Via Josh Griffin.

“People don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect.”

That’s all I really want to say on that.

Via Annanova

Pop songs threaten nursery rhymes

Nursery rhymes are in danger of dying out – because parents are singing pop songs to their children instead.

A new survey suggests 40% of parents with young children cannot recite a single rhyme all the way through.

Of the rhymes people did know, most popular were Jack and Jill (19%), Humpty Dumpty (17%) and Ring a Ring o’ Roses (12%).

So that’s it…

Ian Davidson, of the pollster MyVoice, which questioned 1,200 parents for the survey, said that the nursery rhyme was falling victim to market forces.

It’s all over.

No more Humpty Dumpty, no more Jack and Jill, no more Ring a Ring o’ Roses.

Such a big loss? Or not?

It is 9:17pm on Sunday. We have just finished the final of our 8 services for the weekend.

I got up this morning for our 8am service, and 13 hours later we finished packing up from the 7pm service.

This weekend I have experienced more ‘church’ than some people would experience in two months.

But I LOVE IT!

I am part of the kingdom of God, building my little corner of it. Growing what God has given me the grace to lead and joining with a host of people around the world in participating in what Jesus said he would build… HIS CHURCH!

I really wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but right here.

So here I sit in my office having a breather before I head on out to lock up this awesome facility God has given us!

(Although I am glad I only lock up once every two months!)

Click below to see the Bible Spoiler…

(What’s a spoiler? Find out here.)

CLICK HERE

Dave Ferguson over at his blog posted this last week about the leadership lesson he learned at McDonalds.

He noted a poster describing the seven-step career path that McDonalds offers.

This is a great lesson for all companies and churches!  You need a career path or a leadership pipeline and leaders need to know about it! One of the most exciting things about successful reproducing churches is that they have put a high priority and intentionality on leadership development.  In fact, research tells us that those churches that have a Campus Pastor track or pipeline experience an average annual growth of 25%.  I’m lovin’ it!  And that same study tells us that the biggest mistake that multi-site churches make was “failure of attention to leadership development”.

I have spent the last week thinking about this… if Macca’s can make it this simple, then our children’s ministry can as well. So I am putting together the leadership pipeline for our leaders.

Simple.

Effective.

And Challenging.

What would your ministry pathway look like?

Is it just me or does my son look like Tommy from Rugrats?

Rick Warren article: How to get more out of your reading time

I may be a little biased about reading here. I never had a TV until I was 12… a curse at the time (very embarrassing to try and do an assignment about your favourite TV show), but a blessing looking back. So I got big time into reading!

A couple of quotes:

Practice active reading. Mark up your books. I always read with a pencil in my hand. Even when I’m reading magazines, I’ve got a pencil in my hand. A book only becomes your book when you mark it up.

Yep… Clean bible, dirty Christian. Dirty bible, clean Christian. Carries over to books… as much as I hate to mark a new book… gotta do it!

The best way to save time in reading is to be discriminating. James Bryce says “Life is too short to spend it reading inferior books.” More than 1,000 books are produced around the world each day.

That’s a lot of reading. Try the books that are recommended to you, not just the ones on sale!

So our events coordinator Elizabeth Barry has written to all the key leaders involved in Kidsong World last week the official debrief email!

So in the interests of having something to write I shall take it upon myself to post an excerpt of it here online…

Because if I am going to put so much effort into writing the thing, it would be great if more than one person could read it

Kidsong World 07 – The Kids part of Hillsong Conference.

Conference Debrief

Event Overview: Four days/five nights. 9am-3pm. Two rallies each night; 4.30pm and 7.30pm, lots of kids!

Overall Impression: Easily the best Kidsong World so far in terms of organization and actual running of the event.

Area of Debrief: All media for conference, Worship and Creative Arts, Morning and Night Rallies (Primary Age and Preschool).

What Worked:

• Centre video screen on the main rally stage. Really helps to bring atmosphere with a huge screen on the stage.
• Trading Cards – Kids were so pumped to collect the entire set of Kidsong World trading cards (14) that they were heard to have sold them to other kids.
• Musical in the morning rallies was a HUGE success. Pulled off a great experience of all of the kids. Following the four characters each day was cool and the media was absolutely top-notch.
• Night rallies created a great buzz. The late night talk show feel was a win. Having a couch on stage to ‘interview people’ and the desk to sit behind (Leno, Letterman etc) was a really cool look. Then using the couch as a ‘best seat in the house’ idea for two kids each rally was a real winner. Next year we need snacks and chocolate for those children. Maybe even a palm branch being waved above them.
• Max and Melody show for the preschoolers was great.

What can be improved:

• Production (TV TD/Lighting/Sound FOH and TD) – we need to find out oversights of areas before conference and meet with them. Having dialog with each team leader would be hugely beneficial, especially the day program where production is needed at different times ie. Paddington and Downes teams.
• Pre-conference roles and structure for W&CA. The outworking of who will oversee the team and who will roster team members. We need to make a simple flow chart for the way the team will run next year.
• Reinforce name tags – so many fall off and get broken. Either look at a different style of name tag or find a way to replace each morning the sorrier looking ones.
• Plan/film our media (eg. Musical video clips) at least two months before conference. The filming of our media wnt well, but the editing took a lot longer than expected. All we need to do is move filming schedule up a bit.
• Get trading cards professionally printed. Build on the success of theseand make them business card size and professionally printed.
• Revamp points system… maybe even get rid of it. Each year we divide kids into four teams and ‘compete’ to be the best team over the week by getting points. Maybe its time to do something different.
• Make sure we communicate the need for the coms on stage for communication between stage managers, producer and MC. We fluked it this year getting them in the right place, lets do it deliberately next year.
• Make sure our stage design is communicated and we see a floor plan a month out from conference. Again we fluked the stage setup.
• We need to rehearse the preschool Max and Melody Show like the primary age musical. A couple of dress rehearsals over a short amount of time, pack them into one week, not do smaller rehearsals over many weeks.
• Make sure we have enough media for all venue. Need to have spare copies of everything, and if possible only give copies out to the teams. Label each DVD/CD on the case as well, so we know how many we need to get back.

There it is! Part of the debrief, of which you may understand not much at all, but hey… even if you find it a little bit insightful, let me know in the comments.

Right now over at the swerve blog (from lifechurch.tv) Craig Groesche is writing a 5 part series on mentoring. I was talking to a friend of mine who I thought would be right with me in the need for every leader to have great mentors in their lives.

He hadn’t really thought about it.

Apart from the wisdom you can receive the very act of HAVING a mentor says something about your willingness to grow and accept advice, no matter how tough it is.

So here are a few highlights from Craig’s series because says it really well:

Mentoring Part 1

No matter how gifted you are in your field, there is NO SUBSTITUTE for life experience. Without an experienced mentor, you’re drastically limiting your potential impact and performance.

So now you know you need one, go and visit the Swerve blog and read the rest of the series… (part five is not up until tomorrow… unless you read this tomorrow, then it will be up).

So our church has a number of Youtube accounts now… one for United and one for rest of church life.

Check them out and subscribe so you can get updated on new videos being released.Here is the Hillsong Conference highlight video I linked to in the last post.

Amazing conference this year.

Visit this page for highlight videos!