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.

I just read at a church members blog that a couple from our church told her they were leaving. She didn’t say who they were but that doesn’t matter. This is very sad and I hate to hear things like this but it happens. This couple has felt left out in their time of need and is disappointed that no one from the church has come to visit them. Not cool. The blogger telling the story asked the question should we start a ministry to prevent things like this from happening. Here was my response to the bloggers query.

“This is a problem with all churches. And the first response is to develop some sort of ministry that will solve the problem. But the presenting issue is not the problem. Yes, it is sad that no one has checked in with your friend (and if it’s who I think it is , this is very sad) but the real issue is why people don’t care about people. This is something that people should do because they have been loved by Christ and in return they love His sheep (people). We could set up a ministry but that doesn’t get people to love their neighbor. How do we get people to own their faith and make a difference in the lives of people around them with out having to provide a official ministry for them? Even if we did have a ministry, you know how difficult it is to get people to commit and follow through with what is expected. There is an overall lack of ownership of the Church and their faith by the people in our church. Not everyone but obviously a overwhelming majority.”

After the Deep Shift conference this past weekend I have a new perspective on what is important. What do people need? Are we as a church being the conduit that people need to become what Christ has called them to be? Sometimes I feel like we are too focused on making something cool and hip like TREK our quarterly magazine, having a cool website, and having video and other media in our services. It seems like we have way to much fluff and not very much substance. There is a term that I learned in my design classes that I feel applies to all of life.

K.I.S.S or Keep It Simple Stupid. Simple elegance is so much more effective than flashy, hip, and trendy ideas. I’ve been encouraged to have cool motion backgrounds and colorful lighting in our Sunday morning worship times but I personally don’t think it’s all that effective. Not more than singing songs of substance and meaning. The psalms of the Bible are full of complaints and arguments with God they are not all praise songs telling God how awesome He is. Are we afraid to sing about and talk frankly about the issues our world faces? Can we not take responsibility for our neighbors and love more? Can we not discuss openly the need for social awareness of disease, poverty, and justice? These are the issues that are plaguing our world, and in my opinion it all boils down to people loving their neighbor.

I have some ambitious dreams and plans for our church but I’m willing to put them on the back burner to back to the basics and help people fall madly in love with Jesus. As good as our plans, goals and ideas may be, without a solid foundation they will crumble. We need to have an root level ownership of our faith and our church. The Church does not exist for those inside the church but for those on the outside. How do we go about getting people to own this idea and live by it? I don’t have any ideas right now but I’m going to keep processing this. Even if I do have an idea I don’t know if I will be able to implement it at our church (senior leadership would have to agree) but I’ll try.

Yesterday it snowed, as well as today, but this story takes place yesterday. I awoke to find a blank of white fluffy goodness covering the ground. Oh Boy Oh Boy. The ground is covered with snow and both my wife and I have the day off. So we made a snow man. I like doing things that make me feel like a kid again. See picture above.

When we got home last night from the Rec Center we found our snowman friend headless! How could this be we had so lovingly given him a face and brought him to life and some stupid kid in our neighborhood decided that our snowman needed to die. What is this world coming to when a snowman can’t even live for 1 full day?

Where does someone get the idea that they can just walk up to the front of my house and decapitate my friends? I won’t stand for it. I must put a stop to this kind of behavior but how? If I was wealthy I would invest in a surveillance system, or a guard dog. But for now I am going to keep an ever watchful eye on my front yard and my air soft pistol ready. Beware stupid destructive kids, if you enter my yard you will leave with a body covered in welts.

Let me preface this by saying, I am not a parent yet (Lord willing we will be someday). But I view parenting as a 24hr a day active endeavor. There has been a good sized uproar about the movie “The Golden Compass” by the “Christian” community. People are being warned to not take their children to see this movie. The movie might suck and be not worth seeing, as it appears this movie may be, according to several reviews I’ve read. In my opinion that may be one of the few reasons to not see the movie. Not because the movie propagates ideas you do not agree with.

It is my understanding that the movie is based on a trilogy of books that I have not read either but the author has a sharp distaste for God and the church. Depending on his understanding and experience with Christians I could see how a negative idea is a reasonable response. But that does not mean that the books or the movie are inappropriate for our children. I am of the opinion that experiencing things we don’t agree with helps us view the world from another perspective and can help solidify the things we do believe. This opens up some great teaching moments for parents and an opportunity to have a great discussion with their kids. Why as a parent would you want to hide from an opportunity like that? Again I am not a parent but parenting is a beautiful thing and watching and helping children form their own worldview is a exciting and frightening experience to be apart of.

I’m going to go see the movie as soon as I can so that I may have a better understanding of this whole deal.

Worship in the context of the Christian faith has very little imagination, we all basically do the same thing and no one ever comes up with a new idea. I know there are a few smaller churches that are trying to do things differently but as a majority Christian worship is the same.

For example: This past week the staff of Real Life attended a leadership conference that was being held in Chicago but broadcast live by satelite to places all over the world. We attended a venue over in Boise. They began the conference by singing worship songs. Everyone in the auditorium in Boise stood up and were singing toward the screen as if there was a real person on the stage in front of them. This struck me as odd. As I looked around in curiosity at our trained response to “Worship time” I asked the question “Why do we stand in rows and sing as our worship?” Who decided that this was the best way to worship the God of all creation? Why are Churches set up so the congregation sits in rows? Are we missing some opportunities to worship God in new and creative ways? Again, I ask more questions than I have answers, but I think worship is important and I don’t think we have it all figured out yet.

I like how Real Life has phrased it’s core practice of worship; “Bringing to light God’s activity in the world through the corporate expressions of beauty and art.” Do we actually practice this? I would say…no. I don’t blame anyone at least not anymore than I blame myself. What are beauty and art? How do we corporately express them? I don’t even know what worship like that looks like. I agree with it whole heartedly but I just don’t know how to do it. My rough idea of how this looks is as follows:

We as a community of believers are so in touch with our community, town, nation, and world that we see God working in amazing beautiful ways every day. We are so infatuated with God’s grace and love that we have to express our love for Him through song, poetry, dance, photography, painting, sculpture, and literature.

I don’t know how we get from here to there but I would love to try.

I just read a blog post over at [ hold :: this space ] entitled skiving. It is a good short post (2 paragraphs) and worth a read. I want to call attention to the 2nd paragraph which is actually a quotation from their local paper. The person speaking is a representative from Pixar, the people behind the “Toy Story” movies and more recently “Cars”. I’ve pasted it here.

“People ask us all the time: ‘My child’s interested, so what computer programs should they study?’ What we always say is: ‘Study drawing, study your observations about the world — and study how to tell stories!’ Because storytelling is what it’s really about. Then it’s a matter of how to tell those stories visually, so those traditional skills that have been around forever are the foundation of what we do. That’s in spite of the fact that, yes, we’re innovators. But if you don’t have the foundations, it doesn’t matter. A computer is just another tool.”

When people ask me what about my job I tell them I’m a graphic designer. I should learn to not. This inevitably leads to them telling me or showing me something they or a family member has designed and is usually not very good. Then they ask me for my opinion and I give it to them. You may say that could be harsh or mean but remember they did ask. It’s not my fault.

After I have critiqued the work they always seem to ask what software I use. I would like to tell them that the software used is not the issue but I just answer the questions asked. (For those of you curious, I use industry standard software, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and some mac only programs like CSS Edit and Rapidweaver.) Sure, having the right tools makes any job easier. Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with a pair of pliers? But with out a solid understanding of form, color, space, line, texture, and typography your work will always be mediocre at best.

I have a 4 year degree in Art and that’s how I got my foundation in these things but that isn’t necessary. Some people have an innate sense of what looks good and how to use different elements and some people need to read some books and spend some time learning to draw. I am a designer but I also can draw, paint and sculpt. Almost every project I work on starts with a pencil and my sketch book.

I don’t write this to discourage any artists but to enlighten those that don’t understand what is involved in creating a good design, and perhaps expose the fact that under all the fancy computers and software there is a solid skill set of fine art.

Here in Nampa (and surrounding cities) we have these “10 Commandments” signs. I believe they began showing up a couple years ago when a local city park placard was being removed because it contained the 10 Commandments.

I have issue with these signs on several levels. First of which is poor design, but that is just obvious. I will start with how tacky they make our streets look. Nampa has it’s classy areas and it’s not so classy areas just like every other town, but it is by no stretch of the imagination in danger of being a classy place to live. Overall I would say Nampa needs a little sprucing up (new sidewalks, some fresh paint, weeds pulled etc.)

I was walking down a street the other day that needs some sprucing up and came across one of these signs. It sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn’t add to the aesthetic beauty of their front yard. I mean really! Great you care about a local issue and you want to show your concern but perhaps post a persuasive article in the local paper or something that would be more effective and not such an assault on everyones optical nerves.

That being said it is not the worst part about these signs. Most of the people who are up in arms on this issue are religious, I would assume Christians. Why are these local Christians so obsessed with this 10 commandments statue. It seems to me to be a very telling commentary on Christians as a group. Christ has called us to a life so much greater than following a list of rules. He has called us to love unconditionally! Now that is worth getting excited about. It seems that a majority of Christians in this country are not concerned with this glorious, and exciting unconditional love and more concerned on what you should and should not do. When I see these signs around town I am saddened by what I perceive is some of the underlying reasons that people love Christ but don’t really care for Christians.