Like so many, my heart was saddened to hear the news out of Anderson, SC, where Perry Noble was recently removed from his position as Senior Pastor at NewSpring, the church that he started 18 years ago.

There’s no doubt that the church world is divided into Perry fans and Perry critics, and too often we can become blinded by those agendas in times like these. I believe that if we are, we’ll miss the valuable insights that can be gained from the situation.

I’m sure there are numerous lessons that we can learn from what’s happened at NewSpring, but let me share the 5 that stand out to me the most:

Stop loving your church more than you love the church

The “I Love My Church” trend has been around for a while now, and it’s probably not going away. I’m also probably only one of a handful of pastors who just doesn’t like it. I’m not sure if it originated at NewSpring, but I do know that Perry was fond of saying it. I also think it’s the opposite of what I see in scripture. I see the apostle Paul encouraging people to not pick one favorite voice at the expense of other voices, but to recognize that all the voices are helpful in building the church (1 Cor. 1:12-13; also check out 1 Cor. 3:1-7).

I’m surely not saying that every church that uses the trendy slogan is wrong, but I am saying that if I love my church more than I love the church, then eventually my church could easily see your church (and every other church) as competition. It feeds an “us versus them” mentality, and that can unwittingly fuel the alienation of the pastor from other leaders in the area who could be a valuable resource to him and his church. After all, when we’re focused on ourselves, others tend to be more of a distraction, especially if they are trying to help us see our blind spots.

[Tweet “Stop loving YOUR church more than you love THE church.”]

Reject the lie that honesty is the same thing as transparency

One of the things that I’ve loved most about Perry’s ministry (and I’m not the only one) is his honesty in the pulpit with his people, and yet what we’ve learned in the days since the NewSpring announcement is that Perry had blind spots in his life. That shouldn’t surprise us, because we all have them, but it does beg the question, “How can someone be so honest and yet still have hidden sin?”

[Tweet “Honesty isn’t the same thing as transparency if we’re only being honest about select things.”]

I think the answer to that question lies in the realization that honesty isn’t the same thing as transparency if we’re only being honest about select things. Honesty with many is good, but transparency with a few is better, and will go a long way toward keeping us in a position to continue to share honestly with the masses.

So find the few. Look for the people who will do more than just tell you how great you are, and be willing to admit that your blind spots and hidden sins will wreck you if you aren’t willing to allow others to correct your course first.

Size really does matter

Pastors are fond of playing the “all pastors feel the same stress no matter what size their church is” game, but that’s just not true. The reality is that the bigger the structure, the greater the stress, and the reason we need to understand that truth is because all that increased stress generally falls on the weakest crack in the foundation. My guess is that Perry Noble didn’t wake up 2 months ago and suddenly feel the need to escape from the stress of a 30,000 member church by drinking too much. That crack was in the foundation long before the building was that big, and the lesson for all of us is that the gradual growth of our churches is a gift from God to the leaders because it allows us to identify those cracks and do something about them before additional stress is added to them.

An old prophet said not to despise small things*, and I agree. Faithfulness in the small things helps us avoiding failure in the big things.

[Tweet “Faithfulness in the small things helps us avoiding failure in the big things.”]

If you’re breathing, you’re redeemable

But what happens when it does crash? What happens to Perry Noble now? What does the church do when leaders fail? Not to be too simplistic, but I would suggest that we do the same thing we do when anyone else fails: preach the gospel, because the gospel is a message of redemption for those who need to be redeemed, and ALL of us need the redeeming message of the gospel.

[Tweet “The church has a history of kicking its wounded to the curb, but God is at the curb, too.”]

The church has a long history of kicking its wounded to the curb, but God has a long history of meeting people at the curb. The same grace that Perry preached about to tens of thousands of people every week is available for him, and we should never be tempted to act as if it isn’t. Grace is not reserved for the people we preach to. It flows freely to us all, and that leads us to the most important lesson that we can learn from Perry Noble:

The best is yet to come

When I think of Perry, this is the phrase that comes to mind. Every. Single. Time. It means that God is still writing our story even when we’ve tried to throw away the pen. It means that no matter how bad (or good) yesterday was, God’s working on a better tomorrow. It means that the hope of Christ will always outweigh the sin of man.

[Tweet “The hope of Christ will always outweigh the sin of man.”]

There will be hard days ahead for Perry, no one would deny that. There will be tough conversations about broken trust and how to rebuild it. There will be moments when humility is most needed from him and least desired by him. But the promise on the other side of those hard days is one that he has spoken often, and now needs to hear even more often from a church that believes in the gospel…

Perry, the best is yet to come.

___________________
*see Zechariah 4:10

Nowadays, the only thing growing faster than megachurches is the number of bloggers who hate them.  (There are 1,650 churches in America that average 2,000 people a week or more.  I’m not sure what the stats are on bloggers in the basement.)  My goal isn’t to knock on large churches, so if that’s what you were hoping for, you may be disappointed (but thanks for the visit!).  Hopefully, you’ll stick around long enough to hear me out.  If you do, you’ll find out that the one thing you won’t find in a megachurch is something that I also think you won’t find in a small church or even in the church of one that you attend in your boxers in front of a television while your favorite preacher preaches.

What is it?

Contentment.

Let’s face it.  We live in an externally driven world.  How our day goes at the office has everything to do with how many red or green lights we caught along the way.  The mood at Sunday dinner can have a lot to do with whether or not the receiver on your favorite team caught – or dropped – the game-winning pass.  Found a good deal that you weren’t expecting or got a raise that was more than you had hoped for?  Chances are pretty good that you’re eating out tonight!  Opened the power bill to find that a few too many lights were left on last month?  PB & J for the family, and no, we won’t be cutting off the crust and making any kind of cute Pinterest sandwich shapes.

In fact, make your own sandwich!

I’m not telling you anything new.  All of us understand how external things affect us. This post isn’t even going to attempt to argue against that fact. But very few of us have learned how to stop letting external things drive us, and until we learn that, nothing external will ever help us find contentment.

It is this external motivation that drives so much of the inability of so many of us to truly settle down.  We change wardrobes, jobs, hobbies and furniture because of it.  Tragically, we often end relationships because of it.  A good bit of church hopping is driven by it, even though we do our best to make that sound more spiritual.  But when we strip away most of the excuses and piety, a lot of what we do in churches has less to do with contentment and more to do with our need to be motivated by something on the outside of us in order to make up for what may be missing on the inside of us.

Our typical response to that?  More volume, more smoke, more motivational preaching.

The Biblical response to that?  Less of all the above.

Not because all of the above is bad, but because all of the above isn’t meant to fill that hole.  Only Jesus can do that.  Honestly, the hardest verse in the Bible for our culture is Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” (emphasis added)

Does this make the leaders of megachurches bad for being such good motivational speakers? Does it mean everyone who attends a large church isn’t content?  No.  Any good leader of a big church will constantly point people back to the simple truth that JESUS IS ENOUGH.  In fact, any good preacher of ANY SIZE CHURCH will be doing the same, because if we’re not, none of our churches have a shot at surviving once our time on the platform is done.

While under house arrest, Paul wrote something that can help us here:

I have learned the secret of being content whatever the circumstances. (Philippians 4:11)

Paul was affected by the things that were going on around him, but he wasn’t driven or defined by them.  In fact, if you read Acts you’ll find that he was a man who often did the very opposite of what you would expect if he was being driven by external circumstances.  This man once got run out of town by an angry mob only to get back up and return to the same mob in the same town!

What?  Who does that?

A man who is content in any circumstance.  A man who knows that his strength doesn’t come from the best worship money can buy, but from a relationship with the one who deserves the worship because He paid the highest price.  Philippians 4:13 (yes, the one that is on posters in Christian schools the world over) doesn’t say, “I can do everything because I go to a megachurch and we just got a new fog machine.”  It also doesn’t say, “I can do all things because I go to a tiny church and we all know each other.”

It says that our ability to do ANYTHING comes from our relationship with the One who did EVERYTHING!

Contentment allows us to be settled even though we won’t settle.

Contentment allows us to enjoy the show that many churches can offer without feeling like something’s wrong when they can’t.

Contentment means that churches and pastors – no matter the size or ability – will be able to spend more time releasing their people into ministry instead of convincing them to stay for “the next big thing.”

When we really get contentment, what goes on around us will never be able to change what has happened – and is happening – in us.  When we really learn the secret that Paul wrote about, we’ll find that the American church will begin to rise up stronger than ever before, and that nothing that happens to us will be able to hinder God’s move through us.

The one thing I have in common with Steven Furtick, Perry Noble, Matt Chandler, Jeff Kapusta, David Docusen and a host of other faithful preachers leading fruitful churches of different sizes is that none of us have the ability to be in every circumstance at every time with every member of our churches.  Only Jesus can do that, and when we point people to Him, we’re pointing them away from dependence on worship in A PLACE and toward contentment to worship in ANY PLACE.

A church filled with people like that – no matter its size – is a church that will change the world.

Luke 18:8b
However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?

The other day I realized that it requires absolutely no effort to sit on your butt. None. You can literally sit for hours and hours and not expend any energy at all other than what it takes for you to reach into a bag of chips, chew, and pick crumbs off your shirt. I’d rather not go into how I came to this realization, so let’s move right along.

God calls us to do things, and the doing of those things very often seems impossible.

As I pondered this during a recent run with Perry Noble (okay, fine, he was on my iPod), it dawned on me that we have become really good in the North American church at strategizing faith right out of the stuff God calls us to do.  God specializes in calling us to impossible tasks, things that are far beyond what we could actually even think of. The modern translation of Ephesians 3:20 – “now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” – is simply this: bring together the sharpest, brightest, most creative minds and devise the greatest strategy for making a plan happen, and you haven’t even touched the surface of what God wants to do.

The dark side of that promise is that, not only do we limit the role of faith by trying in our own strength to make the impossible possible, we also cut ourselves off from His unlimited supernatural resources that are specific to the impossible task. Look at the last part of that verse in Ephesians, and you’ll find out how God does the impossible: “according to his power that is at work within us.”

What we can achieve on our own is pretty good.  What we can achieve when a lot of us work together is better.  But when we come together and believe God for something so big that we can’t reduce it to a planning session and a checklist, then we’ve stepped into the realm of faith, and have opened the door for His power to work in us as He accomplishes what we can’t.

That’s a door that I want to leave open.