A couple of my good friends turned me onto this website called The Church You Know. This is so amazing. Hilarious videos. Check it out here.

One of the things that I’ve had to learn the hard way is to not live week to week when it comes to the life of our church. This will drive you insane. If your attendance fluctuates (and everyone’s does), then you will go from feeling like a success to failure in the course of 7 days. There are ways to monitor your progress, but one week to the next is usually not the best one. Here’s a couple of questions I ask: – Where were we last year at this time? This will give you a bigger picture into … Read More

Over on the Momentum Blog, I posted something about the importance of good signage and the type of signage you need, especially if you meet in a theatre. Mark followed that up with some pictures of one of the medium sized signs we produced recently. Link. Check it out! By the way, I highly recommend that you subscribe to the Momentum blog. We’re going to have tons of great resources over there that I probably won’t mention all the time here. Enjoy!

We had a journalism student from FIU visit our church last night (By the way, Sunday night is completely rockin’) and shoot some video for her project. Her cousin attends our church and she decided to do her project on Calvary Fellowship and the amount of young people we have attending. She interviewed a bunch of people from the church and shot some of the worship and message. But my favorite quote of the night was when she said, “This feels like a party!” A lot of churches I’ve been to feel like a funeral, this was a great compliment!

If you’re a Pastor in South Florida, there’s a great event coming to West Palm Beach on Friday, October 13 (Spooky). Nelson Searcy, Lead Pastor of The Journey in New York City and a Keynote speaker for our Momentum Conference in March is going to be doing a free workshop for churches to break growth barriers. I’ve heard some of Nelson’s stuff on this subject and it’s great! Really practical and insightful. You can RSVP on his site by clicking here. See you there… (Hopefully, the Yankees will be out of the post-season by then)

I was walking this morning and listening to Hillsong united on my ipod, when I came to a realization: we have the best worship leader in America! I was standing in the back of the auditorium on Sunday night (which is going great by the way – I’m convinced I prefer Sunday night to Sunday morning) and I thought, “We have the best worship leader in America!” Mark has the ability to take the songs he doesn’t write and make them better than the original. Most people can’t do that. A lot of worship leaders end up sounding like this … Read More

Sunday was a total whirlwind. I didn’t expect our morning service to be completely slammed since we were starting our Sunday night service, but it was packed. Then, since the morning service was full, we didn’t expect anyone to show up to our 1st evening service (which they did). Yes, my lack of faith even surprises me at times 🙂 I don’t have the exact count yet as to how many people were there. I’ll get that Wednesday morning. But I do know it was our largest non-Easter attendance ever! But what I found most interesting was the completely different … Read More

My wife had a photo album open in our home office that had some pictures from our 1st service. Those pictures were taken 6 years ago this Sunday. I was thinking about how much I wish I could travel back in time and talk to that 26 year old kid who thought he knew everything. Here’s a few things that I would tell him if I had the chance: #1 – Think about the long haul – I absolutely killed myself working during the 1st 3 years. In year 4, I started taking a second day off (like the rest … Read More

This could only work in Miami…

We spent some time talking about the “Hedgehog Principle” at our staff meeting today. If you don’t what that is, go buy Good to Great right now. Anyway, two of the questions are, “What are you most passionate about?” and “What can you be the best at?” We talked about what other churches are known for. We named them, discussed them, and found a phrase that described them. Then we talked about our church and what we are known for and why. Here’s what we discovered: the passion of the lead Pastor determines the focus of the church. As the … Read More