Bible Translations (aren’t really a big deal)

Bible Translations (aren’t really a big deal)

Ever since I started entering the Bible YouTube space I’ve learned that a couple of translations really collect some bad vibes. In this video I take the time to talk about how I relate to Bible translations and why I pretty much love every single one of them…even the ones that I don’t love.

 

Stuff I Want to Say 003 | Reading and The Things that Make Us Who We Are

Stuff I Want to Say 003 | Reading and The Things that Make Us Who We Are

Welcome to Stuff I Want To Say, the weekly podcast where I run down…well, the things I want to say. In this episode, I talk about

  • Anchor.fm is a buster
  • So what happens when you start reading?
  • More of what I want to do here.
  • What made me who I am (growing up Southern Baptist and discovering the apostle’s creed)
  • When was the last time you changed your mind?

What I’ve Done This Week
When a preacher finds a book sale (youtube video) 
My May Reading

What I’m Working On
More Methodist pieces (In Search of Normative Methodism and The Coming Red Dawn of United Methodism)
A course on strategic church databases for pastors.
The 98th Productive Pastor
More Videos on reading your bible

Stuff I Want to Say 002 | The smart side of the internet and being deliberate

Stuff I Want to Say 002 | The smart side of the internet and being deliberate

Welcome to Stuff I Want To Say, the weekly podcast where I run down…well, the things I want to say. In this episode I talk about

  • More thoughts on when the internet seemed smarter
  • Why Twitter is what changed things
  • Why Podcasting is what will change things
  • Why I’m a fan of Anchor
  • An earlier tweet this week about being deliberate (and what I learned about being really bad at it.)
  • New segments on the show starting soon (people I want to talk with)

Mentioned
Anchor is Spotify’s best bet to beat Apple for control of your ears. 

Ministry Perfectionism, Starbucks, and the big Game of Thrones mistake

Ministry Perfectionism, Starbucks, and the big Game of Thrones mistake

Apparently I was paying too much attention to things (or wasn’t paying attention at all) this past Sunday during Game of Thrones.*

It was the next day when I began seeing the internet ablaze about the mistake made during shooting and the subsequent mistake that made it through editing, color correction, effects, and what I am sure is MANY other parts of making this television. This medieval fantasy either keeps a Starbucks in the castle, or someone didn’t put their coffee on the floor before action was called.

I guess the Mother of Dragons needed a tall drink to help her get through shooting that day.

At first, I felt it was unbelievable. But then I realized I had this huge sigh of relief.

You see, Winterfell turned into a church and helped me with my ministry perfectionism.

You see, I am a pastor. And my Father is a pastor. I’ll let you into a little bit of ministry life here. Every Sunday, around the lunch table or wherever, there is this interchange of asking friends, family, or anyone else trusted how service actually went. If you are like me, and my wife is pretty integral into Sunday morning, you ultimately end up running through what went right…but really focus on what went wrong.

There is always a Starbucks cup left on the table.

It happens. And it is a heavy emotion. You can easily get to the point where you think one tiny thing might have the ability to disrupt the entire ministry. No matter what happened that was fantastic, that one mistake, that one misspelled word on a slide, a mixup with another part of production, or a missed cue from a musician tanks it all.

And it really doesn’t. We just think it does. HBO issued a statement about the mistake earlier today. And it was as follows.

The latte that appeared in the show was clearly a mistake. Daenerys had ordered a herbal tea

This group of people, who are in the near end of one of the most anticipated series finales in television history made a big mistake. And when they got busted on it, they made a joke and realized it wasn’t the end of the world. There is a big lesson we can learn.

So let’s be serious here…or actually the exact opposite. What you think is a huge deal clearly isn’t. And if we aren’t at the point to where we can’t realize our worship services are designed, led, and experienced by humans, we are taking things too seriously. If anything, things like this show that we are all human. And if our worship doesn’t reflect our humanity and the redemption of our humanity by a God who became human…how honest are we being? Yes, I am all for a distraction free worship service, but there is a fine line between doing our best and the worship industrial complex.

In all actuality, we could all stand to chill out a little. Especially when stressed, or when a tiny mistake happens and we instantly think it ruined everything that could have been fantastic.

So take a deep breath when you realize you left a cup on the table. Don’t let it spoil the time you now have in front of you. You are with the folks who care about you and care about the worship that just happened.

So focus on that Sunday lunch and the people you are with.

*Yes. I am a pastor and I watch Game of Thrones. There are plenty of things I am convicted about in my personal life, and this has never shown up in my prayer life. Remember the 11th Commandment. Thou shalt be cool (and not a religious troll). 

April Reading 2019

April Reading 2019

Since my health emergency of 2019, I have been taking greater stock of the things that bring both joy and fulfillment to my life and my well-being (that’s a close to Marie Kondo as you are getting). Since I am still laying low for a few weeks, reading has been something that I have come back to again as something I enjoy. I also think it is helpful to see what others are reading during any given moment, so I am going to start tracking my reading again as something to share but also to keep a public record.

 

My April Reading

  1. The Band Meeting – Dr. Scott Kisker and Dr. Kevin Watson
    Anyone trying to recover classic systems of Wesleyan discpleship are going to be my jam right now. Just like the previous “Class Meeting” volume, this is both a personal plea, a larger history, and a how-to of integrating a better sense of social accountability into the life of the average Christian. Fantastic book. I bought copies to give out to leaders at church.
  2. Can We Trust the Gospels – Peter J. Williams
    I bought this later last year during my massive book buy while prepping for 2019 preaching. I had a couple of chapters left and finished it off. If you are interested in the Bible, Jesus, and what the historical record might have to say, pick this up. It is a super easy read and I love how it engages with the church tradition and church fathers. I recommend it to anyone who is either interested in a teaching ministry or is serving in the local church in that manner.
  3. The DASH Diet for Weight Loss
    Upon leaving the hospital, I was instructed with a myriad of solutions to get my blood pressure under control and begin living with congestive heart failure. One of these was beginning to follow an ultra-low sodium and fiber-rich diet called DASH. Luckily, one of my best friends and church leaders is a physical trainer with a bunch of experience with DASH. This was a pretty quick read, but it has been tremendously helpful.
  4. Worship: The Reason We Were Created – AW Tozer
    This is part of a new compilation series Moody Press has put out of Tozer’s writings. It’s a good one, but I’m a little disappointed with how the series/collection doesn’t actually “collect” very well together. It seems there are a few formats they are following and I just prefer one better (the Prayer volume is absolutely 100% amazing). It mainly comes from Whatever Happened to Worship, a previous compilation of Tozer.*
  5. Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing – Andy Freeman and Pete Greig
    Earlier this year I spent time reading two of Pete Greig’s books, Red Moon Rising and Dirty Glory. Both are fantastic and are the story of a massive prayer movement that has been moving across the world. They were great. This book is the story of the “Boiler Room” communities, new enclaves of prayer, mission and justice, that have sprung up around prayer rooms across the world. Great read.
  6. Free To Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More By Doing Less – Michael Hyatt
    I was an early adopter of Michael Hyatt. I stumbled upon him several months into his first blog and kept up with his work for years. In the last 5 or so, I have drifted away from what he has been doing. I’d pay slight attention, but never really thought of what he was saying as immediately helpful. After an interview on the Amy Porterfield podcast about his new book, my mind began to change and I ended up buying his new book. Free to Focus is a great tool to help us understand how we manage to never have any time, and how we can begin to repattern ourselves into a life with significant more margin. This is a great book for pastors who feel like life is too busy.

 

 

  • I could read AW Tozer this rest of my life (and I probably will). The gamble is the amount of work he produced. There are hundreds of articles and other additional writings, but he only published a handful of true “books”, so I think many things suffer from the lack of congruency and the difference with the complications is the quality and work of the editor.
Anchor and Ministry

Anchor and Ministry

Over the last two months, I have fallen in love with Anchor.fm. Imagine easy to create podcasts mashed up with Instagram stories. Anchor provides an amazing user experience, the ability to easily create up to 5 minutes blocks of audio content, the quickest publish to iTunes and Google Play that I have ever seen AND an amazing user community interacting with each other’s content. I think anchor and ministry together makes absolute sense.

I believe in the medium of podcasting right now. I think we are going to see audio content reach an unheard of level of engagement. And I think Anchor might be poised to become one of the major players in the field. If you have ever wanted to dip your toe into podcasting, I quickly recommend them to people constantly for the best beginner platform. You can use your phone or upload previously recorded and produced audio content to Anchor. And you can get the content on all the major podcasting platforms. Plus, and this is a big one, Anchor plays embedded clips on both Twitter and Facebook natively.

But before we talk about Anchor and ministry, we need to talk about social media and ministry…

I need to say something about using any social media platform for ministry. Social media is inherently…well, it’s supposed to be social. Before we investigate, utilize, strategize or anything else, we need to be users. I’d encourage you to sign up for Anchor first, start listening, engaging and creating content and then think about how you might apply it to ministry. We have to think about the end user, and if we don’t actually use the service…our marketing is going to appear false and disingenuous. Folks will smell that out quick.  And Anchor is all about the social side of it. Trust me, it’s like an all-day audio party.

So we will now get onto why you clicked this link in the first place.

Anchor and Ministry

Here are the potential use cases I see for Anchor. You need to approach it not from the perspective of a Facebook page. Think about it like an Instagram story that can be shared and publically interacted with. Jumping into any of these 4 will be for a great ministry design using Anchor.

Daily Reflections.
My channel is called Rev. Chad’s Real Life. I talk about ministry some, but I also talk about drinking beer in my neighbor’s driveway, ranting about bad traffic, and what the difference is between a good day and a bad day. I try to create at least 1, if not more, daily reflections on life.

If you’ve ever lived in an area where a church has a 2-minute radio spot, this is the 21st-century version. And folks listen and engage pretty well. I think most of them aren’t Christian and I’m the only pastor they have ever had a relationship with. So I work from that angle and try to be approachable.

Daily Devotion.
You can get a lot of devotional talk done in the 5 minutes (more if you upload external audio, it just breaks them into 5-minute chunks). It isn’t odd for me to pop on in the morning and connect the various pieces of scripture I read together that morning. My church has created 5-minute devotions on our normal podcast feed before, and we would get around 4x the downloads we would normally get in a week.

I could write several more blog posts about what this 5-minute devotion could do, especially in regard to continuing sermon content.

Leadership Notes
Think about how you might use Anchor to share information, tell stories and cast vision for your leadership. All from your cell phone. This is a delivery strategy that could make fantastic use of the iTunes/Podcast feature Anchor offers. As long as your leadership subscribes to the feed, they get the content. And they don’t even have to use the app!

Break Sermons Apart
If you have ever wanted to create a behind the sermon/after the sermon feature, this would be easy. Again, this could be shared via the podcast or with anyone who uses the app. Plus, the embed feature on social media sites makes it easy to get it out to folks who choose not to download an app or subscribe to an RSS feed.

Tell Stories of Church Life
If you are willing to do a little audio production, you could create killer 5-minute mini-docs about your church. Think NPR or American Public Media. This is really taking advantage of the highly social and 24-hour content cycle of Anchor.

So go be social. Engage with folks, create amazing content and dream about how you can use the audio revolution in your ministry content.

Previous Posts About Anchor

Keeping Up With Content Creation

Experimenting with Anchor