If you haven’t heard, Louie Giglio is starting a church in Atlanta called Passion City Church with Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman and Christy Nockels. The first thought that everyone had was, does Atlanta need another church … especially with North Point Community Church (Buckhead Church and Browns Bridge Community Church) there. And the interesting thing in all this is … Andy Stanley (pastor of North Point) and Louie Giglio are very good friends. In fact, Louie has been a charter member of North Point since it’s start.

So, how are they dealing with this? Do they see it as a competition? How will they support one another? Well, they just did a podcast together and there were some honest reflections. This is part one, and part two and three will be coming … I”ll embed them here when they come out. But listen if you want some good insights on church planting and church leadership.

Listen to Part one:

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More pics coming …

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Now, as churches make this huge monumental shift to be focused on “outsiders,” there is this consistent resistance from the “mature” believers. “What about us?” “The teaching is not deep anymore.” “Why don’t we have more Bible studies?”

Bill Hybels from Willow Creek Community Church has come to a realization recently about this through his decades of experience in reaching the lost:

Willow Creek did an exhaustive survey. What they found was the most satisfied church members were those who were new believers or early in their faith–and the least satisfied were those who were more “mature” in their faith.

Bill said they had really missed teaching their growing believers to not be dependent on the church for their spiritual growth. The goal, Bill says (and I agree), is to slowly make believers independent. We (as a church) should focus our attention on introducing people to Christ, and then helping them grow to a certain point. After that–they should feed themselves and focus on helping the church introduce more people to Christ.

To do that, Bill continued, we need to help people “right-size” what they should expect from the church. The reason that the seasoned believers are more dissatisfied is because they still expect the church to be feeding them. They haven’t been taught to feed themselves.

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Good is the enemy of great.

And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good – and that is their main problem.

This is a great principle to learn from the “corporate” world that can be applied to church and even our faith. Why is it that most of us settle for just good? Maybe because it’s good. I think it’s easy to make decisions where we get rid of things that are bad. But what if striving for great means that we shake up what is good? Are we willing to do that? Are we willing to risk good for great?

Stretch me, God, out of the comfort zone of goodness and help me to reach for greatness!

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