I ran across a story last week about the new portable pocket projectors that Mitsubishi has come out with. These things will literally fit into the palm of your hand. Combine that with the video capabilities of the iPhone and some battery powered speakers and you may have a combination of the most powerful tools that we could put into the hands of missionaries in the fields of 3rd world countries. Many of the these countries are investing in better and faster wireless networks and have skipped investing too much in wired networks. For an up front cost of just over a $1,000 and a monthly cost of less than $100 we have put the world’s greatest communication tool into the hands of those who could do the most with it. Imagine sending a message or videos to a network of indigenous pastors across a country or continent. Think of the limitless amount of teachings and tools they would have access to through the Internet. So what all would we need to make this happen?

• The Mitsubishi PK10 or PK20
• PK10 Battery
• iPhone
• Apple compenent cable for iPhone
• Battery powered Speakers
• Backpack
• Jesus Film on iPhone or any other teachings
• Amharic Bible translation on YouVersion.com

What are some other possibilities that you imagine with this combination?  Maybe a pastor in Addis Ababa could teach and direct a network of churches and pastors throughout Ethiopia via this method. Networks of churches that cannot support a teaching pastor getting great teaching every week.  Your turn.

Subway now refers to their subs as "Yum Rockets."

Some drug companies recommend you talk to your "prescriber" instead of your doctor. I am not even sure that is even a word.

Have you noticed any other strange new terms recently?

      I am currently running sound for the 2008 Circle of Nations Christian Women’s Conference. The speaker is blowing it out of the water. She is currently contrasting the show What Not to Wear with the sin in our lives. We have all of this stuff in the closet that we just can’t bring ourselves to get rid of. We need someone to come alongside us and help us get these things out of our life. Amazing stuff. I forgot to start the recorder for this session. Dang it. Read Chapter 3 of the book of Colossians and set your minds on heavenly things.  Ask yourself what you need to clean out of the closet and think about how you need to "clothe yourself." What do you need to put on? Great message people. I wonder if anyone has done a Girls Retreat around this theme before?

Just wanted to pass this along.

We had a great launch party for Skate Church this week with more than 35 people in attendance. We had a great time skating and the skaters love the new quarterpipe, though I had to yell at the for jumping off of the storage building where it was positioned against. The guy standing next to me is Josh and it was his first time at the park. Before I started the devotional I asked for a volunteer to hold the bucket of tickets that we were going draw from for the new skateboard. Josh volunteered right off. I told all the kids that I didn’t know him and that he looked a bit shady so they should keep their eyes on him to make sure he wasn’t putting extra tickets in the bucket. When it came time to draw guess whose name came out of the bucket? My man Josh’s. What are the odds? I met his mom after we finished and she really loved seeing her son skate and what we were doing with the park. We had for older teens from the local skatepark show up early and help set the park up. A couple of these guys dropped out of school, but would like help getting back on track. They would like to get their GED and go to college.

I am learning that effective ministry can really boil down to time. How much time do you have to give? Do you have time to just hang out and talk with students and really get to the core issues of their problems? Many times we try to apply a huge message to a large group of students and spend a lot of time not connecting with the issues they are really dealing with. Maybe it is time to start getting back to a biblical model of small group where one leader leads a small number of students and really invests in their lives instead of one guy preaching at 50, 100, 500 or more students, but never connecting with them individually with what they really need right now. Jesus was able to spend quality time with each of his disciples. Maybe it needs to be quality over quantity. Maybe that is teaching less for more. Teach less students for a greater impact. Teach less messages so that they can work on one thing at a time. Less talking and more listening. I am starting to rant so I will cut this one short.

Great launch party can’t wait for next Tuesday.

Later people.

       This afternoon I sat down and watched Ordinary People with Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton. As the movie begins you know that something tragic has happened in the life of young Conrad that is keeping him from sleeping. Robert Redford directed this movie that won four Academy Awards in 1981 including Best Director, Best Picture, Best Writing, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Timothy Hutton, which seemed strange to me because I would have put Timothy Hutton as the lead in this picture, but he never would have beat out Robert DeNiro that year who won for Raging Bull, but I also would have made him share the award with his fellow nominee Judd Hirsh who plays Hutton’s therapist.

     First of all, this was an amazing movie. It has all of the drama that Noah Baumbach is going for is his recent pictures, without all of the raunchy interludes. There are several shots within this picture between Hutton and Hirsh that prove to be the precursors for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting. Hutton’s character of Conrad is going through a difficult period in his life to say the least and has a lot of people speaking into his life on their own terms and for their own benefit. What I enjoyed about the progression of Conrad’s character was that he was able to find his own voice. He learned how to express his feelings and be heard.

     What was interesting for me to see in this movie was the opening establishing shots which were underscored with the school choir singing Canon in D Major with its chorus of Hallelujahs. I finished reading Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus But Not The Church, which I will blog about in another post, and within the last chapters of the book he talked about the new gap that we have placed between people and God. Kimball states that we are telling people that in many ways they must conform to the Christian subculture before they can even get to the place where they must deal with their sin and the gap that separates them from God. You can get a better picture of this in John Burke’s No Perfect People Allowed. Conrad’s mother seemed unwilling and even embarrassed by what was happening within this family and would rather leave than work it out. This has made me think about how far are we willing to travel down the road with someone walking on their way to becoming a Christ-follower. The church wants people to change in an instance, but that rarely happens. Discipleship and sanctification is a process and we must allow imperfect people into our fellowship so that they can see how more mature followers of Christ handle life. Discipleship is not just what you know, but it is also about how you live your life and how you react to life as it happens. I think that this has a lot to do with the lack of intimacy that has overtaken the church. When we are afraid to share life together we unable to become a body.

• How far are you willing to walk with someone on their journey?
• Are you quick to give up on someone or are you willing to travel with them?
• Think about the farthest you have traveled with someone. Can you go farther?
• Are you relationships suffering because you are afraid to open up?

     I don’t know if you have been following what is happening at Elevation Church, but I just have to share it.  Pastor Steve and the church recently had two weeks of spontaneous baptisms where they baptized more than 1,000 people in two weeks! Check out Steve’s post about this on his blog at http://www.stevenfurtick.com/uncategorized/1000-2/. The Sunday following these two weeks of spontaneous baptism they kicked off their new series called The Gospel and had 600 people accept Jesus Christ during the weekend. 420 of these were adults. Elevation is a Baptist church in North Carolina, about 3 years old and had more than 4800 people in attendance last Sunday. They don’t even own a building. They are really showing us that Baptist churches can still reach people, but they have to change. One of Steve’s current reads is the book What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. I think that many church leaders are afraid to change, because they fear backlash and have experienced failure at some point. I think that people will follow the vision of a leader who is sold out to the vision himself and have seen failure happen in many cases because leaders were afraid to take the steps necessary to make the vision a success. Steve embodies the Go Big or Go Home mentality. After listening to Steve and his church I have started meditating on this, "How much do you want to see lives changed? How much do you want it?" If my heart doesn’t hurt or bleed with this question then I will lack the passion I need to see it happen. So pray that God will give me the passion to go at it with everything that I have. Pray that God would put people in my path. Pray that God would push me out and into the paths of people.

     As I was driving home today I noticed a guy skating behind the local movie theater. I turned around and pulled into the parking lot to talk with him and give him an invitation to Skate Church. I am telling you this not to say, "Hey look at me and how spiritual I can be," but to encourage you to pray that God would continue to give me the boldness and favor with the community so that I can share the Gospel with them. I was tired and hungry and ready to get home to watch television, but I felt the conviction that I had to turn the car around and go talk to this kid. I pray that God would give you this same conviction and passion about that I am finding.

I look forward to sharing more about this in future posts.

What is God doing in your life right now?

Sydnie discovered this week that we were outside our house when the Google Maps vehicle drove through our neighborhood taking pictures. Our address doesn’t quite map right, but if you move the map a few house down you will find us outside arriving home from work. When we tell people to Google map our house we can also tell them to look for the house where we are standing outside. Our friend Melissa is arriving to hang out for the weekend.

I think it would be nice for Google to allow you to know when you are getting your house mapped so that you and the family could get outside in time to get mapped. I am sure that someone would use the opportunity for evil though. Mooning through the window of the house, running along side the Google truck while it is mapping (I am secretly planning on doing this the next time I see a Google Map Truck), acting Washington’s crossing of the Delaware…I lot of things come to mind.

So I got caught. Can you get caught by the Google Mappers?

Are you familiar with the term “crowdsourcing?” It is a relatively new term and can best be described by this description from www.croudsourcing.com,

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

There is a new book about crowdsourcing coming out later this month. I can’t wait to get a copy of the book, especially since we are starting a new series this weekend called “Get In The Game.” The series is all about using your spiritual gifts to further the Kingdom of God. The designated agent in some cases at the church is the minister, pastor, or ministry leader and the goal of the agent is to help the large crowd take responsibility for the jobs at the church that need to be performed. One of my main roles as a leader is to help identify, train and empower others. How can I begin accomplishing this task?

• Define the roles and break them down into bite size portions.
• Tell others about the opportunities.
• Give them the next step to getting involved in the process.
• Equip and resource them for success.
• Check with them to see how things are going.
• Celebrate successes and failures.
• Allow them to begin crowdsourcing their jobs out.

We need more people from the crowd involved in the core jobs within the church. We can’t keep overworking and burning out our volunteers, especially new members and new Christians. Together everyone achieves more. The more ones we have, the more we can achieve.

I recently crowdsourced our Facebook page to a member named Kelly Huckaby. Kelly and her family came to AHBC shortly before I did. Kelly is doing a fantastic job with our Facebook page and is helping get the word out about our events and contacting our visitors. We could not be as effective as we have been at reaching out over the last month without Kelly.

How are you crowdsourcing?

How have you been crowdsourced?

I just read a great article over at www.TheWorshipCommunity.com on developing song writing communities. It is a great article that I wanted to share with you guys. I think it is important to develop these communities within your church. It allows the indigenous flavor our your church to begin to take root. It gives your artists the opportunity to create works for the encouragement of the body and through the process deepens the intimacy level within the group. It is time to move past just having a worship team into creating worship environments and spaces where artists can create, grow, and work. All you really need is a living room, some snacks, and a groups of artists looking to contribute.

While researching the history of Bossa Nova music in college for my historical research class I discovered that the music grew out of an apartment where musicians would gather to play songs with one another.

At our last student ministry practice I had create a loop in reason and asked our musicians and singers to write a song around it. They had a great time and came up with some great lyrics with a personal meaning. I an looking forward to allowing them more creative room within the song set. Some of my favorite times as a musician were when my friend Justin would begin ad-libbing during a set and we would follow him.

How are you nurturing the creators of worship music within your community or church?

       Last Thursday night we went to a Fireworks show and before the show the weather was a bit crazy. I snapped this pic of the most amazing cloud formation I have every seen. I watched this thing form and rotate. I was waiting for it to turn into a tornado, but it never did. The lightening was amazing too. Everyone at the party came outside to stare at this cloud. We were in complete awe. God has put some amazing things around us.

When was the last time you were in awe of God’s creation?