15 Minutes of 15 Minutes

11 May , 2012 No Comments

You’ve probably heard the expression “15 minutes of fame.” Odds are, you haven’t ever been famous enough to experience it yourself. Me neither. But this week I was able to experience 15 minutes of someone else’s 15 minutes of fame.

It began in the Mississippi airport security line. Admittedly, not a location I’d expect this story to begin with.

A few of us from Central were coming back from visiting a church in Mississippi and when we prepared to go through the airport security line we had to pass through dozens of people milling around and holding signs. The signs had different variations of the phrase “Mississipi loves Skylar Laine.”

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The Humble Brag

09 May , 2012 No Comments

This post is as much for me as it is for you. Let me begin there.

The rise of social media has brought with it a tempting opportunity that is hard for the typical person to resist. They call it the humble brag. At its core, it happens whenever someone acts surprised by how good they are and it manifests itself in numerous subtle ways. Here’s a recent tweet that I saw that included not one, but TWO humble brags at once! See if you can catch them.

I black out the names because both of the people involved are good Christian dudes. That’s the point of this all—we can all easily fall into this trap. This is a guy who has a very popular blog and has asked a guest writer to post on it. The guest writer then humble brags about the amazing response to his post and then the blog owner retweets it and let’s him know that he is also surprised at how popular his blog is!

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False Advertising

07 May , 2012 No Comments

This cartoon made me laugh. Terms and Conditions pages have become absurd. I think I might have actually read one or two a few years ago. Now I don’t even think that there is something I’m supposed to do about them other than check the little box next to them.

We do the same thing in other areas of life. Think of how we often describe Christianity to people. It will answer all your questions, fix all your problems, and make sure that you are always happy. Just check the box and accept Jesus into your heart.

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Crowdsourcing the Message

25 Apr , 2012 No Comments

It’s been a few weeks now since my book officially released and I wanted to take a moment and explain who it is written for and what it’s about. If you follow my blog you probably are aware of it—but you might not have an adequate understanding of the book itself.

I wrote the book with a healthy dose of humor—so hopefully it is an enjoyable read for just about anyone—but there are three groups of people in particular that I believe would benefit from it.

  1. Preachers—it doesn’t just have to be senior pastors. Anybody who teaches regularly in the Church can benefit from a team approach like this book discusses. Student pastors or volunteer teachers can all benefit from the process.
  2. Teaching-minded Church attendees—the collaborative preaching approach invites non-staff members of the Church into the preaching development process. If you have a love for what is said during the weekend messages, this could be you. Even if you aren’t a preacher or never plan to get on stage yourself. This is the group I hope gets the most out of the book.
  3. Central attendees—even if you wouldn’t consider yourself in groups 1 or 2 you may be interested in this discussion if you have a love for what God is doing through Central. This book offers a unique, behind-the-scenes look at our process and much of it would be things that the typical person at Central is unaware of.

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No One Will Remember

23 Apr , 2012 No Comments

I got into a conversation this weekend about time management. I was asked whether productive people are born that way or if I thought it was more like a discipline that someone could intentionally choose. While I hadn’t necessarily thought through all of this before, I found it to be an interesting conversation.

My answer is that I think we’re all born with a default setting when it comes to our time management. Beyond that it depends on how we intentionally choose to spend our time. Personally, I budget my time each day in my mind. Like a financial budget, this allows me to tell my hours how to be spent before I get to them.

In our conversation, I also thought of a scene from the movie Troy that has always stuck with me. In the scene, a boy is summoned to get Achilles to fight one on one with the best fighter from a different army. I’ve only seen the movie once, but I’ve never forgotten the following dialogue:

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God is Alive and Well!

18 Apr , 2012 No Comments

[A] few days ago we had another baptism weekend at Central. I spoke about the idea of things beyond explanation and the fact that life with God is more than coincidence. We were blessed to witness 193 submit to Christ in baptism across our four campuses! You can watch the message in the video above.

I want to share a couple of incredible stories that were emailed to me. The first will make you laugh and the second might bring you to tears. A couple of things to keep in mind as you read are the fact that there were two references to the movie Nacho Libre in the service (announcement video one-liner and “baptism” scene at the beginning of the message). Also, I have changed certain parts of their emails to keep it vague.

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