 During the church growth era of the past generation the church at large seems to have primarily focused on asking the question, “How can we DO church better?” In many respects we’ve been able to answer that with an (over)emphasis on improving the quality of our Sunday morning worship experience. We’ve gone from pews to theater seating, hymnals to projected words, random sermon topics to creatively packaged sermon series, lone pianos to band-driven music. All of these modern adjustments were important for Velocity Church to implement.
At the same time many churches seem to have lost their focus for their exterior mission. They’ve forgotten to continue to ask the equally important question, “How can we BE the church better?” In the past few years our increasingly post-modern generation is becoming less and less impressed with what we do inside our walls, and more and more influenced by what we do outside our walls. It’s the shift to meeting them on their turf, rather than just inviting them to ours.
Typically a new church staff spends the majority of its time and energy in three general areas: the Sunday morning “show”, the church’s community, and finally outreach (in that order). When time is short and something has to suffer, cuts are almost always made in reverse order from the bottom up.
One of the most significant dynamics of this video teaching model is not what it will enable Velocity to do on Sunday mornings, though that’s still important. This new model will provide Velocity the opportunity to stay focused on the second question, “How can we BE the church better in our community?".
This new model, where the message is already done on Monday morning, will allow Velocity’s staff not only to DO their Sunday morning “show” better, but also with less time and energy. The staff will then be freed up to focus more on those “BE” tasks that sometimes get neglected. Our goal is not to be known in the community as the church that uses video teaching, but as the church characterized by its externally-focused energy.
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