BrianAyers.net

Dan Pink "The surprising truth about what motivates us"

I loved Dan Pink's session at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit this year. His insights about what motivates us are brilliant!

I work with these people :)

Are we teaching as Jesus did?

"Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of His day.

However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect.

The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted do not bother coming to our churches, even our most avant-garde ones.  We tend to draw buttoned-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church.

That can only mean one thing.

If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."

- Dr. Tim Keller

Savannah, GA in photos

Yesterday we made the short drive from Hilton Head over to Savannah and spent the afternoon walking around.

Sources of Complacency

From John P. Kotter's "Leading Change"

Goals for today

Zombie or Bureaucracy?

Great diagram from Seth Godin's "LINCHPIN"

Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

"People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."
— D.A. Carson

STORIES2

Last year we decided to do something a bit different... instead of a typical Easter sermon or even a passion play we decided, for our Easter Sunday experience, to write an original drama that would take stories set in modern times weave them into the events of passion week... STORIES was a big hit!  We had a great response. This year we decided to one-up ourselves and use four real-life testimonies of people in our church instead of the ones we had wrote last year... and weave those into the events of the Easter story.  WOW! It end-up being pretty powerful.  I'm not the most emotional person, but I got choked-up each time I watched it in dress rehearsal and live on Sunday. One of my favorite elements of the whole event was the video that closed the presentation.  After actors has presented monologues based on the testimonies of the four people in our church, and after we say Jesus betrayed, crucified, and resurrected, the show closed with the four people who's testimonies had been portrayed reciting lines from Isaiah 53 and John 3:16...

Elim Cafe opens today

We live in a culture that's addicted to Starbucks.  The people in our church are addicted too.  So am I. We had an idea though: What if we could offer a better product at a better price and then use 100% profits to fund the work we do in our community and around the world?! Well, we decided to go for it. Today Elim Cafe opens. Elim is "coffee on a mission" because all the proceeds go to fund projects like our teen center, summer camps for kids who would otherwise be home alone all summer, our school, and around the world in places like Peru, Haiti, Ghana, the Czech Republic, and more! We're excited about this new endeavor !