Just finished a excellent yet humorous book entitled Why We’re Not Emergent By Two Guys Who Should Be (at monergism where you can get two free pdf chapters…cool). I took some of their criteria and created myself a little emergent report card (not that a true emergent would grade themselves on anything…that’s too objective…ha!)

Quoting paraphrased from page 20,21

We are challenging all NorthWood members to be intentional about developing relationships and  sharing their faith this summer. Here is the challenge that you can feel free to adapt.

1. Use the summer of intentionality.pdf form and write down every single person you know whether by name or by “clerk at gas station.”

2. Check off whether you know if they are believer, if you know they are not, or you are unsure.

3. Then rank 1-5 your frequency of seeing that person and depth of relationship with them.

4. Begin to pray specifically for God to give you opportunities to share your faith, particularly with those people you see often (5’s). Seek grow your relationship with them. Remember to do friendships with honest evangelism and not friendship evangelism where people are nothing more than your target (to quote a pastor I once heard, “Nobody wants to be your target. Target’s are things you shoot at…”).

As my duties entail overseeing both communications and worship, I find staff members often struggle with thinking through the communicative process of their event and lining up the necessary technical information. Here is a free checklist we use at NorthWood before and after each event to make sure it is communicatively leveraged.

event-checklist-northwood.pdf

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/  Check it out

Amazing simple.

Just cut and paste a song into the box in any text fashion (from internet, word doc or whatever)

Enter old key and new key and whoop there it is output in new key….very very nice.

Get it here http://logue.net/xp/index.htm

[via joshua seller]

Some of you know that I toured both as an individual WL and with dropknee for years before going on staff at NorthWood. I was able to have the blessings of touring with a cool dude, bud, and now my kids’ God-parents, Lance Beaumont. Lance is finishing up his Ph.D. from Boston University. While studying music at TCU, he had the opportunity to study with Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Roland Dyens, William Kannengiser, and Paulo Bellinati. He is the author of the best selling book, “The Capo Chord Book”, published by Mel Bay Publications. Lance is Assistant professor of music at Howard Payne Univesity where he teaches guitar, music history, and music technology.  Check it out….

A friend wrestling if he should stay at his church or even in worship ministry wrote me for advice. As I reflected, it reminded me of the tension between these two statements….

1. To change anything you must be at it a long time.  Most people who make radical world transformation have been heading in the same direction 30+ years.
Just ask Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, etc.

2. Just because God calls you to a brook doesn’t mean it won’t dry up and He moves you to something else. Just ask Elijah.

You have to seek God, the wisdom of other Godly men and women, and look at the opportunities God is giving in you tandem. Take inventory of what you do best in a one or two summary and ask how much of my time is getting spent doing what God has created me to do best.

Like our previous deserted island post, but a wee bit more practical.

If you were stuck on a desert island and could have only 5 vital statistics (in graph or numeric form) to gauge the health of your church while you were lost at sea, what numbers would you want?

If the same scenario were true, what numbers would you want to gauge the health of your worship ministry?

Our answers coming soon but not until you give yours so not as to color your thoughts…ha!

http://www.rescuetime.com/

This might be the great online time auditor we’ve been looking for. Anyone care to test it out and report back on it? I know it should be my role to do that but I am swamped with a month’s worth of sermon prep on Corinthians and don’t have time to fool with it…ironic, huh?

Crystal clear sound, almost like you are wearing a large diaphragm mic around your neck….wait a minute…. [via bobby vaughn]

Brent brought a to my attention a great post by Seth Godin. Many churches get caught between the passion and pop gap, particularly in regards to elements they include in their services. Where do you fall? What can you do to not get caught there?

If there are 6 people at a rehearsal and I am 10 minutes late I just wasted one hour of Kingdom time that could have been spent more profitably.

Tardiness is rarely a time issue. It is always a respect issue. If someone is consistently late, their actions are screaming, “I don’t respect you/the team enough to be on time.” Teach them this and tardiness will usually stop.