Here is the second half of my message @ the Grand Opening of The Courageous Church!
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From the monthly archives:
January 2009
Sorry for the delay, but we finally have the videos from our Grand Opening UP live and in HD! Here is the first half of my message from the morning, but you can get more videos – including some really awesome songs here!
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Hey Everybody! Thank you for thinking about and praying for Rai and I. We are on our way to the hospital now and are scheduled for a 10am C-Section. We don't actually expect it to happen @ 10am, but we'd love to know that you all are praying for us all morning and all day long.
I am very confident that everything will go well. Baby Savannah (we call her Savvy) has been very healthy up to this point. We have great doctors and are delivering @ a great hospital very close to our home. Rai is a bit nervous because we had some pretty major complications with our last childbirth, but I am trusting that God will see her safely through today!
I will be posting videos later tonight if I can get an internet connection, but will be updating everything pretty frequently on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter @ Twitter.com/ShaunKing.
I will also be posting the very first pictures of Baby Savvy there. Rai is yelling @ me (don't tell her I said that)….it's time to go!
Wish us well!
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Every single day someone asks me how I do what I do. Trust me. I'm not a guru. I'm not even sure that I am doing a good job at what I do, but I do have a few strategies that seem to be working for me. I think they are transferrable and will also work for you.
One essential guiding principle in my life that I want to start this series out with is that I CHOOSE TO CHEAT. You should choose to cheat too.
The second thing I do that allows me to get a lot done in a days time is that I SQUEEZE every single second out of every single day.
Don't get me wrong…I rest. I watch a little TV. I pray. I hang with my fam and have fun. I joke around with my friends on Twitter. However, I use my Blackberry and my laptop (a cheap laptop I bought @ Wal-Mart and a simple Blackberry Curve) to get a lot of business done no matter where I am. Here are a few ways I SQUEEZE a lot out of my time every single day.
- I try very hard to respond to emails with short replies as soon as I get them. I receive nearly 150 real emails a day on busy days and have to respond quickly and briefly or I will likely not respond @ all.
- I am typing this post right now on a free computer @ Cactus Car Wash here in downtown Atlanta as I wait for them to clean my wife's car. That picture above is a pic from my Blackberry of me typing this post. I also took a TwitPic here.
- I regularly film videos while I am driving like the one I did for my post two days ago. As you will see from the comments, though, my wife is not pleased:-)
Finally- one way that I squeeze a lot out of my time is a little ironic. I squeeze a lot out of my time by NOT DOING A LOT OF STUFF that people ask or want me to do. I am able to do some of the things that I do fairly well because I say no a lot. This makes some people mad, but they aren't doing what I'm doing and aren't trying to go where I'm going.
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:::After my buddy Gary Lamb told me to update my blog about all that is going on with the church, I got ready to send him this link -only to realize that the post I wrote this past Sunday had not been published! I was wondering why you all didn't comment on it!
——Originally written this past Sunday evening!
I have so much I want to tell you about all of the great stuff going on with The Courageous Church, with my family (we're having our baby girl this Friday), school (started back for me last week), and a whole lot more! However, since I am home alone with my little man (who just ate an ungodly amount of cranberries…oops!) and can't have my nose stuck in the computer all night long, I will just tell you about The Courageous Church for now.
- We are getting awesome reports and testimonies of how many different ways the church is a blessing real people with real challenges. These reports mean the world to me and light a big, fat flame under my butt to pray more and work harder than ever!
- We had a HUGE turnout on MLK Day as a big part of The Courageous Crew came out to feed thousands of hungry people here in downtown Atlanta. Here is a photo of some of our team!
- The event we were partnering with was a HUGE mess. I am wondering how we can help them logistically in the future.
- Nearly six months ago I said a prayer asking God to connect men and women to our church that had completely different gifts and skill sets than my own. It is so amazing to see how God has answered this prayer.
- We have about 150 people that are very committed to the vision of The Courageous Church and they are some of the best, most gifted, friendly, encouraging people I know. I am convinced that we can change the world with this team!
It has taken me nearly 45 minutes to write the bullets above. I have been tickling EZ, getting him a snack, and now we are watching a Spiderman cartoon together. I love that he loves Spiderman!
- Our Sunday morning gathering this morning was awesome! Rai and I were really encouraged by the turnout and by the excitement in the air from start to finish.
- I love our music. LOVE IT! Our team is amazing. Our goal with music has been to create a sound that connects with all people, utilizes the gifts of our team well, and supports the vision of our church.
- This morning we did a little Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Fred Hammond. Last week we did Little Wayne & Michael W. Smith :-) Pretty sure those things have never been done before!
- Preached message #3 in our Greater Than Series. I'll be blogging more about that tomorrow. Today was about Captivity/Slavery and I feel very good about what we accomplished.
- Every week we have tried to use Sunday morning to spur people forward with very practical action steps and THEY ARE WORKING!
I gotta run! Wifey just called and told me to cook some of my famous homemade cornbread! Family calls!
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Hey Everybody! I am pretty stoked to be the
Featured Guest on the Facebook Blog this afternoon. Reaching nearly 3
million people a week, this simple blog is one of the most read in the
country.
Check it out and spread the word. You can find it @ http://Blog.Facebook.com
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Cheating: How I Do What I Do from Shaun King on Vimeo.
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One of the biggest questions I get asked almost daily is…"How in the world do you do so many different things?"
I'm married. I have a 2 year old, a 6 year old, and a 9 year old. My wife is having baby #4 on Friday (Yipee!). I am a full time grad student @ Emory University. I am the Lead Pastor @ a brand new church. I blog (and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and…). Somewhere I make time to be a UFC fanantic, a big follower of current affairs and world issues, make a few media appearances, go grocery shopping, do a few chores around the house, and sleep a few hours a day. Over the next few days I am sharing some secrets on how I do all of these things. I can tell you this now – it's not what you think!
Secret #1 is coming later this afternoon. I have to brush my teeth, get dressed, give my son a high five, and fly like a bat out of hell to school for my 9:30am Old Testament class. Stay tuned!
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I am thinking about and wrestling through some big ideas and tough decisions in my mind. I just wanted you to know that. Please pray. I've been asking you to pray and by golly it seems to be working :-)
Plus, I wanted a good reason to put a picture up of two of my favorite childhood wrestling heroes.
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I hear a lot of talk out there about achieving "balance" in life, in ministry, with family, with health, with EVERYTHING! I want to say a three things about this discussion and tell you what I know from my personal experiences and from what I have observed as someone that has served closely alongside some high capacity leaders.
1. The "balance" that I hear about in which (nearly) everything in life is harmonious is a well-meaning myth. Rarely, let me repeat it again just a bit louder, RARELY, will all of the pieces in your life line up. If living in this world is at all like Jenga, you will have a few moments in which your life resembles a stable well-built structure with total alignment, but, if you live on the same planet I live on, you will soon notice that nothing in life stays the same for long.
Pieces are moved (some with your permission, some not). Some pieces that get moved are pretty unimportant…others are quite foundational. Sometimes it will be funny when these pieces get moved…other times it won't be funny at all.
2. Don't get me wrong, I think that the balance experts (who are normally selling you books and programs) mean well. You should desire and even work toward a sense of balance and harmony in your life. However, and this is very ironic, the endless pursuit of balance ends up causing a great deal of stress because you start to wonder why your best efforts seem to never work. You bought the book. You bought the audiobook. Your bought the file cabinet. You bought the PDA. You use a calendar. Heck – you even pray regularly. And…in spite of all of this – you still have not achieved the sense of balance that the experts talk about. Here is what I believe:
You will never achieve the balance that they talk about because they are in the balance business. If you achieved it – you would never need to buy any more of their products and you and I know that that would be fundamentally un-American.
3. Balance is an on-going journey and not some far off destination. In the journey, sometimes your life will be completely chaotic and I want you to know that this doesn't say anything negative about you. DON'T start to feel like a loser when you see how messy things are. It's just the nature of life. Since I am a pastor, let me give you a quick anecdote about Jesus. His life was full of ups and downs, highs and lows. He laughed. He cried. He kicked over tables. To me – this is what balance means. A little bit of this and a little bit of that = balance.
My wife is about to have a baby in 9 days. I have three kids under the age of 10. I just started a church last week. I am a full-time grad student (I am writing you know in between classes). I also eat and sleep sometimes. I get frazzled, frustrated, and regularly fart (I needed one more "f" word) from the gas caused by all of the stress.
Let me tell you- my life rarely feels like the completely assembled Jenga game and that is perfectly fine with me. I love when it feels perfectly assembled, but that just doesn't happen a lot.
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All of us like something different about President Obama. If you could just pick one thing, what is your favorite quality of President Obama? I love how devoted he is to his family, I love his speech giving skills, but I have to be real – my favorite thing about him is just how cool the brother is. His walk, his talk, his swagger – sometimes under serious pressure is just so doggone cool!
What's your favorite quality about our 44th President?
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What will you be thinking when Barack Obama is sworn in as President of the United States tomorrow @ 12pm?
I feel and see and hear optimism rising with millions of American's and think that it present a great opportunity for all of us to get amazing things done!
Good, bad, or ugly I wanna know your heart on this!
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By posting this blog post, I have involved you in a crisis without your permission. I am sorry for this. The image above, though, is an image of real children that need YOUR help.
See – I believe that God holds us accountable for what we know and
now that YOU know that these kids need YOUR help, I believe that God
will hold YOU (and I) accountable for what we do about it. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! This is not a test. This is not fake. This is not a scam. Real babies are dying of starvation all around the world.
Do
you know that means? It means they have so little food and nutrition
that their little bodies completely break down until they become like zombies and die. Period. I will spare you the awful details for now.
Last Sunday, at the Grand Opening of The Courageous Church, we launched a series entitled Greater Than God? 5 Ways God Wants Us To Change…The World! Part 1 of our series last Sunday was on the issue HUNGER and
we dealt not only with personal and spiritual issues of what it means
when we fill the hunger inside of us with things other than God, but we
also pledged to launch a BOLD, COURAGEOUS campaign to fight back against the most severe cases of starvation in our world.
In just a few short days since last Sunday, we have already made major progress, but we need YOUR support and your input now @ TheyWillDie.org – the website for our Global PlumpyNut Initiative.
There you can watch a video about our cause, learn more about our work,
join our Facebook and Twitter pages, and give us your input on what YOU
could do to help take this campaign to the next level of action!
God Bless You! Be Courageous!
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Since my last name is King and I am a graduate of Morehouse College (Dr. King's Alma Mater) and I live a few blocks away from Dr. King's birth home in Atlanta and pastor a church called The Courageous Church – what would it look like if I sat on my butt this coming King Day (Monday)? I want to make my MLK Day mean something and you should too! You don't have to serve all day long, but I challenge you to find a meaningful way to serve your community that honors the legacy and sacrifices of Dr. King!
The Courageous Church crew will be serving meals to the thousands of hungry men, women, and families in our city this Monday in two different shifts and we would love for you to join us!
We will be meeting @ Turner Field for Hosea Feed the Hungry on Monday, January 19th @ 10:30am to serve in our first shift from 11am-1pm. We will be helping to clean up and break everything down in our second shift from 3pm-7pm.
Let me tell you something – doing good feels good. Give it a try and come on out and serve with us. If you can make it, leave a comment here on my blog with your first and last name with the shift(s) you can serve or email Sophie King @ SophieKing@courageous.tv.
See you soon!
::UPDATE:: If you have signed up for another shift directly with Hosea Feed the Hungry- go for it! It's all about serving
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It's been talked about for several months, but I am very, very excited to let you know about an awesome new community of faith that is coming to downtown Atlanta! Passion City Church – lead by Louie Giglio – is launching in downtown Atlanta on February 15th @ The Tabernacle! Yes, we just planted The Courageous Church a few miles up the road in Midtown Atlanta, but our city needs more and more churches that are doing all that they can to show people what it means to love and live like Jesus!
Any pastor in Atlanta that feels insecure about this needs to fall on their knees in prayer because our city has such a surplus of lost and hurting people that if 100 more churches just like The Courageous Church & Passion City Church came to Atlanta, we still wouldn't be reaching everyone and touching every cause that needs our attention! A great move of God is coming through our city and I'm just glad to be a part of it!
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For the next few weeks @ The Courageous Church we are asking what may seem like a blasphemous question…Can we be/do greater than God? Check out our series website @ DoGreaterThanGod.com for all of the juicy details and my answer to this question :)
On this past Sunday we jumped headfirst into what I think is the most critical humanitarian AND spiritual crisis in our world -HUNGER. In many nations around the globe, children really are dying of starvation. I'm not even talking about diseases related to poverty – I mean children are starving to death because they DON'T HAVE ANY FOOD TO EAT. This is unacceptable and I am convinced that God holds us accountable for what we know but fail to act on. Our team proposed a few things that we could do RIGHT AWAY to make this issue real and to begin working our butts off like the house is on fire.
–We are starting a 30 Hours of Hunger campaign on this Saturday @ 6am to soften our hearts to the issue of hunger and to show our solidarity with hungry people around the world. Here is what we are going to do and we would love for you to join in with us whether you are a part of our movement or not!
- From 6am on this Saturday morning – our 10am Sunday morning service @ CenterStage, we are asking everyone to go without food. If for health reasons this is not possible, of course we understand. If this poses a major challenge for your family, we are asking that you consider going without meat & sweets for 30 hours and consider having the entire family (accept for babies) skip snacks and late night meals to get a feel for what it's like to be hungry. It will be uncomfortable, but this is the point.
At the end of our 30 Hours of Hunger, we will break our hunger campaign during our 10am service by serving communion during our 10am service and we will have a light breakfast after our service available for all of you.
–On Monday, January 19th we are going to be serving together in an area of critical need for our city as we help feed thousands of homeless men, women, and families in our city in partnership with Hosea Feed the Hungry @ Turner Field. We will be meeting together there @ Turner Field for prayer and a quick huddle before we get to work and do what I think really honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – serve those in need! We'd love for you to join us and we'll be posting more details here very soon.
–We are quickly forming what we think will be the world's largest Plumpy Nut initiative to provide food for children with EMERGENCY hunger needs in which things like rice and milk are totally irrelevant. We are asking EVERYONE (in and beyond our church) to help us with this. Every gift and skill will be needed and no person will be too young or too old to help. See the video about this need @ the bottom of DoGreaterThanGod.com.
–Lastly -we are hoping to shed a light on the fact that all of us (particularly those of us without physical hunger needs) too often try to fill the appetite that only God can fill with everything other than what God intended. Be it fashion, money, jobs, drugs, hobbies, sex, or even food – God intended on us having a hunger for HIm. We are asking that you prayerfully consider what you may be doing in your life to fill the gaps and holes that only God can fill. It is my prayer that serving in the ways we describe above will shed a light on some things that you and I really need to change.
Feel free to leave comments or questions here on the blog! Bless you!
-Shaun
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