Awesome Game!

So I got the chance to go to last night's Red Wings Game...here's my brief observations:

• Standing Room Only (my ticket) was a great view, but left my feet cramped at the end of the night.
• Darren McCarty is not a good Hockey player now, but he is well liked by the fans, according to the standing O at starting announcements...
• Watching Squirt hockey (9-10 year olds) is more entertaining than Fox Intermission Report.
• It is eerily silent during play--I am so used to commentary!
• And finally, RockStar Energy Drink in a clear plastic cup looks A LOT like Beer--Nice Ben! (And thanks for the Tickets!)
  

This has got to be the last time...

So last Monday I was in a tshirt and jeans in 60 degrees with no coat, enjoying the sunshine.

Today I am in my winter coat with boots and mittens scrapping 4" of snow off my car.

Gotta love Michigan!

Re-energizing the ministry

Tonight at the Flood, the High School Ministry at Lakeside, we are almost Re-Launching the way we do ministry. We are making a big shift from an up front message driven ministry to a small group environment, where the teaching happens in small groups. This comes as a result of...

• Our Small Group ministry collapsing because students couldn't "afford" another night out
• Our Main program basically collapsing because relationships weren't the focus
• Our Events declining in attendance because students didn't have the information

Here's the scary thing. The only think I can prove is the 3 things that have happened and not the reasons why. I am only assuming those things and so therefore changing our programming. This could be either awesome for our ministry or could potentially destroy it. I guess we'll leave that up to God...

Website Overhaul...

Just overhauled the Lakeside Website. A lot better layout (I think) and structure. Check it out.

Post-Easter

Just like everyone else in Christian land, I will write a quick review of how Easter went at Lakeside.

We had a decent response from our mailing. In fact we are still getting people calling for information. It seems that most of the people who came because of the mailing were looking for a church, so hopefully we will have lots of return guests over the next few weeks!

One cool thing we did was used a newer product called Igniter Tracks. We used the video "Jesus Paid It All" and it worked great. Basically It is the video with a click track behind it that only the band and I had in our In-Ear monitors--this way we could stay with the video, but do a live song over it. Pretty powerful stuff!

50,000 Postcards

Lakeside sent out 50,000 postcards to our neighbors around the surrounding community. It really is serving TWO purposes, first to invite people to Easter Sunday. Also, because we are now meeting at Lakeview High School we wanted to let people know we are in that community now. Who knows how many new guests we'll have as a result, but I can tell you already, the postcards were delivered yesterday and we have received about a dozen phone calls asking about the church and referencing the card and our website hits have DOUBLED!

I can't wait for Sunday!

The last few months...

I know I haven't blogged in a LONG time, so I thought I figured for anyone stopping by here, I would cathc them up on a few things going on in the church...

1. (AUGUST) After our worship pastor resigned, I have been taking over those duties of leading the worship on Sunday mornings (In addition to the student ministry as usual) I have enjoyed this, although it does add quite a bit more to my plate.

2. (OCTOBER) We have a new Vision plan for the church that we launched in October. It doesn't seem new anymore, but there was a lot involved in pulling off this entire series. The new vision is that we want every Lakesider to "Live for God, Love Others, and Reach The World." It is basically taken straight from the Great Comandment (Love God and Love Others...) and the Great Commission (Go into all the world...) and helps us organize and fulfill our purpose as a church. We think the people REALLY have grabbed onto this as something they can take part in!

3. (DECEMBER) Christmas season is always busy. Especially leading worship, but we had a great Christmas program last December

4. (MARCH) Starting March 2nd our church has done the craziest thing since I have been here (almost 6 years!) We leased out our building to a smaller african american apostolic church (just very different from us) and begun leasing on a long term basis a local high school. We have moved from a 300 seat auditorium, 75 cap childrens space, 99 parking space facility to a 1500 seat auditorium, almost unlimited children's space, and close to 500 parking space facility. This is the next step in our BELIEVE campaign, for building a new building. I imagine we will be in this new facility for quite some time (probably as long as our people and the school will let us!)

And now it is Easter. So my plan is to get back to blogging...yeah right, see you next September!