My Journey, His Glory

week one, mega church

rodney — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:46:54 +0000

I’m not quite sure I would call the first church we visited a mega church but I would call it honking huge. When we pulled into the parking lot I needed help fron someone to simply point out what door I needed to be heading for. I didn’t want to walk in the wrong door and end up getting lost in the church somewhere (it really was that big). I had parked in the visitors lot, and was finally able to get someone’s attention to point out where I needed to be going. Visiting a church as a parent is drastically different than visiting without a child. First you have to decide if you want to keep your child with you, and then you have to decide if you trust the nursery workers to keep your child safe. Well, I was the with my wife and my very young (6 month old) son. We decided to put him into the nursery during the service since we knew some friends that went there and they seemed to like it all. We left the children’s wing and made our way to one of two sanctuary’s. We waited for our friends outside the door of one of them, and apparently 400 people had the same idea. So giving up on finding anyone, we made our way into the sancuary. We looked for a seat for a few minutes and were then guided by ushers into first available seats. (In fact the ushers made an entire row of people scoot down so we could sit.) The service was nice. We learned later on that the other sanctuary in the building had a closed circuit projector view of the pulpit area, not a live person. The service seemed very much like a production. I’ve always enjoyed listening to this particular preacher and enjoyed his serrmon this Sunday, something about Jesus and the stock market. After service it took a while to pick up our son and get back to our car. Leaving the parking lot was a nightmare. We saw two car accidents, and almost got caught in one ourselves. There were a good number of off duty police officers direcring traffic, so nobody had to wait very long. We finally got back home and had time to reflect on our morning.

Good

great use of music, drama, environment
a visitor parking lot (that’s just awesome)

Bad

not able to talk with pastor after service
had to get greeter’s attention for assistance

Are you kidding me?

no signs from visitor lot to children’s wing
no way to distinguish visitors with that many people there, no way to follow up with them

Lessons learned

visitors are important and need to be treated that way
signage is very important
make sure staff is available after service
make sure greeters are excited about their ministry, much more likely to greet people right off the bat

Phonevite

rodney — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:56:37 +0000

I heard about this website shortly after bringing up the idea of a phonetree system at our church council. The phonetree system seemed a bit expensive for us at the time, so I went and explored my options. I saw lots of web services that seemed to do the trick, but all of them required a credit card or the purchase of minutes. Finally I came across Phonvite.com. This web service was awesome. For those of you who don’t know I like FREE. Phonevite knows how to do FREE very well. Phonevite allows you to make calls to 25 people completely free of charge. For small churches or youth groups this may be all that is needed. Phonevite does add very brief advertisement to the end of each recording that currently just advertises for phonevite, the paid service does not contain these ads. Phone also gives you real time reporting of who does and doesn’t answer and how long the person listens to the recording. This is all included in the free version. The paid version allows you to request RSVP and messages back to the phonevite system. This truly is a phenominal system. You simply have to see it for yourself. Quite possibly the best phone recording system out there. Try it out and let me know what you think.

from the mouth of babes

rodney — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:18:49 +0000

My son walked up to me this morning with a glow in the dark plastic snake. waiting for him to throw it at me or tell me it was broken he said “dad, this is like the snake that Moses used in the desert” Huh? Where did that come from? So I said “Huh?” He then proceeded to tell me the story from Exodus and all about the snakes. I know a bunch of adults that would not have had a clue what he was talking aboyt. We’re not talking about your normal Bible story here. One of tye great things about having kids is they remind you of the awe you once had reading the Bible. Seeme like one more reason Jesus Himself said that we had to become like little children again, maybe it’s time to gain that awe back again.

Question #1

rodney — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:08:55 +0000

If Jesus had a tattoo, what would it be, and where would He have it?

Not just the same old look

rodney — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:07:40 +0000

A few years ago my wife and I moved to Atlanta, Ga. I had a few friends up here and they recommended numerous churches for us to go visit. In the course of the first 5-6 weeks we had visited some of he biggest and smallest churches in the area (not to mention, some of the strangest). We finally settled into one church and began to start the fitting in process. No matter which way we looked and who we asked we seemed to get the same answer “the church is doing great, we’ll call you when we need you”. As someone who had just got out of a really bad ministry situation, I thought I would enjoy the opportunity to be a participant (read, spectator) for once instead of being the leader/organizer. A month later we still were not involved and I was realizing (again) that I was not called to be a spectator. So, one Sunday morning my wife and I woke up, got ready for church, and left for Service. Only today was different, instead of turning right out of the neighborhood to get to church, we turned left. We decided to go exploring and stop at the first little red brick church we came across. 15 minutes later we walked into a little red brick baptist church and were not only welcomed with open arms, but I actually caught them arguing over who would get (not get stuck with) to take us to lunch. We were home. Not that everything was perfect, but we fit in. Not only were we needed, we were wanted. Over the course of the next few weeks I want to recap the 6 weeks I spent visiting churches, and why we didn’t stay at the “nice” church. We’ll be exploring the good, the bad, and the “you just scared that visitor away”. We’ll also be looking at ways to fix some of the wide open back/side doors at some of these churches that allow people to come visit and then disappear forever. I look forward to remniscing with you as we look at typical American churches through the eyes of an enthusiastic visitor.

Family Intro

rodney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:22:17 +0000

What can I say, a wife of almost a decade, three little boys under 8 years old, and some fairly interesting neighbors. We’ll have plenty to share with you about how my family is impacting my journey.

Church Marketing Sucks

rodney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:21:44 +0000

I’ll let you in on a secret, I’m not a marketing genius. I am however deeply interested in getting the message of teh cross to as many people as possible. That being said, I’ve found a site for people like me. Not necesarily the best at what we do, but still trying. Check out Church Marketing Sucks for all sorts of helpful hints and tips on church marketing. I’ll update this section periodically with bits of marketing genius that I find on the web or have the creative juices to make myself. I’ll also include things that our church is doing.

OpenLP.org

rodney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:20:56 +0000

Media Shout, Easy Worship, Power Point? How do you decide? All of the above are pricey and some might consider them to be overkill. What do you think? A few weeks ago I ran across a new program called OpenLP. This free, yes I said FREE, project is a new open source program which does the job of the big boys, for no cost at all. This being said, the project does accept donations to help keep it running. All that aside this is really a great program. If you’ve ever tried Easy Worship the interface is very similar. If you are used to the Media Shout experience then there will be some learning curve involved. You can’t beat it for the price. It took me two SUnday mornings to get it up and running and then we were good to go. I’m the only one running right now, but I have the current worship leader and a few of my teens who appear to like how th eprogram works out for our church. Enough of what I have to say check it out for yourself at www.openlp.org.

Youth Ministry Insights

rodney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:19:23 +0000

I love working with youth. I started working with teens while I was still in high school. At that time it was either me or the preacher to lead the youth group. I remember what the church decided to call me “Interim Leader of Youth Activities”. It’s been a long time since then, I plan on using this section to talk about all things youth ministry. Being on my own journey while helping to lead youth on theirs doesn’t get boring. Stay tuned.

How I got into web design

rodney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:20:34 +0000

About a year ago I got a call from a buddy of mine. He was running a computer company known as Banyan Data and some of his clients were requesting web sites. He said he could build sites, but preferred not to. Next thing you know I’m on board with Banyan Data building a site for an extremely choosy client. Needless to say the project was completed, but we simply couldn’t handle the ongoing support for someone who needed massive changes each week. Other companies asked for our assistance so we started building sites, but were unable to render long term support to each site simply due to time constraints. We finally came up with a solution. We began designing sites utilizing Worpress. I can’t tell you how many problems this solved for us. I hope to fill this category with various Wordpress tips, and theme reviews. It’s been an interesting year with Banyan Data which includes launching ShareYourChurch.com. The journey has only just begun.