“AFC Opportunities” is an acronym for all the program ministries involved in our Adult Formation Committee. “CLC Opportunities” is an acronym for all the sub-committees involved in our Congregational Life Committee. The idea conveyed in listing them is to acknowledge that Adult Education cannot function as an island to itself.

If you’re a Director of Adult Education at a church I’d love to hear what you are doing to mature disciples and how you’re connecting Adult Education to all the myriad of ministries in your local congregation.

I recently shared this message out of Eccl 9.1-10 called “Redeeming Death”. We’ve been doing a series through the whole book. One of the best commentaries I’ve used has been Peter Enns’s commentary. Pete along with Seow taught me this book when I was in seminary. Here’s a PDF of the message I shared this past week.

This past Sunday I preached this sermon out of Isaiah 11.1-11. The title of the sermon was the “Real” Reason for the Season. I played off the idea that we as Christians often times like to think we’re the ones who understand the real reason for Christmas, but we also often times don’t spend a great deal of time reflecting upon who Jesus is. We, like everyone else, get lost in the consumeristic rhythms of Christmas. My hope is that this message helped our community for a moment stop and reflect upon who Jesus really is and why its good news that he was born. Here’s the PDF of the whole PPT I used.

Click here to download the Keynote message in PDF form here. This is part two of a twelve week series where we’re moving through the whole book of Ecclesiastes.

I was not present for the name change discussion but myself and one other person interviewed, selected, and hired the graphic designer that led us to our new brand image. We were able to find a great graphic artist that was local, here’s Kevin Meier’s website. Here it is below;

The second significant design change I’ve guided lately is the redesigning of our contemporary Worship Cafe services.Here is what our old banner design looked like;

I led this process by myself and was able to find a great person in-house (Bob D’Anjou) to redesign our Worship Cafe banner. My favorite part of Bob’s work is that he used our people during worship to create the silhouette’s. Here’s our new look;

The third significant design change I’ve guided lately is the redesigning of our college ministry branding. Here’s the old branding we had, the formate of this is from one of our large upright welcome signs;

This branding design I did myself entirely. Here’s the new look of our college ministry branding on one of our large entry upright stand formats;

Click here to download a bi-fold PDF of the material I designed to guide our Adult Formation Committee as we consider developing an intentional approach to Christian Education at our church. We are in our first steps of developing an intentional approach to doing Christian Education for our church. Our hope is to develop a very clear, aligned, progressively challenging approach to offering substantive education for every person at our church using gifted teachers in our church to do the work of the ministry.

Here’s a PDF of a Keynote I gave tonight in our series on relationships, “Intimacy in the Christian Life,” Song of Songs 2.16-3.11. This is the fourth part of our series. We’re wrapping it up with a round table Q&A with two couples and single to answer any questions people have about relationships.

“A pastor should not complain about their congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and man. When a person becomes alienated from a Christian community in which he has been placed and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament. But if not, let him nevertheless guard against ever becoming the accuser of the congregation before God.Let him rather accuse himself for his unbelief. Let him pray God for an understanding of his own failure and his particular sin, and pray that he may not wrong his brethren. Let him, in the consciousness of his own guilt, make intercession for his brethren. Let him do what he is committed to do, and thank God.

Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling for his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Here’s the branding for the series we’ve just started on relationships. Its called Bound and the theme of the series is exploring the truth about relationships by examining what it means to be made in the image of Triune God.

This is the second message in the series the first was called “Being made in the image of a relational God – Gen 1.26″. Here’s the PDF of this second message. The video I used during the night was an intimate in house interview with Adele regarding her song “Someone Like You”.