Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Get a Financial Vision

As we kick off our series Mind Your Own Business this weekend at Real Life one of the major themes will be learning to get a financial vision for your life. In other words, what do you want to get out of life and what do you think that God would have you do with his resources. Once you get a clearer picture of that you need to make a plan to get there. The Bible says in Proverbs that "where there is no vision the people parish." Even though the Bible wasn't talking money in this case I think it actually applies pretty well.

If you have no vision of what you are to be doing with the resources God is trusting you with you will die financially. If you have a vision then you can develop a plan that will help you get there.

For April and I. Our plan is to become totally debt free so that we can spend our lives working in full-time ministry without the stresses of having to pay bills. Since that is our vision we have developed a plan that will help us get there. It won't happen without some hard work and it would never happen with out a plan.

So what is it for you? What is your vision? Home ownership? Early retirement? No credit cards? Being able to give more? What ever your vision is develop a plan to get there and learn to focus with "Gazelle Intensity!" (you'll learn the meaning of this next week!)

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Sunday Mind Dump

Great service today. It was really nice being in our own place. Still feels a little strange that we are such a young church and actually have "a place." We have a few things that we need to hammer out yet and a few more things the we have to pick up but overall we are about 98% done with everything at the new place. So here are a few things bouncing around my mind tonight:
  • Really nice being able to just hang out and talk to people after the service. I love that. I always hated that part of being portable.
  • Sound was pretty good today. Noah always does a killer job on the board and we are lucky to have him.
  • John did a great job on drums today. That guy has made some huge progress over the last 6 months.
  • Getting really excited about the new series kick off next week for "Mind Your Own Business." It's probably one of the most practical and important things we have done as a church and my prayer is that people get it and are willing to apply it to their lives.
  • Great to see that we are growing at a nice and steady pace. We have added a little over a family a month from our low point in September. If this pace keeps up we'll be thinking two services next fall.
  • Shelly is doing a killer job with power point and learning the new system with the LCD TV's.
  • We are to the point where we have 2 to almost 3 complete worship teams. We are SO BLESSED!! There are many churches much larger than us without anyone who can play in a band. Next year when we launch Real Life's first campus church we are going to have the band in place from day one. How cool is that? Now we just need to find that campus pastor!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Personal Growth

Many of us get stuck in a rut when it comes to our personal spiritual growth. We don't purpose ourselves to learn more, do more, and be more for God. We are kind of content to just allow things to unfold before us and we don't really approach our lives with any sense of urgency.

I have been guilty of it myself. Just coasting along and relying on what I already know as if that were enough to get me by. The thing is, if we really want to make any type of impact on our families, friends, and community we have to grow. We have to learn more and be more.

At the end of last year I developed a growth plan for myself. I thought I needed to work on growth as a leader and I needed to work on growing my faith. I decided I was going to develop a plan and stick to it. Here is my plan: I am going to read a book a month on the subjects and I am going to stretch myself by taking some steps of faith.

So what about you, are you content? Or do you want something different? A friend of mine once said foolishness is doing the same things the same way and expecting different results. IF you want your life to change you are going to have to do some things differently. You are going to have to set aside some time for learning.

As Forrest Gump liked to say, "stupid is as stupid does." If you really want something to change in your life you are going to have to take a different course than the one your on right now. Get going and get started today.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Volunteer of the week-John Myers

My volunteer of the week has to be John Myers for this week. On Tuesday Jon put in an 11 hour day building the area that is going to contain our sound, computer, and video stuff. On top of an 11 hour day, he did it all with a back he had thrown out a mere two days before hauling firewood.

Everyone needs to tell john how much they appreciate his hard work this week. When you see the tech room you are going to be blow away at how nice it really is. The guy is awesome and a huge blessing for our church. John I cannot say enough good things about you.

Keep it up!!

And I am really excited about trying your chili something tells me it's going to be good!!

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Coming Together

The new location is really coming together. We spent yesterday doing a tad more cleaning and putting together most of the chairs for the sanctuary. They look really nice. People that walk into the building for the first time are going to be surprised at how nice the place looks. I think they are also a little blown away at the actual size of the church as well. It really doesn't look as big as it is from the street. Being able to use all three floors really helps us separate everyone and gives us so much room.

The budget for this move is holding together, we are still trying to raise the rest of the money for the project but it's coming and we had hoped to raise it by the end of March so we are right on track!

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Sunday Mind Dump

I have to say we had an awesome work day yesterday. WE got so much done the place is looking really nice. So many people came out and pitched in it really made the work day go smooth. I am really pumped about the next few months. We are going to see some great things happen and we are going to see many more people stopping by to check us out. The simple fact is, being a portable church is o.k. but, having a stable location does ad an amount of credibility to a church that you just don't get being portable. Over the next few months we are going to be doing some of the following:

  • Teaching a killer series on personal finances.
  • Doing a series called "Religion Bytes" where we look at some of the basics of the Christian faith.
  • Doing a series on building a better marriage.
We are primed to do some really good things and the building location will help us in that. It's not the thing that will allow us to grow but it's a part of the formula.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Getting Pumped

Tomorrow is our church work day for the new location. After tomorrow we'll pretty much be cleaned up and ready to go! We are just waiting on the last of the chairs and tables to come in and those are supposed to be here Tuesday.....It's getting closer!

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Vision 2008 Part 3

Real Life since it started has never been about trying to keep up with traditions we have been about helping people get connected to God. That is our mission and we protect it with a passion. That is why I announced that in 2008 Real Life would be:

Breaking Some Church Rules!

That's right we are breaking some rules this year. There are some things that we do already that would be construed as breaking the rules by many church folks. For example, we don't even try to dress up, we don't know anything about traditional church music, and we encourage people to have coffee and a bagel at any time during the service. Those things are a given with us.....but there are some things that we are going to really look at pushing the envelope on in 2008. Here is a list!

  • We'll work with any church group that wants to work together. That's right. Churches should never have an us against them mentality but too often they do. At Real Life, we'll work with any group that helps us fulfill our mission.
  • We are going to use technology for kingdom gain.
    1. We are adding the tech stuff right now to start video taping and streaming our messages. We'll be linking them to our website so people anytime and anyplace can see them.
    2. We are going to start running some small groups that are internet based so that we can connect with an ever larger group of people. Who might never connect in a traditional small group.
    3. We are going to use blogging to help teach and reach the lost.
  • We are Going to believe God for the Impossible! We have asked every person that calls real life home two questions and we are going to, in faith, believe God will bring it to pass. Here are those two questions:
    1. Who do you think will never in a million years come to Christ.
    2. What do you think God will never do.
At Real Life here is what we are believing for this year.....
  1. We are going to triple in size
  2. We are going to move to 2 services.
  3. We are going to begin the process of planting the next Real Life Church.
That's right. Even though we are just getting started we are going to look at planting the next Real Life Church here in town. Our Goal is to create a network of mid sized churches that together are able to do the things that larger churches can do all while doing the things that smaller churches do really well. We are actively looking for the person who is going to be the first Real Life campus pastor for our first daughter church. We couldn't be more excited and we are pumped to get going!





Sunday, January 13, 2008

Vision 2008 Part 2

Real Life is a Purpose Driven church. Many people don't quite get the concept of Purpose Driven and they think that it's all about a style but that isn't it at all. Purpose Driven is all about knowing your target or who you are called to reach and knowing your mission and how you are going to complete it. For us, we are called to do four things.

Real Life is called to:
  1. Bring people into membership in God's family.
  2. Build hurting people up.
  3. Train people up for service to God and others.
  4. Send out for service.
Being Purpose Driven means that we channel our decisions through the mission. If something doesn't help us meet one of the things we are called to do we aren't going to do it. It is that simple. Honestly, it helps make some choices much easier to make. When you know what you are called to do, it's much easier to say yes, and much easier when necessary, to say no. Being a church that does things one purpose helps us become more effective because we are able to focus our attention and energies into the areas that matter the most to our mission. We don't have to waste time, energy, and resources on things that don't help us complete the mission.

Being Purpose Driven also means that we budget for our purpose. We will continually look at our budget and ask ourselves how does our spending help meet our purpose. If a program or ministry is no longer meeting our purpose we will eliminate it. Purpose Driven budgeting also means that we are going to fund the things that are important to us.

As a small upstart church one of the big selling points we have is that we really have a killer kids ministry. Why is that? We put our money where our mouth is. It would be hypocritical for us to say we care about kids and not fully and completely fund that ministry. In most churches, kids get the short end of the financial stick. We fund other ministries but we give kids the scraps. That will never happen at Real Life as long as I am in charge.

Why are kids so important that we spend thousands of dollars yearly on them? Simple, most people that come to Christ come before the age of 18. A full 47% of conversions happen before the age of 12. Children's ministry is our biggest mission field. I will say that I don't know much about kids ministry. It's really not my passion. But, I know enough to make sure that our kids have everything they need.

Vision 2008 Part 1

Last weekend I gave our vision 2008 message where I laid out where we are going over the next year. I love being able to do that. I need to do it more. We all lose sight of the big picture at times and we never really get past what we are doing in the here and now. Over the next couple of days and blogs I am going to sum up the stuff we talked about last week. We started off by talking about church planting stats and how we are doing compared to other church plants. Our stats were provided by the North American Mission Board which is the worlds largest church planting organization and has the most information on and about church planting anywhere.

Some Stats.
  • The average church plant in America has less than 100 people it's four year mark.
  • Real Life had an average attendance in it's first year of 38 people.
  • The average church plant in America is just becoming financially self supporting at the four year mark.
  • Real Life has been financially self supporting since day one.
  • The average church plant in America has a 50% turnover in membership it's first year. (seems high but remember church planting is hard work. Often church plants are portable adding to the work load, church plants attract people that have issues in other churches and they bring those issues to you, and people can be spiritually mismatched in a plant getting wrapped up in wanting to shape the plant after their tastes, and a host of other reasons.)
  • Real Life has lost two families. Why so low? Primarily, because we take extra efforts to plug people in and connect with them relationally. In fact, April and I make it a practice to have dinner with each new family shortly after they visit our church.
What is our vision with respect to attendance?

  • We are going to triple in size in 2008.
  • How will we do that? We are going to continue doing what we are doing. Additionally, we are going to do radio ads, direct mail, fliers, and inviting quite a bit this year. We are going to look at really connecting with people our our new neighborhood. We are going to create an atmosphere that is so fun people will want to invite.


Monday, January 7, 2008

Leadership

Been reading John Maxwell's 21 laws of leadership over the last few weeks and a few things have hit me pretty hard.

  • First, I need to do a better job caring about people over the project. I tend to get tunnel vision and focus more on the project than I do on the people in the project. It's not intentional I have just always been that way and I am working on training myself out of it.
  • Second, I need to make a practice of rallying the troops than of actually doing everything myself. Like many people in ministry I take on more than I should personally and I need to do a better job of surrounding myself with people who can and want to help me and the church succeed.
  • Third, I need to do a better job of leaking vision. Every leader knows it the really good ones live it. I need to live it. Too often, I assume everyone is on the same planet as me when it comes to vision.
Leadership is a process and it's something I am continually trying to improve.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Sunday Mind Dump

First off....I am blown away at how awesome God is. He always exceeds our needs...always.....As I was getting ready for the worship experience this morning I was praying about some financial things we need for the new building. I was thinking in my mind about what we need and praying that God would provide X amount of dollars in order to get us to the next step so that we would be on track to make our budget........I always ask to small.....God provided more than I asked for. I seriously need to learn to dream and act bigger. So here are some thoughts about today:
  • The bad was seriously good today. Probably the best we have sounded in some time.
  • Our last service at the YMCA. Getting really stoked about the new place.
  • The new place is going to be sweet. We just bought some nice LCD flat screen TV's for the place that we are going to use in place of our projector! Sweeeet.
  • We are really starting to get people to step up and donate goods for the new place. It is going to look seriously nice.....did I mention the flat screens?
  • A bummer today we wanted to get our service put on DVD and the camera pooped out so that is not going to happen this week. Will have it going for the next one. You can bet on that.
  • The new place is going to be cool!
We have a ton going on over the next few weeks. It's going to be crazy. Fun, but crazy!

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Off The Hook

Tomorrow is going to be off the hook good. The band sounded awesome today. We added two new songs in for tomorrow and we picked them up the fist time we played them, the sound was great (thanks Doug,) and to be honest I have been looking forward to this message for quite a while.

Tomorrow we are going to be talking vision....big time!!

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Vision 2008

I am getting really excited about all the things that God is going to be doing in 2008. This weekend we are going to hear our vision 2008 message. I don't want to spoil the message so I am not going to give away too much but let's just say it's going to be a great year for us!

We are down to our last worship experience at the YMCA. After this weekend, we are taking a week off and getting ready for the big move to the new place. We'll have an every one's invited work day on Saturday Jan 19th at the new location. We'll kick off their at noon and work until everything is cleaned, put away, and looking good. We'll have a band practice for the guys and we'll work on getting all the tech stuff ship shape. Our first service in the new place will be Jan 27th. We couldn't be more excited about it.

This new year is really exciting. We are stationed to do some very big things in 2008.