My Worship Revolution

I’ve been spending a lot of time this week wrestling with John 14.
I’m teaching on that passage this week to close out our John series.
Justin Fox will be our guest worship leader.
There are lots of great concepts there.  I was thinking this week that I wish Jesus had listened to Andy Stanley when he said, “Teach less for more.”  That might make my job a little easier.  But I digress.

I’ve been wrestling with exactly what the big idea should be.  I’ve been trying to figure out where to go with the message.
Then I had a good chat with Dan Albrecht last night.  He is a Bethany professor at our church who has been teaching our John bible study on Wednesday nights.
He threw out the concept of mind mapping and using the right brain to get all the ideas out and help it take form.
This morning I woke up at 6:30 and started doing it in my head and it just came together.  So I raced to the office to get it on my whiteboard before my 7am coffee with Lipert.
So here is a peek inside my mind as the message comes together:

Probably looks pretty messy to most of you.  But it all has more form in my head now!
Looking forward to Sunday!

I'm really looking forward to introducing this song on Sunday:

Her voice totally reminds me of Rita Springer.

My friend Rich often posts his staff meeting doodles on his blog.  Always impressive because he’s quite the doodle artist.  Here’s an example.

Well, today I had a long phone conversation and was doin a little doodlin of my own.  So I thought I’d take a page out of his book and share with ya:

Apparently I’m getting into the Christmas spirit.
Break out the Egg Nog!!

One of the things I absolutely love about my wife is her ability to constantly encourage me and feed into my insecure self.  She reminds me regularly of who God made me to be.

Sunday was a pretty busy and good day.  Leading worship in the morning.  Connections lunch with Ed and Brandon after church.  Leading a meeting for our Mexico missions team from 3-5.  Rachel took off right after that meeting to drive to SoCal without me to visit friends and family.

When I got home, I found this on the fireplace:

Just wanted to make you all jealous because my wife is the bomb.

Thanks for the constant encouragement babe.
You’re the best!

Well, if you're in Santa Cruz on November 30th, that is.

As I mentioned before, this Christmas we are running hard with Advent Conspiracy.  Let's spend less money this year, cut down the stress to focus on Jesus, give relational gifts of our time and effort this year, and give away the money we would have spent for the poor around the world.

As a creative way to get our church and our community thinking about and talking about this concept, we rented out the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz and will be screening the movie What Would Jesus Buy from producer Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me).  It is free, and instead of asking people to pay we will be accepting small donations to go to the Africa Oasis Project as part of our Advent Conspiracy initiative.  Check out the trailer:

In case you were wondering, no, this is not a "Christian" movie (whatever that means…I guess it isn't going to heaven when it dies).  In fact many people who go may not agree with all of the points made in the movie.  But it brings up some real issues, will get people thinking/talking (which I feel is a mark of great art, btw), and it is a message that fits in quite well in Santa Cruz.

The Rio has 680 seats.  I think it would be pretty incredible if we filled em all.  A long shot, but let's do it.
Invite all your friends:

What Would Jesus Buy
Nov. 30th – 5:00 PM
The Rio Theater
FREE

Here is the Facebook invite.

So, what do ya think?
And who's coming?

I kinda try to keep my politics fairly close to the vest around here.
I’m too opinionated.
I always end up ticking someone off.
And I learned years ago that it wasn’t worth it for me.
I still can’t help it sometimes.
But now I figure, it can’t hurt since the voting is over, right?  (Famous last words?)
Besides, I’m sure everyone else is blogging about it, too.
Might as well join the pack!

I doubt I keep it close enough to the vest for you not to know that my guy didn’t win.
Then again, both of them had some major weaknesses I wasn’t excited about.
But I’ve been saying for weeks that whoever wins will do fine.
I’ve been saying that I don’t believe one president can single handedly ruin us.
I’ve been saying God is in control.
Then Obama won.

Mixed feelings.
Huge day for us. First African-American president.  That truly is awesome and historic.
Although I was also disappointed earlier in the day reading about people who outright said they voted for Obama only cause they were excited to see an African-American president.  Is that really a sign that we have become color-blind?
But again, the fact that he is leader of the free world is very exciting only a generation away from the civil rights movement.
In that respect, I’m stoked.

But then the fear started to get in.
I let Facebook statuses and people’s opinions/fear tactics get in my head for an hour or two.
What will happen to our country?
What sort of massive mistake have we made?

Honestly, I know I’m in the minority, but I feel like W. has gotten a pretty unfair bad wrap.
And I’ve been irritated for several years now with the way people have attacked him.
That it has become OK to attack him personally completely outside of the issues.
Even cool to do so.

Now it’s my turn to practice what I preach and be on the other side.
I don’t believe any candidate can destroy what this country has built.
I will choose to be optimistic and hope for the best.
I will pray for our leader and do my best to get behind him.  That doesn’t mean I’ll agree always, but I’ll recognize him as the leader we have chosen.
And I’ll pray that he really can do some of the good things hes said he can.
Unity.
Momentum.
Progress.

And above all, whether it’s someone I voted for or not in office, I’ll keep in mind that I’m a citizen of the Kingdom of God before the kingdom of America.
I am optimistic, and excited for the future.

Of course you do have to admit, this is a pretty heavy blow for SNL.

Dude, this is awesome!

HT: JR Woodward

Enjoy your voting today y'all. 
Vote, then take the day off going around town getting all your free food!

Starbucks
Krispy Kreme
Ben & Jerry's
Dairy Queen
Woodstocks!!

So this year, Christmas is going to look a little different.
Our church will be talking about and participating in the Advent Conspiracy.
In addition to our church doing this, Rachel and I have been talking about it since last year and are pretty excited about what this means for us. 
Check out this embedded video:

So yeah, we want to take that pretty seriously this year.
That means a couple things for us.
Obviously, it means our gift giving is going to look a lot different this year.  So consider this fair warning to family and friends.
While we may not hit the bulls eye on every gift, we are trying to be more creative with our gift giving this year.  Giving gifts that will hopefully cost little and mean much.
And then redistributing our giving to people who need it world wide.
I can't wait to see how God is gonna bless it.

It also means this years Christmas wish list looks different.
I'll save that for part 2.
Look for that post later this week.

So, all of you, especially close friends and family…
Who else is in?

Let's take the story back.

I was quickly perusing a couple of blogs between tasks when I saw this video at Vicky Beeching's blog.

I hate hay.