- Nothing out the ordinary today…oh unless you consider our special guest!
- That’s right…I had the opportunity for an exclusive sit down interview with Charlie Sheen.
- You can watch my interview with him here.
- We did this to help us kick off our “Winning” series.
- The series is looking at how God speaks to us through pop culture.
- Today I talked about whether or not followers of Jesus should be involved with pop music, movies and tv shows.
- The number one response I heard afterward was people thanking me for sharing my personal journey with this topic and then showing scripturally why I’m where I’m at today.
- You can listen to today’s message here.
- Here’s a link to the book I referenced…Pop Goes the Church.
- From a technical standpoint, everything went very smooth today.
- Love the attitude and hard work that our team puts in every week!
- Especially grateful today for Jeff Case and Aaron Hoke for playing through pain.
- Jeff tore rib cartilage and Aaron has a bad cold…both soldiered on though…thanks guys!
- Attendance has been down the last few weeks which quite honestly is discouraging.
- But no one said that church planting would be easy so we’re just continuing to do the things we know God is calling us to and allowing Him to determine our fruitfulness.
- Lots of other great ministry and outreach is being done throughout the week so we’re keeping our heads up and kicking the devils butt anyway!
- It was awesome having our friends Chris and Amanda Short visiting today from out of town.
- We did the Japanese buffet with them afterward along with the Krull’s…mmmm sushi!!!
- Tonight I’m traveling down to Chambersburg to my old church for a special worship concert they’re doing. It’ll be great to catch up with even more friends.
- Next week we’ll continue the “Winning” series by looking at how to overcome temptation. The cultural jumping off point will be the movie “Hall Pass”.
- Have a great week…don’t forget to invite someone to come along with you…Easter is coming soon and it would be great to get our momentum back before then.
Inside Today’s Experience
- Don’t know if I’ll do this every week, but we’ll call this one, “The Time Change Edition”.
- This is actually the first time in the past 4 years that the time change has affected me.
- Why you ask?
- At my old church I convinced them not to observe the time change until after we were done on Sunday mornings.
- In other words, everyone got up at the normal time, came to church and then once we were done, everyone moved their clocks forward.
- It was awesome…you didn’t lose sleep and we even got a write up in the paper about it.
- The only people it affected were people who had to work around noon, but better to affect a few than affect everyone.
- Problem is this only works when you have your own building.
- At the theater we couldn’t do this because it would affect movies.
- So the morning got started earlier than normal but I felt good because I went to bed earlier last night to try to make up for it.
- Today was a big day because Andy and Gayle were away for the first time since we launched.
- For those that don’t know Andy, he’s a tech wiz and designed our system.
- This is the 3rd church now that Andy and I have been together and not only are we best friends but he gives me a high degree of comfort on Sunday mornings because I know he can handle just about anything thrown at him.
- However, we’ve assembled a great tech crew at ExponentialChurch.tv and so I wasn’t too concerned unless something completely out of the ordinary happened.
- When you’re doing portable church that’s not completely out of the question, but today we got lucky…or prayer really does work. 🙂
- We ran into a few minor problems but the team of Mike, Cris, and Benji were able to handle it.
- Great job guys and gal!
- All in all the entire day went very smoothly. The band did great as usual…the flow of the day went well…our volunteers are world class…I felt good about today’s message…just one problem…
- Hardly anyone was there.
- I’m talking we just barely had half the normal size crowd.
- Had a few of those tell me that unless they had gotten my email reminder they would have forgotten as well.
- My feeling is two things were at play…
- First, many people just forgot the time change…already gotten some messages to that regard.
- Second, we’re doing a pretty good job of reaching people who either have no church background or little church background.
- While they’re making good spiritual process either as now baby Christians or investigating the claims of Jesus…church attendance still isn’t high on their list and even the slightest little thing (like the time change) can get them out of rhythm.
- That’s one of the challenges of doing “church for people that don’t like church” but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
- Regardless of the small crowd, we still had 2 more people today pray to become followers of Jesus!
- My first pastor used to say that if you don’t preach the same regardless of the crowd size then you’re probably doing it for the wrong reason.
- I’ve always remembered that and so whether it’s a small crowd like today or 13000+, I always try to preach, speak and teach to individuals in the crowd so it doesn’t matter how many total are in attendance.
- That philosophy has served me well not to get discouraged by small crowds and too nervous for big ones.
- Again today was excellent…sorry so many missed it.
- Jump online to listen to the message about the “One Simple Truth” that will transform your life.
- And don’t forget we’re still in the midst of reading the Book of John together as a church. Today is John 7, tomorrow John 8 and so on.
- Then go to the Exponential Facebook Discussion page to share your thoughts via the SOAP method. Not sure what that is? It’s all explained online.
Inside Today’s Experience
- What a day!
- I was just thanking God the other day for how smoothly things have been going.
- Oops spoke too soon.
- Set-up went really well…even have a couple new people helping out which is a huge asset to a team that was already functioning on all cylinders.
- When it came time for the band to do their morning warm-up, we noticed that Bill’s mic was distorting badly.
- I won’t go into all the details, but it spread to Gayle’s mic as well.
- We tried all kinds of things…switching their mics, trying corded mics, switching locations for the wireless receivers, changing channels on the front of house board, changing channels on the back of house board…
- We never did get it completely resolved but finally went with what was the best of the worst.
- I’m not discounting some spiritual warfare going on. I know Satan was not happy that we were going to get serious about some usually not talked about topics so he was doing whatever he could to discourage us.
- Haha jokes on you Satan…goin have to try harder than that.
- Other than that it was a good day…a few minor things here and there but nothing major.
- Of course the big topic of the day was how will Gilbert handle all these questions about marriage, dating, relationships and sex.
- To be honest, I was not nervous at all because I intentionally was keeping it as biblical as possible with very little personal opinion.
- Still…talking about things like porn, masturbation and oral sex is not easy…especially with a bunch of people staring at you…and your wife sitting in the crowd…and the director of church planting and executive director of our region of the denomination in the crowd.
- Still I’m pleased with how it all went.
- Especially proud of the Wordle Picture that is the picture for this post. It shows the amount of times a word was used in the message by size. Notice that even in a message that was pretty edgy, the 4 biggest words are God, Jesus, bible and marriage!
- I knew it was going to be a long message but I wanted to get as many questions answered as possible.
- Unfortunately, the live questions via text never made it to me until after the Experience…luckily the broken crock pot question that came in yesterday was still fresh in my mind.
- So many things I could say about today’s message but you’ll just need to listen for yourself.
- All in all I was pleased with the response afterward.
- Had some guys asking for help and the overall response was thank you for being so open and honest about topics like this and keeping it biblical.
- Honestly I can’t think of any other way to be.
- Why would you want to go to church only to hear something watered down that makes you simply feel good.
- Oh wait I remember.
- Great to have our good friends Bill and Nicole up from WV today to visit and then hang out.
- Next week we begin a new series called ME*TRADE where we’ll look at what to do when life just seems to be in a rut.
- Going to be powerful…make sure you invite a lot of people to come along with you!
Inside Today’s Experience
- Stressing but good day.
- Any time you talk about a subject like sex it takes a lot out of you.
- However, everyone I talked to was very appreciative that we tackled it directly.
- Was so nice to wake up this morning to go put out signs and it was light outside and not below freezing!
- Set-up went pretty smooth.
- In total today we had 51 people serving which is awesome…love our team and their hard work!
- Especially needed the help with the nursery and toddlers area…we had 16 of them crawling and running around!
- In this series we’ve had a lot of guests, including many who are right smack dab in the demographic of who we’re trying to reach…people that have little to no church background or experience.
- I love talking to them because their questions constantly remind me of how much churches just assume that people understand. If you could hear some of the questions and comments I get, you’d be amazed how much the Church in America assumes people know about church and Christianity. That’s why at ExponentialChurch.tv we go out of our way to remove barriers that might be confusing to new people coming in.
- We opened today by covering Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. Sort of edgy but it went well with the message and as I mentioned during the greeting time, here is a young girl who is influencing what today’s young adults think about sex, but yet she herself just a few months into her marriage is already in counseling because it’s not working out.
- Will give them credit though…at least they’re trying counseling. Many in Hollywood immediately go the divorce route. Praying that Katy and Russell “Find the One“.
- In any case, Gayle did a great job covering the song even though it was a bit uncomfortable for her.
- Really liked today’s worship set…pretty decent energy from the crowd.
- I’ve preached on sex before but never really thought I got into a groove today, so not sure it was as good as it could have been.
- However, I did have quite a few people comment positively afterward and saw what appeared to be a handful of people that seemed genuinely convicted.
- Best of all, 3 more people today prayed to begin a relationship with Jesus!
- You can listen to the message here.
- The gist though was this.
- God does not hate sex…in fact He invented it.
- Like any invention to best know how to use it, you’ve got to ask the inventor and/or consult the owner’s manual (in this case…God/Bible).
- Many churches preach no, no, no, when in fact we should be teaching wait, wait, wait.
- So if you’re not married wait for sex until you are. Not because God is a big kill joy in the sky, but because He has something far better in mind for you.
- And singles, don’t see how close to the line you can get and still be a Christian, instead see how close to God you can get.
- As for married couples, I believe my exact words were, “Do it early,do it often, and do it in a lot of positions”. 🙂
- In other words enjoy this amazing gift God has given you.
- I talked about a lot of other things but you’ll have to listen to the message.
- Don’t forget that next week I’ll be answering the questions that you’ve been submitting throughout the series.
- You guys have been asking some great questions, including more in depth stuff about sex so we’ll cover as many questions as we can in our time together to see what the bible has to say.
- See you then…have a great week and don’t forget to invite some people to come along with you!
Inside Today’s Experience
- Wow…blown away by today!
- First and most importantly, 9 more people prayed to ask Jesus to forgive them of their sins and be the leader of their lives!
- That’s now 17 people that have crossed the line of faith in just 2 weeks that we’ve been in existence.
- To put that in perspective, the average church in America has 1 conversion every 2 years…God is definitely moving in our midst!
- Most church plants see a decrease in attendance of 50% on week 2 because all the people that were there week 1 to wish you well are not there any longer.
- Today we only had a 30% decrease and most exciting was we only had a handful of well wishers this week which means most who were there are seriously checking us out to see if they want to be a part of what God is doing in and through ExponentialChurch.tv.
- So awesome to see and hear of people walking into the Experience very skeptical and walking out excited to be a part of a church for people who don’t like church.
- Not sure I’ve seen so many tears of excitement and joy as I’ve seen these past two weeks as people are experiencing God in new and fresh ways.
- From the logistical side of things we’re starting to get a routine for set-up but still have a long way to go.
- One thing we haven’t yet been able to do is a full run through with the band and all the tech in their place and running the various elements that make an Experience happen.
- As a result we’re making a lot of errors that we need to correct ASAP.
- However, all things considered, we’re still night and day ahead of where I’ve ever been before after only two weeks, so I just need to be patient and I’m sure we’ll be at the level of excellence that God wants from us sooner rather than later.
- One of my favorite parts of the two Previews and now 2 weeks of being up and running is the entire team meeting we have at 9am. It’s so neat to have everyone together, give some vision and direction, then pray together that God use us to make a difference.
- Today was especially meaningful because we laid hands on Dan and Jan Krull who left as soon as the Experience was over to head to Buffalo to be with Dan’s mom whom has just days to live. Thankfully she knows Jesus and soon her pain will be over. Please pray for the Krull’s as they travel and spend time with family.
- It was great having some new volunteers with us today who just last week came for the first time, but yet felt called already to be a part of helping.
- We started the Experience with Papa Roach’s song, “Kick in the Teeth”. It was meant to be a performance song but Bill accidentally had everyone stand so that was a bit awkward but it did give me a chance to explain why we use secular music as a part of the Experience.
- The band then kicked into a great worship set, capped off by Gayle’s always awesome version of “How He Loves“.
- I then preached about another spiritual Urban Legend, “You Shouldn’t Judge Other People”.
- The beginning was a lot of fun talking about the ridiculous looks that people had in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Good thing we all look normal today! 🙂
- I felt good about the message but if I’m being honest I hadn’t planned on asking people to make a decision for Jesus afterward…that was a total God thing in the moment and feeling like I needed to…glad I did…again 9 more people stepped across the line of faith!
- After seeing over 300 people do that very thing at my last church, you’d think it would get old but it doesn’t! Every single person is someone God loves and heaven celebrated when that which was lost was now found. Congratulations to the 9 today…looking forward to helping you grow now in that new relationship!
- If anybody is interested, let me know and I’ll email you the document we get into the hands of every person who prays to become a follower of Jesus. It’s called, “First Steps” and literally helps them know what’s their next step now that they know Jesus.
- All in all a very good day. Can’t wait to do it all over again next week. In the meantime we’ve got a busy week planned including the band playing at a dinner celebrating not only our plant but the 3 others going on in our region as well.
- Time for a nap and then who knows what this evening holds…hopefully not a whole lot.
- Have a great week…don’t forget to invite someone to hear next week’s Urban Legend…”Everything Happens for a Reason”.