jeffmatas

As Christians, why is it that we celebrate transformational change in the life of a person and yet resist transformational change in the life of a church? The reality is that we serve an unchangeable God who changes everything He touches. The power of God is synonymous with change. When an individual experiences the power of God, he/she changes and becomes transformed. The same is true of a church that experiences the power of God.

The Church of God holiness movement believes that personal transformation is evidence of an infilling of the power of God through the Holy Spirit. The early years of the Church of God were marked with not only a burning desire to see souls transformed through the proclamation of the gospel, but also a pioneering spirit of risk taking for the sake of the lost. The church embraced all sorts of new-fangled ways to expand the kingdom of God: they used the novel idea of a church publishing house to get the gospel to masses; they retrofitted a boat christened the “Floating Bethel” to evangelize along the banks of the Ohio River; they set up tent meetings, camp meetings; they preached from street corners; they embraced the medium of radio and broadcast the message of the Church of God to millions.

At the turn of the 20^th century, the Church of God wanted to reach out to the mass of immigrants coming to America. They specifically targeted immigrants who were making their way to the Ohio River Valley to work in the blast furnaces and mills that lined the riverbanks of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia (places that years ago the Church of God had planted congregations in part through the ministry of the Floating Bethel). After World War I, a young man named Karl Matas left his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his extended family to immigrate from what is now Slovakia to America in the hope of a better life. He made the voyage across the Atlantic in a ship that once served Kaiser Wilhelm but now was owned and operated by the victorious Allies. As the ship entered New York harbor, he stood on the deck along with thousands of other passengers from Europe and saw for the first time the towering Statue of Liberty. He was processed through Ellis Island and then made his way to the bustling steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with hopes of working in the hot blast furnaces and steel mills that lined the Stonycreek River in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. He sacrificed everything for the sake of freedom and the hope of a better life. In Slovakia, he was a peasant from a family of peasants. In America, he was a free man who could determine his own future.

The Church of God had planted a Slovak-speaking church in Johnstown complete with hymnals and Bibles all printed in Slovak. The church reached out to my grandfather and for the first time he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and his life was transformed. Through the church, he met and married Mary Rusnak, a beautiful young Slovak immigrant. In the years that followed, Karl and Mary had sixteen children and raised them in a four-bedroom house with a backyard that abutted the foot of a hill (a mountain to folks in Indiana) and a front yard that faced a massive rail yard with a steel mill beyond the tracks. The story would be great if it ended there, but there’s more. Karl was called to pastoral ministry. For years he worked swing shift in the mill, raised his children, and served as pastor of the church in Johnstown.

Karl Matas was my grandfather, and I’m thankful for the willingness of the 19^th and early 20^th century Church of God to take risks—to transform itself so that it would be effective in its mission to reach as many people as possible for Christ. Today I’m a follower of Christ and a minister of the gospel, and I owe much to the Church of God and how it embraced transformation so that lives could be transformed.

There’s an old saying, “The only constant is change”. As we go through life, we realize that change is inevitable. We can resist it, but there’s no stopping it. In fact, God designed life so that change is built into it. Everyday we encounter change, both good and bad. In fact, you don’t have to go looking for change; just stay where you are and change will come find you.

Transformation is at the heart of God’s mission for us as individuals and it is at the heart of his desire for the church. A person that is changed by the gospel will have a holy impact on those around him/her (spouse, children, family, work, school, and neighborhood). A church that is experiencing transformation will likewise have an impact on individuals, neighborhoods, a city, a county, a region…maybe even globally. There is something sad about a church that claims to embrace personal transformation and yet stubbornly resists corporate transformation. A life that is transformed is evidence of the working of the power of God. A transformational church is also evidence that the power of God is active and working in the local body. A follower of Christ whose life bears little evidence of personal transformation has little or no Holy Spirit power in their life. A church whose life bears little evidence of corporate transformation bears little or no evidence of the Spirit’s power.

What’s the alternative to transformational change in the life of a church? It’s to fall into a rut of doing what you’ve always done and expecting a different outcome. If we remain faithful doing what we’ve always done then maybe one day God will reward us by having two Greyhound buses full of people arrive in the church’s parking lot on a Sunday morning. It’s divorcing the relationship between being faithful and being fruitful. Far too many churches laud faithfulness without fruitfulness. It’s as if we have taken the Parable of the Stewards and awarded sainthood to the third steward who avoided all risk by burying his talent. Sadly, that has become an accepted definition of what it means to be faithful.

Every church is busy, but few are making an impact for Christ. Rather than be missionaries to our communities for Christ, we are content to go in frantic circles. Yet God calls us to make a transformational impact on the world, not for us to engage in exhaustive activity that is just internally focused.

I write all this, not to bash the church, but to nudge it awake—to rekindle the fire that once burned brightly within it. I love the Church of God. I’m thankful it once took tremendous risks to reach out to the lost and the dying. I’m here today because in the early 1920s, the Church of God took some risks; engaged in ministries that were innovative and new. They loved people more than methods; and they risked it all. Those early pioneers of the Church of God have already heard the words, “Well done my good and faithful servant.” They have passed a legacy on to us. And the question remains, “What will we do about it?” Will we stand on shoulders of giants and reach higher and further for the sake of Christ and his Kingdom or will we resist change and dig our ruts deeper?

During a Matas family reunion, my grandfather sat everyone down and began in broken English to share his testimony. He talked about risking everything to come to America and about the first time he heard the gospel of Christ through the Church of God. He read the twin parables of The Hidden Treasure and The Pearl of Great Price found in Matthew 13:44-46.

[44] “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

[45] “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, [46] who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

My immigrant grandfather understood all too well the idea of risking everything for something that was precious. When he heard about Jesus, he was willing to leave everything behind. And he heard about Jesus through the efforts of the Church of God who was willing to risk everything for the sake of the gospel. What will be our legacy?

W.A. Criswell was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas for 50 years. He told the story of taking a flight to go and speak at an event on the east coast of the United States. As he boarded the plane he was excited to see that he was seated next to a seminary professor that he admired. As soon as they were underway, Criswell introduced to this man and they began to talk.

The professor told Criswell that he had recently lost his son to a terrible illness. The boy had been at pre-school and had been sent home one day after coming down with a fever. The parents assumed it was just another little cold or flu, but through the evening the boy got worse and worse so they took him off to the hospital. After running tests the doctors came and gave the parents the worst possible news—that the boy had somehow contracted Meningitis and that it had progressed beyond the point that they could help. The disease would run its course and the boy would die. There was nothing they could do.

For a couple of days the parents sat with their boy, praying and hoping. But the boy got worse and worse. Finally, after a few days, they could see that his body was too weak to go in. It was in the middle of the day and the boy’s vision began to fade. He looked up at his father and said, “Daddy, it’s getting dark, isn’t it?”

“Yes, my boy, it’s getting dark.”

“It’s time for me to sleep, isn’t it?”

“Yes, my boy, it’s time for you to sleep.”

The professor explained how his son liked to have his pillow and blankets arranged just so and that he always lay his head on his hands while he slept. So he fixed his son’s pillow and watched while the boy rested his head on his hands. “Good night daddy. I’ll see you in the morning.” The boy closed his eyes and drifted to sleep. His breathing became shallow and just a few moments later his life was over, almost before it began.

That professor stopped talking for a while and looked out the window of the airplane for a good long time. Then he turned to Dr. Criswell and with his voice breaking and with tears spilling onto his cheeks he whispered, “I can hardly wait for morning to come.”

Christian, do you know that morning is coming? Do you believe it?

Leading a turnaround in a local church is incredibly difficult. Over ninety percent of Church of God congregations in Indiana are either plateaued or declining, and that means most pastors who are reading this are faced with the challenge of a turnaround. Older parishioners remember the glory days when the church was growing, when souls were being saved, when facilities for ministry were being built and when the church was a difference maker in the local community. But those days are in the past; so much has changed in the world since then, and so much has changed in how we do church. Chances are your church is struggling. The church is not what it was. How did it get this way? What do you do? How do you lead a turnaround? How can you lead a church whose best days are in the future, not in the past? You can’t go back and replicate the past, because things are different now. It’s a different world in which you are called to minister; and although the gospel is timeless, the methods are changing in how we communicate the truth of Christ to the world. Leading a turnaround in a local church is daunting to say the least.

Maybe you can relate to the heart cry of this leader who wrote to his staff and said:
“If you’re really honest with yourself, as I have tried to be with myself, along the way…there has been something we have lost. And it’s no one’s fault and there’s no punishment or blame. We are what we are—but the question is: What are we going to do about it and how are we going to fix it?”

That quote could have easily been from a broken hearted pastor trying to rally his congregation and staff to honestly look at the state of the church in an attempt to lead a turnaround. In truth, those words come not from a pastor, but from Howard Schultz, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Starbucks. Howard Schultz tells the story of how he turned his company around in his book “Onward.” There are incredible similarities in how Schultz led a corporate turnaround for Starbucks and leading a turnaround in a local church.

The best years were in the past
Prior to 2007, Starbucks had the golden touch. If you were fortunate enough to buy Starbuck’s stock in the 1990’s, you would have made a fortune. They were opening stores at record pace; and many times, they would open a store within sight of an existing store—and both stores would do well! Then everything changed; sales were sluggish; the Starbucks experience wasn’t what it used to be. Were the good times gone for good? Would Starbucks end up like Krispy Kreme?

Every church that is plateaued or in decline can identify a point in their past as their zenith; the church had vision; it had a catalytic leader; souls were being saved; the only problems, it seemed, were problems of growth. Everyone knows that something has changed; something has gone wrong. We aren’t in the glory days anymore. We aren’t making disciples like we used to. What we are experiencing today is a far cry from what the church experienced in the past.

What we are doing is not working
Like Starbucks, it wasn’t a single bad decision that brought us to this place. It wasn’t simply bad tactics. And you can’t blame the situation on bad people. Starbucks didn’t try to lose sales. They didn’t try to lower the price of their stock. They had very smart people that were doing the best they could. It just wasn’t working.

A local church that has plateaued or declined is not trying to get smaller. It’s trying to be faithful; but for some reason, it is struggling to be fruitful. Schultz found the damage to Starbucks was “slow and quiet”; it was incremental “like a single loose thread that unravels a sweater inch by inch.” Churches that were once thriving do not decline or fall into a plateau overnight; it happens gradually over time. It’s not the result of one bad decision, but a series of small decisions. It happens when we become complacent and comfortable. It happens when we forget our mission of making more and better disciples.

The world is changing
Starbucks faced a global recession. The stock market plummeted, the housing bubble burst, financial markets were in free-fall, and unemployment was soaring. The economic playing field had radically changed. Who was going to pay four to six dollars for a coffee, even one that was lovingly “handcrafted”? Also for the first time, Starbucks was facing serious competition from the likes of Dunkin Donuts and even McDonalds. Starbucks needed to take a hard look at itself and face some difficult decisions.

The local church also faces a world that is radically different from the world of its glory days. Americans don’t attend church like they did twenty to thirty years ago. Unlike in the past, Americans don’t have a compulsion to attend church. To draw them, a local church has to be compelling and relevant. We live in a culture that communicates by way of media with instant access to power of the Internet. The world has changed radically, and it continues to change rapidly. Churches are faced with the dilemma of doing what they have always done and getting declining, mediocre results, or facing the hard choice of doing something different to get different results.

Passion is essential
According to Howard Schultz, “Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable.” Read that quote again and substitute the word “pastors” for the word “entrepreneurs”. To lead a church—to really lead a church—you have to love what you do; you have to love the church of Jesus Christ; you have to love the local church; and you have to embrace and love your calling by Christ to be a pastor of His church. Doing anything else would be “unimaginable”.

If you are among the ninety plus percent of church pastors trying to lead a turnaround, what do you do about it? Howard Schultz led a turnaround at Starbucks so that its best days are currently being realized with plans to continue its rise in the future. The approach and strategies Schultz employed speak to the challenges of turning around a local church.
Howard Schultz didn’t go it alone to turn Starbucks around; he partnered with consultants and brought in other voices to help set new direction. As a pastor, whether your church is struggling or making progress, you also don’t have to go it alone; Indiana Ministries can help through consultation and coaching. Stay tuned, in the post I’ll take some lessons gleaned from “Onward” and identify some key moves your church can make.

I love that she is more beautiful now than the day I married her
The first time I saw her in the spring of 1980, she took my breath away. I remember the exact moment: I was in the cafeteria at Anderson College and the first time I saw Carla, time seemed to slow down…like the moment was in slow motion. Her smile was so captivating. Her light brown hair was long and feathered on the sides—a style that Farrah Fawcett made popular. In that slow motion moment, our eyes met and she smiled at me. I later learned that she didn’t notice me that day; she must have been smiling at someone behind me. Looking back, it didn’t matter who that particular smile was directed at…I caught it and it captured me.
Through the years, an amazing thing happened…my desire for Carla has grown. The day we married, I loved her with all my heart; but I love her more now. I’m not sure how that works; but I have a theory: I think the years of marriage—the good times and the bad, the success and the loss, the triumph and the struggle, and the challenges of parenthood—have combined to enlarge my capacity to love the woman who gave her heart to me nearly thirty years ago. Life has changed me, I trust for the better and for the good; I know it has for Carla…her beauty has such depth that has been born from the crucible of life as she has allowed God to create the woman He knows she can become. Which leads me to…

I love who she is becoming
One of the greatest joys I have in life is seeing my wife grow: as a woman and in her faith. She is respected in the workplace as a person who is bright, gifted and operates with the utmost of integrity. After thirty years, she is going back to Anderson University and will earn her bachelor’s degree this summer; she has received all A’s…she has a better cumulative GPA than I had at Temple.
Unless you have been the wife of a pastor, you cannot fully understand how difficult that role can be. Carla has been a pastor’s wife for most of our marriage and through the joys and the heartbreak; she has a remarkable faith in Christ. I’m a better pastor because of her.
I catch myself looking at her, in moments when she is unaware of my gaze, and my heart melts…my eyes mist with the joy that can only come from a husband who is so proud of the woman he sees. Paul in Ephesians 5:27 says one day Christ will “present the church [his bride] to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” In the next verse, Paul says that husbands should love their wives the exact same way. Carla was given to me as a gift from God; other than my salvation, she is the highest gift I will ever receive. I believe that one day, I’ll get to present her to Christ and say, “She was incredible when you gave her to me all those many years ago, but look at her now! Look at what she has become!”

I Looked For Love in Your Eyes

I saved my best for you.
Other girls may have given themselves away,
But I believed in the dream.
A husband, a wife, united as one forever.

Nervous, first time, needing assurance of your love,
I looked for it in your eyes
Mere inches from mine.
But what I saw made my soul run and hide.

Gone was the tenderness I’d come to know
I saw a stranger, cold and hard
Distant, evil, revolting.
I looked for love in your eyes
And my soul wept.

Who am I that you cannot make love to me?
Why do I feel as if I’m not even here?
I don’t matter.
I’m a prop in a filthy play.
Not an object of tender devotion.

Where are you?

Years pass
But the hardness in your eyes does not.
You think I’m cold
But how can I warm to eyes that are making hate to someone else
Instead of making love to me?

I know where you are.
I’ve seen the pictures.
I know now what it takes to turn you on.
Women…people like me
Tortured, humiliated, hated, used
Discarded.
Images burned into your brain.
How could you think they would not show in your eyes?

Did you ever imagine,
The first time you picked up a dirty picture
That you were dooming all intimacy between us
Shipwrecking your marriage
Breaking the heart of a wife you wouldn’t meet for many years?

If it stopped here, I could bear it.
But you brought the evil into our home
And our little boys found it.
Six and eight years old.
I heard them laughing, I found them ogling.

Hands bound, mouth gagged.
Fisheye photo, contorting reality
Distorting the woman into exaggerated breasts.
The haunted eyes, windows of a tormented soul
Warped by the lens into the background,
Because souls don’t matter, only bodies do
To men who consume them.

Little boys
My little boys
Laughing and ogling the sexual torture
Of a woman, a woman like me.
Someone like me.

An image burned into their brains.

Will their wives’ souls have to run and hide like mine does?
When does it end?

I can tell you this. It has not ended in your soul.
It has eaten you up. It is cancer.
Do you think you can feed on a diet of hatred
And come out of your locked room to love?

You say the words, but love has no meaning in your mouth
When hatred rules in your heart.
Your cruelty has eaten up every vestige of the man
I thought I was marrying.
Did you ever dream it would so consume you
That your wife and children would live in fear of your rage?

That is what you have become
Feeding your soul on poison.

I’ve never used porn.
But it has devastated my marriage, my family, my world.

Was it worth it?

I’m discovering that blog posts from Shaun Groves are a must read…here’s a recent post of his entitled “Cones and Holes”

God dug ten holes and called them Law.

God’s people were warned not to step in the holes so no one would get hurt. Or stuck.

One day well-meaning religious leaders, who loved God and His people deeply, decided to lay cones around the holes. With cones in place, no one would ever get too close and accidentally slip in.

God’s Law said, “Keep the Sabbath day holy; don’t work; rest.”

A leader scribbled his circle of cones around it: “Do not break a sweat on the Sabbath,” he wrote and “Don’t carry a needle in your clothes while walking or it could move around and accidentally sew.”

Then another religious leader declared another ring of cones to keep people from bumping into the first circle of cones: “Don’t light a fire on the Sabbath,” he said and “Don’t take more than x number of steps on the Sabbath.”

For the protection of God’s people and out of love for God, they went on and on like this for generations.

The cones of men became as revered as the holes of God. Cone crashers were excommunicated, cut off from family and church, and sometimes even killed.

Some people loved the cones more than each other. Sometimes even more than God.

Then the Law Giver put on skin and walked among the people – walked right through their cones, out onto slippery slopes, dangerously close to the holes. Sometimes he even reached down into holes to lift people out. He showed the people how to love without getting stuck in a hole.

Jesus crashed through the cones and right into a party where he turned water into strong wine. He stepped over cones and into the Temple where he healed a withered hand on the Sabbath. He kicked the cones out of His way to touch the dead and leprous. He kicked the cones out of His path on the way to lunch with crooked Roman tax collectors and prostitutes. He crushed the cones and sent an adulterous woman’s accusers away empty-handed.

Jesus hates our cones. No matter who lays them and how well-intentioned and helpful and old they may be.

I’ve laid some cones and called them holes. And I’ve got bruises from stones thrown when I bumped into everyone else’s.

Don’t watch TV. Don’t date. Don’t get a tattoo. Don’t trick or treat. Don’t go to movies. Don’t buy an iPhone. Don’t listen to “rock music.” Don’t drink alcohol or go to places that serve it. Don’t play cards. Don’t get that haircut. Don’t send your kids to public school. Don’t buy Christmas presents. Don’t read Harry Potter. Don’t wear make-up. Don’t vote Democrat. Don’t do yoga. Don’t…

Now if your balance is a little off and you’re out walking alone, you might not want to venture too far past some of the cones right now lest you fall into a hole. It is slippery out there in some places. Use discernment.

But if you’re pretty good on your feet, for God’s sake…

Crash the cones.

Especially to love someone in a hole.

I came across this parable today that really speaks to me at so many levels. When I first read it, it seemed to challenge the followers of Christ to authentically represent the Lord and to show him to the world; that’s what we should be known for, not for all the other stuff. What do you think?

Here’s the parable…

A beloved artist put the final brushstroke on his masterpiece, a self-portrait, and then fell to the floor. His twelve sons mourned his death, celebrated his life and love and artistic contributions, but were divided over the quality of his final work.

The oldest liked the depiction of his father’s eyes, blue like his own. Another brother admired the seriousness etched into his father’s furrowed brow. The youngest, always feeling that his dad was harder on him than the others, stared wistfully at the edges of his father’s mouth where he was sure he detected the beginning of an approving smile. Each of the master’s twelve sons loved a section of the canvas but was indifferent to or even troubled by the rest.

So it was decided that the boys would cut their father’s image into smaller works. The oldest hung the eyes, sparkling like his own, beside the vanity in his bathroom. Another framed his father’s serious brow and nailed it to the wall of his study. The youngest folded up his father’s wry smile and kept it in his back pocket, pulling it out on especially hard days if his therapist was out of town or simply not returning his calls.

As each boy grew into a man so did each one’s love for his piece of the painting – as did each one’s dislike for the rest of it.

Each man built a museum for his slice of the face, commissioning the design skills of renowned artists and architects who greatly admired their father. The museums were so magnificent that visitors came from far and wide to ooh and ahh. The brothers, each afraid that his bit of the masterpiece would be destroyed by the crowds, locked the doors of their museums. And afraid that their museums might be destroyed as well, each brother circled his museum with fences topped by razor wire.

The crowds stood at the fences of the twelve museums day after day snapping photographs of the magnificent structures, unaware of the greater masterpiece divided among them; each fragment of face hidden away behind armed guards, stone and steal, and bullet proof glass.

The sons eventually had sons of their own. None of the grandsons were all that into art. One owned a security business. Another installed fences. Yet another trained attack dogs. A couple were brick layers. A few more were architects.

And not one of the grandsons knew he bore a striking resemblance to a great artist who died giving himself to his children.

Mars Hill’s Resurgence had a great post on tips to avoid burnout; great advice for a pastor or anyone in leadership.

4 Ways to Keep From Burning Out

What is the solution to exhausted and burned-out pastors as well as other leaders giving lots of time to ministry?

1. Confess making an idol of work and find your identity and worth in Jesus and him alone
2. Practice Sabbath on a daily basis, taking short breaks as needed. Don’t kill yourself at work day after day and then pray for a vacation to save you
3. Learn how to say no to some of the needs, demands, and people that come to your attention. You can be concerned without being responsible. Say no to a lot of things so you can say yes to a few things. Say yes to less!
4. Develop other leaders to carry the burden with you (Numbers 11:17).

Most people in ministry try to do too much and travel too fast. Believe it or not, you are dispensable. Only Jesus is indispensable.