Month: July 2007

  • Mike Yaconelli’s 65th Birthday

    I’m sure at least half of the people who will read this won’t get why I’m posting this. I caught this over at Think Christian and I thought it was a tribute worth looking at again. Mike was the founder of Youth Specialties and a guy who made a lot of people think differently about youth ministry.

    I never met him personally but heard him speak a couple of times. Here is a tribute video that was put together shortly after his death in 2003. The last words of his last National Youth Worker Convention are a fitting closing to the video.

  • Embracing our life’s mission

    Slide2
    As promised, here are the talk notes and presentation from Sunday morning.

    Text version at RomeoChurch.com
    Podcast at RomeoChurch.com
    Notes in pdf
    Presentation in pdf

  • A New Rating System

    A couple weeks back I reinstalled everything on my computer. This meant I installed a new operating system, new versions of tons of stuff… and it also meant I reorganized all my data.

    In the course of this process, I had to move where my music folder was stored. Actually, I didn’t have to do that… but to clean things up I now have all of my music in a single folder. Long story short, when I reinstalled iTunes, I was basically starting over.

    The hard part of this is that I had all 3000 songs rated. Now, I have to start over!

    The fun part is that I’m rediscovering a lot of music. The bad part is, 3000 songs is a lot of stuff to rate. For now I am cheating and rating whole albums at a time. But over the next few weeks I’ll be rating everything 1-5 again individually. Stuff that is 4-5 stars automatically goes on the ipod, stuff that is below doesn’t.

  • More interesting graphics about the church

    So yesterday, I used some cool graphics for my message. And as promised, tomorrow I will be putting the text from the message online. In the meantime, here are the graphics from yesterday as well as a couple new ones I came across today.

    God_and_americaBiblebeltMichigan_god_big1_2



    I used all of these for the message yesterday. I’m actually not certain where I got the God and America map originally. But I made the Michigan one on my own, it’s simply a blown up version of the original but I had to use a new county map and color it to map it big enough for the screen.

    Here are two I wish I had before the message though I’m not sure how it would have fit in to use. I found these over at Think Christian.
    Atlas_of_religions
    Map_of_christianity

  • Update from earlier

    Update from earlier

    Earlier I said I was tired. I’m feeling much better. We had a great little event today with Light Force. I think some of the best events we do right now are free and this is no exception. Want to spend an afternoon hanging out and building relationships? Just tell people to meet you at the beach! Bring your own lunch and a ball… you have instant and free fun.

    In other news… I’m a little miffed at a breach in blog etiquette. We all know that in a Web 2.0 environment that collaboration is the name of the game. And so it is no surprise to see something that you said or you wrote about popping up somewhere else. But the unwritten law of blogging is that you simply give credit with a link back. (Sometimes you see the phrase “HT to ____” which simply means, hat tip. Another way to do this is to say, “I saw this over at ____.”) Long story short, I wrote about something last week and someone “of a bigger name” wrote about the same thing on his blog today, read by many more people than will ever come to my blog, and failed to provide the proper HT or link back. How do I know that the person knew they got their post idea from me? I sent it to him! (Which is another rude thing. To take something that was my idea and not even give me the courtesy of responding to my email? Hmph…won’t do that again.) It doesn’t bother me one bit when it’s someone who simply doesn’t know better. But when someone is a recognized blogger, it’s being rude intentionally and a practice of superiority. To the contrary, Mark Oestricher is one of the most polite bloggers I know. All ministry types would do well to act as graciously with their blogs as he is. OK, I’ll stop ranting about it. I am over it…

    That said, I’m starting to think about “Adam’s Blog Etiquette” to go alongside my “Rules for blogging.”  I’m never interested in tearing people down… but instead I want to help the people I know use the internet more effectively… maybe even redemptively. Maybe I’ll even finally write a long thought about article about ministry snobs?

  • Ever just feel tired?

    That’s how I feel right now. I came home from church yesterday and slept all afternoon. I went to bed at my normal time last night, slept in a little, and still feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

  • What’s New for Season 2?

    Here is the video for this morning’s services.

  • Mind Blowing Statistics

    I’ve about done with the message for tomorrow morning. I’m encouraging our congregation to embrace their life’s mission of reaching their community for Christ. But in the the process of preparation I’ve started comparing some studies, mixed with my own informal study here locally to discover some disturbing truths. I’m going to save both the good news and the bad news until the service. But I can’t help but think as I look at these facts, "Why aren’t people sending missionaries to Romeo?"

    The immediate good news is two-fold. (Not sharing any secrets of the message in the morning.)

    1. God has sent missionaries to Romeo.
    2. God’s desire is to reach Romeo through the local church.

    As I’m busy examining the evidence and fact-checking the data, this is one talk where I hope everyone takes the time to download the message notes and check the data themselves. Even with massive margins of error we’re talking one very powerful observation!

  • Saturday Tunes

    Saturday_tunes_2After an awesome meeting about the future of Light Force last night, today is kind of a quiet day of hanging out and thinking about my message for tomorrow morning, "Embracing our Life’s Mission."

    Here’s what is piping into my ear drums this morning. No cheating, next 10 songs on my shuffle. Ratings are also included. Yes, I have all 3000 songs in my iTunes rated.

    1. Midnight (Jason Harwell) *****
    2. Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee (Charlie Hall) ****
    3. All I Want is You (U2) *****
    4. Beyond Measure (Jeremy Camp) ****
    5. The Rain (K-OS) ****
    6. O Worship the King (Chris Tomlin) *****
    7. Love is My Religion (Ziggy Marley) ****
    8. Somebody to Love (Brittany Murphy, Happy Feet Soundtrack) *****
    9. One (U2) *****
    10. Girl America (Mat Kearney) *****

    Looks like a good hour or so for my ears!

  • Marketing the church

    My friend Patti started a discussion over at the YMX forums about church marketing. (Not getting marketed to at the church by companies, but churches marketing to their communities.)

    Here are some questions that have come up that are worth wrestling with:

    • What are the boundaries for a good marketing campaign? Is this too far?
    • Is your church marketing aimed at believers looking for a new church or non-believers uninteresting church?
    • Should every marketing piece feature the churches name?
    • Is marketing the church biblical? If so, how do you justify it? If not, how do you justify it?
    • How do you justify spending money on marketing at the expense of other ministries of the church? From what account?
    • Should you depend solely on word of mouth from your people?
    • How do you measure the effectiveness of any church marketing campaign? (Obviously if you spend $50,0000… you aren’t likely to get $50,000 return.)