A Reasonable Expectation to Privacy

A reasonable expectation to privacy. With the online world intersecting more of our lives on a nearly daily basis, do we have really have a reasonable expectation to privacy?

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. That’s one type of privacy that, at least here in America, we can expect. But beyond denying someone access to things in our homes, cars on wallets, are our lives really private?

I submit that we’ve willingly sacrificed privacy for immediacy.

We share our lives out loud. From GoWalla or FourSquare telling me exactly where you are, to Twitter and Facebook telling me what you’re up to, and blogs telling me what you think, to out of office email messages, we’re providing an unprecedented level of access into our daily lives.

It used to be we had work lives and personal lives. No longer. The lines between our work life and personal life have been blurred due to our propensity to share. Though not anonymous, there is a certain sense that because we’re not looking directly at someone when we share something, our status update is somehow still limited to a semi-private audience.

Though it is possible to use multiple accounts and limit networks to only a few followers – I do this myself with a ‘family-only’ Twitter account – the reality is that anyone can choose to re-post anything I say in a very public fashion. You see, privacy today is limited only to the extent that I control what I share and when I share it.

We seem to have forgotten that what we share, say, post and do online is stored, forever accessible, cross-indexed, referenced and cached. I wonder how many young people looking to advance in a career 10 or 20 years from now will have what they’ve shared today come back to haunt them? And here’s another thought: our kids and our kids’ kids will have more than a photo album and grandma’s memories to find out about good ‘ol granddad.

Do we have a reasonable expectation to privacy? I think we have a very limited expectation to privacy when we share so freely. What say you?

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Who do you love more: Jesus or the local church?

For those of us who spend our time serving the local church, whether on staff, volunteering or in a business that supports churches, there is a tendency to equate serving the Bride of Christ with loving Jesus. To be sure, we are called to serve and we do so out of our love for Jesus. However, we can slip into a mindset of assuming that our relationship with the Bride of Christ is the same as our relationship with the Groom of the Bride.

In trying to serve local churches and help them become more effective, I find myself trying to serve the church above serving Jesus. Said another way, I can love Jesus and out of a grateful and obedient heart, serve his Church; but I shouldn’t serve His church first and love Him second. Our time and attention directed at serving and helping churches grow is noble. It is most likely out of a love for what Jesus did for us that we found ourselves focusing on local churches. But we must be aware of the imbalance that can happen when we let our priorities get out of whack.

This slippery slope can have some serious consequences. I read something that provided me with a different perspective:

If we’re not vigilant, the cares of the world creep in with so much pressure that we remove Jesus from his rightful place as the Lord of our life. It takes tremendous faith, dedication and obedience to make sure we keep our relationship with Jesus as the highest priority in our lives, right where it belongs.

All of this becomes amplified to an unbelievable extreme when we are among those called to serve God in full-time ministry. Suddenly, we feel responsible for the welfare and salvation of all those trusted to our care. The responsibilities are enormous. And in response, we plunge into our work with selfless abandon, offering everything we have to give.

But then, if we are not careful, a shift begins to happen. We begin to measure the effectiveness of our ministry in the only way we know how. Since we cannot be certain how many lives we have helped to change or souls we have helped lead to Christ, we start to examine book reviews, concert ticket sales, web site visitors or church attendance.

Suddenly, and often without warning, those measurements become the end rather than the means. Instead of seeing ourselves as being in the service of the Lord, we risk seeing ourselves as authors, public speakers, counselors or musicians who simply happen to have chosen a Christian message rather than a secular one. We are no longer laboring for the Gospel, we are laboring for our own accomplishments and accolades. God was part of the picture when we began our ministry, but now we’ve got work to do, and that work doesn’t always appear to have anything to do with God at all. – Michael Lane, Executive Director, Delve Christian Ministries

That’s good stuff! I think Michael rightly describes the slip that can occur when we begin to make the transition of making Jesus the focus to making the local church our focus.

Who do you love more: Jesus or the local church?

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Four C’s of Growth: Part 2

In Part 1, I gave examples of the Four C’s:

• Change
• Cost
• Control
• Commitment

Since we understand that change is hard, how we go about making changes requires another toolset I touched on briefly. In evaluating what we must change, it’s helpful to ask the question:

What ministries, groups or events does your church need to rethink, reorganize or remove?

It’s one thing to talk about change; it’s quite another to actually make the hard choices and provide leadership during these transitions.

RETHINK

Often, a ministry, group or event will simply become less effective over time. As these things go, they have a tendency to become traditions, making it hard to simply remove them without creating some negative reactions. If one of these traditions still holds value and fits within the vision of the church leadership, it’s possible to rethink how to make it relevant and effective today.

One of my favorite examples is Vacation Bible School. This tradition of reaching elementary-aged children in local communities actually has it’s roots in the late 19th century, but was first made into a program back in 1922 by Dr. Robert Boville (see credits).

VBS is nearly 100 years old! That’s a time-honored tradition with great stories of success across many generations. But I wonder – and this is simply an exercise in “what if?”, so please don’t flame me – if the phrase “Vacation Bible School” carries the same positive connotation to our society today as it used to? Certainly the methods employed to create VBS have changed, adopted and updated throughout the years. Lifeway.com has an incredible set of VBS resources, from entirely themed curriculum’s to ready-made craft projects to training videos to free articles and how-to demonstrations. Yet, even with all of the four-color printed materials and web-ready artwork, it’s still called Vacation Bible School.

Perhaps in your community, VBS is synonymous with excellence, fun and relevance for kids. But I wonder how many communities might have negative perceptions of VBS? Perhaps some parents had not-so-great experiences when they were kids at VBS. Maybe the idea of more school in the summer isn’t that appealing anymore. Whatever the reason, the rethink part of the strategy for VBS should be on the table.

REORGANIZE

As your church grows, new people will come into your community that offer fresh perspectives, new experiences and passions that may very well trump what’s currently being done. By adding these new faces into your culture, reorganizing teams, lay leaders and adding new opportunities will bring about healthy, vibrant change. Of course, your leadership needs to be helpful in grafting these new people into the fold, as new people are typically not immediately accepted into a new leadership role.

By honoring those who have been leading for a while, these new leaders and helpers will both learn from the original teams and earn their respect over time.

“Reorganization requires more than a nod to the past; it means a change over time that blends the old with the new.”

REMOVE (or REPLACE)

“What was once a good idea is now verging on obsolescence.”

Honest evaluation will probably point the spotlight on ministries, groups and/or events that simply don’t fit into the context, vision or culture of your church today.  There will always be a churn of change that simply replaces what was with what is; and the current what is will one day be replaced with what will be.

Leading people through a replacing old with new is a matter of relational caring, firm but gentle leadership and a constant re-casting of the vision for why we do what we do. As leaders, it’s important for us to help our people understand that they should be tied to the vision, not the event.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this greater than this famous set of verses from Ecclesiastes:

Ecclesiastes 3

A Time for Everything

¹ There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

What do you need to re-think, reorganize or remove? How will you do it?

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