Brandy Autopsy has an amazing series of posts about Starbucks tribal Knowledge, but this one really got me thinking.  They posted the organizational chart that you see posted here on the left.  In the business world recognizing your customer is very easy.  But in church world, who’s the "customer"?  Many will say, "Those that attend your church!"  I disagree.  The "Employee" box is everyone that calls your church home (Pastors, staff, volunteers) and our role is to reach those that don’t yet know Christ (our "customer").  The moment church leaders begin to see our primary "Customer" as church members we … Read More

My wife Carey has a great post on her blog about being on staff at a church.  This is a must read for everyone who works at a church or aspires to.  Read it here.

Well, tomorrow Carey and I are off to Catalyst for 3 days of soaking in God’s Word and getting alone with God for a few days.  We totally need this.  We just got done with a Couples’ Retreat that was anything but a retreat for us.  We were more tired when we left than when we got there!  But I’m planning on posting some notes about the conference, now that I got my Treo back.  I missed it so much.  I had forgotten how happy we were together (That was before I dropped it on the floor and cracked the … Read More

Right now I’m in Naples, FL as we are hosting out second annual couples’ retreat.  We are suffering for Jesus at the Ritz Carlton golf resort.  The place is amazing.  Our featured speaker is Mark Balmer, who is the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel of Melbourne, a church that has grown to over 6,000 since its’ inception in 1992.  This has been a crazy amount of work for our staff but we are seeing great fruit in all the couples that are attending.  Carey and I came up a day early and got to lay out by the pool and … Read More

This weekend Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale is celebrating 20 years of ministry here in South Florida.  I can’t even begin to talk about how much this church and Bob Coy as a person has blessed me.  I showed up at Calvary Chapel having been a Christian for 2 weeks and they taught me how to walk with God.  For that, I am forever grateful.  They were crazy enough to hire me to run their Bible College and I spent 4 wonderful years on staff there before God called us to start Calvary Fellowship.  Bob is my Pastor, my hero and … Read More

As of late, the word that has been rattling in my brain is the word “Simplify!” I’m realizing at church that we can’t do everything in the world and do it well, but if we simplify we can do the most important things well. Too many times, especially when we are starting our churches, we want to offer everything and be just like the big church down the road. Well, I decided enough as enough. We did the unthinkable and started cutting out things that we felt we couldn’t do with excellence. I have to tell you, it felt great! … Read More

It’s September, but we’re already staring to think about the Christmas season. We’re planning our Christmas series, but if you haven’t noticed December 25th is on a Sunday. So I’d like some input from all of you: What is your church planning to do? Have church. Don’t have church. Christmas eve, but no Christmas day. Just to throw something else into the mix, what are your doing on New Year’s Day (Which is the next Sunday)? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Every year we have an appreciation dinner for everyone that serves in the church in some capacity.  This year we decided to do something different.  We wanted to appreciate them with the whole church there.  So we did our appreciation at our annual church picnic.  So we rolled out a red carpet and cheered for all of our volunteers.  We had 115 people that we were recognizing for their faithful service.  That was awesome!  We gave everyone a certificate of appreciation and a Starbuck’s style coffee mug with our church logo on it (The kind they sell for like $25).  … Read More

Well, we finally celebrated 5 years as a church on Sunday (I feel like that’s all I’ve been talking about lately), and it was great.  Going to 2 services went great as our team just did an amazing job making it happen.  Then we had our annual church picnic afterwards and I was so shocked by the hundreds of people that were there. I was with our youth playing a game of kickball, and as I was in centerfield I took a look around.  There were so many people there that I started to get overwhelmed by all that God … Read More

We kicked off a brand new series called "Life", in which we are looking Solomon’s life as told in Ecclesiastes.  It went great. The message was enetitled, "That’s Life."  The main point we are working from is that "God wants to add life to your years".  Solomon wasted so many years of his life only to realize this truth when he was close to the end of the journey.  We designed the whole theatre to look like "the game of life" and it looked amazing.  Carey put together an amazing video that set up the message perfectly and our worship … Read More