Month: November 2019

2_07: Cory Hartman – Stop wasting words convincing people to show up

2_07: Cory Hartman – Stop wasting words convincing people to show up

Breakthrough ideas with Cory:

  • How can you use the written word to extend your reach?
  • Is there a way to leverage your weekly content to make disciples?
  • What are the best possible ways to shape and leverage your content for disciple-making outside of your Sunday service?
  • The church is a content factory every week, creating a ton of content, yet we’re not taking advantage of it outside of the sermonic moment.
  • Are you maximizing the channels to communicate the gospel?
  • The one who works longest is the one who is most devoted to the ministry of the word, right? Maybe not.
  • How do we give gospel-shaped answers to the questions that people are actually asking?
  • There seems to be a divide in the philosophy of preaching with felt need, seeker-sensitive on the one side, and expositional verse-by-verse gospel-centered on the other side. I don’t see why those are two sides.
  • The questions that people are asking, they have deeper questions in life. We’re all walking around with the more profound questions in life.
  • What does it mean to have a gospel-centered, gospel-shaped Biblical answer to the question is my boyfriend cheating on me, and how do I know?
  • When we can speak to a surface-level tension, there’s an avenue to this more significant, kind of gospel-centered question.
  • When you look at the messages that you send: your bulletin or worship guide, look at your website, look at your social media feed, and look at all the different ways that you’re communicating to other people. The call to action is to show up.
  • Show up to Sunday morning worship, show up to the small group, show up to vision night, show up to community outreach, show up to youth group, show up to whatever.
  • Did Jesus tell us, “Go ye into all the world and tell people to show up?”
  • Jesus did not say: “Guys, whatever you do, as the father has sent me, so I am sending you to get people to show up, you have to get people to show up.”
  • When the vast bulk of our content is telling people to show up, what are we communicating there?
  • Is our primary message akin to what the Lord told us that our central message was supposed to be?
  • How are we sending a “grow up” message to people in their personal and spiritual growth according to the Good News that the Lord has given us?
  • Communicate opportunities to grow up into something as much as you communicate opportunities to show up for something.
  • You don’t have to wait for Sunday or wait for the right Sunday. You don’t have to wait for that to try out the Christian life. Just try it.
  • We can talk to the skeptical person; we can speak to the secular person, we can talk to the person who’s disaffected from church and say, “Before you even come to church, try this Jesus thing. Just take this one teaching of his and put it into practice in your life this week and see what happens.”
  • People are showing up to church less, but they still maintain the same level of perceived connectedness.
  • They still call it “my church” even though versus ten years ago, attendance rates are down. And in some cases, giving is remaining the same, which is fogging the lens on what’s happening.
  • It is more biblical to say a disciple is someone who shows up. So rather than put the attendance ahead of discipleship, we need to put discipleship forward of presence.
  • How is the church going to make disciples in the networks of people’s relationships beyond the four walls?
  • Social media is one of those networks, one of those networks that our people are in, apart from the four walls of the church, that sharing the gospel should take place.
  • If we’re diligent about posting helpful enough content, maybe we are equipping our people to share with the people around them that are hurting and struggling and have questions.
  • Facebook could be the new Monday night visitation.
  • Well-designed, well-curated content shared appropriately could be that next Monday night visitation or Chick Tract with the four spiritual laws.
  • Evangelism, even if it was a little bit of a scary word, was a word in the lexicon of our church ten years ago. Not any more.
  • Not being equipped makes it difficult for people to share the gospel.
  • There’s so much baggage with the word evangelical. It’s a political party now, not a posture of believers in kind of an overflow of their life.
  • Instead of talking about how social media channels weaken our faith and weaken the connection between people and are a stumbling block, what if this could be a strength in this new evangelical age?
  • Does anybody read blog posts anymore? I think the answer is yes.
  • We’ve been sitting with the internet for a generation, still trying to figure out how to best tailor the content as the Church.
  • One of the things that the church has missed along the way is the relationship between what happens online and what happens offline.
  • The written word is valuable in part because it is so snackable and so skimmable.
  • Your first few years in ministry are primarily about growing you into the kind of branch that will produce fruit someday.
  • In God’s plan, the next long season of your life is not mainly about how he’s going to use you to help people become like Christ, but mostly about how he’s going to use people to help you become like Christ.
  • Try to relax, and don’t be afraid to relax a little that if you relax a little, you’re going to relax too much, because you’re not capable of relaxing too much.
  • Your church would be happy to keep you forever, but they deserve better than a pastor who is continually thinking about the next thing.
  • The choice that we make at that moment, whether to leap or not leap, itself has no bearing whatsoever on whether God loves us or not.

Breakthrough resources in this episode:

Fulcrum Content

From Show Up to Grow Up by Cory Hartman

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer

Younique: Designing the Life God Dreamed for You by Will Mancini

Cory Hartman is the founder and principal writer at Fulcrum Content, the company he launched to equip churches for disciple-making and help leaders extend their reach with the written word. At Fulcrum, Cory serves as a collaborative author for thought-leaders, provides editing and self-publishing assistance, writes original online pieces, adapts audio and video content into engaging articles, writes marketing copy, and crafts custom-built discipleship material. Cory served as a pastor for 13 years in churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He earned a doctor of ministry degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary with a thesis on 19th-century educator, revivalist, publisher, and abolitionist Mansfield French. Cory previously earned an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell in urban ministry and a BA from Taylor University in biblical literature. Cory’s letters have appeared in such publications as the Boston Globe and the Newark Star-Ledger, the latter winning the paper’s Silver Pen Award. He is the author of From “Show Up to Grow Up”: How to Make Top Content That Makes Real Disciples and On Freedom and Destiny: How God’s Will and Yours Intersect. A native of central New York State, Cory’s family roots are in central Pennsylvania, where he now lives with his wife Kelly and their four children.

2_06: Dr. Jon Roebuck – Actually talk with people… don’t just preach at them.

2_06: Dr. Jon Roebuck – Actually talk with people… don’t just preach at them.

Breakthrough ideas with Jon:

  • How can a church stay relevant to their culture?
  • How can a church stay relational to the communities in which God has placed them?
  • How can a church remain resolute to their DNA and their calling?
  • If you will create physical space, you allow conversations to begin to happen, that are meaningful and perspective-altering,
  • We create better communities if we have better churches, and we create better churches if we have better leaders.
  • Ask yourself: what does the world around me need, and how can I begin to instill into my people this heart for ministry?
  • Community ministry is messy, it’s inconvenient, it’s expensive, it’s all of that, but it’s the right thing to do.
  • Baptists tend to hang out with Baptists, Methodists with Methodists, Presbyterians with Presbyterians, and so we don’t necessarily have an appreciation for what good work other denominations are doing. How might that change?
  • In most urban areas like ours in Nashville, nobody is connecting the dots across the denominational lines.
  • We’re beginning to see that the work in Nashville is more significant than what our church and our denomination can tackle.
  • At the local church level, what does it look like for us to be a good neighbor or contributing partner to our community?
  • What if we stopped telling our community what their needs are, but asked them to tell us what their needs are?
  • Just by the fact that we’ve opened physical space, we begin to enter into conversational space.
  • If you have enough conversations, you begin to develop relational space, where you start to engage at a different level.
  • There’s a movement from physical space to conversational, to relational, to redemptive space, and ultimately to reflective space.
  • If you create space, even physical space, in your building for the right conversations, amazing things are going to happen.
  • Be willing to invite people into your space. It’s not going to damage your church. It’s not going to damage your theology.
  • What we don’t have in our culture is, we don’t have the safe, rational, civil dialog space.
  • So, where do people go to have safe conversations about important things? It ought to be the church.
  • Why is the church not a place that important conversations can take place?
  • Forty million Americans in the last 25 years have left the church because they get judgment, and they get condemnation instead of conversation.
  • We’re too busy preaching at people to listen to what they have to say in return.
  • I believe a lot of our pastors don’t have a vision beyond the seat they’re sitting in right now, beyond the next Sunday.
  • How do you carve out space, even in your ministry, to develop relationships outside of your comfort zone?
  • I’m not going to learn to truly reach others if I surround myself with only people who look like me, who think like me, and who believe like me.
  • The number one problem with the 21st-century, American Christianity, is that lack of evangelistic zeal.
  • If we don’t understand the lies, we can’t speak the truth.
  • In the body of Christ, we tend to lead with the truth we know versus understanding the lies they know and then bringing God’s truth to that.
  • You will never get to that high plateau of doing God’s will unless you’re doing God’s will for your life today.
  • So look for God’s will along the way, not just in the here and the hereafter somewhere.

Breakthrough resources in this episode:

Belmont University

Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership

Creating Space by Jon Roebuck

Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle

Dr. Jon R. Roebuck serves as the Executive Director of Belmont University’s Rev. Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership.  The Center seeks to provide on-going educational opportunities for faith-based leaders across middle Tennessee in order to equip those leaders to be relevant to culture, relational to the community, and resolute in missional focus.  The Institute sponsors a number of on-campus seminars, workshops, and courses each semester.

He is the author of three devotional books, Christmas, Then and Now, Morning Conversations, and newly released, Creating SpaceAdditionally, he has written for a number of preaching periodicals and journals. Dr. Roebuck has also served on several boards and agencies for the Alabama and Tennessee Baptist conventions.

Jon and Linda Roebuck married in 1984 and have three grown children with their own families. Jon and Linda have always enjoyed different sports together but continue the debate of Auburn vs. University of Alabama football.