Last night, Stevie, Devin, and I went downtown to the Peabody Rooftop Party.

Stevie is friends with Kevin and Bethany (the headliner band) so we got to chill in the VIP section and just hang out, laugh, and watch people in a different kind of environment.

We had a blast!

Sitting here at Perks again for the past 3 hours. I have been able to get a ton of work done today. Not a lot of people have been through this morning. This wouldn’t be that important except for the fact that when you live in a smaller town - it seems that you know 1 of every 2-3 people who you come in contact with.

In case you were wondering…

While running this morning I nearly got eaten by two psychotic birds. They continuously dive bombed my face apparantly trying to poke out my eyeballs. I am glad they did not succeed.

When a sports team becomes successful over a period of time - it will inevitably draw a ton of new “fans”. Every great team (minus the Spurs) has a significant bandwagon following.

The same is true when it comes to church planting. Right now, it seems that planting churches is the thing to do. There are a lot of church plants that are experiencing tremendous success and a lot of people are aspiring to follow in their footsteps. That is GREAT, but here are a few thoughts…

Planting a church because it’s cool? - buy a new car…
Planting a church because it is exciting? - go jump out of an airplane…
Planting a church because you hate the one you’re in? - find a new one…
Planting a church b/c you want to be the “lead” pastor? - get over yourself

Don’t misunderstand this post…By all means - plant churches. Just make sure that the MAIN reason that you are planting looks like this…

Planting a church because God has called you to do so? - Go for it!

Any other reason and you WILL fail. God’s call is the only thing that will sustain you. Bandwagon fans jump ship when times get tough. Bandwagon church planters do the same. Be the real deal. Answer the call - just make sure that is what you are answering.

It seems as if I am going to have to send London (1 yr. old) to some kind of institution that teaches people how to NOT eat their earrings.

She has decided that yanking the things out of her ears and eating them is much fun as she has done this 3 times over the past several days.

I am not sure, but this can’t be very good for her.

Student Ministry is really all I have ever known. I hesitate to even use the word “know” because it is changing so rapidly, just about the time you think you understand it, the dynamics change and you have to learn it all over again. A lot of people sabatoge themselves by “learning” the ministry and never changing after that point. It will work for a while, but not for very long.

I still do several student ministry events a year and take emails and phone calls from various student pastors. One thing that has never and will never change is this.

If you want your student ministry (or any ministry for that matter) to grow, you must WORK at giving your people something they can be proud of. Excellence cannot be overstated. Do the absolute best you can with the resources that you have. People are not as ashamed of God as you might think. They are; however, ashamed of their church.

Give them something to be proud of. Work hard at every aspect of your weekly event. The results are life-changing.

I ran across this quote earlier today…

William Hewitt - “To be a leader you must preserve all through your life the attitude of being receptive to new ideas. The quality of leadership you will give will depend upon your ability to evaluate new ideas, to separate change for the sake of change from change for the sake of men.”

Are we really willing to change? Really? Not just changes that you want to make and that were your idea, but changes that make you uncomfortable and will require you actually risking something…

I have set up residence in my new portable office at Perks in Atoka, TN. It is a great alternative to Starbucks as they have all the regular stuff plus lots of other options (including free WiFi). If you love Frozen Custard than this is the place to go. I can’t eat it but if you can - than this is your place…

Come check it out…Tell them J.R. sent you. They don’t know who I am but it would be funny to have a ton of people stop by saying “J.R. sent me”.

Two more extremely incredible people are Bill and Darla Dunn. I would link to them but they do not blog. If they did, it would be the most random blog on the planet and would instantly become a fan favorite.

Darla is a vegetarian and Bill will shoot and kill anything that moves. It doesn’t matter if he is in the woods, his backyard, in the car, wherever. Seriously.

I have known them for the past 4 years and they are incredible. They love Jesus, teenagers, and J.R., Devin, Lexi, and London. I love this family and I will miss them for the next few years until they get right with God and move to Acworth.

Thanks Bill and Darla. You guys are awesome!

After a post the other day in which I mentioned building bridges to the community - I have had some people ask me to clarify what that looks like for Freedom Church…

Just a few examples…

1. We will NEVER have a Christian school and we won’t strongly advise our parents to send their kids there. It’s not bad to go to a private school, but we need people to engage the local public school system.

2. We are not going to have organized sports teams that only play against other churches or other teams from within our church. Again, this isn’t bad, but we want to engage the community (and we don’t have any facilities anyway
3. We will help fund the community ministries that are already available in Acworth rather than starting our own. They are already staffed and easily accessible. Combining our financial efforts will make us all more effective.

More than anything else we will try and partner with the city of Acworth in any way that we can. We don’t want to recreate what they are already doing.

Together we can accomplish much more!

We got back to Memphis yesterday. Not my fastest time but when you have received two speeding tickets in the past 2 months - you can sacrifice a few minutes.

We headed out to the Life Church of Memphis this morning with Bill and Darla Dunn. It was extremely refreshing. The music was incredible! Not many churches have music with the passion, energy and intensity of Life.

Mundo Meneses brought a challenging message about pride that was very practical and hard hitting.

If you live in or around Memphis and don’t already have an exciting church - go check that place out.

After church we went out to eat at Olive Garden with Bill/Darla as well as Jeff/Gina/Houston/Mylee Depreist. We had a great time and it was good to see everyone. Thanks Jeff for the meal. You are the man! Let’s do it again soon…