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I thought this was hilarious and wanted to share it with you. Happy Friday.

Missional Fatigue

I read this from Ed Crepes today and thought it applied to us at Cornerstone. What are your thoughts?

When I visit casual contemporary and traditional churches these days I’m meeting what could be called “a new kind of Christian:” believers who used to attend aggressively missional congregations elsewhere in town. Often a thirty-something couple with two or three elementary age children, these transfers sometimes seem motivated to explain to me their presence in more inwardly-focused settings. In the telling of their stories some patterns have emerged...

Stage 1: intense involvement in the start-up or ongoing ministry of a missional congregation (however defined), often as key leaders

Stage 2: weathering the financial emergencies, ministry shortfalls, and discipleship pressures that inevitably accompany this kind of enterprise

Stage 3: realizing that the stress of serving in a climate that one friend of mine called, “a miracle on the verge of a disaster every day” is never going to end

Stage 4: identifying a gracious exit strategy, often explained as the need for better children’s or teen ministry

Stage 5: transitioning to another high-quality church that is more family-focused.

Stage 6: feeling somewhat guilty over abandoning the missional scene to do more conventional church

Music to my ears!

I am so excited about our opportunity to shift the style of the early service to reach out to those who love the classics. In just two Sundays we will be offering the classic service with hymns and will design the whole service around what I feel is a neglected generation in our area. I know that there will be some surprises, and we will have young families who come to the classic service and some "seniors" will attend the contemporary, but this is about us seeing a need for worship without regard for style. Some people love to worship using the hymns from their youth, they know them by heart and the meaning is as deep as their roots. By the third verse of Victory in Jesus they are singing like nobody is listening. Others, love to sing a new song unto the Lord, and when they hear a new song, that expresses an emotion they could not put into words, they sing it loud. We will know that we have hit our mark when both services are full of people singing praises to God at the top of their lungs. Totally different styles, one unchanging message of praise to the God of the universe. It is music to my ears!

This Sunday

I am excited to be back in the saddle this Sunday at Cornerstone. While we were gone I missed a Wednesday Prayer and Bible Study and all of Sunday Morning. We will begin a new message series this week called "Kidz Rule" and my kids are doing a great job of convincing me that I have no right to speak on this subject. (Thank God it is not me and the Bible that we are looking to for wisdom) We have been planning for this series since April and want to look at the Biblical structure for the home. In order to get things back in line many families will need to do a hostile takeover and kick the kids out of the corner office. Be sure to be there this week and if possible, bring some neighbors with you. Tell them we are planning a coup!

When the machines take over the world

We have all seen the sci-fi movies where computers and robots end up taking over the world. I am here to say that if it ever takes place that I will be your hero. Single handedly I am capable of destroying everything electronic. Let me explain. A few months ago, the remote censor stopped working on the TV, Several remotes later, we now have old school remote control, one is 6 and the other is 9 if you know what I mean. The DVR still works so TV is still manageable. About a month ago my hard drive on the computer crashed. And with that my ipod no longer recognizes the new hard drive as the authorized library so I had to wipe it clean and start over. Last week I got caught in the rain and my cell phone decided to stop allowing calls including the number 3 and 6. Andrew dropped his portable DVD player out the van door on the trip, and the A/C and radio don't work in my car. I would be very happy to go to horse and buggy, but I am afraid that I might beat a dead horse or something. So as I try to rewire my life, the manual button to the TV broke and we are relegated to using a pen to activate the internal button which cannot be good. I write this to say that my electronic empire is in shambles and it won't be long until my internet access goes haywi....

Bible Fellowship

We are moving all of our present Bible Fellowship Tables to meet at 9:30 on Sunday mornings. This is partly to improve timing for the Classic Service, as well as a way for us to emphasize Bible Fellowship as the key ministry of our church. We will be working over the next three weeks on Wednesday nights to find ways to emphasize and organize our Small Group ministry. We will begin by removing the bulk of the responsibility from one "table leader" and dispersing the leadership to everyone at the table. This part of our overall team approach and will greatly improve the quality of the Bible Fellowship Tables. Here are the new positions.

1. Learning – This person takes responsibility for leading the discussions each week. They will give greater time to studying the passage and work with the other teachers on building the lesson.
2. Gathering – This person will keep in contact with the members of the table via phone and email, and keep everyone up to date with the events and projects of the group. They will also follow up on absentees.
3. Inviting – This person will scout out newcomers and people who may not be part of a small group. It is their job to invite people to join the table for Bible Fellowship and any other events that they feel would connect people to the group.
4. Enjoying – This person will be in charge of scheduling monthly events for the groups. Such events would include, shared meals, game nights, trips, sports, etc
5. Caring – This person would take charge of the group prayer list, and organize their table to meet the needs of those in their group. This may include, prayer, rides to the Dr., and meals.

It is our goal that each group would not only have one person fulfilling these roles but each one teaching someone else to carry on that function.

Not much blogging lately...

CRASHing back from vacation is a scary thing for me. I usually cannot really vacate because of the heavy load of things that can pile up in a week added to the things already on this week will take several weeks to flatten back out. This time I refused to do a "working" vacation and I am paying the price. It is probably the most packed August we have ever had at Cornerstone and I am excited to see what this fall will be like. This week we are launching a new series called "Kidz Rule" hopefully it will help parents and grandparents as they endeavor to make adults out of their children. We are also putting together backpacks for the back to school outreach. We need lots of people to sign up to provide everything from paper to pens and erasers. As I announced earlier, on September 2 we are changing our service times and formatting one service to focus on the classic style of worship including hymns and many of the service elements that we grew up with. I know this will be a significant thing for our community and that it will help our church better focus its ministry on all of our community. In order to accomplish this we must change all of our signs and we will be doing a 22,000 piece mailer letting everyone in our immediate area know about our new service. Let me just say that we could not do any of this without Gabe. He is not only handling all of the advertising, and the redesign of our website, but is also putting together a new worship format. I thank God for him every day! So with that said, I am going back to work, and so should you. Please pray for us, the first 5 years was just the beginning!

Back from Vacation

Last week we spent time with family in the mountains of NC. My sister and her husband live in the smokies and we had to drive our van literally through a creek to get to their house. We spent the first part of the week doing the mountain thing, I got a totally useless fishing license, because the trout were not biting. Andrew and I slept in a tent listening to coyotes howl off in the woods. We shot guns, took hikes, picked blackberries (ad a few ticks) and saw some beautiful terrain. On Friday we headed to TN the scenic way, through several national forests, and arrived in Cleavland TN for my cousin Christy's wedding. She was a beautiful bride, and I am proud of her and her new husband. On Saturday we had an 80th birthday party for my grandmother with over 75 of her offspring in attendance. It was neat to catch up with family and see all the influence that a godly homemaker can wield. Here is a picture of her with her grand and great grand kids. We went to church in Atlanta at Northpoint Community Church where Andy Stanley is the pastor. The service was awesome, but the parking was terrible. It literally took 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot and back on the road. It is amazing how such a great church can be hamstrung by parking problems. I expected to learn a lot of different lessons from my visit to Northpoint, but I guess parking was what God wanted me to take away. We as a church must not let little foxes spoil the vine. Every detail matters & leaving impressions are lasting impressions. I would be remiss if I did not thank Pastor Gabe, Sue, and all the volunteers for pulling off a great Sunday in my absence. In many ways I wished we were here.

Drunk

The Smoking Gun has a great wacky Friday Florida story, where Amanda Lynn Bailey, a 41 year old Florida woman, was arrested early yesterday on a drunk driving charge, her second DUI bust in the past three months.

Classic

Five years ago we began Cornerstone with the young family in mind. We designed our worship services around young Disney families. Since then we have been continually burdened to reach out to other segments of our community. Last Spring, our staff sat down and identified 10 different subcultures within our community. That being said we also recognized that there were no new churches being planted to minister to them. In addition, the Orlando Sentinel has slated our area to boom to over 250,000 people by 2020. With fewer that a dozen churches in Four Corners it is a bit overwhelming. The gospel is to go to to every creature, and by that we recognize it to means it is to go to every culture. With the lack of churches being started, we felt God lead Cornerstone to begin offering different worship experienced specifically designed for each culture. Yesterday we announced that beginning on September 2 Cornerstone will begin offering a classic style worship service. It will begin at 8:15 and will have all of our favorite hymns, as well as other aspects of the church services that many miss in today's contemporary service. Our 10:45 service will still be a contemporary blend with Bible Fellowship at 9:30. In the future it is our goal to offer services specific to other cultures including a service designed for college and singles, a service designed for Spanish, and services for black Americans and Caribbeans.