Addressing us on the day will be David Stroud, leader of Newfrontiers UK, and a team of key leaders of churches and worship teams from across the North of England. Praise and worship will be led by the CCM worship team.

Delegates are also invited to attend two of the following practical sessions:
• Keys to leading and discipling a Spirit‐led worship team
• Rasing up gifted leaders for Sundays and other gatherings
• How to encourage more and better Spirit‐led contributions
• Faith for writing and introducing new songs
• Preaching for the presence of God (leaders’ track)
• Growing a leadership culture shaped by God’s presence (leaders’ track)

As always, we’ll close with an extended time of worship and ministry to build you up and raise your faith. Don’t miss this special day.

Tickets
Tickets cost just £10 per person. A discount is available for teams: every 4 people booked in entitles you to 1 extra place free. As word spreads, our worship days are getting increasingly busy so we strongly recommend you book in advance to guarantee places for your team.

Please book your places by email to bookings@ccm.org.uk and send cheques to Worship Day, CCM, 37 St Marys Avenue, Manchester M34 7QG.

Venue
Hyde Town Hall is easy to Wind, just off the M67 (postcode for sat nav - SK14 1AL). There is plenty of parking and places to buy lunch nearby. Drinks will be provided through the day. This event is hosted by Christ Church Manchester, a Newfrontiers church. But whatever church you’re from, we’d love to see you on the day.

Sitting with only my thoughts for company, whilst looking at an empty computer screen, is a nightmare for me. My mind seems to start blank and then drift into a cocktail of unimportant things. I often find myself gravitating to the local coffee house where at least the buzz of other people’s conversation can occasionally stimulate me into some sort of creativity.

You can imagine how happy I was when Deresiewicz mentioned that he was going to include Friendship as a form of solitude. He goes on to say that talking with friends will seem counterintuitive, as friendship is the opposite of solitude. In the context of his overall thesis that leaders need to think, he was highlighting one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation.

“This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense.” I am someone who thrives on the cut and thrust of debate and I am able to adjust my thinking as the conversation progresses. I realize that I need both environments to make creative decisions. I need to be able to write down my thoughts and work them as well as taking time to be stimulated by animated conversation and debate.

Even decisions that have been allocated a lot of time and work often need to be given a road test. Last September we started a second meeting we called The Chapel in a vodka bar. The desire to promote The Chapel with a great fanfare was massively diluted due to a severe lack of funds. The resulting low-key launch has given us the opportunity to experiment, road test and evaluate our strategy.

This has meant that we have developed a much more coherent plan as it became apparent that we were trying to achieve too many concepts that at times conflicted with each other. We discovered that people viewed “The Chapel” as a cool meeting in a vodka bar. However, not many people saw it as a place that could or would commit to and identify as their local church.

The outcome of this low-key road test is an exciting and more coherent strategy. Ten minutes walk away from the vodka bar we have hired Luther King House where we are going to launch a new 6pm Sunday evening meeting – CCM:City. This gives us the opportunity of carrying on using the vodka bar later on the Sunday the evening, developing The Chapel into a creative community. Another beneficial consequence of looking at all the angles and taking adequate time to road test is the rebranding of our morning meeting to CCM: East

The first is concentration - the ability to focus and give attention to the big idea. Deresiewicz writes “It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.”

He goes on to say, “It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of your mind come into play, that you arrive at an original idea. By giving your brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, then a new idea can take you by surprise.”

For myself, I know that the early part of the day is when I function at my best in terms of concentration. This means that my schedule must reflect this, especially when I am looking at important issues. I find the challenge is not the isolated occasion but to consistently and regularly put quality thinking time in my diary. 

Those conferences I do attend I find myself wanting to listen to people who have achieved something. I especially enjoy listening to those people that have some interesting and stimulating insight on a given subject. The challenge we face when listening to great achievers is that they tend to talk about a model that they have developed that has worked for them. A one-way flow of information can motivate us to implement a “Ready made idea” without thoroughly thinking it through and asking the right questions.

Deresiewiez writes - “I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom”. It is so important that we take any idea and really understand how it relates in the context the speaker comes from, and the context that you are planning to implement it in.

To be continued

Again I am challenged with a Deresiewiez comment - “I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating”

As I write this blog I realize that I live in the world of fast communication. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, text, and 24hour news encourage us to make comment first and think second. The real need to make changes, often with limited time availability, can put pressure on us to cut corners. This limits our creativity and ultimately the diligent implementation of those ideas.

While on a day off at the beginning of the year my wife Mary declared, with some intensity, that iphones should be banned. The ability to receive emails, read blogs or Twitter tweets, at anytime and anywhere means that if you did not turn it off you can be constantly bombarded with information and potential distractions. Not helpful for any type of concentration especially when on a day off with your wife.

“Solitude, being alone with your thoughts,” is a vital component to creative thinking. For an external processor like myself that can be a major challenge, even without all the distractions of modern technology. Getting in the bad habit of spending only short spurts of time on the big ideas is a massive hindrance to achieving creative and well thought through plans.

There are things that hinder giving yourself to creative thinking. Over the next few posts I want to look at four challenges we face and then highlight a number of helps.

The first challenge is multi tasking. As a leader in a growing church I find that multi tasking is part of life and I think I am reasonable good at it. Deresiewiez refers to some research done on the idea that today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than the previous generation.  “How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t.” They also found that those who were high multi-taskers scored worse in a number of tests such as distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and amazingly the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

I really enjoy doing most of the tasks that are in front of me. Even the ones I don’t want to do, I can put myself under pressure to fulfill them. Making a real difference in the city of Manchester involves finding adequate, quality time, to stop and think. It means making hard decisions on what is more important. As a multitasker I need to take time away from all of the jobs that demand my energy so that I can focus on the big ideas that bring growth.

To be continued

Two years ago, when there were only 20 people at CCM, I found myself advising the leadership team of a church that was gathering over a thousand people every week. On one of my visits it crossed my mind that not many people would be living in this world, of leading one of the smallest churches and yet advising one of the largest churches in the same movement. Getting involved with these large and often complicated churches whilst having faith for the small start-ups seems to be a world I happily embrace.

My talk at Regents concentrated on how Paul planted the church at Corinth and then at Ephesus. From the narrative I looked at the following themes: Who can plant a church, Team & timing, Start simply, Vision and faith, Persistence, Bridgeheads, and Flexible growth strategies:.

I would have loved to the time to look at some other themes that came out of the text such as- Multiple church planting, Signs and wonders, and Growing apostolic teams. I also mentioned a manual I had written some years ago on the subject of pioneering churches this can be downloaded here.

I am incredible challenged and motivated by these words. As I now find myself leading a church in one of the great urban regions of Manchester. These are mainly poorer and under-churched micro towns, merging into one another in one mass of houses. They offer a large mission field where fresh thinking is needed. There seem to be many and often conflicting ideologies about how this should be done.

Small house churches are one route often advocated. Bussing people out to better-resourced suburban venues is another. Incarnational is the buzzword used for another strategy. This is where people move into a deprived area and live among the people. Over the years all of these, and other variations on the theme, have been tried with mixed success. 

William Deresiewiez: “I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.”

To be continued

I do believe that the New Testament is short on definitive administrative models but high on principle and values. The leading of the Spirit seemed to be vital to decision making and principles, such as the poor being looked after, shaped the support structure. 

With this in mind it is important that leaders have enough time to think through all the different angles that need to be addressed to shape their church for a successful future.
Every church situation is different and the variables we are trying to overcome and even utilize means that we need time to think. In our world where multi tasking seems to be the order of the day and information is shared in bite sized portions William Deresiewiez comments “Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.”

To be continued…

Reading a William Deresiewiez lecture, delivered at West Point, reminded me of something that had bugged me for a long time. That is, how many church leaders are looking for the perfect “off the peg idea”, on how to structure their church for growth, and then implementing these new ideas without thinking through all the ramifications and concepts behind the strategy. Over the years this had led to numerous examples where churches have been subjected to whole scale change with such notions as cell church, house church, attractional church, missional church, church with congregations, church with sites etc. 

It would be a very cheap to make some cynical remark about these different approaches as they have often come out of many years of success. My concern has not been these various church structures, but the way leaders sometimes have naively taken these strategies and then put them into practice without thinking through how they may work in a different context. The outcome often fails to live up to expectations and can leave people cynical about their leaders and their church. As the proverb says “hope deferred makes the heart grow sick”

To be continued…

My goal has always been to have the whole church active in ministry. God has works of service for everyone. If we are saying “please let someone else do it”, for the wrong reason like Moses, we are hindering our personal growth and calling as well as not being a fully participating member of the body of Christ.

Jesus wanted to prepare his apostles to deal in an appropriate way with rejection. He told them “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth; it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment than for that town.”

Moses let rejection fester away on the inside for years. Jesus wanted the apostles to learn how to leave it behind where it belonged. Therefore wiping dust off your feet is an external way of dealing with rejection, instead of internalizing it. It was not they who were being rejected but God. It would be God who eventually they would be answerable to.

“The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’ But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, ‘who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’

The result of this incident was that a very confident leader, fearing for his life ran away and started a new life as a shepherd. The years then passed and the rejection from his fellow countrymen simmered away. After forty years God met him and called him to go and rescue his people.  God also showed Moses that his words would be backed up with some amazing signs and wonders.

Moses reply to God was extraordinary, “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” What a contrast with the truth that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.

To be continued…

Moses is a great example of this. He dramatically changed the way he saw himself after being rejected by his own people and then spending 40 years as a shepherd thinking about this event.

In the account Stephen gives for his defense to the High priest he mentions Moses. Saying “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.

This was the product of being raised and educated as a member of the royal palace. This provided an amazing education and gave Moses access to all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He grew up to be a very confident leader as well as a powerful orator. Then at 40 years old he acted very impulsively out of concern for one of his fellow countryman and killed an Egyptian.

Moses had a sense of call and destiny. So his impulsive action was the result of a bigger conviction. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them. But unfortunately for Moses they saw this turn of events differently and rejected him.

To be continued…