Sunday Update

Yesterday was a draining day at The Village Chapel. I spoke on 1 John 2:18-28 and the presence of antichrists in the church today. For some reason when I speak on tough passages like these it has me stressed before and drained after. When I was done I felt like I got hit by a ton of bricks. That said God is doing such a fresh new work at the church. Besides the sea of new people it exciting to see families that have been spotty in attendance become consistent. I credit it to the fact that we are doing sermon based small groups and that our small group leaders are doing such a great job. Right now we have over half of our church in small groups.

Here are a few other thoughts on yesterday:

• We filled a trailer with clothes donations. Our ministry center is busting with bags and boxes of the stuff and there has been a steady stream of people dropping off more today.
• We had two new interns start yesterday and they already made an impact. They have made a 12 month commitment to learn the ropes of ministry. I bet they didn’t realize the ropes come in the form of a ropes course!
• Tom and his worship team knocked it out of the park! Man it was awesome.
• Christin had a packed house for kids church
• We launched Biggest Loser at the church and several people signed up including myself (gotta get this post done so I can go on a lunch time bike ride)
• With it being Super Bowl Sunday you never know what is going to happen but everything went well
• Getting to that point where I can only have contact with a few people after each service. That is a bummer because there are so many people I want to talk to
• When the youth are with us in the service they take up the whole west side of the chapel
• I think I made some people uncomfortable when I dissected “The Shack” and the “DaVinci Code”
• Taking off to Monterey Bay this week to finish up my consulting with Bill Holdridge. It will be a nice break
• Watched the Super Bowl with several families yesterday at the Austin’s. Great people and good food. I thought the game was okay.

The great global warming collapse

The great global warming collapse – The Globe and Mail

Not sure if you follow this stuff or not but with all the rain and snow this week in the USA I thought you might want to read something on it. It is a great read because the people who are writing it still believe in Warming but realize the movement has ended.

At What Cost?

I’ve been chewing on this thought for over a month now. Back in December Urban Myer was taken to the hospital several times with heart issues. The week before the Sugar Bowl it was announced that he was going to take a leave of absence because of health issues and to be with his family. No less than 24 hours later the story started to change and within a couple of days of the announcement it all started to change. First he was going to be back for the start of Fall football, then he was going to just miss spring football, finally he was going to stay on until the National signing day which was on Wednesday February 3rd. Now we have the quote from him saying that “I tried it for a day and a half and it didn’t work.”
While I am all for excellence and being the best I am having a hard time with this. The reason being is that the real message here is that “I am not going to sacrifice success for anything.” Hurah! Here is a man in his mid-forties who is having the health issues of someone 15 years his senior and he is refusing to listen to what his body is telling him. I keep thinking to myself that this is going to end up as a sad story of someone who sacrificed everything for success.
When do we start asking “At what cost?” When do we realize that all things trappings of success really don’t amount to much? What does it matter if we gain the whole world but lose our soul? These lessons apply to anything that we do where it skews our life so much we lose total perspective. Hopefully Urban Myer has some good counselors around him. If not the cost will be catostrophic.

The Neediest People on the Central Coast

Who are the hungry?

The Santa Maria Times has a great article on the front page of the Wednesday February 3rd paper. It outlines who gets a majority of the food donations from the Food Bank. Over 62% of the people who receive food are under the poverty line. 49% are classified as “Working Poor”, which means that one or more persons work in the house but they don’t have enough to make ends meet. This means they need to decide to pay the rent of put food on the table.
This is why we decided to minister to families like this in 2010. We have adopted over 30 families so far by committing to buy groceries for them once a week. It has opened a flood gate of opportunities for us to minister and pray for them. Many are unbelievers and are so open to the Gospel and our committed group of volunteers are bold in sharing it.
We are asking God to pour out on our church the resources to minister to more and more families as the year goes on.

VillageChapel.com

Recently we purchased http://villagechapel.com. It had been for sale for years but the owners we unwilling to come down on their price. Well I got an email last Wednesday saying they were willing to come down so I low balled them and they accepted. We got the domain name villagechapel.com for half off!
So now you can log on to villagechapel.com and it will take you to our website. Right now it is forwarded to our current site at vvchapel.org but we have a crack web designer working on a fresh new site that will hopefully be up in a couple of months. We are also in the process of changing over our emails to villagechapel.com as well but that will take a week or so.
So go ahead and type in the new domain and watch it appear before your eyes

Sunday Update

I am loving what God is doing in our church right now. Second service must’ve been at least half new people over the last month. As people walked into the church I kept looking at the people and realized Wow! Who are these people? What is cool is that many of them are families that are coming back a third or fourth time. Hopefully we can get them plugged into a small group or ministry team pretty quickly.

Our “Do Something” series is far exceeding my expectations. The study in 1 John has hit our church square between the eyes and it is forcing us to deal with some things that we have swept under the carpet for a long time. Our small groups are hitting their strides and I am sold on the sermon based study. I hope to do two of these are year.

Here are some other thoughts from Sunday:

• Ami & Dave filled in for Tom this week and did a fantastic job!
• Our worship keeps getting better and better each week
• I love the guys and gals who are on our set up team. They are so faithful to show up at 7am to do what they do
• First service is a funny group. They get me and my sense of humor. What is funny first service is not necessarily funny second service.
• Talked about worldliness our of 1 John 2:15-17. Preached more to myself than the church
• Tom & Karen were gone at Jr High camp. Always a hole when they aren’t there
• Christin is walking around with a bounce in her step. She gets what God is doing and is starting to hit her stride
• Somebody brought mini-muffins with cream cheese frosting yesterday that were deadly good
• The youth take up one whole side of the church during second service
• Starting to see a whole new layer of leadership emerge. Excited to develop that group
• Two interns start this week. They are excited now, lets see in six months
• This week the automatic doors in our van went out and our Kitchen sink had more water coming out underneath the counter than on top
• Clothes drive is this Sunday. Clean out your closet and bring them to church. We are going to do a thrift store for our adopt a families in March

After launching small groups, doing a Saturday of Service, and hosting Bill Holdridge from Poimen Ministries over the last three weeks I am looking forward to a normal routine at the office this week.

Easy adjustments for Weight Loss

7 Easy Ways to Lose Weight Without Starving or Breaking a Sweat on Yahoo! Health

Good tips that are easy to do

Outreach Pictures

Here are some photos from our Saturday of Service

Men's Ministry cooking Breakfast at the Homeless Shelter

Sacks of Potatoes for our Food Baskets

Our College Impact Team getting ready to take lunches to the Homeless

School Clean up

Ability vs. Capability

By the looks of the title there doesn’t look like much difference between the two words. In fact you might interchange the two on a frequent basis and to be honest you are not to far off. Let me suggest the subtle but huge difference in the two words.

Ability is in both words. It means our talents, skills, and abilities. Everyone has a few if not multiple abilities. These are given to us by god and we are expected to use them in His service. The question we need to ask is how are we using those abilities. This brings me to the difference of ability and capability.

Capability is a combo word for capacity and ability. We have already discussed ability so lets take a look at capacity. Capacity is the depth and width by which we can handle something. Have you heard “How much can you handle?” This is about capacity. What people don’t realize is that it is a mental state. What you can handle is all based on what you think you can handle. In reality we can handle a lot more than we think we can. So it boils down to one thing: Willingness. Am I willing to do this? This is the difference between ability and capability.

Think about it. There are plenty of people who have incredible abilities that don’t use them or waste them. The people who accomplish great things are those who look at a challenge and say to themselves ” I am willing to take this on.” They may not think they can handle it but they are willing to give it a shot.

My encouragement to you is that ask yourself how willing are you? What is it holding you back? Is it fear, doubt, or control? If so take a deep breath, exhale, and then take one step forward. Then take another breath and one more step. Pretty soon that place you were comfortable will be long out of sight and you will be much better for it.

Heavy Lifting

If I have learned anything about leadership is that it takes heavy lifting. What I mean by that is Leaders are required to move unmovable things and it takes heavy lifting to do that. Don’t be fooled by all this philosophy out there about collaboration or such, it is a myth. Leaders are called to move people in directions they may not want to go and to get anything new off the ground it is the leader who is going to have to lift it. Be it through motivating people to a cause or flat out doing it yourself it is going to take work.

Joseph is always looked to as a great administrator in the Bible. He is promoted to head slave in Potiphar’s house, then head prisoner in the prison. When it comes time for him to be in front of Pharaoh he is ready to shine. The thing people don’t realize is that Joseph had to do a lot of heavy lifting to get there and even more after Pharaoh promotes him. Someone had to store up enough food during the years of plenty so there would be enough and someone had to tow the line during the years of famine. If someone thinks that Joseph experienced no resistance during that time they are only fooling themselves. It took heavy lifting to get Egypt to where God showed Joseph they needed to be.

This is one of the biggest differences between leaders and managers. Leaders are the ones who initiate things and get them off the ground. Managers are the one who keep it in the air. Leaders are the one who turn the ship in the right direction, managers are the ones who keep the ship on course. Leaders are the ones who sense opportunity, managers are the one maximize the benefits of that opportunity. Both leaders and mangers are needed but it is the leaders who do the heavy lifting.