This weekend we celebrated our annual stewardship campaign. For the most part it's been a great weekend, we had a few logistical glitches, but overall it's been outstanding. We're blessed to have had Richard Blackmon from Viscern speaking this weekend. Richard and his wife Debby have been long-time friends of Schweitzer. Richard preached a great message about three stewardship stories: …

Closing session from Innovate with Mark Beeson

Session by Troy Gramling (Flamingo Road Church) & Scott Hodge (The Orchard). Details after the jump.  

Talking about worship leadership. Live blogging after the jump.

Rob Wegner, how do we make sure that our message connects with people so that it really matters. Read after the jump for the live updates from the session. 

We've been wired in our worship meetings for a little over a month now. What does that mean? As part of our new, improved worship planning process we're planning more weekends in advance than ever before. As I said earlier we've basically got a preaching calendar through Easter including series groupings. Our creative team will handle branding of these messages …

Most of the staff and several other leaders at the church are attending the Willow Creek Leadership Summit (at a satellite site) this week. Day one was fairly good, the highlight was clearly Marcus Buckingham. I've read some of his writing and heard him speak before and it's always informative and entertaining. I wonder how much more effective the church …

Last week we did a two-day worship planning retreat for the entire team. We've had some level of team-based worship planning for the entire time I've been on staff, but this takes it to a new level. We're using a modified version of the Big Idea approach used by a numerous churches. Our worship team (four pastors, media director, traditional …

We're still short a contemporary worship leader, but some of our prospects are outstanding and Zak/Angelia are doing a great job in the interim. If you know a talented worship leader that would be intersted in a part-time gig – 6-8 hours a week in Springfield, MO send him/her my way. The next several weeks we have candidates running practice …

VBS was an exhausting, outstanding week. We had over 400 kids attending VBS during our large day program and smaller evening program. We generally always do a wrap-up, overview video for the Thursday night program. This year to provide something more interesting for the fifth graders we tossed them into the mix. They helped collect video footage for two days …