Archive for the ‘leadership’ Category
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
This Sunday we announced that “Love God. Love People. Take action.” would be our new creed/motto/tag line for actionchurch. Obviously, the “Love God. People.” part comes from these verses that we talked about every Sunday in the month of February.
37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37
So where did the “Take action.” part come from? Is it just a clever tie-in to our church name? Not exactly. The name “actionchurch” started out as a joke…a reference to a heated rant about church that I once delivered to my wife after a particularly frustrating elders meeting. Long before I even considered starting a church or being a pastor, I said “if I ever ran a church it would be called action church, and we would actually DO THINGS instead of just having meetings about them.” My wife reminded me of those words when we were thinking about what to call our new church start up. Be careful what you say in anger, because to this day whenever I am tempted to just “talk” about what the Bible says instead of doing something, the word actionchurch reminds me of my words. 
More importantly though, Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan that being religious, knowing the scriptures, even being a religious leader like the priest and the temple assistant is NOT ENOUGH to fulfill Gods commands to “love God with all your heart-and your neighbor as yourself.” The only person in the parable who actually pleased God was the hated Samaritan. He was the one who took action…the one who stopped to help the injured man…the one who took it upon himself to insert himself into a “messy” situation.
If we Love God and Love people…Jesus taught that the only way to PROVE IT is by taking action.
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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Sunday I announced that our new “tag line” for actionchurch was changing from “church for people who don’t like church” to “Love God. Love People. Take action.”. All future advertising, invitation cards, wearables, etc will be tagged with the new line.
How it all started: Two years ago when actionchurch launched at Fat Daddys Nightclub, I struggled to find ways to describe what our little “church in a bar/nightclub” would be like. Some of our early taglines were original (re-think happy hour, No cover charge-no dress code-no joke,) and were funny and/or lame attempts to describe what was going to happen at Fat Daddys on Sunday morning. “Church for people who do not like church” was not original (numerous other churches have used it) and not part of our initial launch. After moving from Fat Daddys to Club 19 in October 2008 we begin to us the “church for people…” tag line exclusively because none of our “bar-related” tag lines seemed relevant to our currently non-alcoholic venue.
Why make the change?: Several months ago our creative team (currently Jerry, Josiah, and myself) met to talk about how we could let more people know that a place like actionchurch exists here in York, PA. Since then we have been working on finding new ways to “explain” and remind people both inside and outside of actionchurch why we exist. Being a “church for people who don’t like church” may describe some elements of our Sunday morning “style/flavor” but it simply does not describe who we are as a church. We needed a new descriptive tag line.
Is this a new direction?: Nope. actionchurch began because we Love God, Love people, and took action when we realized that there was not a place where some of our friends would be accepted, loved, and pointed to Jesus in our area. Because a place like actionchurch didn’t exist we took action. It’s why our great volunteer crew work so hard to prepare for Sunday mornings. Because we Love God and Love People we take action when students in our schools need coats, a family needs a fresh start, people suffering with cancer need our help, etc. etc. Loving God, Loving People, and taking action are in our DNA, in our history, in our name…and in our future. I can’t think of a better way to discribe what we do, who we are, and where we want to “go” as a church!
Tommorow: The ”scoop” about how the name actionchurch came to be.
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Monday, December 28th, 2009
This morning I spent some time browsing through all the posts this year on the actionchurch blog. I wanted to be reminded of all the things that had happened this year. Things that went “right”. Things that went terribly “wrong”. Times when I “predicted” in Faith that God would “come through”…times that I had it all wrong when it came to knowing how a situation would turn out. After reading hundreds of posts and recaps from 2009, I am left with the knowledge that God is truly still at work in our world…and if we will just trust him (even when we don’t know the outcome)…we can depend on him to do things that are absolutely impossible using our own abilities and knowledge.
At some point this week the website will be going down for a complete extreme makeover, but in the meantime I will be linking to some posts from this past year that remind me that God is in control…and I am not!
Here’s an example : God is not going out of Business! -In early March, in the midst of all the economic uncertainty and worry, I wrote about what I was depending on for our church…and my family. Wow did those words prove to be true. Tomorrow I’ll post some examples of how God has provided for us…and how we have been able to pass that on to others…in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I wrote those words.
What are some “examples” from your life in 2009 of providing for you in ways you could not have anticipated?
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