Logos Bible Software is giving away thousands of dollars of prizes to celebrate the launch of Logos Bible Software 4 Mac on October 1. Prizes include an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPad, an iPod Touch, and more than 100 other prizes!
They’re also having a special limited-time sale on their Mac and PC base packages and upgrades. Check it out!
Filed under Uncategorized
Have you ever thought about a wikipedia website for theologians? Yeah…neither have I. But just in case you have, it does exist and it is pretty helpful. So the Friday Freebie this week is a link to Theopedia. Take a look around and let me know what you think.
Click here.
Filed under Freebies
Mother’s Day this past Sunday was great at Bedrock. We actually had more in attendance this week than we did for Easter! Who would have thought? It was great to see all the chairs filled with people both old and new. We had several first time visitors again this week and we continue to see that every Sunday. We counted up the other day and determined that we have had 203 first time guests since we started. People keep coming to check out the new church in town. Some come back and others don’t. We continue to try and be faithful to the vision that God has laid upon our hearts and continue to reach out to the unreachable here in Bedford and beyond.
We had a neat video for Mother’s day that we showed before the prayer time. As I searched the week for the perfect video I waded through countless sappy and cheesy video clips about moms and flowers and soft music in the background and kittens and…(you get the point). I finally found one that was more “Bedrock”. It was a clip of a Mom talking about real life stuff and how she is far from perfect. You can check it out here.
Jonge preached on God’s will and how there are 3 types of will: His providential will, His moral will, and His personal will for my life. We continue to get a lot of positive feedback as we continue to go through this teaching series. I get to follow it up next week with a look at Man and the problem of sin. If you want to listen to all the previous messages and get caught up then just click here or subscribe to our podcast here.
Filed under Game Film, Uncategorized
The food battle has been won! For weeks now we have not had enough donuts and muffins to keep up with the crowds around the coffee table. Every week it seems that there is a line around the coffee table as people desperately wait for that sweet elixir of life. It also seems that every week we run out of breakfast before half of the people get there. Well, this week that all changed! We had plenty of breads, cinnamon rolls, and the best coffee cake I have ever had. Now we just have to figure out a way to get people to move from the table and to their seats when the service begins. Maybe food vendors walking through the aisles passing out cokes and hotdogs? 
Worship went well again this week. I have learned 2 things over the past few weeks of worship at Bedrock. First, I love having a violin being played during worship. It adds a certain element that I just love. Second, I have come to love a song entitled “Revelation Song.” I had never heard the song until we sang it a couple of weeks ago and I really enjoyed singing it this past Sunday. The chorus goes like this:
Holy, Holy, Holy
Is the Lord God Almighty
Who was, and is, and is to come
With all creation I sing:
Praise to the King of Kings!
You are my everything,
And I will adore You…!
I taught on the Holy Spirit this week as we continued our “Elemental Series”. Our Life Groups this week should be really interesting. I am sure that some of the things that we covered or did not cover in the message will be brought up in LGs. If you get any good follow up questions please let me know so that we can cover them in week 9 of the series!
Filed under Game Film
This week was another special week at Bedrock. It was a service that had every element that you could imagine. We had music, video, drama, the message, a special prayer time, and communion. One thought that I had that morning was, “This is going to be a really exciting service.” but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I also thought, “There are so many things that could go wrong today.” The service was packed with transitions, audio cuts, videos, worship, instruments, skits, timing….you name it. There was plenty of opportunity for something to not work perfectly. Certainly we would have some technical difficulty. (The devil likes to take over the sound system from time to time). Not to mention that our head techie guy was out of town for the weekend. We had all of his trainees working the audio / visual end of things. Let’s just say that the 9:30 prayer time before service begins was filled with prayer over all the details of such a full service.
The good news is that nothing went wrong. The service went very smoothly and we even got out on time! We have some great volunteers here at Bedrock and they do a great job week in and week out. God has brought us some very talented musicians (I love having a violin on our worship team!), we have some hard workers who stay after every service to clean up and pack up all of our gear, we have some warm personalities that shake a lot of hands and greet everyone who comes into the doors. They show up early, they leave late, and they work hard the entire time they are there. Thank you Bedrock family for being the church.
We continued the teaching series on the basic doctrines. Jonge did a phenominal job of helping us understand why Jesus is our mediator. We are receiving a lot of positive feedback on this series and on the discussions that are taking place in our Life Groups throughout the week. If you want to keep up with the teaching series you can get all the downloads here.
Filed under Game Film
Need a place where you can keep track of attendance numbers, baptisms, salvations, giving, etc? ChurchMetrics.com is a free web-based application that helps you keep tabs on all of that and more. This is a great free site that will set up all your administration needs when it comes to attendance. We use this site for our numbers at Bedrock and it is very user friendly and provides us a place where all our staff can go and look at the charts to see our current growth trends. It has various tools like: Charts, Reports, Mobile capability, Multi-user, Multi-campus / mutli-site information.
“Better information helps you make better decisions as a leader. ChurchMetrics is here to take care of the numbers, so you can focus on taking care of people.”
Check it out here: churchmetrics.com
Filed under Freebies
Another great day at the Bedrock. This week we really saw our volunteers step up and serve in a big way. We had 10 people show up at 7:00 to help set up. That is probably the most we have ever had. We were able to set up and be ready before the worship band got there and were even able to relax for a few minutes. I grabbed donuts for everybody and we sat and munched and fellowshipped. It was the most stress free setup we have had in a while.
It was a beautiful day. It was warm and the sun was shining. We had a good turn out. My parents were in town. Everything was going smoothly when the coffee machine lost power. PANIC! Cold coffee and the inability to brew fresh pots! A few clicks on the breaker box and soon we were back in business and the crisis was averted but it was close.
Other than a few technical difficulties (wrong video in the Keynote presentation plus I put some of the slides for my message in the wrong order) it was another great Sunday at Bedrock. We were able to kick off our new teaching series called “Elemental” where we are teaching through 8 basic areas of doctrine. Yesterday we tackled God the Father. Instead of trying to completely cover all there is to know about God (as if that were even possible) I simply focused in on His immanence. God is a transcendent, great and mighty God, but He is also near and involved in His creation. What a great God we serve!
Filed under Game Film
I had an amazing morning yesterday as I ran with 4000 other Hokies in order to remember 32 Hokies that were tragically killed 2 years ago. It brought back a flood of memories from my days as a student there as well as a stark reminder of where God has brought me on my journey. Here is a link to an amazing video. I am somewhere in that huge mass of people. See if you can find me!
Filed under Random thoughts
A great website to check out for videos and other creative media is Floodgate Productions. There are a lot of video sites out there now (Bluefishtv, sermon spice, etc.) and they all seem to have a little something extra in order to stand out from the rest. Floodgate provides monthly freebies that typically include a video clip, a motion background, a still background and even some leadership resources and downloads.
This month they are offering a nice little video called “It”. Do you need a service opener that reminds people to worship God with their whole hearts? While this video won’t work in every church, preview it to see if it might work in yours.
Filed under Freebies
This is the third week that I have been reading this great book by John Piper. It is broken up into 30 short chapters and so I have been trying to read one a day over the past 2 weeks and so far I have read through chapter 10. I love taking my time to sit and read and reflect on a book. My scholatic career was filled with so many required texts for classes that I got into the habit of reading at the fastest pace that would still allow me some measure of retention. If I could get the basic idea of a chapter then that was enough. Now that I am finished with school and syllabi I can finally sit and enjoy a good book. This book is proving to be a real delight. Sitting in Starbucks with a grande skinny latte and a piper book is a moment away from the busyness of life and a time to relax and indulge.
This past week had some really good and challenge information in it. The last chapter particularly (chapter 10) hit me hard.
Few things frighten me more than the beginnings of barrenness that come from frenzied activity with little spiritual food and meditation.
This entire chapter was an encouragement for me to refuel and replenish my spiritual energies by protecting my mornings. Too many people in ministry are busy doing the “business” of the church that they fail to slow down and be fed. That certainly describes me way too often. From trying to balance family, being a husband and dad, sermon preparation, counseling, administrating a new church plant, etc. it feels like I am the guy in the center ring of a big circus trying to see how many plates that I can keep spinning before they all crash to the ground and shatter. We have to protect the mornings, our quiet times, our prayer closets, our nourishment, if we are going to make it through the day.
I love this quote from Martin Lloyd Jones. It has helped me really grasp the importance of morning reading:
I have often found it difficult to start praying in the morning…I have found nothing more important than to learn how to get oneself into that frame and condition in which one can pray…To read something which can be characterized in general as devotional is of great value. By devotional I do not mean something sentimental, I mean something with a true element of worship in it…start by reading something that will warm your spirit…you have to learn how to kindle a flame in your spirit…you have to learn how to use a spiritual choke.
Find a quiet time in the morning. Find a good devotional book. Find the warm cup of coffee for your spirit. Find some Spurgeon. Find some Edwards. Find some Bunyan. Pull up on your spiritual choke and get your engine going for the day. Then throw it into high gear and tackle the day!
Filed under Book review
