Mustard Seed Network

Dear Mustard Seek Networkers:

I’m excited to announce that our next meeting of the Mustard Seed Network will be
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
10:00 a.m. to around 2:15 p.m.
Farmville Baptist Church

The agenda for this meeting will be “The Role of the Pastor’s Spouse”

Let’s be prepared to talk about these questions:

• What is your church’s expectations for your spouse?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of your spouse at your church?
• What boundaries have you and your spouse set in terms of church participation and involvement?
• What pressures do you face regarding the role of your spouse in church?
• How do you deal with church members or leaders who “don’t get it”?

In order to prime the pump for discussion, I’ve linked several sites below that talk about various aspects of being a pastor’s spouse (wife). There are not many links on the web that address the role of a pastor’s husband.

• Rebellious Pastor’s Wife
• How Could I Ever Be a Pastor’s Wife by Patricia Clawson
• Email from a Pastor’s Wife posted in John Mark Ministries website
• Self-Care Tips for the Clergy Family by Rev. Frank Shaefer
• Wifely Duties by Lauren Winner in Wall Street Journal Online
  Winner’s article is also mentioned in Christianity Today blog
• Finally, a perspective of a Pastor’s husband

Please RSVP to michael[at]farmvillebaptist[dot]org if you’re coming!

Our box lunch will be catered from Longwood (Aramark catering) courtesy of RASNet. All lunches will consist of a sandwich, side salad, a piece of fresh fruit, cookie and choice of soft drink or bottled water.

Below are your sandwich options.

• Roast beef and Swiss cheese with lettuce, tomato & horseradish sauce on a Kaiser roll.
• Chicken salad on a croissant.
• Smoked turkey and Provolone cheese with lettuce, tomato on a sub roll.

If you do not specify, you’ll get a smoked turkey with provolone on a sub roll.

Hope to see you June 10!

Several months back, during our website session, I overheard several of you wondering about a cheap (free) calendaring solution to your office and website. Farmville Baptist has been using Trumba.com for the last couple of years, costing around $100 a year. Trumba allows us to sync with Microsoft Outlook, our main calendaring program, and then publish the Trumba calendar on the fly on our website. But Trumba is raising its subscription cost to $100 a month. Needless to say, we will let our subscription expire.

I just found out that in March, Google Calendar now includes the ability to sync your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook. Read a report of its release from Information Week and Web Worker Daily.

I’m exploring this option for Farmville Baptist. I’ve established a public Google Calendar for the church that will eventually be embedded into our new revamped website. I’ve set up private calendars for my office manager, my associate pastor and myself. In the office, I’ve set it up so that my staff sees all of our calendars, but those who visit our website will see only the public church calendar consisting only of church events.

Anyone interested in this solution may visit these links:
Basics on Google Calendar Sync
WordPress plug-in for integrating Google Calendar

YouTube has a video on How to add a Google Calendar to your wordpress blog.

Note: you’ll need to have your own domain (and not a wordpress.com sites, like mustardseednet.wordpress.com) in order to embed a Google calendar.

This is a long-overdue report on our last Mustard Seed Meeting held at Ridge Baptist Church last April.

On that rainy day, we had a small group consisting of Tom Baynham (our host), Ted James, Lance King, Michael Cheuk, and John Chandler and a guest.

We talked about how we went about planning creative worship and brought sample services to share.

The following are some samples:

From Tom Baynham -
2007-christmas-eve-worship
2008-maundy-thursday-worship

From Michael Cheuk -
2007-good-friday-service

Lance King shared what he did for a sermon series on the being fruitful.  At the end of the series, he bought two bushels of apples from Carter’s Mountain and covered the communion table with those apples.  At the end of that service, he invited folks to come and take an apple, but not eat it.  Instead, they were encouraged to share it with someone else as a way to share the fruitful zest and flavor of the love of Christ.

If you have any creative worship ideas, please feel free to contribute in the comments section!

Dear Mustard Seek Networkers:

I’m excited to announce that our next meeting of the Mustard Seed Network will be
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
10:00 a.m. to around 2:15 p.m.
Ridge Baptist Church, Richmond, VA

The agenda for this meeting will be “Creating Creative Worship Experiences”

There will be no formal presentation from an outside speaker. We will be learning from one another. We would like for you to bring to the meeting a half-page “case study” (bring 15 copies to share) of a creative worship experience that you’ve either planned or experienced. We still spend the meeting going around the room presenting the case studies and learning from one another.

Tom Baynham of Ridge Baptist Church in Richmond has graciously agreed to host this meeting. Directions to Ridge Baptist can be found here on the church’s website.

Here’s a tentative schedule:

10:00 - 10:15 am - Opening prayer and introducing one another
10:15 - around 12:00 noon - Peer learning
12 to 1 pm - lunch break
1:00 to 2:00 pm - Peer learning
2:00 to 2:15 pm - Scheduling our next meeting and closing prayer

Please RSVP to michael[at]farmvillebaptist[dot]org and Tom Baynham (tombaynham[at]gmail[dot]com) to let us know that you’re planning to attend.

God’s grace and peace, and we hope to see you on April 22!

We had a good Mustard Seed Network meeting Monday as we discussed our theology and philosophy of worship. Some of the issues that were addressed include:

• understanding “worship” as our offering or service to God, not to attenders
• understanding “worship” as being more than just a meeting or gathering on Sundays but as a way of life
• clarifying the role of the ministerial staff in “leading” a worship meeting
• recognizing that each form of a “worship service” is contextually and historically contingent (taking an “anthropological” approach in describing and understanding a worship meeting in the context of a particular culture, a particular community, in a particular time)
• distinguishing between the content and the form of a worship meeting (and recognizing that to some extent, the form of worship affects the content)
• discussing the purpose of a worship meeting - hearing preaching? glorifying God? evangelism? Is there only one purpose? If not, is there then one “foundational” purpose on which the other purposes are based?
• discussing the role that “tradition” (understood as a constellation of assumed set of practices, beliefs and rituals) plays in a worship meeting
• questioning whether an openness to include the practices of other Christian “traditions” might either “water down” or “enrich” our (baptist) “tradition”
• how do we “plan” worship, especially in conjunction with a Music Minister or Choir Director?

The conversation we had was so enriching and thought-provoking that we ran out of time and was not able to share many ideas of the specific things that we’ve done to plan creative worship experiences. We’ll do that at the next meeting!

Dear Mustard Seek Networkers:

I’m excited to announce that our next meeting of the Mustard Seed Network will be
Monday,  March 3, 2008
10:00 a.m. to around 2:15 p.m.
Farmville Baptist Church

The agenda for this meeting will be “Worship.”

There will be no formal presentation from an outside speaker.  We will be learning from one another, and the following are some topics that I invite you to be prepared to discuss:

• What is your theology of worship?
• How do you plan worship in your church?
• Do you follow the lectionary? If not, what guides your worship each year?
• What elements/services/events have deeply touched your people and connected them to their God?
• What guest preachers would you recommend to fill a pulpit supply?

This will not be a meeting touting “look how wonderful we are.”  My prayer is that this meeting will give us a chance to talk honestly about our theology of worship and the points that make a difference while also sharing about where we struggle to make worship truly meaningful.  Feel free to bring past worship bulletins and other resources that you have found to be helpful.

Here’s a tentative schedule:

10:00 - 10:15 am - Opening prayer and introducing one another
10:15 - around 11:00  - What’s Your Theology of Worship?
10:30 to 12 noon - Peer learning
12 to 1 pm - lunch break
1:00 to 2:00 pm - Peer learning
2:00 to 2:15 pm - Scheduling our next meeting and closing prayer

Please RSVP to michael[at]farmvillebaptist[dot]org if you’re coming!

Our box lunch will be catered from Macado’s courtesy of RASNet.  It will consist of a sandwich, chips a pickle, bottled drink and a cookie.  We will also have a chef salad topped with grilled chicken for those wanting a lighter fare.

Here are your sandwich options in terms of the meat, bread and cheese.  Please let me know your preference.  If you have no preference, I’ll order a turkey sandwich on white bread with cheddar cheese.

Sandwich meat - turkey, ham, roast beef
Bread - white, wheat, rye, pumpernickel
Cheese - swiss, cheddar, muenster, provolone, or american

Hope to see you March 3!

For those of you who attended our last Mustard Seed Network meeting about church websites (and even for those of you who didn’t), below are some on-line resources to help you follow up on the things we talked about that day.

First is Nathan White’s presentation that he shared with us.  Thanks Nathan!

As a “value added service,” I’ve also compiled a short list of online resources to help you design and improve your church’s site.  Feel free to add any other sites that you’ve found helpful in our comment section.

Enjoy!

CHURCH WEBSITE RESOURCES

Heal Your Church Website - http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/

Cory Miller - http://www.corymiller.com/

Living OS - http://www.livingos.com/

Church Blogger - http://churchblogger.wordpress.com/

Church Relevance - http://churchrelevance.com/category/design/web-design/

Church Marketing Sucks - http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/

Church Web Resources - http://www.churchwebresources.com/articles/

WORDPRESS TIPS

Lorelle on WordPress - http://lorelle.wordpress.com/

Internet Duct Tape - http://internetducttape.com/tools/wordpress/

WORDPRESS PLUG-INS

WordPress - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

WP-Plugins.net - http://wp-plugins.net/

CHURCH WEBSITE ASSESSMENT

From our very own Chuck Warnock - http://chuckwarnockblog.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/10-things-your-church-website-should-do/

Free self-assessment tool for church websites - http://ied.gospelcom.net/church-site-design.php

Hello MSNetworkers:

Yesterday, I received the following email from Greg Randall of Clarksville Baptist suggesting a possible topic for future discussions.

********

Thank you both for all that you are doing to help get this group up and going.  I enjoyed my time in Farmville yesterday, and I look forward to our future meetings.

As I was driving home, I had a thought about a future topic. I would like to have a time to discuss our worship and worship planning in our churches. A couple of questions that are on my mind are:

· How do you plan worship?

· Do you follow the lectionary? If not, what guides your worship each year?

· What elements/services/events have deeply touched your people and connected them to their God?

I realize this type of discussion can become a “Look how wonderful we are” type of thing, and that is not what I’m looking for. However, a chance to talk honestly about our theology of worship and the points that make a difference while also sharing about where we struggle to make worship truly meaningful would be a great way to spend a few hours.

On the journey together,

Greg

***********

Please feel free to add your comment or thought to this post, and let’s see if we can begin cultivating an on-line community where we can maintain a “cyber-connection” that ties us over until we meet face-to-face again!

Also, several months ago, Mike Lee of First Baptist, Altavista, was interested in identifying quality guest preachers whom we can recommend to come and preach at his church.

At the end of our Mustard Seed Network meeting yesterday, the group decided that we’ll meet again Monday, March 3, 10 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. at Farmville Baptist Church.

Our agenda for that meeting will tentatively be:

Spend the first half of the meeting following up on what we learned yesterday.  If you have a church website, perhaps we as a group can give our impressions of your site and tell you what we like about it (in other words, steal ideas from your site!) or make suggestions on how to improve it.  All this will be done in a Christ-like and gentle manner!  :)  For those of you who do NOT have a church website, but would like to get one up and running, some of our website savvy “power-users” might be able to give you some tips and “hands on” experience.

For the second half of the meeting, we will open it up for ideas and suggestions for future topics of discussion and peer learning.  So start thinking about what you would like to the group to address!

You can email me at michael [at] farmvillebaptist.org if you have any suggestions, and I’ll post your suggestions on this blog so that we can get the ball rolling!

Thanks again!!

Michael

Yesterday, we had a great second meeting of the Mustard Seed Network. Nathan White, a BTSR student and founder of bridgevisionweb.com came and spent three hours with us going over the ins and outs of having an effective low-cost website for the local church. We hope to make his presentation available for download in the near future for those who were not able to make it.

Pictured above are the folks who attended the meeting:
(L to R, Back row) - John Chandler, Stephen Cook, Warren Johnson, Ted James, Dave Peppler, Greg Randall, and Nathan White.
(Front row) - Bryon LePere, Chuck Warnock, Amanda Johnston, Mike Hatfield, Michael Cheuk and Lance king.
(Not pictured) - Jon Parks and Rick Clore.

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