Get Some Sleep

Are you getting enough sleep? I am asking myself this question more and more each morning. I have a tendency to pour myself into my work. I love the feeling of accomplishment and the rewards of a job done well, but sometimes the lifestyle required to do this can wear you out. I have been spending time over the last several years learning how to balance my life. Hold back work. Spend more time at home. Spend more quality time at home. Now that we have Margot in our world it is even more important. She is starting to wake us up in the morning and is disturbing my normal sleep cycle. I am adjusting, but today I am tired. So I have to ask myself, “Are you getting enough sleep?” I know that I need this sleep if I am going to perform well, stay healthy, and be present in conversations. I try and do well at going to bed early and not getting out of bed until I have too. For a person who really only wants to get about 4-6 hours of sleep every night this becomes a battle. But it is one that is very rewarding.

How about you? What rewards do you get from sleeping? Do you take the Sunday afternoons to nap? What is attacking your sleep cycle?

Harrah Church Vision Part 2

If someone asks me what we do at Harrah Church I tell them that we Develop People in Christ. We do this by helping them be great at the Great Commandment and showing them how to love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and body. We want to help people develop a passion for Christ and a passion for the things that Christ is passionate about. We teach people how to care for their soul so that they can begin to give more of it to God and distance themselves from the things that rob their soul. We provide classes and experiences to expand people’s knowledge of God. We provide service opportunities so that people can be God’s hands and feet.

Everything we do at Harrah Church is designed to help people grow in these four areas. The time and effort we put into our worship services is an expression of the passion that we have God and I love seeing people passionately worship God every week. Part of the drive for me to work at Harrah Church is to see other people develop the passion for worshipping God that I have. My last two sermons have been about caring for your soul and learning how the enemy divides and attacks your soul so that you lose your joy. When we take the steps necessary to develop our soul we are able to put greater focus on the work of God in our life and trade our perspective for God’s will in our life. I believe that by gaining a proper view of who God is we are able to trade our fears and misconceptions for faith and hope that God is working in, around, and through us. We provide service opportunities for people to show the love of God to others and so that they can show what the love of God means to them. Our monthly First Sunday Serve is one expression of that. I love watching people contribute to the work of God and the excitement and joy that He gives them through the process.

Take some time this weekend to think about your personal growth and development in Christ. What are your next couples of steps in each of the four areas (heart, soul, mind, body)?

Elbows and Tummies

I am spending the bulk of this week in Orlando for the Exponential Church Planting conference with my pastor Jimmy Holbrook and our worship leader Justin Mann. We are having a lot of fun and I can say that we have broken many laws, but have not been arrested…YET.

I have learned many things on this trip

• We have too many chiefs in this car
• Jimmy eats 5-7 meals a day
• There is a reason that Jimmy has so many traffic tickets, really there are MANY reasons
• 5 Guys Burgers in incredible
• Orlando is an amazing place

I have learned a lesson about why you don’t eat with your elbows on the table. Jimmy eats so often that I have developed a blister on my right elbow from lifting my drink and food to my mouth. Ouch.

Favorite New CDs

I really enjoy listening to music while I work. If I am traveling around the church I turn my iPhone on for a little traveling music. I wanted to listen a few of the CDs that I have really enjoyed over the past few months and ask you what you are listening to.

• Matt Maher, Alive Again, amazing worship album
• Visqueen, Message to Garcia, This one is infectious
• Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, sensitive-man-music to chill out to
• John Mayer, Battle Studies, Great album and the bossa nova track is a favorite
• Lady Antebellum, Need You Now – Single, I really look forward to the album

So what are you listening to? What do you recommend?

New Websites

I have been working really hard these past few weeks to develop some websites for http://HarrahChurch.com. We will use these sites to resource  and educate our people as well as providing me an outlet for casting our vision. I have used WordPress.org as the CMS for these sites and really like what we have ended up with. The themes for the sites came from Elegant Themes who is a great place to find good themes at a very affordable price of $20 per year for access to all of their themes.

These sites are still a work in progress but we are going live with them as I continue to introduce myself to our volunteer and leadership teams and as a hub for learning about each ministry’s strategies and goals. Here is the list.

http://harrahkids.org

http://harrahgroups.org

http://renovatestudents.org

http://harrahchurchproduction.org

http://harrahchristian.org

I like that I was able to tie the sites together and still provide each with their own personalized theme. Though I have spent many hours on the sites and their configuration the theme subscriptions only cost me $20 and I am using the lowest 1and1 hosting package at ~$4.99 per month. I think we have a pretty great set of sites.

How is your church using multiple sites to leverage your reach? Is it necessarily a bad thing to spread your ministries out over several sites? I don’t think so. I don’t think people will have any problems searching us out and think that each site will lend itself well to a saturation strategy designed to help us dominate search.