Just got the breakout schedule for the churchplanters.com conference. They have over 500 people signed up for the conference so far!!! I honestly believe this conference will be second to none. They have a GREAT line up of speakers.

I am excited about teaching a breakout session on “Going All Out For The Disconnected.” I will be teaching this during the 1st and 2nd breakout sessions. I am glad I am not doing my breakout when Perry is doing his. For one reason I want to attend his session, another reason is no one will be in my session if I was teaching during the time he was.

If you aren’t attending this conference, you are missing out. I think this is going to be the surprise conference of the year.

If you are going, shoot me an e-mail and let me know. I would love to meet you.

As we continue to grow, we continue to streamline and readjust our structure to continue to be geared toward growth and simplicity. Over the last week, God has opened some doors and done some cool things that are going to lead to allowing us to be better equipped to continue to grow.

After much prayer, debate, and God making some things very clear we have made some staff changes that I am pretty excited about.

1. John Ventry is going part-time. There are several reasons for this NONE of which are bad. No one had a fight, no one couldn’t do their job, no one is mad, and there is NO sin involved. John is going to devote some time to his family and see what God has in store for him. John will continue on but move into a more CFO type role. He will still handle our finances, budgeting, and purchasing. This is right up John’s alley and his gift mix. I am excited about this move.
2. Cheri is coming on basically full-time. She works three days a week now and we will be bringing her on 4 days a week now. Cheri is one of those people you simply forget how much she means to the church because she simply does her job. When you ask her to do something, it gets done. I trust her and she is sold out to Ridge Stone. I love having her in the office. She is going to be assisting Malcolm and Preston in their areas.
3. I have a personal assistant!!!!!!!!!!! About two hours ago I hired Taylor Wiseman. Taylor is someone I trust but more importantly she is someone DeAnna trusts. DeAnna gets veto power when it comes to my assistant and she is excited about Taylor. I have a thousand little things on my plate that need to be removed and Taylor is going to do that. She will handle my communication and my calendar and will keep me organized. She is also going to be helping Tim out until we bring him an assistant on staff.

One thing you learn very quickly at RSC is things change FAST!!!! As we grow we are learning from some great churches and I am learning my leadership is going to have to change. I can’t do everything and answer every question anymore. I am having to get more protective with my time and balancing my priorities. It is a growing experience but things that aren’t growing are dying. I always want RSC to be a growing church and that comes from me growing.

We are trying to get the bugs figured out at our new home here at www.garylamb.org (I just like typing my name as a url) and hopefully we will get some of the feeds working very soon.

It is driving me crazy but such is life.

BTW, if you are a Ridge Stoner, I found out today Joe Owens is blogging. Joe is a GREAT guy who works in Planet Shakers and with our youth. You could not ask for a more selfless person to attend your church. He has always done whatever was needed to make church happen. Go check out his blog here.

“I come here for the worship, I then go to First Baptist for the teaching.”

I heard that from a guy Sunday. I really didn’t know what to say. I just smiled and thanked him.

You can click up at the top of the page on links and see some of the sharpest guys in ministry around. I updated the list today and changed it around and when I did I deleted all the church planting links I had up there by accident.

I will work on fixing it tonight but as I have scaled back who I read, I am going to scale back the list too.

I also want to put up a list of Ridge Stone bloggers as well. We have several bloggers in the church and it is a great way to get connected with other Ridge Stoners.

When I was in 9th grade I actually had the Vanilla Ice lines shaved in the side of my head. It was pretty cool….not.

Anyway the buzz on the news is we are getting ice and possibly snow tonight. After living four years in Iowa I am not easily impressed but I am excited anyway.

DeAnna made homemade vegetable soup for dinner and I am about to start a fire. Should be a fun night.

For some reason Avery has been up and down for the last two hours and now that he is finally sleeping, I can’t sleep!!!! So here I am at 2 in the morning blogging. I figure I will be paying for it in the morning big time.

As I laid in bed trying to go back to sleep my mind was racing about all that God is doing here at RSC. We truly don’t deserve it but I love what He is doing and I intend to keep pushing to see Him do more.

I have loved what God is doing with our staff through all this. We are a very tight bunch to begin with but like never before I see us becoming tighter and more MEAN about the vision we have here. I have said from day one that the vision to reach the unchurched and dechurched of this are will never change and if it did change, we’ll just shut the church down.

The last thing Canton needed was another church in town when we started. However, it did need a place where those who had given up on church, never been to church, or were burned out with church could come and hear about a relationship with God and not some boring religion. We will fight to keep the vision focused.

God has sent a ton of new people our way lately and I think the coolest thing is how quickly those new people have bought into the vision and jumped on board. There is nothing worse to me then someone who comes to your church and tries to change you into their idea of what church should be. On the other hand there is nothing sweeter then people coming in and getting the vision right off the bat and helping make it work.

I am so excited about the coming days at RSC that I can’t sleep

I love how in church life how quickly the rumor mill starts turning. We’ve made some changes that are GREAT here at the church (I’ll be sharing more about those tomorrow) but already this morning I hear the phone lines are lighting up with busy bodies talking about stuff they have no clue about.

The funniest thing is only ONE of the people I have heard talking about it has done the biblical thing and called to find out the truth before continuing to tell others what they have heard.

I can’t wait to see how big and how untrue the rumor gets before I fill everyone in on the actual TRUTH tomorrow.

Okay this is the second week in a row where you stunk for a whole hour until the last minute.

I am giving you the benefit of the doubt but you guys got to pick it up!!!

Now, Prison Break on the other hand was off the hook AGAIN!!!!!

EDIT: Oh man, I just saw the previews for next week and they look like they might be back on track!!!!

My blogger site now transfers to the new domain but for those getting this from type of feed the new website is:

www.garylamb.org

and the new feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GaryLamb

Update those feeds and come join my adventure in planting the greatest church in the world!!!

EDIT: okay, I can’t get the new blog to work in bloglines. Any of you other people getting that feed to work?