My parents keep saying to me, “It’s a good thing you are young.” They are right and honestly I feel like I am getting older by the minute (wait, I am getting older by the minute…) But, the reality of life for us right now is that I have three jobs. My wife and I also have three kids. I guess you could say that I have a job for each kid. I’ll say this right up front: this is probably not a sustainable life-style for too much longer. But it is where God has us and we have chosen to place ourselves here for this moment in our lives. Right now I serve as the Lead Pastor at The Well. I am running my...Read More →
Archive for November, 2009
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November 30, 2009
The Weekly Rhythm of a Bi-Vocational Pastor with Three jobs and Three kids
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November 18, 2009
Three Questions Worth Spending Significant Time Contemplating
In his excellent book The Monkey and the Fish, Dave Gibbons asks three questions as he talks about the massive shift that is going on in our world. How are we to figure out how to navigation this rapidly changing world as followers of Jesus and as faith communities? Alan Roxburgh has referred to the kind of change we are in as “discontinuous change.” This phrase is defined by Webster as, “Non-incremental, sudden change that threatens existing or traditional authority or power structure, because it drastically alters the way things are currently done or have been done for years.” In light of this, Dave Gibbons brings up three excellent questions that I think we would do well to spend a lot of time pondering the...Read More →
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November 17, 2009
Newbigin on Leadership
I read Lesslie Newbigin’s chapter on Leadership from his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society once every few months. It’s that good. Here is an excellent excerpt: “The task of ministry is to lead the congregation as a whole in a mission to the community as a whole, to claim its whole public life, as well as the personal lives of all its people, for God’s rule. It means equipping all the members of the congregation to understand and fulfill their several roles in this mission through their faithfulness in their daily work. It means training and equipping them to be active followers of Jesus in His assault on the principalities and powers which he has disarmed on his cross. And it means sustaining...Read More →
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November 10, 2009
Custom Facebook Designs for Churches
The last two days I have been working hard on transitioning my church, The Well, from a Facebook group to a Facebook Page. There are some subtle differences and some major differences that made me make this decision. Facebook pages do pretty much everything a group does, but a whole lot more… Status Updates/Twitter for the Org: in groups, you weren’t able to create a status update so the only time people ever heard from the group after signing up was when you sent e-mails. It’s now great to be able to send a status update to the people from my church without having to send out an e-mail. This is great for prayer requests, links, articles to read, etc. I connected the status updates...Read More →
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November 5, 2009
Don’t Use Technology to Do What Should Be Done in Person
Now, I’m a big fan of technology. Frankly, I’m kind of a sucker for it. I always seem to find a way to get the latest toys in some way or another. I design websites for a living and do a lot of my pastoral work with a computer in front of me so needless to say, I believe technology is helpful when it comes to ministry. But I also think it can be a hinderance. I heard a quote from (I think) Patrick Lencioni recently where he said the following: “Don’t get in the habit of using technology do what you can/should do in person.” Think about this for a minute. Last time you had to deal with a hard situation, was your first...Read More →
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November 5, 2009
Todd Hiestand v7.0
If you are a visitor to my website and not just reading this through my RSS feed, you’ll notice my blog has some new clothes. Okay, so I know what you are thinking. Another blog design? Really? Really? Version 7?!?! I promise, there really is some rhyme and reason to this redesign. First of all, I don’t blog as much as I used to so I needed to find a way to bring my older posts “up” into the spotlight a bit. I think I accomplished that here. Second of all, I’m not just bored. In fact, I’m busier than ever. But, the last design I had was a theme that I had been developing to resell to clients. I’d been testing it on my...Read More →
