• All my Christian, church and faith-related entries will go here;
• posts related to software design and development, hardware and other technology will go here, and
• other stuff into a catchall here.

New blog entries will still be announced via twitter & facebook.

Several reasons, but the precipitator was that this blog has been around for about 3 years and I’ve messed with it so much it was starting to do some very weird things – pieces of admin pages going walkabout; cache acting strangely; stuff like that. So I started fresh, exported everything to the appropriate new blog, and away we go…

Happy reading!

I was building a mockup web site for the church I attend. One of the design decisions was to use a very dark – as black as possible – background, and while I don’t like light text on a dark background (since it’s harder to read as you approach geezerdom), we’re a church with a relatively low average age, so it would work there.

So … near-black background, white or very light text. And I thought maybe a third color for the borders and other bits of styling, such as the bullets in lists. Orange on black is a good standout color.

It’s not so easy in CSS to get text in one color and list bullets in another – it’s one of the things I suspect never occurred to the committees. What you want to be able to do is something like:

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<style>
li  { color: white;  bullet-color: orange; }
</style>

… but that property keyword doesn’t exist. And when the question comes up on the web, it doesn’t seem to be something the forum gurus are too up on either – at various different sites one simply said no, you can’t do it; another said use an image instead, and a third suggested enclosing the text in the list in a span like this:

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<ul>
  <li>
    <span>text</span>
  </li>
</ul>

Now the idea behind CSS was that it manage style in place of HTML, not that it require more HTML to manage the limitations of CSS. So I had a think, and here’s how you do it:

In the CSS, turn off the bullet. Then add the ‘:before’ pseudo class to the li statement with the spiffy color and a snazzy bullet character that you pulled from your favorite HTML entity table (here’s a site with them all). And you get something like this:

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<style>
li      { margin-left: 1em; list-style-type: none; }
li:before   { color: orange; content: "\25A0 \0020"; }
</style>

<stuff> … </stuff>

<ul>
<li>... for <a href="#" rel="external">stuff</a> to click on</li>
<li>Something you don’t click on</li>
</ul>

Don’t forget to add your Doctype at the front for IE or it won’t work.

Demo and code here.

Pete’s job – teaching, vision & discipling the other pastors. Pages of notes here about Crosspoint’s experiences (‘MS’ stands for Multisite; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.):

Regarding the campus plant:

• A launch team is essential
• Launch takes a massive amount of work
• Missions are a great way to bring multiple campuses together to help cement connections in the whole church
• Crosspoint has 4 ‘Serving Saturdays’ each year
• MS makes any DNA problems more evident
• MS appears to demand matrixed management, but it doesn’t work very well (something that’s become very obvious in the business world).
• MS has the advantage of making a congregation become less building-centric (cool insight).
• Launched new campuses with mailers, but word of mouth has always proven most effective. Not too much with Twitter/FB. Social media good for communication and assimilation; not so much for growth.
• Target is to have campuses self-supporting within 1 year
• Also give an offering to churches that are planted nearby

Regarding the CP, he must be exactly the right fit:

• same as the lead pastor except for the preaching – Crosspoint’s CPs report to Pete and Jenni Catron (the executive pastor) and meet twice each week.
• Qualifications: heart, commitment to the DNA, be a strong leader, strong communicator.
• Top passions: leadership and spiritual development.
• Every campus sees the CP as their pastor rather than Pete.

Regarding video teaching:

• Video teaching is working well – used to be a 1-week delay, now down to same day (actually about 10 minutes, and could be pulled down to a 2-minute delay if they chose).
• There are 2 backup messages ready if needed.
• Regarding the switch to video teaching –
  • it was hard to stop looking at the people locally and focus on the camera, and
  • gets feedback from the CPs about the video teaching.

Regarding the week’s schedule:

• Mondays: every visitor gets a handwritten card; volunteers get a card as well.
• Tuesdays: meeting day
• Wed/Thu CPs do counseling, visitation, meet with volunteers & staff

My takeaways here:

1. The way Pete talks about it sometimes, you might think that Crosspoint is a well-oiled machine that everyone else is running, and he’s just a figurehead wandering around. But it’s clear that he does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. Until recently, for instance, every new person coming to the church got a handwritten note of welcome from him – as the church growth rocketed upward, that alone was a huge amount of work.
2. Choosing the right people and investing them with the right vision is evidently an essential constituent of the growth – almost as vital as consistently great teaching and an environment of fellowship.

A wonderful talk to listen to – hard to miss the excitement he feels for the church and it’s people.

(‘MS’ stands for MULTISITE; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.)

Terry Broadwater

Director of the Chi Alpha Network

• Go where the people are.
• Lead the elders through a study of Acts – what should we be doing? Where should we be going?
• We must raise up and release a generation of church planters
• We should be people like Philip, who left the Jerusalem church and traveled to the desert, overtaking the lost eunuch in his search for Life.
• David’s attitude and praise in 2 Sam 6 – an example of NT worship in the OT
• Accountability is relational now, not legislated.

The question coming out of Terry’s talk for me is – are your elders or deacons so connected to the pastor that they want to spend time with him? … are they personal friends? … have they bought into the vision he has been given? Or are they ignoring or resisting what he’s trying to do? The founding pastor of a church plant gets to choose the elders, and they generally follow his vision and lead. When the founder leaves for whatever reason, the elders look for the replacement – and from that point on there’s always the concern that he’s bringing in change that they don’t agree with and that wasn’t part of the original pastor’s vision. After all, if they’re hiring him, then he reports to them, right? So there’s often an expectation that he should do the things they want the way they want.

But people and culture inevitably change, and so God’s desire and path for the church will change; can the elders grasp that if they haven’t had formal training? In general I think they can, but a real spirit of unity and humility must be present. Further, there must be a joy in the yoke. I think the proof of that is – do the elders enjoy doing things with the pastor (cookouts and hang times just for the lead team), or do they only get together at official meetings? If the latter, I’m pretty sure the church is in trouble.

Apart from the heat, though, this was an incredible trip. The Assemblies of God (http://AG.org) had laid the church planting conference on for free. I caught wind of it from Twitter, since I follow some of the presenters, and Pastor Ryan & I managed to sign up relatively early. (Some good responsiveness and follow-up from the AG staff during the leadup to the conference – thanks to Debbie Armstrong & Nicolle Rockenbaugh)

As it happens, there are a number of interesting events intersecting for us on this topic – first is the conference itself, of course; secondly the fact that we have just started a series called GOING – something very missional to encourage a more personal level of ministry and outreach. I’ll be taking the sermon “Mission (to the Promised Land)” based on Joshua’s invasion on 7/18 and then doing the follow-up to VBS on 8/1 (“Tidy to messy”) – pastor Ryan is covering the other 5 weeks. The third of these events is an elder meeting next week where Pastor Ryan is sharing God’s vision for Praise Christian Fellowship’s church growth.

So the timing of this was great for us. We’re also thinking of going to the Sticks conference (Nov 9-10) and considering a Grand Tour of a number of the churches whose blogs and pastors’ blogs we’re tracking – Mark Batterson at NCC, Pete Wilson at Crosspoint, Greg & Geoff Surratt at Seacoast, Dave & Jon Ferguson at CCC, Shaun King at Courageous Church and Andy Stanley at North Point and one or two others. It’ll be interesting to see how many we could fit into a weekend. Sadly we’ll not make it to Zak White at Revolution Church.

The other vital accomplishment during this trip was to get Ryan hooked on Doctor Who. All right-thinking men should be, so we watched the episodes written by Steven Moffett – one of the two best writers of current production TV (the other is Bob Larby, but you knew that).

More notes to come…

… and the slides are here:

Download (PPT, 255.5KB)

Further readings on ‘A Father’s Heart’:

Want to know what your teenage kids are up against? This is an eye-opener:

… and here’s another …

Wired Magazine on 'Manga News'

Putting the two together, they are appealing to young potential readers by setting the news into manga – real news in cartoon form. Talk about adjusting your approach to meet the culture!

1. An excellent conference and opportunity – worth a lot more than the price of admission. You sometimes do get more than you pay for.
2. There wasn’t a whole lot of new information for me – its value to me was in what was repeated and confirmed. Sometimes you need to hear something over and again for it to sink in (well, I do anyway).
3. The single most frequent repetition was – “Spend less time ministering to your congregation and more time ministering to your family.” (Perhaps a third of the speakers said this, either in the form of regretting they hadn’t or glad that they had.)
4. I was deeply impressed by the honesty of the speakers. Many of these people had made mistakes that they were sharing – that was gold they were mining and handing out.
5. I was also struck by how many speakers there are out there – people I’ve never heard of – who are excellent teachers.
6. One note hit a chord in me: the speaker (and I’m afraid I don’t remember which) said that people – including pastors – think that the most important job a pastor has is to lead the congregation. Not true. With every pastor, the thing God is building is the pastor, not the congregation. (That is: The most important relationship is the one a person has with God, not with the people God has called us to work with – and this applies as much to pastors as to anyone else.) This was a heavy thought, since we have always heard that the shepherd must be willing to sacrifice everything for the sheep.
7. Sound quality has been improved a little over the original “The Nines” conference, where the level was not balanced across the videos. This time it was – for the most part. However, the sound control for the live portions was very poor, and between that and the 4 or 5 videos that were not recorded at the same level as the rest we were running back to the sound board more than a dozen times during the session.
8. There were also some transmission issues that surfaced, which – considering the complexity of the project, and that it was pretty much a one-off – were understandable; they also gave us a chance to catch up, so they weren’t as frustrating as the sound issues.

My one wish for future conferences: Youse guys run all the videos through level-balancing software to limit the sound levels to one range (an easy step to improve the quality of the presentation). I’ll set up closer to the sound board. Next time will be even sweeter!

All in all, an experience that I (and others at Praise Christian Fellowship) really appreciated. Thanks, Leadership Network.