TonyMorganLive.com

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com as quoted on BusinessWeek.com (April 17, 2008)

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate. That’s actually a serious point. If you’re going to do something that’s never been done before—which is basically what innovation is—people are going to misunderstand it just because it’s new.

One of the advantages of serving with Perry is that I get to sit under powerful teaching, but I also get to watch him model what it is to be a leader in a growing ministry/organization. Yesterday, as we were meeting in our weekly leadership team gathering, he offered this insight. One of the things that Perry is doing is he’s empowering leaders around him to make decisions. He offered these seven questions as filters for us to consider whether or not we’re making wise decisions.

1. Does this decision compromise the Gospel?
2. Will this negatively impact our vision?
3. Is this something everyone will be genuinely excited about?
4. Is this just a temporary solution?
5. Will this decision add more to our plate?
6. Are we attempting excellence or extravagance?
7. Am I making this decision for the good of the church or just my area?

From those seven questions, you get a real sense of the values Perry holds high for NewSpring. Those questions will look different for your church or organization, but do you know what your questions are? If not, it’s highly likely that the leaders around you either aren’t empowered to make decisions or they don’t know what a wise decision looks like.

I’m still unpacking all the boxes, but it feels good to be in the new place. With the help of friends, the site is completely redesigned. If you’re a subscriber and following me through email or a feed reader, you may be interested in stopping by and saying hello. No need to bring housewarming gifts.

There are still a few tweaks to make, but Scott and the Updatable.cc crew helped me move. I’m using WordPress for the first time. I guess it’s a week of major transitions in my e-world.

Welcome to the new digs. Make yourself at home.

I’m in the process of going back through the Bible viewing it through
the eyes of a leader. Here are more thoughts from Romans:

• If faith comes from hearing the message, someone needs to step up and preach the message so those outside the faith hear it. (10:14)
• "I make much of my ministry in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them." I have a responsibility to inspire others to fulfill God’s purpose in their lives. (11:13-14)
• I’m glad God values wisdom and knowledge, but I’ll never know what he knows. (11:33-34)
• Am I a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God? That’s real worship. (12:1)
• God gifts us differently. Which is another way of saying it’s silly for all of us to think we’ll have the same gift. (12:6-8)
• "Honor one another above yourselves." (12:10)
• God establishes leadership authority including the government. And, one specific way that we’re supposed to submit to God’s authority is by paying taxes. (13:1-7)
• "Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification." Imagine how the world would view the Church is we embraced that statement. (14:19)
• God wants unity within his Church. (15:5-7)
• Faith produces hope. (15:13)
• I love it that our faith embraces the leadership role of women. (16:1-5)

I love being on the bleeding edge of technology. With that in mind, I volunteered to be one of the first NewSpring staffers to make the shift from using Microsoft Outlook to Google solutions. I’ve been using Google for several years to manage home email and calendars. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook, though, for I think about 15 years to manage work email, calendar, contacts and tasks.

Today’s a brand new day. Here’s what the current set up looks like:

• We transitioned email to Gmail yesterday.
• After that switch took place, I imported my Outlook contacts into Gmail.
• I imported my Outlook calendar into Google Calendar. The huge advantage with that is that I no longer have to manually sync my Outlook Calendar to a Google Calendar for my wife to have access to my schedule. Love that!
• For task management, I’ve elected to use Remember the Milk. There’s a Firefox plug-in that allows RTM to integrate with Gmail. That makes it easy to convert email messages into new tasks.
• I’ve also started using Jott to add tasks to RTM when I’m on the road. Jott converts voice into text and automatically adds new tasks to my list. Very slick.
• The only missing piece to the puzzle is a solution the IT team (that’s Jared) needs to implement to allow me to access my email and calendar from my phone. That’s coming later this week.

And, yes, if you’re keeping track at home, this entire package can be yours for next to free. That’s one of the nice indirect benefits of moving in this direction. That means more dollars for front line ministries in the long run.

Here are some of the other immediate benefits I’ve noticed:

• Web Outlook has always been a stinky solution in my mind for when I’m away from the office network. Now everything is easily accessible when I’m away from the office through Google’s web-based solutions.
• Gmail rocks. I love the way it groups messages by conversations. I also like being able to tag conversations by projects.
• Google Chat is built right in which will be important as my team goes multi-site.
• We’re going to be able to take advantage of Google Sites to be our internal portal for sharing and exchanging documents and communications across multiple campuses.
• Google search is far superior to anything Microsoft has ever developed for it’s software solutions. The days of hunting for messages in my "deleted" and "sent" folders is behind me. Yippee!

No transition like this is without pain. I’m sure I’m going to experience something that’s going to be somewhat of a setback. But, honestly, so far the transition has been very positive. I’m loving the new set up.

Now, the only question in my mind is whether or not I should test-drive Google Docs and ditch Microsoft Office. It may be time…

Yesterday, Perry talked about how we need to fully surrender everything to God. Here are some of my favorite lines from his message:

• "When the Gospel takes root in someone’s life, everything changes."
• "A 95% commitment to Christ is 5% too short."
• "God doesn’t want anything from you. He wants everything."
• "If God loved us based on our performance, everyone in this room would be totally screwed."
• "God will forgive us for our past sins, but he will always deal with our current sins."
• "We will never understand what he expects until we discover who he is."
• "Until we understand what he expects, we’ll never give him our very best."
• Referring to Malachi 1:10: "This is where the fertilizer hits the fan…if you know what I mean."
• "If your offering means nothing to you, why do we expect it would mean anything to God."

I love stories like this. God created us to experience life in relationship with others. And sometimes, that means we need others to pick us up when we are down.

I just wanted to take a moment this morning to introduce you to the newest sponsor of tonymorganlive.com. I’ve been a big fan of Fellowship Technologies for several years. In case you’re unfamiliar with their service, they provide church management software for churches like Fellowship Church in Dallas (where they got their start) to NewSpring Church (yep, we’re using it to go multi-site) to the church around the corner (it’s for all sizes).

One of the reasons I love their solution so much is that it’s web-based. They handle the backups and the server maintenance and the security measures. We just use their solution to track ministry connections for everyone that takes a spiritual step at NewSpring. That includes tracking things like home group participation, volunteer teams, baptisms, salvations, event registrations, children’s check-in and giving. And, since it’s web-based, their solution easily integrates with our website to offer online options for people to take their next steps.

Though we have heavier users in our ministry, I love the tools it offers ministry leaders like me who can run inquiries on specific individuals or pull up reports to get an overall sense of the health of the church. And, like I said, the flexibility and power of the solution will really become evident when we go multi-site in the coming months.

With that, welcome Fellowship Technologies to the site. I love that fact that I get to partner and be a cheerleader for a company that has demonstrated a commitment to helping growing churches fulfill the Great Commission.

If you’re interested in learning about how you or your company can become a site sponsor, email me.

Here’s some good news my blogging friends. Thanks to Scott and the peeps at Updatable, things are about ready to change around here. This is the first major overhaul of the site since I launched over three years ago. It’s not just a cosmetic face lift. Everything has been rebuilt from scratch. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming days. And, in the mean time, take one last look at the old tonymorganlive.com.

Would anyone like to offer a eulogy for the old site?

I’m guessing it has nothing to do with the blog, but the first radio station picked up the single "Revolution" by Worth Dying For. That’s the band that was featured here through the month of April. WNGR in Greenville is the station that picked the song. Congratulations to the Worth Dying For crew.

Watch for new tunes from Integrity Music in the coming days. More good stuff coming.