Philosophy of Ministry

Church is boring, or so we are told by some who attempt to diagnose ills within modern Christianity. The reason more people do not attend church is that they find it boring. The reason so many of our young people drop out is because they consider church boring.

Every organization is prone to forget why it’s there. People come and go, the founders pass away, the culture changes. Sometimes an organization can wake up and find it’s lost its way. Other times, the organization never wakes up.

The YMCA started in London in the 1840s as a Christian outreach to young men in the inner cities during the industrial revolution. Now, the YMCA is a gym with a robust after school youth program.

“Excellence” might not be the business leadership buzzword it once was, but it’s far from dead. A quick search at Amazon shows plenty of recent business titles with “excellence” in them, and even if the term isn’t the biz word of the day anymore, the concept has never waned.

This is because the business world understands that making what they do, and how they do it, better is essential for their survival in a competitive marketplace. Maybe that marketplace mentality is partly why ministry leaders sometimes view excellence as a “a business thing.”

Introduced by Pastor Ed Vasicek. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here is the last part of our “Purpose and Principles” document, developed and unanimously approved by our 1996 Elders’ Board. It grapples with what we consider to be reasonable and the proper balance in matters of how we conduct services, when we separate, and political activity. It continues to explain what makes our church distinct from both mainline churches and other evangelical churches. This line in particular grips me: “Our concern is that we are headed toward involving our people in edification and ministry, not matching anyone’s model.”

Views on Ministries

Sometimes people think I or our elders don’t know the rules for the game of “doing church.” In many ways, however, the difference between HPC (Highland Park Church) and more typical approaches is intentionally engineered based upon convictions and understandings derived from a fresh study of the Word back in 1995-6.

Besides studying relevant Scripture portions, the elders (yours truly included) read Gene Getz’s book, “Sharpening the Focus of the Church” as prerequisite preparation. We had a second meeting every month for the better part of a year to construct this document. When you consider all the individual work we did at home, this was quite an undertaking.

Our approach was to be different from the typical conservative evangelical/ fundamental church by trying to get as many people involved as possible in our services and church life. One key statement is, “We want people to be attracted to HPC primarily because they see God at work in the lives of our people.”