500toys.org

Last year 100s & 100s of people from 25 states and several countries came together and raised over $20,000 to purchase every single student at an award-winning inner city Atlanta elementary school brand new school uniforms and a new toy of their choosing!  It was amazing!

This year we are doing it again AND we are also going to give hundreds of kids who lost all of their toys in the Atlanta floods a great new toy (or two) too :-)

If 900 people gave $25 a piece we could knock this out!  Or if about 225 people gave $100 we could do it!  Whatever you can give, be it $1 or $1,000 – let’s do this!

See the awesome video from our 2008 BIG GIVE and learn about all of the ways you can help us bring hope to hurting children in our city @ 500toys.org

Spread the word, text it, tweet it, email it, facebook it, fedex it, scream it, tell your boss, write an old fashioned letter with paper and pen…do whatever you can to make this cause huge!

Together…we can really make a difference!

Love y’all!

1. Accept that you did indeed offend them (if you meant to offend them or not should be temporarily irrelevant).

2. Say you are sorry from the heart and don’t say something like “I’m sorry IF I offended…” but say “I’m sorry THAT I offended…”

3. Change the offensive behavior.  If you don’t, #1 & #2 mean nothing.

Why am I saying this? My good friend and fellow Covenant pastor Eugene Cho made it painfully obvious today on his blog that my (internet) friends Mike Foster & Jud Wilhite, with the marketing and promotions of their Deadly Vipers concept, are being highly insensitive and very offensive to Asian people.  You have to read it for yourself.

I say this @ Courageous all of the time, but I love people that tell me I have a booger hanging out of my nose.  There is nothing worse than walking around and talking to folk with a floaty booger thingy hanging out of your nose and people that love you will tell you about it.  Very few people will do that, but when they do it tells me a lot about their character.

Eugene did Mike & Jud a favor.  Their PR campaign is basically a public booger that deserves a public response and will hopefully create some widespread sensitivity to some real cultural issues that folk are pretty much ignorant about.

Before you get defensive, read my 3 tips above.  I have learned them the hard way.

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Yesterday we gave every volunteer @ Courageous Church the day off…without telling anyone else.  No set up.  No breakfast.  No music.  No parking crew.  No Courageous Kids.  No signage.  No sound system.  Nothing!  It was a mess…just like we wanted it :-)

Our goal was to show everyone what a Sunday without volunteers looks like!  It pretty much sucks.

We got this idea from our friends @ Elevation Church and it really worked! We had a ton of people commit to being a part of our Sunday team and we can’t wait to see how next Sunday goes!

Church plants require a ton of volunteers. Without them, you burn people out and the quality of what you are doing really suffers.

So one Sunday a few months ago I was doing my whole sad begging routine and Reggie Joiner, a mentor to me and one of the best leaders in the world, was there to hear it.  Our leadership team met with him later that day and he told me point blank…

Stop telling people how badly you need them to serve and begin telling them how badly they need to serve.  Tell them how serving changes their life.  Tell them how much you grow and change and get connected when you serve and how not serving basically freezes them in time as far as their growth in the church (and in the faith) goes.

It’s 7am on Sunday morning and I am going to be preaching that message twice this morning.  I’ll let you know how it goes on Twitter later.

In honor of Halloween (not really) I just finished speaking at a great church conference this morning about KNOWING WHO & WHAT THE WOLVES ARE.  It is an essential principle of leadership and I want to quickly share it with you.

Far too often, whether they want to admit it even consciously know it, churches think of other churches as being the wolves of the world. This is INSANE!  They compete with other churches.  They battle with other churches.  They play catch-up with other churches. But churches are not the wolves!

• Online pornography is a wolf.
• Drug addiction and alcoholism are wolves.
• Divorce is a wolf.
• Sexual abuse is a wolf.
• Materialism is a wolf.
• Stress is a wolf.
• Depression is a wolf.

When churches make wolves out of the wrong things (like other churches), we fail to create the right shrewd strategies that Jesus expects from us when he instructed us to be as shrewd as a snake in Matthew 10:16.

What are the wolves tearing apart the lives of the people you want to reach?  Answering this question will help guide you as you create the next sermon series or small group.

FREE BONUS THOUGHT: Your spouse is not a wolf. Acting like it will ruin your marriage.

Since that post, I have encountered issue after issue like this and came to this conclusion: Our church is full of sinners. I’m not even talking 50/50 either.  The more I get to know the people I serve the more I realize that they are struggling with sexual issues, drug and alcohol issues, honesty, integrity, and everything in between.

If I had to find a sinless person to serve @ Courageous Church I would be in a world of trouble.  Who would sing?  Who would usher?  Who would cook and serve breakfast?  Who would  tear down and clean up homes with hopeATL? I wouldn’t be able to preach on Sunday.  I wouldn’t be able to lead our team on Monday.  I wouldn’t be able to serve as pastor of Courageous Church if I had to be sinless.

So, here are the million dollar questions…

• Can sinners serve in church? As leaders? As greeters?
• Should pastors and leaders serve as sin police…searching for sins and secrets in the congregation?
• Should people with public sins be able to serve or just with private sins?

Now that our work with demolition and cleanup has ended, we have opted to leave the rebuilding efforts to the pros.  Here are 3 things that we want you to know:

1. If you or your team still wants to serve, please contact Must Ministries.  This great organization has over 40 years of experience and is prepared to help flood victims with rebuilding efforts.  See the website here and contact:

Jenaila Hawkins @ jhawkins@mustministries.org

Donna Holmes @ dholmes@mustministries.org

• Did you read about the 10 Mistakes I’ve Made?  I’ve made about 20 30 40 50 more.   I want you to know that I have made a ton of mistakes so you don’t feel like an idiot when you make so many too.  Church planting is like parenting…you can read every book out, but some lessons you have to learn on your own.
• We have had to fire some people. We had to let other people go because of budget cuts.  We will likely do both again.  This part of leading is harder than I ever expected.
• Our weekly offering is about 80% less than I projected before we launched the church.  Yeah – I said EIGHT ZERO. 80.  We hardly raise enough money to pay our basic bills and this is very stressful.  Church planters that are a few steps ahead of me say this is normal.  However, it still sucks.
• Our attendance plummeted 85% in the weeks after our grand opening and hit a low of just about 50 people.  Yes. For real.  See what that does to your ego.  Since then we have steadily grown nearly every week to about 200 people in Sunday attendance and we have between 350-400 people that attend fairly regularly.
• I work very long hours. I am regularly up at the crack of dawn every day of the week and burn the midnight oil.  I am nowhere near burnout and God has really graced me with the energy to do this, but it’s hard.
• Broken people love me and love our church.  I love them.  Tom Q. Perfect has never attended our church.  Our church is full of skeptics, gay guys, addicts, adulterers, liars, hot heads, homeless people, and shopaholics.  I prayed that this would be the case and this was one of the prayers that God decided to answer right away :-)
• My family still needs me. My kids still get sick.  Dishes still need done.  Wifey still needs me to be present. As a matter of fact, since launching the church, my family demands have increased (my baby daughter is crying now after waking up from a nap while my sick wife takes one of our sick daughters to the doctor).

I have a few more that I don’t have nerve enough to tell you, but I think you get the picture.  Would I choose a different profession if I had the choice?  No stinking way. I just want you to know that this requires you to be called, have thick skin, and some people to hold you up along the way!