Will Mancini

Today I am recommending a book by one of our team members, Vince Antonucci: Renegade: Your Faith Isn’t Meant To Be Safe.

Here are some thoughts from Vince and a great story to give you a taste of Vince’s style and background.

It’s a book about this kind of life – the kind of life Jesus and Jackie Robinson inspire me to live. Today I’m a pastor near the Las Vegas strip, which is definitely out of the ordinary. I’m not sure I live at a higher level everyday, but I am trying.

My hope is that Renegade will help people connect with Jesus in a way that moves them toward extraordinary lives. I’m so eager to see this happen, I teamed up with my publisher to sell the ebook version for 99 cents from April 12-19 in honor of Jackie Robinson, who is celebrated in the newly released movie 42.

I hope you’ll pick it up, and if you do I’d love to hear what you think. You can email me here.

GREAT STORY – How Jackie Robinson Saved My Life

I grew up in a verbally abusive home. My father’s violent tirades were like heart-seeking missiles. And if my father, someone who was obligated to love me, couldn’t love me—if he couldn’t find anything special in me, I reasoned I must be defective.

I needed a place to escape, and I found it in baseball. I tell people baseball was my first love, and I mean it. From age six I was watching games on TV, memorizing statistics on the backs of baseball cards, playing out imaginary games with my glove and tennis ball in the backyard—all of this helped me escape my father… Read More

Vince Antonucci is the founder and lead pastor of Verve, an innovative church plant for the unchurched near the Las Vegas strip. Vince’s passion is creatively communicating biblical truth to help people find God. He blogs at www.vinceantonucci.com and speaks and coaches for Auxano.com. He is the author of I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, Guerrilla Lovers, and Renegade. All three of his books are available in ebook form for 99 cents April 12-19, 2013.

The MOST Important Chapter:  Chapter One – UNORIGINAL SIN

The BEST 12-pages from the Visual Summary : The VISION FRAME

The NEXT tool we are creating: The Unique 19 – “The Top Church List for the Rest of Us.”

Who made the list for 2013? Stay tuned…

The LATEST initiative we launched. CAMPAIGNS!

Yes, finally your next capital campaign can be truly vision driven from the inside out, not just “vision sugar coated.”  See why I hired Todd McMichen to lead this initiative.

My milestone post on Facebook today. Swing by and check out my NEW author page.

Five years after the publishing of Church Unique, I could not be more grateful to God.

The original idea was to write the playbook for a small tribe of churches who were really intentional about the missional reorientation and authentic discipleship but didn’t have a “go to” vision or planning process. My deepest desire was to free leaders from copying other church models and to design their own, based on their unique context and their unique calling.

But God used the book to expose the clarity and strategy vacuum that most churches in North America face. Today, Church Unique is being used as the recommended vision tool in a majority of denominations and church planting networks. It continues to fuel the work of our growing Auxano team and strategic partnerships with other resource providers in the church space. (like Ministry Grid and Visioneering Studios, a church architecture firm).

In the end, Church Unique would mean nothing, if it was not for the thousands of pastors who have passionately engaged the journey of discerning, developing and delivering an stunningly unique vision for the glory of Jesus. It’s all about what HE is doing in beautiful and powerful ways through YOUR church!

(The picture represents one of the thousands of church teams that have taken their church through the Church Unique Vision Pathway.)

If you have not seen the new tool we have developed at Auxano, I encourage you to check it out.  It’s called SUMS. They are totally free book summaries, created by church leaders for church leaders. SUMS are:

• Compact for high-impact reading
• A pure summary and not a review
• Hyperlinked to go deeper
• Attractively designed
• Concluded with staff meeting action steps

I won’t typically post these on my blog, but I wanted to make sure you got to see a few of these if you haven’t pulled the trigger. And by the way, this makes a great holiday reading or a New Year e-mail gift— so feel free to pass these on.

Here are the first four summaries we released.

• Sums-How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
• Sums-The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
• Sums-Resonate by Nancy Duarte
• Sums-The Present Future by Reggie McNeal

Be sure to sign up at the Vision Room and get the next SUMS free every other week in your inbox. That’s right, 26 book summaries a year totally free.

Bob Adams, our VisionRoom curator, just loaded up a tool that my friend ND Strupler had made when we did some training for ICF church planters in Zurich. it’s the Church Unique Visual Summary translated into German. Listen to the values of the ICF movement here.

You can download the free resource here on the Vision Room. Please consider passing this on to pastors in Europe who would benefit from this free tool.

For years I have dreamed of providing a best of class and totally free book summary service to church leaders. Now its time! And it’s called SUMS.  Imagine getting 26 summaries a year absolutely free!

What got me thinking about SUMS?

I love reading, and I appreciate book summaries like most church leaders. But I wished a team would get serious about selection of books for church leaders, design of something great to look at, and application for the ChurchWorld context.

How have we selected books?

There are three kinds of books we are focusing on. 1) Classic leadership texts that are worth revisiting, 2) Books targeted for church leaders, 3) Current business and leadership releases. To the left  is the first one in our series and and example of that the cover looks like.

Who is behind SUMS and actually writing the material?

Bob Adams is the SUMS team leader and the Vision Room curator. One time when I was eating lunch with Bob, years before he was on the Auxano team, he showed me the trunk of his car- it was filled with books. Why? Bob’s favorite thing to do is to read books so that he can give the right book at the right time to any pastor he meets. I have never seen such passion for reading and encouraging pastors in one person! Bob, as well as our Auxano navigators contribute to the SUMS material as as experienced ministry leaders.

Here is the last page of a SUMS summary which is an application page we call “Go Ahead” actions. One of our navigators provides exercises for you or your team.

What do I like most about SUMS?

Because I appreciate great design, I asked the Auxano Design team to put together something refreshing. I wanted tables to make content clear and bold pull out quotes to make the best quotes pop. Time is so short and church leaders are bombarded with so much crap, I really wanted a simple, great looking product that a pastor would look forward to getting. I imagined a pastor printing it off or grabbing their iPad and going to their favorite coffee nook to digest condensed insight for the first time or to consider an important book once again. Here is thumbnail example.

How can you sign-up for SUMS?

It’s simple. You get SUMS through our new online portal for all things clarity called the Vision Room. Here is the link to learn more about SUMS. When you are in the Vision Room, all downloadable content, including SUMS is free by getting a Vision Room key and setting up MyVisionRoom. It’s extremely fast and simple.

Two more things…

First, here is a SUMS link to a book that has changed my life by Mortimer Adler. Sums-How to Read a Book It is an anchor summary for our first quarter.

Second, I hope you not only enjoy SUMS, but also spend some time in the Vision Room. Keep yourself clearly thinking ahead.