Ken

As a church planter and fan of church planting, I wanted to pass this along.  It's called 10-10-10 and it's about encouraging an explosion of church planting.  Next fall on October 10, 2010, churches across the nation will unite to push and pray for new churches.  Here's a bit from their FAQ's: What is the 10-10-10 Initiative? 10-10-10 is a unified, cross-denominational emphasis on church planting designed to accelerate the impact of existing networks, organizations, denominations and churches.  This 4-6 week, sermon-based initiative seeks to catalyze hundreds of church planting ministries with thousands of existing churches to see millions of lives transformed by the love of Christ through healthy new churches. Why 10-10-10? October 10, 2010 is 10/10/10.  August through October are a natural season for new churches to start and a natural season for existing churches to initiate Fall sermon series.  The 10-10-10 Initiative leverages the intersection of these…

Jim and I will be starting a new series this upcoming weekend called "Contagious Generosity."  We'll be exploring the value of developing a generous lifestyle and a spirit of gratitude. The college I graduated from had a motto: "Teaching how to live and how to make a living."  I remember it was plastered on a billboard just outside of the small town where the college was located. I may not have agreed with everything that my alma mater aspired to be, but I liked the motto.  I still do.  It reminds me that the most important thing in life is not what you do for a living but how you live. As it relates to generosity, true wealth comes not in what you keep for yourself but what you give to others.  It's a radical way of thinking compared to the prevailing wind of our culture.  It's also God's way…

As I shared last weekend in my message on spiritual nutrition, one of my favorite wrestlers as a child was Dusty Rhodes.  Not just any Dusty Rhodes but "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes.  After one of his hard-fought wins(!), he was interviewed by "Mean Gene" Okerlund and asked about his training regiment. His response: "I train on beer and pizza." Many of you probably didn't realize you were training to be a professional wrestler. Just as good nutrition is important to live a healthy physical life, we need a good spiritual diet to stay spiritually robust and alive.  Yet many of us settle for a spiritual diet that consists of beer and pizza.  While that may be good on occasion, to eat and drink that at every meal will make you sluggish, overweight, and at risk for a heart attack. When our spiritual diet consists of snack foods (an Oprah…

A number of years ago, I began putting my bread in the refrigerator as a way to keep it fresh longer.  Nothing is worse than wanting to fix a sandwich and finding out the bread gave up its spirit weeks ago.  So, along comes this tip from DIY website about how to "de-stale" your bread.  Not sure if that's an actual word, but you know what they mean. Here's the tip: use celery. Want to know more, read the full article here.

Now that I'm officially in my forties (40, to be exact), it's interesting to reflect back on my twenties and thirties from a relational perspective. We didn't have kids until our late twenties, so much of our twenties was lived as DINKS (double income, no kids).   Lest you think we were on the fast track, our "double income" consisted of a teacher's paycheck and a pastor's salary.  Not knowing it as much at the time, we were blessed to have many mentoring relationships with people older than us.  In fact, one of the couples we spent a considerable amount of time with was three and a half times our age.  He was a retired Naval officer and he gave me a great tutorial on how to handle people. I'm not sure if they set out to mentor us or if it just happened.  Many of my best leadership lessons were…