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 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.

Today Real Life Community Church started it’s Economic Stimulus Project. You can find out more here. The idea is that with these economic stimulus checks we’re getting from the United States Government we should do something greater than spend it on stuff that will just break in a month.

We live in such a consumeristic society and I understand that consumerism is what drives capitalism but I think we’ve gone to an extreme and put ourselves in a tight spot. Americans have a problem with spending money they don’t have, myself included, we rack up massive credit card debt and end up paying for items that are long since busted for 20 years. This doesn’t make sense.

Why not take this money from the government and put it toward a credit card and get out of debt or on your way if you have a lot of debt. There is freedom in being debt free and it is worth so much more than the new BlueRay Player. I’m sure there are several of you that are not in debt at all and good for you. That is awesome, if you’re not in debt then you don’t need the extra money… so why not it give it to an organization that is helping relieve global poverty. We are so spoiled in this country and this money can be given to a lesser developed nation to help them get a stronger economy.

What are you going to do with your Check? Let me know in the comments.

This was my original cover art for this weeks Church program. It ended up leading people in the opposite direction of what Pastor Dana wanted them to be thinking about so we axed it. I had way too much fun putting it together so I thought I’d share it here. Enjoy.

This week the Staff of Real Life Community Church is experimenting with the idea of telecommuting or working from home or a virtual office, whatever you want to call it. Three days in and I am a little lonely but getting a lot accomplished. I had my first multi-person chat in iChat today and yesterday had a short video chat. Technology is so much fun. I think that is why I like working from home because I get to use so much more cool guy tech than I usually get to use. Above is a picture of my setup at home. I get a lot done with everything setup like this but sometimes I want to get out of the house and work at a coffee shop or something and I miss my big monitors. But I’ve got syncing setup between my computers so if I do leave, work and come home then my files are automatically transfered to my iMac. I’ve seriously had way too much fun setting up a home office this past week.

The youth at Real Life Community Church are holding a fundraiser in the Flying M parking lot. $1 gets you 3 hits with a sledge hammer on a car. The money goes to feed children in a 3rd world hunger. Oh and I designed the poster.

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.

This Christmas season our theme at Real Life Community Church is “The Christmas Machine”. Pastor Dana will be discussing the disease of consumerism that plagues us as a nation.

Through out this season we will be partnering with several organizations to bring this problem to light and to do something about it. And by doing something about it we don’t mean just for one sunday. We need to change our patterns of living and what we find as important and necessary.

The 2 organizations we are working with are:

This can be a life changing time of year and in my opinion it should be. Please join with us in changing the world.

We spent a majority of last week cleaning and reorganizing the church office. I got to move to a new office. Exciting stuff. I painted 2 walls and even have enough room to set up my easel to paint. Yeah!!

In reflection of this last sundays sermon at Real Life (listen here), I have a lot of questions and few answers.

What does it mean to do life together? I guess I should start by defining life. My life consists of sleep, work, friends, family, chores, hobbies, and movie watching. Not a very detail list I know but generalities will work here.

So if I take all of these areas of my life how do I share/do them in a community? Should I do them in the context of a community? Real Life has small groups called “Real Groups“, and they is how we are to live in community.

My initial response is to build a commune and we all live together but that’s seems a little excessive and creepy. The opposite of that is the standard small group structure where you meat together for 2hrs each week. That doesn’t seem like sharing/doing life together, that seems more like a meeting you go to each week. This doing life together must fall somewhere in between a commune and a weekly meeting.

The early Christians met nightly and shared a common meal. Is this too much to expect from todays busy people? I think so, but what about being open to the idea? What if you could spend a majority of your free time with friends and family? Sharing your hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations and joys. Not that you have to have serious life changing conversations at all times but just because you are together you experience these things together.

I’m all for this. I have 2 “Real Groups” I attend, one I “lead” (why does a group of friends need a leader?), and is sponsored by Real Life. The other is a group of friends that get together every friday to hangout and play video games, watch movies, eat dinner, or whatever else we want to do. This second group is not an official Real Life Real Group but at times seems to be more effective in doing life together than the Official Group.

This last monday we had our Real Group at our house and my wife made dinner. We invited some people that were a part of the Friday night group in an attempt to bring 2 worlds together and to have more people to share our lives with. It was a great success and I hope everyone will return this next week. I think we are all on our way to living in community and doing life together.