Habits and Attiudes of Highly Effective Churches (Part 3)
Commitment to Excellence

Do you recognize the brand name Smucker’s? No matter the region of the
United States in which you live, I suspect you do. Smucker’s is the
company that makes those wonderful jams and jellies. They played off
their name for years with an ad campaign that said: "With a name like
Smucker’s, it has to be good."

1. The reason many people buy Smucker’s products is the company’s
reputation for value-added products.
2. Smucker’s uses only the best ingredients.
3. It has efficient quality control all through its processing of apples,
strawberries, and concord grapes into the wonderful breakfast-table jelly
many of us like so much.
4. Then, by company policy, each of its containers is filled with just a
bit more product than the advertised weight.

Smucker’s has built its reputation on doing more for its customers than
it has to do. It makes and markets value-added products. Or, to put it in
biblical language, it goes the extra mile.

The famous and oft-echoed text about extra-miling actually comes from a
rather hateful context — hateful, at least, to the people who first heard
Jesus make the statement.

Jewish peasants resented the Roman law that allowed legionnaires to take
advantage of them by requiring them to carry their luggage. The soldiers
were in the homeland of Abraham’s descendants as an occupation force, and
they had the right to force civilians to carry their heavy packs or
equipment the distance of a Roman mile.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his hearers: "If someone forces
you to go one mile, go with him two miles" (Matt. 5:41). If one were to
be subjected to that humiliating servitude, Jesus encouraged him to do
more than was necessary to fulfill the obliga-tion. Go one mile for
Caesar and another — Western texts of this passage say two extra miles —
for the Lord.

If Jesus taught his disciples to live beyond minimal expectations even
when under duress, how do you think that principle should play out in
more routine settings?

1. How should husbands and wives treat each other?
2. What sort of employee should a Christian teenager be in his summer or
holiday job?
3. What obligation does a Christian have to her employees or his
customers?

I hope you live all your life relationships in terms of being a
value-added person — someone who does more than anyone has a right to
expect in order to give honor to the Lord. Then shouldn’t we create
value-added churches?

Value-Added Churches
What is a value-added church? For one thing, it is a church that not only
considers the needs of its committed members but looks beyond itself to
the needs of seekers, unchurched people, and disinterested-but-hurting
people.

For another, it is a church whose activities demonstrate a commitment to
quality in everything it does.

When polls are taken of people who don’t participate in American church
life, the same four basic reasons keep cropping up:
1. too much emphasis on money
2. too little emphasis on children
3. a holier-than-thou attitude
4. irrelevant and/or boring services.

For myself as an insider to church, I think I know how those perceptions
got out there among the people who have tuned us out. And I believe it is
our responsibility to try to eliminate them as legitimate reasons for
anyone staying away from our assemblies or looking everywhere but to the
church for help with the important issues of their lives.

Money.
Christians should be generous with our money, making the needs of the
local church a priority over every other good work that solicits us for
donations.

The biblical principle of tithing is meant to keep God’s covenant
community fiscally competent to meets its challenges. By the time all the
Old Testament tithes were totaled up, some writers estimate that
something around twenty-five percent of a faithful Israelite’s gross
income could have been given to Yahweh.

Yes, I know that the New Testament church is not mandated to observe the
Old Testament laws about ten-percent giving. But many Christians appear
to have used the "We’re-not-under-the-tithe-system" truth to justify
selfishness — so they’re way, way "under" the tithe and giving somewhere
in the range of only four to six percent of their annual income.

The members of a church need to understand the gospel of God’s grace as
the basis for their giving. It then becomes a matter of gratitude rather
than obligation to bring tithes, gifts, and offerings to the Lord.

They tithe to their church before they will consider other good projects,
and ten percent is the minimum rather than maximum for their generosity.
"Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give," wrote
Paul to believers at Corinth, "not reluctantly or under compulsion, for
God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Cor. 9:7).

Non-members of that church should never be asked to give. In fact, it
should be made plain that they are not expected to participate in the
regular contributions that churches take.

Children’s Ministry
One of the things by which non-Christians will judge a church is the
attention it gives to their children. Lots of Baby Boomers dropped out of
the church back in the 1960s. They were pretty anti-Establishment back in
those days — including "church" in the Establishment they rejected.

Something has happened, though, to those same people in the ’80s and
’90s. They have become the Establishment, and they have seen some needs
in their personal and family lives that they didn’t see twenty to thirty
years ago.

The Boomers have had children, and their children are helping bring them
back to church. That is, they have decided that they want their children
to know the Bible and get training in spiritual values. So they have
brought them to the nurseries and Sunday School classes of our churches.

Whether or not we can make a meaningful contact with those returning
drop-outs from the Church of Yesterday will depend in large measure on
what they see the Church of Today doing for their children. They will
expect the Church of Today to show itself to be a value-added church.

Baby Boomers — people born from 1946 through 1964 — want quality clothes,
schools, parks, and churches for their children. They will not exempt us
from their ex-pectations of high quality. They won’t tolerate a nursery
that is dingy, smells bad, or lacks competent and friendly people taking
care of their infants.

They aren’t going to be impressed favorably with classes using
old-fashioned methods in a computer-literate generation.
They want the lively colors, eager faces, and genuinely interested
teachers of a church that cares about their children to communicate that
care in both overt and subtle ways.

1. that means we need to do better jobs here about being ‘on time’ (10
minutes mini-mum) when we’re teaching classes...we had 3 teachers walking
the hallways to their classrooms 2 weeks ago on Sunday morning between
6-10 minutes after 9 a.m.
2. it means we’re prepared for class in advance...not standing in line at
the copier ma-chine when it’s time to begin class (what if the copier
quits working and you’ve waited until the last minute)
3. what is especially annoying......those who are most often the latest
are the ones who live the closest to our building! Many times they don’t
even leave their homes by 9 a.m....how can you be on time!?#

Holier-Than-Thou Attitudes.
In addition to their children, another thing that is likely to bring a
Baby Boomer back to church is a mid-life personal or career crisis:
1. his marriage breaks up or their teenager gets in trouble with drugs
2. he loses his job or she finds a lump that turns out to be cancer
3. these and any number of other crisis situations make people rethink
their basic beliefs and values....that often sends them back to church.

Something that sends those people right back out the doors is anything
that smacks of hypocrisy, denial, or self-righteousness in the church
they visit.

Believe it or not, preachers used to be taught to avoid confessional
statements in their sermons. It was thought that allowing people in the
congregation to know the faults or weaknesses of the minister or the
elder would make him less effective. Get real!

Everybody listening to him knew he’s just as human as they are and get
upset at the fact that he never acknowledged it. And the people whose
kids played with his kids knew just how human he was!

Several things have happened in the past quarter century — while the Baby
Boomers have been out of church — that have changed the culture around
the church. Successful twelve-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous
have helped people discover that honesty rather than denial is the best
way to cope with life.

Preaching has become more confessional in tone, and the life of a healthy
church has come to be one where honesty is both encouraged and welcomed.


Irrelevant and Boring Services.
Worship must always be God-focused and Christ-centered rather than
creature-focused. It praises Father, Son, and Spirit. It creates the
opportunity for human encounter with God so that we can be touch and
transformed by Him.

1. Whatever occurs in worship must both teach God’s will correctly and
reflect His nature faithfully.
2. Not only the doctrines taught in public teaching and exhortation but
the very nature of the worship experience must conform to what Scripture
reveals of God.
3. And worship must speak to all ethnic, economic, educational, and age
groups, insofar as that is possible.

Everything we do in a given worship assembly at West Broward has been
prayed over in advance as we work to plan our worship times.

Fault us for doing things on occasion that don’t work as intended or
criticize us for not doing things as well as our God deserves to have
them done for his glory, but please spare yourself making the false
charge that we have put no reflection to the nature of worship or that we
are simply trying to adopt whatever "trendy fad" comes along.

The facts are just the opposite. We are trying to worship in ways that
honor our God and connect with our culture.

God’s Call to Excellence
From the writings of an Old Testament prophet eight centuries before
Christ, here is Yahweh’s indictment of his covenant people:

Malachi 1:6-8: 'A son honors his father, and a servant his master. Then
if I am a fa-ther, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My
respect?' says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name.
But you say, 'How have we despised Your name?' {7} "You are presenting
defiled food upon My altar. But you say, 'How have we defiled You?' In
that you say, 'The table of the LORD is to be despised.' {8} "But when
you present the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And when you present
the lame and sick, is it not evil? Why not offer it to your governor?
Would he be pleased with you? Or would he receive you kindly?" says the
LORD of hosts."

If such a charge could be brought against his Old Testament covenant
community, it is altogether possible that heaven is due to raise up a
similar prophetic word against his New Testament people.

Think about it. Would you enroll your children in a school that was
equally up to date in facilities, equipment, and teacher training as the
one where you put them in Bible School?

Would you keep someone on a job you considered important who showed the
same amount of enthusiasm for it that you show for the kingdom of God?
Would you tolerate an accountant who messed up your books every month, a
yard crew that cut down your prize-winning flowers with the grass, or an
auto mechanic that couldn’t get your car fixed after three weeks because
he didn’t have any spark plugs or motor oil in stock?

Pine trees are essentially the same as they were 250 years ago, but every
lumber company in America has developed reforestation, logging, and
milling techniques that no 1750s logger would recognize.

The human body is the same as it was 1,000 years ago, but nobody I know
wants to have her pneumonia, his cancer, or her pregnancy treated by
someone trained in the medications and tools of a tenth-century
physician.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is still the same as it was 2,000 years ago,
but a church using the methodologies of a time now gone has no hope of
drawing its own neighborhood’s attention — much less the whole world’s —
to the saving message of the cross.

Conclusion
A while back, I read an interesting newspaper article about dying
brand-loyalty in America. "Fewer than three in 10 auto buyers go back to
the same brand." The same article traced something of the history of a
phenomenon.

1. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. auto industry didn’t have to worry
much about buyer loyalty.
2. There was little foreign competition, save for low-cost Volkswagen
Beetles or low-volume luxury cars.
3. Consumers often formed long-term relationships with local dealers.
4. Although few studies were done then to track buyer loyalty, experts
estimate that more than 60% of buyers returned to the same brand.

That tradition began to change in the mid-’70s with the arrival of
high-quality imports. Japanese brands seized about a fourth of the U.S.
market before Detroit’s Big Three stemmed the losses with improved
quality and service . . .Strange. You could change the wording only
slightly, and you could be talking about churches instead of cars.
People go where there is quality and attention to individuals. We should
learn something from that — before it is too late.

Last modified: April 18, 2006