For a couple weeks now, I have been dissatisfied with the modern worship songs we’ve been singing in our church. The music is great, the beats are fun, the lyrics are powerful, but honestly, they aren’t very deep.

In particular, the majority of modern rock-style worship music puts God in the second person. Everything is about how great “You” are or about our relationship as humans to “You.” The problem with that kind of music is that it only works for people who have a relationship with God close enough to call him “You.” There are many people for whom God is only “God” or “He” and there are many times in our lives when we need to remember that God is “God” and not just another “You.”

In that light, I put some thoughts together this past week to write a song that would begin to reexamine for myself what a song about God might be like if it just told us about him.

It’s not a great song (please don’t flatter me by telling me it is great). It may have some potential to be rewritten, though. And on that note, I’ll post it here for you to hear if you make me a promise: Only listen if you are willing and ready to offer constructive criticism.

If the melody doesn’t work for you, tell me that. If the lyrics don’t work well, tell me that. If the instrumentation doesn’t work for you, tell me that. If my singing doesn’t work for you… well, you can keep that to yourself. I’m under no delusion that I’m anything special vocally.

Anyway, without further ado, here is “Our God”.

Our God (Second Rough Draft)

The first few chapters are all about counting the people of Israel. This tribe has 60,000 people. That tribe has 40,000 people. With twelve tribes to go through, the lists of numbers and names of people can get tedious.

But once again, God proved himself faithful by showing me something I hadn’t thought of before. In chapter 2, God tells Moses to arrange all the people into their tribal camps around the Tabernacle. We are told which tribes should be on the east, west, north and south, but we are also told who the leaders should be and how many people there are.

Here’s an example:

On the east, toward the sunrise, the divisions of the camp of Judah are to encamp under their standard. The leader of the people of Judah is Nahshon son of Amminadab. His division numbers 74,600. — Numbers 2:3-4

The people are given position leadership and identity. That is, they are told where they should be, who will be their leader, and whom they should consider to be among them (the 74,600 people).

For some time, I have been laboring under the somewhat misguided notion that to be a “simple” church, we had to deemphasize organizational structure. The postmodern (and somewhat ADD) side of me doesn’t like rigid structures anyway, but in many respects, I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I have allowed “simplicity” to be an excuse for failing to actually organize people with specific position, leadership, and identity.

The truth of the matter is that without those three things, there is no group at all.

This has been made more clear to me in the last few weeks. Up until this summer, we have basically been surviving as a church by the fact that one person was doing all the hospitality stuff, one person was doing all the sound stuff, we had a few teams loosely led, and we have a pretty well-organized children’s ministry, but as more people started coming and wanting to get involved, the hospitality team seemed like the most natural early fit, and the influx of new people has revealed a few gaps in our organizational structure.

So, I have been inspired recently to get more focused on organizational issues, and my reading today dovetails perfectly with that. If I can gain from what God showed me this morning, I will be developing greater clarity on the identity, position, and leadership of the different teams in the church.

Hold my feet to the fire; we gotta get this done!

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I’ve washed over it quite often. I’ve filled my life with entertainment, tasks, busywork, meetings, and even family responsibilities because of course those things need to be done, but then when I’m alone in the quiet again, and I allow my soul to quiet down, I sense the lack.

My lack is not a lack of knowledge. Although I know there is much still I have to learn, this next level is one you have already taught me about.

My lack is not a lack of desire. I’ve been longing to go to this next level with you for a long time without actually getting there.

Now, I’m convinced that my lack is not a lack of your willingness to take me to the next level. I’m certain that you have something for me.

My lack is mostly a lack of faith—will I step up onto this new level or not?

What’s holding me back? Fear mostly. What if I step up, and you aren’t there? What if I step up and people I love don’t understand? What if I step up, but I fall on my face because I’m not actually ready?

Lord, I want greater depth with you. Lead me deeply into the waters of who you are. Open my heart to see with the eyes of faith where you are moving, and prepare me for the step to come.

• At T.G.I. Friday’s (where I just started to work part-time as a waiter), I had a section of two tables only, but in the brief couple hours of lunch, I managed to make over $30 in tips from only $140 in sales. That means I was making people happy and they were tipping me more than 20%. Man that was a good feeling!
• As soon as work was done, I talked to a core member of our church who has decided to go with his wife and kids to another new church in town. He was supposed to be our drummer for the week, so I spent all afternoon trying to reschedule another drummer and plan a time for practice. None of it came together until about 7pm, and I didn’t get back from practice till after 10:30pm!
• Though I got 4 hours of sleep and a late start this morning for church, I prayed and asked God to help me have a positive attitude despite the potential stresses of the morning (our first Sunday in the swanky Holiday Inn downtown.) He answered the prayer by giving me an absolutely incredible worship service for me. I was really sensing His presence at work in me and in the people who came. I felt great about it. (Even though we had some big issues with the sound system and the computer).
• When service was done, I met a man who volunteered to join our setup team for next week!
• But soon after that, I encountered some people who had been completely frustrated by the hassles of today’s setup and tear-down process with a healthy dose of fear regarding the financial future of the church.

All in all, I had a great weekend personally, but I’m surrounded by frustrated people, and I feel responsible for their frustration.

Lord, teach me the lesson you have for me in this quickly so that I can bring some healing and restoration to others and repair some relationships. Give me the ability beyond myself to organize the systems of the church well. And Lord, please meet our financial needs.

• I mowed the lawn.
• I read a chapter from Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time
• I sent an email to Greg, Kyle, and Josh about our Four Guys and God meeting. (We are going to work through the 10 commandments in our discipleship).
• I’ve taken a closer look at the ning.com social network creation site to see if that would work better than maintaining our own church website.
• I processed a few emails.
• I wrote three blog entries.
• I printed mailing labels for 350 postcards and affixed them to the cards (Jen helped).
• I invited some neighbors over for dinner.
• I read the kids their bedtime story and got them in bed while Jen was at Bible Study

Here’s my productivity list for last Wednesday (July 24):

• Read about internet marketing — 60 mins.
• Blogged my Monday productivity — 15 mins.
• Devotion and Prayer — 10 mins.
• fix look of blog and add comments — 10 mins.
• Completed survey for research project on church planters — 40 mins.
• Lunch and playing with Charlie — 1.25 hrs.
• Processing voicemail and cleaning out email Inbox (finally) — 3 hrs.
• Phone calls throughout the afternoon — 30 mins.
• Evening phone calls — 60 mins.

(I didn’t even get a list done for Thursday.)

Analysis of the week

At the end of last week and throughout the week, I determined that productivity for me isn’t something I can just willpower my way into. I’m generally a very active person mentally, and my tendency to be distracted means that I’m regularly failing to finish projects all the way. I didn’t even get all my daily blog entries written last week (and it’s already Wednesday of this week!)

All in all, I think it was a good experiment, and I hope that some of the more obvious things I’ve learned will help me be more productive.

Things I Learned

As a result, here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1. Productivity for me will not happen without a list of daily goals. More specifically, as I looked at the list of things I actually did each day, I realized that though many of them were beneficial to my overall ministry, not many of them were essential or high priority items.

2. Productivity for me will not happen in a “distractable” environment. My tendencies toward ADD make it very easy for me to follow mental rabbit trails. For example, reading my email through Gmail leads to me seeing news clips that interest me. Thinking that I can read the story in only a few seconds, I click on the link, but that story will have other links to more information, and before I know it, I’m deeply embedded in open Firefox tabs with a sense that I have to read them all before I can get back to answering that email.

3. The mundane, mindless, routine tasks of ministry are the most dangerous for time-wasting because during those tasks, my brain is allowed to work overtime on discovering rabbit trails. For example, while my weekly sermon is being encoded and uploaded to the Internet Archive, I can do other things with the computer and that usually means frittering.

4. The biggest thing I learned is that the most important tasks on my todo list create a kind of paralyzing guilt that hampers my productivity.

Let me explain that last point. I need to write a sermon every week for church on Sunday. I know that the process of writing a really good sermon takes me about 20 hours, but that I can create a pretty good sermon in only 8 hours. As a result, something very strange happens in my mind as the week moves on.

If I don’t get an early start on my message, I face a daily increasing level of stress as the week moves on. Because I feel so much pressure to get my message done, I feel guilty doing any other ministry. I don’t want to meet with people, I don’t want to make phone calls, and I don’t want to have any meetings because to do any of those things feels like I’m stealing from sermon prep time. If I do some ministry that isn’t sermon prep, I actually feel guilty and unproductive. However, if I put in a 4 hour block of time on my sermon, I feel the logistical pressure of needing to make phone calls, meet with people, and call meetings. So working on my sermon feels like stealing from other ministry.

My problem is that I have no internal sense of process. For me, everything is right now and nothing that should be done should wait to be done. As a result, I simply can never determine emotionally which ministry I should do right now. Make phone calls or work on sermon. Whichever I choose, I end up feeling guilty that I didn’t do the other one. I’ve been this way for long enough that I’ve grown to expect it and anticipate the guilty feeling even before I’ve made the choice and quite often the end result is that I do neither. I escape into family time, reading time, web browsing, email or mindless routine items.

I just spent about 15 minutes browsing the ‘Net to see if there were any blogs that addressed procrastination, but I’m back now!

Strategy for Going Forward

To answer my four learning points above, I’m suggesting this to myself and to you as a possible strategy:

1. Set aside 4 hours each Monday for sermon prep without Internet access with a primary goal of getting draft sermon outlines done 2 weeks before the Sunday they are needed (I want to move this to 4 weeks before it’s needed).
2. Use Sunday afternoon to do sermon podcast stuff until I can recruit someone else to do that for me.
3. While the podcast is encoding/uploading on Sundays, I’ll make calls based on communication cards thus keeping me off the computer.
4. Each day, I’ll make a list of things to accomplish and identify which ones can happen on the computer and how long those will take.
5. BONUS: I don’t think I can make this happen because of the distractability thing, but I’d like to publish my daily todo list to the Internet so that I’ll be more accountable for how I spend my time.

• Devotional study of Psalm 116 (BI: Those who know God’s salvation respond with love.) — 30 minutes
• Prayer bike ride through a new neighborhood — 60 minutes
• Blog about my productivity experiment — 40 minutes
• Work on processing audio for Sunday’s sermon — 25 minutes
• Make lunch for kids and watch AFV with them — 60 minutes
• Finishing sermon audio process and upload — 30 minutes
• Reloaded home Email Server — 20 minutes
• Converted a Simpsons video for my Palm Pilot — 10 minutes
• Blogged my sermon — 10 minutes
• Made dinner for the kids and watched a movie with them — 2.5 hours
• Hanging out with Jen, working on miscellaneous household things for the rest of the evening.

Analysis

According to my productivity experiment, here’s how my day broke down.

Personal

• Prayer: 60 minutes
• Bible: 30 minutes
• Other Books: 0 minutes
• Total: 1.5 hours

Family

• Time with kids: 3.5 hours
• Time with Jen: 2 hours
• Total 5.5 hours

Mission

• Direct contact: 1 person (15 minutes)
• Spiritual conversation: 0
• Strategic planning : 0
• Total 15 minutes

Routine

• Managing home: 20 minutes (fixed email server)
• Managing church: 65 minutes (blogged Sunday’s sermon)
• Total 1.5 hours

Wow! As I look at this list, I’m thinking “That’s how I’m starting my week long productivity experiment?” It doesn’t look very productive to me. I’m going to have to do better.

Just yesterday, I preached a message on how we can actually find fulfillment in our pains and struggles, and I was thinking that something uncomfortable for me is the bearing down into a routine of productivity. Along those lines, I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about how much I’m really capable of and whether or not I’m really capable of more than I usually accomplish in a week.

Therefore, I’m embarking on a contest with myself to see just how productive I can be for only one week. (I like short sprints better than long races, so I’m telling myself that it will just be for this one week.)

My plan is simple. I intend to write one blog post every day detailing what I did that day according to a few key productivity markers. I’ve chosen these “markers” to be the measurables by which I can attempt to see daily improvement. However, these are in rough form right now, so I’m sure they will change over the course of this week or any other week I do this experiment.

Productivity Markers:

Personal

• How much time have I spent in prayer?
• How much time have I spent reading the Bible?
• How much time have I spent reading other books?

Family

• How much time have I spent with my kids?
• How much time have I spent with my wife?

Mission

• How many people have I had direct, personal contact with?
• How many people have I had a spiritual conversation with?
• How much time have I invested in strategic planning for the church?

Routine

• How much time have I invested in managing home details — and what did I accomplish?
• How much time have I invested in managing church details — and what do I have to show for it?

Suggestions? What are some of your suggestions for how I should be measuring my productivity?

Last Sunday was our Grand Opening service as a church and I am excited to report that we had between 140-150 people there. We never got an accurate count, but this is how we came up with those numbers:

• 24 Elementary School Kids
• 6 Babies in the Nursery
• 9 Children’s Ministry Workers
• 100 Bulletins handed out (when we ran out)

I’ve tried to be conservative and stick with 140, but my wife is pressing me to say 150! and I’m usually the one who does the exaggerating!

If you want to hear the message I preached or watch the video, it will be posted here soon or you can get to it by visiting our church audio page.

God is bigger than we imagine.

My coach told me a couple of months ago, “Remember, Jeff, no one loves this church more than you and Jesus.”

I was getting kinda frustrated because of the number of people I had been trying to recruit and the slim number of people who were responding. He told me that to remind me that no one would care about the church like I do, but that Jesus cared about it more than even I did. That really helped to encourage me.

And Jesus does care about this church.

On March 18, we had our final preview service and I had the joy of preaching to a crowd of about 15 adults. The very next week, I had the privilege of preaching a message to a crowd of over 100. It was utterly mind-blowing to me!

If you were there on Sunday…

I just wanted to say that if you were there on Sunday, I am so grateful for you. You could have spent your Sunday morning in many different ways, but you chose to come out and be a part of our Grand Opening Event, and more than that, you chose to take a risk and see what God might be doing in this brand new ministry.

God has something really great in store for us, and I believe he wants us to experience it together, but that isn’t all. I think the biggest thing he has in store for us is for us to find our identity in the process of helping other people to discover how much God loves them.

We are just beginning a journey together. It will be a bumpy ride at times, but it will certainly be an adventure.

If you have been praying for us…

You also deserve a special thanks. There have been so many of you praying for us and supporting us financially, that I really am humbled. I’m afraid I will miss someone here, but I just think you all deserve thanks. You know why:

Thank You

Jennifer Asinugo, Mike Atwell, Nellie Aujero, Alexandrina Balanean, Charlie & Lea Battleday, David & Carole Beckwith, Jim & Deb Cartwright, Brian & Melissa Chupich, Sonlife Community Church, James & Katheryn Cross, Herb & Paula Frost, Gloria Greene, Jodi Hanson, Gerald Hawthorne, Dorothy Herschelroath, Rynn Hill, Mark Jacobsen, Mike & Jill Kaminski, Rhonda Kerr, Gary Krebs, David & Stacy Laneve, Chuck & Amy Larish, Larry & Claudia Lasiter, Dan & Mary Martin, Mark & Linda Mikels, Keith & Marian Mikels, Sadie Mikels, Jason & Brooke Miller, Dr. & Mrs. Tom Miller, Marion Mockler, Tom & Chris Nalian, Rob & Chris Nelson, Mark & Amy Peterson, Stephen & Jill Puett, Ken & Cheryl Reynolds, Gary Rohrmayer, Dorothy Samorajski, Greg & Laura Shackleford, Jim & Wendy Sheely, Austin Smith, Jeff & Debbie Spencer, Lorraine Spencer, Joel & Becky Sutton, Josh & Valerie Thomas, Grant & Betty Tregay, Tommy & Bonnie Troup, Zack Turner, Mike & Tammie VanDeripe, Cindy & Rick Veith, Gloria Walker, Richard Wollard, Meadowland Community Church, Tim and Lisa Beavis, Bethany Baptist Church, Community Reformed Church, Tony Suitor, Kathy Abretske, Northwest Baptist Church, Irene Portokalis, Merrill Avenue Baptist Church, Hannis & Kim Thompson, First Assembly of God in Lafayette.

If I’ve forgotten someone, just send me a reminder email or post a comment, and I’ll put you on the list too.

Anyway, we had some really neat things happen Sunday and we learned some more good lessons.

Marketing

Because our Grand Opening is this coming Sunday (the 25th), we didn’t market last week as much as we had last month. I did send out a cool postcard to all those on our mailing list.

Here, you can see the postcard we mailed out.

Also, because of how long the signs took to put together last time, I had our signs professionally printed, and I set them up the day before. Here’s what one of them looked like.

Also, you might be interested to see the banner I set up on the corner of the school’s property.

I got all the signs put up on Saturday including an additional banner on some columns in front of the school.

Also, on Saturday, Josh came over and helped me load up the truck so that we didn’t have to do any loading on Sunday morning. It made everything go so much more smoothly in the morning.

Morning Preparation

Because last month’s morning got off to a slow start, I asked everyone to be at our house at 8:30am this time. Everyone was there by 8:45 and we were able to pray together before loading up the truck.

Yes, I did say truck! This was our first day to use the truck, and it was also our first time using the equipment that came from Willowbrook Community Church. Their sound equipment is much more elaborate than what we had been using.

Somehow we did get a little delayed at our house. I think the prayer time took a little longer than I had thought it might, but that’s not a bad thing. Anyway, we got to the school at about 9:15, and then unloaded everything.

Attendance

Our total numbers weren’t much more than they have been for any of our other services, but something about it felt really good. It especially felt good because between last month’s service and this one, three members of our worship team stepped down. However, we made up the loss in numbers with quite a few new faces.

The coolest story of the morning was one family that was on their way to visit another church when they saw our signs and recalled our TV spots. So they decided to stop on in and check us out.

Here our numbers:

• Children – 12
• Adults – 20
• Total Attendance – 32

Sermon

My morning message was entitled God Is Love and the best part of the message is when I took the “love passage” from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 and asked people to consider substituting “God” for every instance of the word “love.” Here’s the verse from the NIV:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. — 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

I then asked people to consider which of those promises was God’s promise to them for that morning. Try it yourself.

However, I failed to get my MP3 recorder set up properly, so I didn’t get a recording of the service. I’m kinda bummed by that, but what are you going to do?

Lessons Learned

During our debrief lunch following the service, we discussed some lessons learned for the next time. Here they are:

• We need to get some extra equipment
  • 1/8″ stereo mini plug cable
  • 3 Speakon cables (2×25′ and 1×50′)
  • smaller box for AV cables that can fit in the cabinet
  • a mobile cart for our computer and projector so we don’t have to use the microwave stand from the cafeteria.
  • Latex Gloves for the Nursery
  • a hand truck / dolly for getting stuff off the truck better.
  • Trough or cooler with ice for water bottles
  • Bread bags for people to take the donated bread home
  • More water bottles
• We need to darken the room (the screen was getting washed out by the light coming in the back windows)
• We need to make up some cards for nursery workers to easily communicate to parents what happened with their kids (what snacks they got, if they took a nap, if their diaper was changed).

Well, that’s about it. Next week is our Grand Opening. I’ll write another post on our plans for that.

I’m not sure why it was such a struggle to get people to come to our house for a meeting on Sunday night, but Sunday morning seems to work out a lot better. We now gather for breakfast followed by a time of worship songs and interactive teaching, and for the past two weeks we have had pretty good attendance.

Another benefit has been that we are able to have a second meeting each week to focus on planning. For some reason, having two weekly evening meetings also seemed like a hardship, but now, having the morning gathering on Sunday, we can have another meeting to focus more on the planning end of things.

I’ve been feeling pretty good about it all.

http://jeff.mikels.cc/wiki/doctrinal_statements

REVELATION

General Revelation

I believe that God has made Himself known to all people at all times and in all places. He has revealed Himself through the grandeur and the intricacies of the natural world (Ps 19:1-4), the moral awareness of the human conscience (Ro 2:15), and the faculties of human reason (Ps 14:1; Ro 1:21-22).

I believe that this general revelation communicates all that is necessary for people to be accountable before God. Since general revelation testifies to God’s existence, God’s moral requirements, and God’s supremacy, people are without excuse (Heb 11:6; Ro 1:20, 2:13-15). However, no one will come to proper relationship with God through general revelation alone. Humans universally repress what is made known through general revelation, reject God, and refuse to submit to Him (Ps 14:1-3; Ro 1:18-23).

Special Revelation

I believe that God has revealed Himself with more particularity to specific people at specific times for the purposes of reconciling them to Himself. In His great mercy, God has made Himself known through dreams, visions, saving acts, theophanies, and prophetic teaching (Ge 12:7, 15:1; Ex 6:6-7; Lev 22:32-33; Dt 5:5; 1Ki 3:5; Dan 2:28; Heb 1:1).

I believe that special revelation consists of both propositional truth about God and personal encounter with God. The simplest form of special revelation is God’s direct speech to prophets and to others through them (Ex 3:6ff; Jer 2:1; Ez 3:16ff.).

I believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, divinely inspired human agents to record special revelation in the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. This inspiration is such that the written words of Scripture are fully the words of God and fully the words of the human who penned them. Thus, they reflect the personalities and proclivities of the individual authors but are the completely inerrant communication of God to people. That is, the Scriptures as the authors originally intended them are entirely free from error in all matters to which they pertain. They are the final authority of faith and life (Ro 3:2, 16:25ff.; 2Ti 3:16f.; 2Pe 1:20f.).

I believe that Jesus himself is the ultimate revelation of God. In him is prophetic teaching, saving act, and theophany (Jn 14:9; Heb 1:2).

I believe that God continues to reveal Himself specially through the prophetic teaching of the Scriptures, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and the other means already mentioned. However, all present day revelation stands under the Scriptures even as the Scriptures stand under the revelation found in Jesus (Jn 1:1ff.; Heb 1:1-3).

Last Friday, we experienced a great success in ministry. We served people free mugs of hot chocolate and coffee in front of Wal-Mart. It was a great experience.

It came to me on Black Friday

The whole idea came to me last year on the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday” as it has been called) while I was standing in line at a Best Buy store in the bitter cold of November in Chicago. I don’t even remember what was on sale that I thought was so important that I should wake up at 3:30 am and stand in line from 4 am until 5 am. I don’t remember what I was waiting for, but I remember how cold it was.

As I was standing there, I saw some people holding cups of coffee or hot chocolate, and I saw some ambitious types passing out flyers to the people standing in line, and I got the idea for a servant evangelism campaign. Servant evangelism, by the way, refers to a ministry where believers simply serve other people because the good news really is good news. It is nothing like traditional types of evangelism. It’s sharing the good news by doing something good for someone.

My idea was to go to the stores on Black Friday next year and give people a cup of hot chocolate with a little note saying that it was a free gift from our church. I thought about it because I was cold, and I really wish someone else had been walking down that row offering people free hot drinks!

Reality Is Sweeter than Dreams

This year, since I’m in the middle of a church planting venture and my level of freedom to take big risks has been expanded quite a bit, I determined that I wanted to put my plan into action. I shared the idea with our launch team, and even though we were all concerned about the possible expense of it all, the idea shifted from a me idea to an us idea.

The final idea was to purchase travel mugs with our name on them so that we were giving people something of value they could keep with them as they shopped rather than something they would look to dispose of quickly. We decided to set up a station in front of the newly opened Wal-Mart on Lafayette’s southside and to begin not at the “Black Friday” stampede time, but to go at 9 am when the shoppers would be less obsessed and might actually be able to stop and talk with us for a few minutes. We also decided to give away a $25 gift card to Wal-Mart so that we could entice people to fill out a registration card. Finally, we decided to have both hot chocolate and coffee available for people.

From that point on God worked all the pieces out perfectly:

• The older Wal-Mart in town rejected our proposal, but Kris at the prime target new Wal-Mart told us that it was the coolest idea she had ever heard and thought it would be a great blessing to their customers that day.
• Angie, the owner of the nearby coffee shop that donated coffee to our information meeting, agreed to also provide coffee for our giveaway. As we later discovered, she gave us her best coffee that day—coffee which retails for over $27 per pound!
• DiscountMugs.com ended up providing the best price for our mugs. We got them for under $3 each including a rush order, printing on both sides, and shipping! In fact, the mugs arrived two days early! About 5% of the mugs were damaged, missing or unusable, but we are still waiting to hear from the company if they will do anything about it. Nonetheless, the mugs we received looked great!
• Jen and Katie (yes that Katie) washed nearly 550 mugs by hand to make sure that they were clean before we gave them to people filled with hot chocolate.
• overnightprints.com printed 1000 beautiful postcards for us at an awesome price so we could have some informational piece to hand out. Those came early too.
• Laura and Kyle joined Jen and me at Wal-Mart while Jen’s mom came down to watch the kids.
• Jen and her mom boiled maybe 30-40 gallons of water throughout the day, and both Jen and Laura took turns shuttling coffee and carafes back and forth to the Euro Cafe across the street.

At the end of the day

We arrived at Wal-Mart just before 9 am, and were passing out mugs of hot chocolate and coffee within minutes. By 5 pm, we had handed out over 500 southside church travel mugs, received 195 registrations for the gift card contest, and took $0 in donations despite a number of people who really wanted to give us money! We also got to meet a number of people who were really astounded that we were doing what we were doing, and a few of those people are currently looking for a church.

All in all, it was an incredible day. God kept us safe, gave us favor with Wal-Mart and Euro Cafe II, led people to our table, and even made sure we had all the mugs, postcards, hot chocolate mix and everything else that we needed to have a great day.

Oh, one more thing. I know I already mentioned it, but it really should be mentioned again. Jen washed 550 mugs, and boiled nearly 40 gallons of water in addition to shopping for the best hot chocolate mix, getting the tablecloths, getting huge insulated containers, and much more. Send her a note of appreciation if you can.

See my Tabblo>

I wasn’t interested in calling him at that moment, though because I had been thinking about getting in touch with the head of Purdue’s Campus Crusade ministry, and that was on my mind, but this fellow was the next one on my list, so I just decided to call him anyway.

He picked up the phone and as always seemed very excited to hear from me, but this he was even more excited and told me about a couple guys he’s been sharing his faith with. One of those guys was there with him and wanted to talk to me! I talked with him for a bit and suggested that he go through our Bible 101 program. He seemed interested, and I said that maybe all four of us could get together sometime to start it.

He passed me back to the first guy who then asked me, “So why’d you call me? Were you just thinking about me or what?” I told him that actually I had been calling to see if he would be willing to let me lead a Bible study at his house for him and some of his friends, and that it seemed like he already had some guys who would be interested. He said, “Well, that seems like something God wants me to do!”

Then, just before we both hung up, he said, “Thanks for being obedient.” There’s no way he could have known what an encouragement those few words are, but they were. I hadn’t really felt like making that call at that time, but it was just about the perfect time for the call, and he knew it, so he said, “Thanks for being obedient.”

So let me be the first to say to you, if you have been struggling with something and you aren’t sure whether you should follow God’s promptings or not, do it, tell me, and I’ll say to you, “Thanks for being obedient!”

It has been a while since my last post here, but that’s been for a good reason. For the past month, I’ve been working on getting ready for Southside Church’s first public information meeting. We held it last Sunday evening at McCutcheon High School here in Lafayette.

For the past month, we have been putting together marketing materials, soliciting donations, securing the location, and organizing the service. We passed out by hand maybe 800 invitation postcards and mailed about 100 to our mailing list. We put flyers up at local businesses, we sent out email invitations, and we talked about it to everyone we knew.

It ended up being a really good evening. Here are the details:

• It was September 10, 2006, 6:30pm – 8:00pm in the choir room at McCutcheon High School.
• Tarah Kitchell of Tender Loving Childcare (TLCC) provided the children’s program.
• Doug Griffin, Kurt Kincanon, and Chip (?) provided the music.
• Buffalo Wild Wings donated 250 wings.
• Euro Cafe II donated about 6 thermal carafes full of gourmet coffee.
• LA Fireworks donated table coverings and such.
• Chick-fil-A donated 150 brownies.
• The Carpenter’s Son bookstore donated at least $100 worth of merchandise!
• One count had over 40 (43 I think) people in the main meeting room and we also had 11 kids and 3 workers outside with the children’s program. That put our total at nearly 60 for the evening which was exactly what we wanted in terms of numbers.
• Special guests were Brad Bush, pastor of Maple Ridge Community Church and chairman of TEAMM (Tippecanoe Evangelical Association of Ministers and Ministries), Gregory Hackett, pastor of First Assembly of God, Justin Hutts, associate pastor at Battleground Bible Church, and Gary Rohrmayer, director of Midwest Church Planting. My coach Rich Wollard wasn’t able to make it so he sent us a video clip that got lost somewhere in the tubes of cyberspace.

We sang some songs, some guests spoke for a few minutes, I gave a vision message, and then I entertained some Q&A. After that, everyone filled out a “level of interest” survey, we had a closing song, and Greg Hackett gave some final encouraging words and a closing prayer.

All in all, it was a great evening! I plan to post some video of it soon.

Thank you for your prayers.

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According to this personality test, I am an Enthusiast. Here are some quotes from the website:

• The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Acquisitive, and Scattered
• Easily become accomplished achievers, generalists who do many different things well: multi-talented. Practical, productive, usually prolific, cross-fertilizing areas of interest.
• How to motivate me. Sevens want to maintain their freedom and happiness, to avoid missing out on worthwhile experiences, to keep themselves excited and occupied, to avoid and discharge pain.
• People like me: John F. Kennedy, Benjamin Franklin, Leonard Bernstein, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Taylor, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Steven Spielberg, Federico Fellini, Richard Feynman, Timothy Leary, Robin Williams, Jim Carey, Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Bette Midler, Chuck Berry, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Gianni Versace, Liza Minelli, Joan Collins, Malcolm Forbes, Noel Coward, Sarah Ferguson, Larry King, Joan Rivers, Regis Philbin, Howard Stern, John Belushi, and “Auntie Mame” (Mame).
• My Tendencies: When moving in their Direction of Disintegration (stress), scattered Sevens suddenly become perfectionistic and critical at One. However, when moving in their Direction of Integration (growth), gluttonous, scattered Sevens become more focused and fascinated by life, like healthy Fives.

So, take the test, and tell me who you are!

The church consultant had just a few things to tell me:

1. The problems at NWBC were there long before I ever came, and in no way did I cause them.
2. My leadership was such that many of the problems that were “under the table” were brought to the surface.
3. There is nothing that I or anyone else could have done to turn the church around without the drastic process of a complete restart.

He told me that he had clearly communicated these three points to the leadership team of NWBC as well as the Executive Director of the Midwest Baptist Conference.

Therefore, the concerns he had about me were in no way related to the results at NWBC, and that alleviated my fears quite a bit.

He told me that he had done 40 interviews, and one theme came up in about 15 of those interviews while another theme came up in just about all of them.

Some people had mentioned that I wasn’t willing to do any visitation or personal pastoral care. Along with this, some gave specifics of why they perceived me to be insensitive in some way or another. I had failed to make personal face-to-face contact with them in response to certain events in their lives that I would have known about from prayer requests printed in the bulletin.

The consultant and I talked about that for a bit, and he basically told me that making personal face-to-face contact is a necessity for demonstrating to people that you care. I’m cool with that.

The second theme was that nearly everyone said something like I was stubborn or unwilling to change my mind. On that point, the consultant told me that he wasn’t really sure where it was coming from, and he didn’t even have any specifics to tell me. We talked about it a bit, and my own conclusion is that I am very firm on certain principles, and that can be perceived as a general stubbornness if there isn’t the personal connection with people to help them feel comfortable enough to really talk with me about challenging issues.

The bottom line is that I need to

• Make an extra effort to build relationships through being physically present with people rather than relying on phone calls, emails, letters, or even church programs.
• Make an effort to draw closer to people who are my antagonists rather than pulling away from them. If I withdraw from them, they will find other (more damaging) outlets for their frustration.
• Initiate opportunities for me to listen to others so that they begin to see that I really am open to talking about things and even to hear them challenge me on issues. I need to initiate those discussions to establish that the open door really is open to them.

I can do those things.

NWBC Update

It has been a few months since I left Northwest Baptist Church, and in the intervening months, NWBC has been going through a process of evaluation with a church consultant.

From what I have heard, the process has been challenging and helpful. The bottom line is that the consultant reported on some key spiritual problems in the church and asked the leadership of the church to seriously consider what the future would hold. Basically, the question boiled down to this, “Do you currently have the emotional, financial, and spiritual resources to address these problems as a church?”

The answer was, “No.”

So, the only other option for the church was to seek the help of the denominational district (The Midwest Baptist Conference) and to initiate what has been called a “restart.”

The process of a restart boils down to these things: The district identifies a church planter to be the new pastor; then the congregation affirms him; finally, the congregation hands over all assets (name, constitution, property, bank accounts, etc.) to an advisory team comprised of a district representative, the new pastor, the pastor’s coach, and a few members of the congregation. From that moment on, the previous church is officially dissolved, and the assets are used in the formation of a new church fellowship.

This model has had great success in the transformation of dead churches into living and active churches, but there are of course difficulties along the way.

Last week, the congregation voted to do a restart, and I’m glad they did.

Vindication?

Of course, there is a small part of me that wants to feel vindicated at their decision to do a restart. If I allow myself, I could feel a kind of satisfaction thinking that without me, they had no hope of surviving on their own. Or, I could think that whatever problems I faced at the church were so deeply rooted in the culture of the church that nothing could have fixed them aside from the drastic death and resurrection that comes with a restart.

A Failure?

However, in my weaker, more depressed moments, I think that since I was there for 5 years, I was part of the problem if not a key player in the problem. Certainly, I didn’t do anything to solve the problems, and that makes me feel like a failure.

Right now, I’m facing that failure issue head on because the same consultant who has declared the church spiritually hopeless has requested to have a face to face meeting with me.

• He doesn’t want to meet over the phone or tell me what he’s thinking by email—he wants a face to face meeting.
• The District Executive of the Midwest Baptist Conference knows what it’s all about and is encouraging everyone around me to have this meeting because as he says, “it’s only for Jeff’s benefit.”
• My coach who understands my situation in Lafayette a little bit is also working to get some kind of meeting, but has also hinted to me at what the topic of conversation might be.

I’m Pretty Predictable

Even without the comments of my coach, I could probably have guessed the substance of this meeting, but now that I have spoken with him, I’m pretty sure exactly what it will be about.

You see, I’m pretty predictable. If you know me, you will likely put me in one of two boxes.

• Some people put me in a box labeled: Incredibly Smart & a Good Friend.
• However, other people put me in a box labeled: Unteachable & Insensitive.

It seems clear to me that when some people see me as being smart and confident, others see me as being unteachable and unreasonable. I can understand that clearly, and I also understand that at times I really do come across as unteachable especially when I feel that I’m under a personal attack for what I believe. Honestly, unless someone treats me with respect, I don’t really want to give them the time to listen to them.

What about the sensitivity thing? Well, I’ve known since I was very young that I wasn’t really all that interested in caring deeply for people. It’s not that I didn’t want to, but more that I just didn’t have any real empathy gene in me. I was the kid who always made fun of others and didn’t really care if other people made fun of me. I didn’t really have much in the way of emotions at all. In fact, I’m still just discovering emotions for the first time over the past 15 years. So I know that I sometimes seem insensitive, but here is the irony. I can be a greatly empathetic person if people will at least tell me what’s going on with them.

With people who acknowledge their pain to me, I am a great friend. I enter into their world and yet remain myself. (I just learned this week that that’s called differentiation, and it’s a valuable if not essential characteristic for healthy relationships.) Ask people who have actually opened up to me, and you will find that each of them considers me to be a good listener and a caring advisor if not a close friend.

I do well with people who open up to me. My problem lies with people who will never acknowledge their pain to me but still expect me to somehow be sensitive to it. I just don’t have enough relational intuition to pick up on those subtle cues, and with those people, I come across as cold and insensitive.

Some see me as insensitive while others see me as deeply relational. Some see me as unteachable while others see me as bright and insightful. So, how do I see myself? I honestly don’t know anymore. I don’t know which of those boxes is the real me. Those who are close to me and those whom I trust keep me in the good box, but for the last 5 years at NWBC, there has been a seemingly interminable parade of people saying quite loudly, vehemently, and aggressively that I belonged in the bad box.

I’m sure you can sympathize with me when I say that it feels very good to be away from that environment.

My Past is Haunting Me

So as I ponder this upcoming meeting with the NWBC consultant who wasn’t there with me through the process, motivated by the MBC district executive who didn’t walk with me through this process, accompanied by a coach who didn’t even know my name as I went through this process, I feel haunted by my past.

When certain families left NWBC with all their vehemence against me and the ways they felt I failed them, I grieved. It was painful. I was scarred. I have emerged from that with limps and wounds, but at the very least I had the consolation that it was in the past.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, it’s not in the past. Apparently, the words of frustrated people are continuing to circle and they are continuing to find new ears, and with each new ear who hears these stories, there are new people making conclusions about what kind of person I am.

From a spiritual growth standpoint, I guess this is good because I have a tendency to pridefully put too much emphasis on my reputation. Perhaps this is another work of God to bring me humility.

What really bothers me aside from my wounded pride is that there might be some people who are spreading lies about me and other people who are believing them. I am angered not just that I am being wronged but also that the principle of honesty among Christians is being violated.

So, I’m pretty sure, based on the fact that the consultant has been meeting with numerous people with connections to NWBC that this meeting is going to be about me being unteachable and about some variation on the theme that I can’t get along with people. After all, that’s the kind of stuff I kept hearing from angry people at NWBC. I feel haunted by my past.

What do I say?

So what do you say when someone says you aren’t teachable? That’s like someone saying, “You’re always in denial.” You can’t say “No, I don’t think so,” because if you do, you simply confirm what they just said. If someone says I’m unteachable, and I disagree, I have confirmed what they said. If someone says I’m unteachable and I agree, then isn’t that the end of the conversation as well? If someone says you are unteachable, really the only thing you can do is show up and shut up.

What about the assertion that I’m insensitive or can’t connect with other people? Well I know that if it’s based on my intuition of what’s going on in another person’s life, that claim is completely true. I have some kind of psychological ailment where I have nearly no empathy in my nature. I’m left-brained, mathematical and logical, and I just don’t sense when other people might need something other than logic. That makes me a great teacher. And for people who are willing to openly discuss their problems, that makes me a great counselor. I can help them find objectivity in the midst of their struggles. Many people find great relief in the counsel I offer.

Additionally, I have been working hard for years at developing my listening skills, my question-asking techniques and my sensitivity to unspoken body cues so to be better able to demonstrate empathic sensitivity.

So here’s where I stand:

• I know pretty well what’s wrong with me (and I’m growing more self-critical daily).
• I’ve been working for years to fix myself (including professional counseling).
• I also have had a number of close friends as well as that counselor who don’t think there’s any real problem and who try to pull me out of my self-criticism.
• Now, someone I want to respect but who doesn’t know me very well wants to meet with me apparently to address my weaknesses.

When I was first invited to have a meeting, I responded immediately that it would be a good thing, and I sought for a while to make it happen, but as the calendars have been conflicted, as the meeting hasn’t happened, and as I’ve thought more about it, I just wonder what good purpose it could serve.