With the launch of lightforceministries.com I have started to wonder how I can possibly start using the internet in a more effective manner in communicating with my students, parents, and web passerbys.

I wonder:

Can we use marketing techniques to draw interest to our ministry?

Can I draw the curious without spooking them?



I’m trying this on a limited basis now and plan on trying it some more as time goes on. There is even a sign-up for the LF newsletter below. If it goes well I plan on creating one for the church as well. More on this to come.

As I reflect on this post, I am amazed at the millions of different direction my job takes me on any given day. Absolutely amazing.

It kind of feels good to be at work this morning. Even though I didn’t get the week long vacation that a lot of others took and I didn’t even get to take 2 consecutive days off, I still feel refreshed and happy to be here today.

I am trying hard not to come up with new goals for 2005 since I already have so many for the 2004-2005 school year. I like to take the summer to reflect and rebuild for the year to come.

Along the lines of a good start for 05 is that I finished half of my reading for grad school this week. I completed the first 15 chapters of A History of Christian Education last night. I’ll get started on Church History in Plain Language later today.

I’ve also got a running start on Sunday school for this week, as well as a syllabus for the whole Winter quarter. I’ve even got the summer schedule put together for Sunday school. Don’t tell anyone, but the youth guy might be the most organized guy in the whole church! Ssshhh!

Light Force is a little less planned. The worship team will be practicing music on Tuesday afternoon. (Way late!) I’d also like to get a schedule for talks for the whole series on Revelation but that may get done while I’m down in Huntington. It would be nice if I could come up with a clever title for the series and everything. (That part would need to be done before Wednesday.)

I do know that I’ll be interrupting the series to do the love and dating and infatuation series in February… But beyond that I don’t anticipate any interruptions.

There is something so cyclical about the calendar. Perhaps God designed us for the ups and downs of the lunar calendar or perhaps we’ve merely adapted ourselves? That’s a good question not worth exploring right now.

Ever discover an old pile of books or something? I have them all over the place. I’ll read a book and then just put it on the bookshelf. If you do that for a few years you end up with quite a little collection of books!

Well, I’ve decided to start unloading some of that old stuff. Within a few minutes I had listed 20 items on Amazon.com’s marketplace. All you have to do is put the ISBN number and your selling price and wham-O… It’s for sale.

So far I’ve sold 2 books and made about $15.00. It’s not much, but it is turning dust collectors into greenbacks. Not bad, eh? I highly doubt this will ever become some sort of income… But there are a lot of little things you can do or sell that if put together do amount to something.

It’s a tiny bit, but it is profit. I’ll take any kind of profit I can get these days!

As much as I had fun with the 8 Crazy Nights theme… I am very happy to see everyone get back to the routine of going to school. Likewise, I’m fairly pleased to have the Light Force schedule scale down to 2-3 events a month outside of regular meetings.

Oddly, I am also looking forward to the self-torture of school myself. I’ll never get over the irony of paying someone to torture me with more education. Why don’t schools pay me to take classes? It seems only fair… Unless you are a teacher.

Megan with her prized Christmas present… the elefun game! 

this is Paul doing one of his favorite tasks lately… destroying the cabinets! 

this is the pool table I’ve been trying to refinish. it’s at about 90% complete and should be done Sunday afternoon at the latest 

It seems the number is going up all the time. The scope of this tsunami is so large it is hard to contemplate a number that large. 120,000 people is about the size of the city I grew up in, South Bend, Indiana.

As this article notes, the news from Southwest Asia put a major damper on celebrations throughout the globe and certainly in the U.S. It was very noticeable that the major TV networks were downplaying the New Year’s celebration. Likewise, there were no major celebrations mentioned on the local TV channels.

Somber start for 2005.

After a lot of fiddling around and hand wrenching about it… I finally moved the youth group page off of the churches website and onto it’s own domain.

The hope for this is that it will help to create an online community of sorts. That may be a long shot, but that is the goal. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be purchasing new and better software for creating, updating, and maintaining the churches sites… this is a big part of it.

One of the other deep dark desires is that we will be able to create a blog of our Northern Ireland team as we prepare and tackle this massive project. Of course, there are other fish to fry as well in Light Force and in my own life.

But it is nice to see little accomplishments along the way.

Just as the the ball in Times Square was being prepared to drop and all is finalized for our Northern Ireland mission trip, we’ve added the 8th and final team member.

Presuming all are accepted, the team will consist of 6 females and 2 males. Interestingly, only 3 team members will be attending high school after the trip is over.

With exactly 5 months to go, we only need another $15,600. Not too shabby, eh?