Month: February 2008

  • Interior Signs are Here

    This is something someone like me gets excited about. We ordered new interior signs for the church building… and they are here! The pictures here are from my phone so the quality doesn’t do them any justice. But when we get them mounted it’s going to look smoking cool.

    kidstown welcome signinterior signs 3

    The big one of the left will go behind the welcome counter to our kids ministry. It’s HUGE and the quality of it doesn’t come through in the picture. It’s so much cooler than we thought it would be. When Jimmy and I picked it up we sounded like broken records… “That is so cool.” “Wow, we love it.”

    The picture on the right are the signs for the elevator. Obviously the one on top goes in the “adult area” and the one below is for down in KidsTown.

    And for those who live locally, you’ll be seeing stuff that looks like this around town soon.  If you haven’t been to Romeo in the last two years or so, the interior is not like you’ve seen before. Most of the public areas have been completely remodeled. Shoot me an email and I’ll show you around.

  • Light Force All Night Party Promo



    There is really no reason for the monkey, I just thought the colors and all were a lot of fun. So, Light Force students… expect me to stuff a handful of these in your hands Sunday morning.

  • We have an overnighter on March 7th

    I saw this video in an email earlier in the week. With an all night party on the agenda in just 10 days or so… it really touched home for me. To quote our worship leader, “I was like a cowboy as one lonesome tear ran down my face.”

    Of course, the stuff he talks about has never happened at Romeo. Our all-night parties have always been fun, clean, safe, etc. But generally about 4:00 AM I start to question my sanity as the cozy, warm bed becomes increasingly desirable with each passing minute.

    So why do I do it? It’s for the students, duh!

    HT to Josh

  • The Road Trip from Hell Winner

    road tripMy students know that I love a road trip. There is nothing quite like climbing into a church van and driving to a destination. So a few weeks back YMX decided to have a contest to find out “Who has the worst road trip story?”

    It turned out that my NYWC buddy Chris Wyatt of South Carolina (and an adoptive parent newly back from Ethiopia) had the craziest story. This beats any road trip nightmare ever! Read the rest of the stories. If you like ironies, check out how Gospel.com avoided using the word “hell.”

    Here’s the winner:

    We’ll start with the fact that the last 20 miles of the trip took 2.5 hrs, driving over steep, curvy mountain roads in a whiteout. It snowed three feet in those two hrs. I was driving a loaded van, pulling a 10 ft. trailer, leading a caravan of several other vehicles. We couldn’t pull off of the road, and cars were going into ditches all around us. So, after 12 hrs of driving, we finally get to the lodge. We wake up the following morning to 18 degree temps and strong cross-winds. As we are walking to get the kids their skis, we start down a set of steps. One of our chaperones promptly falls on an icy step and breaks her ankle. Badly. I wrap my coat around her, and take off looking for ski patrol. We hook her up to a sled, and get her the infirmary. I then have to dig our van out of the snow (more than an hour), and go off the road twice driving to the infirmary. The nearest hospital with the facilities to help is almost two hours away over icy mountain roads. We FINALLY get to the hospital, and they tell us she needs surgery. They don’t have the facilites to do the surgery. So they put her in an air cast and send us back to the lodge. We get to the lodge and there are no wheelchairs, so we have to carry her to the room on a luggage rack. We get her settled in and drugged up, and my phone rings. It’s the ski patrol office. I have another girl with an injury, and one of my boys has been in a collision that required the other party in said collision to be airlifted out with a kidney injury (NOT my kid’s fault). So he’s been stuck in the patrol office all day, as he can only be released to his legal guardian (me for that trip…the other party tried to sue him for the wreck, and it went to court…our kid won). I take care of the injury, get the kid back on the slopes. The following day weather is so bad that no one can ski. Every kid at the place was holed up in the lodges. For a whole day. We start the trip back the following day. Our chaperone with the shattered ankle has never been in the mountains before this. She is doped up on painkillers. We are about 10 minutes into the trip when she suddently projectile vomits – right into the back of my wife’s head. There’s nowhere to stop for another 20 miles or so until we get to the bottom of the mountain. We finally stop, and I clean vomit up off of the van while my wife goes into the bathroom to try to clean the chunks out of her hair. Well, you know what happens when a van full of people has to smell vomit for hours. Everyone started chunking, and we had to stop every 30 minutes or so to empty out plastic bags full of barf. One of the vehicles broke down, another got lost from the caravan. It took us over 15 hrs to make what SHOULD have been an 8 hr. trip. On top of that, three kids ran out of money, and I had to foot their meals on the promise from their parents that I would be repaid on arrival. Did I ever see that cash? Nay.

  • Will you pray for my ministry?

    Tonight we are starting something new. In a lot of way I wish I had access to this new thing years ago. At Romeo, we say “small groups are where life change happens.” And I am entering into this new study, Life Hurts… God Heals, truly praying to see that come to life. I long to see this study connect hurting students to a God who heals.

    Will you pray with me that life-change will occur as we help our students deal with some realities in their lives? Will you pray that as we deal with the “real stuff” in their lives that they will open themselves up to the healing that comes from God?

    Why are you teaching this? Let’s face it, 100% of us and 105% of our students are hurting somehow. I want to equip them with the skills to face their “stuff” and I want to equip them with the skill to help their friends face their stuff.

    Want to learn more about what we’re teaching? Check out this link

    Want to see your student get involved? We’d love to hear from parents or students, shoot me an email or leave a comment. mclanea@gmail.com

  • Blog notes

    Careful observers of adammclane.com will notice that I constantly tinker. Anyone who has met me in person knows that I’m a total gadget geek. I sat next to a friend at a meeting yesterday and she kind of laughed at me as I casually hooked up my gadgets. I turned my phone into a mobile wifi router, popped open the macbook, and posted notes about the meeting on my twitter account. (Appears here as the mini-blog) That’s the kind of thing I do all the time. I am a relentless multi-tasker. And I have a serious appetite for all things web-geek.


    So, a couple changes worth noting.
    – I tweaked the about me page as I saw it was getting read a lot.
    – I added my rules for blogging to the tabs up top.
    – I created an ability to rate posts. It’s super simple to do, completely anonymous, and a fun way to tell me what you think of a post.

    These are all pretty minor. But worth pointing out as I rearrange the furniture here and there.

  • The highlight of the Oscars

    If you missed the Oscars last night, this is the can’t miss moment of the night. Kristen and I watched this film… great story. (A little too much music for me) But the song is incredible.

    HT to Kristen and First Showing

  • Simply Youth Ministry is Getting It

    I consider the folks over at Simply to be my friends. I will admit that when I first started to get to know them they were a bit intimidating. But they are great folks that any youth worker should get to know.

    They are a couple of year’s into a competition with Youth Specialties for convention dollars. YS has run the very popular National Youth Workers Convention for years and then Simply partnered with another publisher to create the National Youth Ministry Conference. Let me make a quick observation about Simply’s marketing efforts.

    YS has found an edge (in the Seth Godin kind of way), their conference goes after the arts and goes after social justice and those types of things. From a marketing standpoint that’s their angle and they are doing quite well with it. The Simply/Group folks have found a different edge as they try to catch up to YS. They are going to appeal to their audience with silly stuff and videos like the one below. They must have discovered that this is what their audience likes.

    When it comes to marketing, there are two initial things that have to be done before you can succeed.
    1. Define your audience, including what they like.
    2. Define your competition

    HT to Andy

    This post was edited on 2/27 to clarify what I was saying a little better. It could have been misinterpreted, and for that I’m sorry.

  • Kristen’s Dream Bed

    igloo bedMy wife is a bookworm. While I struggle to finish books before they are due at the library, Kristen reads 4-5 books per week. In turn, Kristen has turned my children into bookworms as well and the highlight of their week is the trip to the library to pick up new books and take back the old.

    Her dream job would be to run a children’s bookstore or work at a library or somehow find herself surrounded by books 24 hours per day.

    So when I saw this I instantly thought of Kristen. When I showed it to her she said, “Oh I want that!”

    HT to Cory Doctorow

  • Notre Dame is a Lock for the Big Dance

    notre dame logoAs a Notre Dame fan there hasn’t been a lot to be excited about for football. But with the basketball team things are looking great. At 21-5, Mike Brey and his Irish team have pretty much sealed the deal for getting into the group of 64 for March Madness.

    I’ve watched them in about 4 games this year. In each they have been in control, working together, and are always displaying great sportsmanship.

    The hope is that they make it to the Sweet 16 or beyond. It’s awful fun to have something to cheer about out of South Bend.