FaithEngineer

Today you get to hear from my incredible wife.  She agreed to write a post for the ladies in honor of Valentine’s Day.  We started dating way back in high school and have been married for thirteen years now.  After reading what she has to share, you will see that I am definitely a lucky man.  She is an incredible wife and mother.  She also has a blog where she shares about the joys of marriage, parenting, and being a pastor’s wife.  Check it out at JenniMorris.com.

Yesterday Mike posted “Guys, do you want a new marriage?“  Today he asked me to come up with some tips for the Ladies.

Mike and I had a conversation about a week ago about how many people are facing divorce and marriage problems.  It’s not the problem of “40 somethings” or our parents friends.  It’s effecting our friends and people our age and even younger.  We even have some former youth that have already been through the pain of divorce.

At first I though that I was to give guys tips from a woman’s perspective and he was going to give the girls a man’s perspective.  Isn’t it just like us as women to want the opportunity to give our men criticism disguised as “marriage tips”.  I like that he shared from his heart to other guys about what he as a husband has learned.  I can’t think of a better person to give marriage advice than my husband.  He isn’t perfect and neither is our marriage but he is committed to our family and to God to continually learning and striving to make our marriage what it should be.

Before I start “the list” I can’t emphasize enough that your marriage has to be centered around Jesus.  If it’s not the list you are about to read is nothing but a bunch of “self-help” rules that you can get from Dr. Phil.  The Bible says  “. . . a cord of three strands is not easily broken.”  When you face difficult times in your marriage, Jesus will be the one to hold it together.  When things are going great in your marriage, Jesus will be the glue that makes it even more incredible.

OK Ladies here it is . . .

• Respect your husband. Ephesians 5:33 says that “each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Websters defines respect as  “giving special attention to”.  Give special attention to your husband.  Show him you care about his job, his interests, his hobbies.  So many times men are respected at their job and come home to a wife who gives him the message that he isn’t anything special or worth respecting.  He wants to see in your eyes that he has your approval, that you admire and respect him.

• Build him up. The world can be a harsh place.  Your husband needs to know that you are his safe place.  The place he can come to hear words of encouragement.  Do you inspire him or exasperate him?  Do you compliment him or complain about him? Do you strengthen him or control him?  One of the most unattractive things for a woman to do is complain about or put down her husband in front of others.  It is heart breaking to hear the way some women tear their husbands down to others.  Your words can build up or tear down – what do your do?

• Let him be the leader God has made him. As women sometimes we view our home as “our territory”.  We spend time making our homes look nice, making our kids look and behave a certain way, organizing and directing activities even to the point that our husbands can become just another “thing to manage”.  This leaves him feeling frustrated and ready to hide behind the newspaper and stay out of the way.  Give your husband permission to be a leader in your family.  Have you ever heard (or like me – done it yourself) a wife treat her husband like one of her children.  This can be so true of parents of small children  – mommy instinct takes over and all of the sudden your husband feels like your his mother and he can’t do anything right.  Let him lead.  If he puts the diaper on backwards – so what.  If he gives the kids cake for breakfast – they won’t be ruined for life (and he may get Dad of the year!)  If he fails don’t tell him “I told you so” – tell him “I’ll help you up”.

• Take him seriously. As his wife take his job and his stress level seriously.  Men are too often defined by “what they do” – their jobs.  Watch two men introduce themselves to one another and within a minute or two they will ask each other “what do you do”  It isn’t helpful for you to compete with him about who has the most stressful job – men or women.  We aren’t rivals.  We need to stand beside each other and play on the same team.

• Go to bed early. Save a little bit of your time and energy for you husband.  Kids, housework, jobs, activities and even church can wear us out to the point that we have nothing left to give.  Leave the dishes in the sink and the laundry in the dryer and go to bed early.  You should be able figure the rest out on your own.

We get the name of Valentine’s Day from St Valentine who was a Christian martyr.  Take time this Valentine’s Day to give away a little of your self to your spouse.  A little sacrifice can go a long way in your marriage.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!

I spent a few minutes looking at the stats for the blog this morning. I’ve updated the Popular Posts List on the sidebar with the posts that have been the most popular over the last six months. It was interesting to see a combination of technology posts along with some of the more serious topics. The number one post by far was God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Bear. That shows me that the internet is a place where hurting people go when they need answers.

If you are viewing this in a RSS reader or through an email subscrition, here is the list:

• God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Bear
• Cardboard Testimonies
• Sermon Podcasting Tutorial For Small Churches
• Technology for small churches
• Should We Dress Up In Church?
• Are You A People Pleaser?

This is powerful. Check out the testimonies. Short, brief, and life changing. Mine would be

“thought I could do life better my way”
“Surrendered to God’s plan and ministry”

What would yours be?
Leave a comment and let me know.

(thanks to Chris)

It never fails … Almost every week I look back after I finish my sermon and realize that I left something out that I wanted to share. I always hope that I shared enough to get the truth across. I know that God sometimes takes control of the sermon and redirects what I am saying, but there is always that uncertainty when I’m done. I wonder if I prepared enough, communicated effectively, and honored Christ by what I’ve said. My hope and prayer is that I have said what God wanted me to say.

Yesterday, when I was talking about pain, suffering, risk, and loss, I wanted to share 1 Corinthians 10:13. You know the one that says God won’t give you more than you can bear … But wait a minute, that’s not really what the Bible says. It says you won’t be tempted beyond what you can bear. In life, you will go through situations that are more than you can bear alone. It’s only in those times that we realize our full dependency on God.

I like what a pastor down the road shared on his blog

It does not imply that God won’t let you be stressed beyond what you can bear.
Or challenged beyond your ability.
Or pushed beyond your threshold.In reality, God gives you more than you can bear all the time. On purpose.
It’s only when you can’t bear the load that the strength of Christ kicks in…
and He becomes everything you need and more.

I always love when youth question why we do things a certain way in church. To me, that is an important stage in strengthening your faith. I have always cautioned them to be very careful in their search for an answer. Where do most people go for answers? We tend to go to friends, the internet, or even tradition for our answers. Everywhere except the most important place, which is God’s Word. A few weeks ago, we had a good discussion about dressing up in church. There were different opinions, but I think it is great that they are willing to question the why.

So, to address the issue of dressing up in church. We live in a very traditional area where most people have grown up in or around church. So for us to be a church that does not encourage people to dress up can be a little controversial. To me, the first question is does the Bible address the way we dress. Here are a few places to look:

1 Samuel 16:7
1 Timothy 2:8-10
Matthew 23:25-28
James 2:1 -4
Luke 7:24-26
Luke 12:22-23
1 Corinthians 4:11
1 Corinthians 9:22
1 Peter 3:3-4
Isaiah 53:3

Most people say that we should dress up out of respect for Christ. But how do you define dressing up. Is a tie enough? Or do you need a suit as well? Do nice jeans count? Or do you have to have slacks? Flat front or pleated? Cuffed or not? Shirt tucked in or out? What about sweater vests? Just kidding about that last one. But I think you may get my point because I could go on and on. What one person considers dressing up may not be consistent with what other people think. Very quickly you start down a road that leads to legalism and pride. You also start down a road that causes division between generations. What most 20 year olds consider nice, most 50 year olds would not even consider wearing, and the reverse is true as well. What I would wear to a job interview is very different from what an older person would wear. Why, because we grew up in different eras.

When I think about suits, I think about lawyers, bankers, business men, and funeral homes. But yet Jesus was constantly around the sinners of his day. Not the affluent and wealthy. The Pharisees were the religious of the day who were impressively dressed, but Jesus had some of the harshest words for them. I also think that dressing up can become a barrier to reaching people for Christ. I have had people ask me if they have to dress up for our church and then have a sigh of relief that they don’t. Why? Because they didn’t own any clothes that people would find acceptable in most churches. They felt like they couldn’t even attend church unless they bought “nice” clothes. How sad of an indictment is that against churches today. We are known more for what we wear instead of who we love.

To me it’s a matter of your personal conviction, but it’s not something you can force upon someone else. It simply is not directly addressed in the Bible. These are the type of issues that cause division in a church. When we focus on secondary issues, we are distracted from God’s vision for our church. You will never hear me preach against dressing up in church, but you will also never hear me preach against dressing casually. Why? Because as a church we have more important things to talk about. And if it bothers you when people don’t dress to your standards, please take a look at John 7:24. Let’s not focus on secondary issues that do nothing but cause division.

As a small new church in a rural community, we have a unique perspective on technology. We know that it can help us and we know it is important, but we have to make sure that we spend wisely in making our technology purchases. We don’t have an unlimited budget, so price does play an important factor in our choices. So with that in mind, I want to share what equipment and software we are using. First let’s talk about software.

Worship Presentation Software – Easyworship
We have used easyworship for over two years now. It has been true to it’s name. It is incredibly easy to use. I typically setup the songs and backgrounds and Bible verses in a schedule for Sunday morning, and then have one of our teenagers actually run it. You can literally train someone to use the program in under 10 minutes. Many times, we just put Bible verses up on the fly as they are mentioned by whoever is preaching. Whatever you do, DON’T USE POWERPOINT. When we have software like this available, it really enhances the worship experience on Sunday morning. It has all our worship songs built in, and it has multiple Bible versions so we can quickly put up on the screen the verses being talked about. It is worth every penny of the $399 cost. The only drawback to easyworship is that you can’t create slides, but they do allow you to import powerpoint sermon notes. By doing that, you can seamlessly switch between sermon notes, song lyrics, video sermon illustrations, dvd clips, and Bible verses. I have also used Mediashout before, but it has a steeper learning curve and we needed something that could be used my multiple different people. I am also intrigued by propresenter on the mac, and I am watching it pretty closely for the future.

Kids Check-In Software - Kidzpro
We just started a check-in for our children’s ministry about 4 weeks ago. We got to the point where the teachers didn’t know all the kids and they didn’t know which parents went with each child. We needed a system to provide better security, but we also needed a better system in case of emergency. Now we gather allergy information and special instructions. We can also notify the parent if they are needed by displaying their security code on our video screen. We can now track attendance and capture the name and address of our visitors with children. We went with a simple system, one that does not require internet access since we don’t have that where we are meeting. We also went with a system that does not require a touchscreen. We can run it on any computer(although it won’t run on older OS’s like ME or 98) and we can add more licenses as we go. We print out name tags on a Dymo label printer and it also prints a security label for the parents that matches the child’s. Kidzpro is much cheaper than most other check-in systems out there. I recommend using a computerized check-in system once you have more than 50 children in your children’s ministry. If you want to do it manually, then check out this company. They provide customizable labels with security numbers. This is also a good way to handle all your visitors until you get them in your computer system.

Kids’s Curriculum – Elevate
We have been using this for only the last four weeks, but so far it has been great. It is a dvd based curriculum that has worked well for us. The kids meet in a large group for worship and their lesson, and then they split up into small age-appropriate groups to go more in-depth to learn about the lesson for the day. Since the kids all meet together for the main session, you can get by with a cheap projector, screen, and dvd player. All which total under $1500. A small investment when it comes to our children (you can see where my priorities are)

Graphic Design – Adobe Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements
This is where you have to sacrifice a little as a small church. I would love to have Adobe’s Creative Suite, but the pricetag (over $1000) is a little to steep to justify. Adobe Photoshop Elements does 90% of what the full-blown version does at a cost of less than $100. It doesn’t support CMYK color modes which is a little of a pain when dealing with commercial print companies, and it doesn’t support paths, but it does everything else. I use photoshop for all our sermon graphics, special web graphics, signs and banners, and custom logos/images. Premiere Elements can be used for video editing. It is powerful and will do almost anything you need. Again, the elements versions are slightly stripped down, but they are affordable. Until you have a full-time graphics person, you can get by with these packages.

Podcast Creation – iTunes and Garageband
We make CD’s of all our services on Sunday morning. I take a copy home and rip it to my computer using iTunes. Then I import it into Garageband on my macbook pro and clean it up and add podcast artwork and info and a opening introduction. I then export it back to iTunes as a mp3 file and upload it to the free service Sermoncloud. From there, we link to it on our website and make it available through iTunes. For more info see my post on creating a sermon podcast.

Blogging Platform – Google Blogger
We wanted to start a blog for our church leadership. I managed to create a custom template in Google Blogger that matched the style and color of the rest of our website. I also redirected it to it’s own subdomain so it looks like you are still on our site. It turned out much better than I expected, and did I mention that it was completely free.

Church Management Software – Church Windows
I’m not that familiar with this software. I know we track our attenders and giving and payroll through this program. It works fine now, but if we continue growing I would like to see us move to something web-based like Fellowship One so multiple people can access and use the information we have. Also with a web-based application you can tie in children’s checkin, online giving, and small group involvement.

Service Planning – Google Docs & Spreadsheets
We have an online spreadsheet that anybody on our teaching team or creative team can access to see our upcoming sermons and topics. Our praise team also uses this to list what they are playing each week. It’s not fancy, but it’s free.

Online Giving – eGive
This is the newest part of our technology strategy. We are currently working on integrating online giving on our church website. I’m excited about offering a new way to give to our church. For people like me who take advantage of online banking and debit cards, online giving is a big convenience. I can never find a checkbook and I’m not the only one that doesn’t write checks anymore. You can setup weekly, bimonthly, monthly, or one-time giving. And the thing I like about eGive is that it is not expensive. It costs $25 per month + $0.15 per transaction for smaller churches. They also do not accept credit cards which I think is great. We don’t want people going in debt to give to the church, that’s not good stewardship. I also like it because it fits in well with the way we take offering at our church. We have never “passed the plate”. Instead we have an offering box at the back and we trust that people will give joyfully and generously, and they have. Online giving is just another way for them to do that.

Church Website Content Management System - Soholaunch
Again, I’m not that familiar with this one since I’m not the person that updates our website. Paula does a great job and keeping it going. Once you have a good template, then the work is in keeping new content on the site. If you have a site, you MUST keep it updated.

Calendar Software – Google Calendar
This is more personal than church related, but I do use Google calendar to list all my activities, meetings, and events. I can allow other people to access it or add information. I would love to see our entire leadership team use this as we move forward.

Overall these are just some of the software and web applications that we are using in our church. The emphasis so far has been on doing much with little. I think we have accomplished that. Just think how the big money you spend on software and hardware can be used to help the poor. Are we really being good stewards when we buy the best and most expensive?

I know that a title like this is a little presumptuous. I could just as easily switch the title around and it would be equally true. But I was thinking about how I preach, and I realized that my style was developed from speaking to teenagers for the last ten years. Talking to a large group of teens is a very different experience from talking to a group of adults sitting quietly on Sunday morning. When it comes to being trained for public speaking, I am a complete novice. I have never taken any public speaking courses, and I really haven’t read any books about communication. But I have learned many lessons the hard way. Any I have applied many of those lessons to my preaching. So here are a few things I have learned from teens about preaching.

1. It all starts with preaching truth, but it has to be understandable.
Yes theology is important and doctrine is important as well. But when you preach, you must present the truth of the Bible in a way that people can understand. Preaching is not about showing off your knowledge, it’s about presenting truth so lives can be changed. So always think about what you are preaching, if teens can’t understand you, then you are probably obfuscating (if you don’t know what I just said, then how can you expect people to understand propitiation or justification without explaining them in everyday terms).

2. You have to be prepared for distractions.
In youth ministry you have constant distractions. It might be a kid seeing how many bodily noises he can make or it might be constant talking and laughing or it might be people getting up and moving around. I had to learn to just take it in stride and not take myself too seriously. Sometimes, the distractions need to be addressed. You can do that with humor most of the time, although sometimes more directness is needed. But when preaching to adults, you have to learn to let your sermon flow with the distractions. Sometimes distractions are an indication that you are losing their attention, so you need to change how you are communicating.

3. It has to be a conversation.
When speaking to teens, I am amazed at how often they raise their hand or blurt out something as you are speaking. Sometimes, their comments are right on the money. But the majority of time, their comments are way out in left field. I learned over the years that you can’t become frustrated with their behavior. They learn by asking questions and interacting as you teach. With adults, my teaching style has changed some, but it is still very interactive. I usually don’t have adults blurting out questions, but I still can sense when they are struggling with something I talk about. Even though they aren’t talking back, it is still a conversation. I try to ask a lot of questions and I pay close attention to their body language. Are they nodding their heads, smiling, or do they just look confused? I then try to adapt what I’m speaking about to more clearly communicate the truth. If they are confused, then I will slow down and describe what I’m trying to say. If they are bored, then I try to get them engaged through personal examples or humor. If they are listening to every word, then I try to really drive home the main point. I don’t want my messages to be a long boring message. To really engage your congregation you must understand how they are processing what you are saying.

4. You have to know when to shut up
With youth, it is easy to talk too much. When you start losing the whole group and everything you try is not working, then you have probably said too much. I fall into the trap of trying to communicate too much. When you go on with point after point after point, the end result is that the students remember nothing. And the same is true of adults. Sometimes you get halfway through a sermon and realize that you are close to the limit of what people can digest. Sometimes I feel the Holy Spirit leading me to share personal stories and illustrations and sometimes I feel like I should add a point or go in depth about something that I wasn’t planning on. When that happens I need to remember that too much information leads to the retention of nothing. There is nothing wrong with calling an audible and postponing part of your message to the next week. Although I’m all for planning ahead, if you let your sermons be dictated by the calendar then you have limited what God can say through you. We must listen to the Holy Spirit and be willing to change our plans for the sake of communicating His plan.

I want to introduce a new feature here on FaithEngineer. From time to time I am planning on doing some church technology tutorials. I have stumbled and fumbled my way through learning how to do some things that could help churches on a shoestring budget. My heart really goes out to small churches in rural areas like the one I attend. Typically one person has to be proficient in the sound system, the video projection system (if you have one), and the church website. Our church wanted to provide our sermons online for members who were traveling or were unable to attend. Since we currently have no full-time staff, we wanted a solution that was easy to setup and easy to maintain. I have pulled together the programs, services, and websites we use and my hope is that this will assist other churches who want to reach beyond their four walls into all the world through technology. I will concentrate here on just doing the sermon because of the tricky copyright issues you get into when recording music. I will also just concentrate on sermon audio, even though these same programs and services can be used for video at an additional cost.

Let’s break it down into 3 main steps. Recording the message, uploading the sermon file to the internet, and creating the podcast from a RSS feed.

Step 1: Record the message
Churches typically have several options here. The best way to get the sound is straight from the source, the soundboard. You can …

• Record with a computer: You can run a cable from your soundboard directly to a microphone or line-in jack on a desktop or laptop computer to record. Then using recording software such as the free program Audacity, you can record the message directly to a .wav file. After you finish recording, you can export the song as a mp3 file. In order to keep file sizes down to a minimum, I have found that using a bit rate of 32 kbps in mono works well for sermons. It gives you very intelligible speech and keeps the file size small.
  
• Record with a CD-burner: Our church has a rack-mounted CD burner, the
  Tascam CD-RW750. We run one of our auxillary sends from the soundboard to the CD-burner so we can mix it differently from the main speaker mix. When the sermon is over, we start duplicating the CD in a CD Duplicator Tower so that by the end of the service we have CD’s available for all of our Children’s Ministry workers and we also make extra for people to take and give away. Once you have the sermon on a CD, you need to transfer the message to a mp3 file using iTunes, Windows Media Player, or another CD ripping program. Again I have found that ripping the CD using a bit rate of 32 kbps in mono works well for sermons.
• Record with a mp3 player/recorder: On occasion, I have used a mp3 player that has recording capabilities. I have an iRiver iFP 780T MP3 Player, which is only $71 currently on Amazon. Although it doesn’t have much memory, it is perfect for recording sermons. The cool aspect of this particular player is that it can record in two different ways. You can just start recording before the service and set it on the preacher’s podium and it will pick up great. The sound quality is amazing on this thing, and did I mention that it is very small and inconspicuous. The other way to record is directly from the sound board. It features a line-in jack so that you can run a cable straight from the sound board and record directly to the mp3 player. After the service you can just transfer the mp3 file to your computer. Easy, fast, and cheap.
  

Step 2: Upload the message to the internet
This is the part where people usually get nervous. Fortunately there are several new free services popping up to help you get started. I will talk about two here that I have played with, SermonCloud and SermonPlayer. If your church has a website, but you don’t want to worry about storage space and monthly bandwidth and hosting requirements, then these services are just for you. Both sites offer streaming and download of mp3 files.

SermonCloud is an interesting new service. They will host your mp3 file and provide a RSS feed that you can use for your podcast. Since your sermon files reside on their servers, you are not responsible for bandwidth usage or storage space. Their current policy is that you can have up to one year of recent sermons listed for free. If you would like to have more than one year, then they will develop a pricing plan to allow that. According to my understanding, after one year, they will automatically start removing the oldest sermons so that you have a maximum of 52 sermons listed. SermonCloud has a simple interface that allows you to select the mp3 file to upload. You then fill in the topic, the preacher, the description, the main Bible passage, any artwork, the text of the message, and searchable tags and keywords. Once you upload the message to their site, it is listed with your church’s other sermons. Anyone visiting SermonCloud can then seach by topic, keyword, or Bible passage. People can also provide feedback and “amen” your sermons. I have been surprised at the number of downloads for some of our messages. I know many of the downloads have come from outside of our church. I think this is one of the main benefits of SermonCloud, that people from anywhere in the world can go to one website and search through messages. They have been going through some pretty major server upgrades, so they should have the bugs worked out by the time you read this. Their name comes from the topical “cloud” that they make with the keywords. Here is our church’s sermoncloud webpage for reference. You can list recent sermons on your church’s website through php or javascript code, but you must leave your site to listen to the message. I’ll talk more about the podcast feeds in a minute.

SermonPlayer is another new service that looks promising. It is very similar to SermonCloud in how you upload your files to their web servers. The main difference is that SermonPlayer provides a player to integrate into your website so that people do not have to leave your site to listen to the sermons. They also do not provide a searchable index to all of the sermons from different churches, although you can search through sermons from your church. Since each church is pretty much limited to their own sermons, this may or may not be what you are looking for. The player is really clean and modern looking. Each time you upload a sermon, it is automatically shown in the player window, which is shown here. The player allows you to download sermon notes, stream the mp3 file for immediate listening, or download the mp3 file to transfer to your mp3 player. The player also has a Bible window so that you can look through the Scripture while listening. Their Pricing Information shows that your first year is free. After that if you want to continue using their service, the fee is $25 per month. They will not remove your messages even after 1 year, so you can try before you buy. They also have a good flash demo of their service on their webpage.

Step 3: Create the feed and submit the podcast information
We live in an iPod world. One of the easiest ways to get your sermon out to your congregation is using a podcast. Users can subscribe to your podcast and have each week’s sermon automatically downloaded to their iPod. People can search in the iTunes store to find your church and/or sermon topic. In order to create your podcast in iTunes, you must start with a RSS feed. Luckily, both SermonCloud and SermonPlayer create RSS feeds for you automatically. The RSS feed contains the information about each one of your sermons. The feed is updated each time you upload a sermon, so you don’t have to worry about keeping it updated. The feed contains the description, the preacher, the link back to the mp3 file, and any other information you want to provide. You could take the RSS feed and submit it directly to iTunes(more on how to do that later), but I recommend running it through a feed service first.

I use FeedBurner and have been impressed by it. It cleans up the feed and formats it specifically for iTunes. It also adds many options including the ability to track your subscribers. You can choose the iTunes Category that your podcast will be listed in. The other big advantage to using FeedBurner is that if you ever change sermon hosting providers you won’t have to change anything for iTunes. You can simply go to FeedBurner and set your feed to pull from another source. And did I mention it’s free, and easy. So hopefully you see that it is not all that complicated to record, upload, and distribute your sermons online. There is only one last thing to discuss, and that is how you submit your new feed from FeedBurner into iTunes.

To add your feed to iTunes, go to the iTunes music store in the iTunes program, select podcasts to go to the main podcast page. At the lower left corner, hit submit podcast. It will take several days for your podcast to show up in iTunes. One more thing to remember is that it is very hard to remove a podcast from iTunes, so make sure you have everything right before you hit submit.

If you have found this through a search, then hopefully I have answered some questions for you. Please leave comments and ideas as well. I would like to do some tutorials for other church tech related topics as well. Please feel free to leave suggestions on what to do next. Let’s redeem the technology of the internet and use it to promote God’s Word throughout the world. I’m excited about the opportunities that churches now have. I hope you are too!

I also recommend checking out Cory Miller’s excellent introduction to this same topic on
Sermon Podcasting Made Easy at ChurchCommunicationsPro