Archive for June, 2007
We don’t get to many comments here at Verge so we celebrate every milestone we can. Today we received our 100th comment. Too bad it was from some show off who had to prove his intellectual prowess by matching 10 out of 15 guitars with their rock musician masters, just kidding.
Congratulations, Zack, for being our 100th comment.
If you think you can do better than he did go to the original post and show us your skills.
Anyone who knows me knows that I think Google hung the moon or that they are at least in the process of bringing me the moon. With that in mind it should come to know surprise that I would recommend almost all of their services. So today I thought I would recommend one service in particular.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Let me explain my love for this service. We started LifePoint 3 months ago. We don’t have an office anywhere to speak of unless you consider McDonalds. This makes it very difficult to collaborate and share documents with other passionate team members. Sure we could email them back and forth and hope we are all working off of the most recent document but inevitably something important will be overlooked or discarded all together. So what is the portable church to do?
With Google Docs & Spreadsheets I am able to create detailed files that touch on anything from assimilation to production to major events and share them all with the appropriate parties. Let me explain how I am trying to use them.
I have the entire Sunday morning experience planned out. All the videos, special music, worship, etc. In order to make sure that we are all on the same page well in advance of the service I need to get this cue sheet to all the players. There are 6 in the band. 1 guys person runs lights and the laptop is run by someone else. I can’t forget the set up crew. Al in all there are at least 12 people who need this information. Making sure it’s in a file format that all parties can view and being able to make changes on the fly is a real challenge that is remedied by Google Docs& Spreadsheets. When we are connected to the internet we are connected to our church network.
Here are some other ways they come in handy.
- Message Collaboration
- Project Work Flow
- Follow-Up Team Resources
These are just a few. Try it out and let me know some ways that you are or are considering using this great service.
One of my favorite magazines is Mental Floss. They have a quiz available to see how well you know your rock & roll. Simply choose the right guitar to the right musician. Seems simple enough. Click here and see how well you do and then come back here and let me us all know how you did.
Sadly, to start things off I will have to admit I only got 4 right. Van Halen, B. B. King, Randy Rhodes and Prince were the only ones I got. I know, all the easy ones. Tell us how you do.
Tim Stevens posted today about meeting up with Tony Morgan and how he should greet him considering Tony’s well documented dislike of hugging. Someone pointed him to this video for some assistance. I just had to post it.
- We had a great service today. There was no band but worship had a nice feel to it.
- Today was our first Sunday with our new portable storage cabinet. It cut down a lot on both the front and the back end of set up. We still need to put bigger wheels on it and fix the latches on the door but all in all it is pretty cool.
- Started working on my office today. Up till now my living room has been my office due to space issues but I am currently setting up our spare bedroom to fulfill the need. I find that there somethings that I can’t focus on properly in my living room.
- I have been thinking a lot lately about how I get caught up in the week to week details that future and special projects don’t get my attention. I’m currently trying to solve this problem. I wish it were as easy as to just not think of the week to week details. ;)
- Our power went out today for about 2 hours. There is something very soothing to me about sitting in the dark and listening to the rain beat on the walls.
- I’m still looking for another job but there isn’t a huge market for graphic and web designers in the area currently.
- I’m considering offering my graphic and web design services here on the blog. Certainly some of you could use a freelancer.
- Church finances are tight but I am confident that God has it under control.
- The Rush (the gym where I am a member) has not properly taken the fees from my bank account and is now trying to charge me a fee for this. Hopefully I’ll get that straightened out this week.
- Overall I am feeling pretty good and looking forward to going to bed which I will be doing shortly.
- Goodnight.
I said that I wanted to do a video blog so here it is. I didn’t have any fancy equipment so it is a little rough but not to bad for a $30.00 video camera. I hope you enjoy it, if so please let me know. I will try and do them every once in awhile to break the text blog monotony. This first one is just a quick message to new church planters like myself.
I haven’t had a chance lately to mess around with the blog that much, other than posting of course, so I thought I would add a couple of things.
I first saw ClickComments over at Swerve and finally decided to give it a wirl. Even if you don’t have time to comment simply click on one of the icons to let us know what you thought of the post. If you don’t use it we might just lose it. Probably not. It doesn’t effect us if it sits there but it would be really cool if you did use it.
We also added some links so you can add any particular post that gets your knickers in a cinch to your favorite blogging network. Yeah, I know we are so behind the times on this one but better late then never. I hope you enjoy our newest additions.
UPDATE: Also Steven Furtick did his first video blog you can check it out here. I am also considering doing a video blog type thing here at verge. I started thinking about it about a week ago and then there goes ole’ Steven (we’re on a first name basis) stealing my thunder. Of course mine won’t be recorded with a professional camera and microphone so we will just have to see how it goes.
If you like the whole video blog thing you can check out Ed Young Jr’s here. I have to admit they are pretty cool. Ed (we’re on a first name basis as well) always has something great to say so check it out. Tootaloo.
I can’t believe I just typed tootaloo…
I was the youngest child in the family and I think that has effected how I deal with life and leadership. My brother Tim is 5 years older than me and is the talented one. He’s a musician, an artist and extremely funny. Any sense a humor I have, I owe to him. We fought all the time. I was the mouth and he was the bully. That is probably the norm for big/little brother combinations. The truth is I really looked up to him. Even though he was my biggest adversary he was also my biggest defender. He used to say that no one could beat me up but him. I found a strange security in that.
As I grew up I found myself always hanging out with people older than myself. At 17 I spent more time with the singles ministry than the youth ministry at my church which was always weird because they were mostly 35 or older and all women. The singles ministry not the youth group of course.
At this point you might be wondering where I am going with all of this. Well, as I was driving to work today I was thinking about my leadership style at times. Looking back I realized that at times I lead like a little brother. Here are a few characteristics of a little brother leader:
- They don’t step out unless someone has their back.
- They are always looking for the nod of approval.
- They prefer praise over progress.
- In the end they get beat up from within.
We learn a lot while growing up but sometimes it’s just as much about what we unlearn as it is what we learn that will make us effective leaders. Are you a little brother leader? Are there some characteristics that you think need mentioning?
Dave Ferguson has a post called Leadership Lessons from McDonald’s. In it he shares some great insight about developing leaders and how having an a laid out pipeline will actually increase conversion. Here are a few of my thoughts.
- First of all I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees McDonald’s as viable second office. I find I have my best meetings at McDonald’s.
- In his Post Dave (We’re on a first name basis) looks at the McDonald’s banner of the pipeline to upper management and looks at church leadership. What would happen if we made a similar banner of the pipeline to a fully surrendered life to Christ? What would it look like? Is it even possible? Could we increase the conversion rate of fully devoted followers of Christ if we had a clear path displayed everywhere possible?
I think there might be a lot more that the church could learn from McDonald’s. Now I’m hungry for a Big Mac.
Kevin wrote a great post earlier today about beer. Actually he was talking about how every person in the church, or at least the staff and volunteers, has to be engulfed in the vision and truly believe what the church is there to do.
As I was catching up on some of my blog reading I caught a post from Seth Godin where He points us to The Messaging Times :: Blog. It’s a great post about how true marketing and buzz is created from within the team. In order for true growth to take place the people on your team have to believe it, love it and not be able to stop talking about it. This is real buzz. I’ll leave you with the closing words of his post. “Buzz is an inside job. How is your hive?