So, the secret is out – I am still in Texas. Sure, we decided to stay a few days after the conference to spend time with our son and daughter-in-law who, together with their children, are developing into Texans at a scary pace.

But I was in church this morning. At a movie theater of course. Is there any other place to do church in the 21st century? By the way, there is a conference in DC in May exclusively for pastors of what are known as theater churches. There are a lot of us about!

Preston Trail Community Church is three years old and they’re certainly doing a lot of things right. The congregation seems to be mainly couples in their thirties with young children and that’s not surprising because their children’s activities are outrageous. In over 40 years of being a Christian and closely involved in local church life, I have never sen anything like the Kids Street program that I was in today with my four year old escort, Benjamin at my side.

This isn’t Sunday School as most of us know it, it was a front-led, high energy, fun-filled 35 minutes which is advertised as the place where children and parents learn together.

If I was a parent living in this area, that’s where I would be on Sundays, even if the main service stunk, because Kids Street is so amazing.

Let me hasten to add, the main service here certainly did not stink. The music was great and the message was good stuff too, though a one hour service is still a little brief for someone like me who has difficulty disciplining himself to a 90 minutes service normally.

I’m going to spend some time with the founding pastors tomorrow and hopefully a meeting of the minds will be of mutual benefit. I love church – which is good, because Jesus does too – and I’m always interested to see what is happening in other places. We can learn a lot from each other.

Or as Rick Warren puts it – God gave you eyes so plagerize!

Check out where I was today – www.prestontrail.org

Wow! So that was T.D. Jakes live! He has to be the best motivational speaker that I have heard in a long, long time, possibly ever. He covered so much ground this morning that it will take a while to unpack it all – that’s why I ordered the CD!

You know what struck me most and sticks in my mind here in the coffee shop at Fellowship Church? – He talked about getting ready to break out, about busting out of the normal and launching into a whole new phase of church development and growth. I heard that kind of thing yesterday from Erwin McManus too. I want to think it all over, pray it through and see what that means for us at Grace. But I’m excited.

I was thinking of making T.D. Jakes our Supercool Person Of The Week, but I’m not sure he would show up to receive the award. So my mind went to someone else.

There are several thousand pastors on the internet forum I help moderate for the Purpose Driven Churches network and I have interacted a bit with a young pastor planting a church in rural Oklahoma. He never gets away, can’t afford to go to a pastors’ conference, but needs the input as much as I do. So I offered for him to come as our guest. He shared my hotel room and seems to have had a good couple of days.

His church is in a town of 15,000 people and it sounds like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but after 18 months he gets between 50 and 60 people out every Sunday.

That might not sound like a mega-church, but consider this. In 78 weeks of his church’s existence, Danny has seen 77 people come to Christ. Folks, that is a mega-church. Most established churches in this country have not been that succesful in pointing people to Jesus. Many churches seldom baptize anyone.

Danny’s a giant, getting on with the job with no fanfare, struggling with limited resources, but accomplishing what he has set out to do – bringing people to Jesus.

So sitting in this mega-church after hearing mega-church pastors teaching, I want to nominate another mega-church pastor, Danny Carlisle as my Supercool Person Of The Week.

Check out his website www.churchatthemovies.org

This was one very full day deep in the heart of Texas. Having discovered that I had booked a hotel wthout an exercise room (but the price was right), I hit the road and started walking the streets of Grapevine around 5.45 this morning. If you walk far enough, you discover that it has a real Main Street with porches and all those things that I saw in western towns, when I was a kid at the movies. Very quaint despite the fact that it was still dark.

Four conference sessions with three different speakers, plus a Q & A lunch for senior pastors with Ed Young and I think I am now officially brain dead or at best, on information overload.

Can’t wait to hear T.D. Jakes tomorrow morning. He has to be one of the best preachers around at the present time.

The teaching that got to me most today was Erwin McManus from Los Angeles speaking about choices. Here are a few quotes -

You can’t prove God by playing safe.

What are you doing this year that if God doesn’t show up, your church is finished?

He really got my attention – or maybe God did. If you like church as usual and a high degree of comfort, you may have discovered a while ago that Grace is not the safest place to be.

But if you still haven’t learned that yet, I will be home – and you should be very afraid!

Here I am – tired in Texas!

It’s not really a long trip, but I guess it all takes a toll despite American Airlines’ wonderful hospitality. The cattle truck was pretty full but thankfully no one was assigned the seat alongside me, so the flight was tolerable.

So why Grapevine, Texas? I’m here for the Creative Churches Conference (C3) being hosted by one of the top ten churches in the country (size-wise that is), Fellowship Church which is pastored by Ed Young.

You’re never too old to learn and that certainly includes me. Change is the only thing that is here to stay, so I’m open to learn all I can from whoever I can.

Those whoevers are pretty impressive between now and Friday afternoon – there’s Ed himself, T.D. Jakes, Bill Hybels and Erwin McManus.

So I’d better get my beauty sleep so that I can be there first thing in the morning to get some fresh input on maintaining a creative approach to the greatest story ever told.

I like good food, which is why with no disrespect intended, I never really frequented McDonalds even in the days when I was far less careful about diet. There were really only two things that would get me to the #1 fastfood outlet in the world.

Sometimes being in a foreign country where the cuisine was not all that one might be looking for, it was a relief to find the familiar golden arches – yes, they really are worlwide. By the way about twelve years ago I ate in what was then their biggest store in the world – in Moscow. It was interesting to see Muscovites dressed to kill, enjoying their Saturday night out at McDonalds. It was costing them almost a week’s wages for their dinner, so I guess it was worth putting on your best suit for a burger.

The second reason I would go to McDonalds was to take my grandchildren there. Most kids love it. Ours do too. Thankfully they were seldom interested in finishing their grease-laden happy meals as another attraction lured them – the playground. Kids prefer the slides at McDonalds to the Chicken McNuggets.

So there are dozens of adults sitting around in a place they don’t want to be in, eating burgers they are not really enjoying, because the kids love it there.

We need to learn from that model on a church level. Kids whose parents worship with us regularly are part of our great children’s program because that’s what the family does on a Sunday morning. But how do we reach families who don’t come to church yet and don’t really have a relationship with God?

That’s easy! Have such an outrageous program for kids that even though the adults don’t want to be there, their offspring drag them along on a Sunday morning.

We’re working on that for the fall. Watch this space.

Yesterday we started our new series Win4Life and I approached preaching with far more trepidation than my normal dose of it. We’re covering four choices that make people winners and #1 was Health.

There were a couple of things I was nervous about. One was making it sound as if I think I know all there is to know about good eating habits and healthy lifestyle just because I have managed to stay disciplined for the past eleven months and have succeeded in achieving a substantial weight loss. I didn’t want to be a pain in the neck.

The second thing on my mind was that, as someone who has been overweight from the moment he entered the world and throughout the majority of the following 55 years, I have a good idea how it feels to be a person with weight issues. I didn’t want to add to anyone’s pressures by having them misinterpret what I was saying and go away thinking slim is spiritual, so they’re a loser.

Feedback was very positive. The tape table sold out of copies, which is usually a good gauge of having hit the mark. But I’m still worried in case there is just one person who is feeling dejected rather than motivated.

On the plus side, among those who expressed appreciation, several people also commented on how funny my message was – humor is a good thing. It’s a great help in getting your point across if you can say it with a smile. One kind lady asked if I had ever considered becoming a comedian!!!

I guess we were living up to the wording on the front of our invitation cards – Isn’t It Time You Laughed Again?

When we started our church in the fall of 1998, I got a call from a local pastor offering to help us in any way he could. Anthony Pelella had not been in Medford too long himself, but he was beginning to see the dying Medford Assembly of God turning around and showing signs of life. Instead of being threatened by another church coming to the town, he got behind us and has been true to his word.

We borrowed their little building on Rte 112 and Horseblock Road a number of times before it was demolished almost three years ago to make way for the new building that will house his growing congregation.

I took a look around the new church with him yesterday and it’s going to be a great place to pursue their vision to impact others for Jesus. It has been a long haul for them to get the building up and operational, but they are only a matter of a few weeks or a couple of months from moving back into a place of their own and getting on with the job.

Anthony is a great pastor and he has resurrected that church. The last few years have been particularly demanding, but he has kept pressing on, so my friend Anthony Pelella is my nomination for our Supercool Person Of The Week for this week.

Pray for him, for the completion of the building and the fulfilment of their dreams.

I haven’t seen End Of The Spear yet, for the simple reason that it isn’t out on general release until tomorrow. Sure I was invited to a special premier showing in Manhattan for pastors, but I’m not so desperate to go to the movies that I need to trail all the way to the city. Add to that mix the fact that large gatherings of pastors can be the most boring and false environment you would ever wish not to be in and I think you get my drift.

So while I can’t comment on the movie itself, I am very relieved to see that as a result of the success of Passion Of The Christ, Hollywood continues to see that there is a market for good, wholesome material.

As The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe continues to draw good crowds, the next made-for-a-Christian-audience adventure hits the big screen tomorrow. End Of The Spear centers around the martyrdom of five missionaries in Equador fifty years ago and focuses on the events that followed. It’s a story of forgiveness, faith and of how the whole tribe that had killed the young missionaries was turned around and came to faith in Christ. I gather the movie says a bit more about social changes among them brought on by their new found faith than about their actual conversion, but it should be a great story.

It’s certainly interesting that while one faction in Hollywood is celebrating a sick movie about gay cowboys that is struggling to draw audiences, another is far more in touch with what Americans really want and is doing its best to produce what the majority of us want to see.

I forgot so many people missed last Sunday – here’s some info on the series that begins at the weekend.

Millions of people waste millions of dollars on lotteries of one kind or another in this country every week, hoping to get rich quick. The key to success in all of them is making the winning selections.

At Grace Church we’re going to help folks make the right choices that will set them up for life – and longer. We reckon the four top picks are Health, Healing, Happiness and Heaven.

Sunday’s Health. I’ve never heard a sermon on that before, but there’s loads about it in the Bible!

Here we are just getting ready for our first major series of the new year, Win 4 Life and last night Ron Dylnicki sent me a draft of the main graphic for the next series – Caffeinated Christianity. Then today I have ordered some material that will link in with the following series that will take us up to Easter and a family oriented four weeks on raising children called You Must Be Kidding.

All this is relatively new to me – and I love it! In the good old days of same old same old, I often didn’t know from one Sunday to the next what I would be preaching the following week. Nowadays there is so much that goes into preparation that we need to know where we are going months in advance.

Now I can hear a few purists asking, How does that give room to the Holy spirit to guide you? The answer is simple – the Holy Spirit can speak just as clearly three months before the event as he can three days before it!

I love planning ahead. I don’t know which series I’m most pumped about. This will be a good winter/spring.