Bard Letsinger

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.