Writing For Five Generations

I've spent most of the morning working on a sermon for the weekend after Christmas. I've come to a realization that should be absolutely obvious, but presents a challenge for those of us in a multigenerational church. Sermon writing and preaching is a fairly comfortable endeavor for me – I've had the opportunity preach more than 30 times this past …

Visual Worship – PSU Edition

Visual Worship 1Originally uploaded by kerner Sunday night we had a minimalist setup at The Green Room for worship. Part of the setup served as an object lesson, we didn't pay the PSU to set chairs and everything else had to fit in my car and be stuff I could put together on my own. We didn't bring any PA …

Advent Conspiracy 2009

Once upon a time Christmas was about more than endless shopping and wish lists. Christmas was about joy, peace, hope, and love. Most of us could all do with a little bit less stuff crap stress debt hassle in our lives. What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

State of the House

The state of the house 11-8-09Originally uploaded by kerner Sarah put together a nice mosaic of the current state of our house. The cabinets are mostly complete, we should have countertops, a kitchen sink and trim installed this week. The contractor this morning told me that ideally they’ll be hooking up our fridge and oven today. Hopefully we’re getting close …

#cultivate09 and #story09 initial thoughts

This week I attended to brand new conferences, Cultivate and Story. I can only say the teams in charge of both events did an exceptional job. I was especially happy with Cultivate because it was a format I'd never seen before. It was driven almost completely by conversation – presenters shared for a brief amount of time and the rest …

It’s a boy!

Ultrasound PicturesOriginally uploaded by kerner As many of you know, although I'm sure quite a few people don't know yet, Sarah and I are expecting our first child in late March. We had the ultrasound this morning and everything is going very well. Our baby boy looks healthy and about 8oz at 18ish weeks. We haven't finalized name choices yet, …

Outward Focused Ministry

I spent yesterday with a small group of youth leaders, pastors, and Bishop Schnase (the Bishop of the Missouri Annual Conference) discussing the conference role in helping youth ministry. I wasn't quite sure why I was invited as I have very little involvement in youth ministry (other than I used to be a youth leader). One thing I do know …

Remodel Shopping ugh

We’ve started the process of shopping for all of the things that go into a kitchen remodel. I’m shocked at how many decisions there are. Sinks, faucets, countertops, cabinet hardware and the list just goes on and on. Once you pick a style there are materials, edges and even more choices. We’ve made some progress though. We selected a contractor, …

Texting and Worship

Last night we made our first foray into texting during worship. We had a panel discussion answering questions that focused on how faith impacts life as a college student. I thought the questions were very good and the panel did an excellent job dealing with them. We did have a few issues in the moderation process, which is something we'll …

40 Days of Prayer for College Ministry

NOTE: I'd written this a couple of weeks ago, right before the 40 days started, but it didn't get posted. It's a bit dated, but I logged into write a new post today and saw that this was unpublished, enjoy. Starting August 17th my friends Creighton Alexander and Ashlee Alley and the team at College Union are calling all of …

Theology of Technology Conversations

I'm spending this week in Kentucky at the Asbury campus in a class about the web in ministry. The primary purpose of the class is to familiarize students with the Internet and the web with each of us in the class completing some sort of a final web project. For my project I'm not building a web site, instead I'm …