Gone Fishin!

You've seen them, you may attend one on Sunday mornings. The latest trend is to have a really cool name for your church. After being in and around different types of ministries over the last 15 years it gets more noticeable the way we follow trends. Even the trends of not following trends. This has even affected the way we name our gathering places or the name of the group of people congregating in the name of Jesus. I think maybe these groovy names for churches came about as a reaction to to the folks outside the church walls who had become indifferent to names like 1st Baptist, or ST John's or Antioch Methodist. Maybe the new church name movement came about as a way of assigning identity to that particular group of people. It may have been as well a breaking away of religious typology. Whatever the reason now the hottest thing going that I have noticed is to name your church with one word. Not two, just one word. Something that is catchy on...

j I cannot overestimate the value of getting away. Jack and I just returned from a great trip to Alaska with my brother Steve and my dad. We spent 8 days exploring the Kenai penninsula, angling for trout and salmon, panning for gold, hiking on snow covered trails, wondering at glaciers and just plain having fun. I just got through reading a book that my friend Pete gave me called, "The mission, the men and me". Its by a fomer Delta Force commnder. I was expecting a war story book, but its so much more than that. Its a valuable book on leadership. One of the points that the auther, Pete Blaber, makes is that all good leadership and problem solving requires those "eureka" moments of discovery. But those moments are impossible without a process of discovery. The process he calls the saturate, incubate and illuminate cycle. You have to be able to saturate yourself with context and information about your mission, you've got to allow time to incubate or think abou...