Help you or help me? Simplicity

Yesterday I talked about our commitment as a staff to help others have significant ministry, rather than seeing them helping to make our ministries significant. The first way that fleshes out is that we resist the urge to be staff heavy.

Another byproduct of this philosophy is that the church program structure is necessarily simple. Scott Hodge had a good blog on simplicity not long ago. People are often surprised when they come to McKinney and realize what we don't have. They're shocked when we don't offer classes or groups every night of the week. After all, we're a big church.

But our desire to help others have significant ministry necessarily means we can't ask people to show up to the church every night of the week. We don't have Sunday night church. We do have mid-week Bible Studies, but only one night a week. We don't exist to get everyone out there in here... we exist to get everyone in here out there.

We can't be program driven because of the staffing situation we've chosen - we don't have the man power to run something at the church every night of the week. And that's by design. We've made a conscious decision to shut off the lights at the church building most nights of the week, and send them into the world instead. (Okay... that was cheezy... sorry).

This committment forces us to evaluate what is working and what is not, and spend our time there. We can't do everything, so we have to figure out what is most important. And we always try to err on the side of "programs" that are transferrable to someone's neighborhood. If I can take a Bible study, teach it to ten or twenty of our people, with the idea that they are able to turn aroudn and teach it to five or ten of their coworkers, or neighbors, or family members, I'm going to do it every time. And I'm going to favor that kind of "program" above a flashy mid-week thing that gets everyone here. Those things are great, but their influence is limited in the big picture.

We exist to help others have significant ministry. That means our ministry structure here needs to be simple, so we don't complicate and compromise our peoples' ministry there.