Jensen Shorts

With what Jensen would call “lying” – some paraphrasing and simplifying and so on:

Train people first and ministry opportunities will come second: when the first child turns up at church, there’ll already be a Sunday School teacher and the family will come back.

Put the mission before the people if you want to grow. But never forget that the mission is people.

Churches made up of closed cell housegroups will never grow as people can’t break in to a group who got married together and parented their teens together and….

People in their 50s can’t keep it up any more. They opt for comfort not pain and growth.

Don’t put money aside for a rainy day if its pouring already.

Growing churches will always spend more than they have and make up the difference next year, when they’ll spend more than they have and ….

Everything has declined in the 20^th C of the C of E, except the number of Bishops.

It is easier to give birth to something new than raise the dead.

Everyone has permission to start something, no one is allowed to stop anything.

Sometimes a church needs an under-taker ministry to give it a decent send off. A church may even need an assassin, but don’t kill the people.

Every 6 to 10 years ministers should take a sabbatical, refresh and work out what to do next, rather than looking for a new job.

Grant dependent churches will always behave like dependent children and never grow up.

The church planter should be a scavenger, hobbyist, entrepreneur.

If you don’t have the money, do it anyway. Always get a business man, not a civil service auditor / accountant to be your treasurer.

Growing churches behave like what sociologists would call fanatical / purist sects / cults. “Churches” go mainstream and sell out.

The Anglican chant: “And Make Thy Chosen People Joyful” is a prayer that hasn’t been answered in 400 years.

2 Timothy 2 tells us to “think”! A novel idea for some Christians.

Principled pragmatics.

Longer pastorates lead to growing churches.

Strategy is born of hindsight and opportunity.

Now I’m getting older I’m much wiser as I have much more hind…sight.

Keep at the core business of prayerfully preaching the biblical gospel with evangelistic edge.

Lower the bar and you’ll get more people in the short term and fewer in the long run. Raise the bar and you’ll get fewer people in the short term and more in the long run.

People must be trained to be self-starters: observe one – do one – teach one.

Once a church building is 80% full it wont get any bigger.

If you want to split a church, do some teaching on how to bring up your children and what music we ought to have.

What we need in church is a sense of reality [authenticity].

There must be diversity on staff teams but total personal and theological commitment to one another.

If you don’t change anything in your first year in a church, you never will. Change something that everyone wanted changing anyway and gain credibility as a change agent.

Take people from being passengers to being partners in the work.

In the Bible, gathering = salvation; scattering = judgement.

Preaching sets the tone for the whole church, but the preacher also has to be a leader, a small business man.