The verdict is in, courtesy of the National Opinion Research Center. These are the most satisfying jobs among the cross section of Americans they interviewed -

1. Clergy
2. Firefighter
3. Physical Therapists
4. Authors
5. Special Education Teachers
6. Teachers
7. Education Administrators
8. Painters and Sculptors
9. Psychologists
10. Security and Financial Services Salespeople

Did you see who’s in first place?

Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? I came home from our prayer walking around Ronkonkoma this evening as pumped as I’ve ever been about what we’re doing.

I’ve seen so many older pastors who have become bitter, dissillusioned, bored or all three that I’m grateful to God for the privilege of leading such an exciting church.

Satisfied? You bet, but make sure you write it with a capital S.

Wait till you see the 30-seconds commercial that Regal have made for us to show at the Ronkonkoma theater. It will run before every movie, all day long, on every screen and for the next six months. Of course we’ll probably do a different ad for Christmas.

We’ll show it to you on Sunday morning.

God is pretty sharp. He sends a great family into our church and it just so happens that the husband/father runs the Manhattan office of a major marketing company. He organises advertising campaigns for huge national and multi-national companies, but he seems more fired up about using his gifts to extend God’s kingdom than he is with all the stuff he’s achieving out on Madison Avenue.

Thank you Lord – and thanks Ian Baer!

A mouse just ran across the bedroom floor and into the bathroom!

It was a cute little thing and my initial reaction was to mind my own business and leave the tiny creature to its own devices. If I was at home, it would be a different matter as Gill has a pathological fear of mice, but I’m not on Long Island at the moment.

This morning I arrived in Seneca, SC to spend 24 hours with six progressive pastors in a beautiful lakeside home in the middle of nowhere. We’re here to bounce around what’s working and what’s not and in particular to chat through the practicalities of taking a church multi-site (having one church with campuses in more than one location).

It has been a fascinating day, hanging out with some old friends like Gary Lamb and Tony McCollum, while making some new ones too. I even managed to have breakfast early today with Charlie Pharis in Canton, GA. I’ve never met Charlie before, but have interacted with him over several years on an internet pastors’ forum – and of course, I read his blog. He’s a quality guy.

Great day with some crazy people who are getting the job done big time.

We’re spending the morning together tomorrow and then I’m heading back to NY late afternoon. This could be one of the most productive things I’ve done all year.

As for Mickey’s brother, I caught him and released him out the french doors in my bedroom – did I say this place is really nice?

So it’s goodnight from the South, where they talk really funny!

Picked up this album in Starbucks this evening, subtitled The British Invasion 1964-1969.

I’ve been enjoying listening to it since, as a whole, it’s a good compilation. Too many CDs from the 60’s are well-known songs being sung by obscure artists or well-known artists performing obscure songs.

Only a couple of misplaced tracks here.

I never heard of John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, though I was very much into music during the era in question, so I have no idea why they’re part of Hail Britannia.

The Kinks had a string of hits, so I’m not sure why Something Better Beginning has been chosen here. Again, I never heard of it.

I’m enjoying As Tears Go By, Ferry Cross The Mersey, Go Now, Substitute, Wishin’ and Hopin’, etc.

Good album. Better value for money than their overpriced, fancy named lattes.

Ninety one years ago yesterday, August 27th 1916, Dulcie Kate Bovet came into this world – a fourth daughter for Walter John Bovet, a career railroad conductor and Eva Bovet, whom my mother would only know for the first seven years of her life as she died in her late 30’s.

I didn’t send mum a card and there’s a pretty good chance she won’t read the greeting on this blog – as she went to heaven almost twenty years ago, which seemed a little premature to me at the time, and was long before Al Gore invented the internet.

My grandfather had one more daughter, making it five in all and he raised them when he was widowed – an incredible achievement in an era long before daycare.

I had an outstanding mother and I sometimes think that part of it was due to the fact that she had not really had a mother herself as she grew up. So she became all the things to us that she had missed out on herself.

There were five of us siblings in our home too and my mother never worked outside the house while we were kids. There was never a single day from infancy to the time I graduated high school when I got home in the afternoon and she wasn’t there.

I guess we could have had a lot more stuff if my mother had pursued her career as a book-keeper. We may have had a fancier house with luxuries like an inside toilet and a bathroom, but we didn’t. We might have owned a family car, but I was sixteen before one of those was parked outside the door. We didn’t get a TV until I was six and we never had a phone while I lived at home.

I guess we were dirt poor.

But we weren’t really because we had a mom.

Happy birthday mum!

My boy started school today. Somewhere deep in the heart of Texas my youngest grandson, Benjamin James Blackmore started on the pathway of formal education that will last far longer than his young mind could ever fathom.

He called me Saturday to tell me he was “a bit scared” and then late this afternoon there came the follow-up call to reassure me that his first day had been “great”.

He’s an outstanding kid – rabid Mets fan of course – who seems to have grown very quickly from the tiny infant I used to feed early in the mornings for the first few months of his life, when his mother had to drop him off with us on her way to work.

Every day as I held him, I prayed for him – God let this boy be a preacher.

Politicians are important people, but of course they’d sell their own grandmother to get re-elected.

Lawyers are smart, but let’s face it, beneath the mock sincerity they are living off their clients rather than looking out for them.

I could go on, but I’m tired.

Sufficient to say that I love my life as a pastor and could wish nothing better for my boy – plus of course I have this simplistic idea that as a pastor he could make a tiny bit of a difference in this sad world.

With two weeks to go to our public launch in Ronkonkoma, we actually had our second service at Regal Cinemas there this morning.

Even before our ads hit the papers this week, our thousands of flyers are distributed next weekend and our onscreen advertising starts Friday, today we had the biggest summer crowd we have ever had.

It was a great morning – the buzz is unbelievable. This fall will be phenomenal.

Two things are becoming very apparent -

1. We will be filling Theater 5 before October comes around.
This leaves us with a couple of options – having a live video feed into another theater or going to two services. Not convinced yet which way to go, but we need to make a decision on that pretty soon and start gearing up for whichever way we decide to go.

2. Our influence needs to spread.
I talked to a great young couple from Aquabogue who were with us today. A couple in our church had been trying to get them to come for ever and today their prayers were answered. They loved it and their first question to me was – Do you have a church like this out our way? That’s a fair request for a family who drove 30 miles to get over to us. My answer was two words – Not yet!

For more than a year now I have been convinced that what God has done through us in Central Suffolk is not a one-off, but rather it is a model he wants to be reproduced. I don’t know all the nuts and bolts. I do not have all the answers – heck, I haven’t even got the questions, but I do know that the best way to reach the unchurched is to go where they are.

Church At The Movies – Ronkonkoma needs to have siblings.

Great days ahead!

Gill and I head out for a quick trip to Baltimore in the morning – back at night. Thank God for Southwest and for Islip Airport. It’s less than a one hour flight and we got tickets for $27 each way.

I’m emceeing – or is that MC-ing? – a Health & Fitness Expo, which should be interesting.

Looking forward to week two at the Regal Cinemas on Sunday. We learned a few things last week, which will enable us to tweak several areas. By the time we have our public launch on September 9th, we should be able to convince people we know what we’re doing.

Busy weekend ahead – busy is good!

When we first started our church back in 1998, our children’s area was pretty basic and in retrospect, downright sad.

It’s far from that now, as everyone could see from the look of the whole of the west wing of Regal Cinemas in Ronkonkoma last Sunday.

Much of that stems from something that came from reading Seth Godin’s Book The Purple Cow three or four years ago. His main theory there was that for any venture to succeed it needed to stand out – like a purple cow would. I felt back then that our children’s programs should be a huge part of the purpleness of our church and we have gradually developed until that is now definitely the case.

I call it the McDonalds Principle, which goes like this.

Millions of adults, who probably don’t even want to, go to McDonalds every week because their kids want to be there. What is on offer to children isn’t that outstanding – let’s face it their food is unremarkable and their playgrounds are basic – but youngsters want to be there.

So my idea is that you don’t have to be outrageously, breathtakingly brilliant to attract kids, just good. And if you get the kids, you have the parents and grandparents too.

Maybe I’ll write a whole book about that one day and become as rich and famous as Seth Godin, because the McDonalds principle works.

Thirty nine years ago this month I was in the final stages of preparations to leave home and head off to Bible College. My summer job in the offices of a shipping company was about to come to an end and I would leave for Surrey, just south of London on Monday September 6th 1968.

I arrived before most of the freshmen students that day (early arrival has been a way of life for me) and therefore I had the advantage of choosing which bed I wanted in the seven student dormitory.

Later that afternoon a bespectacled young guy from Essex came into the room, introduced himself and picked the bed next to mine. His name was Peter Butt.

Tonight he’s sitting across from me in our den, here for around 36 hours before he flies back to the UK on Saturday morning.

I am blessed to have a number of good, long-time friends.

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost 40 years since Pete and I met, but it’s good to have friendships that have lasted – and lasted and lasted!

BTW – he does look old!!!!