church in the park

see you there!

Add comment | July 1st, 2008

peter….. what’s happening?

I’m busy busy busy as usual and have been trying come up with something to blog about. So I thought I’d just share some of what I’ve been so busy working on.

We’ve recently added online giving/donating to the church website at there you can give your tithes/offerings via your debit or credit card.

I’ve also started a redesign of all the church brochures. You may have noticed the new “About Us” brochure on the info table this last Sunday Here is a couple images of how the file looks.

I’ll be doing several more of these with the same design only different colors.

Add comment | June 24th, 2008

an open letter to real life community church

I don’t get to say my 2 cents in the public arena very often so I’m going to take this opportunity to say some things that I think need to be said. These are my own personal thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts or attitudes of the senior leadership of Real Life Community Church.

As a general rule you, the congregation of Real Life Community Church, suck at giving. I mean you are the worst givers in the entire Intermountain District of the Church of the Nazarene (I can show you numbers to prove this). I don’t know if you realized this but you have 5 full time and 2 part time staff members that work their tails off so that you have an awesome place to attend church. Yet you don’t give in response to how much God has blessed you through this church.

The following is not meant as a guilt trip but just a presentation of the truth of the situation. Because of a lack of giving your kids have to pay more and more for trips and events because there is no money in the budget to help offset the costs. I’ve heard stories of parents complaining about the cost of youth trips compared to other churches in the valley. Understand this, those other churches have multi thousand dollar budgets to offset the cost of those trips. Where do you think the money in their budgets come from? From weekly tithes and offerings.

Recently we’ve made the tough decision to rent out the church office to lower our expenses. Everyone may have to work from home. This leaves us without a place to have staff meetings, a place to house our copier and will only lead to the staff being more disconnected from each other instead of growing together as a team.

Real Life is a great place to explore the reality of God and how God is relevant in our world. You have the freedom to ask questions and figure this whole thing out in a loving, open community. Real Life has recently been ranked as the 7th fastest growing church in the Church of the Nazarene but yet our financial situation gets worse and worse everyday.

Because your giving sucks so bad it just adds more and more stress to your staff and they can’t focus on the things that are most important. I can’t express to you how important an issue this is. There is some serious un-health in Real Life Community Church. We don’t want to be a church that is constantly asking for money, we want you to be blessed by God and give out of thanks because of that blessing. Everything you have has been given to you by God and you have no right to be selfish with it. I wish this was a non-issue and Real Life could continue to grow and thrive impacting the Treasure Valley, showing Gods grace to those who need it.

Those of you who faithfully give 10% or more of your income to the church I personally thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know who you are or I would actually tell you to your face. I’m sure God has continued to bless you out of your faithfulness. If you are faithful with a few things God will put you in charge of many things. This letter is not written to you few wonderful people. This is for those of you that call Real Life Community Church in Nampa Idaho your church home and you come every week and enjoy the services and eat the food we provide yet don’t do anything to help us continue existing as a church. So I put it to you, if you are just going to consume our resources and not give back then go somewhere else. We can’t afford for you to suck up what we have left.

If you are new to Real Life and just checking things out then by all means disregard this entire letter. We want you to feel welcome and enjoy yourself, but as you begin to call us home we expect you to learn and embrace our core practices. One of these practices is “First Fruits” which means offering to God not our left-overs but the best of what we have, what we do, and who we are. “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31) This includes every area of our lives ie. time, energy, and money.

I hope you can understand the heart from which this letter comes. I love you all but God has a greater vision for Real Life and the difference we can make in the lives of broken people. I hope I don’t get into trouble for speaking my mind and if you have any concerns please do not hesitate to let me know I’m open to discussing this further with you.

5 comments | June 5th, 2008

the end of an era

Hello my name is Clayton and I’m an addict. I can’t stop signing up for social networks. It seems like everyday a new web service or social network is launched and I feel the need to join. Why? Don’t know but I think it some kind of sickness.

I don’t use most of the things I join and those I do use I don’t do anything important. They all seem to become time sinks. After much discussion with my wife I’ve decided to try a new approach to using my time. Why spend tons of time conversing with people I’ll never meet when I have real live friends right here that I could spend more time with? So that’s what I’m going to do. Here is a list of the services that are being cut from my life:

Twitter
Vimeo
Britekite
Several Podcasts
Ustream
Stickam
virb
friend feed

I will be keeping:

Pownce (micro blogging/friends)
Flickr (photo sharing)
Facebook (social network)
iLike (music network)

I don’t know why anyone needs all of those services but we gather them up like they are going out of style. For me I think I had this desire for my 10 minutes of fame. I know I’m never going to be a movie or tv star so I gave being a Internet Superstar a shot but really I didn’t try very hard and I’ve discovered that it requires more time than I am willing to invest. Coming out of this journey I realize how really stupid it all is. We get more and more “conveniences” in our lives but we never have more time. It feels good to know what’s going on in “The Tubes” but I sure don’t need hands on experience with everything out there. So I’m making a change toward simplicity, and I know I’ve tried this before but as I keep coming back to this conclusion it must be the right one.

Add comment | June 3rd, 2008

house up for sale

We did it. Our house is now on the market. I guess it’s a smaller market since we are trying to sell it ourselves. We’re going to try this for a while and then list it with an agent. So if you are looking for a great older home in Nampa, Idaho then this may be the place for you. We’ve listed the house on www.fsbo.com (for sale by owner). This is a great starter home and we have greatly improved it over the past 6 years we’ve lived here. Including landscaping, sprinklers, hardwood floors and custom cabinetry. Please pass the information on if you know of anyone in the market for a home. Thanks.

Add comment | May 27th, 2008

Smart Playlist : Never Played

As our digital music libraries grow larger and larger I find my self listening to a smaller percentage of my music. In an attempt to listen to music I haven’t heard in a while I made this playlist.

Step 1: Open your itunes library.

Step 2: Go to the file menu and click on “New Smart Playlist”

Step 3: From the first drop down menu select “Play Count”.
In the second menu select “is less than”
Finally put the numeral “1″ in the text box and click ok

Step 4: Title the Playlist “Never Played” and now you have a playlist that features only songs that you have never played. It’s a great way to re-discover your long lost favorite songs.

Add comment | May 23rd, 2008

communication

I love communication! I like to study it and learn how people do it. I enjoy finding a new way of communicating information and ideas. I also enjoy flowcharts. Flowcharts do an ok job of communicating some concepts. But what if you worked at a church and you needed to make a flow chart of how communication happens in that church? What would that look like? I found out today during a 3 hour meeting about our communication strategy. We are planning on changing some things latter this summer so we needed to figure out how everything would work after the changes. This meeting took all my energy for the day but it was very productive. I thought I would share the resulting flowchart from this meeting. Click the photo to see a larger size.

1 comment | May 21st, 2008

Dead Meadow

Last night I was invited to go to a show at The Neurolux. I had never heard of Dead Meadow before but I’m now a fan. These guys rocked. They reminded me of The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, at least in musical style but it’s not a close match. Check them out on myspace. After the show we went down to the pie hole for some pizza by the slice. The pizza there is awesome but only after a couple hours in the smoke filled Neurolux and after midnight. For some reason when those two criteria are met the pizza becomes the best in the world. Overall the night was awesome and I should do it more often.

I guess a lot of the fun that was had was just because of the atmosphere of the Neurolux. If you’ve never been down there I would recommend you try it sometime just for the experience. Great people watching and good drinks. But see a concert don’t go when a DJ is playing that’s when all the annoying “kids” show up. Seriously when did college students get to be so annoying?

Add comment | May 17th, 2008

I am Iron Man

Ok, ok, so I’m not Iron Man I more closely resemble Gumby. But I did go see the newly released movie on opening night and I’ve been talking about it non stop without posting my thoughts here. Sorry for the delay but without any more waiting here is my review.

Iron Man ROCKS! The End.

So you want more? Ok…
One of my more recent movie reviews was that of another comicbookesque movie, “Jumper” and I was not too impressed (read it here). Compared to Jumper, Iron Man is one of the best movies I’ve seen over the past several months. Iron man has good acting as well as action, the special effects are great, and like all good action movies there is a good sprinkling of humor throughout.

I myself am not a film maker but I think I might be able to do it if I had the time, energy and desire to do so. Therefore take this one criticism with that in mind. Movies are more than just good looking actors and flashy special effects… movies are an art and all good art tells a story of some sort. I felt the story telling in Iron Man was a little on the slow side. The movie is long at 2 1/2 hours but that doesn’t mean it has to feel long. And really it didn’t feel that long except for after the fact when you look at the amount of time spent on the building of Suit 1 and Suit 2. The majority of the movie covers the building of the Iron Man suits. The cool action and butt kicking of Iron Man is really just a small portion of the movie. I went to the movie looking forward to seeing Iron Man do what Iron Man does and I got to see a little of that and it was AWESOME! but in the end I was left wanting for more butt kicking and less, leg bone is connected to the hip bone.

That said I still recommend this movie whole heartedly and I can’t wait to see it again.

Add comment | May 6th, 2008

Ecommerce Software

I have recently been made aware of some shopping cart software called ashop. I have been interested in selling art through one of my sites for a while but I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. After visiting ashop I found it very easy to work with. They have a couple demo stores in which you can use the store itself and the admin back end. I shopped around the site, added and removed items from the shopping cart and edited items using the administration interface. Everything was really easy.

The site offers lots of helps including tutorial videos that will make setting up your shopping cart software a breeze. You can customize your product fields, accept different currency, and feature best selling and new products.I’m excited to see where I can use this ecommerce software service in the future. Perhaps I might start selling t-shirts.

Add comment | April 30th, 2008