“Before my church could change, this old boy had to change.” All of us listened intently as pastor Jerry Broughton from College Park Baptist Church told us of his journey through the Intentional Church Multiplication Process with the South Carolina Baptist Convention. I was energized by his excitement for his church as they embraced change to more effectively make disciples.
ClampNo one really likes change. Think about it. What do you do with your loose change? My loose change piles up in my car. It rattles around in my washing machine when I forget to take it out of my pocket. I find it on my dresser and in my vacuum cleaner. A lot of times, I’ll just tell people to keep the change. Eventually, all the loose change finds its way to a jar in my room.
It seems like when you finally figure things out, they change. Do you remember Myspace? Just as you opened up a Myspace account, everyone flocked to Facebook. So you left Myspace behind to master Facebook. You get all settled with your Facebook friends in place and then you start to hear of other social networks on the horizon like Twitter and Google+. There reaches a point where you say, “That’s it! No more change! If everyone leaves Facebook, I just won’t have any friends.” And some of you are thinking right now, “What’s Myspace and Facebook?”
Our mission is to go into the world and make disciples of those who do not know Jesus. Our church programs were initially developed to make disciples, but the world has changed. Sometimes we get so used to our programs and the busyness of our church activity that we don’t slow down and ask, “Are we making disciples that produce disciples?”
We must keep coming back to the mission. Why are we doing what we are doing? The mission is to take the whole gospel to the whole world beginning right here in South Carolina. There were 3.6 million people that were not in a church building this Sunday. They are not waiting on us to get our music right or to have better parking attendants. They are waiting on us. In order to get the message of the gospel to them, we will need to change from an internally focused organization to an externally focused organism. The change will take you out of your comfort zone and will push you beyond the walls.
By the way, I cashed in on all that loose change the other day. I couldn’t believe it was $200. Change produces treasure over time. The future disciples of South Carolina are valuable treasure. They’re worth our change.
– Clamp is evangelism group director for the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Follow Lee on twitter @leeclamp or on his blog at www.leeclamp.com.