LeadingSmart

Granger Joins Hundreds of Churches in June

(A long post...but read it all!)

Last Wednesday I received a short email message from Craig Groeschel: "I have an idea. What number can I call you at?"

Craig is the pastor from LifeChurch in Oklahoma City with many campuses in several states. He is a dynamic leader, and has encouraged me personally on a number of occasions since we first met last summer.

So I found his email cryptic, but interesting.

An hour later we were talking on the phone about this idea for having hundreds of churches all join together for one weekend series in June. Each pastor would preach one message "live" -- then the church could choose from a library of messages from other dynamic pastors across the country.

I checked our weekend schedule, made some quick calls and sent off some emails--and by Thursday morning was able to let Craig know that Granger Community Church is IN.

Mark Beeson will be one of the pastors who will record his message in advance and make it available to hundreds of churches around the country. The series is called, "One Prayer," and each pastor will preach one week from his church about his or her one prayer he would want God to answer for the Church at large. The remaining weeks would be via video from one of the other pastors.

The list is growing, but here are some of the churches already planning to join for this multi-church series this June...

• Celebration Church (Stovall Weems) - Jacksonville, FL
• Champions Centre (Kevin Gerald) - Tacoma, WA
• Church of the Highlands (Chris Hodges) - Birmingham, AL
• Commonground Church (Tom Dillingham) - Tulsa, OK
• Crossings Community Church (Marty Grubbs) - Oklahoma City, OK
• Elevation Church (Steven Furtik) - Indian Trail, NC
• Fellowship Church (Ed Young) -- Grapevine, TX
• Free Chapel (Jentezen Franklin) - Gainesville, GA
• Genesis Church (Brian Hunter) - Tallahassee, FL
• Granger Community Church (Mark Beeson) - Granger, IN
• Healing Place Church (Dino Rizzo) - Baton Rouge, LA
• Journey Church (Clark Mitchell) - Norman, OK
• Lake Hills Church (Mac Richard) - Austin, TX
• LifeChurch.tv (Craig Groeschel) - Oklahoma City, OK
• National Community Church (Mark Batterson) - Washington, DC
• New Hope Christian Fellowship (Wayne Cordeiro) - Honolulu, HI
• New Life Church (Rick Bezet) - Conway, AR
• NewChurch (Monty Priest) - Oklahoma City, OK
• NewSong Church (Dave Gibbons) - Irvine, CA
• NewSpring Church (Perry Noble) - Anderson, SC
• North Coast Church (Larry Osborne) - Vista, CA
• NorthChurch.tv (Rodney Fouts) - Oklahoma City, OK
• NorthwayChurch.tv (Buddy Cremeans) - Malta, NY
• Seacoast Church (Greg Surratt) - Mt. Pleasant, SC
• The Church at South Las Vegas (Benny Perez) - Las Vegas, NV
• VictoryChurch.tv (Mark Crow) - Oklahoma City, OK

We are pretty jazzed about this effort. I'm grateful to Craig Groeschel for his leadership in leading this movement. If you are a pastor or leader in your church, I would encourage you to consider joining the rest of us for this series. See this video from Craig with more information:

I'm Keeping Facebook

There are more reasons to keep Facebook than to get rid of it.

However, when I get an invitation like this, it tests my resolve...

Here is a Strawberry plant for your Green Patch. Could you help me by sending a plant back? Together we can fight Global Warming! 

What's Coming In Your Box from Amazon?

How about a brand new book? Pop Goes the Church is in stock and available on Amazon.com for $11.23. Of course, if you want you can order it from here for $16.95...but I'd personally go the Amazon route.

If you've already read the book and would like to add your own customer review on Amazon.com...that would be great!

UPDATE 11:00am: Interesting...the price switched back to $16.95. I'm guessing that must have something to do with how many books they have in stock.

Brainstorming in Buffalo

We sat in a hotel room for several hours yesterday asking questions like...

• How do we create a "WOW" experience for our guests at the theater sites?
• What hesitations or concerns will our regulars have about additional sites, and how do we address them?
• What challenges will we face?

It was a great discussion.

We also had a chance to run up to Niagara Falls (about 30 minutes away), shoot a video and view the amazing handiwork of God.

Headed to Buffalo

When I asked, "What church is doing the best at children's ministry in a movie theater?" -- one church came up several times: The Chapel at Elmwood in Buffalo, New York. So today I'm heading there with 9 other leaders from Granger to check it out. Can't wait to learn from them!

 

780,000 Views!

I just heard that this video has been seen more than 780,000 times on YouTube. Wow!

This was produced by Granger Community Church and first shown during our Christmas series in December 2006. The original idea came from a political advertisement for a guy running for president of Argentina.

The video is available for purchase to use in your church service here.

I Don't Smoke Marijuana

My standard bloglines search engine began showing up hundreds of results yesterday for "Tim Stevens." Evidently a 53-year old man who shares my name just won a landmark case in Texas for the medical use of marijuana.

Just wanted you to know, I'm not 53-years old, I don't live in Texas, and I don't smoke marijuana.

How To Get an Apple Fanatic to Comment on Your Blog

It's easy to get an Apple-crazed friend to interact with your blog.

You just have to post an article like this...

MacBook Air Hacked In Under Two Minutes

If there's one thing Apple users love to taunt Windows users about, it's security. Mac owners giddily flaunt their lack of virus scanners and lack of worries in front of their PC comrades, whose machines look comparatively bloated with virus scanners, firewalls, and daily patch updates to fix the exploit du jour. Bad news for those Mac users, then, as a recent hacking competition showed that the new MacBook Air is able to be completely compromised in under two minutes.

The hacker in question, Charlie Miller, achieved this feat as part of a hacking competition called PWN 2 OWN. Miller hosted a malicious Web page privately, accessed it from the MacBook Air, and then, within two minutes, was able to take full control of the machine remotely and make it do his bidding.The culprit here is apparently an undiscovered flaw in the Mac Web browser Safari, which has shown to be somewhat lacking in the security department on both the iPhone and on Windows.

Charlie won $10,000 for his troubles, and he got to keep the laptop, but as part of the deal, he was also required to keep secret about the details of exploit, so hopefully there's little chance of it getting into the wild and taking over Macs around the world.

Still, we'd recommend steering clear of Safari -- and perhaps not being so smug.

Source: Switched

The 30-Night Rule

There are six big areas that pull on my time.

1. I want to spend time with my wife.
2. I want to spend quantity time with my kids at a very important time in their life.
3. I want to lead our staff well and do my job with integrity.
4. I want to learn from other church leaders (conferences, visit other churches)
5. I want to resource other church leaders (teach).
6. I want to write.

All of these things are good. All of them are important. And there is a dynamic tension which exists in trying to juggle all of these priorities. I've seen leaders mess up.

• Some sacrifice their marriage for their job.
• Some sacrifice their kids.
• Some leaders get on the teaching circuit and stop learning. They spend all their travel time teaching and no longer take time to sit at someone else's feet and learn.

I want to avoid all these extremes.

I've been tracking my travel schedule for a couple years. In 2006 I spent 37 nights away from Faith. In 2007 it increased to 45 nights.

That is too many. This year it is coming down. I've decided to spend no more than 30 nights away from my wife in 2008.

Oh, you should know I realize the 30 night rule is not in the Bible. It's just what is right for me and my family right now. Others may draw the line at a different place. Mark Batterson is also committed to 30 nights. Craig Groeschel limits his travel to around 12 nights a year. I don't think the number is the point--the fact that you give it some thought and get some input is important.

Where do you draw the line?

Whiteboard Sessions Filling Up Fast

The conference I'm looking forward to attending the most this year is The Whiteboard Sessions. I love the concept...I love the organizer...and I love 7 of the 8 speakers nearly as much as I love myself.

If you are coming, you'll want to register soon. The early-bird deadline is this Monday, and I happen to know that it is filling up fast.