Leadership Reminders

Last night we had our summer worship kickoff. Overall I think the night went really well. We're using OnePrayer materials for the summer using four of the messages, small group materials, etc. The prep leading up to the worship was a bit more chaotic than I would have liked. Honestly, it was a lot more chaotic than I would have liked. I've had a bit of time to reflect on the night and I think most of the headache was probably more my doing than any other factor. Ultimately leadership plays a huge factor in the success or failure of any endeavor.

So here are some leadership lessons I was reminded of last night:

1. Be Specific - I made the mistake of asking people to help coordinate the event without asking them to do specific jobs. When I asked people to help I also let them know when we would be starting setup before the event. I neglected to tell people when they needed to arrive. If people don't know when you need them to be someplace they'll get there when it's convenient rather than when  you need them. 
2. Confirm Commitments - I had several people tell me they would help us when we initially asked, but I didn't follow up on the day of the event. That leads to a lot of unneeded stress. I think most everything would have been resolved if on Monday or Tuesday I'd asked people to confirm they would be at the event to help and if I'd have repeated their confirmation, "We'll see you at 4 tomorrow night."
3. Plan Redundancy - Realistically, sometimes people don't show up to serve. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for not being there, sometimes people forget, sometimes you get a lame excuse. In any situation though the work needs to get done. My redundancy plan last night consisted of frantic phone calls to get people to fill in for various slots. In the future I'm going to plan to have a couple of people scheduled to fill in when an unexpected need arises either because of an unplanned circumstance or additional people requirements.
4. Overcommunicate - Vision leaks. It has to be repeated. This is probably one of my biggest failures recently. I make the assumption that because I know the vision and I'm passionate about it that everybody else is as sold out for what we're doing as I am. Honestly the leadership team is behind the vision. Where I need to improve is to make sure that I effectively communicate how the vision relates to every ministry opportunity.

All things considered last night went off well. I didn't get to hang out and chat with folks as much as I would have liked because I was paying attention to last minute details. Thankfully Sarah, the Soles, and a couple of other people came through at the last minute to take care of things I wasn't able to do. I'm especially thankful that Sarah puts up with so much of this sort of stuff from me.

Random stuff & The Green Room

This spring has been a blur so far. I dont' know that I've ever been busier. I think it's a combination of my classwork, expanding the college ministry, and general life insanity. Most people keep up with what I'm doing on twitter, but I'm going to try shorter, more frequent blog postings as well (how many times have I said that now?).

We had some of the best worship at Schweitzer we've ever done on Easter weekend. There was an outstanding drama, a huge tomb built for people to walk through, and great music. Should have posted pictures and some video from the flip cam, but I never got around to it.

After Easter I got to go with a group of 15 students from our college ministry to Port Arthur, TX. During that week the group leveled and refloored a house and reframed the back of a house with a new door and a covered back porch. It was a great week.

Last weekend we were given the check from the college ministry grant we were awarded. We also had our second worship on the Missouri State campus. We're opening the Green Room as a second site ministry in the fall - worship every Sunday night at 9pm directed at college students and young adults. Our goal as a college ministry is to plant an arm of the church that genuinely builds relationships with students on their turf. It's culturally relevant (secular music, movies, tv, etc), media intensive, there are lights that change colors (ooooh), and so far it's been a lot of fun.

Sunday night I set up a camera in the back of the room to capture the action. I like the way this song came out - there are a few glitches, but overall a great experience. We're doing monthly services this spring on campus, hopefully outdoor services over the summer, then every weekend starting August 24. Here's a video from last Sunday:

 

It's Official!

I'll be appointed at Schweitzer as an associate pastor next conference year. I just got done in a meeting with our Staff Parish Relations Committee with our District Superintendent. It's been a long process, but it's now public that the intent of the Bishop and the Cabinet is to appoint me here. I can't imagine serving on a better team.

Multi Site College Ministry

I'd promised this post last week but never got around to writing it. It's been incredibly busy these last few weeks as those of you who follow my twitter probably know. It's really an exciting time to be in ministry at Schweitzer for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is our new college ministry.

We started the college ministry here last fall as part of an expanded view of our age-specific ministry strategies. It's been pretty low key up until this spring. We've been really blesssed by the Missouri Conference in supporting this new ministry. As a conference they've made the shift to ministries that local congregations lead from the traditional Wesley model. As part of this we've been dreaming about what a new ministry from Schweitzer would look like. Last fall we were awarded a one-time grant from the conference to help us expand the ministry (see my previous college sound gear post). This winter we applied for another grant to really expand what we're doing.

I'm really excited to say that we received the second grant we requested. It's going to fund this ministry dramatically, essentially matching the investment Schweitzer is putting into my role as a pastor. All of our pastors wear several hats. The two core areas of emphasis for me will be college ministry and creative arts leadership. The title is a bit clunky, pastor of creative arts and college ministry, anybody got better suggestions? It's not officially my title until July 1, so there's some room to play.

The approach we're taking is to plant a second site on the Missouri State campus.  Right now our college worship is a monthly event. Starting in August we'll be opening a new campus at MSU with a weekly Sunday night worship service. Our worship offerings will be Saturday night (5:30pm), Sunday morning (8:30, 9:45, & 11am), and Sunday night @MSU (9pm). Obviously the focus of the site will be college students, but we've got a great group of older folks that are going to be working with us on the worship and other ministries. We've been using the Big Idea worship planning model for about a year now which will let us coordinate the messages I preach at MSU with the weekend on our main campus. Obviously there will be some differences because of the group, but generally we're going to try to keep on the same message.

My favorite part of this approach is that rather than being a traditional campus ministry we're part of a church. Our goal is to offer campus ministry like options with all the depth, opportunity, and community that happens within a local congregation. We're going to be connecting students to service opportunities, leadership development, small groups, discipleship, etc. We really believe that the local church can dramatically impact student's lives.

I'm having a blast planning and working with students for the future of college ministry. The shift to being a multisite church is really challenging. It's taking a lot of work, training, and prayer. I'd really like to talk with some folks doing portable multisite ministry. It's going to be a fun ride and I can't wait to see what God does.

Green Room Runthrough

We had the first runthrough for the Green Room (our college worship) at Missouri State this weekend. I'm incredibly excited about moving our college worship to the campus, but man is portable church a lot of work. We held the group to the core leadership team (about a dozen people), met at the church at 1:30, and headed to the Plaster Student Union. Getting things out of Schweitzer and to MSU was easy. We did leave some key equipment on the floor of the church and had to send a group back to get it. Load out from the room we're using to having things put away in the church was also very quick. I think both of those tasks took less than 40 minutes each. I really see the benefit of a packaged system for portable ministry, but I think we did a decent job putting our kit together given how smoothly we were able to move things. 

Our biggest hurdle was the time it took from getting all of the gear in the room to being setup and ready to run worship. We're going to have to do some substantial training/practice on the tech/band setup. We did okay - we were ready to do worship about two hours after we met at Schweitzer. I'd really like to get that under 90 minutes.  

We're going to do the worship on campus monthly for the rest of this semester to get us ready for the fall.

College Ministry Sound Gear

Last fall we received a grant to help us fund buying a portable audio setup for our college ministry. We're going to be moving our college worship to the Missouri State campus rather than doing it here at Schweitzer.

As far as our research (and a lot of students) have told us we'll be doing the only full-band worship within walking distance of MSU. I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities.

We finally got around to ordering the equipment and it showed up yesterday. I figured it would be fairly big, but I didn't expect what we received. For some perspective on the size I made my friend Justin stand next to the wrapped pallet. It really isn't all that much stuff, but the packing to ship it is ridiculous. 

Several people have been giving me advice about the system so I thought I'd post a basic list of what ended up in our gym yesterday.

• 2 RCF Mains - 12" drivers, 350w
• 2 RCF Subs - 15" drivers, 800w
• 4 Mackie SRM 150s (for monitors)
• 2 ART headphone amps for wired in-ear
• 4 Shure SM58 mics
• 2 Shure SM57 mics
• 2 Shure ULX wireless mics (one Beta 87 and one Countryman headset)
• Bags, cases, and a pile of cables 

I'd had a couple of people tell me that they really liked the Kaltman Cable Coiler, so I decided to give it a try as well. Quality cables are expensive, and if this can make sure they always get coiled properly and can do it quickly it will be an absolute win. 

You'll notice that what's lacking in this setup is any type of a mix console. I'm really torn about that purchase. We decided that we wanted to go digital for a lot of reasons, but that's a different post. I've got experience (as do a lot of people) with Yamaha consoles and been pleased with them. While I was talking to our rep at Full Compass (we love them by the way) he suggested looking at the Roland M-400 system. 

The M-400 is a new console from Roland which raises some issues with me. It's built around the digital snake (40 channels over cat5) that Roland has had out for  awhile and I know many people who have been using it and are happy. We've got a demo unit for the next week so we can evaluate it before making the purchase. Initial impressions are good. We're doing a more thorough review with a full band this weekend so I'll write more later.

More big announcements related to the college ministry next week. 

Great Ash Wednesday

 

We had a great Ash Wednesday service last night. We had a short acoustic worship set with Kathy and Stephanie. It was also our first attempt at any type of architectural projection. I love the stuff Cameron Ware is doing at Irving Bible Church and been planning something of our own. Ash Wednesday is a good service to do this type of experiment - it's not Sunday and the crowd is generally pretty flexible. We set up an Optoma EP1691 projector at the back of the sanctuary about 10 feet off the ground pointed at the front wall. We used imagery from Awake Images, a large celtic cross. The throw from the projector to the wall is about 85 feet at the farthest point. I love that this is possible with a $1,000 projector and a laptop. We're going to do a similar set up for Good Friday. I'm hoping that we'll be able to incorporate a more permanent setup to establish this type of atmosphere more often. in the not to distant future.

NB: Something went arwy with the publishing of this, it's actually from last Thursday. 

Mardi Gras in Columbia

I had to come to Columbia for the pitch related to our college ministry grant proposal. I think the presentation went pretty well - it was very brief though. I've got to say I think it's a bit ridiculous to drive six hours round trip for a 10 minute presentation followed by five minutes of questions. Thankfully I was able to schedule some other work doing some tech training and a few other meetings. I'm just wrapping up the last of my business in town and headed back to Springfield for Ash Wednesday services (including our first stab at architectural projection).

I was looking for something to do for Mardi Gras but I was in Columbia by myself which doesn't lend itself to going out. That said, I didn't want to spend the night in my hotel room. One of the people I met with yesterday suggested that I go to Village Wine and Cheese for dinner, they had a special Mardi Gras menu. VWC has been a great Columbia establishment for years. They used to mainly focus on selling high-end cheese and wine (think Brown Derby IWC for you Springfieldians). About a year ago they pulled out the cheese case, put in a bar, and began serving dinner. They always used to have outstanding brunch, sandwiches, and other food that would go with being a purveyor of cheese/meats. Now as a dinner establishment they have great choices with a rotating menu.

The entire menu looked great, but I opted to have the crab stuffed trout. The trout was perfectly cooked and lightly brushed with a spicy butter. It was served on a garlic pilaf that had both white and wild rice and sauteed vegetables. The crab stuffing was a perfect compliment to the spice of the dish. The sweetness of the crab and carmelized onions was delicious. Starting with a salad and closing with a cup of coffee made for a wonderful cajun themed meal. 

Bedtime @ Connect

Finally settling down for the night at Connect, our state-wide retreat for college students that's being hosted at Schweitzer. So far it's been a lot of fun getting to meet new students from all over Missouri, talking with college ministry leaders, and hanging out. This is the first time we've done this type of event with college students and so far it's going great. We had some last minute scramble when we decided it would be better to get a console from the production company rather than feed things from the auxes on our board and I gashed my hand pretty good while raising a lighting tree. Overall I'm happy with day one.

The Wayne Kerr band has been providing some outstanding, rocking worship music and Margaret Feinberg's first session was exactly what I'd hoped it would be. Tomorrow Margaret's speaking twice, there are some breakout sessions, and a concert featuring Todd Agnew. Most everybody is sleeping now, a small group is playing games and watching a movie in the youth room. Time for a few hours of sleep.

Pop Goes The Church

I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of Pop Goes The Church, a new book by Tim Stevens, and make some review comments. I thought I'd share with you what I've gotten out of this book. It's seriously going to challenge church leaders in the way we relate to the culture aroud us. I've been quietly (or not so quietly) beating this drum around Schweitzer since I came on staff. My initial thought about the book is that I'm buying a copy for everybody on the staff. It's that good. I figure if our senior pastor can pass books out to everybody why shouldn't other people?

The book includes an outstanding collection of examples from churches of various size, age, and location. It includes practical steps for any church evaluating how it relates to pop culture. Tim tells his own compelling story including his very first movie experience. Pop Goes The Church is incredibly well researched and it presents a balanced view about the church's relationship to the culture around us and the dangers of connecting inappropriately with the culture. Ultimately Stevens wants the church to engage pop culture, but the approach is Biblically sound and cautions about embracing culture for the wrong reasons. I'm incredibly excited to see what happens as this book gets released and church leaders read it.

Connect 2008 This Weekend

I'm super excited about Connect this weekend. It's our first state-wide college ministry gathering. We're hosting this year at Schweitzer and it should be a great event. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with Margaret Feinberg and Wayne Kerr. The event starts on Friday night and runs until 4:30 on Saturday. The first session is at 10pm (it is for college students). There's also a concert with Todd Agnew, Manafest, and One Star Story on Saturday. My favorite part of the event is that it's mostly planned by college students. We've got a great student leadership team from all over Missouri that has been working to make this event possible.

This is the first large scale event we've done for college students. I'm really hoping it will be a success. The cost is only $20 so it's a great deal. I know a lot of churches are subsidizing some or all of the registration for their students. Schweitzer is paying half for the students in our ministry. Even at full price it would be hard to pass up.

Not sure how many college students read my blog that wouldn't know about the event already, but registration is open until Thursday at noon if you want to spend a weekend in Springfield, MO.

College Focus Group: What would a new church for college students look like?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

What would a new church for college students look like?
Students were very clear that having a regular, church worship service was important to them. They also wanted to have that worship in very close proximity to the college campus. Several said that even the edge of campus may not be close enough to attract some students. Numerous students stated that there were no modern worship offerings within walking distance of Missouri State [to our knowledge there is one modern worship gathering in downtown Springfield]. Most of the students expressed a preference for modern worship; only those growing up in church said they would attend a traditional worship. The time of the worship gathering was of importance to students - evenings primarily, or in the afternoon on Sundays. Students said they want to have a pastor rather than a campus ministry leader [sacraments are important to students who grew up in a church]. Students want a variety of opportunities to be in fellowship, worship, and service primarily with other students but also have opportunities to connect with older and younger generations.

College Focus Group: How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?
The best way students claim to bridge the gap between a church and a campus ministry is make sure that what the church does suits college students. It needs to be on their level, in their environment, challenging, and relevant. A common suggestion was that a church should be built on campus. Proximity was the second concern. Students say that having to drive is oftentimes not an option, especially to visit a new church. Students said that they felt the church connection for a ministry on campus was very important - churches are stable, campus ministries sometimes are not. It was also important for students to have opportunities to interact with people of other generations, but that a student worship setting should be primarily ages 18-25. Students said having opportunities to connect with the larger church body from a campus ministry would help to bridge the gap from college to the church.
 

College Focus Group: What are you looking for in a campus ministry?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

What are you looking for in a campus ministry?
The primary item discussed in looking at a campus ministry was that it had welcoming people, and provided a comfortable environment. They want the atmosphere to facilitate hanging out and the programming to minimize the possibility of cliques. The biggest shortcoming they say of current campus ministries is that they don’t have significant outreach and follow up with visitors. The relational connection is incredibly important. Students also say they’re looking for a ministry that understands the “flakiness” of students and doesn’t guilt them into participating. As part of the student situation they’re looking for events that are under an hour in duration so there is time for fellowship. Numerous students also said it was important that there was clarity about how to get more involved in the ministry: they want easy steps that don’t involve a huge commitment to test being in leadership. Ultimately the students say the success of a ministry hangs on it’s ability to be a both/and environment where visitors feel welcomed and can build relationships but aren’t harassed into participation.

College Focus Group: How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions.  

How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?
We think the most significant discovery from this question is the distinction students see between a campus ministry and a church. They recognize the importance of being involved in a church. They talked about how campus ministries are most often about activity: fun, fellowship, service. They’re looking for something more in a spiritual venue and want to have more than fun. Students desire an environment of Christian fellowship that incorporates age diversity, but recognizes that college students are at a unique stage in life. They want to be treated with more respect and have more responsibility than youth, but the church needs to realize they are still young. They are looking for a setting where they can be young but still build relationships with those of other generations, particularly mentoring relationships. Students feel like having older people teaching is good and provides a different perspective. That said, students are concerned about their need to feel comfortable, especially as a visitor to a new ministry. They say that many churches are not welcoming to college students, or don’t accept their unique life situation. A church setting helps students to build deep, significant relationships better than a campus ministry. It also provides broader opportunities to be involved. The number one reason stated for not being involved in a church was convenience and availability of a desirable church.

Hacked Web Server Back Online

If you've been following my Twitter you know that the web server at Schweitzer got hacked. Whoever broke in didn't do a very solid job, and managed to kill the network before doing anything terribly malicious. The site was only down about 12 hours. After looking through the system it looks like the vulnerability was caused by my not patching ssh reliably (it was several versions out of date). The server rebuild was time consuming, but easy. The biggest hurdle was slow mirrors for downloading the most recent linux ISOs. This sort of thing is a known risk of running our servers in house. The good news is that our backup strategy was rock solid and there wasn't any data loss (maybe a couple of hours). As an expansion of our current approach to backups I'm going to set up a duplicate server that mirrors the home tree of the main server hourly. In the event of the main system going offline for whatever reason we'll be able to bring up the mirror just by adjusting the firewall. Hopefully we'll never have to use it, but having a hot spare web system seems like a good idea.

College Ministry Grant & Focus Groups

I've spent a good part of my work life the past couple of weeks working on a grant application to fund part of our college ministry on the Missouri State campus. Currently our college ministry consists of small groups (right now there's only one running), mission projects (which will be increasing in the spring), a weekly coffee gathering, special events, and a monthly worship service. We were awarded a grant this fall to help us purchase portable a/v gear to be able to do the worship on campus. We'll start our monthly worship on campus in February. We're planning to go every week in the fall. We still haven't picked out the gear yet, but that's another post.

As we were determining what we wanted our college ministry to look like we did some focus groups. The research methodology isn't very sound, and I'm pretty sure that we couldn't get any statistical significance out of the data (although I'm pretty sure you can't get quantitative data from a focus group without some intense coding). For the focus groups we gathered together groups of students (usually 12-15) and just let them chat about a series of questions. The first group was students currently involved in some way with our ministry, the others have been random assortments of students recruited mainly with free pizza. We didn't do much other than clarify the questions, and ask "is there anything else to add to this question?" until they said they were finished. We then moved on to the next question.

We asked four questions:

1. How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?
2. What are you looking for in a campus ministry?
3. How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?
4. What would a new church for college students look like?

I'll share what we learned from each of the four questions next week.

Transformed by Generosity Weekend

This weekend we celebrated our annual stewardship campaign. For the most part it's been a great weekend, we had a few logistical glitches, but overall it's been outstanding. We're blessed to have had Richard Blackmon from Viscern speaking this weekend. Richard and his wife Debby have been long-time friends of Schweitzer. Richard preached a great message about three stewardship stories: the poor woman who gave all she had, Zaccheus, and one from his experience working with churches. Richard asked the question, "What is it that causes people to give radically to the church?" He then explained his Popeye theory of stewardship, "That's all I can stand, and I can't stands no more." When you say that you can't stand the world the way it is any more, what better way could you invest in change than in the work of God through the church. I listened to this message all four services and each time it hit me in a different way. I can't wait to see what God does in the hearts of our congregation with regard to stewardship.

Innovate: Live Blogging What's Left When I'm Gone - Mark Beeson

Closing session from Innovate with Mark Beeson

• What direction are your feet pointing?
  
• If you turn your feet in a direction and day, after day take steps you will end up in the direction you are pointed.
• You cannot turn your feet in one direction and end up in a different direction if you continuously take steps.
• we have the tendency to think that if we keep going the direction we're going we'll end up in a new place
• we have to take responsibility and turn sometimes
• the direction you set your feet is most important
• we have to be intentional about pointing our feet and our lives to God
  
• we help people innovate to adapt to the things happening around them
• the direction of our feet matters
• Things happen
• to us
  
• in us
  
• with us
  
• for us
  
• by us
• You can't get what you could have until you let go of what you do have
• knowing the path and choosing the path are different
• the problem isn't getting information
• you used to have to apprentice
• we don't have to do that any more
• we go to leaders, mentors, and teachers to help us make sense of the information
  
• the challenge is to make sense of what's happening and then make good choices
• media piece about a church member's story (3:22)
• Great commentary on being for and with each other
• leaders need to be both with and for their staff
• staff need to be both with and for their staff
• Jesus was both with us and for us
  
• we need to get better
  
• work on your attitude or you'll hurt others
• work on relationships or others will hurt you
  
• work on your persistance or problems will defeat you
  
• work on your priorities or the insignificant will hamper you
• work on your credibility or no one will follow you
• if you don't get better and encourage others to do so, you will work with bozos
• some people won't learn
• just move on
• don't put them in charge of anything
• number 1 job of a Christian leader is to hear from God and bring that message back to the people of God
• people are not here to give you a successful ministry
• the people are your ministry

Innovate: Live Blogging Innovation in Leading Change

Session by Troy Gramling (Flamingo Road Church) & Scott Hodge (The Orchard). Details after the jump.  

• Troy Gramling
• innovation has a lot to do with being naked, exposed
• it's the same type of feeling - being exposed
• you've got to be willing to be authentic, to step out there
• What he's learned - what an innovative person looks like
• what does it mean to lead in innovation
• Ears
  
• traditional way to hear is to listen to everybody
• innovative ears limit who they listen to
• if you don't limit it, you don't hear anybody
• you become unable to lead - angry old pastors
• everybody is valuable, but not everybody is a priority
• whoever you don't listen to gets mad
• who do you listen to?
• people who believe in me
• they love me - not what I do
• people with more wisdom than me
  
• to hear the group around us we have to limit who is in the group
• Eyes
• traditional way to use eyes - broaden focus, narrow influence
  
• as church grows, there's a temptation to broaden perspective
• we have to broaden our influence by narrowing our focus
• How? We focus on:
  
• protecting the vision - because vision leaks
  
• producing the product - the weekend or the ministry
• push out the values -
  
• as growth happens you have less touch
• if you're not careful the church you lead isn't the church you thought it was
• the difference is making difficult decisions
• hands
• traditional hands are used for today
  
• innovative hands execute for tomorrow
  
• today's numbers are the result of yesterday's execution
• we have no control over how people
• show up
• get baptized
• etc
• what we can control is how we execute
• execution is the key to getting where you want to go
• God's going to do His part - it's up to us to do our part
• Convince leaders that it's not about the task it's about the people
• it's never about today, it's always about tomorrow
• Feet
• traditional feet make the next step big
  
• innovative feet make the next step small because the goal is people love God
• when we feel things we tie things to it - energy makes steps easier
  
• leaders help reduce barriers
• Brain
• traditionally we think God blesses the methods
• innovative - God blesses the person
• you are innovative for the place God wants you to do ministry
• you can never be a great copy, you need to be true to how God has called you
• God could have anybody do your job - He chose you.
  
• Scott Hodge
• talking about change - no formula, but a story
• how God has taken an 80 year old church near extinction and has over 3-4 years transformed the church
• father moved to pastor the church and was there 20+ years
  
• chuch bought a campus, built a building, and his dad found himself miserable
• realized the church was declining
• morale was down
• staff focused not on larger vision of the church
• ineffective at reaching community
• his dad decided to transition the church, invited him back to help
  
• they figured they had nothing to lose
• if they did nothing it died
• if they killed it, it was going to die anyway
• it could work
• started asking questions
• what's not effective
• why are doing this program
• why does the church exist
• knew more about what they didn't want to be - so they stopped those things
• the transition was less about music, dress, etc but more about culture
• it was rough, people left
• the church is now stronger than it ever has been
  
• key things learned
• hear God's voice
• courageously obey
• the reason things don't really change
• we want it both ways
• new wine must be poured into new wineskins
• holding onto the old and embracing the new doesn't work
• old wineskins don't cost anything - new ones have a high price tag
• friendships
• popularity
• people
• sometimes even the church

Innovate: Live Blogging Leading Worship - Jason Miller

Talking about worship leadership. Live blogging after the jump.

• GCC worship format
• weekend service
• focused for seeker
  
• midweek service
• deeper for believers
• one weekend a month for the youth
  
• This session is mainly about the Thursday setup
• Filters
• live in the tension between sensitivity and intentionality
• we all lean one way or the other
• intentional: worship planning - detail oriented - never deviate from the plan
  
• sensitive: who needs a plan?
• the answer is to know which moment is appropriate for each focus
• Psalm 78:72
• Integrity in heart - you're in tune with what's happening so you can lead from the heart
• Can't forget the details, but some moments require deviation
  
• remember what you're trying to accomplish
• what's the effect of what you're doing?
• does it achieve the goal or distract?
• more than anything else: God is worth everything
• just because people don't like to sing doesn't mean they're not spiritual
• the point isn't to get people to sing it's  to show that God is worth everything
• focus on the lifestyle of worship
• singing is still important - and it's one of the few things you can do in a group of 1,000 people
• what's helpful?
• more important than what's new
• more important than what's innovative
• some things are helpful for your church and others are not
• Sometimes we fail to teach what worship really is - both in the church and in the world
• what is worship?
• why is it important?
• what does it mean to sing together? Why do we do it?
• sometimes it's good to call a time-out and go back to square one
• 3 week series about worship
• no band first two weeks
• Week 1: Why do we worship together?
• is it optional?
• is it essential?
• Week 2: Being awake to the fundamental nature of God's presence when gathered together
• Week 3: all out music
• video (10:50)
• showing stained glass - made of lighting gels with words, written by the congregation on each piece.
• Q&A

Innovate: Live Blogging Transferring Communication - Rob Wegner

Rob Wegner, how do we make sure that our message connects with people so that it really matters.

Read after the jump for the live updates from the session. 

• Session opened with a great musical number. (8:30)
• there is a bunch of content being generated
• messages bombard us all the time
• people are with messages
• simple message is: you matter to God
• the solution isn't to talk louder than everybody else
• it's not a loudness issue, it's a stickiness issue
• there is duct tape on the table - everybody taking a piece
  
• how do we make it stick?
• if it doesn't stick it's not catalytic
  
• the message only matters when it sticks to hearts & heads
• the message changes things
• showing a media piece about a church member (8:49)
• it's outstanding
• the element captures the sticky moments in her journey
  
• we're all here because we're shooting for transformed lives (8:56)
  
• Matrix for stickiness
• Is it simple?
• Finding the core
• it's not dumbing down
• not church light
• not superficial
• the core is  all people remember
• traditional communication stuffs more info rather than finding the core
• Made to Stick - which is a great book
• When messages pile up they are indistinguishable
  
• Plug for Ferguson's Big Idea - which I adore
• figure out how many messages does a family experience at your church?
• what did you learn at church? Jesus - isn't that always the answer?
• Simple is about choosing
• Rob wraps a coworker with duct tape - most people won't let you do this
• with a single piece of tape -
  
• is the idea stick worthy?
• Find the irreducible minimum
• looking at GCC web site
• it's simple
• two clicks
• determining the core of what you teach?
• all Scripture is equally inspired
• you can't teach it all
• all  Scripture is not equally important
•  there's not the time and space in public environments to teach everything
• repeat a list of numbers
• what stuff needs to get repeated over and over
• two buckets
• 5 purposes
• felt needs
• Is it unexpected? (9:11)
  
• break expectations, surprise people
• media element: volkswagen commercial with car crash: safe happens
  
• the commercial is unexpected, but it makes a point about safety
• unexpected means being unexpected in a way that drives the point home
• Jesus was the example of unexpected - just like the prophets
• suburban legends montage: including the sledgehammer pressure illustration - who doesn't want to smash things on the platform
• unexpected means creating a curiosity gap (9:22)
  
• a gap between what you know, and what you want to know
• clip about the office message series - billboards
• Is it concrete (9:25)
• the more concrete it is, the stickier it is
• JFK - man on the moon, end of decade: it's simple, unexpected, and concrete
• church message is often abstract, because thology & language are abstract - life is not abstract
• deep isn't about depth of information, rather depth of functionality
• concrete means testable credentials: can we communicate in a way that people can test for themselves
  
• Ronald Reagan - am I better off today than I was four years ago
  
• media element - what if we aksed everybody to tithe for one weekend
• Is it story-driven? (9:34)
• shifting from illustration to animation
• "Stories are flight simulators for the brain" Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick
• media element - what's it like to cooperate with the Holy Spirit
• story driven means layering of stories
• layer God's story, with my story, with their story
  
• Am I Spirit-dependent?
• without the spirit of God it's human effort
• our job is to unwrap the grave clothes, Jesus says "Come Out"
• we make it sticky, God makes it transformative
• with God anything is possible
• Closing with a prayer
  

 

Worship Planning with Google Spreadsheets

We've been wired in our worship meetings for a little over a month now. What does that mean? As part of our new, improved worship planning process we're planning more weekends in advance than ever before. As I said earlier we've basically got a preaching calendar through Easter including series groupings. Our creative team will handle branding of these messages about a month before they occur. The new process is more of a system (I love systems).

We meet every Tuesday at 4pm with the entire worship team. Each week we try to spend:

• 5-10 minutes critique (both good and bad) of previous weekend
• 5-10 minute review of upcoming weekend
• 5-10 minute finalization of weekend two weeks away
  
• 10-15 minutes of discussion of the message manuscript for 2 weeks out
• 30-45 minutes of creative brainstorming about the weekend 6 weeks out

The goal of this structure is that we cover everything that needs to happen in the meeting and get done in 90 minutes or less. This system is HIGHLY dependent on everybody making sure our planning documents are prepared with appropriate content prior to the meeting. That means music people fill in information about future weekends, the drama team does the same, the preaching pastor provides all appropriate info, etc. Ideally the meeting time is document review and polish rather than actual planning for the two most pressing weekends which leaves us free to be creative for most of the meeting. Some weeks have been better than others, but we're getting better.

We do our planning via google documents for each weekend. Here is our worship planning template. We have a copy of this document for each weekend. It includes a worksheet for each of our weekend services, plus sheets for general information, possible elements, post-weekend feedback, creative notes, and bulletin announcements. Every person on the worship planning team is able to edit these documents and several others are able to view them.

So far this has been a great improvement to our process. It allows multiple people to work simultaneously, it moves the wrote planning to premeeting prep rather than within the meeting which lets us focus on what really matters. We're still tweaking, but after several weeks I think we're hitting our stride.

Flash Versions: schweitzerumc.org

 

I was evaluating some new content for the church web site this morning and I got to wondering what the ubiquity of Flash Player 9 was for the population that accesses our site. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to quickly look at the information. I was pleasantly shocked by what I found: 

Flash Player 9:  91.20%
Flash Player 8:   5.67%
Flash Player 7:   2.20%
No Flash:          0.93%

If you look at the chart below you'll note that the blue is FP9 and the tiny green sliver is no FP installed. 

That's right, over 90% of our web using population has FP9 installed. This pretty well eliminates any concern I have about using FP9 specific content (that content might even drive the other 7% to upgrade).

So why did this surprise me? Schweitzer is a multigenerational church. In our case the population is pretty evenly spread among retirees, middle-aged, young adults, and children/youth. I know many of the older folks in the church use our web site and assumed there might be a bit of lag in adoption. When we revised the site last winter FP8 was the overwhelming winner. It's even more interesting that there are no really old versions of Flash Player, Player 7 is the oldest  version in our population. What does this mean? Primarily it means that as we build our media player this fall we can target FP9 specific features and know there won't be a huge uproar.

Willow Creek Leadership Summit: Day 1 Thoughts

Most of the staff and several other leaders at the church are attending the Willow Creek Leadership Summit (at a satellite site) this week. Day one was fairly good, the highlight was clearly Marcus Buckingham. I've read some of his writing and heard him speak before and it's always informative and entertaining. I wonder how much more effective the church would be if we spent most of our time focused on our strengths rather than having people working in areas of weakness. Butch Witmire from Granger has a great summary of the presentation.

Early in the day Nancy Beach made a comment about wanting to just process the opening talk by Hybels. I agree completely. I could have had only the first and last sessions.

Worship Planning Retreat

Last week we did a two-day worship planning retreat for the entire team. We've had some level of team-based worship planning for the entire time I've been on staff, but this takes it to a new level. We're using a modified version of the Big Idea approach used by a numerous churches. Our worship team (four pastors, media director, traditional worship leader, music director, unnamed contemporary worship director) is going to meet four times a year to hash out six to nine months worth of weekend material.

Last week's retreat went exceptionally well. We planned big idea topics through Easter next year (although we've got two series options for Lent we'll wrestle with when we meet in November). We spent Tuesday morning talking about values in worship then in the afternoon we took all of the message topics Bob had prepared plus additional ideas from the team (we discussed roughly 60 ideas). By the end of the afternoon we had narrowed all of the messages into series, set aside the ideas that didn't fit where we felt God was leading, and put things onto the calendar. We spent Wednesday doing creative brainstorming for the remaining messages in August and for all of September.

The goal is that each week we'll  spend our weekly worship meeting covering the following:

• recap of last weeked - what was good, what was bad
• last minute updates for this weekend
• discuss sermon manuscript for two weeks out
• finalize service elements for two weeks out
  
• creatively brainstorm for the weekend six weeks out
• pray

Most of the time in the meeting (ideally half) is used for the weekend six weeks out. We've already got the core concept, big idea, main takeaway thought through so this is our time to push boundaries. We'll all toss out ideas for the weekend for media, drama, music, sermon illustrations, possible information for the person preaching, etc.

Our next long-range planning meeting is in early November. This first week went fairly smoothly, we've made some adjustments to the template document we're using for planning. I'll write about that next week. I'm very excited abuot the potential for planning this far in advance - a big step for us.

Catch Up Rambling: Contemporary Worship Shifts

We're still short a contemporary worship leader, but some of our prospects are outstanding and Zak/Angelia are doing a great job in the interim. If you know a talented worship leader that would be intersted in a part-time gig - 6-8 hours a week in Springfield, MO send him/her my way. The next several weeks we have candidates running practice and leading our two contemporary services. Last year we added a contemporary service on Saturday night. This year we're continuing to refine our contemporary worship by having the same band/leader at both services. I'm a bit concerned to be auditioning worship leaders as college students are coming back to town, but so far people are doing an outstanding job.

Catch Up Ramblings: VBS

VBS was an exhausting, outstanding week. We had over 400 kids attending VBS during our large day program and smaller evening program. We generally always do a wrap-up, overview video for the Thursday night program. This year to provide something more interesting for the fifth graders we tossed them into the mix. They helped collect video footage for two days and then recorded voiceovers about VBS in general and each of the daily lessons. Over the course of four days we collected nearly 400 photos, and five hours of video. All of that got cut down to a seven minute video for the Thursday night program. This year we planned ahead to allow the first two minutes of the video to stand alone and be featured in our weekend worship.

airSIGNS - AIR Digital Signage

So I'm working on my first official AIR application. I'm hoping to get it done prior to the onAIR bus tour landing in St. Louis.  We're going to be installing five, 42" LCD displays throughout the church in August and I didn't want to spend the money on a canned signage solution that only partially met our needs. The solution is to develop one ourselves. It seemed like a great project to do with Adobe AIR.

Here is a rough feature list:

• import of XML from SlideShowPro Director
• import  RSS/ATOM
• import ICS data
• display loop of images parsed from XML data (initially SSP, later RSS/ATOM)
  
• ticker of daily events (initially RSS/ATOM, later ICS)
• ticker of news items (RSS/ATOM)
• swapable layouts for 4x3 or 16x9 presentation
• multiple display windows for output on several video cards
• countdown timer for upcoming worship services

There is a real spec, and UI mockups, but I'm pretty sure that it will be changing over the next week. My goal this week is to flesh out most of the features that are needed in some form of usable code. So far I've gotten SVN setup and running, trained my assistant Zak to use source control and started prototyping components. Zak has done the basic Flex tutorials and is now working on a countdown timer for the signs. It'll be fun to watch him learn Flex and AS3 at the same time on a real project.

Right now I've got a slideshow component that takes the XML, parses it, and displays the images in a loop. I've also got a simple ticker (no RSS feed for it yet though). I'm beating my head against the window API trying to get custom positioning to work on a new window, so far no luck.

Long-term I'm going to make this thing allow user-definable layouts with a variety of mashup style widgets for various services. It should be a fun project.

FCP Studio 2: Color

I just completed the first video with substantial color correction and grading using Apple Color today. It was quite a nice process. In four quadrant image below you can see each of the clips from these interviews. In clips A and B you can see clips that had the exposure properly set prior to the shoot. I didn't adjust the exposure for clip C and in clip C the corrected version of clip C.  

 

 

The workflow was relatively smooth and I found the interface for this type of quick correction to be much better than using the integrated FCP color correction tools. Outputting a sequence from Final Cut creates a Color project that has all of the clips in your  sequence and lets you correct each of them independently. Sending back to FCP creates a new sequence. For the final grading I exported the movie and reimported to a new sequence (as a reference movie). I sent that third sequence to Color and applied a slight gamma correction (for our a projectors, a blur masked by a soft-edged vignette, and a flim look to get a bit of graininess on the image. Below you can see the raw footage top and the final color grading on the bottom (click for a larger image).

 

Schweitzer Web Update Launched

Earlier this week we launched the updated Schweitzer web site. There are some substantial design updates and major infrastructure changes - switching to the Web Empowered Church platform, which is powered by Typo3. We still have some content to migrate, so this is basically a soft launch (the only announcement is on this blog). We hit some technical snags that delayed the launch by about two weeks and during that time we neglected the previous site - thinking "Oh, we'll be launching the new one tomorrow." The update task list had gotten so long that it made more sense to launch the new site and move content rather than update the old site.

Remaining items for the next week or so:

• Sermon information - I'm struggling with getting a template that looks good with the SMS.
• Staff bios - several people turned these in hand written, and I wasn't in the mood to spend time typing before the site was launched.
• Better blog tools - right now the pastors' blog is powered out of Typo3, but it will be moving to Movable Type and imported via RSS - see the youth section for an example. I'd much rather train our pastors to use MT than Typo3 - our Youth Pastor already has it down.
• Servant Connector - We're right now updating our master opportunity list. Once that is complete the web team will get the core list imported and leave it to staff to add new opportunities.

Long range we're expanding the web ministry to include a software ministry. I'm lucky to have several people on my team that are professional software developers who are into the vision of building/providing tools for WEC. Here are just a few of the ideas we've kicked around: lyric management system for ProPresenter, volunteer scheduling, worship planning tools, etc. The first project I want to work on is a tool to read/render remote calendar data. We use EMS for all of our room scheduling and main calendar functionality. It has an ODBC interface, so I'm hoping it will be possible to get data from it into Typo3 without too much difficulty.

Now to Good Friday stuff then Easter...

WEC: Installation & HTTP Compression

Installation of the Web Empowered Church platform was smooth and easy. I was a php software developer prior to entering ministry, so  there were no difficulties with the installation. The symlinked install approach even made the upgrade to the 4.1 version of Typo3 very  easy. The docs from WEC make the process simple enough that anybody with basic linux web server administration experience could set it up. The only thing that might make it easier would be to offer it on a vm image with a basic linux installation.

The biggest gripe that I had with WEC after initial configuration was the size of the css it generates. My css customizations and the default set generated by all of the plugins result in a total CSS overhead of nearly 90k. Our front page is graphpically intensive, and includes 125k of graphics/flash.  My goal for the redesign was to keep the entire footprint of the home page under 150k. This wasn't a problem based on my template materials and the planned content. The problem happened when I realized that nearly 90k of css was required, bringing the total size of the page to about 245k. That doesn't seem to bad if you're sitting on a broadband connection, but about 10% of our population is on dialup (according to Google analytics). A 56k connection would take nearly a minute to download the page.

HTTP compression to the rescue. Last Thursday I decided to enable the mod_deflate Apache module and configure our WEC site to utilize it for all content except for images, flash, mp3, etc. We're basically making sure that everything leaving our web server is compressed - either within the file itself or via the mod_deflate compression. We're running a SuSE linux system as our main web server and the setup was painless. Enable the module that was already installed with Apache 2 and configure it for the virtualhost/directories with our WEC site. 

According to the new compression logs I put in place the overal size of the page has dropped to 135k with minimal impact on server performance. I haven't done any stress testing yet, but I don't suspect there will be a problem on the system we're using. Simply by turning on compression I can shave over 100k off our main page load.  Most every modern browser supports http compression and if a browser won't support it they'll get uncompressed content.

I do wonder about the size of the generated CSS, but with the http compression enabled it will be awhile before I bother to optimize it.

Creative Idea Generation

I love Creating Passionate Users and Kathy has a great post that I'm going to have to try the next time we do do a large scale creative idea generating session. It's a Product Design Dinner Party. We generally attack these sessions with a group of people from various fields and with various levels of experience in a round-table set up. This will take a bit longer, but I think it will make for some outstanding ideas. What do you think?

Schweitzer Web 2007 - Web Empowered Church

 

 

 

We're very close to launching the new design for the Schweitzer web site. This update is more substantial than a design refresh, it is a complete overhaul. One of my first goals when I came on staff was to migrate away from using static pages for the web site. Last year we implemented a Joomla system that has served us fairly well, but is severely lacking in workflow tools tht will let us empower each ministry to maintain their section of the web site. This year we've made the leap to typo3 and the Web Empowered Church platform. Over the next week I'll be writing about several of the components of this migration.

To launch our WEC powered web site required:

• installing and learning the WEC/typo3 platform (then later upgrading typo3 to 4.1)
• designing a custom template for the templaVoila plugin
• reforming our content to fit a new hierarchy then migrating the content
  
• casting the vision for the myConnection section of the web site
• implementing http compression

I'm presenting the final layout and structure to the full staff on Monday after getting the sign off from Bob, our senior pastor, on Thursday. We'll do content migration from the existing site this week and start shooting myConnection videos next week. The goal is to launch the site on Palm Sunday. Special thanks to the folks who stuck around during Media Lab on Wednesday night to help hash out the action based content hierarchy, but more about that later.

Anecdotes

Seth Godin had a great post last weekend about how what we do today is tomorrow's anecdote for somebody. I think this really holds true in ministry settings. Think about the last time you had either an exceptional or a very bad experience with customer service in a store or restaurant. These experiences stick with us and are oftentimes the stories we tell to other people. In the church we should be working to make sure that the anecdotes people have about experiences with us are related to life-transformation, joy, and hope. These are the stories that people love to both experience and share.

MMI: Bench Warmers: How Churches are Sidelining Their Young MVPs

MMI: Bench Warmers: How Churches are Sidelining Their Young MVPs

This is an interesting situation. Something I've become more interested in as I've renewed my candidacy process and filled in coordinating the young adult ministry. It's also something that I don't see very commonly at Schweitzer. We've got a lot of young adults active in a variety of areas of the church - they serve on staff parish, trustees, church council, etc. Of course in the next few years many of these young leaders won't be so young any more. We do have a shortcoming identifying people in their 20s for leadership roles (other than volunteering with the youth).

What do you see in your church?  Do you have any suggestions?

Relevant Network

I recently subscribed to the Relevant Network as part of my expanded role at Schweitzer. Until January I had been mainly a participant in the young adult ministry, now I'm serving as the staff coordinator. Our goal is to move the ministry to be mostly led by a volunteer team. It's something I think will work very well, but the transition does require quite a bit of my effort. Hopefully it will diminish over the next few months.

I'm really excited about everything that showed up in the box from Relevant. I've subscribed to their magazine for a couple of years. This box is great for anybody in ministry with young adults. It contains:

• A copy of Relevant Leader
• 4 CDs: Hundred Year Storm,DecembeRadio, Matt Papa, & The Swift
• Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer
• Here's to Hindsight by Tara Leigh Cobble
• What Now by Marc Estes
• In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day by Mark Batterson
• Catalyst Groupzine #2
• Several copies of Relevant and Radiant magazines

If this is what I can expect in each shipment it is well worth the price. I've already read two of the books, but they'll be great to add to the library in the young adult classroom.

ProPresenter Font Choice

 

Like I said in my previous post I'm tickled to death with ProPresenter for our worship presentation software. There are a couple of features I'd love to see added and I'll write that up in a future post, but so far the quality of the text and background display has been great.

The one problem we're having is probably Mac/PC issue rather than ProPresenter, but  it is a bit frustrating and has me looking for a new display font. We standardized on Franklin Gothic last year for lyric display because it is very readable, allows quite a bit of text per line on our 800x600 display, and it's not Arial or Helvetica. Under MediaShout on Windows we used a 32pt font. To achieve the same projection size we're using 42pt on the Mac with ProPresenter. This difference doesn't bother me a lot, it's more of an interesting quirk.

What's bothering me is that character spacing is different (I'm guessing that the Mac is properly kerning the type whereas Windows just throws it up there). The image below illustrates what I'm talking about. With MediaShout and ProPresenter configured for the same margins, and font size adjusted to achieve the same size letters the lines don't hold the same amount of text. With MediaShout all of the text fits on a single line. Don't get me wrong, this looks better, but I'd really like to maintain the number of characters on a line.

So that brings me to my question. What font/size combo are people using for ProPresenter lyric display?  

Christmas Eve @ Schweitzer & Merry Christmas

I hope everybody has a Merry Christmas today. Sarah and I are headed to the farm outside Purdy. Yesterday was a phenomenal day at Schweitzer, but it's left me very tired. We had five worship services - one yesterday morning, and then four Christmas Eve services. The message last night was about the gift of Christ. My favorite part of the message is that the gift isn't really about Christmas, but about Easter. The music was great as always, but Susan LaBarr's singing of the Child of Love topped the evening for me. It's probably one of my favorite Christmas songs.

This was our second weekend using ProPresenter and it didn't disappoint. We smoothly ran moving a background loop throught the entire day with quick crossfades on text changes and very slow fades on background changes (mainly cutting to black during the candlelight portion of the services).

We've got a slightly green/yellow hot spot in our two main projectors which we need to get resolved if we want the screens black in a dark room. I'm not sure if it's the projectors or the feed, but our rear screen doesn't show it on the same feed so I think it's the projectors. I've been wanting to replace the main sanctuary projectors this year anyway and move one of these to Memorial Hall and the other to the gym.

I hope everybody has a great Christmas! 

First Sermon @ Schweitzer

Saturday night I got the opportunity to preach my first sermon at Schweitzer. I've spoken during worship at a couple of churches in the past, but I don't know if I woul