Anyway, I worked as the dish-pig there. And it was crazy, especially
on Saturday mornings when the Salamanca Markets were on. Here are some
lessons I learned from dish-pigging there that I think apply well to
ministry too:

1. Stack like with like: Big plates onto big plates, bowls onto bowls etc. Once you put bowls on top of big plates, or small plates on top of big plates, you end the possibility for a higher stack. Either you put plates on top of the bowl and the stack becomes unstable, or you have to start a new stack. This is the scalability principle. Build things in such a way that you can continue to build on what you have begun. Avoid bottlenecks and short-term conveniences that end up blocking further growth. Stack your team meetings, communication, small groups and training so that you can work with a similar system even if you triple the number of people.
2. Collect cutlery in a vertical container: Both before washing and after washing, don’t scatter cutlery on plates and sink tops, collect them up in standing containers. This saves you scrambling around to find all the cutlery in between things and under things. It’s easy to group it to begin with. It’s harder to collect it up later. This is the systems principle. Especially fiddly and messy things need a system implemented at the front end, so that you don’t spend ages scrambling around later. This might include a system for communication and notices, a system for fundraising or a system for following up people.
3. Know when to use the dish brush and the paper towel: I think these tools can be overused in washing dishes. They are often very inaccurate and clumsy ways of washing things. But when it comes to removing pancake batter or hollandaise sauce, for example, they are very helpful. This is the specialised tools principle. For example, don’t use snail mail communication often - save it for high value communication. Don’t over-use fancy technology because people will become numb to it - save it for the key things. Don’t bring everything to a consultative congregational meeting - it will entangle the church in non-stop crisis.
4. Wait for really big and really dirty things: Don’t let the chef just dump the stove top pieces or a huge bowl of batter into your sink. It stops your regular workflow and completely contaminates the water. Make room for big tasks. Set aside weekend planning sessions, special season for big projects like the next year’s preaching calendar. Don’t let these clog up regular meetings. Preferably save up a few of these things and deal with them all at once.
5. Ask the waiting staff to either stack things properly (see point 1) or to leave the dishes for you to scrap and stack: It’s a nightmare when waiting staff interfere with your system, junking up your workflow and half-doing what needs to be fully done. Better leave more work for you to do than to badly do the work that needs to be done. This is the training principle. You need to train people well to align themselves to the wider ministry. Or you need to hold off on tasks until people are properly trained.
6. Scape dishes and soak cutlery first: If you just put things straight into the sink, the water will get clouded and dirty very quickly. This is the clean workspaces rule. Make sure your most important workspaces, ministries and tools are kept clean and focused. This includes announcements at church and small group ministry.
7. Know when to let it pile up: There are busy seasons where you need to actually focus on getting more coffee cups and teaspoons. Or where you need to begin prepping for the end of the day. At these times, it’s ok to let the dishes pile up - and easier to do it if you have a system! So know when those crazy busy seasons are. And be happy to leave aside normal work and email and reading and 1:1 so that you can focus on, for example, a heightened evangelistic season or a major pastoral crisis.
8. Separate place for delicates and sharps: Don’t treat wine glasses and carving knives the way you treat coffee cups and tumblers. These things are fragile and/or dangerous. This means be extra specially about things that might possibly maybe break or cause harm. They might not. But if they do you are in big trouble. Be very careful with your: social media interaction, child protection policy, nominate of leaders, handling of money, doctrinal disputes.
9. Fill up detergent and stack tea towels: It is far easier to make sure you have all your tea towels and detergent and dishwasher powder filled up before you begin your shift or during quiet periods. You don’t want to have to do big, inconvenient jobs like this when you are up to your elbows in suds and the barista is calling out for teapots. So plan well ahead for your ministry calendar, training, staffing, web design needs, fundraising.
10. Use hand cream: Your hands start to crack and split when they are sunk in a sinkful of industrial dishwashing detergents all day. So bring hand cream and use it regularly. Know the wear and tear your ministry can cause to you and to others. Plan ahead and provide ways to ensure this doesn’t cause damage.

Or send them out to Sunday School for age-appropriate teaching? And to help
parents concentrate?

What about non-Xn parents? What if they can’t get their kids to sit still
during a whole service like well-regimented Christian family kids? (what of
Xn parents with hyper energetic kids for that matter!)

What of nonXn parents who don’t want to send their kids out to unsupervised
Christian indoctrination?

I like the idea of keeping the kids in for at least some of the church
meeting, rather than starting Sunday School right at the beginning. And I
think Sunday School should stop by about age 10.

What do you think?

1. This article argues that people are meant to sleep in two distinct blocks and feel free to wake up and do whatever in between the two blocks. H/T @stimmis for the link.
2. 9 Marks asks whether you pray for revival in the other guy’s church?
3. The New York Times talks about the massive growth in online university study. I feel icky about it. But it’s the way of the future, but is it really?
4. Great new idea from St Matthew’s Unichurch over in WA: The Debrief podcast picking up on issues raised the preaching ministry of the church.
5. Mother’s Day is the most important day after Easter and Christmas visitors in the USA, according to this Lifeway research.. How much do you make of Mother’s Day in your church? I must admit that I have tended to find the Mother’s Day services I’ve attended painfully sentimental.
6. Phillip Jensen rushes in where angels fear to tread talking about working mothers.
7. Sandy Grant wishes the New Bible Dictionary happy birthday. Hip hip hooray!.

Or do you give a blank page so that people can engage directly with
you as you are speaking?

I say: No outline. Definitely not on powerpoint. I reckon Lloyd-Jones
would call them both abominations.

For lots of reasons, not least that it’s a massive time waster to muck
around finishing the outline in advance. Forget it. Have a
cheeseburger instead.

“It’s not about religion but relationship”

This grid is read into the Bible - that’s the problem with the Old
Testament law; that’s the solution that Christ brings about.

Personal relationship with God is a wonderful truth, but it’s not the
central truth of the gospel. It’s the fruit of the gospel. The gospel
is not salvation by sincerity, but salvation by substitutionary
atonement.

It’s not surprising that charismatic churches, with their mystical
bent, to drift into an emphasis that can suggest to the average
hand-raiser that salvation is achieved by experience of sincere
relationship with God. And it’s a tempting thing to emphasise as it
will be welcomed by a culture that hungers for authenticity.

Therefore, especially when ministering to those from this background,
it is important to emphasise the objective work of God in the gospel:
“It’s not about religion OR relationship BUT the righteousness and
redemption of Christ.”

The advantage of saying all Christians are missionaries is that it
makes very plain that we are all to share in God’s mission to the
world. You can’t truly be a Christians without being passionately
concerned for the salvation of the lost. And this work is not just for
people in other countries. It’s also for people across the street.

And yet…

I think it’s better to reserve the term for Christian leaders and
cross-cultural missionaries. Why?

1. Because there is a unique role of leadership: the unique duty is to preach, teach, lead and proclaim. Not every Christian is required to fulfill that duty. Although we all share in the ministry of the word in some way or another, we are not all ministers of the word. Although we are all to be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have, we are not all full-time evangelists. Although we are all to have a missionary heart, we are not all to fulfill the peculiar role of evangelist in the body of Christ.
2. Because there is a unique role of cross-cultural missionary work: the unique gifts, resolve and enterprise of planning to leave the place where you currently are to go to a place where the gospel hasn’t been proclaimed. We may be great at evangelising out neighbours, but if no one dares to go to deepest darkest France or deepest darkest Yemen, then we have failed to be obedient to the great commission.

Either way, I think we should stop using the term missionary for those
who go to another country primarily to do aid work, Bible translation
or theological education. Although these ministries are desperately
needed around the world in some places more than evangelistic
missionaries and although they may also get opportunities to share the
gospel while they are there, these people are not missionaries in the
full sense.

Well I am always stupid busy. And I don’t like to make a fuss about
it. But at the moment I feel crazy stupid busy: ‘pressed beyond
measure’. And so do the staff team. And things are getting fuzzy
around the edges, time-sensitive things are being left too long and
quality-specific things are getting scrappy. Feels like there’s a bit
of decay happening. And I fear we’re not having fun as a team.

I know, I know, you might say ‘Then why are you blogging?’ Smart Alec.
Actually it’s a wise thing to do. Getting enough perspective to make
changes is desperately important. To just do more busy work and not
get perspective would be folly. And I hope that even some of my
readers my give their own suggestions of where to next.

What’s happened?
There is a big project in our world: a major week-long evangelistic
mission on campus in July-August
(God vs Evil). But these aren’t the full
reason for the madness. After all, there are lots of things we did in
Semester 2 last year that we are NOT doing this year because of God vs
Evil.

I think what’s going on is incremental increase in EVERYTHING so that
everything is compressed:

• More small groups (from 9-13)
• More student leaders (from 14-25)
• More students overall (from around 70 to around 100 in the orbit of the ministry)
• Higher quality expectations in all our ministries
• More follow-up systems for new people
• More responsibilities delegated to apprentices and students and therefore more oversight and management required
• More campus-to-church issues
And all of this brings more email, more pastoral issues etc

What’s the solution?
I’d love to hear your suggestions. But here are some of my hunches:

• Get every member of the staff team to delegate even more of what we do to students.
• Time to employ more senior staff
• Re-group as a staff team and regain vision, perspective, priorities and quality standards.
• Spring clean old tasks and unnecessary tasks
• Spring clean processes and simplify things that might be causing time or quality decay.
• Start equipping some students to not just be leaders or even project leaders, but train them up to be team leaders.
• Have a holiday.
• Buy donuts for everyone and celebrate that the main thing is going well.

Or do you have it after the sermon to assist with richer theological
thinking, reinforcement and application?

Or… barely-evangelical pastor that you are :-P .... do you not
synchronise your small group curriculum with the preaching program?!

1. Carl Trueman multi-site take-down: if video venues are so legitimate, why don’t you pipe in the band over video?
2. How Kony 2012 faded Thanks Mike Jolly for the link
3. Rory Shiner shares a different kind of sermon feedback: feedback about long term habits and tendencies.
4. Two questions to ask each year: 1. Why did you start coming to our church/ministry? 2. Why did you keep coming?
5. Phillip Jensen on the (un)truth of church decline. I like how he observes that journalists always write about church decline, but not about how volunteer involvement is in decline right across our society.

Christian fasting is an optional self-expression of grief connected
with sin and repentance. It’s a form of communication going out of
yourself, not a form of discipline directed towards yourself.

For some people bad coffee is no big deal. For some it is a major
cultural turn off.

But then for others, bad coffee is such a big deal that they won’t
trust your coffee. They just don’t drink coffee in settings like a
church service. They’d rather go out to their trusted cafe. So save
yourself time and money and buy a waterslide instead.

Perhaps the only people who will drink coffee at church won’t care if
it’s bad coffee? Buy sachets of Nescafe Instant Froth Latte and
everyone’s happy. You could even provide a ‘nescafe lounge’ to contain
the filthy habit, like a smokers’ lounge.

And yet if you do choose to do good coffee, it is quite hard to afford
and maintain well - how do you ensure the coffee is fresh,
flavoursome, constant and readily available?

1. Wear ordinary street clothes when doing things up the front at church, to show that there’s nothing different between church and everyday Christian life and to make ordinary everyday people feel welcome at church?
2. Dress one step more formal than everyone else in the congregation, to show that you take the gathering of God’s people seriously, that you’ve thought about what you are doing up front and to help those up the front look presentable?

I say number 2.

1. Article on Guy Mason in the ‘City Weekly’ magazine.
2. The latest ‘Spoken Project’ podcast is out
3. An article on the amorality of The Hunger Games. I kinda want to read/see these. It sounds kinda cool. I will call it ‘student evangelist research’. H/T Al Stewart for this link.

But what happens when you do that? And what do you call the result?
Are they multiple congregations of the one church? Or multiple
campuses of the one church?

If so, what does this say about our definition of ‘church’? That a
church is any organisation that shares the same logo, leadership and
budget? That’s a long way away from ‘gathering of the Lord’s people’,
isn’t it?

Should you really own up and call each of your congregations or
services or campuses separate churches?
as St Paul’s Carlingford, Sydney
have recently done, calling themselves the ‘St Paul’s Group of
Churches’, or
Crossway Anglican Churches

And once you do that, how should your organisational structure change
to properly reflect the distinctness of each of these churches?

The 9 Marks Journal on Multi-Site
Churches argue strongly that a church can only be a church if it
is a single self-governing group, that all gathers together on Sunday
in a single service. The position sounds hard-line, but their
arguments are worth hearing.

Or is there a middle ground, and I personally thing there is, where
these networked congregations can semi-regularly ‘church together’ is
one larger gathering - so expressing that they truly are one larger
church/congregation/gathering, not simply an umbrella organisation?

But it was getting harder and harder to manage so many other people’s
deadlines through my A5 Filofax. The margins were getting full to
overflowing on each day-per-page.

So when I got my Nokia Lumia 800, I decided to try using an electronic
calendar for managing other people’s deadlines, preserving my Filofax
for my own actions, appointments and deadlines.

And it’s good.

The problem with calendars on phones
But one thing that I always found silly about people using their phone
calendars was how long it took them to plug in an appointment. They
were there fussing around for ages, while I could write in my paper
diary in 3 seconds.

So what i have done is when I am out and about, I will still write
down pen and paper deadlines, put them in my inbox (a plastic sleeve
in the front of my Filofax). Then when I get back to my laptop, I will
plug the deadlines into my Google Calendar that is linked to my
phone’s calendar.

My advice to you: don’t waste time plugging junk into your phone.