I’m excited to be heading back to Guatemala next week to teach at the Acts 29 conference. Great things are happening for the Gospel in Latin America. Francisco Bendfelt’s church, Casa de Libertad is a great example of this. I’ll be traveling with our Lead Pastor, Renaut Van Der Riet, as well as couple guys from our Mosaic Latino team. Renaut and I will both be teaching twice during the conference and our good friend and global partner, Jay Bauman from Rio de Janiero will also be joining us to teach. When audio is available, I’ll be sure to post links. Pray for us!

I think it’s important to not take ourselves too seriously, and be willing to have a little fun, even poking fun at our own ministries. April Fool’s Day provides a great opportunity to do so, and I took it! One of our churches little quirks is that we start all of our gatherings :02 minutes later than logic would dictate. So, it’s 9:02, not 9:00. It’s 11:17, not 11:15. Our founding pastor will tell you that he did it just to make it stand out and catch your eye a bit more as you drove by a sign. It’s one of those silly things that people remember, and plenty of us make fun of it as well. A couple of years ago, we actually considered changing it due to the cheese factor, but decided that at this point, it’s just a part of who we are. We are the :02 church. But what if suddenly, we decided to become the :03 church? That was the basis of my April Fool’s Day post that went on our website and throughout our social media. People had a lot of fun with it. Here is the article I wrote:

Like most churches, ours has a couple of announcements each week, generally tied in as a closer to the gathering. One of our staff members plays gate-keeper on what gets announced and when. For the weekends, she creates a cheat sheet for us to bring on stage with the list and key information so we aren’t doing that annoying thing where you turn around to look at the screen because you forgot the dates of the women’s retreat or whatever. Recently our cheat sheets got a major upgrade.

I’m excited to announce that the Spanish translation of my book Defining The Executive Pastor Role is now available on Amazon in E-book and Paperback! If Spanish is your primary language, maybe this will be a help to you. If not, please share the link with others who may benefit from this tool. Many thanks to Sandrie Alvarado at Casa de Libertad in Guatemala City, Guatemala for doing the translation.

My church just came through a pretty significant Generosity Initiative. The big question that many of our staff asked was “Will people actually give what they committed this time?” Because last time we did this, we had a low percentage of people actually follow through. But was it entirely their fault?

I’m exited to be teaching at the XPastor Seminar in about a month from now. If you’ve never been before, it’s not too late to sign up and I’d highly recommend it regardless of where you are in your development as an XP.

I’ve been posting a lot about our generosity initiative over the last few months. In fact, I haven’t really been posting about anything else because this project has been dominating my days and nights. Today I want to talk about stage design for a generosity initiative.

We’ve just come through our Generosity Initiative at Mosaic Church. One of the most important things that we did that I have not posted about yet is the special website. We discussed making it a separate URL but ultimately chose to make it an extension of our normal site, thisismosaic.org . So we went with www.thisismosaic.org/getloud .

I want to point out a few things about the site.

When you think about a Missional Community, I find that it is helpful to think about a team of missionaries in a foreign context. What characteristics would you expect to find in a healthy team of missionaries in another country? We expect certain things of missionaries who go serve in another country. Why would we not expect the same things of team of missionaries serving locally in our context? As I think about the expectations of teams of missionaries and apply those to a Missional Community, here is the list that I discover.