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Win 2 Tickets to Catalyst West!

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Catalyst West Conference is just around the corner on April 21-23, 2010 in Orange County, California. That’s where you’ll find 3,500 young leaders, some great speakers, powerful worship, innovative programming, and a leadership experience unlike any other. I was there last year for Catalyst West and absolutely loved it.

This year you’ll hear from leadership authorities including Andy Stanley, Louie Giglio, Erwin McManus, Kay Warren and Reggie Joiner, along with several innovative thinkers and practitioners like best-selling author Donald Miller, Dallas Willard, Charlene Li, Scott Belsky, Eugene Cho, and Wess Stafford, President of Compassion International.

Arrive early for Catalyst Labs featuring innovative thought leaders including John Ortberg, Dino Rizzo, Michael Hyatt, Jeanne Stevens, Jon Acuff, Anne Jackson, Mike Foster, Jud Wilhite, Susan Isaacs, Dan Kimball, Scot McKnight, David Kinnaman, Margaret Feinberg, and others.

In addition, you will want to be there for the special evening session on Thursday with Louie Giglio and worship led by Chris Tomlin.

There’s a special registration rate of $229 available through February 18. To take advantage of this offer, call 888.334.6569 to speak with the Catalyst Concierge team, or register online and use rate code BLOG.

And, for those of you who love the contests, I’m giving away two tickets to Catalyst West today. Here’s how to win:

  1. TWEET THIS: “Giving away 2 tickets to Catalyst West. Comment & RT to enter http://bit.ly/cw0uVu”
  2. COMMENT BELOW: with your twitter name (so I can verify you did step 1…because I know you’re sneaky like that)
  3. At 5PM EST TODAY: I’ll randomly choose two entrants below to win one ticket each!

Jump on board the Catalyst West bandwagon, and may the best Tweet win!

UPDATE: The winners of the free tickets are @taramiller8 and @God_IsMyJudge. Congratulations!

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Yep, my friends at Catalyst sponsored this post, but I accepted the offer because I believe in their events. I think you’ll be a believer as well.

TobyMac Livestream on TonyMorganLive.com

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Does the Church Need a Building?

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I recently spent some time in the bush of West Africa. Our team drove down dirt roads from village to village. Okay, the word “roads” is a bit of an exaggeration. In many spots it was just a dirt path.

I’m pretty sure where I was qualified as “the ends of the earth.” People were living in mud houses and grass huts. A well with relatively clean water was a luxury. We saw children surviving on a couple good meals every week. If you are reading this post, you and I are very rich.

It was in the midst of this environment that I may have experienced my biggest frustration on the trip. In these villages in remote West Africa, people are hearing the Gospel for the very first time. When that happens, they want to gather in community with other believers for teaching and worship.

What was frustrating to me is the investment churches are making in buildings. In just about every village we went into, the church building, if there was one, was the biggest and nicest building in the village. It was truly aggravating. Don’t these people realize church isn’t about buildings?

In one village we visited, the indigenous pastor showed us the tree the church first met under. Then he pointed out the first building made out of mud. Then he showed us their spacious, modern, new worship facility.

Get this, some of these churches are filling up their big buildings and they’re building even bigger buildings. Don’t they know that’s not how the early church did it?

The way it’s supposed to work is that you’re supposed to meet in homes. When one home fills up, you start another church in a second home. Or, you rent a building that already exists in the village. Why, though, would a church invest in a building when people desperately need food and water?

Then that’s when the pastors from the villages taught me a lesson about ministry. In these villages, it’s not uncommon for there to be a mosque. Islam is the predominant religion, so they have a significant physical presence. In fact, they are very intentional of building mosques in every village and they try to establish facilities as close to the center of commerce as possible. In a culture that associates “faith” with a place of worship, it’s impossible for the Christian church to grow and for the Gospel to spread if it doesn’t also have a place of worship.

In other words, these indigenous pastors knew their culture better than I knew their culture. Though I had a strategy for growing the church that I thought was more like the early church found in Acts, my approach would have prevented the Gospel from spreading in these villages.

And all of this was a good reminder to me that knowing the Gospel message is obviously very important, but so is knowing the culture that you’re trying to reach. It gave me new understanding for Paul’s words:

“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings” (1 Corinthians 9:22-23, NIV)

It was also a good reminder that what happens to work here in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia may not necessarily be the best approach to spreading the Gospel in Portland, Oregon or New York City…and vice versa. In fact, last I looked around Atlanta, a lot happens in buildings–some very big buildings.

So, what do you think? Does the church need a building? Or, do the pastors in Africa just need to learn how to properly grow a church?

Change

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It’s a lot easier to embrace change when you’re the one initiating it.

When we decide change is needed, it’s a lot easier for us to receive it.

Change without vision is chaos.

Change to fulfill vision is a lot easier to understand when it’s shared through stories.

Many times the most successful or positive changes also produce the most criticism.

Change doesn’t happen unless someone is responsible to deliver it.

It’s easier to embrace change when we see it rather than when we hear about it.

Change, even the best kind of change, will always generate some measure of fear and anger and sadness.

In other words, someone will always despise the change and let you know about it.

It’s almost impossible to change a change that previously worked.

Test-driving a change is a lot easier than fully committing to the unknown.

Change is more likely to take hold when it’s followed by an immediate win.

When you think you’ve communicated enough about the change, you need to communicate more.

Organizations that don’t change die.

When change happens, it always gets personalized–it always ends up being about “me.”

Slow change is rarely positive change.

Change without metrics is foolishness.

If the change is easy, you’re probably not changing enough.

Resistance addressed appropriately makes change better.

If everyone already recognizes the need for change, you’re obviously not the leader.

How to Start a Movement

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What’s even more impressive is it only took David Sivers less than three minutes to make his point. This is his entire talk from the TED Conference.

Most Popular Posts of January 2010

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In case you missed them, here are the posts that generated the most traffic last month in order of popularity:

This top ten list is brought to you with the help of Google Analytics. It’s the easy, free way to track stats for your website. (And, no, they don’t pay me to say that.)

Listen to New TobyMac for FREE!

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TobyMac’s newest album, Tonight, released today. I love his music, and I want to give you a chance to love it too. Here’s your chance to listen to the album one time in its entirety for free:

By the way, I have a special treat for you. I’m going to be streaming a live event with TobyMac next Tuesday evening right here on my website. You’ll get to hear some music and the stories behind the new album. Stay tuned for more details.

If you like what you hear, you can download the new album using my Amazon link. See you back here next Tuesday evening.

My Next Stops

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I’ve been working on my calendar today. Here’s where I’m going to be heading over the next several months:

I may be able to squeeze in one or two more stops between now and the end of May. The summer schedule is starting to fill up as well, so now is the time to connect if I can serve you and your church. Let me know if you’d like to talk.

Hiring an Executive and Children’s Pastor

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I’m really excited to announce two leadership openings at a church here in the Atlanta region. Mountain Lake Church in Cumming, Georgia is hiring both an executive pastor and a children’s pastor. Mountain Lake was planted by its lead pastor, Shawn Lovejoy. The church is about ten years old. It meets in a brand new facility and currently runs about 2,500 people in attendance.

If you are interested in either role, please email William Vanderbloemen, my teammate at FaithSearch Partners, with questions or to submit your resume. All correspondence is kept in strict confidence. If you want to chat with me about either role and see Mountain Lake Church, then attend the ChurchPlanters.com conference, Velocity, in two weeks.

On another note, we have been able to secure ten free tickets to the Velocity Conference. We have decided to give those away to the first ten children’s pastors who contact us. Just send William your email address and a contact phone number. He and I will announce the winners in a couple of days. See you at Velocity!

Slides from Burkina Faso Trip

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Here are some pictures from my recent trip to Burkina Faso. I’ll post more about my experience in the coming days, but the pictures capture more than I could ever communicate in writing. Click on the button to turn on the background music if you’d prefer.