like a fire

OK, here is a no brainer for guys in the ministry who manage multiple teams. This is a really easy, free tool to help you from Google called… Google Calendar. Don’t tune out yet, it is way more than a calendar.

My issue with calendars goes way back. Mostly, if I try to manage more than one calendar, then I always leave something out and forget about a meeting or something very important that I should have remembered. At the same time, if I put everything I need to remember into one calendar, it is daunting to look at and I can’t see the things that are really important. Enter Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is free and easy to set up. You can manage several calendars at once and you can turn off each group to simplify your viewing. For example, I keep a calendar for my personal schedule, for the church schedule, the youth ministry schedule, my special programs shedules and a small group schedule. They are all separate and color coordinated to help me see quickly what is happening. I can turn off any one or all of these groups to print for my staff in each group or just to see each groups activities. If this doesn’t seem really cool yet, let me give you some specifics.

I get calls from parents regularly asking me when their child’s small group meets. Most of the time I don’t know the answer. With Google Calendar I make a small group calendar and invite all the small group leaders to view and edit it. They maintain the calendar and everyone can view it. I simply look it up and find their group and tell the parents where and when they are meeting. Easy!

I keep track of my team meetings in the same way and since members of each team can edit meetings, they can tell me if they can make the meetings or not. They can see each months meetings and know when they are happening well in advance and communicate (if you work in a church, don’t freak out from that word) effectively.

I have used many apps that try to make my life easier from Outlook to Backpack and this is the best one I have found so far.

Well, I had two firsts last night here at Southland high school camp and both involved fire. First, as the sound guy for the group leading worship, I literally caught a speaker on fire. I won’t bore anyone with the technical stuff, but when you have a PA system designed for half the volume we were trying to achieve and you manage to squeeze twice the volume out of it, there has to be a giving point. That giving point was the sub that in the middle of the first song decided that it was tired of trying to please my sound needs and committed suicide the speaker way. There were flames as high as a foot coming out of the speaker when they ran it from the room. After a quick dose of water, it settled down to the lonely death of smoking outside for a couple of hours. The building has a no smoking policy.

Second, after our worship time, we went to the gym for the dodgeball tourney and then back to the rooms for lights out. I was getting in the shower when we got a call on the walkie. Someone had pulled a fire alarm and the fire department, which had responded very promptly because it was in the lab with explosive chemicals, decided that they were going to get their man or keep everyone up until it was a sufficient discouragement for the future. At 12:15 we gathered everyone into the cafeteria and asked for a confession. If you’ve ever worked with teens, you know that we didn’t get one. At 1:00 they decided to “interview” group 20 at a time. At 2:10 they decided to “interview” teens one at a time. Finally it was sufficient and we were allowed to go back to bed. I got into mine at 3:15.

Here’s my haiku for the night.

Fire, even your threat
causes panic in the crowd.
I will not be burned.

At the youth leader interactive today at camp, we had a great discussion about growth and what that could look like. There was a general consensus that growth for numbers alone is pretty vain and unuseful. Beyond that we talked about what we can do to have healthy growth that builds the kingdom and makes disciples (my words).

One of the leaders had the best analogy I have heard for unhealthy growth. He was talking about in urban cultures it is considered cool for guys to prove their manhood by making babies. They basically try to sleep with as many girls as possible in the hopes of proving their manhood through getting them pregnant. They don’t really care anything about fathering these illegitimate children, but they want as many as possible. The obvious conclusion is the view of church growth t for the sole purpose of “adding to our numbers”. How many illegitimate children does the church make?

Thinking through that was a startling thing for me. Healthy church growth is a steady growing of people who can be sustained by the parents (leaders) of the local body. That’s a lot to think of between fart jokes and dodgeball, but that is what makes Southland Conferences so great. I love working with these guys.

Today we had a great day. Although everyone was tired and a little out of sorts from driving all night, they did a great job of smiling and having fun with it. I got to hear Eric for the first time and he was really great. I think the teens could have listened to him about twice as long. We ended the night out on the overlook just hanging out by the fountain.

We also got some funny pictures of the group as Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty. Though we didn’t get to see much of the fireworks, it was a great night and everyone had fun.

This is what Amy looks like with no sleep and herding kids all day. Deer in the headlights?

Pray for tomorrow, I think we have some great potential for bonding with rock climbing.

I am just waking up here at Covenant College after driving all day yesterday to get here. As part of the Southland team, I get here a day early to set up everything that needs to be ready for the campers and to pray for a great week. That’s not so hard actually. The picture above is a view from my window. How can all these Florida natives not have a great time with vistas like this greeting them at every turn of the head?

I am really looking forward to this week. The mountains are a breath of fresh air, I get to hang out some of the teens with my youth ministry, and see some friends who serve at other places in youth ministry. For camp, this is really great. I don’t have a whole lot of responsibilities (just running sound and video for the sessions) and I get to be around lots of really cool people. I get to here Wayne Kerr lead worship (awesome) and I get to here a really great speaker also Eric Braun

Camp Woot!