North Point Community Church’s middle school ministry is called Xtreme while the high school ministry is called Inside Out.  Both of these ministries are very similar in teaching principles and formats.  The major difference is the level at which the lessons are taught.  The messages and lessons are intended to be specifically for the middle school or high school.  These ministries seek to communicate the following 7 Checkpoints (which come out of an Andy Stanley book by that name):

1. Spiritual Disciplines- making your relationship with God and scripture an important part of your daily schedule
2. Authentic Faith- learning to trust and depend on God
3. Moral Boundaries- establishing limits on personal desires for the sake of your future potential
4. Wise Choices- understanding how to make decisions which are based on God’s perspective
5. Healthy Friendships- developing relationships which encourage positive lifestyle and spiritual growth
6. Others First- establishing a personal vision to make a difference in the lives of others
7. Ultimate Authority- choosing to respect and follow the leaders that God has put into your life

Kid Stuf is one of the most interesting children’s ministry concepts that I have ever seen.  It is a worship service for elementary children who have been through Up Street and their parents.  This is a high-energy, drama-driven service that seeks to entertain and connect to both children and parents.  Entertainment is part of the program, but it is not the only goal.  Kid Stuf was designed to make sure parents know what their kids are learning at church in order to discuss it with them when they get back home.  This allows parents to look for strategic teaching opportunities to connect what their children are learning at church with what goes on at home and in the children’s world.  Since Kid Stuf is an extension of the Up Street ministry environment, it does not have specific teaching points.  It does have some key priorities that I want to pass along:

• Family Centered- establish a consistent shared experience for parents and kids
• Kid Focused- target everyday issues in a kid’s life and world
• Virtue Driven- emphasize a specific virtue to help kids develop faith and character
• Creatively Wired- use innovative and creative tools to communicate a timeless message
• User Friendly- create a predictable and non-threatening place for families to bring friends
• Volunteer Fueled- develop a strategy to recruit and maintain volunteers

One thing that really impressed me about all of North Point Community Church’s ministry environments is that each environment had several teaching points which would be driven home with the children and students over the course of their time within that environment.  The environment that I am going to start with is the birth to preschool ministry environment called Waumba Land.  The name comes from the Swahilian word “Waumba” which means creator.  So the environment name is “Land of the Creator.”  While in Waumba Land, the kids are focusing on the following teaching points:

• God made me.
• God loves me.
• Jesus wants to be my friend forever.

Last Sunday, I was in Atlanta for the Passion Conference and decided to stay over Saturday night and go to North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia where Andy Stanley is pastor.  While at North Point, I went on their tour of the ministry environments that they have from birth through high school.  I really enjoyed the trip and learned a lot from the tour so I figured that I would pass the information along over the next few days. 

I have had the opportunity to come in as a visitor to several large churches and of those churches North Point is for sure the largest.  I was really impressed with the general hospitality and friendliness of the volunteers.  I was quickly directed to guest parking and was greeted enthusiastically at the door.  The volunteers were very helpful and focused on making sure I had everything I needed. 

One neat and innovative thing that North Point seeks to do for first time visitors is that they have a form on their website where people can sign up and let the volunteer team know that they will be coming.  This then allows the church to be intentional about placing a volunteer with the visiting family to show them around the campus.  Visitors are also given reserved seats in the worship service which is a blessing considering North Point runs approximately 20,000 people through Sunday morning services on their three Atlanta campuses. 

This hospitality and service to people who are not members of the church or who do not know Jesus Christ and are just coming to check it out helps to form the foyer experience of the North Point ministry philosophy.  This allows people to feel comfortable in a new environment that they may be apprehensious about.  I was really impressed with the friendliness and welcoming spirit of the North Point volunteers to make sure people feel comfortable and are open to experience God and possibly coming back to church again!

Today, we will look at the second conversation that is going on.  This is the conversation of the church and Christian thinkers.  This group is asking questions like:

• What does it mean to be a Christian today?
• What is the gospel?
• What does it look like to impact the world around us?
• What is the church’s role in society?

These are questions that all different corners of Christianity are trying to answer.  From Joel Osteen to Rob Bell to John Piper, all of these leaders have insight and ideas that fuel this discussion.

This discussion focuses around the church. not the church as in your church or your denominational affiliation.  This is a discussion for the global Body of Christ.  This means that we should be willing to listen to people’s perspectives that are different than ours to gain further insight into what outreach and evangelism looks like in a post-modern and post-Christian culture.

An unaware and disconnected church is limited in its impact for the gospel and glory of Jesus Christ in all nations.  We need to not limit ourselves but rather open our ears to the conversation at hand.

We live in a world of conversations that circulate around us.  There are two primary types of conversations that we need to seek to engage in as Christians.  Failure to engage in these conversations is something that leads Christians to becoming disconnected with the issues and questions that are being raised by many different people who are longing to have these questions addressed.

The first discussion that is going on is one of the culture.  This is a discussion that comes out a lot in politics and news.  These are conversations that have been sparked by everyone from political candidates to scientists to other news makers.  These are conversations that revolve around the following questions:

• What is wrong with the world?
• What can we do about it?
• What role, if any, does religion have in society?

These are the questions that we see being asked by people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.  They are looking to see how the role of a president looks in addressing these big questions from a national standpoint of America as a world power. 

The religion question is being asked by radical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but the discussion does not stop with just the academic individuals that write New York Time’s bestsellers.  It goes on to include fictional books such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. 

We as Christians need to be reading these books and listening to the ideas of these politicians in order that we may be culturally aware of what the world around us is listening to.  This helps us to be able to more clearly speak the Gospel and the Christian world view into the culture around us.  The answer to all of the world’s questions is Jesus Christ.  We have the answer to the hurts of the world.  We need to be actively engaged in conversations to talk Jesus into the culture around us. 

We will look at the second question tomorrow.

The last post for each month is going to be a newsworthy discussion topics that have been highly discussed in the blog world that I want to present my perspective on and link to other bloggers perspectives on.

Pew Forum Study on Religion and Public Life

There was a study released this month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that has yeilded a lot of discussion in response to its findings.  The study has found that people who were involved in a faith of some kind as children drift away from their faith and then may return to it when they have kids for the purpose of having their children grow up with faith.  The study also finds that people are seeking a more personal and less organized faith.  This is a mindset held by parents that faith is an essential aspect of childhood but is not something that impacts all aspects of life.  Faith and religion is then seen in the minds of parents as a good place to form morality and make you a good person, but it is not something that is of any use beyond the forming and developmental stages of childhood. 

In the New York Times article on the subject Professor Stephen Prothro, the chairman of the religion department at Boston University notes that “mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”  People are seeking a faith that has no accountability which would be found in the community of a church because they do not want to be expected to live at a certain standard.  The church has become so consumerised that the gospel has become something that is your personal experience with Jesus without community and embracing a lifestyle led by the Spirit and the Great Commission.

The heart of the gospel has become lost in the American church.  Jesus has been presented as someone less than Lord.  Therefore, Christians are leaving the church and switching religions because they never had a relationship with Jesus Christ seeking after Him and pursuing Him for who He is not what he can do for them.  May God raise up His church to clearly proclaim the holistic gospel that impacts all areas of life so that His name and glory can be proclaimed in all nations!

Related Links:

“Americas Changing Religious Landscape” by Dr. Albert Mohler- This is a good article by the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky
New York Times’ Article “Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds”- This article does a good job breaking down the research findings.
Pew Forum Study on Religion and Public Life- This is the entire report.
“The Religion Shift in America” from ChurchRelevance.com- This is a good percentage breakdown of the research findings.

The third and final essential element for the church to impact the culture is community.  Community is what holds the church together.  It is people gathered together in order to chase after Jesus Christ and to hold each other accountable for personal holiness and being intentional to reach out to others. The early church is shown in Acts 2: 42-47 pursuing Jesus together in the context of community. 

Community is not just important in that it unites the church on mission and personal accountability, but it is also attractive to people who do not know Jesus.  A group of people that love each other and care for each other really stands out as different and attractive in our culture that is full of divisions.  This is something that people will be drawn to, and if our community is open and caring to people who are not part of the community, this makes them desire to be a part even more. 

A church that love and cares for others and pursues accountability will shine brightly to the culture around them.  My hope and prayer is that God would raise up churches focused on the gospel and proclaiming it in the context of mission through the encouragement and accountability of a biblical community!

We have not been called to just sit on this glorious news of freedom from sin and victory in Christ that is given in the gospel.  This leads us to the second essential of being the church in culture - mission.  Jesus left His followers with a mission which we have been exploring all month to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28: 19 ESV).  This should be the all-consuming passion and drive for all believers. 

I want to note that the call is to make disciples.  Disciples are Christ-followers who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ and His finished work on the cross.  There is a tendency in today’s Christian environment to lose site of declaring this good news and to instead make the focus of our mission secondary issues such as social justice.  These secondary issues are not negative things to do in and of themselves, but that is not the primary mission.  Jesus came to earth and lived for about thirty years on the earth before His death on the cross and resurrection.  During that time, He could have solved all of the issues with world hunger, cured everyone from all their diseases, and stopped the injustice of slavery.  The very intersting thing is that He did not.  So, does this mean that Jesus does not care about these issues that are pressing and cause pain and heartache for so many?  No, He does care because we see Jesus meeting many people’s needs such as these.  He is however focused on a single mission - to die on the cross and rise from the dead for sin.  Jesus knew that everything is at its root a spiritual issue due to the fact that all social justice issues are ultimately a result of sin and the fall.  We cannot merely address the symptoms and miss the disease itself.  Jesus understood this.

We need to never remove the proclamation of the gospel from missions.  We should also seek to show the love of Jesus to people by getting involved in social justice and other issues involving hurting people, but this should never be done without presenting the gospel. 

Our mission calls us to be gospel-centered and intentional to share Jesus with others and also to show love and grace to others in Jesus’ name.

We have journeyed over the last month looking at the church in culture and making the gospel relevant to a post-modern, post-Christian generation.  I have waited until the very end to lay out my thoughts and perspective on this topic.  I would love to get your thoughts, perspectives, and feedback also.  I will spend the next three days diving into what I believe are three essential elements of the church being a light and making an eternal impact on the culture.

The first element of the church’s cultural impact is the most essential element - the gospel.  Jesus did not just come to be a good teacher or moral philosopher with a system of suggestions on making your life better.  He came with the gospel which is not some theological presuppositions but is Himself and the mission that the Father had given Him.  I think that the tendency has been for churches and movements which are seeking to redefine Christianity to lose the gospel in the midst of making the church more culturally and seeker friendly.  Paul reminds to the church at Corinth in his letter that they are to “hold on to the word I preached to you” (1 Corinthians 15: 2 ESV).  Paul then goes on to preach the gospel which is the very message that he is encouraging the Corinthian believers to not lose sight of.  I think that we have a tendency to lose sight of the very gospel which Paul was encouraging the church not to miss.  It is so easy for us to lose the heart of the gospel in the midst of postmodernizing the message to make it relevant to the culture.

In light of this, I want to lay out the gospel straight from the Word of God which is the basis of our theology which we will see in the next few days will fuel us on our mission and lead us to embrace each other in biblical community.  The following is an outline of the biblical elements of the gospel as defined in scripture (the outline was compiled by Dr. David Platt at the Church at Brook Hills and the comments are mine):

• The Character of God
  • He is Our Creator/Owner (Genesis 1: 26-28, Acts 17: 24-28)- God is the creator and owner of everything.  We are handcrafted in His image and specifically designed to live in an intimate relationship with Him.
  • He is Our Judge (Psalms 96: 10-13, Hebrews 9:27)- God stands in His rightful place as Judge over His creation.  God has set standards for His creation and will rightly judge His creation.
  • He is Our Savior (Zephaniah 3: 17, Jude 1: 25)- God is the Mighty Savior of His people.  He is the only One who is worthy to save.
• The Depravity of Man
  • We Have Rebelled Against a Holy God (Psalms 51: 4-5)-All sin is an offense to God.  He is holy and cannot tolerate sin. All sin committed is committed not just against the individuals involved but against God.  We have also all be born into sin and have a sin nature that seeks after sin rather than God and holiness.
  • We Are Dead in Sin (Ephesians 2: 1-10)- We are not coping with our sin and managing it well.  We are dead and lifeless because of our sin. We are captive to the passions, desires, and appetites of our sinful nature.  The only hope that we have for freedom is through the grace of Jesus Christ and Him taking our place and punishment for sin on the cross.  We can have victory over our sin natures only through the power of His Holy Spirit at work within us.
  • We Are Unable to Save Ourselves (Romans 3: 9-20)-No person is righteous or a “good person.”  No one seeks after God.  All people are in constant pursuit of their own pleasures and selfish desires.  We cannot keep God’s law and be holy on our own.  We are desperate sinners in need of a Savior.
• The Sufficiency of Christ
  • The Gospel Includes Both the Person and Work of Christ:
  • The Person of Christ (Philippians 2: 5-11)- Jesus was willing to become a man and to humble Himself to save us from our sins.
    • He is God. - Jesus is God who came down from heaven to save us from our sins.
    • He is man.- Jesus lived a life on earth fully man.  He set aside His place as God and humbled Himself to become one of us and bear our sins.  He came to a world full of hurt and pain to bear indescribable hurt and pain for our sin on the cross.
    • He is Savior. - Jesus died for our sins in order to save us.
    • He is Lord. - Jesus reigns as Lord and Judge.
  • The Work of Christ (1 Corinthians 15: 1-5)- Jesus Christ came to earth and died for our sins, was buried in a grave because He was really dead, rose from the dead, and appeared to eyewitnesses.
    • His Life (Romans 5: 18-19)- Just like the sin of one man Adam led to sin and death for all, the obedience of Jesus through living a sinless life and dying on the cross for sin leads to righteousness for many.
    • His Death.
      • Justification (Romans 3: 24)- We have been made just and our resume has been wiped clean by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. We now appear sinless before a holy God due to Christ taking our place.
      • Redemption (Romans 3: 24)- Jesus Christ has set us free from our sin and the penalty of death that we all justly deserved by His death on the cross.
      • Propitiation (Romans 3: 25)- Jesus has satisfied the penalty of death that was the due punishment of our sin by His death on the cross.
    • His Resurrection (Romans 6: 1-14)- Jesus’ resurrection proved that He was God like He had said, but it also gives Christians victory from sin through the power of the Holy Spirit.
• The Necessity of Faith.
  • We Are Saved by Grace ALONE through Faith ALONE in Christ ALONE (Ephesians 2: 8)- We are saved through utter dependence on Jesus through faith in Him and Him taking our place.  We are saved not because we are good people and deserve it, but rather because Jesus is gracious and has shown His grace to us. 

This is a brief summary of the gospel.  There are many theological issues and discussions that can flow out of this outline.  These are issues that divide the church of Jesus Christ as men and women attempt to be able to explain a God who’s ways are higher than ours.  This outline, I think, does a good job of portraying the essentials of the gospel.  This is what we must never compromise preaching and speaking until Jesus returns.  May God keep us from losing site of this message!