Will Mancini

Craig challenged over 3000 church planters at Exponential by considering three levels of belief in the gospel:
1) I believe the gospel enough to benefit from it.
2) I believe the gospel enough to contribute comfortably.
3) I believe the gospel enough to give my life to it.
Then he brought the hammer. The clarity is not the identification of these three levels, but the realization that success in level 3 can lead you to cross back into level 2. Craig admitted his own struggle with this dynamic and challenged young leaders to be prepared for the temptation.

I had a great day of assessment today with Marty Nicholas and the team at Sugar Land First United Methodist.  One of the things that Marty mentioned is that he was bummed to have missed the i3 conference by Leadership Network last month.  Well many thanks to the folks at Leadership Network for their knowledge capture of the conference. Check out these one page links:

The Dangerous Church 

Provocative Leaders for a Dangerous Church (Nancy Ortberg) 

20/20 Vision (John Bishop) 

The Church on the Other Side: What Does the Dangerous Church Look Like? (Ed Stetzer) 

Catching Up With the Rest of the World (Bob Roberts) 

Missional Community

Lovin' Every Minute Of It (Dino Rizzo) 

Challenging People to a Missional Lifestyle (Matt Carter) 

The Foundations of Missional Community (Reggie McNeal) 

What is the Church? (Neil Cole) 

I am getting ready to speak tomorrow at the ChurchPlanters.com conference. Ben Arment will be there, Catalyst’s Innovation and Experience Director. I like the way Ben thinks and his recent post on Blue Ocean Churches, reminds me why. But before diving into his snippet let me remind you where the Blue Ocean idea comes from. Red ocean is where the sharks compete for the same prey. Blue ocean is non-competitive space. In fact, this business book is so compelling, that Vince Antonucci, said is was his primary reference to church planters before discovering Church Unique.

Here’s Ben’s entry:

Occasionally, I get e-mails from people who think Catalyst is part of North Point Community Church. They ask about ourvideo venues, our assimilation process, even how Andy is doing. “Fine,” I tell them. “He’s in a good mood today.”

What’s interesting is only three of us attend NP. A few go to 12Stone. And a fairly good number attend All Souls Church down in the city. I’ve never been, but I hear All Souls is the anti-programming church. Overhead projectors, white sheets of paper with announcements on them, stiff liturgy… A surprising choice for staffers at the most programming-rich organization in ministry.I guess it’s like working at an ice-cream parlor. You don’t go home after a long day of work, sit down in front of the TV… and eat ice cream.

Got me thinking about Blue Ocean churches. I really believe you can only have so many churches in one community that successfully reach families with 2.5 kids, SUVs and a golf club membership. If your church is #4 or #5 in this genre of church-making, you’re better off finding a new sociographic to reach or you’ll continue to struggle year after year after year… after year.Do the opposite. Drop the rock band and intelligent lighting. Forget the climbing wall for kids and the KidStuf knock-off. Go with the opposite attributes and set apart your church for a new kind of community.

It will be surprisingly refreshing for a large number of people.

My friend and kingdom master-mind, Todd Wilson of the Exponential Network, has done leaders a favor by filtering and aggregating the best “nuggets of gold” from the blogs of top thinkers and leaders.

The name of the E-book which is the first of a multi-part project is Leadership Learning from Bloggers.

Contributions are from:

Ben Arment

Mark Batterson

Chris Elrod

Dave Ferguson

Mike Foster

Seth Godin

Craig Groeschel

Alan Hirsch

Scott Hodge

Michael Hyatt

Gary Lamb

Brad Lomenick

Shawn Lovejoy

Will Mancini

Tony Morgan

Perry Noble

Bob Roberts, Jr.

Ed Stetzer

Tim Stevens

Tullian Tchividjian

Jud Wilhite

Jared Wilson