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"Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down it its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

Romans 12:2 (The Message)

Here’s the personal note I just received from Dick Costolo, the CEO and Co-Founder of FeedBurner regarding the problems I’m encountering with my feed:

Tony,

I just read your post, and I want you to know we’ll do everything we can to keep you at FeedBurner. I realize there’s an obvious issue if Bloglines isn’t updating your FeedBurner feed. We will continue to attempt to create a dialogue with bloglines to make this issue go away.

I realize how annoying this must be for you, and we take it very seriously. I just wanted to shoot you a note to say that this is a priority for me personally, and we’ll continue to try to conceive of inventive ways of addressing this issue when it occurs.

I know it doesn’t do any good to get emails like this and then see your feed continue to have issues at Bloglines, but we’re on the case, and we want this issue to go away. Thanks for the post.

best,

Dick

I’m not only posting this because I’m grateful the FeedBurner team is working on my side to fix the problem. I’m also sharing this note because it speaks volumes about being a good leader. Here’s what Dick said to me:

• You’re important to us.
• I want to keep you as a customer.
• It’s not even really our problem, but we’re willing to make it our problem to find you a solution.
• Your situation is a priority for us.

That’s the CEO modeling that kind of leadership and quality customer service. I love that!

Let’s go Bloglines. It’s your turn now. I want to cheer for you as well.

If you sense frustration, you’re very discerning. I’m experiencing another Bloglines malfunction with my FeedBurner feed. That means a number of my subscribers have no idea there are new posts on my site. Bloglines confirmed the issue was on their end earlier this week. I emailed them again to see what it’s going to take to correct the problem.

Unfortunately this might become a FeedBurner problem as well. If I have subscribers that can’t receive my feed, I may have to drop FeedBurner. Hate to do that, but the feed has been very unreliable with Bloglines.

Let’s hope the techies can get this ironed out. Anyone else using FeedBurner experiencing similar issues?

This week’s edition of "Tony Morgan’s Cool Church of the Week" is dedicated to my boss and good friend, Tim Stevens. Who–risking physical, emotional and spiritual adversity–has set out on a 7,000-mile road trip with his family. Over 23 days, they are on a journey that will take them to the west coast and back in their silver minivan. Tim has four kids. Tim has a "mini" van. Tim is a smart guy, but I think he may have been sniffing the fresh paint from our new auditorium a little too long when he made these plans.

Crossroads Community Church in Mansfield, Ohio is also beginning a road trip this weekend. That’s the theme for their new summer series. Make sure you click on the "Road Trip" graphic on the main page to watch the trailer. Among other things, you’ll catch a glimpse of Jacob’s Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. Go Tribe!

I love what Crossroads is doing. They’re clear about their strategy: "Through drama, multi-media presentations, contemporary music and practical messages, we present the ageless truths of the Bible in a format that’s easy to understand, even if you’ve never been to church." And this new series indicates they’ve nailed that by addressing issues people are thinking about, especially this time of year.

If I wasn’t attending Granger Community Church this weekend, I’d visit Crossroads Community Church and join them on their road trip…mainly because that road trip sounds a lot more appealing than the one that Tim Stevens is on.

I’m a simple guy and I tend to lose focus when I’m listening to long, drawn out explanations and teachings (more on that in a different post), so I think that’s why I’m attracted to quick lists of insights. Just give me the nuggets and I’ll decipher whether or not they’re applicable to my ministry/leadership environment. Here’s one of those lists that I found on Russ Hollman’s “Strategize” blog. These insights are attributed to Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon, from a Business 2.0 article available on the Raytheon website:

1. You can’t polish a sneaker. (”Even if you polish a hollow shell, it’s still nothing more than a hollow shell.”)
2. Learn to say “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be used often.
3. You remember 1/3 of what you read, 1/2 of what people tell you, but 100 percent of what you feel.
4. Look for what is missing. Many know how to improve what’s there; few can see what isn’t there.
5. Never direct a complaint to the top; a serious offense is to “cc” a person’s boss on a copy of a complaint before the person has a chance to respond.
6. Treat the name of your company as if it were your own.
7. Have fun at what you do. It will be reflected in your work. No one likes a grump except another grump!
8. When faced with decisions, try to look at them as if you were one level up in the organization. Your perspective will change quickly.
9. If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
10. When something appears on a slide presentation, assume that the world knows about it and deal with it accordingly.
11. A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter — or others — is not a nice person. (This rule never fails.)
12. When facing issues or problems that are becoming drawn out, “short them to ground.” (Find the quickest path from problem to solution.)

Good list for leaders. I guess that’s how someone becomes CEO of Raytheon. You have to know smart stuff and make it easy to understand for simple guys.

Lots of good stuff in the book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots if you are trying to improve your personal or ministry/corporate communications; however, I want to highlight a paragraph that really made me chuckle. In a section titled "Romancing the Dull," the writers talked about our pursuit of cool jobs, but acknowledged that most of us end up doing stuff like this:

"We get e-mail, send e-mail, detach things from e-mail, save those things, read them, and make some edits. Sometimes we file them or make copies of them so we don’t lose them. We share them with other people who change the format of these things and show them to groups of other people. We stow things away for a while. Then we retrieve them and take little parts of them and put them into bigger files, where they become part of what we call ‘intellectual capital’ (because we don’t want to call them ‘bigger files’)."

Why do parts of that sound painfully real? Could be why I find it so hard some days to explain to Emily what I’ve accomplished. I guess I can just tell her I created "intellectual capital" for Jesus.

"If you try to control things, that’s self-limiting. The easiest way to think about this is that if all the decisions inside an organization had to roll up to the center of the company or to one person, it’s a massive bottleneck to progress. Instead it’s very important to establish philosophies, strategies and guidelines as well as have clear lines of accountability and responsibility inside the organization."

Michael Dell, Chairman of the Board of Dell as quoted from the Abilene Christian University Videoconference (Feb. 8, 2005)

Look what I found. Here’s a picture of me in a peach shirt very similar to the one Mark found with Ed Young. Not that I’m trying to avoid that hug or anything, but it appears that something’s not right.

By the way, I think I’m going to start wearing a male necklace again. I think I look pretty good with it don’t you? In the 80s, I tried to pull off the gold chain look, but that really never fit me. It was one of the disadvantages of having a small neck. Gold chains never looked good on small-necked guys like me. Now that I see this picture, though, I think I look pretty good with one of those trendy male necklaces…especially when I wear a peach shirt.

UPDATE: It turns out this was a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Ed was really wearing a white shirt in the original picture. See the comment from Jason on Mark’s post. The only difference is that Jason is apparently much more adept at PhotoShop than I am. Mark has underestimated my raw power of discernment and aversion to physical contact particularly from other males. (Don’t over analyze. I love my mom and dad. I’m just weird.)

Mark Waltz thinks he proved Ed Young owns a pink shirt. I promised Mark I’d buy a pink shirt, hug him and put a picture of the embrace on my blog if he could provide photographic evidence that Ed owns a pink shirt. You tell me. Is that not a peach shirt? And, how do we really know it’s Ed Young? Maybe someone has just superimposed Ed Young’s head on another guy wearing a peach shirt. In fact, that looks very similar to a peach shirt I used to own. I need to hunt through my pictures and see if I can find it. In the mean time, all I can say is this appears to be a vast, right-wing conspiracy to get me to hug Mark Waltz.

Just wanted to let you know there’s quite a bit of buzz surrounding the WiredChurches.com workshops we’re hosting on the Granger campus on July 22. The phone’s been ringing off the hook here today. As of yesterday today, we already had over 140 210 registrations from people throughout the country that are planning on joining us for one of the four topics being offered.

We tried to offer a few of our most popular topics in July. They include workshops on groups, First Impressions and creative arts. Additionally, Tim and I will be teaching Simply Strategic Growth for the first time. We’ll be sharing some of the strategies we’ve implemented at Granger to attract a crowd to our weekend services. You can take advantage of the early-bird savings (deadline extended to June 30) by registering online at WiredChurches.com.

If you join us and you’re one of my blog readers, please catch me and say "hey." I’d love to meet you in person and hear a little bit of your story.