Rich Young Ruler

This week we were in a stand-alone message from Dave Nelson called “No Successful Sacrifices”. This piece is a paraphrase typography project that I made out of Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler.

Enjoy:

Anger

I know this doesn’t come as a surprise, but I’ve been a smidge busy for the last little while. I thought things would slow down a bit after Easter, but they really haven’t seemed to. Here’s to hoping for a slight summer slow down, but I’m pretty confident that’s not in the cards.

Regardless, I’ve not been able to post some of the projects I’ve been working on. So, over the next week or so, I’ll try and catch up and share some of what’s been keeping me busy.

Today I’ll share a bumper piece we did on anger. There are 3 stories from K2 staffers about times when they just got angry. What I love about this piece is that these are familiar faces that you see every week at K2, and that each story is totally a different side of anger. We used this as a bumper to get into our message called “Don’t let Anger Control You”, which was a part of our series “Stuck Like Glue: How We Keep it Together” that we kicked off the week after Easter. The series walked through Ephesians 4.

Enjoy:

My kid

I’ve been busy lately. Really busy. And I won’t lie, I’m ready for a slowdown. This little girl up above? She was a welcome break today. Can’t wait to meet my kid.

Weddings

 

I’ll be honest. I love weddings. I just do. Seems odd for a dude, but weddings are a blast.

You’re with people you generally like or love.
There’s dancing.
Bad dancing.
Good dancing.
There’s music. And food.
At my wedding, there were grown men doing knee slides across the dance floor. That’s my father-in-law in the picture above. From what I’m told, the party really got going after we left.

The more I go to weddings, the more I understand why Jesus has his first miracle at the wedding in Cana. It makes sense right? What an awesome way for Jesus to enter the scene – in a time of amazing celebration. Everytime I’m at a wedding, I always think of this story. He didn’t heal someone, He didn’t bring someone back from the dead. He revealed His glory and continued the celebration of union.

The other day, I came across this wedding recap video. I don’t know the people in it. I know the guy that made it, and that’s about it.

I had a few thoughts while watching it:
- I’m always inspired by great creations. This is a great video.
- There are few moments that well up as much joy as you see in this video. They’re worth it.
- Someday, we will greatly miss the way we used to build churches.
- Good music is always good music.
- People want to dance. They just need a place and an excuse.
- It’s always interesting to watch the father of the bride.
- Someday I’m going to be the father of the bride; I’ve got a daughter on the way. That pretty well wrecked me.

My .02 for the day.

Easter Elements (Part 2)

The Baptism Recap

Generally, we try and recap our baptisms on bigger days where they might carry larger impact. Easter is no exception, so we recapped our January baptisms on Easter Sunday. It was also a great chance to announce and promo our upcoming May baptisms to a larger audience.

Here’s the recap video below, in case you missed it:

Easter Elements (part 1)

This week, now that I’m finally out from under the Easter rush, I’ll be posting some of the artistic elements we rolled at K2 for Easter.

Below is the piece that really got us rolling initially. It’s a spoken word piece that I wrote specifically for this service. It followed the opening tune (which I’ll share more about later this week).

The Details:

Talent: Da’Jon Lang
Location: Salt Lake City Cemetery.
Additional Cam: Virag White (our communications director)

Edit: Final Cut Pro
Color: Magic Bullet Looks
Post/Visual Effects: Trapcode Suite, Magic Bullet

The Video:

8 surefire ways to burn out in ministry

Photo Props: Live Stock Market

8. Keep in mind that the church down the road or across the country has it so much better, and they don’t struggle with anything because they have everything.
I’ve been there. And I know firsthand how helpful it was to ministry burnout to think about how much greener the grass was on the other side. It was easy to think that with all the extra resources, the problems didn’t extrapolate. I mean, obviously they don’t, right? – look at all the stuff they have! Forget for a moment that half the reason they grew and got those resources is because they led and managed well what they already had.

7. Find your identity in what you do at the church
This is really helpful to burnout. It keeps you on the treadmill, gives you that wonderful tunnelvision that ensures your thought process of “What I do in ministry is what God cares about most, and if I fail, take a break, or plateau, then I’ve lost who I am and what I’m valued for.” Here’s a reality check – your church will go on without you, because it’s not your church.

6. Assure yourself that you’re the only one that can do it, and do it well.
Piggy-backing right on that last one, because you’ve built your identity around what you’re doing in ministry, you obviously are the only one that can do it right. So don’t bother training anyone. Don’t spend time getting help. You’re the only one that’s smart enough, competent enough, and really, they could never replace you.

5. Remember that your days off are suggestions.
They really are. Usher in that burnout quick – just run around the clock. And let’s be honest, you are SO much more productive when you’ve gone 36 fourteen hour days straight.

4. Only attend your own church. Always.
Nothing you could learn or be inspired by elsewhere. Besides, what would your congregation think?

3. Keep in mind that you can never be real with anyone – you’re a leader after all!
Leaders are the ones that speak into other’s lives. Don’t let your guard down, even when people call you out on it. Build your walls as high as possible – you’re a strong leader! Lie if you have to, you’re doing great! Someone is trying to help and walk with you through it? Crazy talk. Get back to leading!

2. Only hang out with other church employees, ideally ones that work as hard as you do!
Nothing helps you along this path better than rolling with co-workers or friends that fuel your burnout fire. Be sure to only hang out with people that are as bitter or more than you. Even people that aren’t in ministry, but love to complain about it. They are GREAT for morale.

1. Reserve prayer for staff prayer, time in his word for weekend prep, and quiet time for bed.
You work in ministry for a living. Why would you spend EXTRA time doing churchy stuff?

Father to the Fatherless

Love this story. Love my church. Love that my job is to tell stories like this.

This is a story that we used in yesterday’s services at K2. Enjoy.

Using Foursquare to Engage Your Church Guests

I’ve been working on K2′s social media push now for a little while. While I have a few plates spinning, I took some time last week to look at Foursquare. Here was the state of affairs:

- People had created a couple K2 venues on 4sq.
- We have an average of about 50-60 people checking into those venues in a week on 4sq.

I wanted to see how we could better connect with those people that were using Foursquare, and leverage it to our benefit. Here’s what I did:

Claimed and combined our venues:
Foursquare allows venues to manage themselves. That is, if I were the manager or owner of a location, I can claim it and manage it. I set up a new account in K2′s name, and filled out a form that said, “Hey, we are K2!”. After a confirmation process that included a phone call, we were officially in charge of our venue. Why did that matter – what did it do for us?

It allows me to monitor our checkins, and reach out and connect with those who are checking into our venue. One of the ways I’m doing that is through Foursquare’s specials.

Specials
Foursquare allows businesses to set up “specials”, that can be based on a whole host of different criteria. For instance, one special could be for people that have checked in for the first time. Or the 50th. Doesn’t matter – we pick.

Many businesses use these as incentive to check-in (a free coffee every 5th checkin, for instance). Most foursquare users post their checkin to Facebook and Twitter, thus giving us free advertising. Since we’re a church, I’m not selling hamburgers. So we set up a couple of specials.

The first is for a person that checks in for the first time. It thanks them for being here, gives them directions to our connections teams and also lets them know if they have an immediate need, they can tweet K2 for an instant response. It’s just another way of being hospitable.

Our second special pops up after the third check-in, and simply reiterates the first welcome, and sort of “checks in” to see how everything is going.

Our final special will be a reward from our bookstore for repeated checkins. We haven’t nailed this down, but it’ll either be a free gift or a certain percentage (10%-15% off) discount in the bookstore, after say, the 15th or 20th checkin.

Why?
People were already using foursquare to checkin to K2 on Foursquare. We’d be nuts not to engage with them. Secondly, I want to encourage behavior that virally spreads the word about K2. It’s cheap advertising, and builds great rapport with those who are using these social networks. A third benefit to the “specials” system is that when someone checks in to surrounding businesses and locations (say, the transit station next door, or Best Buy), Foursquare alerts them that K2 has a special near them. So we’re reaching people that are just in the area.

Lastly, I love that by doing this we can connect with existing users. Each week, we can leave a personal comment on each checkin. “thanks for checking in today” or “welcome back!”. It adds a personal touch to a digital existence that most businesses aren’t giving them. That builds trust.

Fight for Philosophies, Not Ideas

Note: This is a repost from Jonathan Malm. When I read it, I thought “Man, I couldn’t have written this better myself.” And so I didn’t try. It was as if the guy read my mind and my M.O.. You can read the original post here, and do yourself a favor – go subscribe to his posts, they’re good.

I’m a scrapper when it comes to meetings. I love fighting for my ideas. But last Monday, as I was arguing emphatically for an idea, I kept getting shut down. It was a somewhat complex, but brilliant idea. But people kept getting hung up on details. I felt like my ideas were losing an intergalactic space fight – getting shot down left and right. What was going wrong here?

I realized I was fighting for my idea instead of the philosophy behind my idea. I was fighting over implementation instead of what I was trying to accomplish. My implementation was getting in the way of what I was trying to accomplish. Let me explain more concretely with what I was fighting for:

We have three Sunday morning services. The middle is super full and the first and third have ample space. Easter’s coming up – the busiest day of the year. We either have to turn people away or come up with a creative idea to accomodate them.

My idea: tickets to the services. Announce to our congregation that we’re offering tickets to the services. We make tons of first and third service tickets and very few middle service tickets. We explain that this is a guarantee that they’ll have a seat if they get a ticket. Of course we wouldn’t be rigid by requiring them to bring their tickets and we’d have tons of room for unexpected guests. But the idea was to help spread out the load between the three services.

People hated the idea. “Tickets don’t match our church’s culture.” “I’ve had bad experience with services that require tickets.” Many reasons why we shouldn’t use tickets. All hope was lost.

Until I realized tickets were just one way to accomplish my philosophy. The idea was to tell people they were guaranteed a seat if they came to the first and third service. Why not just tell them that?

Perhaps it wasn’t a great idea. But it was a great philosophy.

I spent a bunch of time arguing for my idea when I could have explained my philosophy and come to a great idea much sooner.

Don’t be so married to your ideas. But be willing to fight for a good philosophy.