A couple of things...

Alright, I should be going to bed right now, but after catching up on my blog list, I've got a couple of things on my mind. Vacation part 2 still to come tomorrow.

Beef #1
Why is everyone in the blogosphere talking about Facebook. I'm quite sure I'm just not Web 2.0 enough but is Facebook really that revolutionary. People who've been interconnected for years are now all excited because they can connect via the internet... hmmmm, is this really so useful?

I don't know. I haven't tried. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dogging Facebook. I'm quite sure that when I get a little time, I'm going to register and connect with all of these people that I've already been connected with, and then at the very least I'll be able to speak from experience. Until then, I'd really like to NOT open up another blog about Facebook... please?!?!?!

Beef #2
So obesity is contagious. Researchers have discovered that if you hang around with people who are obese you have a greater chance (something like 57%) of being obese yourself. Duh... Is it coming as a big surprise that you become the type of person you hang out with?

Sorry, we've been saying this in Youth Ministry for years. "Show me your friends, I'll show you your future." "It's hard to soar with eagles, when you're hanging out with turkeys." (Although, turkeys never get sucked into jet engines!)

Please report something else, media. Please blog about something else, blogosphere (except for Facebook, that is).

I need to go to bed...I'm crabby!

Vacation Part 1

So we're on an amazing vacation in Portland, Oregon. Some friends of my wife's invited us to come and use their house while they are on vacation. Too good of an offer to resist. I'd never been to the West Coast before.

Thursday, we flew to Portland after several delays at O'hare Airport, arriving about 1:00 am Central Time. We got to spend Friday with Derrith and Evan Lambka, a very cool couple who've relocated to Portland area from Naperville, IL. They have been the greatest hosts imaginable.

The Pacific Northwest is beautiful! Everything is incredibly green, probably due to the amount of rain they get most of the year, but right now is perfect. Highs in the low 80s...lows at night around 70...tons of sunshine... We couldn't ask for better weather.

Well, what do I get excited about doing on vacation? Going to churches, of course. My plan was to drag my family to at least 3 different churches and I succeeded to a point, but I'll save the saga of the search for Donald Miller until tomorrow.

Speaking of Donald Miller, since I'm in Portland I'm reading Blue Like Jazz. VERY COOL BOOK!!

Church Logo

Last night at a communications team meeting to address our future website, we got onto the topic of church logos.

Today I came across this post on the topic at Church Relevance.

Thought I'd throw this out there for discussion and enlightenment.

Personally, my preference is one that is not dependant upon a background color. Also, I prefer one that the logo can stand alone without the need for words.

For the above reasons, "Church on the Move" gets my vote, but all of them are excellent.

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

Last week, I grabbed The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive off the shelf at the office and as the wife and kids were out of town for the night, I polished it off in one sitting. That wasn't my plan, but the book is a fantastic read--more than that it's indispensible for church leaders.

Sunday night, I'm catching up on some blogs that I follow and find that Tony Morgan (the first blog I ever read) has also just finished it and he put some of insights he picked up from it down on his blog. They are well done and this saves me the trouble, so here you go from Tony's blog on July 21st:

• "No one but the head of an organization can make it healthy."


• "Initially he insisted on seeing every candidate who cleared the first round of interviews. As the company grew, he limited himself to senior managers and partners."


• "Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team."


• "Create organizational clarity... Essentially it's about eliminating confusion with the company, especially at the executive level."


• "Over-communicate the identity and direction."


• "He was adamant about not using anything slick or glossy, as he called it, to convey the identity of the company."


• "Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems."


• "Success is not so much a function of intelligence or natural ability, but rather of commitment to the right disciplines."


• "When an executive decides not to confront a peer about a potential disagreement, he or she is dooming employees to waste time, money, and emotional energy dealing with unresolvable issues."


• "For cohesive teams, meetings are compelling and vital. They are forums for asking difficult questions, challenging one another's ideas, and ultimately arriving at decisions that everyone agrees to support and adhere to, in the best interests of the company."


• "Even teams that get along well together should be experiencing regular conflict and intense debate during meetings."


• "The search for fundamental values requires a significant level of focus and introspection, and a willingness to acknowledge that all things good are not necessarily essential to an organization."


• "Effective communication requires repetition in order to take hold in an organization. Some experts say that only after hearing a message six times does a person begin to believe and internalize it."


• "What they need from leaders is clear, uncomplicated messages about where the organization is going and how they can contribute to getting there."


• "Healthy organizations use their values and other issues related to organizational clarity to guide their decisions about moving employees out of the company."

Thanks Tony! BTW, the bold italicized items are the "4 obsessions" that Lencioni puts forth in the fable.

Church of the Week

NC3 is the "Church of the Week" at a semi-local Christian radio station, WBGL, 104.7. I'm not really sure how churches are chosen, so I can't speak as to whether or not we should consider this an honor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad of the opportunity, and I thank WBGL for considering and choosing us, but my guess is it won't go far in helping us achieve any goals. Our mission is to build bridges to connect people to Jesus, so our main target is an un-churched person...one who has no relationship with Christ. My guess is that most of those people are not listening to WBGL.

How cool would it be if some of the local rock stations from Joliet or the Chicago metro area were talking about us. Now that would be a kingdom advancing BUZZ.

I believe that God is speaking two major things to our leaders: community and community.

That may sound like the old "location, location, location" bit, but that's not what I mean. What I'm saying is that God is telling us that we need to be more "in community" with each other and that we need to be more involved "in our community."

The world doesn't care about our worship services or the numbers that are being saved and baptized... They don't really care about the campus we're going to build (unless it benefits them in some way, i.e. meeting spaces, ball fields, etc). They can't understand the priorities that we have, but they notice when we serve them. When our church prioritizes in such a way that the community's goals line up with some of our goals as a church, then we can make a difference in our community. And when we make a difference, we can create BUZZ. And when there's a BUZZ, maybe we'll be the church of the week on WRXQ 100.7 -- the rock of the Southland.

Now that would be cool!

Sunday July 22, 2007

Another weekend experience is in the can... We had 274 people in attendance at our two meeting times. It was a great crowd -- lots of fun, interaction, etc.

The band played one of my all time favorite songs this weekend... "Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble" by Delirious? I'll admit that in the past I've been leery to do this song, because as much as it means to me, I'd be devastated if we performed it and it stunk or even if it was mediocre.

Well I give a lot of credit to our band, because the song flat-out ROCKED!!! I had a blast.

We turned the normal flow of the service upside down to fit the subject matter. As part of our current series, REEL LIFE - Finding Truth at the Movies, we grabbed Pirates of the Caribbean pt 3 and talked about Hell. PK actually pulled a Bart Simpson and said it about 15 times in his intro...pretty funny.

All in all, a very good day. I'm glad I get to work with the awesome artists who help plan our worship experiences as well as the musicians, singers and techies who pull it all off.

I'll be vacationing here with the family next Sunday, but I know I'm leaving everything in good hands. Next Sunday will rock!

YWAM in the house

This Sunday, July 15 was a change of pace in a very good way. A team from Arts With A Mission (division of YWAM) came and performed a program during each of our services. They also hung around afterward and conducting a dance clinic for our aspiring dance artists. Someone told me that Tim Kazmierczak now thinks he's a dancer... he he! Good to have the AWAM team, though. Harmoni and her team did a great job.

Our attendance was 322 at our two services, giving us hope that we're breaking out of the summer blahs that seemed to hit a low on the two weekends surrounding the 4th of July.

Here's a question...should every church expect and accept significantly lower attendances during the summer?

Here's another question...what's the difference between being concerned with numbers (because those numbers represent people who will go to heaven or hell) and letting attendance be our measure of success? How do you walk that line? Is that even a line that should be walked?

Two Movies in One Day

I did something today that I don't think I've ever done. I saw 2 movies at the theater today. All right, so there may have been a time or two in my younger years that we paid for an early show and then slipped into another show at the end of the first, but this was definitely the first time that I paid for two shows on the same day.

The first was Transformers. I loved these toys as a kid. I didn't have any, but I was certainly envious of my neighbor who had 19. I didn't really care for the cartoon, though. It just never seemed plausible enough I guess. (Like Thundar the Barbarian was...) I guess the movie followed suit. It was easy to like the Even Stevens kid as the protagonist and his crush/action partner/soon-to-be girlfriend. The CGI was out of this world. The movement of the robots was very believable...if only the plotline had been.

I guess, just like in the cartoon, it just never really seemed plausible that giant advanced robots with ridiculous tech IQ's would give one rip about the earth and it's inhabitants. Some of the robot dialogue was SOOOOO BADDDDD!!

I liked the catch phrase though..."If there's no sacrifice...there's no victory." That's definitely transferable, and it's a good thing as I was watching the movie for an upcoming sermon.

Both movies actually...

The second movie was Live Free or Die Hard, and I wasn't expecting much more from Die Hard 4 than I did from Rocky 4 (or 5 or 6, etc.). I was very pleasantly surprised. Lots of thrills from the word go and Justin Long was a good sidekick for Bruce Willis. The motivations all seemed natural...the acting was good...the dialogue wasn't trite...the ending was even surprising.

All in all, for a homework assignment, LFoDH was a good flick. The theological ramifications...I'm still working on it. Probably something to do with the exchange between Willis' character and Long's character about "I only did what no one else would do." And Long's character responds, "That's what makes you that guy."

Well this is getting long... adios!

PrisonBreak part 5 - video

I'm now officially a YouTuber.

Here's the video I promised if you missed week 5 of the PrisonBreak Series at NC3.

Sunday July 8, 2007

This past Sunday was a very good day, the culmination of a very good week, but one that I'm very, very glad is over. I got to preach, which is always a very cool thing for me... Not saying I would want to do it all the time, but I really love the chances I get. I also did a wedding for a very neat young couple. I'm excited for them!

Since I hate for Sunday mornings to look like "the Corbett Show," I always try to schedule someone else to lead worship on days that I teach. My wife Tricia was the go-to-guy (err...girl) this week and backed by Lori Ritter (making her triumphant return after CANCER SURGERY!!!) and the world's most dangerous praise band, they totally knocked it out of the park.

A bit of a down crowd, no doubt somewhat due to the Fourth of July weekend stuff, (or maybe they heard who was speaking...) we had 240 people between the two services.

The topic was very real... we talked about revenge and the nature of the human heart to dwell on bitterness and the wrongs done to us. We saw Jesus reversing the "Law of Lamech." Read here and here.

God is good and several people talked to me about wanting to take the steps in their lives to forgive and not live in the story of Lamech.

A very cool day!

Multi-Site Arts blog

Huge thanks are in order for Bill Carroll. Bill has an awesome blog for anyone who is involved in Arts Ministry. His blog is Multi-Site Arts, but a crazy thing happens that I bet wasn't even on purpose... Because their mulitiple sites are of a variety of sizes and in different types of facilities, their ability to be relevant is totally multiplied.

Not following me? Their main location is a permanent install with a weekly attendance of around 2500, but they also have sites that are weekly set-up/tear-downs with weekly attendances much closer to a small church setting.

The pay-off is... no matter what size your church is, or what type of facility you meet in, the stuff the blog deals with applies to your setting.

ok... ok... enough butt-kissing (but, Bill if you read this, I'd really like to come to the audition!)


Next up... What I learned about our upcoming audition from Bill and Carrie!