Core Meeting Tonight

Tonight is the night for our Five Points Campus core meeting. I'm jacked...things are happening...my house is not big enough to handle it.

I love great problems like this.

Multi Site and Bay Area

John Atkinson had a great post today called Multi Site Keeps Moving. Make sure you go check it out for info on what we are doing.

Here is an excerpt from the end:

Here's what I love about following your dreams; you don't need to have all the answers, all the ideas, all the skills, and most importantly, all the money, you just need to have faith. If you have faith, God will take care of the rest. I'm living proof of that because I'm sure not smart enough to pull this gig off. Just ask well, pretty much any person on the planet that knows me!

My thought is that if we could do it there really isn't much faith in it at all. Make sure your dreams are the size that it's going to take God to do it. Then, supernatural things will follow.

Bay Area Five Points

I'm double dipping on my two blogs today because Pastor John let me know that our Bay Area Fellowship Padre Island campus had 70 at their core meeting tonight...they raised $6,500 for the campus as well....I'm so excited about what God is about to do through us.

Scream it to the rooftops...We're bringing it to the Five Points area and beyond. Calallen, Tuloso, Odem, Sinton, Orange Grove, Mathis, Robstown...fasten your seatbelts...it's coming and we are going to change this area.

If you know someone in any of these area let them know about what we are doing. Alone we can only do so much...together we are an army poised for something big.

Let's win this area TOGETHER!!!!

What Happened

I guess it happened so fast that I'm sitting here tonight going what happened. A month ago we were plugging along depending on God. I was working as a teacher and we were putting together a team to launch a church.

Fast forward and I'm now a principal and we have been asked to launch a campus for Bay Area Fellowship. God is so amazing. And when He gets ready to move He can turn things around in a snap.

Friday Night Core Meeting

Great things are happening with our launch of a Bay Area Five Points Campus. This campus has a prime mission to reach the Calallen/TM and surrounding area by extending the vision of Bay Area Fellowship.

*** Due to the initial response of our meeting, our house is no longer able to handle the size of the meeting. We will be moving the meeting to Bay Area Fellowship. Click [HERE] for map.

The meeting will immediately follow the Friday night SPONTANEOUS meeting that begins at 6:30 pm. Pastor Bil was led this week to have a spontaneous revival beginning Wednesday to Friday. Read about it on his blog [HERE]. Each night’s meetings begin at 6:30 and will end around 8:00.

This is perfect for our meeting as you will get to see just exactly where God is leading Bay Area, as well as give you an idea of who Bay Area is. Our meeting to follow will be a time where we will then meet with Pastor John Atkinson and me to field any questions you may have about our upcoming Five Points Campus launch.

After the service, I will be next to the information table and we will go from there.

If you have any questions feel free to email this week and I’ll try and provide you with any details. Make sure to let me know you will be there.

My Big Announcement

In case you missed it on my other blog I made my big announcement.

Oh yeah, John Atkinson made the announcement as well. Go check out his blog to read where we are headed.

We're gonna charge hell with a water pistol fire hydrant.

Taking The Cut Up A Notch

Ok friends...nitty gritty time...I feel a fast/spiritual awakening time coming on. If I'm going to do what we are about to do then I'm going to need His presence and fire in me more than ever.

This is going to be a 50 day push beginning tomorrow, March 22nd, and will end May 10th. Here is what I feel God challenging me to do. Don't worry I'm really asking him if He is sure.

I'm going to do my best to chronicle this here. I believe that will challenge me.

If anyone else out there feels like they could accept this challenge, or even part of it, let me know. I could use a partner to help keep me honest.

The Details:

• Cut back to 50 blog subscriptions. And once a week on my fast day not read any of them. Today, I cut it back from 115 to 50. Don't worry Bill I still have both of yours in there...although Batterson, Noble, Arment, Stevens, Morgan, Furtick, and Lamb didn't make the cut. I figure enough people follow them and they wouldn't miss me for 50 days. This was a brutal one for me. I have made so many friends and it was hard to narrow down to who to cut and not cut. If you didn't make it don't take offense. I am also not reading my twitter friends feed during this time. It's just gotten too big for now. (Why not cut them all out? Glad you asked...cutting this amount is almost the equivalent of that. It's like drinking water for me for a day.)
  
• Read through book of Acts twice during this time. I'm also going to read through Visioneering by Andy Stanley. No other books unless I get some on Multi-Sites.
  
• Fast one day a week from eating. Only drinking water for a 24 hour period. 7 weeks=7 days
• Pray one hour a day. 50 days = 50 hours
• Cut back on the Podcasts I listen to. Not sure how this one is going to shape up just yet. But I already cut out 10 subscriptions on it at the time I'm writing this.
  

Meeting

Had a meeting with this guy last night, who is a pastor on staff with this church for this pastor.

Look for an announcement coming soon. ;)

Bil Cornelius at Evolve Conference

Go over to churchplanters.com and check out Pastor Bil Cornelius' session at the Evolve Conference. They have it up there for free to listen to. Look for it on the right side of their podcast page. It is called "Session 5: The Resilient Leader Bil Cornelius"

Bil Cornelius is the pastor of Bay Area Fellowship in Corpus Christi, TX.

You can read more from Bil at his blog.

Subscribe to my feed to get notified of my next post.

Life Church Website

As we seek to build momentum to our September 7th, 2008 launch date, I have worked on creating an internet presence. I had a great friend walk through it all with me to look at the "brand" we are beginning to establish.

Today I completed and added some pages on the site. I also want to give you my philosophy on this. I have always believed in doing the best job with the resources you have available. Currently all of our sites are free sites that we are using to spread the word. As our resources begin to come in, be on the lookout for a revamped version of our website.

You can view our internet presence at the following links:
lifechurchwired.wordpress.com
www.myspace.com/lifechurchwired
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7419532292

Make sure you stop in and add us as a friend. I also have one more secret site that I have been working on that I will be revealing in a couple of weeks.

All These Questions

So of course I've been thinking again. That's why I have all these questions roaming through my mind. Maybe some day someone will answer them.

What if the focus was more on making disciples than on altar calls? How would that look?

What if the altar call was more like Acts 2??? repent and get dunked...NOW!!!!

What would the community look like if we put 9 million into it rather into a building?

How can we streamline church to it's simplest form to make the greatest amount of impact possible?

How can we put a reproducing church culture in place from the beginning?

What if a church launched two sites from day one??? Or three??? Has that ever been done?

How much vision is too much vision?

Will too much vision scare people off??? Am I fine with that?

What would reaching ONE BILLION for Christ look like?

Marketplace Ministry

Michael had some interesting questions in his "What if?" post. It totally flips the question of what and when to build. His questions were:

1. What if, instead of building a church building, we built an elementary school? Or build a school tailored to our needs and let a charter school or at-risk school utilize it to meet the needs of the community.

2. What if we built a new boys and girls club or a YMCA and let that non-profit operate programs all throughout the week? Partnering with an existing non-profit would create a win-win situation for both.

3. What if we built a movie theater? Everything could be built and tailored to meet the needs of the church but would be suitable to show movies during the week.

4. What if we built a giant family fun center, like a Chuck E. Cheese or a Fun World? Not only would this be suitable for our children's ministry needs but could be a way to service the community with a positive environment.

Wordpress Problems

For a brief moment I was thinking about a transition to Wordpress. Unfortunately that is on hold right now.

Reason why is that I have been using it temporarily for our church site. It has many great features that blogger doesn't have. One is being able to create separate pages that make it look more like a website vs. just a blog. Another is creating a static home page which I think is really cool when you want to use it like a website.

Today, as I was working on my pages each time I saved a page, one other page would disappear. In fact all of the work I had originally done is now gone. Which honestly bites. I didn't realize I should have exported all the pages so that I would have it. I wasn't doing anything unusual or out of the ordinary. In fact, I was doing things I had done before on the site.

If anyone else has experienced this through wordpress let me know. For now, I am evaluating everything until we purchase our web hosting.

Our Values Coming Soon

Several things that I believe are important for a church to know are: vision, mission and values. Of course once you know these then you need to develop them down into goals and tasks to accomplish your mission.

Next week I am going to break down our values each day with their own post. I have placed them in the form of an acrostic - TO DOMINATE. That alone is our greatest value and vision. Be on the look out for that next week to get to know Life Church a little better.

What are your organizational values?

The Questions Continue

How can we see the greatest level of influence as possible?

Can we be a church that, if suddenly closed down in 10 years, would be missed? And not just by the 100 to 500 people who attend. Would the community abroad even know it?

We marvel at a church like Lakewood...but 47,000 in a metropolis of 5,500,000 is only .85%. Less than 1%. Do you really understand that number???????? Yeah but they own the old Compact Center... point-eight-five-percent folks. (BTW...I respect Joel and what they do tremendously....I worked for his brother-in-law in Victoria...we were reaching about 4 - 5% there) I'm just talking pure community impact here.

What good is it to sit in our pews and behind our pulpits and say God bring 'em in? When are we going to start going out? What about impacting poverty? Teenage pregnancies? Homelessness? Substance abuse?

Does outreach need to be re-invented? A friend of mine who will remain nameless had an idea for an outreach to rent a big facility and have a crusade. A crusade???? You know hire this big Christian speaker...with a praise band....and have every Christian in town come and then say we had an outreach to the community. Gimmie a freakin' break.

Is creating culture possible and what would that look like here?

How big is too big in thinking what we can do?

Just a few questions I'm thinking about....how about you????

Life Church Wired

Short one here....we are calling our internet experience Life Church WIRED!

I've spent the better part of the last few weeks working it all up to launching it this week. I'm using all free resources to start with as one of my core convictions is don't let money stand in the way of you doing anything.

We are using wordpress to begin with on our website. http://lifechurchwired.wordpress.com

We are using myspace and facebook for our social experience...and will be also quickly working twitter into the mix. www.myspace.com/lifechurchwired Search for "Life Church Wired" on facebook and you should find it.

Welcome To

Life Church

It's official...this weekend we have release our name. Check out our launch video below.

You can also check out our myspace which I got up and running tonight.

Be on the lookout this week for our wordpress blog site.

Our First Launch Team Gathering Of 2008

Tonight marks the first launch team gathering of 2008. I'm so pumped for it. We will be studying through Visioneering by Andy Stanley for the next few months as we gather speed for our September launch date.

I spent all day yesterday shooting video and then editing it into a video for tonight. I was up until 3 a.m. working on it. I am using it to launch the name of our church to our team as well as using it to serve as a little vision casting.. (Don't worry...I'll put it up here for all of you sometime this week) I might even let you in on our name.

Be praying for us as we continue taking steps towards DOMINATING this area with the life of Christ.

Values

A couple of weeks ago I started posting on our ethos which is the DNA values we will be as an organization.

After prayer and meditating on how God has fashioned the way we have done ministry we are going to state are values as such. I will be adding the last two over the next month.

T
O

Deliver Unprecedented Truth
Oriented To Seekers
Market-place Ministry
Innovative Thinking
Non-stop Reproducing
Allegiance To God
Team Approach To Ministry
Everything An Experiment

Vision

The vision God has set for our church is so far beyond me. In fact it scares me a little. For the past two months I have been praying and seeking Him, asking Him to make His vision so clear.

It's no wonder we have come up with a vision statement that is so far beyond us. It really is a God thing when you think about it. I believe that is what a true vision from God is. It is something that we can't do. It is a vision that can only be accomplished with a team in total surrender and trust in God.

That is why when I keep going back to this vision statement it kind of scares me. This is way bigger than me. There is no way "I" can do it. There is no way "I" can remain the same and it be accomplished. It is going to take so much more.

Here is our vision: To DOMINATE the Coastal Bend area with the life of Christ.

Dominate - to predominate, permeate, or characterize; to exert a supreme, guiding influence on or over; to enjoy a commanding, controlling position in

Acts 6:7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.

John 10:10 I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.

We want that real and eternal life that Christ came to give us to dominate, or permeate not just Corpus Christi but this whole region of the Coastal Bend...it will be an area which is characterized by disciples, people who adhere to following Christ and becoming more like Him, increasing rapidly.

Like I said...way beyond me...way out of my comfort zone.

We are not here to create a church so that I can live in a lap of luxury...driving BMW's or living in a $500,000 home. We are not here to create a country club where people will come just to hear some fancy motivational message. We are not here to create just another church filled with people who didn't like the last church they were in.

Corpus doesn't need another church. It's got plenty of them. It has far too many Churches that are set up just to keep the status quo of the Christians that sit in its pews.

We are here to create a movement. We are here to create Kingdom impact. We are here to bring radical change to this area. We are here to create a new culture with a God mindset. We are here to DOMINATE the Coastal Bend area with the life of Christ.

ARE YOU READY TO GET ON BOARD WITH US?