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A long time ago I signed up for Google alerts, a service of Google News that grabs news stories that match a profile you create and emails the link to you. It's wonderful. Especially if having 100 + emails in your inbox makes you feel like more of a man. Seriously, I love it.OK, so today I get this headline that reads, "Is Normal Now A Mental Illness?" What a great title ... and an interesting question. In a world that celebrates abnormality and weirdoes, what is normal any more? Are you normal? Am I normal? What is normal?It made me think that Jesus himself was not normal. He didn't operate the way the "normal" leaders of his day did. He didn't manipulate. He didn't coerce people into following him. He didn't sit back and demand that people bring him a drink. He didn't berate those that fumbled and stumbled…

LifePoint is now three weeks old and getting older all the time. As a new church community, there are growing fits and learning experiences. Technology continues to be a blessing and a curse. The same program that allows you to feed text over video and jump slides on the fly is the same program that decides to lock up five minutes before worship is to start. Personally, I believe it's the spirit of Bill Gates manifesting itself in our PC. At least XP got rid of the blue screen of death.Our LifePoint team continues to serve cheerfully and enthusiastically. Many of them are serving dual roles at both gatherings -- some arrive as early as 7:00 AM. Building a new church community is definitely a team adventure. And I do mean adventure.One very encouraging sign is the number of new faces who have offered to help. This is the lifeblood…

One of my desires for LifePoint's worship gatherings is for them to reflect the creative diversity that exists both within our church community and the community at large. Our God is a creative God and didn't finish his creative work after six days and retire. He's still creating and has put his creative impulses within us.We had our first large-scale creative arts gathering last night at our house. It was great! The best way I like to describe our approach is to use the analogy of an artist's palette. Each of us brings a certain perspective, background, training, and passion to the creative process. Last night we had musicians, artists, actors, teachers, and nerds like me. If a pastor isn't intentional about using the gifts of others, he will create a worship experience that reflects the heart and head of one or two people. He will probably teach in the…

I've been re-working LifePoint's website so it reflects an actual church rather than a church in planning. It's 99% there ... for now. A few of the tweaks include:I've brought back the right-side modules to highlight upcoming events. This will give the site more flexibility as events increase.Users can now download our Sunday teaching material and related graphics. This will be especially helpful to those LifeGroup leaders who will be using Sunday's teaching as discussion starters in their groups. You'll also get to see my teaching notes in their raw, unedited form. You may even learn to decipher my short-hand.Our creative arts team now has a secured section of the site where we'll post our ongoing creative planning ideas and assignments.You can view our current and past media efforts, including mp3's of our featured artists.Jay has added a category entitled "Worship Thoughts" where he posts occasional, random thoughts concerning worship.Of…

In order to beef-up the laptop to better handle video, I went from 512 MB to 1GB of memory. It's smokin' fast. I went to open MS Word and I never even saw the splash screen. BAM! It was there. We use a lot of video at LifePoint, most of it ran off the laptop using a program called "MediaShout." I highly recommend it to any church that wants to do more than PowerPoint during worship. We use it to put video loops behind song lyrics, show flash animations, and DVD clips. The DVD function is really cool. You can cue up the video from within MediaShout and play it as part of your presentation ... all from the laptop. It also allows you to jump to any thumbnail without having to go in linear order. You can also make edits on the fly without your audience knowing it. For…