History in the Making

The WIBO Virus Alive and Well

After two years of hiatus, the idea virus that is Whiteboard is still alive. Yesterday, I announced we're doing it again on Friday, May 21 here in Virginia Beach and...

• This blog received the most single-day hits in its entire history... by double.
• People are taking advantage of the pre-website $69 rate... event unseen.
• We're hosting it on a Friday so you can enjoy the beach... Whiteboard is about to become WhiteboardWalk.
• We're waiting on confirmations from just two speakers.
• We're having Q&A time built into the program this time.
• Our goal is to put leaders on stage together who would never appear together at other conferences due to methodological differences.
• May 21 is late enough for great beach weather... and early enough for pre-Memorial day rates on hotels.
• Announcing some speakers next week...

Undercover Compassion

Lots of undercover work going on by the Royal Family in England. First, the Duchess of York disguises herself to expose the horrid conditions of Turkish orphanages...

Then Prince William secretly sleeps on the streets of London to later bring awareness to homelessness.

Great examples of helping people experience causes rather than just advocate them.

Big Announcement

 
In 2008, I launched a 1-day conference called The Whiteboard Sessions.

It was One Day.
8 Influential Church Leaders.
30 Minutes Each.

The purpose was for each speaker to present one compelling idea for ministry. It was a grassroots success with nearly 900 people in attendance.

This year, we're doing it again on Friday, May 21, 2010 here in Virginia Beach at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts.

At most events, speakers show up with a well-crafted, prepared talk. But we're asking speakers to treat Whiteboard like an extended “senior-level staff meeting” where they wrestle with a new idea. It may be untested; it may be a new biblical insight; or it may be a proven strategy that they’re just now ready to share.

I'm still confirming speakers and working on the website, but it's shaping up to be a remarkable gathering. I'll start announcing some of the speakers next week...

In the meantime, I'm offering a special rate of $69 per person until the site is launched in late January.

You can register [HERE].

Wednesday Morning Run-Down

• John Piper's message at Matt Chandler's church on Sunday. The Village is going to grow so much thru this.
• Got Ainsley a new 3GS iPhone because her old one was half duct-tape. I tried convincing her that duct-tape phones were cool, but no dice.
• Ainsley and I got more free movie tickets for Christmas than we have babysitters.
• This week is all about organizing the office and buttoning-down financial records. Someone shoot me.
• There's a free iPhone app for Behance's The Action Method. It amounts to a digital to-do list however.
• Iconic reformed pastors believe in great design and media. They just save it for their conferences.
• The Office is funny because those characters are real. I've met them in real life.
• Reading the bestseller Confederates in the Attic, which is such a disturbing picture of racism in America.
• Picked up the Making of Where The Wild Things Are. Didn't love the movie, but amazed by how they did it.
• Talked to Mike Foster yesterday as he was walking into a live movie scoring at Sony Pictures. That's not fair.
• Confession: I haven't stayed up to watch the ball the drop on New Years Eve in years...
• Big announcement coming later in the day...

Two More Days to Be a Part of This

Love Jarrett and Jeanne Stevens. And love that they're moving to Chicago to start Soul City Church. Here's a video message. There's still time to contribute to their "Year End, Our Start" campaign.

Tragic Story with a Redemptive Ending

Wanted to share this true story with you...

 In January 2003, a 9-year old boy named Tyler Doherty was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. He got 30 radiation treatments over four months, but doctors couldn't stop it from taking over his brain. So tragic.

But get this - all the while Tyler had cancer, he wrote letters addressed to God and actually put them in the mailbox. The amazing thing is that the postal carrier Brady McDaniels started reading the letters and gave his life to Jesus as a result. Tyler died on March 7, 2005.

A film has been made about this boy's story called Letters to God. My friend Mandy Campbell is looking for "Agents of Hope" to help spread this story to churches and small groups all across the country. If you're interested, click [HERE].

When No One Cares About Your Cause

Many of us have a cause we're trying to advocate. We're passionate about it, moved by it, and convinced that others should feel the same. So we're dumbstruck when no one does...

Years ago, there was a study conducted at Stanford where a students were asked to tap out a melody with just a pencil while other students tried to guess the song. The tappers were absolutely convinced that the listeners should be able to make-out the song. After all, they heard the entire orchestration in their heads. But only 2% succeeded.

When it comes to our causes, we hear the "melodies" in our heads because we've experienced them first-hand. But unfortunately it sounds like just tapping to others. Our goal shouldn't be to advocate the cause - because no one cares - but to help others personally experience it.

The Death of House Churches

I'm a closet lover of house churches.

When I started History Church in 2001, I wanted it to be a house church model. But while researching other house church leaders, I kept getting out-of-service phone numbers and returned mail. 

When Alan Hirsch wrote The Forgotten Ways, I said "Aha! Finally, a serious book about the viral spread of the Gospel through living rooms." Never mind that you need Christian persecution to accompany it.

But I've been watching Zolder 50 in Amsterdam for about six years as my last hope and testament to the power of house churches. Every so often, I check-in to see if we might be moving to Holland.

But this past weekend, I was devastated to read this...

"...We've decided to bring the whole church together for weekly worship gatherings, starting with the first Sunday in September."

Say it ain't so.

It's Not That I Don't Like the Kindle...

It's that I've seen snapshots of the Promised Land.

Merry Christmas From the Arments

This is the closest thing you'll get to a Christmas letter. =)

Each one of our kids has ushered-in a new beginning in life for Ainsley and me. This year brought Cody... and a new career in Virginia Beach as a kingdom entrepreneur.

Wyatt owns the role of big brother. At 5, he implored us to let him ride the bus to school. He also calls me during the day unbeknownst to his mother, and I'm like, "Wyatt? What tha? How did you get this number?!"

Dylan struggled at first in his role as a middle child, but he's learning from the best -- two parents who were middle-children. So in other words, he's learning how to be a fighter. He makes women swoon. And he can also kick my rear in Wii games.

I got Ainsley back to her hometown one month before Cody was born. It's been a long-time coming with eight years away for church planting and a stint in Georgia. I owe her a serious 10-year anniversary present in May. By the way, she's preggers in the pic above. She'd kill me if I didn't clarify that.

This past year, I took a leap into the "idea economy" which may or may not actually exist. =) But I'll live the dream of writing, creating and producing for as long as God allows.

Merry Christmas to you and yours! I'll be back on Monday, December 28 with some big announcements.

Wednesday Morning Run-Down

• Behance offers some nice tools for creatives. Less doodling. More doing. Sign me up.
• There's no point to re-tweeting or re-posting Carlos Whittaker since everybody and their mother reads him, but here is a must-watch video he posted.
• It's a whole other ballgame to read the Bible when you aren't preaching it. The only way to take it is inward.
• I just wrote the first 900 words of book #2 last night. What a difference in writing confidence #1 makes.
• We've never gotten so many e-mail Christmas cards in all of our lives. I like it.
• The weekend DUMPED snow all over Virginia except here in Virginia Beach where the water is still warm, it's always 5 o'clock, and people wear flip-flops at Christmas.
• I'm excited to announce that Whiteboard is coming back. I'll share the details just after Christmas.
• I took about 4 of the suggestions you gave on my "Who Would You Like to Hear?" post. Thanks again for that.
• How does one ever tire of People of WalMart?
• I marvel at the number of causes and charities we promote... and yet our own lives are so remarkably unchanged. What ever happened to abandonment for a cause, rather than just throwing tips at it?
• The top 100 most followed people on Twitter.
• And finally, for your viewing pleasure, the Red Bull BC One b-boy competition. I'm competing in video #3.

The Lost Story

Over 200 of you have asked for pre-release promo packs for Vince Antonucci's new book Guerrilla Lovers. I'll leave it open one more day before shutting off the offer. In the meantime, you can check out Vince's talk at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas this past weekend. Love the Vince. Big fan of his speaking gift too. Click "The Lost Story" under videos.

Your Idea Needs a CEO

I chose the participants of Dream Year last Thursday night, and I'm excited to get started with them. Looking forward to bringing clarity and hope to what can feel like a daunting challenge...

Not having the money is a big reason most of us don't go after our God-given dreams. If we're already stretching to make house payments, pay for school, or reduce credit card debt, it can kill our tolerance for risk... or, heaven forbid, our willingness to follow God's leading.

But tight finances doesn't mean the dream should get put on-hold.

It means we have to allow the dream to become its own entity... with you as CEO. This means it shouldn't compete with you cable bill or your tuition payments or your mortgage... or it'll get ditched every time. We'll always be weighing each expenditure against what we could be buying.

We have to strip away the dream from our personal finances and let it live on its own spreadsheet. This way, we'll have a much more objective view of the dream and a more courageous response to it. We have to objectify money, be generous and wise with it, and keep it in an open hand... which is what I'm pretty sure God wants anyway.

Keillor on Creativity

Interesting thoughts by Garrison Keillor on the challenge of producing creativity in the internet age [HERE].

"I see young people of tremendous gifts who are working for practically nothing, and this is one of the effects of the Internet on media. It really has spread out and become miles wide and inches thick.

"I think what motivates young people is much more a sort of a comradeship, this wonderful feeling between people engaged in the same sort of work. And it's a kind of a loyalty to other people in your field. That wasn't true back in the day.

"I think people of my generation were very, very, very interested in money. And motivated by that. To us, having a chance at a windfall profit on a project was sort of a guarantee of freedom. I don't know that it always was. But that's how we felt. And that's what we were interested in, was to be free of people in suits, like I'm wearing right now."

Dear People with the Profile Pics...

Your wedding is over.

Undercover Lovers

My friend Vince Antonucci is launching a new book this February called Guerrilla Lovers. It's all about impacting the world for Jesus through... get this... love. Vince believes our "shock and awe" tactics of impressing people with big worship services, high-end videos and trinkets are getting us nowhere. Such a great book. Anyway, he's giving away 100 pre-release promo packs at the end of January. You can get one [HERE].

The Kindle is Impressive Because of Why?

Why isn't someone building robust, multimedia e-books for the next generation of e-readers? Why are we so unimaginative that we're holding back the content to stay on-pace with the device's capabilities? Where's the motion design, the full color images, the video...? I don't get it. Easier distribution. Lower cost. And with all the technology available, we're choosing to make our e-books look exactly like the paper ones on a computer screen?

We Are The World

Saw this on Soul City Church's blog about their "Year End, Our Beginning" campaign. What a great case study of the vanity of profile pics. =) If it helps, mine was taken on a loading dock amid the stench of trash behind the Gwinnett Arena by a bored Daley Hake who was actually waiting to shoot Mike Foster.

At any rate, Jarrett and Jeanne Stevens and the whole Soul City team are still looking to raise much needed funds to help them start the church: www.yearendstart.com.

Nobody Knows What Leadership Network Does... So I Asked

They're like a secret society in a Dan Brown novel. You hear rumors of backroom conversations, high-level meetings at undisclosed locations, hazing rituals. =) So I decided to go to the source - Dave Travis who is such a great guy and directs Leadership Network...

Leadership Network hosts backroom meetings for influential church leaders. I've heard rumors of Osteen, Hybels, Stanley, Warren - all sitting down together to talk about the church at the invitation of LeadNet...

For 25 years we have had LOTS of meetings with a broad section of influential church leaders. Many times those are with senior pastors of larger churches (and for example we had 432 Senior Pastors involved over about 45 meetings this year) but they are also with what we call the "strategic leadership team" [at these churches]... To my knowledge Joel Osteen has never attended one of those meetings with us (although his brother - the strategic leader of the church - has).

What do you talk about?

Our convening power is based on selecting a mix of true innovators and early adopters so that the ideas coalesce. Plus our real strength and bias is NOT to have folks dream things up and implement, but rather to take their ideas and help them learn from each other and implement. Then we share what is being learned with others in order to facilitate movements...

Has anything good come out of it?

Let me give you a few examples. In 2001 we convened the first gathering of multi site churches in the US. We had found 125 at that time and invited all of them. We actually held several summits and then started our Leadership Communities on Multi Site. We started capturing that in books, papers, podcasts, eventually did a few partner conferences with multiple models.  Now over 3500 churches doing it.

We believe that our Burning Bush program (for churches planting at least 10 churches a year) that started in 1998 actually seeded the overwhelming movement now of new church plants. We gathered the leading church planting churches, helped them connect and learn from each other twice a year. Then we started adding other communities, knowledge, worked behind the scenes with the various conferences to platform those churches and now for many evangelicals, you aren't a player unless you are a church planting church. That's a big change since 1998. It used that "the bigger the better." Now the ethos is to multiply and spread.

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

The Aggregator
Re-posts interesting tid-bits from all over the internet.

The Talk Show Host
Brings up provocative topics in a likable way to fuel comments.

The Professional
Writes insightful posts about particular industries amongst invitations for sponsorship.

The Hobbyist
Tries to blog seriously, but can't help but post family pics and sports scores.

The Editorialist
Writes long diatribes that have been fueled by current events.

The Human RSS Feeder
Tries to blog but ends up mostly citing other blogs.

The Preacher
Preaches short sermons in each blog post because the world is his parish.

The Jokester
Treats the blog like a humor column and links excessively to YouTube as if nobody's heard of it.

The Social Media Expert
Blogs about blogging to help others blog about blogging.

The Storyteller
Uses chuckle-in-the-belly anecdotes to share insights about life.

The Mommy Blog
Oh, those crazy kids...

I stand guilty. What other ones am I leaving out? =)