In the last 50 years, media has quickly risen to the top as the #1 influence on Western Culture. Below are five reasons that have driven that accent to such a paramount place in our lives. While I’m not celebrating this fact, I’d much rather see the Church as the #1 influence in our culture. I do hope that this conversation helps us better understand the culture in which we live so that we may more effectively influence it with the Gospel.
It is widely accepted that the following statistics on communication hold true…
55% of communication is physiological: your mannerisms, how you sit, etc.
38% of communication is tonal: your voice inflection, how you sound, etc.
7% of communication is verbal: the actual words you say
That means that 93% of what you convey has nothing to do with what you are actually saying. Or you could say that you are saying more than what you are saying when you are saying it. So here’s a quick list that hopefully actually says something about saying something.
It was 14 years ago. Lisa and I had recently been married and I had just gone on staff at my first church as a Youth Pastor. She was finishing her teaching degree driving an hour each way to and from school. I was full on diving into ministry, trying to change the world. It was a pretty tradition church. There was an organ and a choir in the sanctuary. It was a suit and tie kind of a place, cool church, just a traditional style church. The youth ministry was growing at a pretty quick pace and students started coming to this church that didn’t look, act, talk, or smell like they had ever been in a church before, and that was because they hadn’t. Being a pretty conservative environment, the church actually had a hard time with these new students walking through the doors. But something about the whole thing felt right. To fast forward, a young man by the name of Will came to the Student Ministry one evening and got radically saved. Immediately we started praying for his little brother. Eventually Will’s little brother shows up at church one Sunday morning. I can remember, he walked in all thugged out with his saggy jeans, black t-shirt, stocking hat pulled down to eye level, and a chain hanging from his wallet to his jeans. He walks all they way down the center aisle of the sanctuary and plops down on the front pew. He slouches down, crosses his arms, and didn’t move the entire service, not even when we stood to sing. He just sat there, as if to say, “I dare you.”
This past year I watched one of the most gifted and talented worship leaders that I’ve ever been around walk through an incredibly difficult pregnancy that resulted in a painful loss for their family. In the middle of it all I watched that same family demonstrate a resiliency and faith in God that is rarer than it should be. Most recently I’ve been able to celebrate with them the music and unexpected blessings that have come from this moment. What follows is a bit of his story. You can also check out the video and free download below!
A week ago Lisa and I took a quick trip out to Atlanta to nail down a rental house. While we were in town we had the opportunity to attend a worship service at North Metro and were blown away by how the Lord moved. The preceding week the Staff had wrestled through the idea of doing a spontaneous baptism. That is to say, call people that have not repented and or who have never been baptized to get it done right there on the spot in the service. The Staff had prepared changing kits ahead of time for those that responded which included appropriate clothes and towels among other things (BTW there was an extra run to Target involved to pick up more towels). Between the two services over 170 people responded and drew a line in the sand to publicly be identified with Christ! The first service went almost 2 hours and the second went 3 hours! For those of you who are used to 60 minute cues for your weekend services you get what an amazing moment this was. Fathers were baptizing their children, children baptized their parents, and spouses baptized one another. Grown men (the big hulking manly kind of men) were in tears, broken in response to the grace of God in their lives. Lisa and I stood in the back and wept over the stories of life change and this tangible demonstration of the obedience of people as they responded to and followed the Lord. We are continually humbled that the Lord would allow us to partner with Himself and the leadership at North Metro to help shape this community of people into what God has dreamed up for us to become!
I help churches make vision real. I am a pastor, speaker, strategist, and ministry consultant at The Unstuck Group.
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