Welcome to my new blog – gcmatrix (gee-cee-ma-trix). Over the years I have dabbled with blogging unsuccessfully and I have wondered why. Of course, I’ve never been first out of the blocks with the latest digital trends, among the last to acquire a desktop, a laptop, an email address, a smart phone or a website, and I’m just now beginning to tiptoe into the media networking phenomenon. But my ministry of training, consulting, preaching, teaching and speaking in the field of church vitality utilizes communication as a primary vehicle, and yet blogging has remained a challenge.
The struggle, I have concluded, is two-fold. First, I find that much of what I have read in blogs might better be referred to as “clogs,” i.e. “clogging” rather than blogging. At the risk of sounding cynical, I’m speaking of blogs that ramble on as if someone is simply providing a transcript of whatever is running through his or her brain. Apparently, all of us need to know that brain’s every thought. I don’t want to be a “clogger” and add to the self-absorbed clutter that litters the blogosphere. Second, as I have read through my limited backlog of previous attempts at blogging, I see mostly my training material slightly repackaged in written narrative. I don’t want simply to rehash training material that is readily available in more effective formats just so I can say that I blog.
So why blog now? The timing is right for one simple reason. In the past year my ministry has expanded beyond the nuts and bolts of pragmatic church vitalization into a ministry with a biblical, theological message that I am compelled to deliver by any means possible. This message has been there all along, hovering just beneath the surface of my presentations as a covert, implied assumption, but now the message has moved toward center stage. That message is this: The vision and strategy for God’s building His church is rooted in the Great Commission. Therefore, the Great Commission is foundational for both the vision and the strategy for bringing vitality to a local church.
Though this might seem obvious, trust me, it’s not. For the past twelve years I have been working full-time with pastors and church leaders as they endeavor to lead their churches toward health, growth and multiplication, often from the posture of plateau or decline. This decade-plus body of ministry includes hundreds of pastors and leaders and many dozens of churches from multiple denominations and theological camps. One common denominator among this diverse ecclesiastical population is that the Great Commission receives much more lip service than commitment. Rare is the church whose leadership is totally invested in the primacy of the Great Commission in terms of how that church deploys its staff, leaders and workers, and how it allocates its time, energy, creativity, finances and other resources.
So I have a story to tell, a message to deliver, to complement my ministry of training and consulting. Central to that story, that message, is leveraging the visionary and strategic potency of the Great Commission with a ministry development and implementation grid that I have titled The Great Commission Matrix. The importance of this grid drives me to name this blog “gcmatrix,” and holds me accountable to staying on task as I communicate.
Here is my promise to those of you who are interested in making this journey with me. On Tuesday of every week, I will post a weekly blog. I am targeting Tuesday morning, ET, for my posts, but due to a very busy ministry schedule with lots of travel, I can’t guarantee that I’ll hit that ET morning target every week. Between posts, I’ll do my best to respond to your responses and your questions. May God be glorified and may His church explode with vitality. Let the conversation begin.
