church split Archives - BibleScribbler

WCAGLS14: Joseph Grenny, The Art of Crucial Conversations

Dan Sullivan · August 26, 2014 ·

First up, Friday morning, was Joseph Grenny and Mastering the Art of Crucial Conversations. You can tell I liked this one a lot because I took 4 pages of notes. The best talks either get zero or a ton of notes.

One great takeaway was this:

“Everyone tells the truth in the hallway, where it doesn’t help anybody.”

Of course, we think it doesn’t hurt anybody either, which is why we say it in the hallway.

Read through this and see if any of it applies to your work/family/church. I’m sure some of it will.

Don't talk bad about the building or the customs!

Dan Sullivan · May 6, 2013 ·

There is a section in Acts 6 that shows how sometimes the things people argue about aren’t really the things they are thinking about.

Acts 6:11

Then they secretly instigated men who said,“We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.”

Acts 6:13-14

and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, 14 for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.”

I can count three times these guys change their story. As you pick apart their words, it gets a little more revealing every time.

Their story is that Stephen is against Moses and God. The Law is a big deal and it came from God to Moses, so those two are the sore spots in Judaism. You can talk ideas all day long, but don’t talk against them specifically
Their story is that Stephen is against the holy place and the law. Ok, now we are getting more specific, and seeing that it isn’t really God or Moses that Stephen is talking about, but the holy place and the law. The building is a building. It represented a lot to the Jewish people, but at the same time the building they were in was far beyond God’s design and had a ton of improvements from an evil Gentile ruler. Kind of like hanging a “Brought to you by Jack Daniels and Victoria Secret” backlit electric sign on your church. Sure, it was intended to be a holy place, but it was funded and built up by evil.
(This one is really the best.) Their story is that Jesus of Nazareth (whom they killed and claimed His body was stolen) is going to destroy the temple and change the customs of Moses. If their story that Jesus’ body was not really back from the dead but rather was stolen, then how is this possible? And have you seen the temple?! A man can’t tear that thing down anyway! I think it is so interesting that they bring that as an accusation because it’s either preposterous to think something is possible or there is some genuine fear.

All in all, the truth comes out that God isn’t really the point of this at all, but their building and their customs.

Great Section on Change from "The Forgotten Ways" by Alan Hirsch

Dan Sullivan · November 25, 2012 ·

A couple years ago I was reading “The Forgotten Ways” by Alan Hirsch. At some point I stopped. I’m not sure why. I remember around that time I was getting really frustrated with the way church was and I was reading a lot of books about the problems with church but I couldn’t find much support to fix those problems. I think that might be why I stopped reading books about church for a while.

I was cleaning up my office yesterday and I came across this book again. I opened it to the page AFTER my bookmark and read this.

You may or may not already know where I’m going with this. I have seen 2 local churches self destruct due to this very thing over the last two years. That’s right, I said two. Both churches saw compelling opportunity to reach out to more people than ever. Both churches got eaten alive in the rapid, discontinuous change happening around them. The result: in one case a new church was formed, making the changes that the old church couldn’t make, and becoming it’s own entity. In the second case, a new church is now in the process of forming, but it is too soon to tell how things will go (they are still in their first 3-4 months of formation).

One problem, of course, is that neither of the old churches could handle the change, and so the group that could see that they did need to change left. The new parts are now actively growing like the old churches would have been, and the old churches are growing the way they have in the past.