Sometimes the greatest story ever told can be the hardest to tell

- STORY 2010

Last year I had the amazing opportunity to attend STORY Chicago 2009. It was an incredible experience and I am grateful to my church for allowing me to go. My friend Dan Beirne, who is also the Youth Director at my church, attended last year with me. We heard from some amazing speakers which included; Ed Young, Dave Gibbons, Nancy Beach, Chris Seay, Stacey Spencer, Mike Foster, and Donald Miller. It was very cool to hear from each of them and learn how they’ve developed the art of story telling over time.

As worship leaders, both behind the scenes (myself) and up on stage (pastors and worship directors), it is so important that we know how to tell a story. The story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told and God has entrusted us with that task. Telling that story in the most creative and inspiring way possible is our mission.

This year I am pleased to announce that more representatives from the worship team at my church will be attending with me! I am very excited about sharing this experience with them and I know we will all walk away from this conference both energized and better equipped to do ministry in the local church!

STORY Chicago 2010 takes place on September 23-24th at Park Community Church (Near North Campus) in Chicago, IL. This year’s theme is “Communicating the Unseen”.

Are you going? If not Buy some tickets! Space is limited!

[Image by: STORY Chicago]

(list of speakers after the jump)

(more…)

I had the privilege of attending Catalyst One Day this year and got to hear Craig Groschel and Andy Stanley speak. John Saddington was kind enough to give me a ticket to the event and so I blogged my notes on their talks on ChurchCrunch.

Click on the images below to be directed to my posts about their respective talks.

[Craig Groschel - Image by Scott Fillmer from Catalyst One Day 2009]

[Andy Stanley - Image by Scott Fillmer from Catalyst One Day 2009]

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to meet Tony Morgan when he stopped at The Orchard in Aurora, IL. He was on a self-made book tour for his book, Killing Cockroaches.

I first have to say that Tony is somewhat to blame for my spiritual development in the past 7 months or so. It was his blog that I first found as I was searching the interwebs to see how different churches “did church”.

He’s a super nice guy… okay, enough of the details… this is what I learned. The following is basically my notes from Tony’s talk. These are really his words… not mine.

In order to understand my notes… you first need to understand the title of the book, Killing Cockroaches. Watch this short video…

There are 5 reasons why we get stuck killing cockroaches:

1. We settle for something that’s not God’s plan.
2. The ministry will outgrow us.
3. We stay too focused on the execution rather than the outcomes.
4. We avoid giving volunteers the opportunity to serve and lead.
5. We Embrace fear and/or pride rather than humility.

I’ve been on staff at Our Saviour’s for almost 6 years now. For the longest time I’ve been doing a lot of the work that I should have developed other leaders to be doing. Usually this is because I feel that I can do it better than my volunteers, and you know what… for the most part that’s true! I’m better at most of the duties of the job than my volunteers because I do them all the time! But that doesn’t mean that it’s my job to do them. It is my job to grow other leaders within my tech arts team to do some of those jobs. Tony used a car scenario… we can only learn so much about driving a car by watching someone else drive it. It’s not until we actually drive the car ourselves do we really get good at it. We must empower other leaders in our ministry. There are people that want the opportunity to lead… we just need to give them the tools and the chance to do it!

It is equally important that when we give someone else the keys to our ministry… that we don’t become a backseat driver, telling them exactly how to do what we want them to do. We need to tell the other leader where we need to end up, and let them figure out how to get there. They might take a different route than we would have taken, but as long as the end result is the same, does it really matter?

These are some questions that potential leaders ask themselves when they’re thinking about getting involved in our ministries.

1. Am I needed?
2. Will I have input?
3. Will I be on the inside “in the loop?”
4. Do they care about me or are they just trying to use me?
5. Will they let me lead?
6. Will they allow me to do something significant?

As ministry team leaders, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our volunteers… If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’ then we’re doing the right thing!

Tony says that we, as leaders, have to embrace humility.

God opposes the crowd but gives grace to the humble.

- 1 Peter 5

People will make mistakes along the way, as leaders our job is to encourage success via failure.