joshinreallife.com

Loic Le Meur (Seesmic founder) recently published a video message describing the change to his beloved video conversation tool, and why he felt the change was needed.

Watch it for yourself here, but a few things he said really hit home with me.  Loic spoke about the flatline of growth that Seesmic had seen in it’s previous form.  So, he decided, he would do anything it took to keep ‘growth’ the main thing.

Now, when you go to Seesmic.com, it’s actually pretty hard to find the video communication section… seriously, it’s way down on the bottom in a corner.

What’s really captivating, however, is the fact that Loic made this change after a few months of stalled growth…

Months

Not after 20 years, not after review after review after review… months.

I believe that now, more than ever, we have to be able and more importantly, willing, to change our direction as quickly as we see the need, or the stalling of growth.  And not just a slight change, but whatever change is necessary.  The key is to keep the mission central, primary, sacred.

This is one of the areas I think churches have the most room to grow – changing when the need arises, when growth stalls.  I think more than a lot of today’s organizations, churches are the worst at this kind of effective, mission-focused change.  I’m sure there are a lot of reasons, maybe it’s too many committees, too many ministries pulling apart at one another and away from the mission.  Maybe it’s that a church is based on a personality and not a purpose.  Maybe it’s that the church is the one place we have left where things won’t change, where it’s safe… dare I say where people don’t change?

So what do you think? How important is our ability to change for the purpose?  How do you think the church is doing?

Alright, like the wise Scott Williams recently said… “This adultery madness has got to stop!”

It seems like over the past month, every few days there’s a new marriage that’s over, or in trouble.  Is anyone else disturbed by how memorized we all are at the Jon & Kate impending divorce?  What about yet another public figure caught in adultery?  I don’t know about you, but personally, as powerful as all these events are, I’m one for positive reinforcement.  So, I think maybe we need to take a look at what’s going right with marriages.

All around the world, there are husbands loving their wives, and doing whatever it takes to protect them, and his faithfulness to them.  All around the world there are wives loving their husbands when they’re not perfect, polished, or the best they could be.  There are parents working at raising their children the best they can, and families fighting to stay families.

Let’s tell those stories too, let’s encourage, uplift, and as the book of Hebrews says in the Bible, “spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

So what’s your marriage story? How have you struggled and pulled through? What words of encouragement do you have for the rest of us.  Trust me, right now, we really need it!

As if Twitter wasn’t debated enough, Conan O’Brien brought it into the spotlight as the new host of the Tonight Show.

As funny as it is, I think it’s a great reminder of how sometimes we can look at the oddities of Twitter like looking at a car wreck… It’s awful, but I can’t stop looking at it.

So at Forefront we’re kind of on a budget…

Something about being a ‘church plant’ and all.  So we save money where we can.  One of the big places was with our website.  Our website was done ‘inhouse’ as you say.  It’s a Wordpress theme, and we manage the hosting/domain renewal.  Brett Crimmel and myself put it together and continue to manage it’s content, along with other folks that we serve alongside.

It’s definitely affordable, but there’s more work involved, and creating teams that are comfortable maintaining/progressing the site is key.  So here’s my question for you, did your organization go ‘inhouse’ or ‘outhouse’ ? Why?  Do share with the class