don’t want to grow, we should not continue to bless their fixations. Jesus accepted everyone, but not everyone stayed. You started to get well or you got out. Expectation wasn’t separated from affirmation.
Grace was not a license to loaf; it was a power to perform.

We are looking for those who are part of Grace to commit to growth:
a. Through leading or becoming part of our small groups
b. By participating in the classes that make up The Journey @ Grace Church

2. Grace needs to be a church that isn’t afraid to challenge its own members
Every church with a vision will attract five kinds of people:

• VRPs: Very resourceful people who inspire the dream.
• VIPs: Very involved people who share the dream.
• VTPs: Very teachable people who catch the dream.
• VDPs: Very draining people who sap the dream.
• VNPs: Very nice people who enjoy the dream.

VNPs are the largest group. They will take all we can give them. They fill the theater, but not the empty ministry slots.
The 20-80 rule is not a reality with us: 20 percent of the congregation gives 80 percent of the money and does 80 percent of the work. But we’re nowhere near where we could be.
The trick with the VNPs, is to nudge them constantly, realizing that part of our mission as a church is to challenge our own congregation.

This year we are looking for an increase in -
a. Involvement – We have hundreds of volunteer slots filled, but want to see everyone using their God-given gifts to help us succeed in our mission.
b. Tithing – We need to really embrace a Biblical basis for giving, which will free up resources to help us move forward.

Here’s a quote that was on my blog last week –
We tell people that once they join the church, they are no longer in the target group. They are expected to pick up an oar and help row the boat because we’re on a rescue mission, and we’re after people who aren’t in church.

3. Grace needs to be a church where the preachers have chutzpah
Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.”
Preachers with chutzpah don’t preach to the choir.
They tackle the tough topics that need preaching. They tell it like it is.

4. Grace needs to be a church that judges itself by the difference we make in our world
Instead of pointing to buildings, budgets, and baptisms to measure effectiveness, the test should be the spiritual and moral difference we makes in our corner of the world. Instead of simply coexisting with government, the schools, and the business establishment, our members need to be the instruments to make God’s Kingdom come and His will be done on earth.
Our goal is to have 20% of our adults go on short-term missions trips this year.
Teams going to DR, South Africa, Indonesia, Scotland and Mississippi.
We will also be continuing our local programs to reach out to others.

That’s the abbreviated version – you can get the tape if you want to hear the whole thing.

With the west coast football team I have followed for the past 20 years narrowly missing the playoffs again – try 4-12 on the season! – I transferred my allegiances to the Indianapolis Colts a few weeks ago.

Sadly, the highly acclaimed Colts ended their Superbowl dreams yesterday with a disappointing show against the Steeelers.

They’re still a great team with an outstanding head coach in Tony Dungy. A few days ago we got copies of the booklet he was getting distributed at the January 1st game I was at. It contains some of his testimony and contributions from six other Christians on the team. You can pick some up on Sunday and pass them out – they’re an outstanding tool for sharing your faith.

Yesterday’s weather was brutal. I was surprised at how bad it was when I went out the door at 6.30 to make my way to Patchogue UA for our morning service. Saturday evening’s heavy rain had frozen and then it had snowed on top of that and the pretty white stuff was still falling, combined with 50mph winds.

Not expecting too many folks to turn up at all, we opted to have a special snow day service in our Grace Cafe area of he theater complex instead of us all feeling a bit lost in the usual 565 seater Theater 13.

What a shock to have 145 people come for worship on a morning like that. I think some liked the idea of sipping coffee and chewing bagels all morning and while it was a substantially smaller crowd than on a regular Sunday, it made me think that maybe we really are a dangerous church!

For those who missed my final Sunday speaking on Dangerous Church, I’ll post some if it here over the next couple of days. But not today – it’s my day off!

Tomorrow morning I want to outline some of our plans for 2006 in the second part of our series Dangerous Church.
With a covering of snow threatened, we’ll get a good chance to see how dangerous we really are!

It’s fascinating sometimes, listening to IPOD owners trying to outdo one another. Conversations go much like this -

How many songs have you got on yours?
Around 700, but there’s room for 15,000. What about you?
I can only get 5,000 on mine, but I have over half of it full.

Imagine the sheer joy of having 15,000 songs instantly accessible! If you ever needed a break, you could actually check out from the real world for around three months, sit back and listen to them all!

The cynical edge on my comments should be taken with a pinch of salt and seen as coming from someone who has a 6-disc CD changer in his car and hasn’t changed a single one of the CDs there in living memory.

Music isn’t a big part of my life. But worship is. I love to worship God and I particularly enjoy being able to do that with a crowd in a Sunday service. There’s a special dynamic to corporate worship that makes it totally different from sitting in my recliner and singing Kum Baya.

So this Friday as we come to our coveted Supercool Persons Of The Week Award, I want to honor a great group of people who put heart, soul and a lot of hard work into helping me and so many others to worship on Sundays – our worship team, led by Nancy Saponieri.

These are not only talented musicians and singers, but they are people with a heart to bless God – they are worshippers themselves and not performers. Functioning in a tenant church, they don’t have the luxury of simply arriving and plugging in on Sundays, they’re among the first to arrive and the last to leave. Equipment has to be set in place, wires run, soundchecks done and all this reversed a couple of hours later. Long before that, there is all the preparation and practice that is somehow added into already busy schedules.

They did an excellent job at our 4Him worship evening last night and I see this developing quickly into one of the most popular things we do outside of our Sunday services. It gives us the opportunity to spend a lot longer worshiping than we do on weekends.

I’m not a music buff, but I am grateful that God has blessed us with such an outstanding worship team – our Supercool Persons Of The Week.

It’s weird, but this morning for some unknown reason I left the gym feeling I could have done more. I had upped my exercise today and went at it for longer than I normally do and yet I felt far less exhausted than I was yesterday when I only did about 3/4 of what I did today.

I know that there’s something that’s meant to kick in somewhere in the brain when you work out that makes it pleasant and almost addictive, but trust me after more than ten months of rolling out of bed when it’s still dark and spending the first couple of hours of the day sweating like a pig, my endorphins simply haven’t shown up yet. So it’s still hard work every time.

Some days are easier than others, but with the positive end in view, I just keep doing what I’m doing regardless.

That kind of reminds me of something Paul wrote to the Galatians. Here’s the MMV rendering of it (My Memory Version) – Let’s not get tired of doing good because in due time we will reap the benfits if we don’t give up.

That’s a good point for every area of our lives – let’s just keep on doing what we should be doing!

Thinking about being on the road again this week – to our friends at Christian Asembly in East Patchogue, who are letting us borrow their building again! – I was realizing that we’re kind of a cuckoo church. Now, I don’t mean cuckoo in the sense of crazy, more in the ornithological, feathered bird sense.

Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests if I remember rightly from Elementary School. Looking back it seems that there are quite a number of other churches’ nests we have used when we need to do anything that falls outside of our Sunday morning movie theater slot.

A few months ago we were loaned First Baptist Church for our Pinewood Derby, Thursday we’ll be in Christian Assembly for 4Him and in a couple of weeks we have two Tuesday nights planned at World Outreach Church of God for The Journey @ Grace Church. We’ve had the use of a bunch of other places too and have offers that I still have on hold and will shamelessly call in as needed.

It’s great to have such a good relationship with local pastors. It’s also good to have a bunch of leaders who realize we’re all on the same side and who want to do all they can to see the kingdom of God advance.

Other churches are not the competition. Godless influences are the enemy and we fight them best by being the answer to Jesus’ prayer for his followers that they may be one.

God never intended us to be the same, to worship the same or even for us all to belong to one church. Variety is part of the genius of the creator. Unity in diversity is of our making and I appreciate the fact that so many pastors in our area see that as a priority.

I missed our first 4Him evening of worship and communion a couple of months ago as I ended up making a last minute 48 hour trip to Scotland for a funeral. So I’m really looking forward to Thursday for my first opportunity to participate in this new addition to our schedule.

We have a great team of musicians and singers, who are committed to their ministry, so it’s great to have a night every second month when they can do what they do best – help us to worship God.

Years ago we used to be of the opinion that the longer the worship time, the better the service and that was often totally true – for those of us who were already Christians and who were able to participate, that is. But nowadays we have regained our focus and have come to appreciate that our major gatherings are not just for us, they are the main portal for people to come into our church and to know Christ.

So on Sundays we are sensitive towards our unchurched guests and try to organize things so they hear about Gods love in an environment where they feel at ease. It’s all about them.

So 4Him is a believers’ gathering and there is the opportunity for extended praise and worship, prayer and for communion. So like I said, I’m looking forward to Thursday – be sure to join us!

I just read this – written by a friend of mine who pastors a church in Iowa that started one month before ours. It’s as clear a way of explaining what we’re about as I have seen in a long time -

We tell people that once they join the church, they are no longer in the target group. They are expected to pick up an oar and help row the boat because we’re on a rescue mission, and we’re after people who aren’t in church.