These are thoughts updated and continued from this post last week where I discussed the Rock’s need to improve at “assimilating” people who come to the Friday night Rock into other Rock activities and into a deeper walk with the Lord.
If you don’t like detailed posts about ministry strategy, you can probably skip this. 
I’ve been giving this continued thought this week and had some interesting conversations with people on this topic. I have a new theory to put forward: I am thinking this issue is more complex than just “how to get new people more involved.” I think there are actually seven (or maybe more) different types of “newbies” potentially coming to a Friday night Rock, and it is possible that different methods will help us better integrate each type of person. Continue reading »
I’ve been reading “Emerging Hope” by Jimmy Long, as have a few other Rock leaders. Here are a few quotes I liked and a few thoughts about them. These quotes have many implications as we ponder the future direction of the Rock’s teams and Lifegroups:
“In the church we think of two primary places, the large group worship service and small groups, for people to belong. However Joseph Meyers in a recent book identifies four places people need and desire to belong. These four spaces are termed public spaces, social spaces, personal spaces and intimate spaces … The social spaces are the places we most neglect in the church. Meyers identifies the “front porch” as the significant social space in the community. In the past people would gather on their front porches (or in the cities, front stoops) to talk casually with their neighbors. These were important places for informal social interaction, making people feel like they were a part of the larger community. As society has lost many of its “front porch” spaces, the church has neglected many of these important opportunities for people new and old to connect with each another.”
I think this quote highlights the importance of what the Rock does with its Ministry Teams (or in some cases, Fellowship Teams). The medium-sized group of the Rock can provide that otherwise missing element. In the college setting this need is more readily filled with dorm floors, greek houses and other campus organizations, but I would be there are still many people longing to have this need met…or who will notice a substantial difference in the social spaces developed by believers as opposed to those developed by the world. Continue reading »
So, there’s not much time to get word out, but I’m gonna try. There is an opportunity to serve the community of Ames on July 9th. And we need 10 volunteers by this Friday.
Wendy Korthals heard of an opportunity to serve during the Midnight Madness road-run. So, she pledged 10 volunteers to help register runners for Midnight Madness.
The thing is, she needs to know who is going to help and their T-shirt sizes by this Friday (6/24), preferably by noon. That’s not much time to find 10 volunteers.
So, I’m on this blog asking for your help. People need to volunteer, and the word needs to be spread quickly.
If you or anyone you know (or anyone they know, or anyone they know knows, etc.) can help, either call Wendy (450-0746) or email her wendymk@rockisu.com to tell her you can help and your T-shirt size.
Thanks.
Michael made a comment at the Rock leaders’ meeting about not liking to make people jump through hoops just for the sake of hoop jumping. This is really kind of unrelated to the specific topic Michael was talking about, but after he said that I thought to myself, “I do like making people jump through hoops.” After a few more seconds of thought, I mentally corrected myself: It’s really not that I like making people jump through hoops…It’s that I like making the hoops, metaphorically speaking. Even after making them, sometimes I don’t care as much for jumping through them myself or even making/asking other people to do it.
It’s kind of a strange thought, I know…but I really like making structures, forms, charts, paperwork, systems, checklists and other things along those lines. For me, the joy is often just in making them. I can’t even say how many times I have made a great chart or system for keeping our house cleaner, keeping track of our finances or doing a more systematic Bible study, only to not use it when push came to shove. Or, instead of going through with the hard work of actually doing whatever I created the chart or system for, I spend my time creating a better system. Luckily, when I am making “hoops” for the Rock, I am usually not the one to use them so I don’t have to worry about this phenomenon.
At worst, it could be considered a form of hypocrisy. At best, it is a strange personality quirk. Sometimes I make “hoops” I don’t use because I am a fairly naturally organized person and decently good at remembering things. There are some things I think I have organized so many times that I don’t really need a special checklist or a form to do it. Sometimes the personal touch just seems to work better. For example, I made a form that the Rock Lifegroup leaders are supposed to fill out on a regular basis…and the awful thing is that I wasn’t super strict about making the Lifegroup leaders I coach fill it out. I occaisonally asked them to do it and some of them did some of the time…But I also found it was pretty effective for me to just ask the questions from the form (and/or similar questions) to each leader as I met with them and then discuss their thoughts about it on the spot.
Yet, through all this I still love creating the hoops. I get a thrill out of making a form or a checklist. Maybe my true calling was to be a government bureaucrat. And, sometimes I do joyfully use hoops I create for personal or ministry use. I’m not sure what all this means or what the best way is for me to get my “hoop making” fix…but if you ever need a hoop created, you know where to find me!
Here is yet another day of demolition pics available on my flickr photo stream. A special, crazy pic of Madeline awaits you at the end of the set of photos!
Don’t forget…if you take any pics at the building, you can sign up for a free flickr account, upload your pics. give them “ezekielproject” as a tag…then we can all go here to see them! If you use an RSS reader like bloglines, you can also subscribe to a feed of these pics and be notified whenever someone posts pictures with that tag!
I’ve uploaded more pics to my flickr photostream of the demolition taking place at the 3329 Lincoln Way building. This set contains pictures taken yesterday and today (Friday and Saturday) as the work progressed. It’s amazing how big that space really is!
Our gallery upload wasn’t working correctly today, and since Matt wanted to see my pictures of yesterday’s Closing Day celebrations at 3329 Lincoln Way I created a flickr stream to hold those pictures. You can see them here.
Matt also had a great idea that all of us taking pictures of the progress of the building should upload them to Flickr and give them a common tag, so that people could just look at or subscribe to that tag and see all the pics. I think that’s a great idea…I have given all my pics the tags “ezekielproject” and “3329LincolnWay”. But, if the final decision from Matt is that there is a different tag everyone should use, I will add that one too…
So if you have pics from the building…create a free flickr.com account if you don’t have one, and upload your pics!
At some of the recent Rock leaders meetings, we’ve been evaluating the Rock as we do every year, and trying to think about how we could improve things. One thing that came up at one of the first eval times was how well we “assimilate” new people who show up at the Rock on Friday nights (I know that sounds bad, but that word is the best fit I can think of).
The thought came up that other ministries have something specific they are asking people about when they show up to a large group meeting. Something like, “Have you joined a Bible study yet?” or “Have you joined a connection group yet?”. We don’t have any one standard thing to ask people at the Rock, since our teams are very diverse and each one does different things to help new people get involved. One team might do a Bible study, another might do a Sunday dinner, and another team might not have anything specific to which they invite new people.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the diversity of the Rock’s teams is one of our strengths. But many people at the evaluation meeting seemed to agree that our “assimilation” from Friday nights to getting people more deeply into Fellowship is one of our weak links. We saw lots of people come on Friday nights and then not come back, or come more than once but not get plugged in. There might be a lot of reasons for this. Some people might not like what we do on Friday nights and not want to come back. Other people may just not be at a point in their spiritual journey where they are open to spending a lot of time with Christians. Continue reading »
So, even though most technology around me has been rather disappointing lately, at least a lot of other good things have been happening. The biggest thing is that we closed yesterday on the 3329 Lincoln Way building, which will become the Rock’s new venue and ministry center. Praise God! We had our Wednesday night BBQ there yesterday, and it was unreal to think that we actually own this building. I took lots of pictures which I hope to get up in the gallery soon.
We took an awesome three day trip to Chicago last weekend and stayed with the SALT’ers in “The Condo.” We spent most of the day on Friday driving, and then attended the SALT BBQ and sat in on the first session of Theophostic Ministry training with the SALT’ers on Friday night.
Then on Saturday we went to explore some of the neighborhoods in Chicago where young professionals live. We drove around north of the Loop for quite a while, I saw Wrigley Field for the first time, we ate some great sushi for lunch, then grabbed coffee at Intelligentsia across the street. I think this is the only coffee place I have ever been to that doesn’t offer carmel syrup for flavoring drinks. I bet they really live up to their name! We then drove up to Evanston to see the Northwestern campus, and finally headed back to The Condo. Heading back to The Condo was easier said than done though, since our air conditioning gave out in the middle of stop and go traffic on the interstate, and we had a hot, crabby, screaming Madeline in the back seat. So we took the scenic way back (better to be on interesting, somewhat shadded streets than on the interstate without air conditioning on a hot day !) and got there about an hour and a half later!
Saturday night we had a double date with Paul and Christie, then Sunday I finished up making a Ladybug Cake for Amber Ruppert’s birthday, Tony got the air conditioning fixed, and I hung out with Jackie. We surprised Amber with the cake on the way out of town, and then headed back. A full and fun weekend!
There is very little other explanation why there have been so many technological failings impacting my life lately. It started with the laptop’s hard drive going bad several weeks ago. At least nothing too important was lost, other than some sent emails and web bookmarks I hadn’t thought to back up.
Around the same time we started having some issues with our back-up desktop computer, where we generally store our music files. This wasn’t really a new problem, but an old one re-occuring that we don’t completely know the cause of. Since there wasn’t really room on our main desktop computer to store all the music files (It nearly filled the hard drive when we had them on there for a while), I don’t have a very easy way to manage my ipod shuffle right now. We got a good deal on a new hard drive for Tony to build a media computer, but that project is taking longer than expected, especially since it just something Tony works on in his spare time.
And, of course Tony’s computer at the office got hacked last week, and all our websites were down for a week. All that was lost was a few pictures that can be restored from a back up DVD we have at home, so that is good news.
Then, rocksiu.com email crashed on Monday…Everything is probably back to normal with that for everyone else, but since I am using a protocal called IMAP that I don’t think anyone else on our server is using…I still have problems I don’t think anyone else is having. Like there is no way to receive new emails except by exiting the email program and then restarting it. And of course since we are talking about Murphey’s Law, it completely figures that the only email messages I am still missing are the ones I absolutely have to have — the ones with Daylights articles attached that I should be editing this week. Mike Biang is trying hard to recover them and I have faith that he will find them…but is just the final annoyance in a string of several weeks of technological foibles.
I am trying to take joy in these trials and I don’t think I am doing too bad a job at it…though I am sure Mike must be getting sick of all my whiny emails…
