Read about it here.
Archive | April, 2008
All Marketers are Liars – Review
17 Apr
Seth Godin is a marketing genius. This book is a reminder that Marketing is story telling, and the stories we tell need to be true and authentic. We can’t tell other people’s stories and if our stories are false we will be found out.
As a church leader, it is imperative that the we tell first off, the Greatest Story, the Gospel. And it’s not enough to just tell it, we need to live it out. And then the stories that we tell about transformed lives are our most important assest for spreading the gospel.
There were quite a few quotes that I wrote down in my moleskine that I thought were particularly powerful, and reminded me about everything that is wrong with the health and wealth and prosperity gospels.
I think even though church leaders are not by definition and title, marketers this is still a valuable book and a great reminder that we need to be authentic in our message. Thank you mister Godin.
Poison . . . you don’t really have to worry about it
16 Aprthis was at the church we gathered at for ethos
Baptism Video
16 AprLast week we baptized 6 people at Creekside. What a great morning it was. Baptism is so cool, and to see a whole family get baptized is just awesome
You can watch the video here.
I’m going to post them to our church’s youtube channel as well, but I need to compress it, or cut in half, so I’ll keep you posted on that.
Chew on This for the weekend
12 AprI was perusing the blog-o-verse today and I came across this thought from Peter Blue, who is a worship leader in Canvas and serves at Cedar Park. Peter was the worship leader in youth group when I was growing up and he was always a huge encouragement in my life, as well as someone who always made me think. Today he made me think again.
What good is initial physical evidence if there isn’t any other evidence to follow? “ If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” What a mighty percussion section we have become.
Chew on that for the weekend. And read the rest of the post here.
The God Who Smokes – Review
10 Apr
The God Who Smokes is a refreshing look at theology through Timothy Stoner’s personal experiences. All of theology should apply to life and when you read The God Who Smokes I believe you will see all the various ways that God is talking to and revealing himself to you.
TGWS is a middle road between the fundamentalist and the emergent streams of theology. If you like Rob Bell but are a little concerned with some of the things he has written or said, Stoner helps you see why and what a more biblical view may be. If you love Driscoll and Piper but are overwhelmed by their headiness and need for rock solid reason and arguements, then Stoner provides a meaningful way that you can still believe in absolute truth, and still feel comfortable with questions. Written in the tone of compassion this book was a very refreshing and at times humorous book.
This book really could be several shorter books. And sometimes it doesn’t quite feel like a cohesive work. But it’s definitely worth the read. Particularly Stoner’s theology of the artist. It reminded me of why I do what I do, I believe that preaching is an art form and God is pleased when I declare his love and grace, or when I teach people about how to live in that love and grace.
Also interesting are Stoner’s perspectives on growing up as a missionary kid oversees, and they way he lived out love before his friend David. I really recommend this book.
Geeked Out
7 AprSo I mentioned in my previous post that my geek-o-meter was off the charts. And now I shall tell you why.
When I was at Northwest University, I knew a young man named Kengo. Kengo was a Japanese student studying biblical literature, as was I. I was always in awe of the library that he had created over his 4 years at northwest. He was a devoted student and his library was giigantic.
After graduation Kengo moved back to Japan and stored his books and other belongings at Don Ross’ house (Kengo attended tNC back in the day too). He must have planned to ship them over or something, or maybe he wanted to move back to the states some day. Whatever his plans were he gave up on those and told the Ross and Ushikubo families that they could do whatever they wanted with those books. And they said that I could have them.
So yesterday I hauled 5 boxes of books out of the Ross Basement and today I unloaded them into an undisclosed location. And now for all the book geeks out there I want to show you want I have inherited. If you are not interested in books I would recommend you stop now. Or if you know that you might covet this new collection of mine, turn away.
For those who are still with me:
Now with a little bit more organization:
there are probably several hundred dollars of books that I have just inherited, and many of them I have no immediate need for, but someday I’m going to learn Hebrew.
So thank you Kengo, I appreciate your generosity and whenever I read one of these books I will think of and pray for you wherever you are.
Monday Morning Memo-Random
7 AprWell it’s Monday, my weekend was very busy, and today so far has been nice and not stressful.
Let’s re-cap, our beyond::afterhours event went well. It was spring break for some of our students so they didn’t have the same level of contact with their friends, so we didn’t have as many students come out, but we still had loads of fun. We had a bunch of group contests, and a sweet relay race. A couple of first time students were there also so that was really cool.
We finished our organized games and then we had a half hour of free time for students to hang out, play some X-BOX, board games, eat food, whatever. What I didn’t think would be such a huge hit was FourSquare, we had a line of people rockin’ the foursquare until after nine o’clock so that was really fun.
Then on Saturday I lead a break-out session at Evoke 08. I talked about Belonging and how everyone is looking for belonging. I was really surprised by how full the seesion was. I printed 40 handouts and only got a few back, and I know some people didn’t get a handout because they came in late. So that was really neat. Here is my outline.
Sunday was busy as usual, we had the most people at my house yet since we’ve moved back to my house. And it was a good time. So super busy weekend, but it was a lot of fun.
And by the way, WordPress, if you are reading this, I love the new dashboard. It’s very nice. IF you don’t use wordpress you should, it’s awesome. I know you blogger people like your analytics, and adwords, and whatever, but wordpress is just so fun to use.
Have a great day, I might post something later about what else made yesterday so phenomenal. Let’s just say my geek-o-meter was through the roof.
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