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Author: Clif Guy
Willow Creek Summit in pictures
Here are some pictures I snapped in the last two days as we hosted the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at Resurrection. The first pictures are from our narthex (lobby) during breaks.
l to r: Brian Slezak, Chuck Russell, yours truly
2008 Willow Creek Summit, Day 2
Personal highlights from today …
Craig Groeschel:
- “What is ‘it’? Don’t know.”
- “‘It’ happens. But often ‘it’ doesn’t.”
- “The early church – those dudes had ‘it’.”
- “To reach people no one else is reaching, we will have to do things no one else is doing.” And the corollary: “To do things that no one else is doing, we can’t do the things that everyone else is doing.”
- After a few years, they cut everything except five core areas: weekend worship, small groups, kids, students, missions. This freed up resources. They stopped doing things everyone else was doing in order to do things no one else was doing such as Internet Campus, YouVersion, etc.
- “You have everything you need to do what God has called you to do.”
- “What is God trying to show you through your limitations?”
- “Organizations that have ‘it’ are willing to fail.”
- “You try, it doesn’t work out, then shake it off and step up.”
- “You need to have ‘it’ in order for your church to get ‘it’.”
- Craig had “it”, then he started doing ministry and ministry started killing “it”. “I had become a full-time pastor and a part-time follower of Christ. I lost ‘it’.”
Catherine Rohr:
- “I hope I’m a 75 year-old lady going around prison beating up gangsters with a cane.”
- “46% of all closing situations end without [the salesperson] asking for anything.”
- Jim Mellado: “The process you (Rohr) are using for character development is like a Wesleyan small group.”
Pastor Howitzer: “When I think, I have thoughts.”
Brad Anderson: “People are drawn to leadership because they’re looking for an affirmation of themselves.”
Bill Hybels quoting Mother Theresa’s vows to God:
- “I will refuse you nothing. I will do your bidding without delay.”
- “Even if I don’t feel Your presence, I will seek to love You as You’ve ever been loved before.”
- Video: “Here am I, send me.”
2008 Willow Creek Summit, Day 1
Personal highlights from today …
Gary Haugen:
- “If God is passionate about it, He is responsible for it.”
Bill George:
- “Understand the purpose of your leadership.”
- “Follow your compass, not your clock.”
- “Leadership isn’t about having power over others, but about empowering others.”
Bill Hybels: “I never advocate insane living. I’ve done it, but I would never advocate it!”
Wendy Kopp:
- “It’s easy to lead when you are pursuing something you deeply, deeply believe in.”
- “People want to live a life of meaning. We give them that opportunity.”
Unplanned blogging hiatus
Why did I launch clifguy.com and then not blog for 6 weeks?
- trip to Florida to meet with Christ Fellowship and Flamingo Road
- personal briefcase/laptop bag stolen
- lost my assistant Amy (promoted to the executive suite – good for her, bad for me!)
- interviewed for and hired Amy’s replacement
- several staff teams moving from one office to another requiring changes to the cable plant
- new private office for me (yea! but a took time to move)
- IT staff vacations, leaving me to cover
- end of fiscal year for my wife’s church for which I am the unofficial CFO
- obtained a new vehicle for my wife (yea! but a pain to research, test drive, etc.)
- replacement laptop arrived so I had to move onto it
- Glenn Kelley of Vine Hosting in for a 4-day visit
- my daughter returned home from 6 weeks study abroad in Europe
- major rain storm that flooded the basement of my wife’s church, the cleanup was left to me and Glenn due to many people from her church going on a mission trip
- trip to Colorado to take my 16 year-old son backpacking
In his blog roll Brian has me as “Clif Guy Some of the Time”. In truth, for 6 weeks it was “Clif Guy None of the Time”. Now you know why.
iTunes/QuickTime isn’t optional
Three months ago I posted about how I was fed up with iTunes and was uninstalling it. Well … here I am downloading iTunes and QuickTime. I’m NOT happy about it, but too many things just assume you have it. My new digital camera (purchased to replace the one in my stolen laptop bag) records short videos. Alas, I can’t watch them because they’re in QuickTime .MOV format. I’m a podcast fan and too many of them just assume iTunes – they don’t give you the feed URL for other podcatchers such as Juice. Is there any other way?
RoundTable early bird deadline
If you visit clifguy.com as opposed to subscribing with a feed reader then you can see the Google gadget on the left counting down the days until the Fall 2008 Church IT RoundTable at Seacoast Church in the Charleston, SC area. Early bird registration is $50. It goes up to $75 on August 8. I just now registered myself along with Brian and Jeremy from my team. We got the early bird rate. Did you?
The sad tale of my laptop’s demise
June 17-19 Chuck Russell and I visited South Florida to benchmark the Internet Campuses of Christ Fellowship and Flamingo Road. When we arrived at the Palm Beach airport, I hit a snag totally of my own making. Somehow I forgot that I had carried my bag on to the plane whereas Chuck had checked his. So we moseyed on down to the bag claim, whereupon I regained my senses and realized I had left my bag on the plane. By the time I found the right person with US Air’s baggage service, it was too late and the plane was already on its way back to Charlotte. I’ve traveled a lot on business and never have done anything quite that absentminded.
Jason Reynolds, IT Director at Christ Fellowship, had met us at the airport. He waited while I filed a report with the baggage service. They said they would bring the bag to my hotel as soon as it came in. I would just need to be patient. I was mad at myself over the inconvenience, but it wasn’t a huge deal.
Jason showed us around the Palm Beach area a bit and then we went to dinner at a great seafood place where we were joined by David Helbig, Internet Campus Pastor at Christ Fellowship. A church member came into the restaurant and saw us. There were introductions all around. Before we knew it, dinner for our whole table was picked up by this generous man. The evening had taken a decided turn for the better.
After dinner, Jason asked if we would like to go check out the beach before going to our hotel. Being from landlocked Kansas, Chuck and I readily agreed. Here’s the sunset, captured on my (bad) cell phone camera.
Little did we know as Chuck, Jason, David, and I discussed Internet Campus while enjoying a beautiful night on the beach that just a couple hundred feet away in the beach parking lot, Jason’s car window was smashed and my briefcase/laptop bag was stolen containing my laptop, digital camera, web cam, cables, and all kinds of personal items. It was a sinking feeling when we returned to the car and I discovered my bag missing and Jason’s window smashed. The Jupiter police were very professional and courteous, but it’s now been 6 weeks and (no surprise) nothing has been recovered.
After filing the police report, Jason took us to our hotel. It was very weird walking in to the hotel and checking in without luggage of any kind. My only possessions at that moment were my wallet and cell phone that were in my pockets.
Jason was very generous and hooked me up the next morning with a Dell D530 laptop out of Christ Fellowship’s inventory so I could at least get my e-mail and have a way to take notes during the trip. However, without all my usual tools (camera, PhotoShop, Windows Live Writer, etc.) I wasn’t able to blog. In fact, due to that incident and a lot of other things I’ll share soon, I’m just now getting back to a normal workload and routine. Hence the sudden return of my blogging.
I wish I had a profound theological comment to add here, but alas, it just sucks to have your laptop stolen. Don’t be like me. Be sure to put your laptop in the trunk or otherwise hide it from the prying eyes of thieves. Also, it’s a really good idea to encrypt the contents of your laptop hard drive. You’ve been warned.
Death of the land line
Eight years ago I hired a software developer in his low 20s, straight out of college. He had a cell phone but no land line at home. It was quite weird at the time, but was the start of a trend. The number of land lines in use in the US has dropped every year since 2000. Newsweek now reports that so far in 2008 the rate of decline has jumped sharply.
In an informal poll, the Newsweek reporter discovered that among his acquaintances under 30, almost none had land lines at home. I can understand why. My family of four has four cell phones and two land lines. Even though cellular service is still one or two orders of magnitude worse than land line service, I’m really wondering why I still have those two land lines at home. The fact that the cell service is worse probably isn’t enough reason to justify having land lines. What are your thoughts? Do you still have land lines at home? If you do, are you thinking of dropping them?
Life Church Internet Campus benchmarking day 2
This morning we went back to the LifeChurch Edmond campus to meet with Brandon Donaldson and Terry Storch. When we arrived, Brandon showed us the new Digerati office and the Internet Campus studio.
We then spent a couple of hours picking Brandon’s brain on everything from congregational care to budgeting to vision. I’ll post details as soon as I can organize our notes. After a tasty lunch at McAlister’s complete with enormous cups of sweet tea, we returned to meet with Terry Storch.
Finally I got a surprise tweet from Jeff Wilson of Henderson Hills asking if he could see us. So we went over and spent an hour with him before getting on I-35 for the drive back to Kansas City.
Jeff is now leading IT at Henderson Hills and is thinking about Internet Campus too. It’s becoming quite a club! Henderson Hills is a cool church that was our host for MinistryTECH back in April. It was fun to show Chuck, Brian, and Andrew a quick tour of their comfortable, human-scale facility.
More substantive content to follow soon.
Clif Guy sporadically 