Here are some solid Christmas offerings that we have found.

O Come Let Us Adore Him is a solid offering. We especially like the Joy William’s performed Hail Almighty King. A songbook is also available.

I got a copy earlier from Sir Kauflin and we have been waiting with bated breath to do track number one corporately. Next week we finally get to breathe. Solid theological offerings akin to Stuart Townend in its lyrical weight. Very incarnational and nature of Christ in its approach. We are even brining in a vibraphone and chimes to spice it up like the CD. Very nice open acoustic arrangements that can be adapted to be more electrified or even more minimalistic. Good stuff.

Finally a humble offering of this demo freebie original Who is this King of Glory as recorded by yours truly. Of course, with a great airy female vocal it would sound much better than my crooning…hahahaha. This one doesn’t fit my voice the best but no one else was around to do. We have a girl who tore it up the first time we did….candles on stage and super intimate.

king-of-glory-47.MP3

who-is-this-king-of-glory.pdf

There is also a version 2 that goes into Third Day’s King of Glory attached as a back page to the chart.

Here are my tops:

The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Sample (President of USC)
great advice, practical and a bit counter-culture but solid; probably one of the books I have most instituted.

Good to Great (and especially the non-profit monograph follow-up) by Collins
by the leadership research guru who analyzes the best companies and CEO’s in the world and discovers what makes them great.

First Break All The Rules by Buckingham and Coffman
What do the world’s greatest managers do differently? Read it and be a better shepherd for the people who work alongside and under you.

Leading for Innovation ed. by Hesselbein, Goldsmith, and Somerville
Written by a plethora of who’s who. Each chapter has a very different flavor.

Brothers, We are Not Professionals by J. Piper

Martha, our admin made this. Paste the link in Internet Explorer and get ready to laugh (for some reason this doesn’t load well in my firefox). Then post your 4 favorite people’s faces in and brighten their day.

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=9574645405

In case you missed them, here are our most popular posts since we started this endeavor in March 2007:

1. 1. Acoustic + Electric = 1 Guitar (w/ youtube video)
2. 2. Year End Review Tool: Process 1 Self-evaluation (w/ free pdf tool)
3. 3. Year End Reviewing Your Life and Ministry Prep
4. 4. Gorillas and Worship (w/ youtube video)
5. 5. Visual Leadership from the Platform…free mp3
6. 6. Why We are Done with Conferences…sort of
7. 7. Year End Review Tool: Process 2 Team Response and Evaluation (w/ free pdf tool)
8. 8. Free Video for You…On the Third Day w/ click track
9. 9. How Loud do You Run?
10. 10. Eddie is Available for Your Worship Band

Ocassionally flip those tuning stocks around to inspire new voicings and writing. You will write melodies differently as a result and your under=noodlings will sound unique as well. Here is a solid chord chart to get you started in DADGAD via Han Speek. Also check out this.

Here is. Designed to be a 270 degrees high participation room of 2,000 seats. Two large side screens and a huge center screen. The stage is larger than what you currently see as they have to frame out more of it. Six rows of theater chairs in arcs on the flat floor then the rise of the room starts.

One of my communication heroes, Kem Meyer, recently wrote this post. I wonder if people ever feel like this when they attempt to get information, sign in their kids, etc. at our churches because we are so policy driven that we never bend? I am all for systems (you know me, Mr. Beaver) if they integrate with other policies for a seamless procedure. Obviously, this one was not. What other nutty things like this have you seen inside the church?

Cristian found this. Why was he surfing youtube when he should have been getting his stuff done. Actually, he found it while he was on vacation (which is only one letter away from vocation I just noticed; man, that is too close).

Having an intern program is an arduous but profitable enterprise. We have learned over the years to be more picky in who we allow in the role. Character is a given, but we still ask regarding debt, substances, pornography, and other issues they might have faced. We also now make the interns supply us with references. We try to eliminate any “character surprises.”

The second challenge is how to utilize the interns so that they profit but also benefit the ministry. The ideal solution for us is a couple of office days a week including attending rehearsals. Any more than that and they start drifting with not enough to do and it carries over to the two office days. We try to have projects for them lined up when they arrive each office day. We also assign outside reading and have a 1.5 hour-2 hour meeting discussing their reading and homework assignments they have been assigned. Occasionally, we have run our internship with guys/gals who have full-time jobs so we only do the weekly meetings with no “office days.” But leadership is as much caught as taught so it isn’t our preferred method.

We spend more time on Monday-Friday leadership, systems and worship design than we do “stage tricks” or musicality. Most newbie worship leaders struggle in their people leading skills and systems building which is vital for them to understand if their ministries are to ever grow beyond them. We make the participants take time audit, personality tests, and read leadership books such a Good to Great by Jim Collins, in addition to doing theological reading (including Systematic readings on the Trinity, atonement, etc.) We try to give them venues to lead worship (Celebrate Recovery, etc.) and then critique them. We also have them sit in on some of our design meetings.

We are still experimenting with the process and any input would be welcome. If you would like to be considered for the internship (either Summer or nine month Fall-Spring), let us know. The internship is unpaid though we will assist you in landing a part-time job. We also have one week shadow opportunities.

A good article on not wasting time.

I hate paper clutter. In an effort to reduce it and to get us ready to move our ministry totally into planningcenteronline.com (where all charts will be pdf), I purchased the Fujitsu Scansnap 510 for $380 from newegg.com. It might be the best investing purchase I have ever made. (Okay, after my wife’s engagement ring.) Here is the beauty of this thing in video form. My process:

1. I put up to 50 sheets in the loader and hit one button. The sheets going whizzing through at 18ppm.
3. The scanner picks up both sides of the page in a single pass through in full-color.
5. The doc is automatically converted to .pdf. And the Adobe Acrobat full program comes included (not just Reader but a full Standard Version, almost worth the price alone). Size doesn’t matter as I have run a small business card all the way to a huge long file of connected computer paper and the scanner/pdf convertor automatically sizes the pdf.
7. Then I simply hit scan to file and drop it into whatever folder I want.
8. 

1. I dump the paper documents into the recycled paper bin to be a good steward.

This thing is smoking easy to use. You only push one button and wallah! I just dumped out a whole file cabinet and my desk file cabinet. I can also attach any pertinent pdf’s to its corresponding vitalist.com action so my systems are becoming totally integrated…YEAH BABY…this thing is like crack for an efficiency freak! People keep walking into my office just to watch me scan. The ScanSnap S510’s image enhancement technology increases character recognition for more precise OCR accuracy so I can edit the .pdf after scanning. The bundled ABBYY FineReader software enables the user to scan documents directly to applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint software.

The only con in product reviews is that you must keep the in-take wheel clean or documents can get jammed. I have run a ton through and haven’t had to clean yet. After I remove staples from a doc, I fan them to make sure they are not stuck together. When I didn’t, it gave me a few jams which are super easy to remove. Just push one button, open the front panel and pull.

For all you Mac users, make sure you order the ScanSnap 510M so your scanner and Adobe software will work.

Here is what my Occupational Therapist is having me wear on my hand. It is “pulling some ligaments out of the fracture where they are getting stuck.” So now I don’t just have to go my therapists for pain, she can travel vicariously with me thru the brace that I have to wear all day. I know, it’s for my own good….owwwwwwwwwwww.

This is a little golden nugget of spousal wisdom that Omar Reyes, our Glocal Impact Pastor, shared with me one day. I pass along this genius with his permission. See the hand drawn picture above each blurb for you visual learners. I am proud of myself for drawing this all with my left hand as the right hand is still a no-go.

Okay, so everyone you relate to is happy…you, your co-worker and spouse (The spouse can be a man if the “you” is a woman. Hopefully your husband wouldn’t be wearing a blue dress.)

All of a sudden there is some conflict at work between you and a co-worker (maybe even another pastor, gasp!) but your spouse doesn’t know that yet so everything is still cool between you and your spouse and between your spouse and your co-worker.

You are angry and you go home and vent, shoveling crud and bad blood onto your spouse. Things between you and your spouse are fine, but man is he/she mad at your co-worker. Maybe even more angry than you are.

You go back to work and have a great forgiving conversation with your co-worker. You hug, eat a bowl of Pho’ together and everything is fine in your world because you and your spouse are cool (you were never at odds over this, after all) and you and your co-worker are cool, right? Oops!

Don’t forget to include your spouse in on the fact that tension and conflict at work have been resolved. Otherwise, they’ll harbor resentment that you let go of a long time ago. This is particularly important if your co-worker is also someone who is in a pastoral role with your spouse. Otherwise the whole time the co-worker is ministering to your spouse through teaching, worship, or leading a ministry they serve in, your spouse will be angry at them. Forgive generously, and when you do, make sure to talk with your spouse about how the conflict was resolved and that the relationship between you and the co-worker is healed.