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This past Sunday was great. I would love to say that it’s because everything went smoothly with no complications but that is not the case. In fact we had more complications this Sunday than any other one to date. Here is a list of the things that went wrong leading up to service. It actually started early on in the week.

• Preston, one of our main musicians just got a new job and had to work on Sunday.
• One of the founding couples on our launch team, who also were the majority of our children’s ministry, left the church.
• The morning of the service Myk, another important musician, was throwing up and couldn’t get there. That made us a two piece band, which actually means we have to go acoustic.
• The computer we use to run “everything” for the adult service crashed and hour before the service. Kevin got it up and running again but that didn’t help with my anxiety at first.
• We get ready to start the service and one side of our lighting blew all of its fuses. Now our lighting is inadequate and a bit lopsided.

Needless to say it was not the flawless Sunday morning experience we all long for. Here is what happened despite all of our complications.

• We had a 71% increase in attendance from the previous weekend. It seems very impressive when I say it like that.
• We had 7 first time guests, all of which were very cool people I might add.
• And the best thing that happened at the service was that one person rededicated their life to Christ. Isn’t that why we do all this in the first place.

All in all this had to have been one of my least stressed Sunday’s of the launch and one of the most fulfilling so far. I think I can go another round.

Several days ago I wrote a post called, “What is our website saying?“. The whole point was that sometimes we try to build so much into our websites that we just end up over-complicating the whole thing. As a new church our only need for a website is to tell people who we are and how to find us. That will not always be the case but at the moment it is. So here is a screen shot of our new website that I put together over the past few days. You can check it our live here.

In building it I wanted to accomplish just a few things.

1. Give people the information they are wanting when visiting a church website.
2. Give them a place to get regularly updated information.
3. Give people an idea of what they can expect “when” they visit.

This site is far from done but it is fully functional. Here are a few of the features that I built into the site to create some elements of connecting and inviting.

• The ability to subscribe to our newsletter from the main page.
• Information on our current series with the ability to send it out as an E-vite.

I would love to know what everyone thinks. Suggestions are greatly appreciated but remember to be nice, it is still a work in progress.

As many of you know we just started LifePoint this month. We are not yet what you would call stable, much less large. What this means is that when people are missing it really causes all of us to scramble. Today we are missing two key members of our band. One to illness and the other to vocation. This means that our music is going to be me and Marisa, who has a cd coming out soon. Being a leader means you have to face discouraging circumstances with vision and faith. I’ts not about what we can do, it’s about what God will do.

If you remember my post a while back about blogging with my phone then you might be coming to the scary realization of where I might be writing this from.

I meant to mention this earlier in the month but a good friend of mine named Zack Baranick just started blogging recently. To give you a little background, he is the Vice President of the New Life Drama Company which is a travelling drama ministry. Since he has just begun it is hard to tell with what frequency he will post but I assure you that every post will be an interesting read. From the few posts that he has written so far I can say that I already like his style.

You can check out his views on MySpace or just people in general. Leave comments and tell him James sent you. Or just enjoy the read.

Zack, we are looking forward to many witty insights…don’t let us down.

A week ago Kevin posted about our new teaching team. I have always wanted to use a collaborative approach to message preparation but almost always revert back to Saturday night cramming sessions. I don’t know about anyone else but sometimes I like I can’t really pull all my thoughts together until then. This is more of a discipline issue than anything but still it has been the norm.

This past Monday we had our first official teaching team meeting. We are focusing on the series starting in May but are having to work a little double time to get ourselves ahead of the messages a little bit. I was worried how it was going to go since we sometimes get a bit ADD. Overall the meeting went really well. I was very pleased with the direction and felt like there was some good chemistry and varying lines of thought.

This was our first meeting and we still don’t really know what we are doing with this kind of preparation process but if this meeting was any indication than we are in for some awesome messages here at LifePoint.

I have a confession to make. I am never satisfied with websites I design. I have redesigned our church website over 4 times trying to find the one that works. The one we are currently using is done with Joomla for ease of updating and such but I am realizing that it has a lot of features that we just don’t need right now. I also don’t have any time to update it on a regular basis. This has caused me to reevaluate why we have a website in the first place. I have come up with an answer. First let me share what we do not need a website for.

• Private member sections.
• Fresh content…that’s why we have a blog.
• Sharing absolutely everything we believe.

Of course none of these things are bad; in fact they can be very helpful but when you apply the “do less for more” principle you realize that we are not doing anything well on our website. So here is what we need from our website. Call it the “Big Idea”, the “One Thing” or whatever else you want to call it. This is what we want our website to convey.

• Who we are and what you can expect…nothing more, nothing less.

The question is how do we go about doing that? Any suggestions? I also know that I will design it 3 times before it’s done. Any volunteers…::wink-wink::

It’s even worse than that. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut. I like helping people, it’s a curse and it finds it’s way into every area of my life. Some might conclude that is one of the reasons for starting LifePoint and they would be right. The problem is that I over extend myself because of my inability to say no. Or as I implied earlier, I volunteer to do even more than was asked in the first place because I know it will make it better.

As I feel the pressure of these looming projects I start to ask myself why I keep falling into the same predicament? Here is a small list of some of the errors that cause this to happen.

• I fail to see the effects of the various projects on my overall life mission.
• I for some reason feel it is selfish to refuse do something that is in my ability to do.
• I overestimate how much time I have available.
• I underestimate how much time it will take me.

I am currently working on 4 extra-missional projects right now. All of them with the pressure of completion currently on my shoulders. The sad thing is not only does not saying no hurt my life mission, it hurts the other things I do say yes to. Quality and timeliness of everything suffers the more I say yes.

I have a simple prayer. God, help me get done that which I have already said yes to and help me say no a whole lot more often.

So here is a question for everyone who would like to participate. How do you choose what you say “yes” to?

When any church planter sets out to start a church they most likely have a large vision of what that church will look like. If they don’t they are already working against the odds. Sometimes we even have a vision of a very impractical type of church. You know the kind I’m talking about, the church that meets every need of every person, everyday. Sunday services, midweek services, Sunday school, small groups, age appropriate children’s ministry, 17 genres of music, ministry to the poor, ministry to the disabled, fitness center, basketball court, day spa.

In his post The brand formula, Seth Godin points out that one of the strengths of AT&T was that they did one thing and did it better than anyone else. Not so now. They have added so much to their plate that they don’t do any of them well, which has created brand dissatisfaction and bad press. There is more to be gleaned from his post but I will let you deal with those on your own for now.

What it all comes down to is the fact that a new church must move beyond Sunday morning services to be what Jesus commissioned the church to be but be careful what and how much you add. You may wake up one day and realize that your church has not only lost its edge but also its mission.

It can be easy to get discouraged when involved with a new church launch. Finances don’t go your way. Time management doesn’t go your way. Marketing doesn’t go your way. You don’t go your way. God doesn’t go your way. Sometimes it is a real struggle but we must always remember why we started to begin with. We started because we long to see changed lives at the hand of an amazing God. Sometimes it doesn’t happen as fast as we think it ought to. I don’t think that it was any coincidence that Jesus chose some fishermen and told them that He would make them fishers of men.

Fishing is task of skill and patience. Derek Brown over at www.desertfather.com writes this:

We can stand on the pier all day and not catch a one for a long period of time; but eventually we will, and it makes it all worthwhile.

Yes it does, Derek. We have other forces working against us as well. Like Christians who have not faithfully represented Jesus or His church. They have been programmed to expect the worst and it takes time of consistently not living up to those old standards before they will believe you are any different.

Seth Godin made this statement in his post entitled Just because they say it:

The challenge to a marketer that chooses to enter a market with a miserable history of customer abuse is obvious: you can claim to be better, to be unevil, benevolent even, but people just aren’t prepared to believe you. It doesn’t fit the consumer’s worldview. So, you could be the honest politician or the quality contractor or the direct marketer with no fine print and no spam, but you better be prepared to prove it over and over before we believe you.

So be encouraged even if your church isn’t a success immediately. Join me on the pier as a fellow consistent fisherman. If we throw enough hooks into the water we’re bound to catch some fish.

This is the beginning of a new category for Verge. One of my great regrets is that I have been married for over 9 years and I only have a handful of pictures of Angela and myself. We are slowly making strides to fix that but it got me thinking about other areas of my life. I have forgotten a great deal of my life before the age of 18. Even memories I have from then till now seem to be more dreamlike than vivid recollections of actual events. But I want to remember.

I want to remember the struggles that I had to go through to get where I am. I want to remember the awesome things God has done along the way. I want to remember. So at least as far as the church is concerned this will be the place I will log the various events happened at LifePoint. I will hopefully post them within a few days of said events as to keep my notes accurate. So here goes the first one.

• I really need to stop leading the music. I’m not talking direction but actual performance of the music. Reasons: Not my gifting, not my skill set, not my desire. When you add all these up you have to wonder why I have been doing it. We shall save that for another post.
• We had 4 first time guests. We’re still small and only a few door hangers for marketing so that is still cool. A follow-up post on this topic is coming later today or tomorrow.
• One of the first-timers heard about us through a pre-launch flyer that was handed out over 4 months ago and has been circulating around their family. Talk about a forgotten seed that sprouts up out of nowhere.
• Set-up and tear down went very smoothly. There are 4 of us who meet at 5:30 a.m. do get all of our stuff to the theatre and get it mostly set up. The 3 other guys are champions in my book.
• The music and the message went great! I led both of them so I might be a little biased.
• We had some technical difficulties with Media Shout and my stupid computer. The videos don’t play and when they do there is sound but no video. We are going to need to fix that this week.

That’s it for this addition of Looking Back. I realize it wasn’t really meaty but it will evolve in time…I promise.