Let There Be Light

At somewhere around 8pm tonight, we called our home from WalMart (we were there with around 10,000 of our closest friends) and heard the beautiful sound of our answering machine picking up. It meant that after 2 1/2 days...56 hours and 10 minutes, we had power at our house again! We started jumping around the store like we had hit the Education lottery and triple coupon day at the same time. The people around us probably thought we had gotten the Holy Ghost or something - we didn't care. We had heat!

I will never again take for granted little things like: expecting the heat to come on when it gets cold outside; or how beautiful our tree looks with all of the Christmas lights lit up. God has blessed us so much and we have so much to be thankful for. Maybe sometimes stuff happens in life to help us put things back in perspective. What do you have in your life to be thankful for right now?

Frozen Tundra

I am posting this with my Treo 650, because my office and my house have been without power all day. We do not have power because Greenville is frozen. One large piece of ice. I am sitting here watching large trees in my backyard snap like twigs. It's a little disconcerting to watch tall trees now almost touching the ground from the weight of the ice. We ventured out for lunch and had to drive off of the road a few times to avoid fallen branches and power lines. Oh well, at least I don't have to worry about hurricanes anymore!

Catching Up

Ok, I haven't blogged in awhile - so I have several things to get out into the blogosphere. Here goes in no particular order:

I bought a Windows PC for the house at the 5am Black Friday after Thanksgiving. I am a musician, so I wasn't really aware that there were two 5:00's in a day, but apparently there is. There aren't very many nice people out at that first 5:00 - but that's beside the point. I bought a PC. I wrestled with the desicion for several weeks. We haven't had a working computer in our house for a few months, and I thought that getting a pc would be the best thing for the whole family - because of my daughter's games, ect. Man - am I regretting that decision! Maybe I've been Mac too long, but I have already experienced all of the "joys" of Windows. Crashes, virus software for the virus software...it goes on and on. Please take me back Steve!!!

Last night, I checked out one of our worship leaders, Chris Sligh and his band Half Past Forever, at a concert in downtown Greenville. Those guys seriously rocked!!! Chris had eaten some bad Mexican food the night before, so he looked a little putrude all night (it may have been the green light on him as well), but they still put on a great set. Chris has an amazing voice and writes great songs. You can buy one of Chris' cds at our bookstore next Sunday.

We decorated our auditorium for Christmas a couple of weeks ago and it looks very cool! The best part was - I had very little to none participation in the design. We have some very talented people in our church who know how to do that kind of thing. I just showed up with a ladder and put things where they told me! That was the best thing for all. I will try to post some pictures here or at the Greenville blog.

40 Days of Community was a very cool thing for us. We ended up with over 80% of our adults in small groups! I can't wait for the next small group semester to get kicked off in January. We have some great new groups that are going to be starting up. Also, I'm very excited about our new online learning experience. More about that later!

The uproar about churches not having Christmas services on Christmas Day is getting almost ridiculously funny. My brother Greg has a great post on it here.

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that the spell check on my blog does not recognize the word "blog"?

I spoke 3 times this week - twice this morning + a child dedication. That's about all I have in me...

Not So Good

I've always fancied myself a pretty decent keyboard player. I have done it for a living for most of my working life, and have gotten by pretty well.

I sat down with my 7 year old daughter tonight to play with a little Christmas keyboard book that she has. You know - it's one of those miniature pianos with different colors on each key. The sheet music tells you which note to play by the colors. It doesn't give you a key, time signature, or note values. Just colors. I couldn't play it. I finally had to give up and let my 7 year old take over. She breezed through it with no problem, and then looked at me with the look we usually give our children - as if to say "it's ok daddy, you'll get it one day." I'm learning how to play the flute now.

Great Blog

I had a very cool lunch today with Perry Noble, the pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC. If you have not checked out his blog, you need to. I have no idea how he has the time to pastor a mega-church, root for a mediocre football team (Clemson) :), and write incredible stuff every day...but he does. When I grow up, I want to be like Perry...except for the Clemson part. Hook 'em Horns!!!

CD Review

I just recently downloaded (legally :) ) the latest worship album by Lincoln Brewster - All To You...Live. It immediately became one of my all time favorites. This cd seriously rocks!!! Lincoln has always been an amazing guitar player, and has written some great songs...but he put it all together on this project. Every song is great - and several tracks have unbelievable, extended instrumental "jams". The sense that people really worshipped that night comes through the recording as well. Stop what your doing right now and get this cd. No...I mean it, start downloading people!!!

All For The Kingdom

My brother Greg has a great post about doing ministry for the Kingdom, not the credit. Check it out.

A.R.C. Conference

I am going down to Charleston tomorrow for a 3 day Association Of Related Churches conference at Seacoast. I am really looking forward to it, because it's always great to connect with church planters from around the country. Also, some of the best speakers in the nation are members of the ARC. Dino Rizzo may be the best communicator I have ever listened to!

Not very many people know that Seacoast Greenville is a member of the A.R.C., as well as a campus of Seacoast Church. The training and support that I received from guys like Chris Hodges, Rick Bezet, and Billy Hornsby was amazing. If you haven't checked out the A.R.C., I encourage you to take a look at the system they have for planting churches to reproduce planting churches. It's a vision that I strongly believe in and I am very proud that a portion of our budget will always go to starting new churches.

Family Palooza

We held our first annual Family Palooza event yesterday afternoon. There was a great turnout and it was a lot of fun. I posted some pics at the Seacoast Greenville blog. It did make for a really long Sunday though!!! Very, very tired...

Be Available

I try to meet with anyone who wants to talk to me. There are certain boundaries of course (my family always comes first), but usually I can work something out. I learned this from my brother Greg Surratt. In my ten years at Seacoast, I have never seen him turn down an offer to buy his lunch and quiz him on anything. It didn't matter if it was the governor of South Carolina, or a brand new pastor at the smallest church in town--he made time. I think that's an essential value for church and business leaders to have.

When I first moved to Greenville to plant Seacoast Greenville, I tried to meet with a major leader in our area and was turned down. It was conveyed that he didn't see the point of meeting with me. I wasn't on his radar yet. It just reinforced the thought that I never want to get to that place. We have to be willing to pass along the wisdom and knowledge that only comes from experience. Like Rick Warren says, "if my bullet fits your gun - shoot it!" Blogs are great for doing that as well. I learn so much from guys like Perry Noble and Mark Batterson. I can't always buy their lunch, but they give it out for free every week!

Anyways, that's my Saturday rant - anyone want to buy my lunch on Monday?

Our First Chair

I am very excited, because today I purchased our first office chair! I went down to Office Max and slapped $50 down on a real beauty that swivels, rolls and rocks! You have to understand our office situation to know why this makes me giggle.

In our budget system, the office comes in dead last. We put almost no money into it. We worked out of the front room of my house for the first 10 months, taking advantage of free internet in places like Port City Java and Atlanta Bread Company. After we moved into our current building, I begged the church that owns it to let us use a 10' x 10' room - just so we could move our equipment out of our home!

Here's how it looks now: we have the 10' x 10' room for our administrative assistant and associate minister to share; and we just gained access to the office next door for me to share with their facilities manager whenever he is on the premises. If he shows up, I move out. The two office chairs that we have now, we rescued on their way to the dumpster. The only reason I bought this one is the new office only has one folding chair. Not the ideal counseling set-up. We are living the church-planting dream!

Multi-Site Conference Day 1

It's the end of day 1 at the Multi-Site Conference in Chicago - and it was great! Geoff is blogging the details about the general sessions at multisiterevolution.com. A few of the highlights for me:

1. Meeting some very cool people. It was great to finally meet Todd Rhoades in person. I felt like I was in the presence of blogging celebrity! The guys at Community Christian have been great hosts as well.

2. Talking about how you start a distance campus. Our breakout session this afternoon went very well...and there were great questions. You could feel the excitement of possibility in the room! I think this multi-site thing is going to catch on! :)

3. Hearing from the pioneers of muti-site. These guys stepped out when there wasn't anyone else doing it. As Greg said today - "I never talked to anyone who thought this (multi-site) was a great idea." Who knew?

Well, after a 5:30am wake-up call this morning - I'm tired! I'll try to blog live from the sessions tomorrow.

Great Day

We had two great services this morning. I am too tired right now to go into a lot of details, but I will hopefully be able to post some pictures from our Ministry Fair here and on our Greenville blog in the next few days. Our team did an unbelievable job!!! I am so proud to be working alongside our Dream Team every week. You guys rock!!!

Church Planting Observations

I am helping present at a muti-site conference in a few weeks in Chicago. Mostly, I am going to help carry Geoff and Greg's bags...but that's beside the point. In thinking about my session, I have noticed that we have a unique perspective on planting churches at Seacoast. We have started 9 campuses of different sizes in the past 3 years. We have also planted 22 churches through our church planting arm - the A.R.C. Through all of these churches, I have noticed a few things that really work well, and some things to avoid. I think it's always best to learn from other people's mistakes, not my own. :)

I hesitate to post this for two reasons:

1. We certainly don't have it all figured out yet. We are only a year into this, and we have a ton of learning yet to do.

2. There are always exceptions. I have never seen a church with a worse location than Lakewood Church before their current home. Location, location, location!

With that said, here a few church planting observations:

Do a few things and do them well.
We started Seacoast Greenville with 3 focuses: Sunday celebration, children's program, and small groups. That is all we worked on for the 6 months before we launched. The churches that I have seen do well from the start, keep their focus. Out of those three, I think that a high quality kid's program may be the most important. If you are not ready to have a full kid's area on Sunday morning, then you are probably not ready to launch. You cannot compromise in this area. Parents will stick with a bad church if they have a something happening with their kids - they will leave a great church that doesn't. Invest in your kids.

Have a solid core leadership team in place before you launch.
I have heard all kinds of different thoughts on how many people you need on your core team before you officially launch. I think that you do need enough people to cover your priority focuses, but I also think that you need solid, committed leaders more than big numbers. When the opening day crowd goes away (trust me, they will), you need people who bleed the vision to be there every week.

Location, location, location!!!
We learned this one all by ourselves! We wondered all over Greenville before we had the right place. I believe we probably could have started a little quicker if we had locked into a better venue earlier. In our experience with campuses, movie theaters work really well. You have to get a bit creative with the children, but it can be done well - check out our Irmo campus. Those guys have it rockin'! High schools are also great if you can get them. They were at a premium here in Greenville. A couple of locations that don't seem to work well: motels and storefronts. Motels feel like convention centers (where we started), and storefronts lock you into a location. It took us 6 months to find where God wanted us to be.

I think that's probably enough for one post. I'll continue this in future posts down the road.

Sports Dilemma

I have a serious sports problem right now - my two favorite baseball teams, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Houston Astros, are playing each other for the National League title. This happened last year and I almost couldn't take the pain! Should I abandon one for the other? Will the other one understand and take me back if they win? Is there any way to root for a tie? It's going to kill me!!!