Next week I am teaching on the subject of Authority.  I will be talking about the who, what, when, and wheres of it.  As I have been studying the last couple of days it is amazing how many people in the Bible had authority issues and how they ALWAYS led to bad results.

Authority issues is something I have to check every day.  I struggle with people telling me what to do and how things should be.  I guess in some respects, that is why I planted a church (that along with the whole God called me thing and wanting to see lives changed).  Next week is going to be a very eye opening message for a lot of people.

God gives us authorities to protect, mature, and guide us along this crazy adventure of life.  It is going to be a blast!

From our office you can see the city of Canton fireworks GREAT.  So we announced from the stage last Sunday if you wanted to come hang out, you could.  We organized NOTHING!  We just showed up and a dude in our church had his band play some awesome covers and around 400 people showed up.  Very cool.

It was a GREAT time of connecting and gettting to know people.  We very rarely do things that enable our people to just enjoy hanging out and everytime we do, I am reminded of the value in people getting connected.

Today Malcolm has started cleaning out our filing cabinets.  We are all in agreement that Tadd heard right when he heard God call him to plant a church BECAUSE he sure was NOT called to be an organizational genius. :)  We also think Tadd heard right when he brought on an Executive Pastor.

All kidding aside, I have never seen SO MUCH mess in my life!  We have CRAZY stuff filed away.  We have stuff I have never seen in my life.  We even have stuff I have totally forgot about!  I totally forget that we used to send out a Ridge Stone Newspaper every other month.  It was pretty dope and we all looked like dopes.

It has been fun looking through old pictures and stuff.

It isn’t all Tadd’s fault either.  We had another person try and organize us one time and that stuff is more disorganized then Tadd’s stuff.  It is a mess but by next week everything should be GREAT!

Taking the entire staff and some volunteers who put in time during the week up to Blue Ridge tomorrow for a day of vision casting, planning, structure, etc.

I normally dread these things.  I am way to ADD for them.  However, tomorrow I will be casting vision and talking about what I love and then Malcolm gets to do the boring, but needed stuff.  Funny thing is he loves it!

I think it is going to be the icing on the cake for some of the moves we have made and we are going to put the final nails in some things we have been building.

Lift a couple of prayers up for us as we cross your mind!

With the family gone, I came up to the office to do some work. I forgot our students were having a weekend thingy going on, so I got up here and the place is packed out with kids. I went to my office and listened to their service and all they are doing and I got to be honest, I almost got a little teared up.  I think Salty discharge from my eyes has only happened twice in my life.  I am just a hard hearted person who doesn’t cry for some reason.
I have made NO bones about the fact that students has kicked our butts here. We have a ton of teenagers but we have zero luck getting them to a youth service.

Well, I think after this weekend that could be changing. Without a doubt this has been the best thing the students have ever done. It is organized, fun, they are bonding, and they are getting pumped about serving Jesus!

I am most happy for our volunteers. Joe, Chris, Taylor, and Julie have been there through EVERY thing we have tried with the students and never quit believing something awesome could happen.

We still have a long way to go but Adam is doing a great job and for the first time every I am very excited about our student area.

Great job guys!

I have really been trying to take my prayer life a lot more seriously and make it a scheduled  thing every day.  I have started keeping prayer journals and while many things on there change daily, there are a few things that I think will be on there forever.

1. God would stay at the forefront of my life
2. God would continually grow me as a husband
3. God would help me to pour my life into my children
4. That RSC would always be a growing, healthy, community impacting church that is focused on the disconnected in this area
5. That I will always take risk over safety
6. That my children will grow up to be dangerous and wild for the cause of Christ!
7. I pray for Ashlyn and Avery’s future spouses
8. I pray that God will allow me to stay at RSC for the rest of my life
9. That I stay reminded that RSC is all about God and not me
10. That I stay morally above reproach
11. That I am a friend
12. That our people know how honored I am to pastor RSC
13. That we always make the comfortable very uncomfortable
14. That when believers walk into RSC for the first time, they are just a little uncomfortable after seeing the people we reach
15. That God uses me to impact the area

I can’t freaking wait until Sunday gets here!!!!  We are coming with one of my favorite stories in the Bible and a story that for some reason I haven’t taught from yet at The Stone.  It is going to be a blast, plus the band is busting out one of my favorite songs right now on my playlist.

I love Sundays!

God has blessed me with some great friends since starting RSC.  From o2Graphics to Kent Morris, God has sent us some big time people who because of my friendship have been there for us and I appreciate and am thankful for that.

Another one of the people who God has sent in my life is my good friend Scott King.  I met Scott right before we launched The Stone.  He did all kinds of tech stuff for us early on and played in our band for over a year even though we were NOT the kind of church he would have chosen.  He believed in our vision and believed in me and wanted to do whatever was necessary to help out.

Well, that friendship is paying off again.  Starting next week, Scott has agreed to come back to The Stone for a month to a month and half to help us in our technical area.  Our regular sound guy (Cheri’s husband) is on the road a lot and while we have some GREAT guys doing the job, they need a little more training.  Scott is one of the BEST I have ever seen at training tech guys.  He is going to come in and train our sound people, lighting people and I couldn’t be more happy!  Scott will have the guys (and gals) up and trained and better then ever in no time.

The pieces are coming together….

We are in the zone this summer gearing up for the future growth we are asking and believing God to send this fall. I have learned so much planting The Stone the last couple of years and one of those things is you have to always be thinking of the next moves that are going to enable you to reach more people.

A few weeks ago we moved Malcolm Young (no, he didn’t play for AC/DC) from our Connection Pastor to our Executive Pastor. We are already seeing the results from that move.

However, that wasn’t the only move we knew we were making. This week we moved some other positions around to better utilize everyone’s time, skills, and passion.

Tim May has been with since our first day and has been our Creative Arts pastor since our 4th week. I think Tim is one of the greatest worship pastors in America and I think he is THE best worship pastor for me in America. Tim has been over EVERYTHING that happens in our worship center since day one. He has been over set-up/tear-down, tech team, sound, video, lights, purchasing, bands, singers, leading worship, etc. He has done a GREAT job doing what in our style of church could easily be a 3 man job. However the jobs simply have gotten to much for him to maintain the pace and do it effectively.

This week we moved Tim to Worship Pastor. This is his passion. He will focus 100% of his time on bands, worship leaders, writing music, and training musicians for our future growth and campuses. Tim will be over all musical worship aspects for all our campuses. Our worship is second to none NOW. I can’t wait to see where it goes.

We then moved Amy Young from programming to Creative Arts Director. Amy has been with us since day one and designs all stage sets and runs our Sunday morning services. She will now be over EVERY aspect of our Sunday morning service. She will be over set design, Sunday morning worship, lighting, sound, video, etc. There are very few people who remind me of myself more then Amy. We are so in tune sometimes that it is scary. Because we are so much alike there are also times we want to kill each other like few others. I am excited about her taking this role and she is going to rock it out!

We also have moved Cheri full-time under Malcolm. Cheri is Mrs. Ridge Stone. She has her hands in everything we do and in many aspects has kept us afloat Monday-Friday the last two years. I love having her in the office and have loved watching her grow into what I think is a very good leader. She will be assisting Malcolm in the business junk of the church.

And last but not least, we have tweaked Adam’s role. Adam is on our staff as the Youth Pastor and is doing a bang up job. At this time though that is not a full time job. He is now doing that part time and working with Preston during the week part time in our family ministries. He is helping Preston stay organized and lending a huge hand in that area.

I am so freaking pumped about the future of The Stone. Sunday morning has always been rocking, now I feel the rest of the church is getting caught up.

A Sunday like yesterday just makes a good start to the week.  Yesterday I really felt like things were clicking!

The band was smoking, the creative elements worked, the creative team did a great job, I thought the message was pretty good and got the point across, and it was just a GREAT service for any service, much less the middle of summer.

I’ve been enjoying the Ridge Stone Rocks series in a huge way!