Jeremiah Richards
MidTown Fellowship Experience
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So if you work for a church you know the feeling of pulling off a great service and yet not really connecting with God for yourself. It shouldn’t be that way, I have built systems that are designed to help keep me and the rest of the staff healthy, but sometimes it happens.
So last week Michelle and I, during one of those moments, decided to attend MidTown Fellowship. We had heard great things about MidTown, but had never been there.
Dustin Willis, the lead pastor is doing a great job of creating an church motivated by one vision, to be missionaries to our city. I must have heard that said 10 times during our time at the State Museum. They are a portable church and are using a fantastic space at the South Carolina State Museum. They do a good job making their portable location work. They utilize some fantastic children’s space for their children’s environments and the whole place has a very urban feel with exposed brick and exposed beam ceilings.
The thing I was most impressed with was not how well they did church. There were many things they could improve on and I am sure they will as they continue to move ahead, but what impressed me most was how well the invested in the things that mattered most in carrieing out their vision. I know with unlimited rescources they would imporve several things, but God is moving and Dustin is doing a great job maximising that momentum. I personally know several people who have invited friends to MidTown who have accepted Christ at MidTown, and that is really all that matters!
A few of the things they are doing really well are their media production, worship experience, community missions / outreach and teaching Gods word. I believe God will continue to bless this ministry as they are a blessing to the downtown community.
Rock on MidTown, keep it up God is using you!
Caption Please
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So a blogging companion, Carlos Whittaker over at www.ragamuffinsoul.com, is notorious for posting pictures that are either funny, gross, bizarre, or amazing images and than he asks for a caption. This was his latest one.
Caption please?
I replied,
Spinach artichoke dip, yum. Who has a chip?
So I have a growing collection of such images captured on my iphone and I thought I might share them and ask you to do the same.
Here is the first one.
Caption please.
Small Blessings
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So today I got to go out to lunch with my wife and kids to Chilis’s. It is alwasy nice to be able to break for lunch with the family. After we finished eating I asked the waiter for the check and he told me it was taken care of. The waiter told me that the guys sitting across the isle had paid my bill. My wife and I just sat there.
We have done that to others, but to my knowledge it had never been done to us. The waiters we shocked. To them it was a testimony of kindness, to me it was God, in a small way, saying I care and I am involved. My wife and I are not struggling financially, but it still spoke to us. The God that holds the earth in it’s place motivated a couple of buisness men to reach into their pockets to bless me.
God, Thank you.
So what small act of kindness or encouragement have you recieved lately?
Best Reads For Today
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I had to repost these 2 blogs I read today.
From Steven Furtick:
“I told our team the other day:
We’ve got to become more comfortable with controversy!
We’ve learned how to tolerate it and move past it. Now it’s time for us to learn to view it as a gift, and use it to our advantage. Controversy is a sign of progress. Controversy is a sign of impact. Controversy is a precursor to promotion. And a training ground for greater things.
If you want to be like Christ, expect controversy.
And when it comes, don’t fight it. Ride it. Pray through it. Learn from it. Celebrate it.
And watch God use it to elevate you to your next level.”
and from the Deadly Voper Blog:
“I love what J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, said in a speech given at Harvard. It resonates so strongly with why we believe in being “People of the Second Chance.”
In recalling her days when she was a divorced, single Mom, almost homeless, and feeling like a total failure she says:
“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.””
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I am on twitter. You can follow what I am working on and doing by checking (http://twitter.com/jdstwit) here, or by watching the twitter update on the sidebar of my blog.
What is your favorite twitt?
Leadership Pitfall
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So yesterday I was in small group and an interesting idea surfaced that is true not just in leadership but in many arenas of life. As you lead your organization it is easy to get paralyzed by the potential of making a bad decision. We labor countless hours to make the best decisions possible, but the most dangerous enemy to progress is not a wrong decision. The thing that will sideline your organization’s forward progress more than anything is complacency.
Nothing is more contagious and destructive than complacency and nothing is easier to fall into either. As christian leaders we often go to great lengths to guard ourselves from the destructive power of sin, and we need to, but we put so much effort into not doing sinful things that complacency just happens.
Where in your leadership are you prone to complacency? Where are you suffering from just good enough?
Leadership Mess
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Leadership thought.
Without oxen a stable stays clean, but you need a strong ox for a large harvest.
Prov. 14:4 (NLT)
Your thoughts?
