From Some Strange Ideas via Bumbling Forward:

It seems like pastors and Loverboy have something in common. We’re only interested in “working for the weekend�*. Unfortunately.

As a pastor, I read a lot of blogs of others pastors. Monday is reaction day. Many pastors review the day before and how they felt about their Sunday services. I certainly know the feeling, because I do the same thing.

The problem is this…church isn’t a Sunday service. As pastors, we have to be about so much more than that. We put a lot of time work on and evaluating how a Sunday went, and it is far too easy to lose sight of the rest of the week. However, we also talk about how we want the church to go and be the church the rest of the week.

So I’m asking myself some questions:
How can pastors who spend the majority of their time and energy preparing for Sunday morning (or critiquing the previous Sunday) expect others to think of church as more than just a Sunday morning event?
How can we find ways to measure what happens in the life of a church throughout the rest of the week (and I don’t just mean small group attendance)?
How can we reshape Sundays to be a valuable time in the life of a church community, but not the primary expression of church in people’s minds?
Can we do this simply by restating it over and over, or do we have to make noticeable changes?

There are 8640 minutes in a week, not just 75-90. It’s time we pastor’s started “Lovin’ Every Minute of It�*.

*lame, I know, but how could I resist?

Here are my $0.02.

Those who truly learn from us become like us. That is the basic sense of discipleship. This applies not just to Christianity by to most learning environments. The most natural fruit of a college professor’s work is not actually educated students but, well, more college professors. Think about it. If you mentor people, they become like you. They most naturally interact with you in your career context. So they, too, take on your career.

This works with the “Sunday Focus” as well. We cannot expect the majority of our congregations to place the appropriate emphasis on Sunday Morning if we are placing an inappropriate level of emphasis on it ourselves. If most of our week is spent getting Sunday going for an hour+, we are overemphasizing Sunday ourselves. How do we expect everyone else to focus elsewhere?

I think we have to make noticeable changes to worship and to our structures of church if we are to put Sunday morning in its proper place. Worship is an essential discipline; so is celebration. Nevertheless, unless we provide people the opportunity to celebrate (in corporate worship) what God has done in day-to-day existence, our efforts at affecting change in worship centrality will be for naught.

The trick will then be to incorporate what God is doing in people’s lives individually and in small groups into the core of our worship service.

So yeah, that will look different. How different? I dunno. But I’m cool with going there.

I think if we want to measure what we need to measure to pull this off, we’re going to be measuring spiritual maturity and the rate at which it is being achieved and developed. The centrality of giving our will over to the will of God will be necessary as a first step to achieve this. To measure that will take personal relationships with those who are disciples of Jesus and those disciples, in particular, who disciple others.

Hmm… I’ve been working on this one a while; now someone else is talking about it, too… Sounds like a good discussion to keep going on.