My Worship Revolution

Just thought you should all know that our new youth pastor, Brandon, has joined the real blogosphere.  (He used to blog on MySpace.  That doesn’t count.)

So go check out his blog and encourage him to keep it up!

Day one of the official Catalyst conference is over.  Again it's late.  My notes are in the car, and it would take too long anyway.  I'll try to post session notes tomorrow morning if I have time.  But in the meantime, allow me to share some of my personal journey over the last 24 hours or so.  How Catalyst is effecting me, rather than the content of the information.

I'll preface by saying I usually pride myself on being fairly transparent on this blog.  But I realized that I'm not as transparent as I'd like to think sometimes.  I didn't want to share my thoughts and feelings.  I'd rather hide the vulnerable stuff and show you the put together, ready to lead Bobby. 
But I will anyway.

Last night at the Deadly Viper session, Mike and Jud talked about the things we all have going on under the surface.  That we all have our conference face on.  But there's a lot underneath.  I didn't get that.  Till this morning.

As we worshiped, I realized a joy that I wasn't experiencing that I used to have.  I recognized a dryness inside me.  But I'm at a conference with other ministers.  I wasn't about to let it show. 
Then Andy Stanley got up and talked about moral authority.  He talked about our creed matching our deed.  One of the areas he specifically addressed is forgiveness.  It drudged up some places I have struggled inwardly more than I'd like to admit with forgiveness.  I don't want to deal with it.  But I have to.  It's the virtue at the epicenter of my faith.

All the speakers were amazing today.  But 2 stood out for where I'm at.  Stephen Furtick talked about the painful process that happens between the promise of God and the payoff.  It's a long process.  I really want to start seeing the payoff.  Like now God.  But I'm in the process.

However, one of my personal favorites, Craig Groeschel, pushed me over the edge.  Pushed a lot of us over the edge.  He talked about "it."  I remember when I first had "it."  When Jesus first rocked my world and I was sold out. 
The time I sensed God calling me to go to New York to minister and dropped everything to get a plane ticket before I even had a place to stay.
When ministry was so much more than a job.  In fact, it wasn't a job at all, but it consumed every part of my soul.  I felt myself thinking about my desire to not be in occupational ministry at times in order to rediscover the purity of that passion again.  Craig talked about getting "it" back.  God's desire to use us.
Us asking God to stretch us. 
But first to heal us. 
And before that, to ruin us.

I came to Catalyst expecting to get some great leadership principles.  Expecting to enjoy rockin good music.  But for some reason I didn't expect a serious encounter with God.  But God was already wrecking me.  Not in the hugest ways, but big enough for the pressure to be welling up behind my corneas as Craig shared. 
He invited those who wanted "it" back in their lives, who needed "it" back, to stand for prayer.  I can count on one hand the times I've responded to that kind of invitation from pastors at conferences.  And honestly, I didn't want the people I came with to see me stand.  I wasn't sitting with them, but I figured they could see me.  I stood anyway.

All that to say, God is stirring something in me.
Perhaps this passage from Revelation 2 sums it up nicely.

God, renew my passion for you.  Dive down deep into the recesses of my being and make me uncomfortable.  Stretch me and make me find my strength, my passion, my purpose in You.  Remind me of the faith I had at the beginning and take me back to that place of unabandoned love.  Help me to pursue You relentlessly, being willing to do anything necesarry to get just a glimpse of who you are and to see you work miraculously in my life and in the lives of others, recognizing that you are already pursuing me.  And use this to make me a more complete child of God, a more complete husband, a more complete father, and finally, a more complete vessel of your truth and grace to a world desperately in need of Jesus.

When I go to a conference, the content is actually only a very small part of why I like to be there.  My primary desire is to network, meet new people, and reconnect with old friends/ministry compadres.  Yesterday I had some great connections with several bloggers.

The highlight had to be getting a little face to face with another worship leader, Ben Abu Saada.  Ben was probably one of the first worship leaders whose blog I started following.  For the past 3+ years we have interacted by email and blog comments, so it was great to have some good conversation in person.

I also got to connect with Todd Rhodes and talk ministry for a little bit.
Touched base with Ben Arment after Jon Tysons session on the church planting track.
And at the end of the evening, I ran into Jonathon Herron, a church planter I respect highly and have been following since before his church launched.  He also has an adopted kid right around Caleb’s age.

And of course at the very end of the evening I got to hang with all my old ministry partners from Revolution.

How about you?
Do you have anyone you are “friends” with as a result of online communication?
What blogging friend would you like to hang with sometime?

It’s almost 2am.
I have to be at Catalyst in like 5 hours.
I should go to bed.
But I’m in the lobby of the Hilton.  So instead I’ll share some quick highlights from my day at the labs and then go to bed.

Ed Stetzer

One of the sessions I checked out was Ed Stetzer in the church planting track.  Many of you know this is a passion of mine and look forward to the day we get to embark on planting.  Ed is a great communicator and very inspirational.  As I listened I seriously wanted to go out and start tomorrow!  He talked a lot about the Kingdom of God and the keys to the kingdom.  Here are some notable quotes from his sharing.

• Make sure that Jesus is the focus of everything in your church, not your creativity or your pithy sayings.
• Many of you will go out and plant churches and you will fail.  God does not fall off his throne when that happens.
• When Jesus said “I will build my church,” he was talking to you.
• There are more verses in the Bible to support you having a concubine than for us forming a denomination.
• Reach the lost, not the found.  Changing from their denomination to your denomination is NOT reaching the unchurched!
• If you plant your church, and don’t plant again, you are not kingdom minded.  You are only concerned with building your own church kingdom.  Everybody says they’re gonna plant daughter churches, but they never do.
• You will never feel ready to multiply.
• Plant because the kingdom has birthed a church.

There was also this light hearted interaction that I thought was pretty funny:

Jonathon Tyson

One of the main reasons I wanted to check out the labs was to hear Jonathon Tyson again.  He was a highlight at Recreate for me this year, and was speaking on “In The City.”  He shared what he refers to a cultural acupuncture.  We need to find the nerve centers of our culture and reach them.  that is the cities.  Here is some of what he shared.

• There are 3 competing movements set on reaching the world:
  • Western Consumerism
  • Islam
  • Christianity
• By 2080 – 50% of worlds population will be in a city.  Move to cities and plant churches!
• Planting churches in cities is expensive.  You could dig a freaking ton of wells in Africa with the money it takes.  We as Christians need to have a both/and approach, but at the same time, Starbucks is giving lots of money digging wells in Africa.  What Starbucks is not going to do is pay to advance the Kingdom of God in urban areas.
• You can’t plant one church to reach a city.
• The neighborhood is the building block of a city.
• Parish Church model
  • Relational – Triad – Smallest building block outside of Jesus
  • Communal – Life Group – built of triads
  • Missional – Missional Community – built of life groups
  • Contextual Incarnational – Parish church – built of missional communities
  • Church – Network of Parish churches
• Islam is on their face trying to reach the world, industries are spending billions to spread consumerism, and Christians are trying to come up with cooler ways to do services.

The parish church would be a lot to really unpack, but it just makes sense to me.  I still think this guys a genius.

The night ended with an evening with the Deadly Vipers Mike and Jud, and that was an amazing evening.  Very transparent discussion about the assassin of Sprinting Headless Chicken and avoiding burn out as church leaders.  Very powerful.  I’ll just leave it at that.

My only beef at this point is that there isn’t free wifi at the Gwinnett Center.  And I heard a little rumor that the Catalyst team had them turn it off so it wouldn’t be used during speakers.  If that’s so, I’m extremely disappointed with the Catalyst team.  Another reason I love Recreate.

Anyway, time to crash.  Greatly looking forward to tomorrow…even if there isn’t internet access.

OK. let me preface this by saying, I guess I can see how someone might enjoy this experience.  But I stumbled across this video last week and honestly, this worship experience just seems ODD to me:

Been wanting to go to Catalyst for quite a while now.  This year I get to go for the first time.  In just over 3 hours I’ll leave with Ed and Brandon to catch a plane in San Francisco.  in the next 3 hours, I still have to pack and get a bunch of work done for when I leave.

So I’ll make this short.  Looking forward to lots of great speakers, but right now I’m most looking forward to hearing from Jonathon Tyson again in the labs after being inspired by him at the greatest unconference in the church universe.

Also looking forward to meeting and/or connecting with good friends and blogger friends alike.  If you’re gonna be there, lemme know, and let’s connect!  And you can be sure to catch some live blogging over here during the week.  See ya!

Early on in the process of blogging I learned of an RSS reader.  If you don't know what that is, all you need to know for starters is you need one.  It changed my virtual life.  I've stuck with Bloglines for the past several years, but alas, this weekend I switched.  I decided to move all my feeds over to Google reader, primarily because I wanted to put it on my Google apps page with everything else, and I have had a few problems with Bloglines site in the past week or two.

That being said, I still haven't been able to get the Google reader app on my Google page, but hopefully we'll figure that out soon.  Rather than export all my feeds (which I didn't realize I could do when I started, but I can always find a reason that what I did was better) I went to each blog and subscribed again.  Here's a few things I noticed:

• A lot of you changed your feed at some point.  So while I thought you just slacked off of blogging, I just wasn't getting your feed.  I'm back now.
• Some of you, however, haven't blogged in forever.  So, if you haven't blogged in over 3 months, you are no longer in my reader.  If you decide to get back in the saddle, let me know.
• Pet peeve.  Didn't realize this just now, but I really want you to know.  If your feed only sends me the first few sentences, CHANGE IT PLEASE!!  I am not reading your posts.  Maybe you did that to get more traffic to your blog for your stats so you could feel better about yourself.  Outside of a few family members, and maybe some people at my church, I love you, but if I have to go to your site every time to read you posts, I'm just not gonna read it.  That's why I have an RSS reader!  When I want to comment or see your flash widget, I'll come visit.  Otherwise, please share your content with me.
• And finally, but most importantly, make it easy to subscribe to your blog!  I was amazed at how difficult it was to find a subscribe link on many blogs.  Some from people who I know should know better.  There were actually several that forced me to copy and paste the URL.  Generally, if I find a blog I think I might want to follow but I can't subscribe easily, it probably won't make it onto my blogroll.  Some of you may think it's ridiculous to think you care if you're on my reader, but most of you are so dependent on stats to make you feel better (it takes one to know one, unfortunately) which is why you do things like the bullet point above.

Just some thoughts from my RSS switch.  One other thing.  I realized it's about to update the links on my blog as well.  So perhaps I'll have some time in the ATL hotel at Catalyst next week to do so.  Which means 2 things:

1. Again, if you haven't blogged in more than 3 months, you will be removed.  Of course, you probably don't care much then and aren't even reading this.
2. If you link here, and I'm not linked to you, I owe you some serious link love!  Sorry I'm behind.  Leave me a comment so I can be sure to get you on here.

And again, if you don't have an RSS reader, go get one and subscribe here.  It makes life much easier!

How about you?
What RSS reader do you read?
Agree with any of those thoughts?  Disagree?
Do share.

Most of you probably know that Santa Cruz has a very high homeless population.  Homeless downtown.  Homeless up in the mountains.

Many conversations lately seem to center around politics and specifically the current economic issue.  So if y’all are talking about it around the water cooler, might as well weigh in with some thoughts at my proverbial water cooler.  Having not participated in a while, this post is a part of Watercooler Wednesday at Ethos this week.  Go see what others are talking about as well.

“It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.”