Had an amazing time on Thursday night with Matt Barnett. It was an awesome honor to preach at their Thursday night service at Angelus Temple. Amazing LA vibe, cool worship and just an awesome God atmosphere.

The tour of the Dream Center was so moving. Met all the guys in the resident discipleship program. The most moving experience was walking into the chapel with all the residents clapping and welcoming us like we were celebrities. Then they began to share their stories of how the Dream Center literally saved their lives.

Matt and I strategized about launching a Memphis Dream Center. How awesome would that be???

Can’t wait to get back for our weekend services. If you haven’t ck’d out our new Saturday night service at 5p. Come ck it out tonight!

Pretty awesome day. We do this at least twice a year and it really keeps me fresh and focused and connected. Dino started the day talking about the danger of isolation. How easy it is to just get focused on your own thing and get isolated and disconnected. And its the enemy’s plan to isolate us and get us all alone. Its just stupid. Not just for pastors but all of us. We all need good friends in our life. Here’s what the Bible says, Proverbs 18:1 - A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; He rages against all wise judgment. Pastor Brian Houston poured into us all day. It was stratospheric (my new word : ) Headed to LA. Say a prayer or two for me as I preach tonight at the LA Dream Center.

The end of the summer has officially come. School has kicked back in and my kiddos are settling into life as a 1st grader and 5th grader. Our family is super pumped because we’re moving into a new house. God has given us the desire of our heart and we’ll have some breathing room in a beautiful new home. I’m pumped about my new 52 inch LCD TV : ) Just in time for football season. Thank God for Brian, Adam, Matt, Nate, Chad, and Peter. We pulled a late nighter (with the biggest pizza I’ve ever seen) and got my new toy(s) all set up. We’re pushing hard to move in to the new house by Sept 1.

And church life is booming. The Saturday night service has been super strong the last 3 weeks. Thought it would make room for us on Sunday, but the two late services on Sunday are still jammed. Hoping more people come out to check out the Saturday night service. The momentum on Saturday night is incredible. Tons of young people, and a slightly edgier worship experience. I absolutely love it. We’re in harvest mode as well - tons of fresh starts, people getting their lives on track with God. It’s what I live for.

I’m headed to Vegas and LA - we’ve got a roundtable with some amazing pastors around the country and then I’m speaking at the LA Dream Center on Thursday night. Life is great. I’ll do a few more updates this week.

Wanted to give a shout out here on Monday morning and a quick update on the weekend.

In church life, except for Easter and Christmas, there are always two or three what I call “BIG” weekends. A weekend when you launch a new service, motivate everyone to bring their friends, start something new, refresh something existing, etc. If you can put everything together right, they can push you to a new level of momentum (or help you get some momentum if you’ve lost some). BIG weekends help the church see its potential. Everyone is buzzing because there are people everywhere, etc. Over the years we’ve done dozens of these days. I should do a week of posts on the power of big weekends and give some strategy. They really work.

This past weekend was a big weekend for us. Normally we would do it a little later in Aug, but we decided to try to bump the momentum as early as possible in the fall. We launched the Saturday night service because 2 of our 3 weekend services were full. At the same time we tweaked all of our service times a little to get everyone to choose again what service they wanted to attend and because we needed more time at our early service.

The weekend was a smashing success…

-The Saturday night service was completely full, parking lot was jammed, etc. We had 33 decisions for Christ just in that service.
-The early service, now at 8:45a was not impacted, pretty much the same attendance, but the energy was strong. Another 17 decisions.
-The 10:15a and 11:45a were completely full. In fact, I think we ran out of extra chairs in the 11:45a service.

We had a total of 166 salvation decisions! That’s phenomenal. To me that means that we touched a lot of new people this weekend and we grew the church. In fact, the attendance numbers were double of last year. God is definitely visiting us in a special way. I’m sure the numbers will settle back down, but the great thing about big weekends is they show you what the next level looks like. Typically for us, if all goes well we’ll be running those numbers as a norm in a few months. Thankfully we’re planning an expansion of our current facility. We definitely need it.

I had one of those moments in worship during the last service where I was just overwhelmed with gratitude that I didn’t quit back in the early days when it was hard going (real hard going), or that I didn’t compromise the style and spirit of the church to try to bring growth quicker. We kept true to our spirit-filled, passionate roots. And now, we have this amazingly passionate, next generation, multi-cultural, reaching people church that is truly making an impact in Memphis!