Discount Mail

I'm working with an established church that does not yet use the post office's discounted mail rates. I knew they existed, but didn't fully understand how to get them. It's really not that difficult, and is significant.

The US Postal service describes it this way:

"Your discount depends on the mailing service you choose and the work you do. For example, if you mail 1,000 letter-sized flyers to everyone in your ZIP Code advertising your business's sale, it would cost $0.41 per piece for retail First-Class postage, or $410.

"If you mail 1,000 flyers using Standard Mail to everyone in your ZIP Code by adding a barcode, sorting them by carrier route, and depositing them at the Post Office designated by your Business Mail Entry Unit, you might pay as little as $0.135 per piece, or $135."

One source says that churches can qualify under special non-profit rates if they mail more than 200 pieces more than 4 times a year. For most of the USA, if you are getting the word out to your neighborhood, there will be more than 200 pieces. Except in the most remote rural areas, everyone could participate.

To qualify, you must be a recognized 501(c)3 nonprofit, not just a church. And you will need to make application by filling out Form 3624, Application to Mail at Nonprofit Standard Mail Rates. Turn it in at the Post Office where you intend to mail from. (For more information about nonprofit rate eligibility and how to apply, see Publication 417, Nonprofit Standard Mail Eligibility.)

p.s. -You will probably want to contract with a mailing service who can presort based on zip code regions and can affix bar codes to the item. Some of the services I have looked at give good rates for printing, sorting and mailing all at once.

The Irrationality of Christian Action

One of my Google Alerts linked me to a posting from Joe McKeever about the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. First Baptist there has bought abandoned property and cleaned the remnants of Katrina off, so that Habitat for Humanity can come build new housing.

The comment that caught my attention was his "atheist rant."

He wrote, "It amuses me to hear the occasional atheist/humanist rant on television about what dangerous people Christians are. I think to myself, 'It's those dangerous Christian people who have put their lives on hold and came to help rebuild New Orleans. If we were waiting on the atheists to give of themselves, we would be out of luck.' "

Many of the nation's hospitals were founded as ministries of churches. The first (and still best) colleges were to train pastors. Without Christian intervention, prison would still be a fearsome place. Around 90% of the meals the Red Cross gives out in any given major disaster is cooked in a Baptist Disaster Relief kitchen, and most of them are served by Salvation Army personnel.

Which brings us back to Katrina. The people of First Baptist have managed to create a fund that can keep building houses "forever". Why do they do it? Says one parishoner, "It has been a privilege."

What this means for your church is that you need to find a cause or need that you can meet, either as a congregation or in partnership with others. Do it in the name of Christ, that you will have opportunity to share Christ with an unbelieving world.

While looking for ways to blast a message to the community about a new church revitalization effort, I stumbled across a site that caught me up short.

The site talks about the end of outreach, but introduces the concept of “withreach.” Withreach is a response to a perception that outreach/evangelism is all “information push” – meaning we give the message we think the other person wants or needs to hear, but don’t stop and listen to their concerns first. Without listening, we sometimes will run past the one key objection that might be easily overcome.

We think of the church as a body. The Apostle Paul taught us that there are many parts to the fully functioning congregation, but the site says that the church is seen by unchurched people as a mouth instead of an ear, a hand or a heart.

“Listening is the only way we can find out what (the Holy Spirit) is doing there, what He wants us to cooperate with. Through incarnational listening the agent of transformation is also transformed. Creative opportunities for the Kingdom abound in community conversations and one-on-one listening times.”

It is the job of the pastor, as chief teacher and encourager of the congregation, is to train the congregation to talk with the unchurched, not at them. Not until you begin this “incarnational listening” will you be heard when they are ready to receive the Gospel message. We have to be engaged in what matters to them before they will hear what matters to us.

If you want to learn more about Withreach, visit their website.

The Position of the Church in Social Change

Dr Rick Warren (Saddleback Church, Purpose Driven Life, etc.) has suggested that the community church is uniquely positioned to create massive global social change. And he encourages Christians to use that position to do just that, in part by linking and networking the social structure they already have resident in even the smalled congregation.

By example, he remarks that in many third world countries, the church is the only "public" building in the village. It is the only place where people can gather to discuss issues common among themselves.

But the church is also big - very big. There are an estimated 2.3 Billion Christians in the world, representing thousands of subgroups, clans and tribes. And they have a spiritual and social connection that is not limited by national and political barriers.

The challenge, says Warren, is to create those networks. He says that even in his own megachurch congregation, "most of the congregation is unseen beneath the waterline." Those who attend services carry the message and motivations back to their friends and neighbors, to Bible study and ministry groups at their home and jobsite.

It is this structure of loosely-organized and self-forming small groups that presents the opportunity for social change. Warren gives several examples of how churches respond to needs with social responses: 90% of Red Cross volunteers are from churches, and cook almost all the meals they give away. The church volunteers were the first ones there at Katrina, and have yet to leave. In Africa, there are more church-run clinics giving away AIDS medicine than official Ministry of Health clinics.

His message, in a nutshell, is that - despite fears of ulterior motives - the church is uniquely positioned to create massive positive social change.

How will you lead your church to join him?

8 Lessons from Megachurches

In the Dec 21, 2007 edition of Forbes Magazine, Dale Buss reported that "CEOs may have a lot to learn from their counterparts running evangelical megachurches." The pastors and business leaders interviewed for the article say that business has a lot to learn from how churches are run. In fact, a lot of today's business manuals are based on the idea of "servant leadership," a concept straight out of the Bible!

Running a church of several thousand is in fact a lot harder than running a substantial for-profit business. For example, in a business, the motivation to show up each day and work hard is money and career aspirations, and it is the company leadership that provides that external motivation. In a church, the motivation is all internal - the people come for their own intrinsic reasons. More than that, they often give time and money to the organization because of only a 30 minute speech by the "Chief Encouragement Officer."

Using data from Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, Buss gives us 8 key lessons from the pastors of the healthiest megachurches in America, lessons such as casting a vision and showing gratitude, doing regular reviews and saying no so you can do the important things well, and focusing their passions in ways that help the organization, instead of boosting their own ego or status in the community.

I encourage you to read the article for yourself. There's a lot of meat in that one quick page. This is the stuff revolutions are made from (though some of the people who have commented so far don’t quite “get it”).

Do you want to be well?

“Do you want to be well?”

On the surface, it’s an odd question for Jesus to be asking there in John 5 (v1-9). Here was a man who had been sitting at the well for 35 years. He was waiting for healing from the crippling disease. And he said so: “I’ve been here all this time, but every time the angel troubles the water, someone jumps ahead of me and steals the blessing, and so I go back to waiting.”

But that wasn’t the question Jesus asked. Rather, He asked if the man truly wanted to be well, or was the man content to rest on excuses. In your church, Jesus isn’t asking why you aren’t healthy. He wants to know if your ‘want to’ still wants what your words say you want. Jesus was offering a new thing. Not to help the man cut in line, to be first according to the old rules, but to be well in a new way.

Like the prophet Ezekiel. In chapter 37 of that prophet’s book to us, he tells of when the Lord took him to a desert filled with bones of people long dead, bones dried in the sun and wind. God asks the rhetorical question, “Can these bones live?” Ezekiel wisely answers, “Only you know, Lord.” So God told him to prophesy over the bones. To prophesy is to speak the words of God, to create an effect. The prophesy held the power of God in it, and the bones gathered themselves together, grew flesh and skin and became whole. But still there was no life in them. Again Ezekiel prophesied, and the Spirit breathed life into a mighty army.

Dean N Kelley ("Why Conservative Churches are Growing", NY: Harper & Row, 1972, page x) said that “having once succumbed to debility, a church is unlikely to recover, not because measures leading to recovery could not be prescribed and instituted … but because the persons who now occupy positions of leadership and 'followership' in the church will not find them congenial and will not want to institute them. They prefer a church which is not too strenuous or demanding – a church, in fact, which is dying.”

Alcoholics Anonymous says the first step is to admit there is a problem. Sociologist Gary Farley says that churches must reinvent themselves every generation, or they probably won't survive past the deaths of the founders. Many such once-thriving churches litter our denominational rolls with only a handful of members each, unwilling to move forward, resting in the past.

In the 6th chapter of Mark, Scripture says “Jesus could do no miracle there except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them.” Nothing? The all powerful son of the Lord Most High, who had just raised a 12-year-old girl from the dead (Mark 5:41-42), was limited? Verse 6 gives the answer: “He wondered at their unbelief.”
And again Jesus asks if you - each of us - are you going to just sit and complain and be miserable? Or are you willing to believe you can be and do different than you've done before? You must "admit, believe, confess" - be willing to be healed, like the withered arm in Luke 6:6-11, to stretch forth and be transformed by the renewing of our minds and hearts and spirits, for the glory of God.

Do you want to be well?

(copyright Mike Mitchell, 2005)