Church

It's a lesson every pastor should learn early in ministry ... don't get sucked into the numbers trap. As a pastor, it's easy (even tempting) to measure ministry effectiveness by the numbers: attendance, giving, percentages of involvement, etc. We feel good when the numbers are up and begin to question our sanity when the numbers go down.Perhaps it's because numbers are ever-present and even unavoidable. We live in a numbers-driven society ... the stock market, gas prices, speed limits. Baseball managers are hired and fired based upon winning percentages. Politicians are elected by counting ballots. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries ... the numbers of years we've lived or been married.When it comes to church life, numbers can drive you crazy. LifePoint had our highest attendance average in October; November has been about 25% lower. At the same time, our weekly offerings have been greater in November than in October. Try…

It had to happen sometime in our convenience-driven society: Drive through flu shots. Motorists in several cities can get a flu shot without leaving their car. To reach the passenger side, they use a really big needle. Just kidding.Article from the Orlando SentinelAustin NewsGet it with a bagel in Galesburg, IL

A shameless plug for a new design. I did this in the aftermath of the midterm elections. ...The caption says: "That whoopie cushion thing gets me everytime." Buy It Here

I made the decision after a few weeks of hesitating to upgrade to Blogger's new beta version. It has some slick features that I finally succumbed to. Two that attracted me were the abilities to give your posts "labels" or categories. Other blogging software has incorporated this feature for quite some time. The other feature is the "drop and drag" template editing. It would be nice if someone developed elements for Digg, Technorati, and some of other common blogging add-ons.What continues to puzzle me, however, is why Google/Blogger doesn't have 3 column templates as part of their standard offering. It seems like that would be a fairly common template. So ... if you use Blogger beta and would like a 3 column template, click here. This is the site where I found the code to rework my 2 column template into a 3 column template.

This little gem was actually created by an anonymous guitar player at LifePoint.