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.

I have a dream! Don’t all good speeches start with that? But seriously, I am in the process of starting the Real Life Visual Arts Ministry. So far I’ve just been asking for anyone interested in art to let me know they are interested. I have yet to start describing what I want this beast to look like…

I envision the VAM to be and do several things I will list them here now and in future posts dive deeper into what they involve.

1. Integrate Visual Art into our Sunday worship services.

2. Help educate others about art and how it can be used as a form of worship.

3. Be a support and critique resource for the artists at Real Life.

4. Start and run a not for profit art gallery for local artists to show and sell their work.

We at Real Life Community Church try to do all things with excellence, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the excellence of our budgeting. Recently we’ve been working towards a large project starting in the Fall that hasn’t been officially announced yet but will be very exciting and worth all the work.I’ve been working on a, for lack of a better term, “promotional brochure” for this upcoming project. It was supposed to be a 2 week turn around and has now been over a month. We received a proof back yesterday and everything looked great so I told the printer to go ahead an print. Then we noticed one glaring typo which lead to a complete rescan through the entire document for more errors and several more were found. You may be wondering if we even proofed this document before this and, yes we did and by about 10 different people. We made a lot of changes and it was a good process to go through but when I got the proof back this morning with all the new corrections I was discouraged and may have said a curse word or two in my head (oops).
But shortly after that I remembered what the goal of this project was and how Real Life strives for excellence. So as a apart of that team, idea and having subscribed to the vision of Real Life I gladly make more changes and spend more time on this beast of a project because of you, because of me, because of our community of believers/non-believers and because of a vision for the future.

photo courtesy of http://www.jeromegerull.de/

More real life staff have started writing blogs (it’s about time guys). Our childrens pastor Heather is blogging at leastof.blogspot.com and our youth pastor Sherri has writen her first blog over at sherribeth.blogspot.com. Give them a read and a comment. Encourage them to write more. Thanks for joining the conversation.

How do you cast a vision? Why don’t people catch a vision once it’s been cast? Do people not get inspired anymore?For those of us that do get inspired, for me it’s daily, what can be done to share this great experience with those around us? For me as part of the staff of a church I deal daily with vision casting and trying to get people to care about the things that God cares about. This is an up hill battle for sure and it is very discouraging sometimes.

Imagine if you will a place where you have friends, friends so close you could call them family. These people love and accept you for who you are, where you are, and what you are, right now. These people may or may not care about the environment, politics, social injustice or religion but that’s ok because they love each other for the simple fact that they exist and what they believe doesn’t matter to receive and give that love.

Sounds pretty good to me. How about you? This is part the vision of Real Life Community Church, but getting people to actually live this vision out in their lives is harder than it seems. With an idea (it’s Christs’ idea) as good as this why don’t people want to live it? Here are a couple easy ways to join in.

1. This Blog. I spend time and energy on this blog every week. I enjoy it. I could enjoy it more if people would read it and leave comments. I have publicized it at church, on the website, and in the weekly email but to no avail. This blog is for you. It is here so we can have a discussion and share ideas, concerns and to celebrate life and beauty. This is an easy way for you to start giving and receiving the love I spoke of earlier.

2. Real Groups. At Real Life Community Church we are a church of small groups and not a church with small groups. I am a group “leader”. I hate that term. I don’t want to lead why does a group of friends getting together to “do” life together need a leader? I’ve been inviting several people to our group and they just don’t seem interested. Some attend Real Life and some don’t. Those that don’t I can understand but those that do attend Real Life really don’t have a excuse (unless they just don’t like me, and that is very possible). They attend a church thats vision is to share life together in community but these people don’t join in a community (real group) to do this. They come every week to a Sunday service but don’t understand the vision of the church. Why? I hear it preached from the pulpit (music stand) every week. I don’t think it could be any clearer. So why attend a church were you don’t even buy into the vision. If you just want to sit there then do it somewhere else.

This may sound mean, like I don’t have this love that I talk about but that is not the case. I say these things because I do love you, I don’t even know who if anyone reads this, but I love you. I want the best for you I want you to live you life to the fullest and experience things beyond you imagination. I think this is possible by living the way Christ exemplified. That’s the driving force behind everything we do at Real Life.

But…I could be wrong.

This week the staff of Real Life Community Church went to Salt Lake City Utah for a retreat. It was a much needed break from the busy pace of day to day operations. We got a lot of planning done and were able share some quality time together. On friday afternoon we visited a non-profit organization called Art Space.

Art Space is a non-profit organization that provides living, studio, and gallery space for artists in the Salt Lake area. This a very cool organization. By building new buildings and remodeling old buildings in a older part of town they have brought awareness and revitalization to that part of town.

Because their organization is for artists they draw patrons of the arts to that part of town, which in turn brings more interest and money. With the artists living in Art Space buildings they can continue to afford to live/work there even though property values are rising because of their artistic influence in the community.

It was very exciting to view the Art Space operation and see what can be done to a forgotten part of town. After our tour the Real Life staff discussed how we could use some of this new knowledge to encourage art and revitalization in Nampa. It will be a slow process and won’t change overnight but we want to open a gallery for local artists. A place where artists can show their work free of charge and hopefully sell some. Right now we don’t know exactly how this will look or where we will do it but our initial thought is in our office building.

Sound off in the comments and let me know what you think. Is this something that Nampa needs? Are there enough artists to support something like this?