Bill Easums Observations

For years now church gurus have talked about the seating capacity of a building.  You know- if your main worship service is 80% full you need another worship service. Well, even though that’s still true, how many you have in worship and the size of your building is not enough.  The real standard for evaluating success for a church is how many people does it send out into the community and world to share their faith.

Over the last ten years I’ve noticed more and more leaders catching on to this “sending” factor.  Some churches even send people out every week to bless the community in some way and spread the Good News. It’s a real blend of social action and evangelism. It’s not just doing good, although that happens.  It’s transforming the community in multiple ways- better schools, neighborhoods, jobs, salvation- well you get the picture.

So here is my question- how many people do you intentionally send out to bless the surrounding community? Is that even on your radar? If not, there’s something missing to your ministry.

If you want to see the “sending” in action, visit one or more of the following churches who have and are leading the way

The Healing Place in Baton Rouge
Cincinnati Vineyard
Dream Center in Los Angeles
Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham

Bill Easum
www.effectivechurch.com
easum@aol.com

Welcome to 2013.

How are you going to measure the success of your church this year, and every other year for that matter- Worship attendance, Finances, Sunday School and or small group attendance, the number of baptisms, the number of new leaders raised up?

What if I told you none of these is the absolute measure of success even though they are all important.  Would you believe me? Well only one of them is even close – baptisms.

So what is the measure of success for a church? I think it is how much difference a church is making in the community and the world. So the key question is, Would your community miss you if you left? Or maybe, Does your community even know you exist?

The church is suppose to be the sign and example of the coming Kingdom of God. It was put here to make the world a difference place.  I doubt if God counts how many noses are in worship or what the take was.  But I know God is thrilled when the community and world is different because of your church.

So how to you measure the sending factor of your church? Let me suggest that you do the following:

1. Make a list of all the programs you have and then use a yellow marked to highlight those that are for your members and a red marker to highlight those that are geared to make a difference in your community and world.  We are how we spend our money.
2. Next, count the number of people working within your church each week for any reason and then count the number of people who went out from your church to make a difference in the community or world by actually doing an overt act of some kind.

Do you like what you see? If  not, start working toward changing the picture. It will make 2013 a much more productive year and will be a better sign of the coming Kingdom of God.

Happy New Year
Bill Easum
www.effectivechurch.com
easum@aol.com

My heart fell through the Sunday tonight as I listened to 60 Minutes tell me that one out of every four children in our country now lives in poverty. This is the highest number since the Great Depression and there is nothing on the horizon to make me believe this number won’t get higher.  And we still are talking about Nation Building in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Give me a break. Please. It’s time to focus our attention and our money rebuilding our own country before it’s too late.  We’ve spent $1,250,000,000,000 on these two wars and we are closing schools, cutting back on education, and have more people now on food stamps than ever in our history other than the Great Depression. Where is the sanity in all of this?

And please don’t make this a political statement because it”s not. Both parties are equally guilty. This situation is not a political issue; it is a moral issue.

So I want to make two challenges.

Challenge One: I want to challenge every church in the U.S.  to adopt at least one homeless family of four living below the poverty level of $22,000 a year.  What would happen if the 450,000 plus churches in the U.S. adopted at least one family? Some mega churches could adopt ten or twenty or thirty families.

Challenge Two: I also want to make a challenge to our politicians – either focus on rebuilding our nation or get out of the way. Quit the double talk and the campaign rehtoric and man up, opps I should have also said woman up too.

It seems my article “Six Tactical Mistakes Churches Make” hit a cord. Several commnents have been made both on and off my Blog.  One of the most important comments came from Matthew:  “How would you “combine evangelism and social justice into the fabric of the church?” Help me understand what that would look like.”

Here’s my response:

Matthew, this is an excellent question that goes to the heart of much of one of modern day Christianity’s most deadly heresies. I’m glad you asked the question because it shows you care about the issue.

The Dream Center in Los Angeles is one of the best examples I know of embedding social justice into the fabric of the church. The pastor, Matthew Barnett, used to be Assembly of God and is now a Four Square Gospel pastor, which means personal evangelism is high on his priority list. However, every week hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of food and medical supplies is sent out by the church and its hundreds of volunteers from all over the world.

And what about Saddleback’s war on Aids or Ginghamsburg’s fight to aid the suffering people of the Sudan. The list of churches the combine evangelism and social justice is long so I will l list only one more  church- the church I was pastor of for 24 years. 

We had a strong outreach ministry both in evangelism and social justice. We never did a social project without introducing Jesus in some way. We were part of the first churches to begin Project Free which became Meals on Wheels (we included a pamphlet with the meals). We were the first church in the U.S. to raise all of the money and build a house for Habitat (we had a bible study during lunch and invited the neighborhood). As a result of our efforts in community organizing in San Antonio 500 million dollars was invested to insure West side homes didn’t flood every time it rained. 

Matthew, I believe the Scriptures teach us  you can’t feed the soul if you don’t feed the body; and it doesn’t do any good to feed the body if you don’t feed the soul.

The separation of social justice and evangelism is one of the worst forms of reductionism in the history of Christianity. The long-standing fight between liberal and conservative Christianity is one of the major blights on Christianity.  It has simply truncated the church to the point that in many cases the church is a useless piece of junk that should be discarded. To say one is more important than the other is to discredit the words of Jesus found in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. Social justice and evangelism are simply two sides of the same coin. One without the other is vain, stupid, and downright useless.

Over the years I’ve heard many conversations about which one is most important, evangelism or social justice. As if one could choose? Such stupidity! Such lack of understanding of the Gospel! You can’t choose one over the other and be a follower of Jesus. Not possible! Both are required for a whole Gospel.
Reductionism has hurt our witness over and over through the centuries. It’s time we quit truncating the Gospel.

I’ve also heard this argument “Evangelism isn’t always social justice but social justice is always evangelism (if you want to know more click here).” I don’t buy this argument either. I’ve seen too many people use such an argument as an excuse not to verbalize the Gospel when the time is right. I’ve dealt with a lot of church people who want to “do good” but have no interest in people coming to faith. And you know what Jesus said about being “good.”

So you see evangelism and social justice go hand in hand. When they don’t, you really don’t have a biblical church.