The Bridge

There is a consistant battle in this work called “church” of what should be the focus.  Not the gospel focus, seeker focus, bible preaching focus but more the measure of success or structure focus.  You can identify success in a number of ways and more often then not the answer I hear is the 3 B’s are the best indicators of fruit and thus should be the focus.  The 3 B’s are Bodies, Budget, and Building.  The larger these are the greater the success.  That just sits kind of uncomfortable with me though.  Is that really it?  I mean yes I’ve seen that to be true personally but that can’t be the focus can it?  If it is true it would be important for Christ centered pastors to create systems and strattegies that focus on the 3 B’s.

What about the 3 C’s?  The idea that a church should balance its congregation (People Focus) corporation (Organization Focus) and cause (Purpose Focus).  If one tends to move away from the middle where all three of these connect you can have inbalance.  A Congregation and Corporation tends to miss out the greater mission and spends most of its time maintaining and staffing the programs.  A Corporation with Cause is like the Red Cross or fill in the blank but its not church.  A Congregation and Cause is frustrating because all of the passion seems to fall short due to a lack of organization and eventually you don’t have any of the C’s.  Overall with the 3 C’s one can never reach a perfect balance.  The Cause is always moving, the people are always changing and thus the organization always needs reshuffling.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?  I’d love to find 3 A’s because that is a much better mark then B’s or C’s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under Church Planting, Leadership, Mission. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.