Today was the first day I visited my churches’ second campus. It’s our second work week in there - last week the sound was set up and this week I helped set up the video. We’re still working through some kinks in the video quality, since we’re shooting HDV (not HD) 1080i60 and I’ve never worked with that before. The image is enormous, though (about 35 feet wide). I reminisced to the days of meeting in the school - before we acquired our current warehouse. There’s a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork that setup and tear-down fosters that seems lacking when in a fixed location. I definitely felt that today. I look forward to many more weeks, months, and years of that. The current plan at Journey is to reach all of Raleigh, and that involves many campuses.

Paul Tripp, author of War of Words and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands, has some interesting comments on language. Warning: some words in this may be offensive.

So, recently my life has gotten crazy, but in a good way. Three weeks ago my church hired me as their “Production Assistant” - aka “help keep one of the pastor’s sane” plus “do whatever else is needed” guy. I love it and it’s amazing, but I also kept my other job. Both are part-time, but part-time for a growing church is code for full-time. Heh. It is great, though. I’ve been producing intro videos (check out our page on facebook) as well as editing sermon videos (for DVD and web) and creating a commercial (coming soon to local Raleigh TV and select movie theaters). I’ve also been revamping the webpage until our out-sourced redesign goes through (takeajourney.org) and setting up a blog for our pastor (not completed yet). There’s also a ton of other stuff, but I would have to pull out my schedule to remember it.

We’ll see how often I get to blog now. ;p

Ed Stetzer writes about Influencing Churches on his blog. In this, is lists different problems that surface in churches. Here is his abbreviated list; the full list is in his book Comeback Churches.

• Institutionalized church–this is the church that has lost its way within the forms and programs of ministry. This church is just going through the motions and has forgotten the real purpose for which it exists.
• Voluntary association church–this church functions more like a democracy rather than based on New Testament principles. Competing factions help maintain the “status quo” because of a desire to keep everyone happy.
• Unintentional church–this is the church that often has good intentions but have difficulty acting on those intentions. This church has a hard time embracing an intentional process for making disciples.
• “Us four and nor more” church–this is the church that practically believes that growth will destroy their “sweet fellowship.” The desire is to maintain a “family feel” which can make it hard for new people to break into the group.
• “We can’t compete” church–this is most often the smaller church that has concluded that there is no way they can compete with the program-rich larger churches, and so, they stop trying to be the church.

I’ve recently begun reading a vast quantity of blogs via Google Reader. I’ve noticed that many of them are a complete waste of time, especially the local news. It will give a snippet of some story about some random guy getting some sentence at a trial I never heard about for some very petty crime. Also a waste of time is any story related to some pop culture star. While I do want to be able to converse well with the culture and be relevant (hence the name of this blog), I struggle with the pettiness of some of it. Case in point: the TV show Extra. I feel like I lose one IQ point for every second I watch it. Anyone feel the same way about this?