In two days I’m going to celebrate Easter with a HUGE milk shake. HUGE. Like as big as my good ol friend Peter Yokota’s head.

For 38 days I have not eaten a piece of chocolate, not one skittle, no ice cream, no cookies, nothing that could be declared a sweet or a dessert. I have not eaten the staff birthday cake, no easter jelly beans, not even didn’t eat my stupid fortune cookies at Panda Express. It has been my first experience of giving up something for lent.

I have kept this candy jar in my office to lure people in like fish to my friendship bait and it works. People keep coming in and eating it, which is great but I have not eaten any. None. I just smile and say, “Enjoy”. I have been trying to turn my face to Easter every time I’ve been tempted to eat it, which seems like every day. But alas… my fast is almost over.

PRAISE JESUS FOR THE RESURRECTION… AND FOR MY SWEET TOOTH.

So, do you buy these two “gay men” a hotel room with the hotel contract you have for this purpose through your church?

If you do, do you buy one or two rooms?

How would your answer change if they were boyfriend and girlfriend? What if it’s a non-married couple with 2 kids?

I know what I did, what would you do?

Well for about 6 months I’ve been stewing on this post, but for various reasons I have not said anything. Not that I think it’s a real shocker or that very many of the 4 people who read my blog will even care, but tonight, I’m breaking my silence. I think there are two things that are normal in the church office life that I think are broken. I’m know they are normal in the business world too, but I don’t like them in particular in my world and I don’t think they don’t foster our goals.

I think we all need to get out of the office to think a little. I think it’s great to meet in a cafe or whatever. I don’t have a problem with a conference room or place where private conversations can be had. But I really don’t like the boxed in or absent faced office spaces that a lot of churches, including my own can tend to foster.

Here’s why:

• Offices keep people segregated, not integrated.
• Offices enhance the individual at the expense of the team.
• Working from home is about the product, not the community.
• Offices cause people to call and e-mail one another when they are 3 feet away.
• Working from home does not build relationships or cause others to share ideas.
• Offices encourage the private life at the expense of the group life.
• Offices reinforce comparison instead of creativity.
• Working from home is often motivated by comfort.

My optimal? Some variation of cubicle land. This post I think is pushing it, but I’d try this before offices. It allows people enough personal space to not be distracted by every passer by while allowing the community to still be active. I think working together and dreaming and laughing and doing life in the office doesn’t happen because we spend so much time working from home or locked up in our offices that a lot of the casual/ life on life community that could happen is circumvented by the architecture.

Recently I was given the chance to redo and resize my office to a smaller/neater work space and to redo our student ministries conference room to make it fun and inspiring. This was due to some office staff moving around and the need to create another office space due to new hires and such. Personally, I still would have loved to have bulldozed the interior walls and turned it into cubicles with some specific rooms for people to share: a library, a cafe, a brainstorming room, and a few meeting rooms around the side would have been sweet.

But despite my complaining, I do like my new digs… even if they must have fullsize boxed in walls.

About 3 months ago I was asked to oversee not just middle school and high school, but college age as well. We now have 5ish people on our paid team.

1. Myself as Student Ministries Pastor and High School Director.
2. Christina as Middle School Ministries Director
3. Todd as College Age Ministries Director (2 days a week)
4. Sarah as High School Women’s Coordinator and Weekend Producer (half time)
5. Aundrea- Administrative Assistant (1 day a week)

We started having staff meetings for our whole team together once a month and one thing we wanted to do was unify our ministries under one common banner and decide what we could and should do together instead of apart.

As a result, we landed on an overall missions statement we really like that we are all going to teach through next fall as we launch into our new leadership teams. Here it is:

Inviting a generation to understand, own, and live out a life changing faith in Jesus.

I also had a friend toy with an idea about a logo using the recycling theme. I liked it because it was 3 sided and implied that our ministries were cyclical and dependent on one another. Well he tweaked it some and I really like what we landed on. Here it is (the E is from our Encounter High School Logo, the R is from the Riptide Middle School Logo, and the NF is from New Format- the college age logo):

Maybe now we can get some current websites up and stuff.

I wrote another article for simply last week called “Maximizing the ministry of the moment”. It posted today.

Here’s the intro:

There is a relationship between time spent and impact had. Just like you can’t get closer to your spouse by spending less time with him or her, you can’t change the fact that the more time you spend with a student or friend, the more impact you’ll have on one another. But this truth often leaves many (myself included) feeling guilty because there’s not enough time to meet with all the people you wish you could.

So, while there are no short cuts, there are a few ways to make sure the time you do spend with students, staff, or family is leveraged for maximum impact. Here are four ways.

Hit up the whole article if you want on read about how on Simply’s site.