Sermon Cloud [Advanced Sermon Syndication] is launched

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Mar 29, 2006 in Church, Church Technology, Ekklesia, General Technology, Sermon | 1 comment

We just launched Sermon Cloud as a tool to help churches use advanced sermon syndication. It is in BETA form with a handful of churches (12 and counting) signed up to start using it. Features include:

- Resampling mp3′s to be optimized for the internet.
- Syndicating content
- Podcasting mp3
- Tags (as sermons are added you can see the tag cloud on this site)
- Commenting on sermons
- Community voting to recommend sermons
- Searching for sermons
- and more…

NOTE: We have paused the release to get our first round of BETA churches up and running. We are still taking 100 add’l churches for our next round of BETA’s.

New Life Launches on Ekklesia Church CMS

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Mar 29, 2006 in Church, Church Technology, Ekklesia, General Technology | 0 comments

This month is going to be a very busy month at Ekklesia. New Life Presbyterian launched this month and now we are working on LifeSong, Rio Vista, Fuel Church and next month our pipeline is extremely full already:

4/3 City View
4/3 Adventure Church
4/3 Vineyard Church

4/10 Western Hills Baptist
4/10 Bible Church Intl

4/17 PDP
4/17 The Springs

4/24 Meadowbrook
4/24 Antioch

5/15 Acts29

It’s a good season as Ekklesia will be represented with Church Plant Media at the National New Churches Conference in April and a few other conferences coming up. Our goal is nothing short of total world domination in the church content management arena!

Blogger Gathering at Resurgence

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Mar 22, 2006 in Church | 1 comment

Kevin Michael Cawley the great internet organizer is planning a gathering of bloggers to meet up at the Resurgence conference. And Cawley assures us “going to a bloggers meet up is not going to make you any more of nerd than you already are.”

Thanks Cawley and see you there!

How Mutliperspectivalism shapes Church Leadership and how you staff a church

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Mar 18, 2006 in Church, Teaching, Triperspectivalism | 3 comments

Earlier I posted about how everything must look through normative, situation and existential perspectives. As John Frame wrote, “The knowledge of God’s law, the world, and the self are interdependent and ultimately identical” (The Doctrine of Knowledge of God, Prebyterian and Reformed 1987, p.89).

Further, we stated that Jesus perfectly modeled how we ought to live out these perspectives in the roles of Prophet, Priest and King.

Prophet – Jesus declared the norm/Word with authority
Priest – Jesus ministered God’s presence to the people perfectly redeeming them.
King – Jesus exercised God’s control.

As humans, each one of us are not a perfect balance of all three of these roles and most often tend toward one of these roles. You can think about what role is your strength

PROPHET strength – You are a visionary who has a burning desire to ‘preach the word of God’. You love to learn, read, study God’s Word and teach/preach it to the people. You see the normative standards declared by scripture and want all humanity to see this as well.

PROPHET weakness – A visionary leading people without a plan is going for a walk by themselves. As mentioned in this post, a Prophet can preach “Christ-centered” (norm, information) rather than “gospel-centered” messages. You can preach Christ and crush your people with the news, law and perfection of Christ.

KING strength – You know how to take a vision, organize and implement it. A king understands systems, planning and organization.

KING weakness – Without the proper vision or gospel-centeredness a system is worthless.

PRIEST strength – A priest has a tremendous understanding of the needs of the people. They can rally the people, help solve interpersonal problems and counsel.

PRIEST weakness – Without proper understanding of the norms (God’s Word) and how to apply it, a priest will only be dealing with felt needs.

Most people have one dominate area (Prophet, Priest or King) and a secondary area of strength. For example, many of the church planters I know are Prophets and then either King’s or Priests. Yet some people are just one (Prophet/Prophet). This leads to all sorts of interesting combinations:

King/King – Heavy systems, organizing, running adminstration. A manager.
King/Prophet – Vision to take a big picture to actionable steps and implement it.
King/Priest – A coach who can also help show people practical steps to take in a counseling situation.

The problem many churches face is that the pastor hires other people just like him. A strong Prophet tends to gather other strong prophets and as such, may have other leaders, pastors who are prophets. What is best for a church, is if a pastor understands his own strengths and hires people who have other strengths. This is where (1) pastors needs to understand and assess themselves and (2) pastors need to understand how to ask the right questions and behavior based scenarios to discern the strengths of those they plan to hire. Of course, pastors need to always be working on their greatest areas of weakness. The good news is that Christ performed each role perfectly, and a pastor through prayer can seek God’s grace in the areas or their weakness.

(Tri) MultiPerspectival Preaching

Posted by D. Goodmanson on Mar 15, 2006 in Church, Sermon, Teaching, Triperspectivalism | 0 comments

The Reformissionary had a post pointing to Keller’s writings on Informational vs Experiential Preaching, which brings up a great illustration of how to apply multiperspectivalism in preaching. Here is the quote:

The “informational” view of preaching conceives of preaching as changing people’s lives after the sermon. They listen to the sermon, take notes, and then apply the Biblical principles during the week. But this assumes that our main problem is a lack of compliance to Biblical principles, when (as we saw above) all our problems are actually due to a lack of joy and belief in the gospel. Our real problem is that Jesus’ salvation is not as real to our hearts as the significance and security our idols promise us. If that‚Äôs our real problem, then the purpose of preaching is to make Christ so real to the heart that in the sermon people have an experience of his grace, and the false saviors that drive us lose their power and grip on us on the spot. That‚Äôs the “experiential” view of preaching (Jonathan Edwards.)

Multiperspectivalism Application: The difference of ‘Christ-centered‘ preaching (norm, information) versus ‘gospel-centered‘ preaching (which uses a multi-perspectival approach) is HUGE. You can preach Christ and crush your people with the news, law and perfection of Christ. (I’ve seen a number of FUNdamentalist pastors do this.) It is only gospel that brings hope. Here’s how the perspetives play out in gospel preaching:

Norm: the “news” in the Bible (NOT advice which implies works)
Situation: The change of identity, worldview
Existential: The application of grace/hope

You can see this in one of David Fairchild’s recent sermons on Biblical Masculinity. (David is working through this at a level far beyond my meager brain. He should be releasing a series of articles about this and why going beyond tri to mulit is necessary to see through a series of lenses in the norm, situation and existential views. Piper fans have already seen some thought of this in his ‘doctrine’ feeding ‘passion’ to ‘Christian living’ which is part of the triperspectival view.)