The BEST night yet! Most of the guys rocked it out! I told the guys at the office after the first show that Dilana was going to win it and at this time I am standing by that. However, Storm Large is coming on strong and the band LOVES Lukas. Toby is falling quickly but he has a chance.

I truly feel they are going with a chick to lead the band and that narrows it down to Dilana and Storm with Dilana wining it. She just fits Supernova.

BTW, Gilby Clarke ROCKED tonight! I am a huge GnR fan so it was fun seeing him on stage.

Ridge Stone Links…

Ridge Stone Church

Ridge Stone Backstage

Haiti Cheri Missions

John Ventry

Malcolm Young

Preston Porter

Tim May

Christian Adoption Consultants - DeAnna’s Gig

Church Planting Blogs I Dig…

Bob Franquiz

Chris Surratt

Chris Elrod

Greg Rohlinger

Jason Taylor

Jonathan Herron

Mark Batterson

Mark Driscoll

Matt Evans

Michael Lukaszewski

Perry Noble

Scott Whitaker

Tadd Grandstaff -RSC Church Planter

Tally Wilgis

Tony McCollum

Travis Johnson

Some More Cool Cats…

Charlie Pharris

Evan Erwin

Ken Wilson

Tony Morgan

Last week my Serpentine belt broke on my Jeep. That stunk. After getting the belt off we discovered that my harmonic balancer had broke in half and that caused the belt to break. Fixed it and then my air compressor went out. So right now I have no A/C in my BLACK Jeep with DARK Grey HOT leather seats. Today my Jeep decided to start not wanting to crank so now I need to give it a Tune up, not a lot of money to do but still a pain.

Then last week our dryer stopped drying. Just fot if fixed and I kid you now, our washer started leaking.
On top of that Preston’s car is broke down. Malcolm (connections pastor) had the A/C on his van just go out. and Tim has gout (no, I am not kidding).

But things are going great at the church so what do you expect?

Last week my Serpentine belt broke on my Jeep. That stunk. After getting the belt off we discovered that my harmonic balancer had broke in half and that caused the belt to break. Fixed it and then my air compressor went out. So right now I have no A/C in my BLACK Jeep with DARK Grey HOT leather seats. Today my Jeep decided to start not wanting to crank so now I need to give it a Tune up, not a lot of money to do but still a pain.

Then last week our dryer stopped drying. Just fot if fixed and I kid you now, our washer started leaking.
On top of that Preston’s car is broke down. Malcolm (connections pastor) had the A/C on his van just go out. and Tim has gout (no, I am not kidding).

But things are going great at the church so what do you expect?

Ben Arment posted about going to Rob Bell’s Everything IS Spiritual tour. Rob is doing a cool thing where he is traveling around the nation and doing a talk/sermon/discussion in bars and concert venues. His goal is to communicate to seekers about God in their environment. GREAT idea!

In his post, Ben makes a point that the only problem is that the large majority of the crowd is your typical Christian who wants to hear Rob. I talked to someone I know who went here in Atlanta and he said it was obvious that the large majority of the crowd was Christ followers.

To me that is typical. I am consumed with those who don’t know Christ and it drives me nuts that someone like Rob is out trying to go those who don’t know Christ and share the message in their language and in their turf, yet “feeders” are buying up all the tickets.

Just doesn’t make sense to me….

The sad thing is most of the Christians who went were probably so giddy that they actually went to a concert venue or pub to see Rob. I can just seem the bragging and thinking they are now relevant because of it. Maybe they should try that on a regular basis to see those who don’t know Christ.

But those are just my thoughts.

Troy Gramling

This week we are ending our Face The Music series with one of my FAVORITE songs of all time. I can’t tell you the song, but we have a old friend coming to play keys with the band and I hear he does a mean Steve Perry.
Oh yeah, the band is going to start the service this week WITH the 5 minute countdown clock. I love the band we are covering this week so much that I couldn’t narrow the song down to one, so they are going to start the service off with a little bonus! So come early this week!!!

This Sunday we end summer and let’s do it with a BANG!!!!

As we were putting a video together for our big bash in a couple of week we looked at a bunch of photos and video of our early days. MAN, we were rough!!! I joked to the crew that we were to dumb to realize we were supposed to close down. I actually was a lot skinner and that is a good thing! In one of the videos, Tim as wearing a Bill Cosby type sweater and I about crapped in my pants I was laughing so hard. Our stage props were so lame!

It is so easy to forget where God has brought us from.

I literally get up every morning and start my day by doing three things:
Thanking God for saving me
Thanking God for my family
Thanking God for the church I get to pastor

The last two years have been wild and I can’t wait for the next 23!!!!! (I’m only doing this thing for 25 years, then I am taking the whole staff and we are going to Panama City Beach and do another one on the ocean!!!

We had to move our creative meeting to today so after staff meeting we had that meeting. It made for a long day of meetings but it was AWESOME!!!!!!!!! I love the people I get to work with. Today we laughed as much as we worked. We nailed down the details of our 2nd anniversary service in two weeks, nailed down the final details for our Love Affair series we are launching and called a change and decided to do a series on small groups starting the week after Labor Day called “Together.” The vibe of this series is going to be so different then anything we have done and I am excited. I’m not sure this makes sense but it is going to be very Jack Johnson-ish. We have some VERY cool laid back ideas for the stage and it is going to be awesome to talk about the importance of doing community together and we are also going to be talking about our small group geared to addicts. We got two dudes in our church who are crazy in a good way leading this and it is going to be HUGE!

I truly think it rocks that I get to work with people that I love and love being around. The crew here is the most creative bunch I have ever been around.

We have some cool things coming up and it is going to be a blast!

Today was an interesting day. We had a VERY rough set-up this morning. Things would just not work. Tim had the day off so just having a different worship leader was odd to me and had me uncomfortable. Things were just not clicking today before the service.

However when the service started, it was good. We had a good crowd for the week before school starts back (Can’t wait for August!!!!), the music actually carried me today as I really didn’t feel I was clicking all that much. Thank God for good music.
The cool thing is before the service this guy walks in. I say hello and after he walks away I tell the guy next to me, “That guy has church planter written all over him.” He just had “the look.” After he walked away I just felt like I had seen him before but blew it off and figured I had met him at some conference.

After the service, everyone was leaving and I said goodbye to him or something and he said he enjoyed the service and he was passing through and was a pastor in South Fla. Instantly I knew where I had seen him. It was Troy Gramling from Flamingo Road! That probably is not a big deal to you, but Flamingo Road and Dan Southerland, the former pastor are one of the reasons I didn’t leave ministry after I read his book. I listen to Troy almost every week, so it was cool that he was in the service.

I think he said they had been at Buckhead Church prior to attending our service, so I am glad he got to finish in a bigger and more known church like Ridge Stone.
Anyway, it was cool. Troy, e-mail me your feedback dude!
Next week we end our iPod series and it is going to be the best service yet!!!!!!! Our crowd is going to go nuts when they hear the song, we are busting out that day!!!