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.

Church of the Resurrection got a very nice write up in the July 2007 issue of Church Executive magazine regarding the Best Christian Workplaces survey and what we’ve been doing over the last few years to improve our human resources process. Our own Dan Entwistle (one of our top two executives reporting to our senior pastor) was featured with a big photo on the cover. Go Dan!

This week we finished the process of converting our year-old Dell 2950 server previously running Win2K3 x64 to our new VMware ESX insfrastructure. We had SQL Server 2005 on that server and virtualized it. Unfortunately, we saw a Shelby performance drop around 50% when we moved the database to the new virtualized server running SQL. So now we have some tuning to do. Other than that, this has been the smoothest major server upgrade project I’ve ever seen. Many thanks to our ESX consultant, Cameron Shove, for making that possible.

The next step for us is to virtualize three older physical servers. These are old enough and/or have significant enough issues that we aren’t going to try P2V. Instead, we are building virtual servers from scratch and migrating the applications and services. We have a good start on virtualizing a terminal server and an Exchange server. Last to get virtualized will be our main file server.

When the project is complete by the middle of July, we will have only one remaining physical Windows server in our central campus data center – a server that will run ARCserve with disk and tape backup storage. All of our production will be on approximately 13 virtual servers running on the two physical Dell 2950s sharing the Dell/EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN. It’s going to be sweet!

Jim Walton posted this morning about technology vision for the church.

My thinking on this rests on two important principles:

1. Mission/Vision alignment is more important than any clever statement you might create.

2. Too often, mission/vision/purpose statements are “we” centric. They talk more about “us” and what “we” do than they do about those we serve.

To illustrate, Church of the Resurrection’s purpose is: “To build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally-religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians.”

Correspondingly, our IT Department’s purpose is: “To build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally-religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians. We do everything possible to fulfill this purpose directly and to help Resurrection’s other ministries make effective use of technology as they also strive toward this purpose. Our users’ mission is our mission. Additionally, we take very seriously our responsibilities for information security and high availability of all of the mission-critical services we provide.”

This purpose is perfectly aligned with the church’s purpose and it puts the priority on those we serve. Our vision for technology is to be excellent at fulfilling this purpose.

For church IT, I believe in serving first and leading second. If we start by earning a reputation for excellent, high-touch service, then when we are called upon to lead, we will be much more persuasive and effective.

Seth Godin says most successful organizations are driven by something. Then he goes on to list a number of drivers. So I’m reading the list and nodding, when suddenly, this jumps out:

SUBSCRIPTION DRIVEN: How do we transform a stranger into someone who uses what we do, all the time. Intuit, certainly.

(He means that the company Intuit is an example.) This seems very much like things I’ve heard from Adam Hamilton, our senior pastor. To help people become deeply committed Christians, first we need to get them to try us and then we need to get them to become a regular. Spiritual growth comes out of habitual practice of the spiritual disciplines that we offer in our churches. We need to convert people from occasionally picking up a copy from the news stand into every week subscribers.