Chicks and Dudes is our early summer series about relationships.  It’s all about how men and women struggle in relationship and what God says about it.  You can help add some primal research.

Dudes, it’s your turn.  What drives you nuts about women?  What don’t you understand?  What seems like it will always be in the category of permanent mystery to you?  Where are the tension point in your relationship?  Post your comments and let’s hear it!

Thanks to the chicks for some things to think about. Anyone else want to chime in? Ladies, add your struggle/complaint/question here.

I have not been a good blogger lately, but this being the season of Lent, I am repenting and reflecting and getting back into it again.  Actually, I do want a closer walk with the wider community as we approach Easter.

I'm already getting  questions from people about how they can get their hands on the messages for the Orange Families series that started last Sunday at Connexus.

This is a huge series for us, because we built our church around a family ministry strategy.  In Orange Families, we're covering for the first time the parenting strategy that Reggie Joiner and I have been developing over the last year.  I'm so excited to share it with our families and the wider church community (some of you have heard snippets of this on the Orange Tour and at last year's Orange Conference, but this is the first full run at it).

The easiest way to get the messages is via the Connexus Podcast. Just go to iTunes and search "Connexus Community Church" and our audio and video casts will pop up (don't have iTunes? click here.)  Subscribe away.  It's free.

You can also go to our website where we stream the messages.  You can also burn a DVD for yourself off our site.  Click here.

If you are a church leader or volunteer who wants to know more, I'm teaching a breakout at the Orange Conference on how to position your church to maximize a parenting series.  Orange is an awesome conference (you have to get to it) and, if you're interested, the breakout covering this is called "Communicating the Family Ministry Strategy to Your Church". 

Really looking forward to the next five weeks of Orange Families.  Excited by how God might change families because of it!  Looking forward to hearing your feedback and comments!

Been doing way more twittering than blogging lately (y'all on twitter yet)?  But I do have a few thoughts that take more than 140 characters to express…so I'm resurfacing….

I've been thinking about shifts that we'll see (or that we'll need to see) in the church in the next five years, and I want to outline a few that I'm wrestling with.  Some of these shifts are already underway – some might yet need to happen. Would love to hear what you are wrestling with too.  Some of these are really thinking in pencil.   But the church and culture are always moving and changing.  Sometimes it's hard to spot the trends ahead.  So hereogoes.

Shift One – Clarity
We're exposed to a wider variety of choices every year, but is more always better? There's a growing opinion that excess choice leads to paralysis.  Faced with ten options, people start to feel overwhelmed and end up either doing nothing or making an ill-informed choice.

And yet companies like Apple, Toyota and Honda, who offer surprisingly little choice when compared to their competition, are gaining market share, not losing it.  Increasingly it seems like people would like fewer choices among quality products rather than a sea of mediocre options.

How does this translate into church leadership?

 People can't follow a fuzzy calling, random messages or muddy strategy.  Here are three shifts I think need to happen in churches:

• Our call needs clarity.  There can be a temptation to play to
  bigger and better.  But you can get there by shuffling Christians out
  of a church that is slightly less hip or relevant than yours.  Bad
  move.  Ultimately, if I am not over the top crazy in love with Jesus
  and the people Jesus died for (read 'the general population), I probably ought to quit.  I am struggling
  more with this call now than I have in a while, and I think that's a
  good struggle.  You can play to an audience in the church or give your life to loving and serving the world for which Jesus died.  He usually doesn't call people into ministry to impress the already-redeemed. 

• Our message needs clarity.  Too many of us have walked out of a 40 minute message and asked what on earth it was about.  The application isn''t clear or (often) is non-existent.  In the guise of being "deep", the content is over people's heads or obscure.  Maturity is sometimes defined as being able to sit through long sessions of these.  I know as a preacher I am constantly being challenged to be clearer, simpler and more direct in the messages I give.  It's much harder to be clear than to be fuzzy, but I think people would be so much better served if we shifted to clear, applicable and easier-to-follow messages.

• Our strategy needs clarity. As ministry leaders, we often let random things happen in our ministry because we have no clear plan or path in mind and don't like saying no.  If you pick up a church program or browse a web site and no clear path is in place, how do we expect people to make progress?  If you're not sure where you're going, any path will take you there.

What's your take on the need for clarity?  Do you agree?  Where else might we need to become clear?

So what determines how much far you can go in this life or what you can accomplish in God's Kingdom? What are the most important things you can develop?  Your talents?  Your intellect?  Your work ethic?  Your skill set? (Get some mad skillz…)

More and more, I believe this is true:  Who we are are will always set the limits on what we can do. 

I used to think that competency trumped everything.  But ultimately, I think character trumps competency. 

You don't have to be a follower of Jesus to know how important character is.  Witness public reaction to A-Rod and Michael Phelps in the last few days.  Character trumps competency – again. 

I am always looking for ways to grow my abilities – to be a better leader, to be a better preacher, to be a better dad, a better husband.  But in each of those fields, I need to put one quest above them all: to have a character more deeply shaped by Christ.

What do you think about character and accomplishment?  What helps you grow your character? 

One of the ways people exercise power when not connected to Christ is to outsource everything you don't want to do to someone who will do it.  Some of this makes sense.  No one has a monopoly on gifting, and to work in a team that's healthy and diverse is pretty phenomenal.

But the shadow side of outsourcing and delegation is that it can lead to an abdication of responsibility.  When I was in high school, I thought math was so awful I remember thinking "when I get older I'm just going to hire someone to do my math."  Right.  Then I ended up in ministry.  Glad I married a smart woman and have smart kids.  And that I have a calculator. And that I don't do the finance at Connexus.

That attitude is not healthy.  Nothing wrong with not being good at something, but I absolved myself of responsibility.

Been doing lots of prep work for our Orange Family series that starts February 15th. One of the things I'm wondering about: have families outsourced spiritual development?  I don't mean in some old-school "let's read six chapters of the Bible while we sit in neatly lined up rows" kind of way, but I mean do we expect someone else to raise our kids spiritually?

What do you think?  What's your experience?  If you're struggling in this area, can you identify what the issue might be? 

I'd love to hear back from you!

I love getting around leaders who make me think.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to be at the North Point staff meeting where Reggie Joiner spoke. 

After serving at North Point for over 10 years, Reggie left the staff there to devote all of his time to ReThink.  As part of that move, he's traveled the country meeting church leaders.  Yesterday, he shared some of his learnings.  Here are a few highlights that got me thinking:

• People who are anti-mega church tend to be the people who already go to church.  That hit me pretty hard.  Obviously, large churches do a pretty good job of attracting unchurched people.  Church people find large churches too big.  I'll chew on that one awhile.

• Maybe the job of the communicator is not to resolve tension, but to create it so that people leave having to wrestle with what was said.  I love that!  I think that happens a bit already in good preaching, but what would happen if we made that a goal?  In family ministry, we say that what happens at home is as or more important than what happens at church.  Maybe that's true of big church (when adults gather) too.  

• You can tell people they are significant, but until you give them something significant to do, they won't feel significant. Okay, that's just way too true. It made me think – maybe the problem of burnout in churches is not that we have given people too much to do, maybe it's that we've given people too many insignificant things to do. 

What do you think?  Do we need to create more tension – more wrestling, in preaching?  Do we ask people to do things that are not really significant?  Is there anything wrong with a large church?

PS. If you want more stuff like this, you might want to get down to this conference where this kind of sharp thinking will be all over the place.

We're wrapping up a series we called a growing relationship, which is a rework of several series our partner church, North Point Community Church, has done (most recently….Five Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith).   You can access our series here or North Point's here.

It's no secret to any teacher that when you teach something, you learn.  Here are a few reflections/insights that really hit me during the series:

• At the heart of faith in God is trust, not just belief.  To trust someone is to have confidence in them.  If you don't have confidence in your car to get you to Toronto, it's because you don't trust its reliability.  Same deal with God.  If you don't trust him, it's basically that you don't have confidence in him. The more I think about that, the more I realize that what I really need to grow is my confidence in God.

• I'm convinced we've totally misdefined spiritual maturity in the church today. I know I've been on this one for a while, but I just get more convinced all the time that many Christians today are missing the boat.  Like I said early in the series, many Christians think knowing more makes us mature. Wrongo bongo. Knowing more just makes us more hypocritical.  Application grows us.  When we apply what we learn from God, it stretches us deeply (Ever read the bible?  Seriously, it's stinkin' crazy counterintuitive stuff!)  When we get stretched, we have to trust God.  And when we trust God, we grow.

• If we're not careful, most of us will become spiritual voyeurs (watching other people grow) or spiritual consumers (getting but never giving and, ironically, never being happy).  Jesus is the opposite. He applied.  He gave.  Maturity comes from giving, not getting.  (Thanks to all of you who stepped up to serve for the first time during this series!!)

Well, there's more, but that's enough for now. 

What thought is stretching you these days?  Any take aways from this or other things that are growing you into a fuller and more intimate relationship with Christ these days?