The Oscar for Best Director Goes to…

I was reading in the book of Jonah this week, and noticed the reccurrence of this phrase “God Arranged”.  God arranged for the famous great fish to swallow Jonah whole.  Then there are two much less recognized arrangements.  We all know the first chapter of Jonah, but the 4th tells the story of God arranging for a “leafy plant” to grow to bless Jonah and keep him in the shade.  Then God arranges for a worm to eat the stem of this plant and for the plant to die.

Jonah was really upset about this and started wishing God would kill him all ready.   I realized today that I am such a Jonah.  God has brought me from such terrible situations (not quite as bad as being in a whales stomach).  Not only that god has brought blessing into my life.  As director it is his right to take away blessings from time to time.  I am sometimes left whining like Jonah, thinking my situation is so miserable.  I wonder why God waits so long to do what I expect.  I wonder why he would ever take away blessing.

In the end, he is in control and has a perfect plan.  He is the ultimate “Best Director”.  I know that he has plans to use me to make a difference in my my sphere of influence.  As long as I have a part in this production I must be content.  I have  a part in the great story ever told.

Sin is Fun

I have a friend I have been trying to bring closer to Jesus. This friend of mine is struggling with turning his life over to Jesus. He mentioned to me a few weeks ago that the word surrender keeps coming  to  him. However, he has also mentioned that sin is fun to him and he does not want to stop doing it. You know what, I agreed with him that sin is fun. As a matter of fact, I used to enjoy it in a major way. I liked doing the things that God is against.  A lot of it felt really good too! For example: drugs, sex, and partying all the time was fun while even producing a sense of euphoria.

I have to admit though that inside I was hurting. I was very aware of that. Not only that, but I was really hurting those in my life. The euphoric blur of sinful fun often seems to out-shine the darkness it produces inside of us and that it produces for those in our lives as well. However, when I caught a glimpse of what it really was doing and chose Jesus; that fun stopped. A new and improved fun started that only brought good things to me and others around me. This fun was more fufilling than I ever imagined in so many ways.

I really hope my friend realizes what the fun in his life really is doing. Jesus brings so much fun and life to the soul plus some!

Thought this was funny. False but Funny.

And we are live…

Great News. The brand new Restoration Community site is live. Be sure to bookmark it.

www.rescom.tv

Do/Be Church.

Had the pleasure of living the Austinite life to the fullest today.  We have a close friend in town for a few days and got to take her to a Live Music Fave.  A little place downtown called Threadgills.  It is a pretty standard Louisiana meets Mexico type cuisine, but the real draw is on Sunday mornings they do a “Gospel Brunch”  Hundreds of people turn out for the event each week, partly because the food is decent, but mostly because they get to have a church experience, minus the teaching.  The music  today was an old blues group.  And I mean old.  The lead singer was in a walker.

This is totally contrary to our youth driven worship experiences, but they have a good thing going.  Life changing, not for most, but they know how to get a crowd.  And people are willing to drop $10.95 a head!  Most of whom never would step foot in a church.

Two take aways:

1.  Life change comes from being church, not doing church.

2. People appreciate authenticity (read: old man in walker) over a production.

Oh and a third take away…

3. Food helps draw a crowd!

I’m no Artist

We will be starting a new series on the 15th of February. I like pretending to be a graphic designer, but usually leave it to the professionals. Here it is. Tip of the hat to The Gimp, for giving a guy like me who cant afford Photoshop a chance to do try my hand at design.  Also, keep an eye out for rescom.tv 2.0, coming soon (hopefully this week)

Turning a New Page

A few weeks ago I shared in a service some of our goals for the New Year. It was pretty intimating to tell the 5 people in attendance that night that we had a vision of breaking 75 average attendance this year, and that we were praying for 20 people to come to know the Lord.

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, we serve an amazing God. This weekend we we saw 42 people at our service, and saw 3 people make decisions to follow Jesus with there whole life. That is 3 people who God loved and died for. That is 3 people who we will get to spend eternity with. That is 3 people who are now part of the mission to bring restoration.

Vision is a powerful thing. When it comes to pass, although planed it is still remarkable.

Pastor’s Open Source Toolbox

Over the past year I have been discovering the beauty of open source software.  For those that may not know, open source is simply software where the source code is open for development, and typically available to us, the public, free of charge.  It used to be that these programs were a far cry from their commercial counterparts, but today there is a viable alternative to nearly every commercial program.  For a church this is a beautiful thing, especially in these times of economic uncertainty.  So without further ado, here a list of what I call a pastor’s open source tool box.  Check out these replacements for a pastor’s everyday software needs.

1. Firefox – I have to start with this one.  Probably most used piece of open source software.  Although its competitors are free, it has experienced such success because it is flat out better.  Firefox is a Web Browser that competes with commercial browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari.

2. OpenOffice.org – Let’s face, Microsoft Office is expensive. Part of the reason for this are all of the programs in there that neither you or I have any idea how to use. For a great alternative at no cost check out OpenOffice.org. It makes a great alternative to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The one hole in Open Office for most of us however is the lack of a true alternative to Outlook.

3. Thunderbird – For the solution to that Outlook hole, I use this Personal Information Management tool. Thunderbird, by Mozilla the makers of Firefox, is a one stop shop for email, and contact management. With the Lightning add on, allowing more calendaring capabilities, it has become a true competitor for Microsoft’s email giant.

4. Pidgin – A great little all in one instant messaging client. You can talk with anyone on any of the major messaging services, and it doesn’t have the ads that the commercial products do. I love it because it runs seamlessly in the background and takes up almost no resources.

5. The Gimp – I wouldn’t call this a Photoshop rival, but for the church market, it can handle just about anything you throw at it. I use it all the time for creating graphics for our upcoming events and sermon series and have found that it is pretty easy to get the hang of, and has some of the functionality that only the most elite graphic designers would find use for.

6. OpenLP – The LP stands for Lyric Projection. This little program is a great alternative to the Big Boys (with big price tags). I tried out Media Shout as well as Easy Worship, and found almost all the same functionality. It doesn’t come preloaded with any contemporary Bible translations, but there are some workarounds for this, and with a little time invested we have found this to be a huge cost saving choice.

7. VLC Media Player – I use this for all of my video playback. The beaut is that is plays just about any file type you can think of. I was so sick of having 4 video players for each type of file. This put together all the pieces.

Alive and Well at New Life

They say that time heals all.  Well, that appears to be the case over at New Life Church in Colorado Springs.  You know New Life… the church where the pastor was accused of (and confessed in part) to meth crazed homosexual encounters.  The church where a little over a year ago two members were murdered in cold blood during a service.  Yeah, that New Life.  Well according to to the Colorado Springs Gazette, there has been a total about face.

• weekly attendance has grown from 8,800 to 10,000
• giving has gone up 9.5 percent
• paid of 1 million dollars in debt
• gave 2 million dollars to the poor

I have got to hand it to the new pastor, Brady Boyd.   He  had both enormous shoes to fill, and an even bigger mess to clean up.  The report said he really had doubts about taking the Job.  I don’t know about you , but i would love to pick his brain for an hour and gain some insghts on leadership.  All that to say, a tip of the hat to Brady Boyd.  In a world where we are much more accustomed to ministries in these situations left to wither and die, it is great to hear real restoration happening.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Our New “Curiosity” Cards

They will be on a rubberized “indestructible” 1″x3″ card.   Love to hear your take.

Front…

back….

Special thanks to Greg Johnson, the world class designer who threw this together for us…