I was added to Alltop today. If you’ve not heard of it, Alltop is a mashup of affinity/focus/similar blogs and sites based on a category system. Pretty cool, really.

You can find my stuff on the page http://church.alltop.com. Fun.

I recently read a great post over at Jeff Wilson’s blog and posted a comment that I felt passionate about. I wanted to share those thoughts with my blogging friends, too, so here’s my list of “don’t do this” in church. Please add to this list with your passionate thoughts, too!

Don’t preach that same old sermon.

Don’t do another “Living Christmas Tree” - ever. How is that entertaining or relevant?

Don’t send me another Christmas letter from the pastor’s wife writing like we’re best friends. Be real.

Don’t make excuses for not leveraging blogging or micro blogging to expand your reach, create relational proximity and sharing beyond the pulpit.

Don’t let that person sing a solo that really can’t sing. You’re not being kind; you’re being manipulative.

Don’t tell me there’s not enough money in church. Instead, tell me how the vision is going to inspire sacrificial offering.

Don’t ever let “becuase we’ve always done it that way” become a part of a church leaders’ lexicon.

Don’t create a website that promises one experience and then deliver something completely different (usually not meeting expectations) once I arrive.

Don’t send out another mailer with the pastor and his wife smiling from the comfort of a Sears portrait studio. I don’t care if they dress nice or look happy; I care what you’re doing to speak into my life, so please tell me how your church has application for me and my family.

Don’t make me fill out a form on my first visit. I’ll fill something out online when I’m ready.

Don’t make me stand up or “be recognized” - even if you clap for me - by asking visitors to be welcomed. I’m not interested in false greetings. I’m interested in genuine people saying hi of their own accord and not looking or acting like a clique or club.

Don’t ask me to leave my children with your volunteers without knowing only I can pick them up (check-in systems rock for this).

Generally, don’t give excuses. Delivery authenticity, quality and passion!

Several years ago, I responded to a blog post about “innovative churches". Recently I was asked about this same subject, so I’ve revisited my thoughts in the hopes of opening up the discussion again with you - the churches leading and getting it done for the Kingdom. I’d love to hear what you have to say on the subject and learn from the practical ways you think we can become truly innovative.

I’ve yet to be in any church that meets the real definition of the word innovative, though I hear many churches use the term to describe their approach. Instead, a better set of descriptors might be: artistic, clever, hip, inspired, resourceful or even atypical. But these descriptors are really only accurate in comparison to other churches, not to the culture at large.

Yes, the church should be innovative (leaders instead of imitators), but to do so will first require church leaders to understand that the current church definition of “innovation” is often inaccurate.

Dictionary.com defines the word Innovative:

adj 1: ahead of the times; 2: being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before.

Far too often we promote our churches as “innovative” only to set up the attendees for a bait-and-switch.

For example, if you’re going to use the Spiderman theme for a sermon series, then make the full connection between this comic-book superhero and the super-power of God; not a tangential spin that looks at the web that Spidey casts as a metaphor for a web of lies. That tie-in is marginal and could easily have avoided the Spiderman theme, but that wouldn’t look as cool on a post card or movie-theatre advertisement.

And so a bait-and-switch (we offer one thing that will get you in the door, but will largely ignore the thing that got your attention so that we can force-feed you our propaganda) leaves the attendee feeling ripped off - nay, LIED TO.

Our communities don’t expect us to photo-copy our culture - they expect us to be different. We should leverage technologies, themes, concepts and practices that help us achieve our goal of communicating truth without the bait-and-switch actions that turn off the unchurched.

Similarly, being creative is a goal many churches try to attain. I’m in total agreement that church should be creative in reaching their communities, but just because your stage was set up to look like a Lenny Kravitz concert doesn’t mean you’re creative - it simply means you’re good at copying culture.

Real creativity and innovation is hard to do for an organization (the Church, if you will) that’s not been an influencer of culture for a long, long time.

I believe that a two-fold approach is necessary to see real change:

1) Resourcefully equip your church to meet the relational needs of people. This will involve the improved use of technology (audio, video, lighting, computers, database management, etc.) and the adoption of new pastoral models that include production managers, project managers and IT managers as not only people devoted to specialized tasks, but as true pastors who lead a team of lay people to utilize their gifts in these areas.

Let’s face it: when it comes to technology, the church as a whole lags far, far behind the culture and thus continues to feed the impression that we’re out-of-touch.

2) The re-igniting of the arts within the church. If I hear of another “Creative Arts” ministry within a church that limits the “arts” to music and drama, I think I might puke. The “arts” include both traditional art (painting, sculpting, acting, singing, playing an instrument, etc.) and digital art (electronic painting, 3D modeling, voice acting, digital editing, etc) and should be a major focus of both churches and seminaries to re-evaluate how we include artists in our ministry training.

As true art is inspired, real innovation and creative thinking will develop beyond the mere duplication of culture back to the influencing of culture. As this happens, the secular world - ever in search of new and innovative ideas - will start to see the church as a true innovative force.

We’ll measure our results by the impact we make on our local communities and in how we interact & influence people outside of our church walls. The greatest measurement will be how seamlessly our people take the paradigm of innovation out to the marketplace.

Will our Artists and teachers develop community service opportunities that look nothing like what’s available in our local communities today?

Will the church be viewed as a community center that’s open 7 days a week and as heavily populated on Thursday afternoon as it is on Sunday morning?

Will we create opportunities to redeem the culture through our community involvement instead of forcing our community neighbors to come to our (not their) facility and participate in a way that’s culturally out of context with their lives?

Our obstacles are age old:

• Change - not a mere modification - is really hard.
• Cost - technology, in particular, doesn’t always scale down to allow a small church to leverage it as well as a large church.
• Control - it’s hard to manage more than we’re used to managing. Most churches stay small because we can manage (control) a smaller size.
• Commitment - real innovation and creative development is expensive in three ways: people, equipment (resources) and time. Because it’s hard to manage that which we don’t understand well, many leaders will fail to give the freedom and flexibility to the technicians and artists that are so desperately needed in today’s church.

In the end - or the new beginning, if you will - churches must learn to creatively communicate to their local culture if they ever hope to be a leading innovator to the masses.

UPDATE: Check out Ben Arment’s thoughts on the subject of innovation at the Collide Magazine website.

I love the top-notch videos that Rob and his crew over at Igniter Media create for churches. I’ve known these guys for a long time and they just keep taking amazing to a whole ‘notha level!

To see this and a bunch of other amazing videos, check out Igniter Media.

Over the years, I’ve found that my “best church clients list” is far more diversified in style, budgets and denominations (or the lack thereof) than I’d have thought. I’ve worked with very small churches and some absolutely massive ones across a wide spectrum of locales, demographics and leadership styles. Yet what I realized were some key, shared attributes that I found interesting.

Here are, in my order preference, the traits that my best church clients have in common:

1. Their staff is passionate about Jesus. There are no posers in this list; they are all on-fire for our Lord!
2. The focus of the church is on the people (the Bride of Christ), not the “stuff".
3. The senior pastors have serious vision and constantly seek God for his will, not their agenda.
4. These churches enter into long-term relationships with me, not one-off consulting gigs.
5. The executive/leadership/management top-level staff and elders are committed to excellence, not perfection.
6. The leadership demonstrates strong passion, decisive action and significant humility.
7. Expectations are clearly defined, progress is measured and encouragement is part of the DNA.
8. Reproducing leaders are constantly reproducing the leaders under them and exampling the art of delegation rather than the science of singular work organization.
9. Leaders take the responsibility for failure and share the success with others.
10. Training and retraining is part of the culture and expected for everyone. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make consistent.
11. They pay on-time or early. As a small business owner, I’m not in the business of floating loans. These churches demonstrate 1 Timothy 5:18 and value my relationship with them.

My favorite “small church client” runs about 300 in attendance. My favorite “large church client” runs over 12,000 in attendance. Both are incredible churches getting it done for the Kingdom. The rest, like them, are each being true to the DNA of their church and white-hot in their passion to hear from God and move forward in the confidence of their vision.

As this year comes to an end, I’m thankful for each of them and look forward to the continued relationships and new ones yet to come.

I remember one Christmas years ago, when I was first on staff as the lead media director for a church, when the long hours and last-minute changes of the church Christmas production all became too much. In a moment of frustration, exhaustion and anger, I popped off at the worship pastor.

It didn’t matter that I was technically right about the issue, nor did it matter that he wasn’t being respectful of me or my volunteer’s extra time and ridiculously long hours. What did matter was how I handled the situation.

In reading Galatians chapter five this morning, I was reminded of something I’ve read a lot and heard more times than I can recall:

“So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.” Galatians 5:16-17

I wanted to be heard and to right a perceived wrong during that Christmas production rehearsal. Yet all I accomplished was to disrespect the worship pastor and not handle conflict correctly. Furthermore, though I did this in a semi-private setting, the tension between the two of us weighed on the volunteers who knew something wasn’t right.

I missed the opportunity to demonstrate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

I’ve tried to remember that lesson and handle conflict much differently since that time. I still fail and let my anger win the conflict between flesh (my sin) and the Spirit.

Remember to practice Matthew 18:15 whenever you’re in a situation where you need to handle a conflict with someone who’s done something against you. Don’t let this awesome season of celebrating the birth of the savior of all mankind be tarnished by conflict with each other. Let the fruit of the Spirit resonate inside you. Show extra patience and self-control. Handle situations with love and gentleness.

I truly pray that you have a blessed Christmas production season at your church and that the results of your hard work and long hours pay off when your family, friends, neighbors and unchurched community hear the presentation of our Lord’s birth on Earth.

Wow. Yes.

I smile almost every time I receive an email from a church asking me for my advice on a very specific piece of equipment. Why do I smile? Because I always get to ask them a question that, hopefully, will help them answer their question.

Asking me to give you advice on one piece of gear is the same as asking “what’s a good car?”

The answer, of course, depends on what you need the car to do.

Do you need it to carry a few people or lots of people?
Is gas mileage a top priority?
Will it be driven in ice and snow and need optional traction control?
Will it be used to pull a trailer?
Will it be used to haul stuff around?
Will it need to support multiple car seats?
Do you want it to have leather or cloth?
Is cruise control important?
Does it need to be an automatic transmission?

The list of questions is necessary to understand what kind of car is needed. In the same way, technology must be approached with the same kind of needs analysis and understanding of who will be using it, how often, where and for what purpose.

I’m more than happy to give advice on equipment, but understanding that my advice is sound only when the application is completely understood. And that’s where churches often don’t go the extra mile; you have to know the context to pick the right equipment.

So feel free to call or email me about gear. But know we’re first going to be talking about cars.

I’ve been reading Getting Things Done and am working on a “zero Inbox". This monumental task is horrific. I don’t know how you do it, but I organize my Inbox into a nested tree of folders (Church Clients>Church Name>Church Contact, etc.) and try to put the right person in the right folder and then set a rule for all new email from that person to go to the appropriate Inbox folder.

Sounds organized and simple, right? You’d think so, but when people send from multiple email addresses or there’s more than one place for the email to go, things get jacked. Add to that the fact that I’ve YET to find an email program that can handle the thousands of rules and folders that I create. MS Outlook & Entourage both crater when it comes to running rules. Thunderbird, my current email client, seems to have the same issue (though it goes longer before jacking up the rules than MS).

So I’m down to under 1,000 unfiltered emails and KNOW I had an email from a church asking me to pick an available weekend for January to come and do training with their tech team. Weird thing is I can’t find the emails anywhere. I want to be able to search for an email or name - not a problem in the Inbox - but very problematic if the email got jacked up into the wrong email folder tree somehow. There’s no way to do a search for all folders in Thunderbird. Ugh.

OK, all of that venting to ask two questions: 1) What’s a truly bullet-proof, IMAP-capable email client that doesn’t break when you have thousands of folders/subfolders and rules? 2) If you’re the church that emailed me about training in January, please call me (I dare not have you email into the mess. )

Getting Things Done is nice…but the zero Inbox may be my ruin.

My friends Jason and Len, creators of the Midnight Oil church resources, are giving away their “Christmas Freebie” and offering training at multiple regional conferences over the next year.

These two guys are the real deal. They’ve authored several books including The Wired Church 2.0, Digital Storytellers and Design Matters. I personally have spent time with them over the years and have continued to be influenced by their creativity and passion.

If you’ve not heard them speak or picked up one of their books, I recommend you get to know these two men of God and learn from their incredible experiences.

For the last couple of years NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC has given away a house to a single mother. Their Senior Pastor, Perry Noble, has blogged about it before.

What would happen if every church that could afford this (or work out a great deal with a builder) did this at Christmas and again on Mother’s Day? There’s such a massive amount of obvious outreach and positive press that comes from an act as wonderfully outrageous as giving away a house!

Has your church done something so awesomely audacious? If so, what was it? If not, why not?

I realize that the title of this post is dramatic. That’s intentional on my part because I believe this is the most simple yet profound way of demonstrably telling stories that will claw their way past any facade, any hard life or any objections about the power of Christ in our life.

The website is IAmSecond.com. It’s a masterpiece of simple, high contrast design with minimal interface fuss and entirely centered around stories. As far as I’m concerned, every Bible-believing church should be prominently linking to this from their own main page, blogs and social network pages.

My personal favorite story is of Brian Welch, the former leader of the band Korn. You can watch his amazing story, told powerfully and beautifully in just a few minutes, by CLICKING HERE.

I was highly impacted by Brian’s story and desire to meet him one day, hug him and thank him for sharing his story on this website. It moved me.

Have you seen this site yet? Is your church linking to it and sharing this with your community?

Are your church members and attenders getting the point of Christmas? This video says it all:

A friend pointed me to this very brief and excellent demonstration of over and under cable wrapping. This should be required viewing very every church tech and volunteer!

“Over and Under” cable wrapping is the correct (and professional) way to wrap cables. If your church has issues with cables flipping up , coiling or building “memory” (it only wraps one way), then you need to learn how to wrap properly.

I actually have taught my family how to do over & under for everything - garden hoses, extension cords, ropes, you name it. Yes, I’m a geek BUT our house has BEAUTIFUL coils on everything that can be wrapped!

Pass this post along to all of your volunteers and other church techie friends!

I’m friends with the CFO at Sweetwater and wanted to share another holiday giveaway contest (it’s free) with my church friends. They’re giving stuff away every day through December 24 and much of it is really great stuff. Click here to go sign up.

According to their rules the only thing you need to know is that they reserve the right to call if you sign up for this sweepstakes. They’re good folks, so a nice sales call is nothing, I think, for a chance to win. Hey, someone’s gotta win; might as well be you!

This came through my Inbox today and I wanted to share it with my church friends:

NILES, IL, December 1, 2008 — Shure Incorporated today announced a rebate program of up to $1,000 for the trade-in of Shure 700 MHz frequency band (698-806 MHz) wireless systems and other related components purchased before February 1, 2007, and for any other manufacturers’ qualifying 700 MHz frequency band wireless systems and their related components.

“Our number one priority is to provide our customers with the highest quality products, service, and support,” said Al Hershner, Vice President and General Manager of the Shure U.S Business Unit. “We’ve known for some time that the ‘700 MHz band’ would be reallocated for new services following the DTV transition on February 18, 2009. Although a final decision from the FCC is still pending, we felt the need to assure our customers now that we will take care of them regardless of the outcome.”

Customers may submit their rebate forms with the purchase of the following new replacement products: UHF-R®, ULX®, MX690/SLX4L, PSM®700 (H3, L2 bands), and PGX.

For a complete summary of the terms and conditions of this rebate program, to learn which products are eligible for the rebate program, and to obtain a rebate form, customers should visit the Shure website at www.shure.com/rebate.

“There has been a great deal of confusion for wireless microphone users regarding the political and technological developments surrounding the DTV transition and the 700 MHz auction over the past few years,” added Hershner. “As always, Shure has a team of sales, customer service, and technical support staff available to answer any questions people might have about this rebate program or their products.”

For information about rebates or trade-ins for in-warranty Shure wireless systems purchased on or after February 1, 2007, please contact 800-25-SHURE (800-257-4873).

The gurus over at WorshipHouseMedia.com are at it again this year giving away a free download every single day. I’ve known these guys since, well, before they were WHM! I respect them mightily and love the quality of producers they attract.

Go get your daily freebies here: http://www.worshiphousemedia.com/

God is using everything in my life to speak to me in this season, whether that’s through my bride, my family, my friends, my pastors, bloggers or, of course, His Word. I’ve been pummeled by His love, admonished with His gentleness and encouraged with His kindness over the last week.

I desire to share some of these learnings both as marker stones along my life’s journey and, hopefully, as encouragement for you in your journey, too.

“When I think that something is mine, the only person I’m fooling is myself.”

If there’s really nothing new under the sun then thinking that I came up with the idea or even own the idea is flatly absurd. God is the owner of everything and that would include new ideas (at least new to me). Therefore, rather than assume I somehow deserve to take the lead for every idea I come up with, I should first acknowledge that if I had an idea, God gave it to me. I then need to ask him what He wants me to do with it, not try and figure things out on my own.

“If I don’t stop to ask God if he wants me to do something, why should I be surprised when things don’t work out the way I planned?”

It’s very easy for me to make a decision on my own. After all, I’m capable enough and experienced enough to know how to work through situations and am able to make snap decisions. The problem with snap decisions is that unless they’re directed by God, I risk making the wrong decision.

I’ve recently been challenged to pray about everything. Literally. Everything. Every decision. Every question. Every time.

I make hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions every day. The intentionality and humility I’m learning are lessons I hope I won’t forget. If I really want to live a God-centered - a God-chaser - life, then my will should be His will. The best way to know His will is to pray about everything. It’s a whole new way of living, but I’m learning to make this my new priority and focus. So far, I’ve been surprised to find out how much easier it is to make good decisions when I have to run every single one up to God.

“Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation?” (from Francis Chan)

The short answer is: “Yes". God owes me nothing. I owe Him everything. For me to assume that God needs to share his motives, timing and decisions with me every step of the way - especially when I can’t understand why things are happening - is nothing short of supreme arrogance.

The revelation God gave me after praying about this was: “If God doesn’t tell me why something is or isn’t happening then He needs for me not to know.” That should be more than enough comfort to assuage any “need to know".

These three lessons have been important both for the moment (now) and for my life (all of my next tomorrows). I hope they resonate with you, too.