Dave Travis Now

March 10 Show Notes Updates

OK, I am trying to shoot a three minute video each week to post. These are the notes with a little elaboration, just to point viewers to some specifics. This is “last week’s news”

The video link is here: http://learnings.leadnet.org/2010/03/the-three-minute-round-up-for-week-of-march-12-2010.html

These are my speaker notes so they are sort of incomplete.

Leadership Network Behind the Scenes

This week – Church Planters Leadership Community at our Dallas Collaboration Studio.

Generous Churches Leadership Community also at our Dallas Collaboration Studio – Lab coming – see http://innovationlab.leadnet.org for more info there about future labs on Generous Churches and Multi Site and Externally Focused.

A few Aha speakers have posted videos and we will have those up in a few weeks.

Look out for Sage on May 19 – follow the http:// learnings.leadnet.org to stay posted or @leadnet on twitter

Saw Neil Cole this week and our Leadership Network Advance featured his new book Church 3.0

News from around the Networks

Exponential Conference and Catalyst – east coast and west coast in April. Sales are up and almost sold out.

Spoke to Ed Stetzer – Ed Stetzer.com about his broadcast – monthly

I think Mountain Lakes Church did a wedding for 10 couples last weekend. Sort of like Bryan Carter did last fall. All yall living together need to get married. And did counseling and married them all at once in front of the church. Cool idea. Shawn will be down at Exponential – Connect with him there. See Shawnlovejoy.com to read the story.

The Blogs

Tony Morgan.live set off some storms with his post on holographs the other week.

Real interesting read at experimental theology on how facebook killed the church

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-facebook-killed-church.html HT to Bradley Wright for that.

Willmancini.com – The System Down the Hall beats the Mission on the Wall

Billy Hornsby on Attractional Church – www.billyhornsby.com

The Books

Ministry in Hard Times by Bill Easum and Bill – Tenny Britain – Abingdon (Bill Easum’s wife has been in and out of the hospital quite a lot)

Real Time Connections by Bob Roberts Jr. – Zondervan and I think Exponential sent it to me.

Also read Meeting of the Waters – Fritz Kling – great book on reinventing Missions Paradigm

Prayer Requests

Praying for leaders at a church in Frisco TX, Abilene TX

Internet Monk Michael Spencer Cancer treatments

Bob Buford up at Mayo Clinic for some days. (but has now returned to Texas)

Interact

To send in your news, books, blog referrals or announcements or prayer requests just email to dave.travis@leadnet.org or find me through davetravisnow.com or @davetravis on twitter

Whether you are in a micro or megachurch, an organic or an “Oh My Gosh” kind of place, a pastor or volunteer – we are pullin and prayin for you at Leadership Network.

Next video update will be Thursday evening I hope.

 

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network

Behind the Scenes – March 12

This was a super intensive and busy week around Leadership Network as we had LOTS going.

I got to sit in with most of our Church Planting Leadership Community gathering on Monday and Tuesday. I love hanging out with churches that plant churches that plant churches. While I love church planters that plant churches, I love even more those that are building systems of reproduction. Brent Dolfo, our happy Canadian, and Linda Stanley took the lead on this one.

[During the meeting I tried to get Hill Country Bible Church to change their name to Heathens Changed By Christ. I don’t think they are going for it.]

Later this week, in fact just wrapping up today was a gathering of our Generous Churches Leadership Community. This is the final group we are doing in a community format. We have done 5 groups of churches over the past five years. We have helped them grow in the discipleship of giving generously.

We are now moving to do several “Labs” in the generosity area. These labs take what we have learned from the previous five groups and help churches apply those learnings and get up to speed quickly in this area.

If your church is interested in applying to be a part of one of the labs, contact Chris.Willard@leadnet.org.

Leadership Network Advance featured a conversation with Neil Cole this week. Click into that here: http://www.pursuantgroup.com/leadnet/advance/mar10s1.htm

While that was going on I missed THE SHOW and THE SPOTLIGHT this week. The Show featured Bruce Miller, one of my favorite guys, talking about “Your Life in Rhythm.” Just point your way to http://theshow.leadnet.org to find the archive.

And Stephanie Plagens hosted “The Spotlight” with Dino Rizzo and Eric Swanson talking about their thoughts on Externally Focused Churches. (We are going to do a lab on that topic later this year as well. Find out more at http://innovationlab.leadnet.org)

See the article here that has a link to both that show and next month’s. http://learnings.leadnet.org/2010/03/new-spotlight-webinar-sticky-churches.html 

Next Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern DAYLIGHT time, Neil Cole on The Show.

Some great posts on the Learnings Blog from Eric Swanson on the first Global Connections Leadership Community. Read that here:

http://learnings.leadnet.org/2010/03/reflections-on-the-global-connections-leadership-community-11.html

And I did a quick three minute video round up that is also on the learnings blog.

As to other behind the scenes news, we have a new player joining our team next week who I will announce next week.

Bob Buford, our founding chairman, spent the week at Mayo Clinic and I think they have him fixed up from his recent bone infection. We sat together for an hour on Monday and he is improving.

Tom Wilson, our CEO of 100x, left for Rwanda late Tuesday and I think he has probably arrived by now. It’s a long way to Rwanda no matter how you route your travel. There are several board members and others along for that trip but we aren’t worried, the resourceful Linda Wilson is with them.

More news and views next week.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network

@davetravis

Behind the Scenes – Great Artists Ship Edition

Seth Godin says in his new book Lynchpin, that Great Artists are not just the people with great ideas, but they ship. In the middle of the Aha! conference this week, Todd Rhoades looked up and said to the team - “We are shipping today.”

Before I describe the Behind the Scenes for Aha! I want to share some other great things from Behind the Scenes at Leadership Network.

Our First Global Global Connections Leadership Community kicked off on Wednesday. This is a group of US Churches working to redefine the “missions” paradigm. 

They came from across the country and behind them in the shot you will see a globe map. For an opening exercise they placed images where their churches are working around the globe. It was an incredibly resourceful and rich experience.

Eric Swanson is our Leadership Community Director heading up this project and to learn more, just email him at Eric.Swanson@leadnet.org. Also on the team this week – Richard Petty, our facilitation director, Bonnie Randle, Cindi Haworth, Keith Young, DJ Chuang, Lupita Cardoso and probably more.

Look for a post from Eric with more on this story. Also, his Leadership Network Advance Article – Eight Trends that will Shape the Future of Global Missions from last week about the topic is here.

http://learnings.leadnet.org/2010/02/eight-trends-that-will-shape-the-future-of-global-missions.html – A Must read.

The photo to the left is of the part of the Aha! Conference team in the underground bunker  moments before kick off on Wednesday. That Todd Rhoades actually panicking as we had a technical glitch. Erin Pinkston to the right designed the Program book and helped with the cover is stream throughout the day. Linda Stanley at the far end of the table interacted with participants via the cover it and twitter streams. Greg Ligon is not in this photo but worked on some of the same issues. Also our Prize Pirate – Stephanie Plagens helped by giving away lots of books and other neat things throughout the day.

A Big Shout out to Cynthia Beal for all the IT support for secure connections. [Cynthia hooked me up with a sweet new laptop this week. It’s great but I am having to adjust to Windows7]

I want to thank our sponsors Lightcast Media, Jossey-Bass and Zondervan as well.

That’s me and our Chief Administrative Officer Gayle Carpenter right before her on camera appearance. (“I’ll be on camera but I won’t say anything” she said.)

We will have more to say about the Aha! Experience in a later post but it was a really big show and conference. LOTS of great nuggets from the speakers.

I forgot to mention last week some of the awards our book authors have won in the past few weeks.

Outreach Magazine named two of our books as “Outreach Resources of the Year” in the State of the Church category. Mel Lawrenz’s Whole Church and Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance got those awards. Mel is a pastor at Elmbrook Church and was actually in Dallas this week for the Global Connections Meeting. Reggie is a Leadership Network Director and runs our Missional Renaissance Leadership Community. For more information on that, just email reggie.mcneal@leadnet.org

Those are affiliate links above that will connect you straight to those books. Both of those are in our Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network books series.

We were glad as well to see Wayne Cordeiro’s book honored with an award in the Leadership Category. Wayne’s book is entitled Leading On Empty. It’s good.

Speaking of Leadership Network authors, Sam Chand, author of an upcoming book in our series on healthy church culture was honored this week with a “Top 30 Global Leadership Gurus” ranking. Sam is “associate staff” with us and we love him.  Here is the link to his award. www.leadershipgurus.net  and find him on twitter @samchand.

I would take the time to mention Eric Swanson’s new book coming this month, but I will save that for later.

Thanks for reading and we appreciate your prayers and support for our ministry at Leadership Network.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

www.twitter.com/davetravis

Last Week's Behind the Scenes - Communities and Conferences

I have been running behind all week since I was out at a conference to start the week, but we had plenty going on at Leadership Network last week.

I'll lead with our Missional Renaissance Leadership Community held out in Dallas at our Collaboration Studio. This was Group 2's last meeting. This community has been led by Reggie McNeal and Eric Swanson. Julia Burke was the hostess making sure all the details were handled.

Here's a photo of the group and Reggie as they are getting started:

As this was the last meeting there were more than a few tears shed as they contemplated how their communities had changed since they began 18 months ago.

Good news if you have interest in joining this type of community, we still have a few spots open for Group 4 that starts this fall.

For more information on that just email Reggie.Mcneal@leadnet.org.

And while that was going on in Dallas, Liz Swanson was leading our part of a partnership conference out in Riverside, California - Recovery Conference 2010. I haven't seen in any photos from The Grove yet, but I have seen some emails from some very pleased participants sharing their stories about starting and sustaining and healthy recovery ministry.

I have already mentioned in my name dropping posts about the Velocity Church Planters.com conference up in Cumming, Georgia. There were almost 1000 church planters from dozens of states and 4 countries gathered.

I was told that all the main sessions will be available on the web at www.churchplanters.tv starting tomorrow.

And finally, over near Thessaloniki, Greece, Brent Dolfo was working with our European Church Planting Network in spite of a country-wide transportation strike. We have a lots of helpers over there including Anders-Michel Hanson, Peter Dyhr, Nicola James and our partners, 3dministries, Mike Breen along with others. I'll try to come up with some photos for next week.

And in our Leadership Network Advance, our email that goes out across the world, the lead article "Eight Trends That Will Shape the Future of Global Missions" by Eric Swanson got more opening day feedback than I can remember in a long time. A must read, so click through. That product comes as a part of our various concept tools from the area led by Dr. Warren Bird who is always trying to develop new ways to serve you.

Eric is leading a brand spanking new Leadership Community starting Wednesday in our Dallas Collaboration Studio with 12 fantastic churches. More about that later this week.

I know Todd Rhoades and his team were hard at work finishing up the details for our Aha! Online Conference this next Week. He even released the news that we are giving away an Apple iPad to one of the lucky registrants. Go find Aha! here. http://aha.leadnet.org 

March 3, 12 noon Eastern to around 4 p.m. You can "Come" for FREE but you need to register.

Todd and the team have prepared a great program book complete with schedule, program notes and other resources as a part of the "premium" registration. It will be a useful tool especially if you want to use the conference for team development.

Three of our speakers for Aha! are from our European community so look for them on Wednesday. And to follow the behind the scenes action from Aha! you can follow me, Todd and leadnet at @davetravis, @toddrhoades and @leadnet.

Of course, I can't capture all the behind the scenes work that our team is doing each week as much of it is preparation, interviews and helping our clients around the world. But watch this space each week for updates. Thanks for reading.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Finally - Velocity Day Two report - Serious Name Dropping

And yes, I know, I should have taken more photos of the event to share.

I arrived early on Tuesday up at the Velocity Church Planters.com conference in order to check some email. But I sat in instead at Mark Clement’s breakout on Social Networking: Making Twitter, Facebook and all that work for you. It was good.  Mark leads bigpicturemediagroup.net. And no that is not a paid endorsement, I just enjoyed our time together.

Before I go further I will point you over to one of the hosts, Shawn Lovejoy’s blog for a wrap up. Said they had 33 States and 4 countries there for the week. http://www.shawnlovejoy.typepad.com/

Speaking of the other partners there at the conference, I got to chat with some of the various companies and organizations that I always enjoy.

I spoke to Bill Cochenour of Cogun. The day before I mentioned that I had seen him on the back cover (inside) of Seth Godin’s new book. He had no idea. Saw Bill’s brother Jim late on Tuesday. Also talked to some of the other guys from Cogun that are based here in the Atlanta area.

Saw William Vanderbloemen of Faith Search Partners along with a few of the others engaged in that search ministry effort. It was good to talk for a bit with William.

I got to have lunch with Alan Hirsch and he gave me a copy of his new book “Untamed”. He explained the idea to me the night before about how discipleship begins before conversion. I look forward to reading his thoughts. He wrote it with his wife and I realized that I have never met Mrs. Hirsch, only Alan. He said she was currently in Europe doing some work this week.

Brian and Amy Bloye sat down for a few minutes after lunch so we could catch up. They are also planning some good things for church planters in the coming days out at Westridge Church in Dallas.

I forgot to mention on Monday I did a video interview on Church Planter Fashion with Casey Graham of The Change Group. That was unique. I really like the ideas that the Change Group has for helping churches. Find them at www.thechangegroup.tv.

Again, that is not a paid blog post or anything, just me talking about a friend.

Ditto for Will Mancini, founder of Auxano. Yes he wrote a book for us (Church Unique) and now is spreading the clarity message including through their co:lab process. I think he spoke on that at the conference. www.auxano.com He is probably doing a lab near your town soon.

David Putnam, one of the co-founders of Churchplanters.com, caught me up on his latest journey and has now published this on his blog to let others know. http://davidputmanlive.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/my-new-ministry-adventure/

They had a hole in their speaking schedule which opened up time for David, Matt Carter and Darren Patrick to hold forth. Matt and Darren are some of the great leaders and pastors of the Next Generation. Alums of our Next Gen program.

I got to sit in with them for a few minutes backstage with Rick Warren. Rick was a great encourager to them and to the whole crowd that day. Rick spent a little time talking about his dreams for the next decade of his ministry. It’s very exciting. Also got to meet Steve Komanapalli of the Saddleback team on Tuesday. I know lots of the Saddleback team but it was my first time meeting Steve. Rick also told me some great stories about people he has met through twitter. Funny stuff.
 

Saw some Church planters and others that I have known for years there as well. Always good to get updates from folks.

At the very end I worked in a quick hello to Mary Beth Stockdale. I follow her twitter @mbstockdale. She had been at innovation3 last year and I had missed her there and almost missed her Tuesday! She was kind to introduce me to her friend – Aubrey Howell (@simplyaubs) – so that was good to make a quick connect.

I had a late night that night as I did some consulting work with a church via a skype video call so I am using that as an excuse for why this post is so late. More Behind the Scenes over the next few hours.

At the Velocity Churchplanters.com conference

Well our team is scattered around the country today. We have some team members out in California at the Recovery Conference. We have teams locked into our Dallas Collaboration Studio for our Missional Renaissance Leadership Community. Beyond the US we have a team in Greece for our European Church Planting Network. Works like our Leadership Communities.

But Sherry Surratt and I are here at the Velocity Church Planting Conference in Cumming, Georgia. Sherry is speaking and I am here just to talk to people. Shawn Lovejoy is lead pastor here and they do a great job hosting and planning this deal. David Putnam, his co conspirator at churchplanter.com came by to harangue me about his new book Detox. I haven't read it yet but it looks great. Shawn is going to be an Aha! speaker next week. http://aha.leadnet.org.

I spoke to Larry Osborne and Chris Mavity of North Coast Church out in California. I recorded a video with Larry about his new book "Sticky Teams" which I will release soon. Chris and I spoke about a conference they are planning out at North Coast about the new book. That will be in the fall at their new building.

Todd Wilson and I met out in the Exponential RV for a few minutes and I got a video from him too. A lot of our team will gather down at Exponential in Orlando this spring. So come find us there.

Hugh Halter, author of our LN Book, Tangible Kingdom, is here speaking.  

And I ran onto Noel Hekkinen and his son Ethan yesterday as well. Ethan is 9 and was the youngest "participant" there.

We had a nice dinner hosted by Shawn and David and their wives at Tam's Backstage in Cumming. This restaurant is in an old Elementary School, probably built during the depression. But it is very nicely done refurbishment.

I was lucky to have Larry Osborne at one elbow and Alan Hirsch at the other with Noel and Ethan across from me. I also got to speak to John Worcester who I haven't seen for years. It was good catch up with what he is doing now in California.

I will share more from Velocity tomorrow.

But it is a great conference to keep in mind for next year!

Behind the Scenes - Valentines Week Edition

We had a big week at Leadership Network because it was when all of our teams gather in Dallas for thrice a year team meetings. When your team is spread from coast to coast and even around the globe these meetings become very critical.

As a part of that time this week we gathered a group of leaders on Tuesday the 16^th to think about “Unthinkable” events and how they would impact US society and culture. It was lots of fun and plenty of both scary and exciting possibilities.

Warren Bird posted some thoughts on the LN Learnings Blog on the event.

Chris Willard hosted THE SHOW live from our Dallas Global Headquarters with several participants to talk about some of them. Find it here at http://theshow.leadnet.org

In addition we saw lots of friends, old and new. I will mention a few here. Bruce Miller from McKinney Fellowship was there. Bruce has another book coming soon, a follow up to Your Life in Rhythm.

Andy McQuitty was there from Irving Bible. Andy is coming off of recent cancer surgery and looked great. Pete Briscoe came and later in the week I saw a video about his upcoming Leadership Network book – "The Surge" scheduled for later this year.

Toby Slough and Jim Kuykendall came. Toby had some really kind words and I will paraphrase: “Our tenth anniversary is coming up and on our way down here we got to thinking of all that you, Linda (Stanley), Greg (Ligon) and others here at Leadership Network have meant to us.” Cross Timbers Church has been a part of man of our programs. I am glad we could help.

Brad Smith, one of our Alumni Team members, now the President of Bakke Graduate University, was also along. He had some great perspective from across the globe that was really helpful.

And Bob Buford, our Board Chairman of 100x, our parent organization, made a brief appearance on that day. Basically to tell everyone he is still alive. Bob has been on the puny list lately due to an infection which has led to several rounds of hospitalization. It was good to see him back in action.

Lots of other friends there but I want to give a shout out to Richard Petty, our facilitation director, designed and led the experience. Bonnie Randle handled lots of the other details. Lots of fun.

While our whole team was together this week I got to hang out a bit with Don Ankenbrandt from Birmingham, AL. Don works alongside our Halftime Team and leads Alliance Ministries there in Bham. see more here http://www.alliancemin.com/home.php?page=who

 We also held another Radical Future Lab this week, this time on Small Groups. Sherry Surratt from our team put together eight great churches for the lab. To find out more see http://innovationlab.leadnet.org about other Innovation Lab offerings this year.

Late Wednesday night I got to hang out with Cedar Creek Church of the Toledo area. Their Arts and Management teams were down for a conference and I got to have dinner and spend time mainly telling my old and odd stories. Thanks to pastor Lee Powell for scheduling that time together.

We celebrated 15 years of service of Linda Stanley on our Team at Leadership Network. Linda leads our Next Generation Pastors group and is conducting interviews for our upcoming Leadership Development Group. Wish her well here.

We also celebrated 10 years of service to Leadership Network of Julia Burke. Many of you have met her through our Multi Site Leadership Community but she currently is serving lots of our other things as well. Wish her well here.

Todd Rhoades reports that registration for Aha! New Voices, Fresh Ideas surged passed 2000 earlier this week. That is just 12 days away. Sign up here http://aha.leadnet.org

That’s all for now, look for more next week as we scatter back across the country and world for the next week of pursuing Ahas with you.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

 

Behind the Snowy Scenes Edition

The snow is still lightly falling here in Atlanta and socked our offices in Dallas yesterday that they were closed today. Before she left yesterday, Diane Reynolds, our CFO snapped a few shots to share "Behind the Snowy Scenes".

Here is a look out of our 9th Floor Collaboration Studio there.

That same space was relatively quiet this week but will be very active next week. We start the week with our staff meetings, one of the three times a year we gather our whole team together.

Then there is one of our Innovation Labs kicking off on Wednesday. Sherry Surratt will be leading a lab on Small Group Innovation. To learn more about that program go to our Innovation Lab page. 

One of the highlights this week was a special luncheon honoring our founding chairman, Bob Buford. I will share more of that in a future blog post. Bob has been under the weather for a month now, in an out of the hospital a few times but is on the mend. It will be good to get him back in the flow of things.

Todd Rhoades tells me that our registration for Aha! New Voices Fresh Ideas online conference is up over 1500 now. Time to get registered for that event happening on March 3. That's 40 great speakers without leaving your house or office for FREE. Plus we have a "premium" option where you can get a conference notebook complete with speaker notes, group discussion questions and the schedule for the day.

I know Chris Willard, who helps lead our upcoming Generosity Lab, was over in the Jackson, Mississippi with Pinelake Church this week.

They tell me Eric Swanson, who kicks off our new Global Connections Leadership Community in a few weeks, was in Rome. Not Georgia, Italy. Working with a group of leaders there on city reaching tactics.

Linda Stanley, who launches our Fifth Next Generation Pastor community in a few weeks, completed 12 more interviews for our upcoming Leadership Development Community.

To contact any of our team about any of those programs just remember their email is firstname.lastname@leadnet.org. So give them a shout.

I missed The SHOW this week that featured one of our authors Earl Creps, interviewed by our own Sherry Surratt. The archive show is here. And then Stephanie Plagens, the host of our monthly Spotlight program.

We have an informal event next week we call "Unthinkable" where we have a group gathering to discuss how some Unthinkable events would disrupt society. More on THE SHOW next Tuesday. Watch it at 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central.

And our Leadership Network Advance Featured one of our latest books Missional Mapmaking.

find it here: http://www.pursuantgroup.com/leadnet/advance/feb10s1.htm

Plus as a treat, another new Leadership Network book arrived "Church 3.0" by my friend Neil Cole.

I have a few newslinks to share and I hope they are still in operation. These came from churches we have worked with on a regular basis.

 Here is a story from the Asheville, NC paper covering the Seacoast Church Haiti Relief partnership with Water Missions International.

Our friends up at LCBC up in Pennsylvania, members of a few of our Leadership Communities has a nice article here    about their new site.

And speaking of new sites, The Crossing, in Quincy, Illinois, one of the more rural churches we have worked with in our Multi Site Leadership Community, is opening a new site back in Quincy. See the story here.

And speaking of "The Unthinkable" - Tim Keller covers some of them in his blog post this week. You can read that here.

In case you are reading this on an RSS post like thousands of others. I hope you didn't miss the excellent posts by Warren Bird:

Unusual Ways to Reach People

A Report from our Latino Mega Pastor Forum

Sherry Surratt's - Do Small Groups Really Work?

And Stephanie Plagens on Third Culture Leadership.

Super busy week next week so look for posts later that week.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network

Behind the Scenes - ONE MONTH UNTIL AHA edition

Behind the Scenes For February 3. 2010

Lots of news this week and will try to break it up a bit for you.

Leadership Network specific:

+ Warren Bird, our Research Director, just completed our first Latino Megachurch Pastor Forum yesterday. This was a gathering of large churches with Latino pastors who minister in English and Spanish in the US. He said it was a very creative group of guys. I look forward to more reports.

+ We went live with our Aha! online conference web site. That is one month from TODAY! Registrations already pouring in. We will be blogging extensively about it with more and more detail as we go. But get signed up here.

+ I mentioned the new Halftime Director last week and while he’s not new, Chris Willard of our team is putting on an additional hat for the future. Chris has been ably leading our Generous Church and Rapid Growth initiatives and now will add “Director of Development” for our parent organization 100x. Go get ‘em Chris and congratulations.

+ I got my copy of our latest book, Missional Mapmaking by Alan Roxburgh came in the mail. I haven’t read it yet, but it jumps to the top of my pile.

Here’s the link, and yes, it is an affiliate link. And yes, it is available for Kindle too.

Book link here.

+ Tom Wilson, the CEO and President of our parent organization, 100x, is up in DC for the National Prayer Breakfast and some related meetings. Some of the Halftime team is there as well. Tom had a birthday this week and I forgot to call him. But I have a card.

He turned really old.

+ I guess we should have sung Happy Birthday to him on THE SHOW this week. We had Jesse Rice –author of The Church of Facebook with us.

+ Eric Swanson, another one of our old staff, is in the Philippines.  No, I have no idea why.

Conferences

+ We have a team traveling down to Verge in Austin this week. Linda Stanley, Reggie McNeal, Todd Rhoades and Wayne Smith for sure. Making trouble wherever they go.

Love seeing that Verge will broadcast major sessions online but you have to get registered here. It’s a sellout so this is the only way for latecomers.

+ More room opened up for our Recovery Conference in California for the 22/23. Go to RecoveryConference2010.com to get signed up.

+ And I got a tweet from Kristin Ruther about the Cornerstone Conferences this year. Find them here.  I have been before. They are a great value. I may make the Atlanta one late in the year.

 

Friends:

+ Sort of in the conference zone, my friend Shawn Lovejoy of ChurchPlanters.com said they were within a few dozen of being sold out. Good for them but now I will never find a parking space. They have a bigger building this year to handle a much larger group.

+ I did an interview with my old friend and co-author, Bill Easum for one of their podcasts. Mine won’t be up for awhile because they have to edit out all my verbal tics but there is more great stuff from Bill and his partners at www.churchconsultations.com.  

+ I had lunch with Matt Williams of Grace Church  Greenville last week and he shared several really cool things they are doing. I am going to blog more about those soon. But you can catch some of the news on their site. www.gracechurchsc.org  Matt and Grace are alumnus’ of several programs at Leadership Network.

+Speaking of Matts, I think everyone saw the AP story on pastor Matt Chandler over the weekend. If you didn’t it is here.  And the reporter, Eric Gorski of AP, had some more thoughts on his own blog – here.

I have enjoyed speaking with Eric and I am sad that he is being reassigned to the Higher Ed beat at AP. Religion reporters have a hard job condensing stories down to newspaper-sized bits but I always found Eric to be well-informed and fair. Good luck in his new beat. And thanks AP for continuing to cover US religion stories from around the nation.

Chandler and Highland Village are also alums of several Leadership Network programs.

+ One of the mentors in our Next Generation Program was mentioned in a recent post over at Duke’s Call and Response. Dr. Barr is a good friend and explains how he led his church from traditional to contemporary and back again when it comes to worship. I am glad to see Jason back in the swing of things after his illness a few years ago. Find the story here.

+My friend Ed Stetzer started his new weekly program “The Exchange” yesterday. Good stuff Ed. Every week on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Central – find it here

And to answer the question that everyone asked me, “No, I don’t know what was up with his new hair do.” At least he has some and it ain’t gray like mine.

+ My friend, and another alum of LN programs, Scott Wilson from The Oaks Church sent along his new book the other day. I think it is out now. “Steering Through Chaos”. Here’s a link. Just hit the shelves this week. I haven’t read it yet but will add it to the pile and blog about it over at http://books.leadnet.org . Remember, Leaders are Readers.

+ I know everyone is talking about Mosaic Church’s Doritos ad for the Super Bowl and I sure hope they win. But I saw this story in the LA Times that I think is even a bigger deal.

See the story about a church as the center of a troubled community. Here.

Sure, there are other factors, but as my colleague Eric Swanson says “We want to be the best church FOR our community.” We are doing a lab for churches with vision like this later in the year. Check it out at http://innovationlab.leadnet.org

+ And my New Orleans friends want me to cheer for the Saints, The Indy folks for their team on Sunday. I could really care less for Pro Football. My heart says Saints, but my head predicts Colts. My prediction Colts 20, Saints 17 in a more defensive game than is predicted.

That’s a lot of Behind the Scenes for just three days and I may have more on Saturday for you. Thanks for reading.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network

www.twitter.com\davetravis

Behind the Scenes - End of January Edition

Not to worry, not going to cover all the news from January, just this week’s news.

+As promised we have a major staff announcement for you. We have just announced a new team member, Dean Niewolny as Managing Director of our Halftime Initiative. Dean comes from the business world in Chicago but for all you cheeseheads, he is a Wisconsin native. He starts in about a month.

+ While we didn’t have any “live” events in Dallas this week we had lots of meetings literally around the world among our staff.  A few of us connected with Gerald Sharon and David Chrzan of the Saddleback Leadership Team while they were in Dallas, and a few more of us connected with some leaders of the Kern Family Foundation while they were in Dallas. I also got to see Jay Hein, formerly the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives Director and now President of the Sagamore Institute as well as Byron Johnson of Baylor University this week. It is good to see old friends.

+ I didn’t catch all of it but Dave Ferguson of Community Christian Church was on The SHOW this week. You can watch the reruns in the archive. Dave’s brother and cofounder of Community Christian, Jon, is one of our speakers at the upcoming Aha! conference.

+ Our Leadership Network Advance team meets regularly to plan future issues and review past issues. That publication chugs along. Every two weeks it delivers fresh articles to your email box. Well, you and 30,000 other people. If you don’t subscribe, you should. It’s FREE. http://leadnet.org/Resources_Advance.asp

Plus there is a redesign coming soon to reflect our new logos, colors and other new features.

+ I mentioned the Aha! conference above. Todd Rhoades tells me that announcement is early next week with all the speakers and ways to register. Like THE NINES last year, the basic conference is FREE and is a no travel, online event. Aha! Fresh Voices, New Ideas is March 3!

+ Speaking of conferences I know some of our staff is down at Verge next week in Austin, Texas. The Saddleback Guys told me that Radicalis is looking strong. Also our Recoveryconference2010.com registration for later in February is growing.

+ I was listening to the weather this morning on the radio and it was predicting snow and ice for Oklahoma environs. Just like a year ago when our Innovation3 conference and our big 25 anniversary party had some hiccups due to ice. One year ago this week!

+ I got a call a week or so ago from a Dallas Morning News reporter about something Bob Roberts was doing at Northwoods Church with a Muslim Iman and rabbi. Did I want to comment? “Sounds like what Bob does all around the world” I told the reporter. The story is here.  After that Ed Stetzer had an interesting conversation, very civil, on his blog about the story including a full interview with Bob about the story. Check it out here. Some good comments pro and con. If anyone cares, I’m pro here.

+ And my friends over at Leadership Journal have posted an update version of my speech/blog posts on What is Changing and What is Not over on their site . http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/currenttrendscolumns/culturewatch/whatschangingwhatsnot.html

Thanks to Marian for the great edits.

+ Some great posts at the Leadership Network learnings blog featuring some video interviews with Mac Lake, Kevin Penry, the best of Leadership Network’s concept papers of 2009 and more. So check it out.

 Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network