Zilch

I recently finished Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business written by Nancy Lublin who directs a hugely successful non-profit and now offers advice to business leaders. A really good read with one big takeaway from early on in the book dealing with branding. She makes the point by writing “the save-the-world sector is crowded and competitive. Organizations must ask themselves, ‘how is our breast cancer group different from the dozen other breast cancer groups?’. The trick is to be able to use one or more of the following terms to describe your organization: first, only, faster, better, cheaper. I call these ‘the five’. So long as you can pin yourself to one of these words, you’ve found a niche (38).

It is an interesting way of thinking about things. I know some church leaders who bemoan the idea of anything from the business world or that smells of marketing to influence the church, and yet Lublin’s point is a good one. And while I'm not saying that churches rush to figure out which of the five categories they fit into, it's ok for churches to figure out what kind of church they are, and perhaps more importantly, which kind of church they aren't. Does that mean that things can't change? Certainly not, but being upfront with who you are saves some potential headaches (and heartaches) down the road.

Random Thoughts

Nothing spectacular, just some random thoughts:

• Thankful that Hardees is back in Sioux Falls, and thankful that they are a bit out of the way for me otherwise I'd be getting cinnamon and raisin biscuit every morning!
• I've been to Menard's on Friday night and Saturday night the last 4 weekends. For real. Maybe I should have signed up for the Big card.
• You know you're a geek (or frugal, or both!) when the price of rock excites you. I got a ton (a literal, 2,000 pound ton) of rock from here for $28. For real. Sure beats the $3.50 a bag. And the crazy thing is I ran out- needed another 1/2 a ton.
• Thanks to bros Mike and Aaron for helping paint this last weekend. Couldn't have gotten that much done without them.
• We had a funeral at Hillcrest Monday. Anne Johnson was a special lady who loved the Lord and others. As I was setting up for the funeral on Sunday, my son asked me if we were eating lunch at church (not an unusual question for a pastor's family). I said no, it's for tomorrow's funeral. My son said, 'oh, who's dying tomorrow?'. Literal children.
• Your kids will get a ton of candy if they attend this event at CTU. Hillcrest and Powerhouse are also partnering with Wesley UMC on a trunk or treat event this Saturday from 12-2. Kids will get plenty of candy here as well. And yesterday at Sam's I picked up a couple boxes of candy bars- yes, we'll be that house this Sunday so if you have kiddos, stop by early, cause once the candy is gone, it's gone!
• R and W had a skating party at Carousel Skate for school this past Monday. A good time, got to wear costumes, see friends, etc. But, and I know I'm getting older and that our kids aren't the median for pop culture, but does a kindergartner need to roller skate to Katy Perry singing about california girls and teenage dreams?

Clifford the Big Red Dog and Hillcrest

The Powerhouse Tutoring Center received another grant! Our director Jessi submitted a proposal for Scholastic Book's "Be Big in Your Community" contest, apparently sponsored by Clifford himself! Check out the link here to see Jessi's proposal (scroll to #16). The grant will be used to cover the Achieve tutorial that Jessi uses with the students each day to boost their reading aptitude.

Halloween links

Halloweeen isn't a popular thing in Christian circles. Most probably either prefer not observing it altogether or hosting an alternative event- harvest party, etc. I get that Halloween doesn't have the best of histories. I do. But I don't think that's enough of a reason to roll over and pretend the day doesn't exist.

Here's a blog on 8 reasons this pastor enjoys Halloween- couldn't agree more.

And if you're going to hand out candy, make sure to avoid these candy mistakes.

Mission of the Month

Each month, Hillcrest selects a different mission focus for the month. Most of the time, these events tie in with groups or places that we already partner with. This month, however, one of our events comes to us from Megan, a high school student at Washington High School. Megan is the president of the Drama Club at Washington, and each October her club goes trick or treating for non-perishable food items for the food bank- a great idea! This year, Megan wanted to involve Hillcrest, her church, since she knows of Hillcrest's care for the community as well. When Megan came to us with the idea, we were more thrilled and made it part of our October focus. Megan shared in services last Sunday about the idea, and it is so cool to see a high school student combining so many different arenas of her life- school, the drama club, church- to raise food for a good cause.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

When I was just starting out in ministry, I used to think church meetings were the worst possible kind of meeting, and I generally placed them into three categories:

1. The 'why did we meet?' meeting- occasionally, we'd have a meeting simply because it was on the schedule or calendar and that it's what we did on a certain day of the month. These types of meetings, however, were few and far between.


2. The 'marathon' meeting- these meetings would drag on for hours, sometimes because there was that much to talk about and other times because there was that much certain people wanted to talk about. My first years at Hillcrest I can remember council meetings going until 1 or 2 in the morning (seriously!) and church business meetings going until 10 PM (and we started at 6!).


3. The 'all in' meeting- again, these were rare, but occasionally there were 'all in' meetings where you knew big stakes things were going down. A group didn't like a program change, someone or some group didn't like the staff, someone or some group didn't like the church's direction, etc. These meetings were often loud, intense, and and filled with both shouts and tears.

For years, church meetings were my only frame of reference for how 'real world' meetings went. And bouncing back and forth between marathon meetings and all in meetings, I came to believe that church meetings were the worst, especially since the folks attending them follow Jesus.

However, sveral years down the road and much more experience with meetings outside of church, I think church meetings get a bad name. Yes, there is still no place for screaming or shouting or tearing people down, but at least there's some emotion from time to time, some sense that people care about what is happening. I've been to several different types of meetings now, most of them centered on stuff that my kids are in: meetings for coaches, meetings for schools, meetings for clubs, meetings for fundraisers, etc and I've really come to believe that meetings, regardless of whether it's for a church, a school, or a club, run better with a few simple tips:

• have a simple agenda- let me know where the meeting is going, and if possible, let me know ahead of time


• cover the important stuff first- if a meeting is going to last an hour or so, doesn't it make sense to cover the important stuff right away, when everyone is at full attention?


• less reading information and more Q and A- one of the mistakes I see with informative meetings is that we give you a bunch of information, read it to you, and then ask for questions. This makes meetings go longer than they need to and insults people's intelligence. Why not provide the information ahead of time, allow people to read it, and use the meeting time to answer questions?


• end meetings with action points- meeting minutes are great, but if they don't end with a 'what am I to do now' piece, the meeting isn't as effective as it could be. Even at my kid's scout meeting last night, we ended with a take home piece, something we needed to do to be ready for the next week.

As someone who occasionally runs meetings from time to time, this stuff is just as pertinent to me as well.

Planning Retreat

Our pastoral staff was out of the office for most of this week planing sermon series and messages for the upcoming year. We like to be planned about a year out (when we left Wednesday we had made it through September 2011) and Pastor Doug is gracious enough to allow the other pastors to participate in this exercise. Some takeaways from the retreat:

• While I'm biased, we've got some great series coming up!
• If we can pull off our May 2011 series, it will be awesome! And I mean it!
• Broom Tree was an excellent location. We stayed in the cabin with a full kitchen and it was great. The howling coytoes at night were not so great, and when I went for a morning run on Wednesday, I couldn't tell if the animal that jumped out behind the cabin and proceeded to follow me was a dog or a coyote. Needless to say, I cut the run short!
• Monday night we went to Yankton to watch the game (no news here that Favre can still hurt a team as much as he helps it) and found a great little pizza joint.
• Tuesday night we watched a couple episodes of Money Hungry, a reality show that has a Hillcrester on it. Melissa, the Hillcrester, does great, but the Phillip character is over the top!

Powerhouse Pic

A sweet pic of Jessi and the Powerhouse students!

Backpack Update

As of Sunday, Hillcrest had sponsored 76 packbacks! It's one more than our goal and over $10,000 in donated funds!

Where's the beef?

To summarize Dave Workman in his book The Outward Focused Life:

Sometimes Christians wonder where the meaty teaching is- either from the pulpit, their small group, or even children's/student ministries. They claim that they wish the pastor/leader/teacher would go deeper, because apparently what's being taught is elementary and they are so past that. Workman responds this way: "Tell me who you think was the deepest teacher who ever existed. If anyone throuhgout history was going to do a Bible Study, who would be the best teacher?"

Is there not a Christian who wouldn't say "Jesus"?

Workman continues: what is the largest collected sermon we have by Jesus? Ther Sermon on the Mount- Matthew 5-7. You read that and tell me what's deep there. Jesus isn't doing some exegetical teaching of the tabernacle or the mandated feasts that all the male Jews had to attend. He's saying things like "here's how you love one another; here's how you love God. Don't do this with God. Don't do this with each other; do that instead.

His rant continues, but makes a good argument. Can we move to deep when so many of us, me included, haven't mastered the shallow?