Lost in Faith

Why I am blogging?

It used to be that I could sit around the table at HyVee or in my den and talk to everyone at Shoal Creek. Those days are long gone. The rocket launch that happened when we moved into our I-35 Campus re-ordered my world. I am and have been playing catch up ever since.

This is a pivotal year. This year will determine whether we continue to be effective connecting people in a vital relationship with God or we become an average church doing an average job.

What are the determining factors?

Leadership, more gifted leaders leading. I will speak about this in the coming weeks. But SHIFT is the place to explore what this looks like for you.

Ownership, more people moving into ownership. Because of our strategy, it is easy to remain a spectator. It looks like things work like a well oiled machine when in fact they are usually held together with bailing wire.

Early on our tribe increased because I met with people, cast a mean vision of a place of freedom, authenticity and passion. With growth my focus has shifted from collecting tribesmen to training leaders. Others have taken up the struggle to cast vision and build a cohort radically committed to a community of freedom, authenticity and passion. Some do it better than me, others not so good.

Largeness (a word?) cannot not steal my strategic role of the primary cultural architect. So I am about new ways to “meet” with people and share a compelling story, hopefully infectous to the point of creating more owners.

That is why I blogging? Because the world is flat as Thomas Friedman has told us. If I want to get what’s on my heart to you, we no longer have to sit down and create space in physcial world. We can meet in the virtual world and carry on a conversation. Some might argue that this would be impersonal but the same chronological predjudice was used with the advent of the postal system when people wrote letters instead of talking face to face and the telephone when people could talk without seeing each other. Rather than impersonal, it maybe be an even more effecive means of dialogue. I would argue that Francis Bacon was correct when he said, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

The internet has taken us forward and backward at the same time. Forward by encouraging dialogue anytime, from most anywhere, unlimited by physical space. Backward into the textual world having to think about what we are writing (hopefully) and therefore becoming more exact. The downside of our visual world is mushy minds, lazy thinking.

I want this to be a place where anyone @ the Creek can interact with me about the journey that God has us on. You are certainly encouraged to comment on these thoughts. I am much more comfortable with dialogue than I am with monologue.

It will also be a place to find out what’s cooking in the future of Shoal Creek. In the next few days, I talk about some big projects in the works that will make some radical changes. Hopefully it won’t be a place for me to rattle on or spill my guts. But it will be a place for people to get connected to the heart beat of Shoal Creek.

I leave tomorrow during the Chiefs game for the mountains of Colorado. Candy will join me as we spend 12 days writing. As much as I like the Francis Bacon quote, writing is not one of my preferred activities. Pray that I will be able to give birth in writing to the concepts of the 7 Journeys. It is strategic to Shoal Creek’s future. Candy is focused on producing a study guide for the Journeys while I am targeting a book.

I am looking forward to this journey and the dialogue. Come on in- the water is great!

Roy