Monday, November 18, 2019

Groeschel and Stanley - Who Wins the Hearts of the WELS Appledumb Circuit?- Luther or the Enthusiasts?
From 2009





Ski went to the November Stanley/Groeschel event:

Groeschel: My church needs my leadership more than my preaching. Interesting thought.
11:46 AM Nov 20th, 2008 from twitterrific
Groeschel: Pastor's who don't take time off are dull of pride and are poor leaders. - wow.
11:42 AM Nov 20th, 2008 from twitterrific
At the one day Catalyst conference. Good stuff
5:41 AM Nov 20th, 2008 from twitterrific
@ the movie in Granger baby! What a town!
6:52 PM Nov 19th, 2008 from twitterrific in reply to the
Going to Granger to see Andy Stanly (sic) & Craig Groeshel speak on leadership.
8:31 AM Nov 19th, 2008 from twitterrific


Ski's plans have been made known to his WELS circuit:

At Appleton Circut Pastors Conference. Going to give an update on The CORE.
7:32 AM Dec 1st, 2008 from twitterrific.



Andy Stanley held the Catalyst One Day Event with Evangelical Covenant Minister Craig Groeschel, November, 2008. Here is what he presented:


WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

At Catalyst One Day, you will:

■Discover the key to creating and sustaining momentum in your organization
■Identify and break through the barriers to momentum
■Overcome personal leadership lids
■Leverage the three triggers which ignite organizational momentum
■Create a culture of continual improvement
■Embrace a new approach to leading organizational change

Vintage Groeschel, decanted at a Willow Creek Training Event


  1. How many of you have been to a church and it was dead? They didn’t have… IT
  2. What about going to a place where you felt God and knew they had… IT?
  3. Sarted in a two car garage students met in closet… Every week students came out of the closet
  4. They didn’t have the stuff that most people think we need to have a church.
  5. Every week people came to know God and invited their friends because they didn’t have the stuff they thought they needed… they had what they needed… The Spir-IT!
  6. It’s something more than just the Spirit - to say the people who don’t have it don’t have the spirit would be insulting
  7. New York Campus has seen %145 increase in a year - the campus he attends is the only one that has decreased = %3
  8. What is it? The answer is = don’t know
    God makes IT happen. We can’t create it, we can’t reproduce it, we can’t manufacture it, it can’t be taught, but it can be caught, it’s not a model, it’s not emergent, purpose driven, seeker sensitive, it is usually brought by more than one person, but usually one person can kill it
  9. You could say, “IT Happens!” but often it doesn’t
  10. Good news = if you don’t have it, doesn’t mean you can’t find it
  11. Bad news = if you have it, you may not keep it
    Acts 2:42-47 -
  12. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
  13. Four qualities that are most often there when IT is present:
  14. Laser Focus - most people today said more ministries/events is better. I believe better ministries is better. Jim Collins asked, “what can you be the very best at?” In order to reach people that no one is reaching, you’ll have to do things that no one else is doing. But to do things that no one else is doing, you can’t do what everyone else is doing! Planned abandonment!
  15. Started examining ministries. Concert ministries was just entertaining other churches people. Don’t do
  16. Cut all but 5 things. Worship, Small groups, kids ministry, student ministry, missions.
  17. What are you doing that you need to STOP doing.
  18. They see opportunities where others see obstacles
  19. You have everything that you need to do all that God wants you to do.
  20. You don’t have what you want or what they think they need, you have what you and they need
  21. What if I said you need to raise 100,000 dollars by Friday? Couldn’t do it. What if I said you have to raise 100,000 for a shot for child otherwise they will die? YEP! Overcome the obstacle!
  22. He often provides where God doesn’t provide. They had to see something they couldn’t see.
  23. What is God trying to show you through your greatest limitation?
  24. They are willing to fail
  25. Failure is not an option… I agree, “It’s a necessity!”
  26. Peter couldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t failed! He failed walking on water, he failed by denying Him, but he succeeded feeding his sheep! 3,000 were saved!
  27. They failed starting two campuses in Phoenix and ended up having to merge them
  28. There are two steps to failure.
  29. The Mule - shook of the dirt, the dirt started piling up at his feet and he started stepping up. SHAKE IT OFF! STEP IT UP!
  30. What has God called you to do that you are afraid to attempt? When are you going to do it?
  31. They are led by people who have IT!
  32. You need to have IT for your ministry to have IT!
  33. Before long ministry started to kill IT! It became less about building his kingdom and more about building my church. I started preaching messages that would bring people in instead of pleasing to God
  34. I tried to be Rick Warren - but I’m accidental. I tried to be Joel Osteen - but I’m not that happy!
  35. When you have IT in you, it starts coming out, and other people with IT will come to you
  36. We start to try to acquire the things we don’t need to have IT
  37. God showed me I had became a full time pastor and a part time follower of Christ! DANG!
  38. I stopped reading other books, and started just reading the Bible. I went to another country and held a baby that would probably die after I left. I started fasting again!
  39. Let God break your heart again!
  40. If you read this say a prayer for Mike. A guy Craig has been ministering to for 4 years and still hasn’t accepted Christ!
  41. If you don’t have it what are you going to do to get it?
  42. WOW! Go here and buy his message if you are a church leader. It should be up here later.

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So here is Swerve, where Groeschel is writing about borrowing an Andy Stanley sermon. If Swerve sounds familiar - Ski is a follower.

How To Use Someone Else's Material

Recently I used Andy Stanley’s series, “How to Be Rich.” (If you haven’t listened to his messages, I highly recommend that you do.)

Here’s what we did:

•We asked for permission. (For the record, if you use something from LifeChurch.tv Open, you don’t have to ask for permission. Since I didn’t know North Point’s stance, asking permission seemed like the right thing to do.)
•We gave Andy credit publicly and sent people to his church’s website.
•We sent Andy a note with a small gift to say “thank you.” (This obviously isn’t necessary, but I wanted to express my gratitude for his hard work, excellent material, and generosity.)
Parts of the series included almost exclusively his material. Other parts were very much my own. To me, he deserved full credit and honor for God’s work through him.

Several people thanked me for exposing them to North Point’s ministry. I’m thrilled to turn them on to a great spiritual resource.

When have you observed this done well?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 5:46 am and is filed under communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Since Groeschel has to borrow sermons, we have to wonder if those, like Ski, who borrow Groeschel, are ever getting original material to foist on their audiences.

One person actually objected to this practice. I have some of his material copied below. Please read the entire essay.

When it comes to matters of integrity and decency, the normal course of events it seems, is that the secular culture and the world often condones that which the church condemns. For example, when the world calls adultery an “affair,” justifies divorce without cause, or calls addictions “diseases,” it is then the church that holds its own people accountable to a higher standard of morality and has less toleration for a lack of integrity and morality.

Although we typically find the world celebrating sin and the church confronting it, there is one area where this seems to be reversed: Plagiarism.

When it comes to intellectual property, copying another person’s work, and presenting it as one’s own, the secular world has absolutely no room for toleration. However, the church too often fails to condemn the same behavior, and sometimes even boasts of its use!

Why?

Consider this, can you imagine a member of congress standing up and saying “Last night I was doing some research and 74% of …” when he didn’t, but was reciting another person’s experience? Or what about a CEO standing in front of his board of directors saying “I remember it like it was yesterday,” while every word he speaks is another person’s history? Or what about your child’s 6th grade English teacher grading a book report presentation that was actually memorized from another student’s report?

We all know what happens when people in the secular world behave this way. Last year, an aide to the president resigned. Ironically, a university was recently under fire for copying another school’s policy on, plagiarism. Even Oprah Winfrey has been embarrassed, twice, for endorsing books written by authors who have manufactured history. If this behavior was appropriate, why was Oprah embarrassed by it, and why was it a scandal in the secular press? How can it then be endorsed by those who claim the name of Christ, and be tolerated by churches who practice this deceptive behavior while claiming and even openly bragging about their churches being “authentic” and “genuine?”

So what exactly am I talking about, the reader might ask? Am I talking about a pastor who hears another pastor’s sermon and wants to share it with his congregation, uses the same outline and verse, and disclaims ahead of time what he is doing? While I think doing so should be rare, it isn’t what I am criticizing here. This post is also not concerned specifically with a pastor who reads another’s sermon aloud, and tells his congregation what he is doing. While that should be rare too, it isn’t what I am addressing in this post.

What I am focusing on is the use of the same sermon, the same text, the same examples, and the same experiences, even first person, as if they are one’s own.

Craig Groeschel, who gives his sermons away on the Internet for free says, “It isn’t plagiarizing if you’re given permission,” and also agrees that “just because it isn’t plagiarizing doesn’t always mean you shouldn’t give credit to others.”

While I agree with Pastor Groeschel’s definition, I think it is incomplete, because plagiarism, I believe, also includes the element of deception when a sermon is presented, because the expectation of the congregation, without being notified, is that the material is the speaker’s own work. Especially when examples, experiences, and testimonies are spoken in first person. Just because a pastor has permission to use someone else’s material, this doesn’t mean he is without responsibility to not compromise his integrity to his hearers by presenting the material to them as if it were the work of his own study and preparation.


Craig Groeschel is a member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, closely related in doctrine to Trinity, Deerfield, where Larry Olson studied, and where WELS spends so much money in training that The Sausage Factory is listed twice in their catalogue as a sponsor.

Affiliation
LifeChurch.tv is part of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) - a rapidly growing multi-ethnic denomination in the United States and Canada with ministries on five continents of the world. Founded in 1885 by Swedish immigrants, the ECC values the Bible as the Word of God, the gift of God's grace and ever-deepening spiritual life that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, the importance of extending God's love and compassion to a hurting world, and the strength that comes from unity within diversity.

What makes the Covenant unique from other denominations is the fact that while it strongly affirms the clear teaching of the Word of God, it allows believers the personal freedom to have varying interpretations on theological issues that are not clearly presented in Scripture.


Note the statement of beliefs on the same page, which will occupy a separate post above.