Monthly Archives: November 2006

A day at the ice rink

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OK, here’s the update on our Management Team “Laugh Event” at the ice rink…

Total falls:

  • Paul 8x (Shut up!)
  • Vern: 2x
  • Darlene: 2x 
  • Terri: 1x
  • Anthony: 1x

Descriptors of each skater:

Terri – Evil Knievel! She kept wanting to do the whip… with me on the end!

Darlene – a swan – graceful! She can even skate backwards!

Vern – an ostrich – he kept flapping his arms and ducking his head! (I think he was trying to keep his balance!)

Anthony – a hockey player!

Paul - a dead horse!

Jeff – Jeff’s back hurt so he spent most of his time doing this… (and taking pictures)

 

BUT, because we love him so much we made it possible for him to skate…

He did great! He even did a few tricks…

Although we weren’t able to catch everyone’s amazing skating skills we did catch a few…

Darlene tackling Anthony…

Paul staging a wipeout (since no one could catch any of his other eight because he was on his feet so quickly afterwards… Yea Baby!)

The entire team in action…

We wrapped our Laugh Event with lunch @ O Lacy’s!

It was a great END of the day!

 You can only imagine the conversation that we had about the man and the picture!!! ;-)

We laughed A LOT and are a better team because of it! Remember, the team that learns and laughs together will be a better team!

Hope stories

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Yesterday Terri, our office manager, sent out an e-mail to our church asking for people to finish this sentence, “God gave me hope when…”. We are going to read several of these stories this weekend.

Some of the “Hope Highlights” include…

 ”God gave me hope when I was going through a divorce and all my children gathered around me to show me support.”

“God gave me hope when He answered my prayer for a true friend.”

“God gave me hope when He provided a month’s rent when my husband was out of work.”

“God gave me hope when He used others to share their cancer experiences with me.”

Hey, whatever you’ve got going on in your life today know this,

 ”Those who hope in me will never be disappointed!” God (Isa. 49:23)

Do you have a “Hope story”?

Pastor’s on Ice

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I believe that the team that learns and laughs together will work better together! So, our management team (the pastors and the Director of Operations) is intentional about learning and laughing together… regularly.

Learning – every month a different member of the management team picks a book to study for the month. We all read the book and discuss it during our Tuesday meetings!

Thus far we have read and discussed:

A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards, and

Choosing to Cheat by Andy Stanley.

Our next book (starting next week) is The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero and Warren Bird.

Laughing – every other month a different member of our team picks a “laugh event” in which we get off campus and just laugh together.

Our last “laugh event” was at Lasertron in Buffalo! We played Lasertag and raced go-carts! For whatever it’s worth, Darlene is one heck of a shot, and Jeff is way to easy to shoot! All we had to do was follow the sound of his laughter and shoot him for extra points… and we did!!!

Tomorrow is our next laugh event and we are going ice skating! AHHHHHHHH! I can’t skate worth a hoot!

Yes, there will be pictures and commentary immediately following our day on the ice! Stay tuned…

Just a thought

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This weekend we’re launching a new series “What Do You Want?”

We will be talking about four gifts that Jesus offers:

1) Hope

2) Peace

3) Joy

4) Love

So this weekend I’m talking about “Hope.” Here’s a thought…

Hope is not static; it’s dynamic. It changes as life changes and yet one part of it stays the same… we always hope for something better! Have you ever hoped for something worse?

After church thoughts

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This is a new post that I’m going to do after every weekend (i.e. church service)… just a collection of random thoughts and reflections on the weekend

1) It was pretty cool talking about the return of our Leader (Jesus) this weekend! As best
     I can recall, this was the first time I’ve ever preached on this topic. (sermon notes
     here)

2) We brought ten new people into membership this weekend.

3) We had 712 people in our services this weekend (We had 720 on this same weekend
     last year… a Thanksgiving weekend slump)

4) Our parking lot guys are just great! They regularly park several hundred cars without
     damage! Way to go guys!

5) I CAN’T BELIEVE THE STINKIN STEELERS LOST AGAIN!!! They even made the
     front page on espn.com! HUMILIATING! GEEZE, EVEN THE BILLS WON…

What the church can learn from the American Music Awards

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Last night I watched the American Music Awards, and I’ve gotta tell you… I was impressed. (PLEASE, if you’re easily offended, DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ THIS POST OTHERWISE A BITTER, OFFENSIVE VIRUS WILL EXPLODE YOUR HARD DRIVE & YOUR HEAD!!!)

Here’s the crazy truth… I can understand why people would rather go to the AMAs (or a lot of other places for that matter) than to church  - it kept my attention!

So, here’s what I think the church can learn from the AMAs:

1) Excellence matters. In spite of some weird hair and tons of ink, every performance was pulled off with a HIGH degree of excellence. Apparantly the artists felt the crowd that they were performing for was worth doing it well. (Yep, the sarcasm was intended)

2) Visuals matter. I was blown away by the cool effects. I realized a sad point too. Our church uses “Keynote” (stop laughing) and we’re light years ahead of many churches (stop crying)… and compared to the visuals at the AMAs we’re pretty passe (archaic).

3) Normal “Church music” isn’t going to pack the place out. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve seen a place packed to sing the normal Sunday morning repertoire that most churches would die for! (Sarcasm again…)

OK, some commentary…

I don’t think we should apologize for wanting to be excellent in what we do. We do what we do for God. Our efforts are missional – we do what we do to bring people to Jesus on the weekend. If they are bored what do you think the chances of them coming back are?

I don’t want to be bored on the weekend and I certainly don’t want to be boring! What happens on the weekend is a picture of our philosophy of God. In other words, what we do on the weekend is what we believe about God. If we offer crappy performance… guess what we think about God (if you don’t agree with this check out what God says in Malachi 1:6-14). If we are boring and create an environment that puts the insomniac to sleep… guess what we say about God!

Here’s what I want…

I want our church to be ”The place to be on the weekend!”

I want people to skip other “stuff” in order to be at and serve through the church!

I want other activities to “take the hit” because people have committed to church!

I want our church to be the most exciting, entertaining, high energy point in people’s lives, because I know that Jesus Christ is thoroughly exciting, entertaining, and energizing!

Peace!

What would happen…

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What would happen if every church decided to:

1) Provide the BEST weekend experience!

2) Be the BEST place to serve – paid and unpaid!

3) Be the BEST place for people to give their resources to? (e.g. time and money).

And what would happen if the church was filled with Divine energy and consistently creating drawing environments?

Would people sell their Bills tickets on eBay because they’d rather come be a part of the weekend?

Would people get a new job… one that would allow them to have more time to serve in the local church?

Would people drive cheaper cars so they could have more money to give to the local church?

And what would happen if pastors and leaders decided to pray like crazy until God ripped through the crap of normal church and just blew us away with His presence?

And what would happen if instead of fighting with each other we decided to fight the real enemy… the one that is destroying lives, tearing apart homes, and ultimately damning people to hell?

And what would happen if the church would settle into the reality that what we have we’ve been given to invest for our Leader (Jesus) and rather than saving and plotting for a rainy day we became “high risk” investors… investing in Kingdom expansion?

And what would happen if we decided that the most important thing is bringing wandering people to our Leader and facilitating life-change instead of placating grumpy church people?

And what would happen if pastors and leaders just quit caring about all the religious whiners and just focused on bringing people to Jesus?

What would happen?

Why do we get “weird” when we talk about Jesus’ return?

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This coming weekend we’re going to be talking about the confidence that we have as a consequence of our Leader’s (i.e. Jesus) promise to return.

The big question I have is, “Why do we get dorky when we talk about the second coming?” Why do we pull out charts, maps, and use big words to describe such a straightforward promise? It’s kind of like putting mud on a beautiful picture!

Because some have gotten silly when talking about this awesome promise we have a tendency to react and virtually neglect this pivotal point in our Leader’s teaching!

I can’t get past these four points:

1) Jesus will return

2) We can’t possibly know when He will return

3) We must stay ready for His return

4) This promise should be the catalyst for confidence in those who are living for Him

 What do you think about when you hear someone refer to “The second coming?”

 Peace out…