Yesterday I launched ChrisWalkerLive.com. I am not dumping this domain, but probably won’t be posting much here for the time being. I may turn it into something else eventually, but I don’t want to just delete the almost 1000 posts that I have here. I am launching the new blog in an attempt to unleash my ideas to the world. I have tried to stay structured here and on some other blog endeavors, but I just can’t limit myself to a handful of topics. So go check out the new site and please subscribe so you don’t miss out on new posts.
Something New
I haven’t been writing very much lately. I have been doing a lot more dreaming and soul searching about what I am contributing here. But I wanted to let you know that I am still here and I have plans to try something a little different. More on that to come in the future. For now I just wanted to check in and say hi. I hope that you are doing well.
Never Give Up
Over the past year I have really learned about never giving up on God. I never thought that my faith would ever be challenged to the point where I would consider giving up on God as an option. But over and over I have wrestled with that in my mind. Sometimes it seemed it would be easier if I could just blame God and move on. It often seems that if I didn’t have this calling, this dream inside of me that I could just move on and get another job I hate so that I can pay the bills and have a comfortable life. But I just can’t give up.
I don’t have the answers yet, but I have watched God provide in some crazy ways for me. His pursuit of my heart is relentless. I can’t just run away from him. He pops up everywhere. I have this Kingdom radar that I can’t turn off. It is exhausting.
When you encounter trouble, I want to encourage you to never give up on God. You are not alone in this fight. People may desert you, but God never will. Our perspective is severely limited. If we will just hang on no matter what we will eventually be able to see.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
I Didn’t Publish Anything Yesterday
The past 2 nights, I have not written anything to post to Churchpunk. I have some ideas, but none of them are complete yet. And instead of trying to write up something just to have a post in place, I decided to not post because I didn’t want to sacrifice value. I set a personal goal a few months ago to post at least once every weekday. I managed to do that and I saw a lot more consistent traffic, but sometimes I was just not happy with my completed work.
I am adjusting my goal now to try to focus more on the value of what I am writing. I have a lot of ideas and started drafts, but none of them are complete right now. That means my posting schedule may look a little different around here for a while because I am not holding myself to one. You also may get some posts of me just thinking out loud.
Either way, thanks for reading. I hope that I can continue to bring value to this blog that keeps you coming back for more.
Foolishness is a Moral Deficiency
I started reading Proverbs yesterday and in the first chapter I read verse 7.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
There was a footnote on the word ‘fools’. The footnote said that the Hebrew words rendered fool in Proverbs denote one who is morally deficient. I thought ahead in the book of Proverbs and remembered all of the comparisons of the wise to fools that I am going to read. When Solomon picked his word for fools, he wasn’t talking about just being silly. He was talking about a much deeper character issue of foolishness or moral deficiency.
I used to read the Proverbs and always put myself in the wise position, but when I really look at myself, I see how often I have been the foolish one. I often find myself morally deficient in the ways of discipline. I want to be more disciplined in my life with my health, finances, and my relationship with my wife and kids. But I find it so easy drift off to do things I want to do instead of what I should be doing. It is hard to draw a line sometimes because the things I drift to are not bad things necessarily, but I should be doing other things. Discipline is hard because I see it as something I don’t want to do. I want to eat whatever I want and I want to spend money on whatever I want. But it just brings me more trouble. I feel like asking God to give me discipline is like asking for patience. He will gladly give it to me, but it is never what I expect and it is usually a painful process. And I know that if I would just get started, it gets easier as I go.
Proverbs Chapter 1 ends with the following:
For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm. Proverbs 1:32-33
I am going to read Proverbs like I have never read it before and I am praying that the lessons I will learn will really take root in my life. Bring on the pain of transformation.
4 Steps of the Undercover Evangelist
I am what you could call an undercover evangelist. I always hated when I would feel pressured into walking up to strangers in order to talk to them about Jesus. I always felt like the street preachers scared more people away than they attracted. But I can’t knock them because they have more guts than I do.
My methods of evangelism are much more discreet and long term investment than the whack-a-mole approach. I have always been very relational in my faith. I feel that I can be more effective about sharing Jesus with others when there is an established, trusting relationship between us. In fact I can be down right sneaky about it. So here are my steps to undercover evangelism.
- Be yourself, but don’t blow your cover right away.
I don’t ever introduce myself as a Christian or as a member of my church when I first meet someone in a casual social situation. If you work for a church, this might be kind of difficult. If religion comes out in my first impression, it can be great or completely fatal. I have no idea what their history of religious experience is. They might associate a painful past or nothing at all based on that history. - Ask questions, but nothing about religion.
I like to ask them a lot of questions to get to know them. This helps me to figure what common interests we have and I can try to connect with them on a non-religious level. If I have a lot in common with this person, I have a good shot at being good friends with them. If I can be good friends with them, my chances of sharing Jesus with them have greatly increased. - Invest your time with them.
This isn’t a sniper operation. We are in this for the long term. The primary goal here is not to convert them. The goal is to plant seeds. The better the soil we plant them in, the better chance they have of survival. To get to the good soil of a relationship takes time. Most people won’t let you beyond the surface right away. You also have to be willing to let them beyond your surface a little bit too. Take the time to really get to know them and share with them too. Once you have planted enough seeds and invested enough time, you will know it is time for step 4. - Blow your cover.
The charges are set and the fuse is lit. Let them have it. At this point they will listen to you because they consider you a friend. Before they might have written you off as a Jesus Freak and ignored you always seeing you in the same light. But now it just might blow their mind that you can be a follower of Jesus and be cool enough to be their friend at the same time. It can go either way at this point. They might want to learn more or they might not be interested at all. But you still have a friend and can continue to plant seeds with them.
I hope you haven’t got the idea that I am just exploiting a relationship to share Jesus. I don’t have an agenda on my mind when I meet new people. I like to meet people and make new friends no matter their religious choices. I just don’t try to start a friendship by blowing my religious trumpet.
Yesterday Was An I Give Up Day
Do you ever have one of those days where you just give up? Yesterday was one of those days for me. They don’t happen very often and it usually coincides with my pace of life being high on the RPM’s. We have been traveling and throwing parties and running the children to VBS. I have been pulling a lot of late hours and getting up early. I have been writing it off to some major hustle in trying to get things done while my kids are at home for the summer. And yesterday was one of those days where I just ran out of gas. The days are running together and our schedule keeps changing. In the midst of all the chaos, I have not allowed myself to rest and prepare enough. Today I had planned to get caught up and just had zero motivation to try. I just wanted to sleep. So I went to bed early last night and hopefully today is a much different kind of day.
When is the last time you had an I give up day?
How Are You Building Community on Google+?
With the opportunity to build on a new Social Network like Google+ are you thinking about how you organize your newest network? I know I have. With the ability to create circles of people so that you can control who you are sharing what with, I intend to add friends to my network in a much different way than I did with Facebook. I always thought if I started over on Facebook with no friends that I would be more selective. That is not a problem with Google+ because of circles. If I am following someone who gets a little spammy or updates about the same thing over and over to the point that I don’t even read their posts, I can add them to a circle that I don’t visit very often. I can collect those who share things that I value more in their own circle and I can read about Aunt Lucy’s cats in the family circle. I wonder if that is where Google got the idea to call them circles from the comic strip ‘The Family Circle’.
At one time, I had created all of my groups on Facebook and sorted it out, but it has become very difficult to maintain and view. The Google+ circles are all drag and drop. It is so simple. I am looking forward to building this social network from scratch. If you haven’t been invited yet, I can send you an invite. Just leave a comment and I will send an invite to the email address that you use to leave the comment. Don’t leave your email in the comment body because it is public and you could get picked up by spammers.
How are you building your new network on Google+?
Dave Ramsey and Church Budgets
I have been listening more to theDave Ramsey show lately because I am getting that Gazelle Intensity. The other day a man called in asking about how to go about setting up a budget for a church that has never really budgeted before. It got me thinking about how to apply the principles of Financial Peace University to a church organization. All of the churches I have ever worked for had a budget that was fought over and approved for each year. But these churches always have borrowed money for very large projects based on pledges of giving from the members of the church. In many cases I have seen churches struggle to pay off the debt in the projected time and have been forced to cut back on other ministries to pay for the debt. They also sometimes will go back to the congregation and ask for new or updated pledges to the project in order to make up the short fall.
So why not take the approach of taking pledges and saving up that money so that the church could pay cash for their project? Monies would be designated to that project not to be used for anything else at the church. They could be placed into a money market account to earn back some interest while saving and the money could be raised before the project was ever started. Seems like a good idea to me. Any thoughts?
Blogging About Technology
When I started this blog 4 years ago I think, I wrote a lot about technology and my family. But it evolved a little bit. I started writing more about church and ministry. Recently I have tried to focus on writing about church and ministry. I moved my family posts off to a Tumblr account. And only wrote about technology when it applied to something that fit my other categories. Yesterday I broke my own rules and wrote about Google+. I didn’t apply it to ministry ideas, just wanted to write about it. I also have some other technology posts that I would like to write. So I think I am going to add it back as a category and mix technology posts back into this blog. I wanted to get your opinion on it though because you are the ones who read the blog. I know that I get very few comments here, but if you have an opinion you want to share, please do.
I just broke another rule. I don’t usually post on Saturday. Its not really a rule though. I would post something everyday if I had more ideas. I may get there one day. So here is a bonus post for you.
Oh, and I like breaking rules depending on who made them.
