I just wanted to post something quickly to say that our time in Crown Point went really well on Sunday.

Jen, the kids, and I all went up there Sunday morning and had a good time at the service. Afterward, Pastor Tony and his wife treated us to lunch at Portillo’s. It was a great meal and a great conversation too.

We had a great service this morning. It was our second monthly service and here is a brief rundown of how it all went:

Marketing

We really ramped up our marketing efforts this time. Here’s what we did:

• We sent out our “New Movers” letters this week. (We send a letter welcoming them to their new home and giving them a coupon to a local bookstore and one for a free Chick-fil-A sandwich.)
• We sent out a postcard to everyone on our mailing list inviting them to come to our service.
• We put an ad in the newspaper.
• I sent out an email to everyone on our email list.
• I made a bunch of phone calls.

Monthly Service #2 Postcard | Newspaper Ad

Despite all these things, it seemed that we were fighting an uphill battle because this week saw the worst snowstorm Indiana has had in years. In addition to a storm that closed schools for the whole week and cold weather that caused school delays the whole previous week, we had an extra 5 inches of snow fall Friday night and all day Saturday.

Morning Preparation

Jen and I put in a lot of work last night and this morning before anyone came over to load up vehicles, but I won’t report on all that. People arrived at our house at about 8:50 this morning. As a result, we didn’t get everything loaded up until about 9:15. I didn’t think that would be a very big problem, though because we weren’t planning to start our service until 10:30. As it turned out, though, it put us way behind.

A few things happened this morning that increased our time by a lot.

1. Our directional signs had to be put together at the school. Last month, we put our signs together at our house at 8:15am. This month, we didn’t have the super early gathering at our house, so the signs were put together at the school.
2. The banner outside fell down last night, so I had to repair it.
3. We were couldn’t find one extension cord and a couple mic cables.

As a result, we never actually got to have a full sound check, and the service started 5 minutes late.

Attendance

Our attendance reflected the difficult circumstances of snow and cold. We had a number of new individuals make it, though, so that was encouraging, and every one of them told me how much they liked the service.

• Kids - 12
• Kids Helpers - 3
• Congregation - 15
• Total Attendance - 30

Here are a couple comments people put on the comment cards:

I know God is working in my life right now. But sometimes it’s hard! Coming here today made me feel good today! Thank you.

The service is awesome! I will bring more people next month! … The message was GREAT! I really like the way you put things so simply.

Message / Sermon

My message todaywas entitled “God Always Does What’s Right” and it was actually a rehash of a message I’ve preached before. You can hear the original one at this link: God Always Does What’s Right

In fact, I think I did a better job with that one than I did today, and that disappointed me a little. Last week, I was so concerned with the logistics of the church service that I hadn’t been able to put the time into my message that I would have wanted, and thinking that I was doing one I had already done gave me a false sense of security. Nonetheless, the comments from people after the service really told me that they were listening more to God than to me, and that was quite encouraging.

Here is today’s version: 030-02 — God Always Does What’s Right .

For Next Time

As I think about our next scheduled service (March 18), I’m thinking honestly that a few things will need to come together in order for us to go ahead with the launch on March 25.

• We need more strongly committed team players. While we already have an excellent group of people that have come together to make all this happen, we also have some odd inconsistencies. For example, a week and a half ago, we got in touch with a Purdue student who was really interested in joining us. He was fired up and excited and made a commitment to run our children’s ministry on a volunteer basis for a while, but after he left our house after our last planning meeting, Jen sent him an email asking for his references, and he hasn’t answered his phone, or returned any messages since then.
• We need a solid system of pre-service set-up. Our haphazardness today resulted in a lot of unnecessary stress before the service started and it caused us to start late.
• We need to reach a “critical mass” of at least 60 on the 18th. The first major attendance barrier is 50 and I don’t want to waste time trying to beat that one. We need our Grand Opening Sunday to surpass 100 (I want it to surpass 200), but I really doubt our ability to do that if we can’t reach 60 at our next monthly (preview) service. Don’t get me wrong, 30 is a good number for today, but we need many more than that to really launch a church that will be able to impact our community.

All these things are quite doable, and this is what I plan to do about them:

• Talk to my coach and get his feedback.
• Make phone calls to all the people on our local contact list to see where they are in their interest level.
• Spend more money on some direct marketing.
• Host an info dinner in early March at a local restaurant / banquet hall to raise funds and commitments.

Last Friday, we experienced a great success in ministry. We served people free mugs of hot chocolate and coffee in front of Wal-Mart. It was a great experience.

It came to me on Black Friday

The whole idea came to me last year on the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday” as it has been called) while I was standing in line at a Best Buy store in the bitter cold of November in Chicago. I don’t even remember what was on sale that I thought was so important that I should wake up at 3:30 am and stand in line from 4 am until 5 am. I don’t remember what I was waiting for, but I remember how cold it was.

As I was standing there, I saw some people holding cups of coffee or hot chocolate, and I saw some ambitious types passing out flyers to the people standing in line, and I got the idea for a servant evangelism campaign. Servant evangelism, by the way, refers to a ministry where believers simply serve other people because the good news really is good news. It is nothing like traditional types of evangelism. It’s sharing the good news by doing something good for someone.

My idea was to go to the stores on Black Friday next year and give people a cup of hot chocolate with a little note saying that it was a free gift from our church. I thought about it because I was cold, and I really wish someone else had been walking down that row offering people free hot drinks!

Reality Is Sweeter than Dreams

This year, since I’m in the middle of a church planting venture and my level of freedom to take big risks has been expanded quite a bit, I determined that I wanted to put my plan into action. I shared the idea with our launch team, and even though we were all concerned about the possible expense of it all, the idea shifted from a me idea to an us idea.

The final idea was to purchase travel mugs with our name on them so that we were giving people something of value they could keep with them as they shopped rather than something they would look to dispose of quickly. We decided to set up a station in front of the newly opened Wal-Mart on Lafayette’s southside and to begin not at the “Black Friday” stampede time, but to go at 9 am when the shoppers would be less obsessed and might actually be able to stop and talk with us for a few minutes. We also decided to give away a $25 gift card to Wal-Mart so that we could entice people to fill out a registration card. Finally, we decided to have both hot chocolate and coffee available for people.

From that point on God worked all the pieces out perfectly:

• The older Wal-Mart in town rejected our proposal, but Kris at the prime target new Wal-Mart told us that it was the coolest idea she had ever heard and thought it would be a great blessing to their customers that day.
• Angie, the owner of the nearby coffee shop that donated coffee to our information meeting, agreed to also provide coffee for our giveaway. As we later discovered, she gave us her best coffee that day–coffee which retails for over $27 per pound!
• DiscountMugs.com ended up providing the best price for our mugs. We got them for under $3 each including a rush order, printing on both sides, and shipping! In fact, the mugs arrived two days early! About 5% of the mugs were damaged, missing or unusable, but we are still waiting to hear from the company if they will do anything about it. Nonetheless, the mugs we received looked great!
• Jen and Katie (yes that Katie) washed nearly 550 mugs by hand to make sure that they were clean before we gave them to people filled with hot chocolate.
• overnightprints.com printed 1000 beautiful postcards for us at an awesome price so we could have some informational piece to hand out. Those came early too.
• Laura and Kyle joined Jen and me at Wal-Mart while Jen’s mom came down to watch the kids.
• Jen and her mom boiled maybe 30-40 gallons of water throughout the day, and both Jen and Laura took turns shuttling coffee and carafes back and forth to the Euro Cafe across the street.

At the end of the day

We arrived at Wal-Mart just before 9 am, and were passing out mugs of hot chocolate and coffee within minutes. By 5 pm, we had handed out over 500 southside church travel mugs, received 195 registrations for the gift card contest, and took $0 in donations despite a number of people who really wanted to give us money! We also got to meet a number of people who were really astounded that we were doing what we were doing, and a few of those people are currently looking for a church.

All in all, it was an incredible day. God kept us safe, gave us favor with Wal-Mart and Euro Cafe II, led people to our table, and even made sure we had all the mugs, postcards, hot chocolate mix and everything else that we needed to have a great day.

Oh, one more thing. I know I already mentioned it, but it really should be mentioned again. Jen washed 550 mugs, and boiled nearly 40 gallons of water in addition to shopping for the best hot chocolate mix, getting the tablecloths, getting huge insulated containers, and much more. Send her a note of appreciation if you can.

I know what you’re thinking. I wasn’t too interested in this link when I first saw it, but to tell you the truth, the plate design simply looks good. I’d seriously consider putting these on my car. If you are living in Indiana, go ahead and vote for your favorite.

http://www.main1media.com/INGODPLATE/INGODPLATE.htm

Tonight we had a dream team gathering over at our place and though we had a much lower attendance than at other meetings, we still had a good time. Here’s the summary:

Singing

We sang Beautiful One and then You Are My All in All

Lesson

Continuing our series on the early chapters of Acts, I discussed a few points from Acts 1:7-9:

• Experience makes a witness.
• Jesus told the disciples that they would be his witnesses.
• But weren’t they already his witnesses? They had personally experienced Jesus’ life, his teaching, his death, and his resurrection. However, Jesus said they weren’t ready to be his witnesses. They wouldn’t be so until they had received the power of the Holy Spirit.
• They might have had a head awareness of Jesus, but they wouldn’t know the power behind Jesus until they had received the Holy Spirit.

We can’t really be his witnesses without a personal awareness of His power through the Holy Spirit.

Planning — Camp

We have been planning a camping trip, but it turns out that our originally chosen date isn’t working out for people, so we have to push it back to the beginning of August.

Planning — Informational Meeting

The major upcoming event for Southside Church is our informational meeting.

• We need to settle on a firm date in the last two weeks of August or the first week of September
• One of our main goals for the evening is to Knock People’s Socks Off with quality throughout everything we do.

We need to get point people for each of these areas:

• Promotion (flyers, invitations, postcards, press releases)
• Location & Setup (McCutcheon, Banquet room, Ivy Tech) — Laura offered to point this.
• Technology (projection, sound system, computer)
• Music
• Hospitality — Pamela offered to point this.
• Children’s program
• Signs & Handouts

Before we can make any progress on these areas, I need to get a date firmed up. To do that, I’m waiting on three things:

• When Rich and Gary could be here.
• When Doug and/or someone else could be our band.
• When we could get a good location.

All in all, it was a good meeting especially because at the end of the planning time, we got the chance to share on a more personal level how we are feeling about our progress as a church. It was a good time for us.

Update from Last Week

• New Contacts Made (Liz, Heath, Ryan, Andrea) — 4
• Face to Face Meetings
• Events
  • Tuesday Study with one family
  • Wednesday Bible 101 launch
  • Thurs. hosted open mic night at coffeehouse
  • Fri watched kids for friends
  • Sat. hosted BBQ for soccer team
  • Sun. hosted Vision gathering (meal, communion, and discussed Acts 2:42ff).

Today’s work

• Met with Ron about office space.
  • We can lease 1200 square feet next to Bar Barry Liquors for $12 / sq ft per year with a 5 year lease (and the rights to sublet).
  • We can lease however much we want for about $11 etc. in the Sycamore Village.
  • We can purchase an end unit in the Sycamore Village of whatever size we want for $135 / sq ft (includes a $41 build-out credit, so we could offer $90 or so and do our own build-out). This end unit would provide a place to have street-visible signage.
• Meet with Pam to conclude Christianity 101 session 4
• Update family finances
• Write checks
• Called Doug to set up meeting sometime (waiting for call back)

What I did today:

• Met with Tom for lunch and talked through the Bible 101 lesson 1 as well as a ton of other stuff. The dude just won’t let me pay for meals!
• Mowed the Lawn!
• Did the MC thing for the coffeehouse and played a couple tunes myself (Still Know How to Groove by Everybodyduck, and This World by Caedmon’s Call).
• Met a new person who is interested in learning more about us.
• Met Popple a band whom, if they weren’t Catholic and deeply involved in youth ministry already, I would try to recruit to create/run our youth program. Cool guys.

Jen and I just got back on Monday from our conference up in Green Lake.

Yesterday was spent catching up with email, performing security upgrades to church websites, making some phone call reminders of Bible 101, and meeting two fellows who came to set up our Air Conditioner (it was hot!).

Today:

• Called people all day long reminding them about our Bible 101 class tonight.
• Ran Bible 101 tonight
  • Bonnie (Taylor & Michaela), Kyle, Ashley, Greg (to observe me teaching), Jen & me.

My day:

Connecting

• Meet with Kerry Bowman, lead/founding pastor of Eagle Church in Zionsville, just north of Indianapolis.
  • Kerry is going through a process right now of trying to recover his “strategic” focus in the church and beyond the church walls considering that he has been so wrapped up in the work of that particular church for a long time.
  • He said that they wouldn’t be able to offer us any financial assistance, but he did recommend to me that we stay in touch.
  • He will also put me in touch with the CMA director of church planting because he is a great guy that I could learn a lot from.
  • He asked me some pretty big questions about how I was staying strong. It was a good time.
• Call local churches including Mark Dutton over at Faith to set up more vision-casting meetings.
  • I finally got an email out to Steve Viars, but I still haven’t talked with Mark Dutton.
• Call local contacts to invite them to a new Bible Study.
• Contact potential office locations.
  • I called three potential office locations on 350S.
  • the Shook agency (742-5096) manages a couple storefronts behind subway and behind the boiler express gas station. They have 1400-10000 square feet and go for about 13 per square foot per year including the common fee.
  • bar barry (412-2400) owns three store fronts that can be configured separately or together for 1200-5400 sq. ft. – 14.50 per square foot per year after common fee.
  • Regal place (george 447-6270) has two storefronts next to a cingular store. Each is 1620 square feet. The one on the corner is $14 per, and the one in the middle is $12 per. Common fees are $2, but should be significantly less.
  • Valley Lakes center / 900 sf @ $7.00 per + $2 common
• Write SOUTHSIDE newsletter.
• Write Prayer Letter & bookmark.

Limcast

• Boil down the limcast audio of my interview with Marque Azrael.
• Time-lapse the chess game where he beat me.
• Set up meetings with other local artists — LeeAnna Atwell, lafayettemusicleague.com

Thoughts:

• I’d like to develop an overall theme/philosophy for the a41 website (a41.us) to be the “connecting point” for all things community-oriented in our church.
  • Bible Studies, and online/emailed devotionals.
  • Blogs (work like myspace? link to myspace?)
  • Downloadable small group materials (lessons, video, audio, songsheets)
  • Forum (with a special consideration for small group leaders)
  • Events Calendar (Every group gets an iCal compliant calendar, and the frontend allows people to subscribe to different ones.)