Working On A Headache

It's amazing how I can so easily drive myself into the horrible land of headaches simply by thinking about things.

Today, my headache is mainly coming forth as I think about church stuff. Yesterday was a rough one at our 10am worship gathering. In fact, my Aunt Lela said, "I'm tired of this." I'm pretty sure that's the first time in her 97 years that she's said anything along those lines. When our guest speaker finished, Aunt Lela said, "Oh, go jump in a lake." That's her way of expressing her displeasure with the mornings worship service.

And, it wasn't just good old Aunt Lela that struggled through the service. I heard many comments from many people stating that they had a hard time sitting through the service.

Now, here's the thing...it's not that our guest speaker wasn't saying good stuff...everything she presented was valid and good information for people to hear. But, it was definitely not Sunday morning worship service appropriate. It would have been better to have had this presentation made at a time outside of the service. People came to church wanting to receive a word of encouragement, inspiration, even challenge and instead received information about the global state of aging adults. Again, let me say...it was valid and important information...just not what people are looking for when they attend a worship service.

This only highlights my issues of how we need to be doing things differently. I see things we need to be addressing (this is where the headache comes into play), have ideas of how to address the issues, and yet we take way too long to even approach the idea of beginning to address the issues. I had great hopes for our staff retreat! I thought we would put together some concrete plans of how to lead our congregation forward. However, we just did some abstract brainstorming and spilled out some ideas. So, we still don't have a plan together to help us move forward. And, as we take our brainstorming to our leadership team, it will be another six months before we have any kind of plan together to start moving in the direction God is calling us toward. As we continue to drag our feet, we continue to loose people. By not changing, by not moving forward we are simply standing still. But, as we all know, if you stand still...you're actually moving backwards as the rest of the world goes flying by.

I would have been satisfied if as a staff we had simply put together a preaching schedule so we would know what themes we'll be addressing and who is preaching from Sunday to Sunday. That would help our worship design team plan. It would help people feel like we have some kind of vision as to where we need to head. I just really feel strongly that as the leadership of the church we need to be putting solid plans together. After we have a plan together, we need to present it to our leaders for them to make suggestions, corrections, and additions. Maybe I'm totally wrong here. All I know is that the more I think about this...the worse my headache gets.

So, I'm done thinking about this for the moment. Time to start reading some Donald Miller ("Through Painted Deserts" is my latest read...and so far it's up to par).