Skittles

Skittles is one or our family's favorite games. Ever noticed that some of simplest games are the best--like who came up with mancala? In Merdel's Skittles a top is spun to knock over pins in a wooden game board. Each pin is worth different points. The hardest pin to knock over is worth 100. I don't know if this game is still available, we inherited it from a great friend and teacher, Cheryl Draughon, who said it originally belonged to her mother.

Every one of my family members has their own unique way of wrapping the string around the top for optimal performance. Optimum is a steady spinning top that moves to the back of the game board where the higher points are. It's hard to find a game that everyone in the family enjoys and can play--especially when the age spread is 3 to 30 something.


What are some of your favorite family games?

Launch Sunday!

6 weeks ago we had no sound system, no cast, no vocalists, no Kidstuf dancers, no greeters, no tech people, no set, no kidstuf director (or at least she hadn't started yet) and today we had our first Kidstuf production at River Park Community Church. Zero to full production in six weeks--that is an amazing feat. As noted by Jeff Cowan--putting this caliber of sound & audio system together was nothing less than supernatural. Putting a production like Kidstuf together in less than 6 weeks was nothing less than supernatural.

Some facts:
5:3oam our trailer was picked up from storage.
6:00am: set-up began and was finished by 7:30am
10am over 120 people shared an expereince together called Kidstuf and learned that: "God knows everything, so we should learn what He says."
At least 4 families came from the surrounding neighborhood in response to post cards that were passed out on Friday and our signs on Sunday morning. And . . . they registered their children for Upstreet.
By noon everything was taken down and loaded into the trailer, while our sound system was tuned for the room.
At 1:30pm I enjoyed lunch with my family.

Great work by an amazing team of people! We are praying that impossible things would happen through River Park Community Church so that there is no mistaking who gets all the glory.

On deep Bible Study . . .

I have been reading through the historical books of the Bible (Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings, I & II Chronicles . . .) I'm doing my own version of reading the parallel accounts simultaneously. That just means while I am reading the account of David in II Samuel, I am reading the parallel account in I Chronicles. If you want to try it yourself, it is quite easy to figure out by using the timelines in the back of a good study Bible. There are actual Bibles that have been organized by the chronology of the narrative, however I like to know what book of the Bible I am reading out of in order to not miss the themes unique to the book.

Sometimes I think that as long-time insiders of this thing called Christianity we come to believe that we have to do deep Bible study--I'm all for deep learning that leads to deep application. However, I think we often equate deep Bible study with lots of research, Greek and Hebrew lexicons, Bible dictionaries and a wide array of Bible commentaries. All helpful in their own right. I think we also equate deep Bible study with learning something new rather than applying something well.

So . . . my goal has been to read the historical books as story. There is a lot of meaning that can be gained from reading as much of the story in one sitting as possible. We get the big picture of what is happening versus trying to draw meaning out of an isolated account.

Remember the first three Stars Wars movies? If you hadn't read the books and only seen the movies, could you have guessed that the main character was Anakin Skywalker and not his son Luke? It is not until the first three episodes were finished that we are able to see that the main plot line is the rise, fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. It is amazing that the first movies did so well without developing that meta-story.

The Bible is a lot like that. There are several levels of story. Right now I am currently reading II Samuel and I Chronicles. In the two books there are individual accounts of the kingship of David. But read together with I Samuel there is a meta-story that is really the story of the leadership of two kings. Side-by-side the books show two leaders, King Saul and King David. In one you see a failure of nerve and the loss of integrity, in the other you see well differentiated leadership and redemption from moral failure. (Maybe that is why they are called I & II Samuel) Then there is a meta-story that ties all the books of the Bible together . . . the story of God's relationship with mankind, mankind's fall and then redemption through God's Son, Jesus Christ. Try reading the entire Bible in one or two sittings. I wonder what we would discover.

How do you like to read the Bible?

Back online after a while . . .

So it has been nearly 20 days since my last post. I have been a little underwater these days with preparations. We are currently trying to do the impossible--get the best deals on audio/visual equipment, to create an excellent environment and do it fast. I believe that you can only do two of those things at any given time. It can be excellent and cheap--but that takes time. It can be excellent and fast--but that take money. So we are trying to do all three--and I think we are succeeding. Let you know on September 14th--the grand opening of our Kidstuf Production.

Peacemongers

I think people have heard me talk about this before. I read about 15 books at a time and finish about 100/year. Nothing to boast about. I am just that ADD. Recently I have been working through A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman.

Freidman was a Rabbi turned family psychologist. He began to be sought after for his application of family therapy to “bigger” families—organizations. If his assumptions are true, our understanding of leadership would be deeply impacted.

Here is a quote. Let me know what you think.

In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is tha the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger. By that I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a “middler,” someone who is so incapable of taking well-defined stands that his “disability” seems to be genetic, someone who functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats conflict or anxiety like mustard gas—one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask, and he flits. Such leaders are often “nice,” if not charming. (Failure of Nerve, 14)

What is the difference between a peacemonger and a peacemaker? I have some partially formed ideas . . . but what do you think?

Betty Louise Roberts

During the Christmas season our family and several families go Christmas caroling to shut-ins.  Each family brings homemade cookies, candy and cards to share.  We make baskets from the cookies and candy that everyone brings. These then are given  to people we carol to.  Afterwards we gather for chili at my home.  Try it sometime it's great.

Every year we have been visiting an old friend who has struggled through a hip surgery and the loneliness of not being able to get out much.  Her name was Betty Louise Roberts.  She died last week.  This Friday my wife and I attended her funeral.  When my five year-old son found out he asked, "Do you mean we won't get to sing to Betty this Christmas?"  I realized in that moment that sometimes we do ministry, only to find out that we are ministering to ourselves.

One of Betty's best known quotes was: "God looks out for us all week long; we can afford to give Him one hour a week."

Have you ever thought you were doing ministry only to find that you were ministered to more than ministering yourself?

5 Priorities

While our core team was in Georgia for n*Rich, we had an opportunity to list the top five priorities of each or our positions.

We have a unique staff structure at River Park Community Church. We are trying to pry off the lid for growth by separating the talker from the leader. Most churches expect the Senior Pastor to be an excellent weekly communicator and an excellent leader of people. We have all experienced senior pastors that are good talkers and poor leaders. We have experienced senior pastors who are great leaders but can't keep an audience awake for thirty minutes in a row.

I think not only is this gift mix rare, the reality is that even where both gifts exist in one person, one person simply doesn't have the time to do both. Something gets cheated--usually it isn't weekly communication. We are prying the lid off of the church in this area--more on this later.

We have five staff members: Lead Pastor, Lead Communicator, Executive Pastor (Admin/Groups), Service Programming Director and Kidstuf Director.

As a team we defined the five priorities of each position. Maybe I will spend some time fleshing out each of the priorities later. Here is the short list though:

Lead Pastor:
1. Vision Casting
2. Staff Development
3. Fundraising
4. Key Leader Recruitment/Development
5. Strategic Planning

Lead Communicator:
1. Series Planning, Sermon Prep. and Delivery
2. Managing alternate communication channels
3. Fundraising
4. Communicating Vision and Strategy
5. Married Life Live/Parent Matters

Executive Pastor:
1. Dashboard
2. Groups vision and leader training
3. Group tracking
4. Records and Legal documents
5. Cultivate a culture of giving

Service Programming Director:
1. Guest Services
2. Recruitment and management of SPD team
3. Oversee, design and maintain Worship Experience environment/context
4. Pre-production, creative planning and evaluation
5. Implementing vision of worship experience/big picture

Kidstuf Director:
1. KS Stage production
2. Recruitment and training of cast and crew
3. Oversee, design, maintain KS environment/context
4. Pre-production, Creative planning & evaluation
5. Graphic design

More on the details later . . . Our next step is to fill in these priorities. I plan to assign a one line "win" to each position. Then we create an organizational chart for a church of 750 and put our names in each of the slots.

Flannery O'Connor

O'Connor is one my favorite Catholic writers next to Walker Percy and more recently Mary Doria Russell.

She is best quoted as saying "for the near blind you have to draw really large pictures and for the hard of hearing you must shout really loud." She said this in response to the many people who were offended by her use of shocking characters and circumstances in her stories.

Edwin Friedman, author of Friedman's fables, had a similar philosophy. He wrote his fables to induce anxiety. Sometimes you have to shout really loud.

While on our way to Savannah, Georgia, we stopped in Milledgeville. There is not much in Milledgeville except the family residence of Flannery O'Connor. She spent the last decade of her life here battling the disease that consumed her at age 39. She wrote some her best stories. Sometimes I wonder what she would have written had she lived longer.

If you have never read O'Connor start with "The Misfit" or "Parker's Back." Out of all the literature I read at Wheaton College, I return most often to O'Connor and George Herbert.

Here is a question: Should we shock or induce anxiety in order to jumpstart life-transformation?

River Park went down to Georgia

Friday was our first official meeting since James and I returned from an internship at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. To celebrate we had a Southern potluck—does that make us Baptist? Maybe . . . Southern Baptist?

Our featured food was Marcona Almonds—guaranteed to keep your spleen lean. They are from the South of Spain . . . which is a sort of South.

If you didn’t make it, you missed some great food and lots of sweet tea. You also missed an update on what is happening at RPCC.

Some things we talked about:

The mission of River Park Community Church is to lead people in a growing relationship with Jesus Christ by creating irresistible environments that encourage intimacy with God, community with insiders and influence with outsiders.

In a past blog I talked about 5 catalysts of faith—five things that God uses to grow us spiritually. They are practical teaching, providential relationships, private disciplines, pivotal circumstances and personal ministry. We believe that the best thing a church can do is create environments where those five catalysts can be best leveraged. One of those environments is community groups. A community group is a small group of people--8-12 people committed to meeting together on a regular basis for fellowship and Bible study. It is where I believe that all five catalyst converge. It is where people do life on life.

Important Dates: Our goal is to launch two irresistible environments in the fall: Kidstuf on September 14th and our Worship Experience on October 5th. We will be alternating Kidstuf and the worship experience until January 4th.

Our next launch meeting is Sunday August 3rd at 6:30pm at the DeLillo’s.

Four Things: I often get asked about membership at RPCC. Membership is participation. Specifically, to be a part of RPCC we want people to be involved in four things. (One day we will have some great branding for this, cute logos and maybe a jingle—but right now it will be known as four things.) We want every person at RPCC to be involved in community groups and investing in outsiders and inviting them to our environments. We want people to be percentage givers and involved in personal ministry at RPCC. Those are the four things.

Hope to see you on Sunday August 3rd at 6:30pm. We are currently attending the 9am worship service at Camarillo Community Church.