After a full year at the Schaumburg High School, we have been blessed with a tremendous opportunity. SummitView Church, a neighbor of ours, presented the chance to share their facility. They have a beautiful place, and a separate office building to boot, and they are going to let us share the use of it. This is a blessing is several ways:

1. It gives us a 24-7 home. We can now begin to connect with and serve the community we have come to know, love, and be a part of. We have so many good ideas on how to do that that we have to take a deep breath, and settle in first!

2. We can now use the rent money we were already spending, and bless the local church with it. Nuff said.

3. This may become a model for other churches to begin to steward the resources God has blessed us with in more creative ways. Many churches will partner with a “different language” church, but what we are doing is somewhat unprecedented!

Our new location is: 695 Illinois Boulevard | Hoffman Estates | IL 60169, and we will meet Saturdays, 5pm. Come join us!

• The arts small group recieved free tickets to the Schaumburg Flyers game. We had a blast! Our small group is really growing.
• We had an awesome church picnic, with almost 100 people attending.
• We have added several new members to the Arts team, and numerous leaders in the other ministries as well.
• We have had 2 great outdoor concerts, with members of our worship team, as well as other musicians. Thanks Scott and Jin for hosting these!

We are planning for the Fall season, but I am in no hurry for summer to end, it’s been great!

We are in the middle of a very challenging series called “Things I Wish Jesus Never Said.” CCC did it about 2 years ago, and it was one of the better series we did while I was there. We decided to domething a little different, though, when we got to the “Gouge Your Eye Out” week. We did 2 weeks, back to back, on the same scripture. And, we invited a couple who had a very personal story, to share it on the second week. The husband, Justin, was the pastor for a growing church in Indiana. But somewhere along the way, things got off track.

As the church got bigger, and busier, Pastor Justin began growing farther and farther from his wife. He began relieving stress in unhealthy ways. And, ultimately, he began an inappropriate relationship with a ministry partner. As this became public, he dropped out of ministry altogether.

As a church planter, this story is a real wake up call. It can happen to me. It is also a wake up call to our congregation. Pastors are not immune to these types of pressures. If we aren’t “real” enough to be transparent people in community with each other, we can hide all sorts of dangerous behaviors. And we will be left wondering, “how did I wind up here?”

I love being a part of a community of believers that are willing to be uncomfortably, and uncompromisingly “real” with each other. This could start a revolution!

a Nielsen survey reports that only about 40% of users who sign up for Twitter are still around a month later. And that’s bad news. David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online, says:

it is clear that a retention rate of 40% will limit a site’s growth to about a 10% reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

Nielsen Online has a graph showing how Twitter is faring against the similarly hyped MySpace and Facebook social networks. Martin says “their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70% today.”

This article just came out at Christian Standard, which seems to be a pretty cool site.

Read the article here.

Dedicated to my Dad!