Monday Ten

So, my wife says to me this morning, "You need to blog." And, she's right. So, here is today's Ten

1. I write a lot about the Church, and Christianity on this blog. That's because I have a passion for the Church, and for people.

2. There are a lot of great churches in our world. Some have a lot of people who attend, and some have very few.

3. The size of a church isn't important. The strength of a church is best defined in how well they live out Jesus' teachings.

4. In my opinion, the greatest plague affecting the American church is "club-itis." This is a condition where the people inside the church focus more on their own well-being, and neglect the people outside the walls.

5. My current pastor once told me that every church, new and old, fight this. The natural tendency of any church is to start out with an outward focus. But, as the organization ages and matures, it tends to switch to an inward focus. It's at this point that growth and effectiveness plateau. Death is on the horizon.

6. One of the best ways my church, North Point Church, maintains that outward focus is through our ImpACT program.

7. ImpACT is designed to battle four giants in our world: Spiritual Emptiness, Disease, Poverty and Illiteracy. North Point is all about changing lives, and ImpACT is a huge tool we use to achieve that goal.

8. For the past three weekends, our church has been focused on this program, now two years old.

9. This year's main ImpACT thrust is to expand the outreach of North Point by opening our first video campus on East Sunshine Street in Springfield this coming January.

10. Our ImpACT campaign culminated this weekend with the most moving and wonderful moment in the church's history. As the congregation was being challenged to make a financial committment toward ImpACT, a group of people who have been impacted by the church walked on stage in a Parade of Changed Lives. Extremely moving. Every church should celebrate the victories of people, once dead in sin, and now alive in Jesus.