I know the vacations of other people are not particularly interesting, but please indulge me just one more post before I return to the usual church IT theme of this blog.

After Big Bend, we proceeded to San Antonio. My son took this picture of Laura and me eating dinner at Casa Rio on the famous San Antonio River Walk. Note the shirt I’m wearing!

From San Antonio, we continued to Galveston, the Gulf of Mexico island community south of Houston at the mouth of Galveston Bay. I took this picture of the beachfront just a block from our motel.

On the way home we stopped at the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Laura took this picture of a statue outside the Catholic church immediately across the street from the site of the destroyed Murrah building. The statue is of a crying Jesus with his back to the site.

So that was our Texas sampler vacation: 3700 miles from Kansas City, via Little Rock to Fort Worth, Big Bend, San Antonio, Galveston, and back home via Oklahoma City. Texas is a HUGE state with an AMAZING variety of cultures and vistas. It’s a great vacation destination because it has something for everyone: major cities, remote mountains, the ocean, and Tex-Mex food everywhere!

I will be back in the office on Monday after three weeks away. I must admit, I’m not looking forward to it. Vacation is more fun than work!

When General Assembly was over, we proceeded to the next destination on our 2007 driving tour of Texas: Big Bend National Park and the surrounding area. Big Bend, so named for the sweeping curve of the Rio Grande that forms the rounded border between southwest Texas and Mexico, is as little-known as it is spectacular.

We stayed in Terlingua, gateway to the park and famous for the International Chili Championship, held there in November each year. Terlingua, home to fewer than 300 people, is the most remote town I’ve ever visited. It’s not on the way from anywhere to anywhere so everyone there either lives in the area or went there, like us, very much on purpose.

Our accommodations were at the Chisos Mining Co. Motel. I wish I could say I recommend it. We had no phone, no TV, and no Internet service. Terlingua has no digital cell service. And then, to make our “off-the-grid” experience complete, there was a total power outage throughout the entire Lajitas/Terlingua/Study Butte area from 4:00 pm the last evening we were there until 8:00 am the next day just before we checked out. According to the locals, the power there is unreliable. Heh. They claimed power was out everywhere south of Ft. Stockton, but we can’t confirm that. At the very best the closest town with power was 70 miles away (Presidio) or 80 miles away (Alpine).

We had to scrounge for dinner since no restaurants could serve and then do our best to sleep with all the windows open since the air conditioning was out. As you can imagine, though dry, Terlingua is a very hot place in late July. It wasn’t a pleasant way to end our stay in Terlingua, though I’m sure we’ll remember it for a long time.

Did I mention Big Bend is spectacular? Here are a couple of pictures I took:

Rio Grande with Mexican cliffs in the background and Texas to the right of the river

Moon over the Chisos Mountains, taken from our motel in Terlingua

At General Assembly I attended some technology workshops and met three new church IT people.

Christopher Higgins is the Manager of Internet and New Media for our denominational headquarters. He’s responsible for www.disciples.org.

Nathan Hill is a student at Wesley Theological Seminary and works with youth and young adults for the Christian Church Capital Area Region. He blogs at disciplesX.com.

Jeff Champeau is an uber-volunteer for First Christian Church of Norman Oklahoma. He makes his living as a LAN/WAN technician for the headquarters of Sonic Drive-in restaurants in Oklahoma City.

I told all of these guys about the Church IT RoundTable. Jeff said he would try to get away from work and come to the Fall RoundTable. Cool! We’d love to have Christopher and Nathan too. The more the merrier!

General Assembly of the Christian Church is a family affair for us. My dad was a DOC pastor and his sister Marje also married a DOC pastor, Mickey. Uncle Mickey also had brothers who were DOC pastors. Each of them had children that are DOC pastors: my brother, Greg, and his wife, Karen; my sister, Mary; my wife, Laura; my cousin, Michael and his wife, Jennifer; my cousin Marci married a DOC pastor, Dan; and my 2nd cousin Shannon married a DOC pastor, Kevin. Is that ridiculous, or what???

At the closing worship service, the following members of my extended family were in the house.

l to r: niece Elizabeth, daughter Beth, niece Judith,
wife Laura, son Rob, brother Greg, niece Kimberly

Kevin and my 2nd cousin, Shannon

Jennifer and my cousin, Michael

At the end of the evening worship service on Tuesday, there was a brief celebration of the new Disciples of Christ congregations established since 2001 and a prayer for the planters.

Those planters who were available that night went up on the stage with Rick Morse, the head of our new church organization. To Rick’s right is Sharon Watkins, the head of our denomination. If you look closely, you’ll see that the third person to the right of Sharon is Laura in her Living Water shirt!

On July 15 I preached at Living Water because Laura was out on a mission trip. I talked about the new church movement within Disciples of Christ. We have the most active and dynamic new church initiative of all mainline denominations. In the sermon, I mentioned two key people in our new church movement: Dick Hamm, the former head of our denomination who cast the 2020 Vision which included the goal of 1,000 new congregations by the year 2020; and Rick Morse, the wild-eyed spiritual entrepreneur who took on the challenge of making this vision become a reality and leads our New Church Ministry Team. Read a recap of my sermon or listen to the MP3 here.

Little did I know when preaching that five days later at the National Evangelism Workshop, a sort of pre-conference prior to General Assembly, I would be in a breakout session with Dick, Rick, and about 10 other people. Very cool. After the session, I invited them to come to the Living Water site and listen to me talk about them!

Sunday night, the head of our denomination (we use the fancy title “General Minister and President” or GMP for short), Sharon Watkins, spoke on the State of the Church. Though flawed in some ways (for example, it was too long and too repetitive), her message was very powerful and motivating. She showed great leadership by pointing out many positive accomplishments of the last two years, including an impressive response to the Katrina disaster which occurred just a few weeks after our last General Assembly. Her theme was that Disciples are “choosing life” – a reference to Deut. 30:19-20. It was evident that she had spent weeks preparing her message of hope and encouragement and the response she received was enthusiastic. Way to go Sharon!

After the State of the Church, those of us who hung around enjoyed a brief concert featuring outstanding Disciple musicians from around the country. We heard some terrific original music from these artists in a wide variety of styles. It was a wonderful celebration of musical creativity and spiritual vitality. I believe they made a CD of the concert. If so, we should get it!

Sunday morning we attended the youth worship service in the main auditorium at the Fort Worth Convention Center. It was the best worship service we’ve ever experienced at General Assembly. It was so good, in fact, that Laura bought a DVD of the service so we can show it to Living Water when we get home.

After the service ran into some of Rob’s and Beth’s homies from
Kansas City outside the main entrance to the Convention Center

Sunday evening Laura organized a dinner for the Bethany Fellowships at one of Fort Worth’s most famous restaurants, Joe T. Garcia’s. The food was even better than I remembered. The service was outstanding. And though it was a little hot to be seated out on the patio, a grand time was had by all. And it didn’t rain until dinner was over!

Bethany Fellowships dinner at Joe T. Garcia’s

A few days ago Guy Kawasaki reviewed the top 9 stories that people like to talk about as explained in a new book by Lois Kelly. The idea is to use these types of stories whenever you’re trying to persuade people to believe something or do something. In my experience, we IT people aren’t especially good at marketing and selling our ideas. I’m going to learn from this post and keep these stories in mind as I have opportunities to persuade. I think particularly powerful in a church setting are #1 – stories about aspirations and beliefs, and #6 – personal stories.