Tear the roof off!

Today was such a good gathering. It was just one of those days where you feel like the wind is at your back and everything flows effortlessly. A couple highlights:

• It was great to see so many guests out. It seems like the fortune cookies are getting passed out
• The crosses all over the theatre were awesome. It was alot of work but I think it paid off. It could have been very distracting but I think it turned out better than we had hoped.
• It was so good having so many people wanting to help out. We are getting to the place where more people are wanting to step into a serving role because they view TXC as theirs not just something they attend.
• The band practically tore the roof off the theatre. Dave got sick on Wednesday and wasn’t sure if his voice would hold up but I gotta say that more than held up. The song by Decyfer Down was killer and I just sat back and thought “This is church! And I get to be a part of it!”
• It was a little risky putting a montage of fighting scenes from The Last Samarai on the screen during the special song but because this is a series for dudes, we felt it added to the vibe. And that it did!
• We had so many media elements integrated into the gathering that we always get a little nervous in the execution of it all. But today was one of the best as far as seamlessness goes with the amount of stuff we had.
• It was frustrating beyond anything making the message intro video of me under the bridge just because I messed it up so many times. But thanks to Dave’s superior editing skillz, it was all worth it in the end. If everything goes well, there will be 4 more of those this series.
• It felt good threatening the dads of boys who might potentially want to date my daughter later…haha. And no…that wasn’t a joke 🙂

I am anticipating great things for this series. With what I’ve already seen when it comes to the men in our church and what’s happening right now with men choosing to be God’s man, not their own, some amazing things are bound to take place.  I’m praying that more and more men with start to fight for things that really matter and are the things that Jesus wants us to fight for.  Ultimately I want to be a leader that submits to our One True Master and be able to lead the men in our church to do the same.

Harder than I thought

Man alive, this  Starbucks Challenge is harder than I thought it would be!  It’s ridiculous how much stuff I spend my money on that I don’t really need, mainly junk food.  Particularly food high in saturated fats, sugar, salt…you know, all the good stuff!  We were at Walmart today and they were selling Krispy Kreme donuts.  If you’ve had them before (especially if you bought some today!) you know what I’m talking about when I say my fat cells were screaming for those donuts!  Emma was getting her picture taken and they were 45 minutes late.  The whole time I was freaking out and just about bought some multiple times.

So what stopped me?  The starbucks challenge!  It wasn’t the fact that they’re not healthy and I don’t need to get any more morbidly obese than I already am.  It was the fact that we’re doing this.  And as much as it sucked not slipping into nirvana as I ate 12 heavenly donuts, it felt good to walk away knowing that I’m going to be giving that money to someone who needs it far more than my fat cells do!

So what about you?  How are you doing with this?  Have you slipped up yet?

Even if you have, keep on doing it!  Match what you spent and move on.  Someone’s future could depend on it.

Unbelievable stop motion

This must have taken forever but it is an amazing work of creativity. Take the few minutes required to watch it and prepare to be awed!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about "Unbelievable stop motion", posted with vodpod

Unacceptable

Warning!  Offensive post below so don’t continue on if you don’t want to get angry!

I just watched this video and I now feel sick to my stomach.  I don’t really have many words to say to describe how I feel.  I’m angry.  I’m ashamed.  I’m filled with an anxiety of not knowing what to do.  But all I know is that we have to do something.  Watch this.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Unacceptable“, posted with vodpod

It not just these little kids.  It’s more than half of the flipping world!  There’s such a tension between having stuff to live and then having stuff just to have it.  We can’t help that we live in the culture we do but I think we take it for granted more than we know.  We abuse the freedom we’ve been given, even if it’s just the freedom to eat a cracker.

You might be reading this thinking “Oh here we go again, the big old guilt trip” and if you’re thinking that…you need to grab a heart.  Seriously.  You have a problem and I have no issue with letting you know that.

Some of us are choked about The Starbucks Challenge because we’ve challenged your comfortable little world.  We don’t care.  We really don’t.  God has called us to do so much more than attend a cute little country church and hang on for dear life until Jesus comes back.  We are here to bring hope, not only to Mission and surrounding area, but across the world.

And if you intend on just sitting on the bank and watching, good luck.  That’s not who we are.  You might just get pushed in so you better learn how to swim!

Big talker

Are you a big talker?  Do you like to go around making people think that you are better than you really are because you are incredibly insecure?  Do people think you are pretty spiritual but deep down inside you know different?  If push came to shove, could you back up everything that you say you are by ACTUALLY living the way you say you do?

Stop talking and do it.

Creating Magic: Everyone

“Everyone matters.” – pg.36 from Creating Magic

It sounds so simple and yet it’s very easy to feel like your position doesn’t matter in an organization.  It’s also very easy for “top dogs” to treat the lower employees like they don’t matter.  I’ve definitely been to my fair share of companies where you get the vibe from the employees that they don’t matter.  What’s the reprucussion?  The employee treats me like I don’t matter.  I don’t go back to those places.

When it comes to those who serve in our church, I’ve had the perspective from the start that everyone matters.  If the greeters aren’t on top of their game and welcoming people the way that they need to be welcomed, my job of teaching is going to be greatly hindered.  They will be ticked that they walked in without a person saying a word and will already be shutting me out.  They might give us grace 1 time but if they decided to come back and it happened again, we would never see them again.

My position isn’t so great that I could do everything all by myself.  The fact that we have been able to establish this church in 2 years is due to a huge team of people committing themselves to our mission and doing their very best at whatever it is their doing.  If that’s you, THANK YOU!  You sweat, blood and tears make more of a difference than you will ever know!

Creating Magic: Humility

I am currently reading a book called “Creating Magic” by Lee Cockerell.  It chronicles he journey with Disney and the leadership principles he learned there.  So far it’s pure gold.  While I’m reading it I’m writing down some of the nuggets and I’m just gonna post my thoughts on them.  It’s more for me than anyone but if you pick something up from it, great!  Here’s the first quote:

“Good leaders are humble enough to admit what they don’t know and great leaders are constantly looking for new information” ~ p.22

If there’s one thing I’ve had to realize early on with church planting is that I don’t know everything and I never will.  Now there are things that I’ve got to know inside and out and believe with all my heart or the church is a guranteed failure.  However, there is more that I don’t know than I do.  And there are tons of people that do those things far better than me.  It would be very easy for me to get bent out of shape because of that fact.  I might be prone to think that I look stupid if I don’t know certain things and so I hold on to them as tightly as possible.But the reality is that those people know what they do for a reason and I’m not supposed to know how to do everything.

At the same time, learning new things is absolutely vital.  It’s a tricky tightrope, learning to see what you need to know and what you leave to others.  I try to read as much as possibly can to keep expanding my knowledge base.   Some may not see the need but I try to read as many leadership, business and marketing books as I possibly can.  I’ve learned a lot about through those mediums.

I sometimes wonder why I’m in the place I’m in.  I’m not so cool as to create something out of thin air.  I don’t have what I sometimes think is necessary to do what I do.  And yet I’ve been given incredible responsibility.  I’m honored and have committed myself to doing whatever it takes to continue to grow and be a lifelong learner

2 years and counting

I honestly can’t believe how fast time has gone.  It feels like it was just yesterday that 8 of us were sitting in a church nursery dreaming about a church that would one day reach thousands of people and reconnect them to Jesus.  This Sunday marks our 2 year anniversary and those years have been an absolute blast!  We have had front row seats to some of the most amazing things we could have only dreamt of seeing.

In January we made a decision in 2 weeks time to give away 3.5 weeks worth of offering.  At that time it was equivalent to $5,000.  We divided it up into different amounts, put it in envelopes and gave one to every person in the room.  Their job was to give it away to someone that needed it then write their story down at livegenerous.org.  It was a monumental day in the life of our church.  I talked about giving that day and it was tense but when the flip came and we gave away almost every penny in our account, people left confused and excited that a church would do that!  The generousity in our church sky rocketed the week afterwards and it continued to right to present day.  In fact, we had our highest giving Sunday in our short history a few weeks ago!

Our UnderCurrents have seen a new system implemented that will allow us to see many more undercurrents launched in the years to come.  We started off just trying to get a few off of the ground and we did.  We just didn’t have a way to make them grow exponentially.  We believe that we have created something that is going to be amazing, not only in 5 years, but starting this next year.  Some of the stories that are being told in this present semester are unbelievable and lives are being changed.

We have seen our Core Team grow by leaps and bounds as well.  These are the people that serve week in and week out and believe so strongly in the mission of TXC that they are willing to sacrifice time, resources and lots of sweat to make it become a reality.  We have bi-monthly gatherings called All Access where we eat good food and have a good time.  Here’s a few photos from past gatherings. This last All Access we had so many people out that we are thinking it’s almost time to find a new venue to meet in.

Quicken was in July and it was our first beach baptism party.  It was a huge success as we had over 100 people gather at Rolley lake where we baptized 10 people.  The stories of the people ranged from young teens committing their whole lives to Jesus to young adults making decisions for the first time to follow Jesus.  And these were just the stories of the people that were willing to share them with us.  See some of the pictures here and here’s the video we made, showed in church the next day and gave to each of the people getting baptized.

This October we launched a series called HOSTAGE that we had been planning for 9 months.  We did as best as we possibly could with the resources that we had.  Combo’d with God moving in ways that only he can, we were absolutely blown away by what happened.  The last week of the series we saw 216 people gather together.  I personally experienced some of the stories of people choosing to leave the cage and stop being held hostage by numerous things.  We had a live hostage inside the cage for 5 weeks in a row and during the last week we set him free.  Here’s a few of the photos taken and videos that we made during the series

All in all, it has been a whirlwind of a ride and we have been changed in the process.  I honestly believed that TXC was what God was calling me to plant when God showed me the dream.  But I know who I really am and while I never doubted God, I doubted my abilites.  And the beautiful things is that my abilities have not been what has made TXC. It’s been a combo of having a great lead team that is very cohesive and passionate about what God has called us to and amazing people in our church that are willing to do whatever it takes to reconnect people to Jesus.

We are getting so excited for the coming year!  We’ve got a few things planned that are right around the corner, another massive series just before easter and then we’ve got a few opportunities to partner with other parts of the world that will enable us to do some amazing things for people who don’t yet know Jesus.  If you haven’t figured it out yet, we are passionate about this thing we call following Jesus.  Welcome to the journey!

So good to be back!

2 weeks was a looooong time!  It was actually a really good break for me.  The first week I felt guilty not being at church.  The second week I was really relaxed and could enjoy myself.  The week leading up to today my anticipation for getting back into the swing of things was HUGE!  And apparently there were a ton of other people feeling the same thing.  Even with the snow we had a pretty strong turn out.  The band was firing on all cylinders and I felt pretty confident teaching.  Alot of guests again which continues to blow my mind.  No Upstream kids due to the break and the snow combined so the kids came into the gathering with us which was actually really good.  The funny thing about kids is that they have no idea what rhetoric is.  So when I asked a question that I wasn’t really looking for an outloud answer to, half the kids would shout out their answers!  It was pretty funny but also really cool to see that they were listening and paying attention and actually thinking about what was being said.  They’re far smarter than we sometimes give them credit for.

This is going to be an awesome year!  We’re kicking it off with something in 4 weeks that I’m practically giddy about.  It’s one of those things that you just have to talk about.  But I’m not gonna let the cat out of the bag until the last week of this current series.  You don’t want to miss it.

We move into our new office tomorrow!  We’ve waited 2 years for this and it’s going to add a whole extra level of productivity to what we do.  We’ve been meeting in coffee shops which has been really good to keep us out and about with people but at a certain point you just can’t get much done with people interrupting you every few minutes.  It’ll take us a while to get it furnished but at least we’ve got a place to call home!

It’s good to be back!  And Sunday is only 6 days away!

Church is on!

For those of you that might be reading this from looking at the website, we are in fact still having our Sunday gathering tomorrow (Jan.4).  I know it’s supposed to snow like crazy tonight but we’ve had 2 weeks off and we feel like we need to gather tomorrow.  So get out your snow tires, tow ropes, shovels and winter gear and head on over to SilverCity a little bit earlier than usual to ensure you make it on time.  We’ll see you there!

Here’s the opening video for the series we’re starting