My month-long hiatus from having the internet at our house has finally come to an end! I will be working mostly out of my house now. Should be interesting with the wee little Docusens climbing all over me.

We had a great gathering this morning at Hope. I'm so excited to be a part of this team doing ministry in this town. I love it. I pulled double duty today by leading worship and then preaching. I don't like doing that too often because I feel like it makes the service come off as a bit more personality driven than team driven. We will remedy this in the future as we build worship teams and worship leaders to rotate.I preached the 2nd part of the series "Setting the Table". My sermon focused on intentionally setting the atmosphere of love, worship and anticipation at Hope. I am trying to...

I just finished building my Keynote presentation to accompany my sermon on Sunday. I haven't worked much with this program, but thanks to a few tips from my good friend John James I think I'm going to switch from powerpoint to Keynote. I was not only able to incorporate some really smooth transitions and pictures, I was able to embed a video seamlessly into the presentation. Pretty cool.In the famous words of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber: "I like it alot."

I honestly cannot believe how inconvenient life is without the internet. This problem should be remedied on Monday, but this is absurd. I never realized how much we depend on this for basic information and communication.How did the world still spin in circles without the internet a long, long time ago?

Luke Bolin and I have been working on a design for our mailing piece that we will be sending to the community in August. I feel like he hit a home run with this design!We will send this postcard to 50,000 people to promote the launch of Hope Church. I wanted to go with something that was very strong graphically. Less information and more creativity to stir up interest. I am a big believer that people are over saturated with information. I want all of my design pieces to simply communicate the main points and let the design speak for itself.On this particular piece, I want people to be so...

I have been working on my sermon for this Sunday today. I love the idea of hearing from God for a group of people and then delivering the message. There is such a responsibility that comes along with that task. I pray that God gives me the words to say, the Scriptures to support it and the stories to identify with people and drive home points. I love doing what I do...

I have been working with Luke Bolin (graphic designer for The Association of Related Churches) on our new website for Hope Church. I am so excited to be really pushing the envelope with some great design ideas. He has been a joy to work with and I would absolutely recommend him for any graphic needs (print or web) that you might have.

Mike and I are about to meet to go over our Hope Church budget. I am thinking about a conversation that Jud Wilhite led at the Unplugged Conference a couple weeks ago. He talked about the blessing of financial restraint. If we had everything, we wouldn't need faith. He claims that having boundaries financially is actually a GOOD thing, not a BAD thing. Interesting thought.I'm praying for wisdom today as we meet. The bottom line is that there is so much stuff that we could put our money towards as we start this church. We have to remember that when we decide to buy something in one area, we...

Dara and I had dinner last night at the Rock Bottom Brewery in Downtown Charlotte with Hutch and Adrienne Vollendorf. It was so nice to have an "adult night". Thank God for Grandmommy and Grandaddy living here 🙂 I have been feeling some things pretty deep in my spirit these days about downtown Charlotte. I heard a teaching by Mark Driscoll about the importance of the city. So many things start out of the city and then move out into the suburbs and beyond. I think one of these days we may do something pretty unique downtown. That falls under the "I'm praying about this one" category. Lots...

I just finished designing our new business cards for Hope Church. I got the idea from a card I saw at the Apple Store. Everything they do is very clean and simple yet communicates effectively. I also paid a tad extra to get rounded edges on the corners of the cards. Little things make a huge difference...