Posts

Showing posts from February, 2009

Transition Thoughts - Integration is a Team Sport

Image
If I can be truly honest... and since it's my blog I figure I can be... I wish I could have changed my title here at the church. Why? Because the title of Pastor Integration & Discipleship gives a false sense of what my role was... Let me explain. Integration is a Team Sport! Plain and simple. It is absolutely impossible for one lone person to integrate new guests into the life and ministry of a church by him or herself. In a little church, sure, one key volunteer or one staff member will be able to meet every new person. But after a church reaches a certain size it is just flat out impossible to meet every single new guest who shows up. And most of the time, you never even hear of them until long after they've stopped attending... I think the problem with having a pastor with the title of "integration" is that the congregation assumes that he is integrating everyone. Truth be told, I have been incredibly ineffective at connecting new people to the church!

Transition Thoughts - It's Not About Me

As I start getting my head around the fact that God has called us out of our current ministry and is sending me to be a part of a new church, I have a lot of thoughts/prayers/hopes/dreams for the friends and family at this church.  As I spend the next 4 weeks prepping volunteers and documenting ministry guidelines and procedures I'm just struck by the different aspects of ministry that I've learned over the past 2.5 years. So... I figured that while in this transition between two churches I'd share just a few of the things floating around in my head and heart.  I figured I'd share my deepest prayers for the church. The first is It's Not About Me .   One thing I love about this church is the fact that it came out of a very conservative Mennonite tradition.  The fact that these people had the guts to follow what God had called them to is incredibly impressive to me.  They risked losing family and friends who are religious legalists in its strongest form...  all for t

Brain Dump

Image
Definitely have a LOT on my mind lately... so here is today's brain dump. Working on documentation is exhausting! When I started here at Woodside I didn't have any real guideline or resources to draw on in supporting most of the ministries here. I pretty much had to go those thousands of pages of paper and old computer files to figure things out... and even then I pretty much had to guess at most things. So in order to facilate the transition here I'm trying to document EVERYTHING that I've learned and did here. And boy is that a lot! This way, for each key area of ministry, I can put a folder together with all the past history and current status of the ministry. I'm hoping this will be a good place to start for whoever replaces me. With my new position I'm going to have to work at home a lot. Since it's a fairly new church plant they don't have a church building or office space. I'm going to have to find some comfortable chairs at Starbucks to work

New Adventure!

With my first post back I have some pretty big news to announce... I've stepped down from my position of associate pastor at Woodside Bible Fellowship to accept the role of Pastor at a small church plant just up the highway from us in Waterloo. My time at Woodside was great and we've really enjoyed it there... but ever since coming back from our cruise in November we just knew that God was moving us out and that we had to be open to where that that was going to be...  talking about it with the elders and the senior pastor everyone is really on board with me taking on this new position.  The beauty of it is that this plant (which is a few years old now) was actually a church that Woodside people were a part of.  So this is really going to be cool to keep great relationships between the churches. My last day is going to be March 22nd.  I'll be starting at LifeSpring Christian Fellowship on April 5th. It's weird... being really excited about something and a little sad all

Taking a 2 week fast

For the next two weeks I'm going to try an all out internet/reading fast.  I've been thinking of this for quite some time and figured now is a good time as ever to give it a try :-) No Facebook.  No Twitter.  No blogging.  No reading blogs.  No reading books. All I'll have is email and my Bible.  I need the email to work... and the Bible to live :-) So pray I don't have a freak out.  Be back on the 25th.

Ultimate Alliance 2 Game Trailer

I SOOOO can't wait to get my hands on this game! This is going to rock!

Small Group Leader Podcast Revamp!

Yup... it's been MONTHS since the last podcast for the Small Group Leader Lifter... several reason why: We changed our hosting options here at the church and that affected pretty much every single piece of media out there... you may have noticed that all the links to the podcast have been dead...   I've been working BIG TIME on why we do small groups at our church and what is the purpose for that ministry.  This has been a HUGE learning process... both in small group ministry in general and getting to understand the culture of our church better. and I have many other excuses but I won't bore you with those!  :-) But, now, after doing a lot of praying and thinking on how to continue with the podcast I'm nearly ready to get the podcast back going again.  YAY! The first change is a new hosting environment.  I've transferred all the past episodes to a new location to be available to listeners.  Also, because I've been getting more and more downloads from people from

New Job?

My favorite commercial at this year's superbowl was this one!  Man on man I laughed for about 30 minutes after this one! (If you're reading this on Facebook check out this link )