Pastor Coy and I shot out here after Skull Church to attend a one day leadership conference put on by Catalyst featuring Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel. From 9am to 5pm we were (literally) bombarded by an exorbitant amount of practical advice on leading with vision and energetically executing your God-given mission. Andy pastors North Point in Atlanta, Georgia and Craig pastors Lifechurch.tv (the church that produced the killer Youversion Bible app for mobile devices.) Their sessions were salient, sage, and strategically aimed at cranking up momentum in ministry. Phenomenal.

Straight after the conference we headed downtown and met Pastor Mark Driscoll and his executive Pastor Jamie Munson for dinner. They were gracious to spend almost three hours with us as we picked their brains on ministry, church, leadership, and what they have learned in the almost 14 years that Mars Hill Church has been turning Seattle and beyond upside down for Jesus. They opened up the floodgates and, in what I have realized is quintessential Mark Driscoll style, were like machine-guns of advice/encouragement/challenge/inspiration/sarcasm. It was kind of like drinking from a fire hose but it was awesome. There is much I can learn from Mark and I was honored to spend time with him.

Over the course of the day we took in a lot on subjects ranging from: effectively using video teaching, conserving energy in the midst of a full preaching schedule, building systems and structure to keep up with the growth with out smothering the creative chaos that God used to bring the freshness and growth in the first place, etc; One topic of particular interest to me was the ins and outs of having multiple sites. All three men we were listening to do this VERY well. If you take North Point Church, Mars Hill Church, and Lifechurch.tv together there are over 25 campuses! We meet at two locations currently but are praying about more in the future.

Coy and I spent some time, later that evening, ambling around downtown Seattle ruminating on the different things that we had heard, like glutted cows. I’m sure for several days to come we will continue to be processing and sifting through the wealth of knowledge that has been imparted to us.

I try and learn what I can from a broad spectrum of leaders, not just any one source exclusively. (Except Jesus!) An important part of that is having the wisdom to chew the meat and spit out the bones. I think you should have a full “bull-pen” of influencers and coaches, who are each strong in different ways, without ever trying to be a carbon copy of any one person exclusively and you will be much better for it. This means being quick to learn from anyone but slow to implement with thought and prayer. And this coaching doesn’t have to be face-to-face or even at a conference. I learn from pastors, leaders, authors, and people that I have never met on a weekly basis through podcasts, books and websites. I definitely have found that leadership is something that is caught better than it is taught.

This morning (since it was my first time in Seattle) we made the obligatory tourist trip to the Pike Place Market and had a coffee from the very first Starbucks. The Mermaid Mecca. It was surprisingly humble and yet they have a map on the wall showing all the Starbucks in the world, all birthed from that nondescript location. I6,082 was their number of locations at the time the map was printed. Staggering. As I drank my Americano and thought of the evangelistic manner in which Starbucks spread their wings from their “Jerusalem,” (Seattle) to their state, the country and literally to the ends of the earth I was inspired to continue to make Jesus famous, with every breath, ’til He returns.

A number of Pastors who were saved during that period spoke and there was music and then Pastor Chuck gave a message looking to the future–which is key–because he isn’t just sitting around remembering the past but pressing on for what is to come because he knows Jesus is still on the move!

The best part was getting to see so many friends who I love and respect–Pedro Garcia, Skip Heitzig, Jon Courson, Mike Macintosh, and Raul Ries to name a few. (In addition to my dad and brother Daniel, who I am super proud of) There was also music by Crystal Lewis, Phil Wickham and others and it was great getting to show Phil how his song, “the time is now” brought our sheep blog vid to life!

And for more info on RIPTIDE click here, you can watch a trailer for the film there on the site–which I recommend you do because it is awesome!!

Without a doubt, the highlight of the conference was the evening with Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio. They didn’t have any laser-shooting robots, or comic sketches or loin-cloths. It was just a simple and powerful night of worship and the Word. It rocked. Jennie and I both experienced God doing eternal things in our hearts as we worshipped and were ministered to by Louie’s talk and we left recharged and refreshed.

I had never heard Louie speak in person before, though I have been impacted and blessed by his ministry for years. One of the biggest things I enjoyed watching was the partnership between Chris and Louie on stage. Though one spoke and the other sang, you could tell that they were working together for the same cause through the whole night. As I watched, I thought of Ira Sankey and DL Moody, Cliff Barrows and Billy Graham–examples of worship leader/speaker teams that were united powerfully. And it clearly makes a big difference when God melds two different hearts together to be used in harmony in this way.

I think I am going to post soon about some things that you can do to try and get and stay in sync with your worship leader.

I have been meaning to blog about the pros/cons of the Kindle for public speaking for a while. I regularly get emails from other communicators who have seen me using it and are wondering: whether I like it and is it hard to get used to? and which size they should get? and how to get their word docs onto it et cetera. So here goes…

Let me give a disclaimer–I teach using a manuscript style of notes and although I totally have mad amounts of respect for those who can charge it with one page of handwritten notes (James Macdonald) or commit their messages to memory (Louie Giglio) that isn’t how I roll (but I secretly wish I was skilled enough to try it.) So this concept certainly won’t be for everyone. I am also a big fat nerd and love new technology and finding ways to use it to the glory of God.

Having gotten all that out of the way I will say that I was pretty freaked out by the thought of actually doing it at first–what if it turns off halfway through a message? what if the screen saver engages and I look down to see a picture of Edgar Allen Poe instead of my next point? what if Y2k shows up 10 years late and the robot overlords secretly warp my doctrine? Also there was the loss of color formatting which I used in my paper notes to quickly distinguish a quotation from Jesus (red) to an illustration (blue) with just a glance.

The day I tried it for the first time it was the fall of ‘09 and I was speaking on the East Coast and I had forgotten to bring a mobile printer with me (I used to lug around a small Canon inkjet to print my notes on the go.) I went to the hotel’s business center and the printer was black and white. It hit me that if I was going to be speaking off black and white notes anyway I might as well give the Kindle a try. At that time I had the 2nd generation kindle with the 6″ screen so getting a word doc off my mac involved emailing it to Amazon and having them pipe it to me for a charge of ten cents. The way they stripped my document of formatting in the process wasn’t ideal but it worked.

I was so freaked out that I brought my paper notes up to the platform with me as a backup plan but didn’t ever need to use them as it worked ok, my biggest complaint was that the screen was too small and so I had to change pages way too often. I went back to paper. When they released the Kindle DX in May, in addition to the 9.7″ screen, they added some great features made it a great prospect for preaching. For one thing, the DX could handle PDF’s so I didn’t have to email and pay to send my docs to it. All you have to do is have Word kick out a PDF and after connecting to your computer via USB drag the file to the Documents folder on the Kindle’s hard drive and voila–it shows up as a book.

my Bible and Kindle side by side before a recent message.

Secondly, the DX’s screen is more advanced, while it is still black and white, it can display thousands of shades of grey so you can use that in formatting your notes and it registers it on the screen as dark or lighter text. And because it is not turning your notes into an e-book you can use all the underlining, italicizing, bold type, and even boxes to give your eye key words to grab onto that you want and these rich elements aren’t stripped as they are kindle-ized.

I have been asked a lot about battery life and let me say this, the Kindle battery is a freak of nature that amazes me everyday. It only uses power to change pages and so it lasts forever. The only power guzzling feature is the wireless 3G which if you live in a remote area like Montana it roams while searching for legit service and kills the battery faster, but that can be easily turned off. I also turn off the accelerometer so my notes don’t accidentally switch over to landscape if I am walking around with it and it senses the movement.

I made a Word template that is exactly the size of the screen and found that I have to bump my font up one number from 12 to 13 font for ideal legibility. Since the first message using the DX in June of 2009 I have never looked back. The ability to tweak a message in between services without reprinting is great, on the road it is unbeatable and the type on the screen is so crisp I don’t notice any difference from paper. Not to mention the money I have saved not buying color ink cartridges and the absence of stress that comes from dealing with printers/finding printers on the go.

Some Kindle cons: you can’t handwrite a quick thought in the margin of your notes if something comes to you right before you speak.
you can’t disable the screen-saver.
you can only advance the pages with the one button on the right side–we all know swiping is so much cooler! not to mention that if that button were ever to jam during a message, you would be bummed.
the keyboard is clunky and is wasted space, couldn’t there be a way for it to be an on-screen keyboard that showed up when you needed it then disappeared?
also–grayscale is nice and all, but this is the year 2010, I’d like to see some color, baby!

In short, while I have definitely enjoyed rocking the Kindle, let’s just say I am stoked that April 3rd is only a week away. I think the iPad could be the ultimate preaching machine and I am excited to give it a whirl on Easter Sunday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

the Kindle DX in action at Skull Church

My favorite was hearing from Alistair Begg last night. He is one awesome Scotsman! His passionate and genuine conviction that the Bible is the actual word of God shows on his face as he speaks and you can’t help but feel like you are almost getting to go back in time and listen to Robert Murray McCheyne who preached, “with eternity stamped upon his brow.” Alistair is also a full on wordsmith and busted out yoda-esque pearls of wisdom like, “even the best of men are men at best.”

Getting to spend time backstage, between sessions, with guys like Alistair is worth more than gold. And you can be sure I worked on getting him to bring his radio show, Truth for life, onto fresh life radio. James MacDonald’s show, Walk in the Word, will be coming on later this year and I hope to hear some sweet scottish preaching soon too.

with Alistair Begg

My message was on David’s time hiding from Saul in the caves (I called it Beverly Caves 90210) and how he had to trust God’s promises even when they seemed super unlikely. I love preaching on David. He was just a punk kid who God used in major ways because he had a special heart. Normally in life having a heart condition disqualifies you from certain things, but it was David’s heart condition that qualified him to be used. Not that he was perfect (far from it) but he was a man after God’s own heart.

I am headed home for skull church and will be prepping my message on the flight–praying for God to move!

On Wednesday at Skull Church, in addition to a special message from Greg Laurie, as a bonus we were joined by Seattle rockband The Myriad. They get tons of play on fresh life radio, have a song on the game Rockband and have even received a good amount of attention from MTV. A few years back we had them at an O2 Experience event and I really dig them. They are super cool guys and musically they are awesome, without a doubt one of my favorites that have played at Skull Church so far–just good clean rock and roll.

After they played Greg gave a great message on how to know the will of God and we saw a number of people respond to the invitation, making professions of faith, at both the Strand and Liberty theatres. I love Greg’s preaching skillz (and his nunchuck skillz* too) he is passionate, easy to listen to, thoroughly Biblical, and hilarious. The next day we flew to SoCal and I spoke at his Bible study in Orange County. I gave a message called Flour Power on the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarepath from 1 Kings 17 and then promptly ate at in-n-out. Today we spent some time with another super cool pastor who also lives in Seattle but more on that later. The boarding door just closed and I need to make some progress on this weekend’s NUCLEUS message.

*Napoleon Dynamite Reference

Greg Laurie, Pedro Garcia, Don McClure and I all spoke 2x each during a seminar on Christ’s Return at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove. There was also music at each session by the always enthusiastic Dennis Agajanian and worship by Marty Goetz. It was a really sweet blend of hanging out and ministry. Everybody brought their wives and Greg brought his whole family along and we all had a blast drinking sweet tea, eating delicious Southern cooking and meeting all the friendly people that were there on retreat. Skip and Lenya Heitzig were supposed to be there too but due to Lenya’s cancer treatment they had to stay home in Albuquerque–we missed them.

BIlly and Ruth Graham’s vision for the Cove was that it would be a place for Christians to go and be rejuvenated in the Lord and in His Word and be equipped to be used by God more powerfully when they went home. Their vision certainly became a reality, and everyone (there were people from 23 different states) who attended–including those of us who were there to serve–seemed to really be blessed.

Here are a few more pics:


Jennie from the block.

Greg Laurie, me and Dennis Agajanian.

The hills are on fire!

Me and Franklin Graham.

Here is a shot of me teaching on how we should respond to the reality of Jesus coming back.

They just shut the cabin door–gotta go!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Webcast
We have recently upgraded our webcast from the platform we had been using. The new webcast looks better, the player is simpler and best of all, there are no more ads! Check it out during one of our webcasts. (Saturday at 6pm, Sunday at 9& 11am and Wednesday at 7pm at freshlifechurch.com and skullchurch.com Mountain Standard Time)

Orange County
I just got back from Southern California where I gave a message on the cross at Greg Laurie’s Thursday night Bible study.  It was a great night of ministry and thirty people responded to the invitation at the end of the message and made public professions of faith in Jesus Christ. Greg is on vacation recovering from the harvest crusade and it was a blast to fill in for him.

Surfing

I brought Kevin Guido, who is fresh life’s creative arts pastor with me and took him surfing for the first time in his life. He did great. There was an incident where he left the water bleeding from his head after coming in contact with his surfboard…but it ended well and he is back home, safe and sound. (Usually you teach people how to surf on a foam board for that exact reason, but Kevin is not the foam board sort of guy. He is more the bomb a ski-hill on a mountain bike drinking red bull sort of guy.) If he is anything like me than he is addicted to surfing now, because once I caught my first wave–I knew I was hooked for life.

Radio

The transmitter for the full power, FM radio station that fresh life church is building, went up on the antennae yesterday and everything is on schedule for the station to go on the air in September.  I love looking at this picture and thinking about how the gospel will be amplified from this metal structure and go out into the area to people who need Christ. Missionary airwaves.

Heaven
And last but certainly not least, this weekend I will be preaching the last of 4 messages on heaven.  We are going to be focusing in on the question, “What we are going to do there?”  This little series within a series has been so wonderful to go through and I hope you will join us, in person or online.