Churches will put together really nice postcards or other types of mailers for communicating with potential attenders for big events or what not. But do we communicate with the people we’ve got and do it such excellence? We send out plain text emails as updates, and we have stuff in our Sunday morning program that communicate to our people but do we have not up to this point done anything that looks nice and catchy. We just got our post cards from the printer and all they are is to communicate/ remind our people that we are going to 2 gatherings. Just a question, just a thought, do we take for granted the people that we have since we already have them or do we think we should only spend money on getting noticed by people in your community. Think about it.

We are going to two gatherings on Sunday morning the week before Easter and wanted a fun way to remind our people and get the word out so put together this postcard and had it printed over at Overnight Prints. They did a great job, they look great.

We have been having conversations on a few different blogs about the idea of churches sharing the sermons ideas, outlines or manuscripts, graphics and videos like open-source software. Over the weekend Gary Lamb posted about Life Church putting up a section of their website for churches to come and download their sermon messages, graphics and videos and Mark Batterson got in the conversation today and had some good comments going back and forth on his page about the idea. I am very much for churches sharing rather than charging. If a church is producing original content for a sermon, a program, anything they are already having to cover the cost of in house work (if the have paid staff) or maybe they have a volunteer doing it, so why pass the cost on to churches or ministries who obviously don’t have people doing for them or they wouldn’t be looking for these sermon helps or program helps? Now I know there are companies producing these same type of products but that is different they were started to make money the churches aren’t creating these with the idea to turn around and sell them. They only want to sell the stuff that comes off as professional. Check out the conversations going on Chris Marsden, Matt Payne, Mark Batterson, Me.

[tags]wikipedia, open-source, resources[/tags]

Last night as my wife, my daughter and I were driving home from Dora the Explorer Live, I started to think about the old adage about if someone was to look at you checkbook they could tell a lot about you, and Jesus saying, where your treasure is there your heart is also. We dropped $60+ dollars on these Dora tickets in the highest section (which turned out to be pretty good seats) and we’ve taken our daughter to Universal Orlando to see Barney before she grew out of him. I say all this to ask the question is there even the smallest amount of money you spend, spent on you children? I’m not wealth by any means and $60 bucks is four family meals at Wendy’s when we all splurge and get what we want, it can be quite a few pairs of pants and shirts on sale, its bills paid or gas in our gas eating SUV, or it could be around 522 songs from allofmp3.com. But we think our daughter is important and should be shown by the fact that we are willing to spend money on her even when its not a holiday or birthday. Just because. And my conclusion last night as they both slept on the drive home was it was very worth it to see her beam and laugh and sing along and I can’t wait till the next time we do something like that.

(on a side note it felt like we those families they show on the Wiggles or Doodle Bops at the shows, kinda weird but tons of fun)

Being a new dad, nothing gets me more than seeing a child who is sick or hurt.

Nothing.

Thomas is the son of some friends of people in our community… His mom has been active in our community’s forum, even though they live several states away.

Recently, they found out Thomas, a brand new little guy, had a brain tumor.

The good news is- they operated and seem to have gotten it all.

The bad news is that the expenses insurance won’t cover are a huge burden on a young family… And dad has had to quit his job to help take care of the family…

Not good.

So here’s my question.

Got $5?

Or $10?

If all the people who read this, take 5 minutes and drop them $5 on paypal, well…

C’mon folks.

You can do it!

(ht: bob hyatt)

Sometime I get caffeined out or maybe its coffeed out but I still want to go to a coffee shoppe and hang out or surf their free wifi but I want to patron the shop and not just take up space so I need something else to drink. Yesterday I stumbled upon Oregon Chai Tea. I maybe one of the last people to realize there are other drinks at a coffee shop than coffee but I’m ok with that. Anyways for me its a great alternative when I’m not in a coffee mode. In some post in the near future I want to discuss free trade and coffee shops that offer fair price to their coffee growers or don’t.

Donald Miller as many people are finding out is a great writer with lots of interesting takes on church and theology and life. I was hoping to be able to point you to a message that he delivered at Status in Orlando, FL in February but they have taken it out of their podcast section. Anyways he had so great things to say and instead of me butchering what he said I’ll point you to a download from his site of the 13 Paradigm Shifts we encountered doing Christian ministry in a pagan environment. I think his use of non-religious words to talk about God and to not-yet Christians is something we all need to pick up on. Donald Miller is someone you want to keep on your radar for his writing and times he might be in your area speaking. He also has a site that he is a part of call Burnside Writers Collective that has some really great articles and in their store they have some very interesting sounding books that you might want to pick up.

I was on the Burnside Writers Collective website and they had a link to McSweeney’s Lists and I came across a list call Things I Might Be Convinced To Give My Left Arm For and its great especially line 5…

Things I Might Be Convinced to Give My Left Arm For.
BY GIBSON HOLUB

World peace

Cloak of invisibility

Bottomless margarita

Pegasus unicorn

Fifteen minutes with Jesus (or Bono)

Magic credit card

Bionic robot arm

Line 5 gives some credibility to a comment David Nasser made jokingly at the Youth Pastors Summit, He said that Bono was the emerging church’s Pope.

This is pretty cool, The Brick Testament, its bible stories done with Legos and Lego characters. You have to go check it out.

Our local news paper did an article today called God and the iPod. Let me back up to Monday. I got a call on Monday afternoon from a journalist at the News Journal asking me about the our postcast and why we did and what results we think we are getting from it. It was great, this morning on the front page on the bottom was the article with our name, Tomoka Beachside. You can’t pay for publicity like that. The only problem is that they said my name is Brian Boles, its Ben Boles. My mother-in-law called tonight and was talking to my wife about the article and she said that my father-in-law said I only get 7.5 minutes from the article. But I’m not sure what is worse them getting my name wrong or our lead guy being called Reverend. Anyways it was a good article and I’m happy with the way it turned out.