Josh Young

I’m watching the videos of the main sessions from the 2008 Unleash Conference at NewSpring Church, and Perry Noble just said something that really hit me hard.

He was talking about the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, but he didn’t talk about the lost son. He talked about the other son.

Basically, his point was that the older son was so busy out in the field working for his father, that he didn’t know his father’s heart. He drew the parallel that we as the church can get so caught up in “doing the Father’s work” that they don’t spend any time with him to know his heart.

It’s not that we do the “wrong” things or that we’re not doing it for the right reason or in God’s name, but a lot of times we end up making it “our work” instead of the Father’s work. And we don’t spend any time with Him in the process.

I think this is one of the biggest things I can be guilty of. A lot of times I get so caught up in doing the Father’s work that I neglect spending time with him.

I really believe if we’re able to reconcile these two things, God will move in powerful ways in our lives and in our church.

Let’s spend more time with the Father while we’re doing His work.

Last Sunday, we didn’t have a “sermon” at Amelia. The last message in our Decibels series was brought by four individuals in our church family via video testimonies or stories.

I finally got them posted last night, so you can see all four of them on our website.

Go check them out when you have a few minutes. Several of us put quite a bit of work into them (including the four people who gave their stories, Mike, Brian, and myself), and we hope they affect you as much as they did us. One of them is even from my wife, Marie.

It was an awesome weekend, and people are still continuing the discussion even today, which is a great sign.

Great things happen when God’s people are real.

Amelia Church of Christ - Shouting With Your Story

My brother, Joel, just posted about a book he recently read called Reveal. We were talking about it some as I was visiting with them and my new nephew this weekend.

It’s written by Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, and it takes a new look at the ways in which we measure the spiritual growth of people.

Check out what Joel had to say about it and visit their website for more info. Looks like an excellent book.

Joel Young

Reveal

Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church has been posting several video portions of a talk he gave called Death by Ministry (via TheResurgence). Every one of them is full of great stuff. He talks about leadership methods, stress, burnout, health, etc.

Below are links to all eleven parts of the video. If you’re in church leadership (or any sort of leadership for that matter), these are a must watch. Each one is around 10 minutes long, and they’re totally worth every minute of your time.

• Death by Ministry - Part 1
• Death by Ministry - Part 2
• Death by Ministry - Part 3
• Death by Ministry - Part 4
• Death by Ministry - Part 5
• Death by Ministry - Part 6
• Death by Ministry - Part 7
• Death by Ministry - Part 8
• Death by Ministry - Part 9
• Death by Ministry - Part 10
• Death by Ministry - Part 11

We’re back from CIY and now in the midst of VBS (it’s like the month of acronyms or something).

CIY was amazing. It was great to get to know some of our high schoolers more and to see them grow throughout the week. We have some great kids at ACC.

Marie and I also got a lot out of the week aside from the kids. The whole conference was just a great experience (just as I remember it being when I was in high school myself).

One thing that was amazing to me (and yet not surprising) was the way technology has shaped what we do at these things in the last 10 years. The amount of audio, video, lighting, etc. that was used there was staggering. It’s amazing the resources that we have now that we could have only dreamed of 10 years ago. CIY did a great job of marrying everything together to produce some amazing worship experiences. They were able to use these tools to engage a very large group of otherwise distracted and media blitzed teenagers.

Along that line, one of the electives I attended was called “Backstage Pass and Production Principles,” and it was basically a tour of the whole stage setup (back and front of house) and Q&A session with the Production Manager, Josh Maichele. Josh was very impressive. He took any and all questions, and he was a great resource to all of us there. He ran a killer production, and he was extremely nice. It was great to ask him specific questions about how they do what they do, and to see up-close all of the equipment and props they were using.

I’ll post more later on the week. I’m also working on some videos from it all, and I’ll post them once I get them finished.

CIY

Luminous Student Ministries

Just read an excellent blog posting by Mark Batterson of National Community Church in Washington, DC. It’s actually an excerpt from a book he is contributing to on decoding culture, which is one of the themes for Buzz07 (which Mike and I were really hoping to go to this year - next year we’ll be there for sure).

I’ll just let it speak for itself.

Decoding Culture via Evotional.com

Our new student ministries website is officially live starting today. You can visit it at www.ameliastudents.com.

We’ve worked really hard to make it a safe and fun place for our students and their friends. You’ll probably see some changes with it over the next several months as we tweak it to be even more centered on the needs of our students.

On the tech side of things, I built the site using WordPress 2.0.7 (there are some conflicts with 2.1 and the polls plugin that we’re using) with a custom widgetized template that I designed. I also integrated Vanilla 1.0.3 (forum) into the design.

Here is a list of WordPress plugins we’re using on the site:

• About Me Widget
• Akismet
• Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer
• Auto-hyperlink URLs
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Email Shroud
• FD Feedburner Plugin
• Google Analyticator (gotta love those stats)
• Google Sitemaps
• Image Manager
• Page Links To
• Polite-ifier
• Search Pages
• Sidebar Widgets
• WP-ContactForm
• WP-Polls
• WP-Polls Widget

Here is a list of Vanilla extensions we’re using on the site:

• Account Pictures 1.1
• Announcement 1.2
• Applicant E-mail Verification 0.4.0
• BBInsert Bar 0.1.5
• Better BB Code 1.0
• Discussion Filters 2.0
• Extended Text Formatter 1.0
• Guest Welcome Message 1.0
• Hide Success 1.0
• Invite Friends 0.3
• Legends 1.0
• MarkAllRead 1.0
• New Applicants 1
• NewsMailer 0.2
• Predefined Attributes 0.3.3
• Private Accounts 1.0
• Role History 1.0
• STOP CAPS ABUSE 1.0
• Saved Searches 2.0
• Smooth Page Jump 1.0
• Yellow Fade Effect 0.1
• Comments Permalinks 1.0

For the games on the site, we’re using code from a free Miniclip.com game each month. Watch out, the game I have up as Last Month’s Game is really addicting!

Luminous Student Ministries - ameliastudents.com

Wordpress

Vanilla

Miniclip.com

Our very own Mike Edmisten is being featured in a Cincinnati Enquirer article called Preaching beyond the pulpit: Web-savvy pastors turn to blogs.

It’s pretty cool to see the things that have changed and the new people that have been reached because of the use of our website and Mike’s blog. He’s really embraced it wholeheartedly, and he’s committed to being real with people, which is awesome. Hopefully even more people will be reached and affected because of these tools.

Mike Edmisten: Enquirer Article

Enquirer: Preaching beyond the pulpit: Web-savvy pastors turn to blogs