We’re up to something new. This Sunday we launch a new service with me as the pastor.

It all starts in a movie theater 20 miles from our campus. A little bit different adventure for me. I finish preaching our 8 AM meeting, jump in the car and boogie to the other town. 

We’ve had a couple of dry runs with over a hundred people showing up last week. But this Sunday is the big one. We ran radio ads all week and put an ad on the internet. Now the terror begins. What if we shrink on our big day? What if more people come than we can handle? I can lose sleep over questions like these.

We have a great team. They have edicted that I can preach while staying out of their way. Couldn’t have it better in that department. But I am still a jumble of faith and fear all mixed up. 

I wonder if we’ll meet needs or just put on another show. Worry that we won’t build small groups fast enough to be a real church. Don’t want just a preaching point. Children’s church is already growing faster than we expected–good people are jumping in. 

So what’s my point? I’ve been launching churches for three decades and I still get the butterflies. In fact, i think they are healthy. They keep you humble and draw you nearer to God. Not a bad combination.

I’ll keep you posted.

Our staff is in the middle of performance reviews. We do them quarterly. And they are great.

Yesterday I was able to applaud great performance in one review. Provide support to someone badly in need of it in another. And, perhaps best of all, we were able to get four people together and untangle a string of mis-communications that were keeping each from fully contributing to the life and work of the others.

We began with quarterly reviews. Everyone thought that they came a bit too often. We drifted to doing them annually. Trouble with annual reviews is that you can barely remember your stated goals after 365 days. And there is that ever present problem of procrastination. A year is a very long time to put things off then try to catch up at the last minute.

We’re back to quarterly reviews. Solves the procrastination issue since you can “catch up” more often. Also allows people to get positive feedback for great performance more often. And it helps surface those inevitable communication gaps in any staff.

I’ve discovered that small businesses (and small churches) seldom have a review system in place. If I were starting over, I would calendar quarterly reviews from the very beginning. Healthy communication makes things grow.

I just got returned from Europe to find my face attached to a cartoon poster depicting superheroes. It was the kickoff for a teaching series called “Heroes and Villains.”

The idea was hatched by the younger members of our staff. The plan is to teach on the lives of little known—seldom discussed people in the Bible.

While I was gone they kicked off with a couple of the better known characters then moved into relative obscurity. The last couple of weeks have covered the examples of Haman and Anna. Anna gets all of three verses in the book of Luke. But , our congregation thrilled to her. She saw and she championed the potential she saw (prophetically) in a tiny human from Nazareth.

Haman on the other hand pried open some pretty hard hearts. He shows the futility of demanding respect, whether it is due you or not. His sad story brought relief to some ongoing conflict. God can use anyone.

Looks like we are in for several months of these heroes and villains also in for some strong blessings. Goes to show that every word in scripture has value if you do the data-mining.

Someone asked, “Why did you launch another website? Whatever happened to the old Church Planter’s Forum (www.cpforum.net)?

The short answer–as the list of contributors grew, cpforum morphed away from disciplemaking and church multiplication to a host of other topics. I needed to get back on track.

This site is decidedly different. It shamelessly promotes my books, contains a (fairly random) blog, my own current reading list and articles on disciplemaking and church multiplication. Mostly, it is a lot more focused than the previous site.

Its singular purpose is propagating the gospel by making disciples and multiplying churches.

I hope you will find the content useful enough to recommend it to others.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting held by our mayor, just for pastors.

Yes, Henry, you read that right–the mayor held a meeting for pastors. In fact, he’s held several such meetings during his first four years in office.

He even hosts annual “kick off the new year” prayer meetings (on his own time and never on city property), he’s met with pastors to hear concerns about interaction with city departments, etc. This time the meeting was to give him an opportunity to explain his vision for rapid transit on the world’s most beautiful island.

Beautiful it may be, but it also has the distinction of hosting America’s slowest morning traffic.

Both our mayor and city council have decided that a rail system is the best way to handle the problem. Having seen lots of big cities, I concur with them. Buses get stuck in traffic, trains do not!

The meeting was very cool. We thought beyond the train to the train stations–in other cities, they become small urban villages. Higher density, low-rise multi-use buildings make for lovely living spaces. People who live there can even ditch the expense of owning a car if they choose. This is how people live in Europe, Japan and Sydney, Australia.

We saw photos of village life in big cities around the world. And, we saw renderings of what I hope will be our future.

That is, some of us saw them. Entire movements of pastors chose not to show up. Afraid of crossing church/state boundaries? Simply dis-interested in their community? I don’t know. I do know that the church is becoming increasingly sidelined in our culture. I’m appalled that we so easily criticize politicians for locking us out then refuse to meet with them when they invite us to the table.

I once spoke with a legislator who said he was afraid of Christians because they are “single-issue voters.” I asked what that meant. He replied, “Whenever you stick your neck out for them on their issue, you can count on them to retreat from you on every other issue. They don’t make good constituents.”

I for one would like a better reputation than that one. Besides that, the mayor served a great lunch along with the talk he gave. So why not show up, listen, eat and ask a couple of questions?

Did you ever question all the meetings in your church?

Not that there are too many (probably are). But that there is such a disconnect between them.

Pity the poor pastor who preaches three distinct messages a week. Sunday AM is probably a “get saved” message. Sunday night something from the Old Testament. And, midweek we do a little of the epistles.

Pity all-the-more the poor person trying to load up on all this and somehow integrate it into a busy life. To make matters even more confusing add a radio preacher or half-a-dozen podcasts and you don’t know which way is up.

Then there are Vacation Bible Schools, leadership/marriage/managing money seminars and so on. All this is useful if it is integrated. But usually it is not. They say that people can only implement one life-changing message every seven days. There has to be a better way!

Can you picture a continuum where we begin discipling a not-yet-follower of Christ with a steady path that would bring some all the way to planting churches in other countries. And, how could we do it without a continued sense of purpose where all learning tools complimented each other?

Question: “How can we get back to basics if we’ve lost our way? The New Testament seems to suggest such a path…

Thought I was being patient. I waited two weeks before attempting to buy the new Iphone.

Got home to discover that it wouldn’t sync my Outlook Calendar. Stayed up till midnite discovering that it wasn’t intended to work with Outlook 2002. During that time I downloaded every patch that google could offer.

Spent my day off upgrading to Outlook 2007 which now wouldn’t access my email.

Then spent a sixteen hour workday turning my computer into a brick and building it back from scratch. All that only to find nothing much had changed. Got a little help and got email working and the calendar would move from the computer to the phone. But still crying over lost time and a frustrating phone.

That was last week. This week, Apple did an Itunes upgrade that solved the whole mess. Everything works!

Somewhere, there is a message here about patience and not always taking things into my own hands. I’m always in a hurry, but some things are best left to those who have the real power to make change, Jesus for instance…

I’m still learning the bigger lessons of life after all these years.

A month ago I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia just in time to witness the first anti-government riots since Mongolia’s revolution against China a century earlier.

Bright sun partnered with a soft breeze to provide a perfect day for introducing my friends to a dose of Mongolian Culture. As always, the stark beauty of the place delighted visitors.

As my friends gawked at the monuments, I was busy shooting pictures of a city rebuilding itself faster than any other I’ve visited. Gold and copper mines coupled with hints of oil are transforming this city faster than Sao Paulo or perhaps Shanghi.

Touring the national square before a week of teaching was a little more interesting because of the contrasts. At the top of the square (think Tiananmen) workmen put final touches on a marvelous new monument to Genghis Khan while boys on skate boards enjoyed the smooth pavement. Nearby a young man raced a midget motorcycle between clusters of people collecting signatures to protest an election they believe stolen by the ruling Communist party.

Speaking of the Communists, loud shouting emanated from their headquarters just off the square. Mongolians took it to be a rally supporting their election victories. But it wasn’t…

Within an hour we got a cell phone message that the news had reported shots fired during the “growing demonstration.” We hustled off to watch the proceedings from the safety of our hotel room.

Everyone looked frightened. Rioters armed with sticks and stones tentatively pressed police lines. Closeups of police and soldiers revealed eyes filled with terror. Most were holding their fire while doing their best to fend off a hail of rocks, A few more mature cops fired tear gas and the occasional rubber bullet into the crowd. Then the police fell back and demonstrators entered the Communist headquarters.

Soon the bolder demonstrators began tossing bottle after bottle of expensive liquor to the waiting crowds. The bottles became missiles for smashing windows and dowsing offices with alchohol. The goal was to burn the building in hopes that the world would notice a small country where democracy seems to have run off its tracks.

One week of martial law later, many voice suspicions that the government let the riot get out of control as an excuse to round up the opposition. Official media vows to execute the “ringleaders.” Buddhist priests proclaimed the whole thing a “Christian” travesty and called for ending the “Christian problem.”

Meanwhile I met with hundreds of Jesus people who love their country, pray for its salvation and take pride in its strong history along with its newfound verve.

The Western church needs the Mongolian church as it does every other in the world. Few understand that the rampage of Genghis prevented Islamic conquest of Europe during the middle ages. There would be neither renaissance or reformation without the Mongol hoards.

Today Mongolian Christians have grown from just 5 people in 1990 to more than 100,000 or four percent of the country. They believe they will number ten percent by 2020… they plant churches with that intention. They send missionaries back across the ancient Silk Road. We need these people. They need our prayers, short-term missionaries and our support.