Last year @ Courageous Church one of the most popular messages series we did all year was our ASK ANYTHING series where for 3 weeks I took time out to answer every tough, challenging, hilarious, sincere question about life, the bible, sex, drugs, God, faith that people had.

It was certainly an exciting challenge for me and I am amped that we are DOING IT AGAIN starting this Sunday morning!

However, we NEED MORE QUESTIONS.  Ask anything here and feel free to stay anonymous if you need to!

Ask away!

Hey!

I hope that you are doing amazingly well!  We wanna knock out 3 birds with this 1 blog post and are excited to see YOU follow up right away!

1. REGISTER NOW FOR OUR VERY FIRST SMALL GROUPS!!!

We are wanting you to sign up now to be a part of one of our very first small groups!!! You DO NOT have to a member of Courageous Church (or even a Christian) and we encourage you to invite as many of your friends and family as you want to join a group.  Anyone can be a part of a group, but you MUST register.

Each group is free and will provide a place for you to build relationships, learn timeless truths to help guide you through life, and ultimately complete a courageous project together!  Can you tell I am excited??? :-)

We are having a special kick-off service this Sunday and some groups will begin meeting as early as Monday.

NEW UPDATE: The teen small group is now meeting @ 1pm instead of 5pm here in the Courageous Church offices.  This way you can come to the 11am service, then go to Financial Peace University @ 1pm, and then have your teens meet with their small group. Encourage your teen to register and encourage their friends to register too. It’s going to be the bomb (is that still cool to say?)!

2. Sign up NOW for Financial Peace University! It will change your life!

NEW UPDATE: FPU begins on Sunday, March 7th and is offered @ 11am & 1pm every Sunday for 13 weeks.

A few VERY IMPORTANT details:

• You do not have to be making money to take FPU -it’s for everybody!
• Although we have invested a good deal of resources to become an official Financial Peace University site, we are offering the class for free.
• Like any university setting, some books and materials are required and cost $93 per family unit.  Order them from a link on the registration form.
• We have a limited # of partial scholarships available from the church to help you if you absolutely cannot make this investment.  You can let us know on the registration form if this is needed.

3. We need more volunteers in the office every day of the week to help with our efforts in Haiti, manage our daily operations, and so much more.  We’re growing and need you to help carry the load, OK? Sign up now! Thanks!

BE COURAGEOUS!

Launching Courageous Church has been the most exciting, challenging, rewarding endeavor of my life.   I am not an expert though. I regularly guess and experiment. Sometimes I guess correctly.

Here are my 10 favorite correct guesses :-)

I have made a gazillion mistakes since we launched though (I list 10 here).

In the spirit of keeping it real, I laid out some brutally honest facts about our church here.

Church planting has been way harder than I expected. A few months ago I wrote about 10 of those difficulties.

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All of that said, I think we’ve learned a few transferable strategies on how a church can have a big launch (or grand opening) in large cities.   Understand this, everything that we’ve done is not transferable.  You must find your own voice/expression/strengths in your own context.  Too often, church planters, with a genuine heart to grow a church, end up wrongly mimicking every detail of something they saw at their favorite church -and were SHOCKED when it didn’t work for them.

God does not desire that you simply be a carbon copy of what He is doing all around the world! Some programs or principles may transfer, but I urge you to first listen to the voice of God and get His heart for the people you are serving before trying any of what I am about to share.

Here are 3 practical strategies we used to launch Courageous Church that helped us have over 700 people at our first service (and have helped us throughout our first 13 months).  I will be posting more details about these 3 strategies on Wednesday after I teach both of my sessions @ #cp10.

1. Pray Hard – PUSH HARD.

Breaking through the SKEPTICISM and noise and clutter and bright lights of the city is not easy.  I regularly worked 24 hour days leading up to launching Courageous Church and we pushed hard. I mean like our lives depended on it.  Strategies that work in the suburbs can easily cause church planters in the city to fall flat on their face and ultimately wonder cause a great deal of self-doubt.  People in the city, more than the suburbs, don’t simply accept that churches are needed and it is going to take hard work to secure your place in the city.

2. Do so much good that it makes the news…a lot.

Leading up to the grand opening of Courageous Church, our 500toys initiative was covered extensively by several local news stations, the radio, The Today Show, Wall-Street Journal, was picked up by the AP, and ultimately covered in dozens of newspapers in countries all around the world.  This was HUGE for us.  It branded us as the church that loved kids and showed it in tangible ways.

Since this, including yesterday and today, our church has been covered by the local news media for GOOD news for six different initiatives and we have been featured on the official Facebook blog, WIRED magazine, in many church publications, and much more.

3. Make real connections via Twitter & Facebook (including effective Facebook ad campaigns).

Over half of the people (80 % if you include 2nd generation) that attend Courageous Church learned about us on Facebook and Twitter.  However, our Facebook and Twitter campaigns DO NOT STAND ALONE.  They are CLOSELY CONNECTED to #1 & #2 above. More details soon!

Tomorrow Only! A Snuggie Contest @ Courageous Church!

#1: Yep.  I’m serious.  We have a SPECIAL PRIZE for any person that wears a SNUGGIE to either our 9am or 11am service this Sunday!  It’s cold out and so many of you joked last Sunday that you wish you wore yours so now I’m giving pastoral permission and a prize :-) Think about it, the design is perfect for you to lift your hands and praise the Lord. Reply now if you think you might be bold enough to wear your Snuggie so I have an idea of how many prizes to bring!

For all of you that are not fortunate enough to have a Snuggie, we purchased three additional space heaters this week to make sure we stay toasty.

#2: Tomorrow (Sunday) we will begin our Next Steps class again for 2010.  We have a new conference room available directly across from the auditorium and it will be offered immediately after the 9am service is over. Grab your breakfast and come on to this casual reception to learn what the NEXT STEPS are for you as you commit yourself to God through Courageous Church.  If you are interested in becoming a member of Courageous Church, this reception is required.

#3: Our ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY service is being hosted @ Morehouse College on Sunday, January 17th @ 11am!  During this service we will be celebrating what God has done in our first year, looking forward to year two, and helping the college celebrate MLK Day!  I find it to be very powerful that our church was invited by the college to host our service on King Day!

We’ll have several awesome guests and cannot wait to SEE YOU THERE!  More details coming from us soon!

#4: So many of you have asked how you join or become a member of Courageous Church.  Wanting to make sure that we take membership seriously, we have waited until now to introduce Courageous U - an engaging, surprising, interactive 4 step process to becoming a member of our church.  It’s coming this February and will only be offered 3 times a year!  Are you ready?

#5: SMALL GROUPS are coming!!! Starting the last week of February we will be launching our very first small groups for kids, men, women, and married couples! We will also be offering Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University twice every Sunday!  Are you excited??? I am!

We hope you’ll continue doing a great job spreading the word about all that God is doing through our young church!

Our friends @ 11Alive News (NBC) came through to film our gift wrapping & BIG GIVE for 500toys.org! Check it out! (My favorite part is the boy @ 1:03 that has a grin from ear to ear and starts flapping his arms like a butterfly :-)

On this past Sunday @ Courageous Church we launched a new series dealing with the intersection of faith, finances, and the church called “iGwt?”.  It is the first time we have really dealt with this topic head-on since we launched this past January.  People REALLY received it well and I am praying it helps us (and you).

We have a simple microsite up for the series where you can download my sermon notes and the podcast.

Check it out @ www.iGwt.me My first message was entitled “The Naked Truth”

On Sunday, November 1st we gave every volunteer the day off @ Courageous Church!  We filmed this video the previous Sunday to really show all of the attendees what it takes to pull one “simple” Sunday off!  Shout out to DJDust for the great video!

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Yesterday we gave every volunteer @ Courageous Church the day off…without telling anyone else.  No set up.  No breakfast.  No music.  No parking crew.  No Courageous Kids.  No signage.  No sound system.  Nothing!  It was a mess…just like we wanted it :-)

Our goal was to show everyone what a Sunday without volunteers looks like!  It pretty much sucks.

We got this idea from our friends @ Elevation Church and it really worked! We had a ton of people commit to being a part of our Sunday team and we can’t wait to see how next Sunday goes!

For the first six months after we launched Courageous Church, I often felt like a car salesman when it came to volunteers.  Regularly I would basically beg people to serve and tell them how much we needed them in the clearest way possible.  In the end, a few great people would sign up, but it would never be as much as we needed.  I’ve changed my tune. Let me tell you why.

Church plants require a ton of volunteers. Without them, you burn people out and the quality of what you are doing really suffers.

So one Sunday a few months ago I was doing my whole sad begging routine and Reggie Joiner, a mentor to me and one of the best leaders in the world, was there to hear it.  Our leadership team met with him later that day and he told me point blank…

Stop telling people how badly you need them to serve and begin telling them how badly they need to serve.  Tell them how serving changes their life.  Tell them how much you grow and change and get connected when you serve and how not serving basically freezes them in time as far as their growth in the church (and in the faith) goes.

It’s 7am on Sunday morning and I am going to be preaching that message twice this morning.  I’ll let you know how it goes on Twitter later.