I've Been Thinking About This…

• Pastor Ryan was away today in Minnesota for our denomination’s biennial convention. He’s on the technology panel there, and he’s visiting a multi-site church as well.
• The new coffee continues to be a hit. There is a dedicated crew that comes in around 8am to get it ready by 9am – a real gift!
• Worship music was great as always – Chris added in a new song, “Every Move I Make” – at the request of a couple of children. It has a chorus with NA NA NA repeated about 20 times, but we lived.
• I preached on Fatherhood (see my previous blog, ” Message: A Father’s Heart”), as the last of our series on “Love in New England”. I think it would be a breeze to build outlines for preaching on Fatherhood every week for a couple of months! There was so much I had to cut out.
• The Elders have joined the service during May & June, taking turns to pray – this is the last week of that, but I hope they continue. Phil’s prayer today spoke to children (and me!) powerfully.
• Attendance was lighter, as usual during the summer, but at the beginning it looked non-existent. Folks trickled in during the first 15 minutes and we wound up with a goodly crowd by the time we got to the sermon.

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Here are the supporting Scriptures from the message on ‘A Father’s Heart’, June 20, 2010. The audio message will be posted here: A Father’s Heart

… 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 …

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I think this is clever marketing. In Japan, although newspapers are more widely subscribed to than in the US, the publishers can see an inevitable decline as the next generation moves up. They also observe that the next generation is crazy about manga – a stylized form of cartoon.

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!

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Wrapping up thoughts:

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.

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Really smart guy but No Name posted

• pour your life into the life of your wife
• hire people that are smarter than you are – otherwise you’ll wind up doing the work
• when you build a team that you would hang with (chemistry again)
• always be learning – reading, interviewing
• be sure you’re learning the word of God every day
• people need to see Jesus in your ministry – not you
• our job is to bring each person we bump into closer to Christ

Earl Creps

• You don’t need to hold onto the ‘cool young leader’ image.
• William Shatner has been successful by reinventing himself, often around a self-parody.
• Maturity allows you to grow into a better version of what you used to be

Les Hughes

• I’d have an intentional sabbatical every year – ignore media, just listen to God.
• read Wayne Cordero – “Leading on Empty”
• Life should have rhythm, just as the world does.

Chip Ingram

• Spent time with God in prayer every day.
• Don’t feel you have to meet everybody’s needs all the time – stress in marriage and personal health.

At this point the signal locked up on us, so we’re packing up. (Sorry Chip! You were doing great til then.)

Gene Getz

• I’d establish better priorities – especially with my family.
• Don’t try to make up for past mistakes; focus on doing the right thing now.

Bill Wellons

• Share vision about 100 times a year.
• Tell stories to communicate vision.
• It’s better to empower the laity than to hire professionals.
• Spend a lot more time asking how I can serve others than get people to serve me.
• Simplify, in order to gain true understanding of what church is.
• Bring people around you (small group) and develop them into church leaders.

Bob Buford

• I wish I had surrendered to Christ earlier in my life.
• Transition from success to significance needs to continue on to surrender.

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David Loveless

• Don’t overload people with change – Gen 33:13
• Don’t be a person more convinced about outcome than the way to achieve it.
• Ask yourself – do we really need this change? Is this the right time? Are the right people involved in the change, or are acting ‘So Low’? Is this sustainable – can others keep up?

Robert Lewis

• Concentrate more heavily on foundation-building. I’d be ruthless about developing Godly men & women; Godly marriages; a children’s program that trained parents too; evangelism programs.

Dale Burke

• less really is more – be a boxer rather than a street-fighter (skillful)
• please others less, but focus on pleasing God more.
• Do less, but focus more on the main things.
• Do less, but focus on YOUR main things (gifts).
• Do less, but focus on the main people. Jesus spent most time with the 3; then with the 12; then with others.

Eric Swansen

• Talking about sin and the fall – didn’t really catch anything about what he would have done differently.

Mike Slaughter

• People are bringing Christ into their world-view, but not moving into Christ’s world-view.
• wish I’d shifted from attractional model to missional model earlier.
• There are 2,000 passages dealing with justice and the poor. If it’s not Good news for the poor, it’s not the Gospel (Luke 4:18).
• Make a commitment to put marriage before the church.
• Make connections with Godly mission people.

Elmer Towns

• Dream big, but look at the downside of the dream.
• Sometimes chasing what you think is the dream takes you to other places you don’t want to go – there’s more to the reality that the dream represents.

Michael Duduit

• I’d spend a lot more time making my sermons clear and less in making them clever.
• I’d leave out the impressive bits, no matter how much I liked them.

Walt Kallestad
‘Being the church’ vs. ‘doing church’
Simple, sustainable, significant.

• I would keep it simple – loving God, building community and being missional.
• Make sure that ‘doing church’ is sustainable. Teaching people the Bible and praying. (I’d pray more and work less.)
• Move toward significance – transformed people who move to Christ.

Carl George
Wrote “9 keys to an effective small group leader”

• (didn’t catch anyhing about what he would have done differently.)

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