Blake Thompson daht NetI'm just saying….

I’ve heard Tim talk a few times before on two different podcasts and seen clips of his teaching online. But I enjoyed his teaching today. He used TONS of clips. Some from media. Some from examples of dramas, clips, and promos that GCC has used. He did a great job at communicating that we leverage the media and culture around us to communicate life changing truths of Jesus Christ. And as a result, those people can in turn love God by serving Him and the community around us.

Here are my notes, but they are a little more scattered.

Tim Stevens :: Pop Goes The Church.

I lead a really sheltered life early on in relation to pop culture. Grew up with the idea that going to a movie was a sin. First movie I went to was at age 26.
But he ended up experiencing God moving throuht some pop culture.
Eyes Wide Open
WHY LEVERAGE THE CULTURE
RECENT EXAMPLES
Clip(s) from Desperate Housewives
There are people all across our communities who are on a journey. They’re exploring God. But they’re not using the church.

Reality #1. Most churches aren’t impacting their communities. Most churches are not getting the job done.
Reality #2 – Spiritual interest in increasing in America.

UnChristian – Gabe Lyons.
Church :: UnChuched :: DeChurched. Everyone falls into one of these 3 groups. And the church isn’t doing well with the 2nd two groups. And they drive by our churches each day w/o much thought.
As church attendance is going down in our culture, spiritual interest is growing.
People don’t see the church as able to meet their needs.
Christ ‘became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood’ John 1:14 [msg]
Acts 17 Paul preached and got run out of town. Then he goes to Athens.
Paul saw that they were searching for answers, but looking in the wrong place.
Sometimes in churches we don’t ask questions.

FOUR WAYS TO LEVERAGE CULTURE FOR THE GOSPEL
Use pop culture to package a topic or series. We made an intentional decision a while back to limit series that are using pop culture to package it. Because there are still so many that are not into it.
Use it to get people thinking or laughing. Usually people are defensive or skeptical. Sometimes it can loosen them up a little to where they’re more likely to receive the msg.
Provide a new interpretation for a popular cultural element. Some people outside of GCC really reacted negatively to the Beatles Christmas series because of some of the quotes/stances/beliefs of the Beatles. But GCC provided a new interpretation on some of the songs.
To encourage those who serve.

The question all of this begs is WHY? Why the research and time and $$ spent to research, prepare, and present w/ Pop culture in mind? why drive so close to the line? wouldn’t just preaching a msg be easier. Isn’t there enough of God in the Bible w/o using culture? What’s so wrong w/ that?
Or do we just want to be labeled as hip and cool?

SO THAT…
…the man who is losing his family can keep his job
…the single mom can
…so the elderly woman who’s husband has died can find a reason to live and find purpose in serving others
…so that the sexually abused teen can be surrounded by men of God can help him
so the couple that is struggling in their marriage
so the woman who has never experienced intimacy out side of a 1 night stand
so the mane who has been steeped in legalism
the woman who has been to mass every day of her life can see that it’s so much more than duty

So that all these people can experience God and grow closer to HIm and begin to grow in their relationship w/ him and then begin to serve more pray more and value others more and give more.
In the church, but also in their work/schools/streets/prisons/communities

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Breakout One :: Kathy Guy -

I wanted to make sure to go to this one since it is my primary area of responsibility at The Orchard.

• Groups come in every shape and size. and we get flipped out on what is “The Right Way” to do groups.
• But it seems that there isn’t one right answer. It’s messy. Relationships are messy.
• So Granger has pulled back and said that relationships are primary and all the other stuff is 2ndary.
• Of or With? GCC is a church with small groups. Not all their teaching tries to funnel people into groups.
• GCC has realized that not everyone that comes to church wants to be in a group.
• If you try to push people into a group, they’ll often times resist.
• “How bout if we give that up and just tell people that this is one way you can connect”
• Groups don’t change people. God changes people. People matter to God. It’s about them. And that’s who we focus on. That’s why GCC is a church WITH small groups.
• We try to channel people into relationships and it might be through groups. But it might be through serving, volunteering, or groups. Giving them opportunities to be in relationship. And the people might not realize it, but they’re forming a group
• Church is one of the few places that people show up and expect the church to find them a friend.
• Would people go into a bar, and tell the bartender that he should find them a friend there? Yet people expect that at churches.
• But we create the spaces, but help people create the opportunities and take ownership to create relationships in the spaces we provide
• We’re not trying to force you anywhere, but if you become a grown up and step up and initiate on your own, you can form relationships
• We want people to step in and discover love and discover that they’re cared for…it is huge.
• How do we do that?
• Starting Point: “I want to meet some people and start some relationships” We tell people “come to this meeting and you can find one there” What’s the reason people are coming?  Starting Point is for people looking for friendships [Not the Northpoint Model]
• Turning Point: “I want to change the not so helpful patterns in my life and meet some others who are in a similar place.” It’s a support group.
• Both of these are consistent:
• A recognizable brand
• Easy Entrance
• Easy Exit
• Safe Experience
• How do we provide acceptance vs. tolerance of one another?
• We are going to err on the side of Grace. And once people realize they matter to God…
• Starting point:
• Launching vehicle 8x a year
• 6 Meeting experience
• Focus on getting to know each other
• Easy entrance/easy exit

How do we find leaders?

• The hesitant but willing person is who we look for. The confident and cocky people don’t work out. Look for friendly people who are warm/welcoming. Committed member of the church. “Have you ever had any interest in helping people connect in community?”
• They need to be relationally intelligent
• A lead learner. taking steps themselves to grow in knowledge.
• Cares about people
• Don’t just take the warm body. You’ll be sorry.
• We have a very difficult time placing people w/ teaching gifts. People don’t want to be taught to, but cared for. “People don’t care how much you know, but want to know how much you care.” When people are cared for first, then they can much better learn.
• We use the word “facilitate” more than “lead”.
• At starting point, people get 4 rounds of random questions “where do you live, what do you like?” to help people group.
• Most people use the Granger Notes [notes from the sermon], but some choose book studies or Nooma or other stuff.
• GCC doesn’t have affinity ministries. No men’s, women’s, couples, etc. We group by marital status. Mixed groups sometimes work, but the drop-off is higher in those mixed groups. Esp singles.
• How do we measure a win? It’s not if the group stays together. It’s if someone shows up and formed relationship with 8 or so others. In a large church, it helps the larger church become smaller.
• Have a friend. Be a friend.
• Discipleship. Control or Trust? It takes way too much energy to approve every single group’s study material and manage the inner goings on in each group. You have to release trust to your groups.
• Not everyone is cut out to be a group facilitator. Model trust. Treat people like they’re trust worthy.
• Measuring the win. We use Fellowship One as our database. Approx 27% of our people are in groups. But about 50% have touched a group experience and experienced our relational culture.
• The soft measurement is the stories that come out of group experiences.
• It is up to each group to decide their own child care solution.
• We only offer childcare at our weekend experiences and our midweek experiences [at church]. So it’s in the culture already that child care isn’t offered unless it is a total church experience.

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Here are my raw notes from Shawn Wood, Experience Pastor at Seacoast church. He was really good. Started funny. Nice, quick slides to go with his talk. Really engaging. Then turned the corner and brought the heat. I’ll have to clean these up tonight probably.

• We get lots of questions about how we do stuff
• stuff= how we tell the story through spoken or sung word or digital, web, print media etc.
• telling a fictional ‘but true’ story about Michael, a new pastor at SCC, Scranton Community Church. Telling how church gets so full of “STUFF” that it bogs the pastor down.
• Often times we let the stuff become the object of our attention. When the only reason the stuff is important is because it helps communicate Jesus.
• Stuff will never change a life. Stuff will, by itself, make a difference. We have brand schizophrenia. Our brand should be JESUS. Not the “stuff”
• Stuff can be good. It helps is communicate Jesus. But don’t worship the stuff.
• Don’t copy other churches and try to be who they are. Be who God created YOU to be.
• If we begin to manage our “brand” as a church, there’s a danger of forgetting that Jesus is our reason and goal.
• Not only do we manage brand but we perfect brand. We chase excellence and drives what we do. We pursue better art, and videos, and tech, and programs.
• If it’s just about the stuff, why not go work in the marketplace. Make lots of money. WHy would you waste your time w/ a hobby such as church. That’s a lame hobby. But if you are doing it for and because of Jesus, then your stuff has value.
• Brand no equals stuff. [new logo, slick look, etc] Brand is much more. A deep gut feeling of who we are.
• Brand = the aftertaste left by an emotional experience.
• That can be w/ an encounter with your website, your service, your greeters, a conversation w/ a member, etc.
• Having a new logo, or a slick look,or whatever isn’t the answer
• Find out who you are, and who God created you to be. And do good things in that.
• If God didn’t call you to be something, why would you do it? I would call that sin.
• “Don’t touch the poop.” So often I see all these thigns around me I want to do or take on, and God’s saying, “I didn’t’ create you for that” But we want to touch it. But if it’s not what He made us for….would you call that sin?
• What is the Seacoast Experience? Spirit Filled. Practical [not talk w/o doing. non spooky.] yet kind of mystical. experience in multiple locations. on the cheap.
• We measure everything through that.
• Know where you’re going as a church.
• The challenge is to not try to be someone else. Either as in individual or a church. Don’t chase after excellence just for the sake of excellence. Find out who you are as a church. And start doing something with it so that people can have an aftertaste that changes their lives.
• Eph 1:18 I ask God to make your eyes focused adn clear, so you can see exactly what it is God is calling you to do.
• We need to be laser focused on who God created us to be, instead of trying to be everything we think is cool.

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Here are a few ways to keep up with everyone who it twittering at Innovate 08. I’ve been keeping up even during the session and it was going nuts.

• Innovate08 on Twitter
• Innovate on Twitter
• Granger on Twitter

There is a little overlap in some of them. But if you’re wanting an almost live feed, it’s about as close as you can get.

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A quick upload of Session 1 notes. I’ll clean them up later.

Mark Beeson: Session 1: Stop Talking

• Can we just be the Kingdom the next few days
• God has you here for a purpose.
• The church has not kept up w/ the population growth of America. But the church has talked and talked and talked. But maybe we should, as churches, stop talking and start doing.
• Some of us have been in the ‘church bubble’ for so long that we have truly disengaged from a world in desperate need. So many of us have not experienced real poverty. Poverty of the spirit, economics, soul, mind. We forget there is an urgency and desperate need. And the world is waiting on us to stop talking, and start DOING something to help w/ those needs.
• Sometimes we shift from acknowledging God for who He is and relying on His power to trying to tell God how things should be done.
• What if we could get clarity on Truth and stop talking about it and do something about it.
• “we know there are people and marriages zooming down the road towards disaster and we need to step in and do something instead of just talking about it.’
• WHo wants to be balanced
• You can’t move if you don’t lean. You have to lean to make progress. Lean into Christ, into the Word.
• If you lean in you might fall down. YEAH
• If you want safety, don’t lean into anything. You want success, you gotta lean into it.
• Staff salaries have been frozen for a year as they lean into getting a grip on their economic issues.
• There is a real danger out there. The church is on fire. The world is on fire. And the church is flapping its gums more than anything else. And marriages are going to be wounded, children hurt, lives crumble. And there is no one else lined up to do what God has called us to do.
• The Gospel of Mark has an immediacy to its message. That word, that idea is repeated over and over. Mark was writing to a Roman culture.
• Could our churches be an outpost of God to where they have impact on the natural order. In an immediate way.
• We need to bring up there down here. That God is shown to our communities through the presence of our church.
• The challenge is that we need to maybe boil the truth down  to where there is an immediacy to it. So people can digest and respond to the gospel.
• BottomLine: We must immediately diagnose reality. The world is headed for a crash. We need to define an alternate path that leads to life. Do it with image and story bring it to bear on the desperate bottom line of our people. We need to wrap it in image and story to impact

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Since I was here already, I figured I’d like to check out the GCC experience apart from the Innovate Conference. Since I won’t be here during a weekend service I wanted to check out one of the midweek Bible Classes. The guy who was working the front desk when I checked in [his name was Kyle] told me I should try Dr. Bob‘s class. He said Bob was a prof at Bethel College and a great teacher.

After I got in there, looked at his name again, it dawned on me: I know this guy! I mean, not personally, but I heard him teach at a youth weekend after my sophomore year in high school down in Mississippi. Small world, huh? I liked him then and I liked him now.

He taught on The Radical Jesus. And about how Jesus had radical grace. And He always chose grace over law. Here are a few points that were really good:

• You love God exactly as much as you love the person you love the least. Meaning, who ever you love the least…that amount of love is how much you truly love God.
• Jesus always chose people over policies.
• We all exist in The Impossibility of Performance. Meaning we can never follow the rules well enough to always get it right. That’s why we need grace.
• “Beware the anger of a patient man”
• The Pharisees allowed the law to become their God.
• Why is it easier to live by the law instead of by grace? Because it’s the safer choice. You don’t have to think. And it gives you a type of power (because you can look down on people who don’t follow the law well)
• Gal 3:10 - “All who RELY on observing the law are under a curse.”

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Well after finally getting into the room and cranking the AC up, I caught up on some email, took a shower to wash the air travel off of me, and took a nap. I had a headache. My alarm went off and I got up read to go to the Journey Bible Class at Granger. The headache was still there. And all I’d had to eat for the day was a muffin at 4:30am and cheese & crackers with Reese’s Pbutter cups at the airport. But I found some popcorn in the lobby as I left.

Without any wheels yet, I walked to the church. It is only a half mile. I kept looking for a BIG church building I’d see from a distance. But I didn’t. Which was cool. But the parking lot was filling and people were all filing in towards the front door. As I got there, immediately on my right was Connection Cafe, a little coffee bar and then some seating on the right as well. A nice lady w/ a nametag was saying to everyone at once, “I know it doesn’t look normal, but adults are taking the kids to their rooms!” I don’t think I looked lost, but anyway.

There were lots of people w/o being crowded.

I went to Bob Laurent‘s class he was teaching. It was on The Radical Jesus [I'll post the notes in the next entry]. At first I didn’t clue into who Bob Laurent is. But he spoke at a youth weekend I was a part of back in 1990. I liked him a lot back then, and 18 years later I still liked his teaching. He’s pretty passionate. And there were LOTS of people there. Bob said 900. And I think with a big shift in what Granger’s mid week events used to be, that’s a pretty significant number.

But first impressions of Granger Community Church was A+. Now I can’t wait for Innovate tomorrow. I’m back in the hotel after stopping by Target for some toiletries and by Moe’s for some supper! Now I’m full and typing while watching John and Kate plus 8.

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I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel. I can’t get in just yet. The guy behind the counter says he sees the rooms blocked out for us, but can’t view the individual reservations. Merissa who made the reservations isn’t here yet, but I called her and she won’t have any different info for him because she doesn’t have the confirmation number. So, I’m sitting in the lobby. Wondering if I should try to walk over to Notre Dame vs paying $12 for a taxi ride there.

Granger Community Church is just about a half mile down the road, so I could walk down there and check it out. There are actually some Journey Bible Classes going on tonight. I might give one of those a go to check out some of the changes that GCC is undergoing. Or I might go to bed early since I probably got 3 hours of sleep and have been on planes or rushing to them all day.

I got up at 4. Showered. Ate a muffin. Left for Tupelo. Flew to Memphis for a 37 minute layover. That means I rushed around to my next gate. Then I flew to Detroit. There I had another 37 minute layover. Interesting. But then I flew to South Bend and got a taxi to this hotel. So I could use some time on a bed infront of ESPN or something like that. And you can’t beat this wifi either.

But I know I won’t do that. I’m travelling, baby! Can’t be still for too long.

OH, and if things look different now and then, it’s because I’m trying out some new themes around the ole blog.

Edit: A 3:45 I got into my room

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Yesterday I finally got all the pics out of the camera onto the hard drive. Some wifi issues kept me from getting a lot uploaded, but here are a few. All straight out of the camera with no post processing. I’ll clean them up a little later.

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This NFL season we at The Orchard here in Oxford decided to form a Fantasy Football League. The draft was lots of fun and the first week was surprising. Here’s a picture of part of the first weeks standings.

Now the thing is, both of those guys, the top two ranked teams, are the PASTORS of The Orchard. Yep, funny how that happened. That’s Pat and me atop the week one standings. Of course you can’t go on just one week. I know that. Heck, the Patriots won every game but their final one last season. And all people talk about are the Giants.

Week Two is almost in the books. And as fate would have it Pat and I are matched up. We still have Monday Night football to go. He’s got Brian Westbrook playing and I have Jason Whitten. But here’s the score total heading into tonight.

Truth be known, which ever of us loses will probably have the 2nd or 3rd highest point total for the league, but be 1-1. I plan to be 2-0!

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