Bard Letsinger

Wasting Time Well

A movie debuted the summer before my senior year of high school that was destined become a classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. At the time I had all these decisions in front of me to make as well as the pressure I felt from  coaches, teachers, parents as well as myself to succeed and accomplish all the goals that were set before me. But then one line from the movie changed my whole perspective. 

This week at Renegade Church I did a message called “Time Well Wasted” in our series “Life Lessons from Brad Paisley”. The song and the clip go together well. Life does move pretty fast….and then unexpectedly, poof, it’s gone, and we look around wondering "What just happned?!?" Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 9:9 “Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity;” The Hebrew word for  “vain/vanity” means breath or vapor. Simply, life is like the soap bubbles kids play with, existing for a brief moment... then gone, poof, with little evidence that it was ever there. So when we think about all the things we stress ourselves out trying to accomplish, what good are they if they cause us to speed through life and miss out on all the relationships and moments that truly make life rich?

Take a minute to listen to the advice of Brad Paisley, then figure out where you need to stop, look around and stop letting life pass you by.

 

Meeting the Chupacabra

Ever since I was in elementary school I have been fascinated with cryptozoology. Back then I had no idea what the study of creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and others was called, I just thought it was cool. Recently a creature that people are calling a Chupacabra, literally goat sucker, stared being spotted around Cuero, Texas. An area rancher, Dr. Phyllis Canion had seen one for several years on her ranch and when it was hit by a car she quickly retrieved the body for study. Since then Dr. Canion and her Chupacabra have appeared on the History Channel’s Monster Quest, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and soon on an upcoming NatGeo special…and now with a couple of crazy Renegade Pastors.

Like many people when I first saw a new story on this “chupacabra” I came to a conclusion on what I thought it was, but it was not until I got a firsthand, close up, look and quickly found out there was more to this creature than meets the eye. Here is the full interview with Dr. Canion. Check it out for yourself.

Games People Play - Trivial Pursuits

Been too busy to write like I use to, but going to try to at least get into the habit of doing a M3D (Monday Morning Mind Dump) tossing out anything that was left in my head on Sunday morning but just did not make it into the message.

We wrapped up Renegade Churche's current "Games People Play" series Thanksgiving weekend with Trivial Pursuits. Here are the two main points I wanted everyone to walk away with.

First: Remember being “Thankful” and “Other-Centered” is a choice.

We can choose to be self-centered, spending our time looking at what other people have, wondering why other seem to work less and make more, have the house/car/clothes/spouse/kids we don’t, don’t have health problems we have, or just seem to be luckier. If we do that we wind up discouraged, resentful, negative and miserable. Not someone people want to be around.

OR…

We can choose to focus on those around us who are in need, those who have truly hit hard times, those who are really struggling in life and when we do we find ourselves counting our blessings and being thankful for what we do have.

Which one of these attitudes did you have over Thanksgiving?

The choice is yours. That’s right… you choose consciously or unconsciously which one of those attitudes you carry with you each day. Make a conscious choice to be other-centered.

Second: How do you know if something is a Trivial Pursuit?

A "Trivial Pursuit" is something that you feel once you have it/accomplish it you will be truly happy, everything will be great, that life will be complete, that all your problems will be solved.

Finding the right spouse, getting your degree, the right job, having kids, getting a promotion, getting a new car or your own home are all good things, but if we are not carful we can base our happiness on obtaining them. And when we do get them we are happy…for a short time, but then they let us down and we go after another one thinking that the “next thing” will make us happy.

The simple truth is that anything we chase after to fill that God shaped hole in our life with to make us happy and fulfilled is a Trivial Pursuit.

 

 

Throw them a Curve Every Now and Then

I love/hate movie trailers. They always show the best/funniest scenes or show you the whole movie (beginning, turning point, end) in three minutes. Most of the time I find you can just skip the movie, watch the trailer and save $8 bucks.   

Took my wife to the movies a few weeks ago and saw the trailer for the new movie "Green With Envy" staring Jasion Segal and Amy Adams. 30 seconds into the trailer and I thought “here we go again, crediting the actors, check, so next they will show Ryan working to make it up to Amy, show the kid/place/item that connects them, show Amy coming around, the two comming back together, show the final make up kiss…” then WHAM….WAIT, WHAT!?! Totally blindsided. Most creative movie trailer in the past decade.  

In the church the weekly service can be like a movie trailer. Everyone comes in and knows what to expect. Song, Welcome, Two more songs, offering speach and prayer, offering song, message, conclusion/alter call, final song, announcments, dismissal, lunch.  Take a lesson from the few creative people left in Hollywood and change things up, mess with the order, do something unexpected. That is what people remember.

Here is an example from our F-Word series on Forgivness at Renegade Church where our Creative Pastor Skip Mozisek came out with a spontainous interuption of the service that had eveyone talking for weeks.

 

So, what are you going to do this week to mix it up, help people remember the message and start talking about your service?  

It’s the End of the World As We Know It…It’s the End…oh wait, it’s not. Or False Prophet 0-2 / Bard 4-0

We were having fun this past week with the Harold Camping prediction of the rapture on May 21st. People were talking about the rapture like there was no tomorrow.  However, I am not sure why anyone thought Mr. Camping’s prediction would come to pass. Come on, the man is the head of a Non-Prophet organization after all.

Best joke of the whole week was played on me. I changed that weekends message in my “Fearless” series so on Saturday, May 21st, I texted Skip, my worship guy, “I'm calling an audible changing tomorrow's message at Renegade Church to "Fear of the Rapture"...that is if we are still here tomorrow LOL.” A few minutes later I got a text back saying “This isnt Skip. I found this phone on a pile of his clothes.” I about died laughing

Now that May 21 has come and gone people want to know where all the money people gave to Mr. Camping went. He is not saying but one look at the guy and you know none of it was spent on plastic surgery, ant-ageing creams or new suits.

Monday evening I was sitting on my porch pondering what Harold Camping’s next move would be. Guys like this never just lick their wounds and fade away, they always spin what happened and come up with a new prediction. I thought about what Camping might say and I jokingly posted on my Facebook page:

“Waiting for Camping (the Rapture is May 21 guy) to come out and say something along the lines of "Oops, forgot to carry the 1, so May is 5th month, double number 5 you get 10 so the end of the world is actually happening October 21, my bad". Or "It was a silent/invisible coming only true believers could sense". These guys can't keep their heads buried long.”

Darn if I did not wake up Tuesday morning to friends sending me links to news stories saying that Camping said he was off by five months and that the new date of the end of the world is….wait for it…. October 21st!!! And that what happened “May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ's judgment.”  You have to admit that I was more accurate in predicting what Camping was going to say than Camping was in his predictions of the rapture and the end of the world.

How did I know Camping was wrong? The Bible. Apparently he missed Matt 24:36 "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.” So if you want to follow a true prophet follow me. Based on that verse I have predicted that every end of the world prediction since 1988 was wrong and I am like 8-0. And right now I am going out on a limb and predicting that Mr. Camping’s October 21st date, as well as the Dec. 21 2012 Myan end of the world date will come and pass without incident and that I will be celebrating Christmas with my Renegade Church on December 25, 2012.

Looking forward to being 10-0.

Annual Posting of "Celebrating Earth Day by Flushing my Toilet Over and Over Again"

Personally I don’t hold to this whole global warming thing. In the 70's it was overpopulation and we would run out of food in the 80's, then it was global cooling and the hole in the ozone (don't hear anything about the ozone hole anymore) and now it's global warming. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against taking care of our environment. I like clean air, all for finding new sources of energy, obvious that we do have water shortages in some areas of the country, however some of the solutions are….well… just plain stupid.

Take green toilets for example. No, no, no, not toilets that are painted green to remind us to be kind to the environment, I am talking about the “low-flow” verity. For years standard toilets used between 3 & 5 gallons per flush. The house I grew up in was build in 1972 and had one of these standard toilets, and boy did it work. You could flush a football down that thing with no problem (I know because me and my brother did). Our toilet was not just the final resting place for a few expired gold fish, but hamsters, gerbils, gunnie pigs and the occasional small dog. 35 plus year in that house and my parents never owned a plunger.

A few years ago we built a new home and discovered that due to government regulations you can only install new, low flow toilets with a 1.6 to 2 gallon per flush rate. Translation, my 3 year old goes to the bathroom uses a couple pieces of toilet paper and I am headed to the garage for the plunger. Now I am not a math wizard but lets see:

Old toilets: Take care of business, flush (3 gallons of water down the toilet, literally)

New toilets: take care of business, flush….flush again, plunge, plunge, flush, plunge, flush, plunge,flush (at 1.6 gallons per flush that is 8 gallons of water plus extra carbon dioxide emission from your heavy breathing from all the plunging and not to mention all the noise pollution from your yelling and cursing out the blasted, tree hugging no good #*%#))# that invented this #(@)! thing).

Now you tell me which is better for the environment the old one flush and done toilets or the flush three times just to get a roach to his final resting place ones. The answer is logical, however logic and things like government regulations or global warming are oxymorons.

Well I must be off to celebrate Earth Day by in one trip to the bathroom flushing away enough water to supply a small town for an entire earth day.

Oh, and one more reason to hate Earth Day, the annual All day Captain Planet Marathon on Boomerang. Makes the Smurfs and Hammerman almost worth watching.

Leveraging Social Media thru Rebecca Black “Friday” Parody

As a new church still in the planting stage Renegade Church does not have much of an advertising budget, and by not much I mean we have as Larry the Cucumber would say, “Zero, Zip, NA-DA!!!” So we have to use the best advertising every good church has, and that is word of mouth. If your people are not inviting people, excited about what they are doing as a body, then all the advertising dollars in the world won’t mean squat.

One way to leverage your congregation is to leverage social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Now, you can tell them to post something about what you are doing but many will not. Not because they don’t love the church or what it is doing (if they don’t love what you are doing then leveraging social media is the least of your concerns) but because many don’t know what to write or share other than “Another great Sunday at 5th United Fellowship of Yourtown”.  So help them out, give them something to Tweet about or on Facebook “share” with their friends.

This being Easter week that is what we did at Renegade Church. My Worship/Media guy, Skip Mozisek, and I went current and put together a parody of the Rebecca Black song…err, video….err, viral sensation "Friday"   (If you don't know what that is I am amazed you found this blog...no offense. Follow the previous link but warning it contains earworms.) Then at the end of the service we debut the video and and posted it to YouTube encouraging all our people to post/share/tweet/e-mail it to their friends. Here it is:

So far the response has been great, with key people reposting and sharing it with their friends and family and having it lead to conversations about our church, service times, and what we are doing for Easter. Members have even reported their elementary school kids walking around singing the chorus. All this is having the desired effect of people learning about who we are and what we are doing.

We have even had request to make it into a ringtone.

We always could use some new ideas as our advertising budget looks to be doubling from zilch to “jack squat” over the summer. So what is your church doing to provide content for your congregation that encourages them to “Share” your church with friends and family on social media? Love to hear about it.

Out of the Blog-o-spear for a while

Can't remember the last time I had a chance to blog. Way too busy working on planting Renegade Church and getting thigns off the ground. For awhile I did not think I could aford to blog but now I am thinking I can't aford not to. For so long it was a creative outlet and a way to keep my sanity. Now that I am teaching on a weekly basis and the lead guy at Renegade there are a lot of things that eat up my time, but it is time to start making time again...wait.... I guess we can't make time, we just rearange our time, or is it our scheadule, and did I even come close to spelling that corectly, well I know I spelled "that" corectly...choo choo this is how my train of thought goes off the tracks sometimes. O.K. back to blogging. Where has my time gone? A lot of it into our messages at Renegade, here is the latest, the start to our 3G series on the trinity.

The F-Word

I have been way too busy being the church planting pastor over the past few months to blog. But I am hoping to change that with our new series at Renegade Church called “The F-Word” starting March 20. Instead of writing about it let me tell you what “The F-Word” is all about.

This is going to be great series and I can’t wait until Sunday to teach. This is one of those series that people will discover why we say that “Renegade is the church for people who think they don’t like church.”

Importance of “Making the Ask” at Christmas

One of the pastors who’s blogs I follow is Perry Noble, pastor of New Spring Church  in Anderson, SC.  His church is dedicated to reaching the unchurched, dechurched and spiritual seekers. They have made it their mission  to constantly challenge their people to “Make the Ask” and invite their friends, family, neighbors and co-workers. Here are some facts Perry published on his blog this week that might surprise you about asking someone to church.

Top Five Times People Are Open To Considering Matters Of Faith…
• #5 – After the birth of a baby (28%)
• #4 – After a natural disaster (34%)
• #3 – After a major national crisis i.e. 9/11 (38%)
• #2 – During the Easter season (38%)
• #1 – During the Christmas season (47%)

Renegades…my prayer is that we will EMBRACE this opportunity (because found people find people) and do EVERYTHING we can to BRING people to a service during Christmas!!!  Research ALSO shows that the #1 way a person will receive information about a church is through the PERSONAL INVITE from a friend or family member.  Let’s pursue them like Jesus pursued us!!! Make the ask and invite someone to Renegade this weekend and to our special Renegade Christmas Event Wednesday, December 22 at 6:30 PM.