here is another song form eric glaze who leads the music at tapestry. i believe eric is going to post a new song each friday at least for a few more weeks.
growing small
i’m pretty sure that i have guest preached at this church before. i have definitely driven 45 minutes before to preach at a church that had 8 people at it and has had around 8 people for years. while i am most assuredly a small church guy that doesn’t mean that i believe churches should stay small by never adding anyone. in fact, i believe the exact opposite.
tapestry is small. most sunday nights there are 45-50 threads at washington elementary school. we also plan on staying small but emphasize growing. we are very intentional about staying small and growing at the same time.
we are doing this by knowing that as we grow we also plan on splitting to form new churches. it is a concept that i bring up often with the leadership team and the church. our magic number is 150ish in average attendance. tapestry stole this concept from the hutterites, an anabaptist community, and from my brief experience with a group of churches in philadelphia called the circle of hope . i am a big radical reformation guy so the hutterites are a particular draw for me. anyhow hutterite communities look to split when they hit 150ish. the insulated wear company gore-tex also practices this mindset. the idea is that people can only truly know and connect with 150ish people (no matter what facebook says) and therefore groups work best at around that number. the anthropologist robin dunbar talked about this in the principle that is commonly known as “dunbar’s number.”
so 150ish is our split number (btw, i love saying split with people who have been raised in church because it draws a very different image for them – they usually prefer the word divide but i really like saying split). that number leaves us plenty of room to grow right now. we started 3 years ago with an average of 8. we’ve slowly grown by focusing on people who weren’t connected with a local church. we will continue to grow by focusing on people who are not connected with a local church BUT the goal is not to stop when we get close to 150ish. nope. the goal is to grow while staying small (i guess you could say “growing small”). we’ll just split and form a new church that reaches a different group of people. we’ll be “sister” churches that still do many things together while also reaching people who might never connect with tapestry at washington. then the fun will really begin because we will hopefully do an even better job of “growing small” when there are two tapestries. i hope years from now there are dozens of us intentionally “growing small” churches in the area.
again the goal is to grow and stay small. not just stay small.
SIDE NOTE – the graphic comes from asbo JESUS. i love that blog.
eric’s music
eric glaze usually leads music at tapestry on sunday nights. he has started posting a video every now and then on youtube of some of his own song writing. the one above is the first of three i know are coming up over the next few weeks. i told him i’d definitely buy an album of this stuff. i hope he decides to make one.
i thought i would share it with you ladies and gents and encourage you to “like” his facebook page so that you will know when he posts more songs.
i love that we have talented people as “threads.”
project point
tonight at tapestry i talked from mark 8:1-10 concerning JESUS feeding 4,000 men (plus who knows how many women and children). the major focus of the message was that JESUS wants to do HIS work through those who claim to be HIS followers. it is called incarnational ministry (i.e. GOD working through HIS people to do HIS work). as a part of the message i passed out maps of point with the request that everyone there mark down every act of service they do this week because of CHRIST. this next sunday we will have a large map of point in the room for threads to mark down their acts of service on for us to see everything that has happened this week because of JESUS in our lives.
if you weren’t at tapestry tonight please consider printing out the map above and joining us in purposefully doing as many acts of service as possible this week. please mark your acts of service down on the map and come next sunday prepared to put them on the big map. it should be cool to see what happens.
CHRISTmas and easter
i have to confess that i have never really understood it when i have heard ministers complain about people who only come to church on CHRISTmas and easter. thankfully i haven’t heard many ministers complain about this phenomenon but i have unfortunately heard a very few. i am honored no matter when someone comes to tapestry to declare the worth of GOD. it doesn’t matter how often. some people come more often than others. others can’t come as often. that is just part of life.
the irony for me personally is that while CHRISTmas and easter are usually large attendance days for most other churches, they are typically days where tapestry has lower attendance. this is because of the average age of the people who are a part of tapestry. we are a young church and this means that the majority of “threads” are usually at the age where they need to go visit their parents’ home for major holidays. we usually have more people at our worship gatherings that build up to the CHRISTmas and easter than we do for the actual holidays. the thing i love is that we care more about making sure we live out the meaning and purpose of CHRISTmas and easter than we do about having a lot of people at those days’ worship gatherings. church attendance isn’t what matters to us.
my hope and prayer for you is that you live out easter in your life. the truth behind resurrection day should effect how we live all our days. if you need a church to help you remember this i can gladly recommend tapestry. 🙂
prep for easter / holy week
for holy week i have three goals for tapestry.
- that we spend a good bit of time in prayer
- that we spend a good bit of time in serving
- that we spend a good bit of time in scripture
for prayer we did this by putting on a labyrinth for the community. this is hard to explain completely, it is a period of guided prayer that uses a very large marked canvas mat, some experiential stations, a british lady with a wonderful accent to help people pray for 30 minutes to 2 hours. for serving we did this by providing and serving the weekly meal for the place of peace which led to some wonderful conversations and seeing JESUS in some of HIS most distressing disguises (a teresa of calcutta saying). finally we did this for scripture by reading through the gospel according to matthew during lent and then reading through the 14th and 15h chapters of the gospel according to mark during our annual tenebrae.
adam h was nice enough to take some photos. i decided to make an animoto video of them. i’m looking forward to easter.
labyrinth & tenebrae promos
baptism & my afternoon
tonight was a tapestry baptism gathering. for us that means we baptize a thread who has become a follower of CHRIST and then we potluck together to celebrate what GOD is doing in us and through us. it is always a wonderful night. in the above photos you might notice some steam. that’s what happens when you use a hot tub on a screened in porch because the river that we usually use for our baptisms is still WAY to cold. the plan/hope is that the plover river will be suitable in april. we’ll see.
SIDE NOTE – we’ve had a VERY mild winter this year. there are advantages to that but also disadvantages. one of the disadvantages is that there hasn’t been as much snow to do some of the things that pam and i love to do during the winter. thankfully we received a few good inches this week (i think around 6”) so i was finally able to go into the forest behind our house and do this today. it was wonderful.
3 & 30
THREE
i posted a while back about the increasing wedding officiating i’ve been doing each year of tapestry and my thoughts concerning weddings possibly being a sign of health or not in a church. as of today, if all goes as planned, i will be officiating at least three weddings in 2012 (the schobert wedding has already been done and two more are scheduled). today jessiah and amanda asked me to officiate their wedding and, of course, i was honored to say yes to doing it. they might have to talk with pam concerning the date of their ceremony since they picked our wedding anniversary to get married on.
THIRTY
as a youth minister i regularly led students through world vision’s 30 hour famine. today, due to a couple of the ways i have been prepping for easter through lent, i have been constantly thinking about “the famines” i used to be a part and how i always thought they were something that everyone in the churches i was a part of would have benefited from rather than just something for students. of course, you would have to do it different if “the famine” involved all the members of a church rather than only youth. in youth ministry you treat “the famine” as a lock-in (here’s a great youth lock in video) where all the students are gathered together and stay up way later than normal people should. couldn’t do that with the whole church, especially when tapestry would have to rent a building to do it. instead i think as a church we could achieve the goals and focus of “the famine” without going down the road of it being merely a youth event with adults.
here’s what i’m thinking of doing.
- still do the 30 hours without eating as a reminder of JESUS’s command that we feed the hungry.
- instead of doing a lock-in we spend a great deal of time together throughout friday evening and saturday by having lots of planned opportunities to …
- worship together (a worship time friday night, saturday morning, and saturday afternoon)
- serve together (planned service opportunities friday and saturday)
- goof off together (planned opportunities friday and saturday)
the national dates for the 30 hour famine are february 24-25 and april 27-28. GOD speed and bless all the students and chaperones who are doing “the famine” tonight all around the world. i really think the threads would get into this so after i bounce it around some more you might be hearing more about this. it might be fun to still set up a lock-in for the teens that fit in with the whole church doing the famine.
my geek side
much of tapestry’s communication is done online. a ton of social media, online presence, website changes, email, etc. this means i regularly post LOTS of links. some of them can get kind of long, which is, of course, why in the past i have used url shortening services like tinyurl.com and tiny.cc. i decided i wanted tapestry’s name to be in the url and personally have more control over the shortened name of each url without making the address super long. so i just installed yoURLs which make the tapestry website into our own personal url shortening service. now i can shorten url’s with the sptapestry.org address.
for example, thanks to wesley (one of the leadership team members) i have begun posting youversion “scripture events” each week. these scripture events are basically a way that people can easily see each week’s scripture, the power point slides, take notes, etc. this (bible.us/e/ICL) is the link to this week’s (as yet unpublished) scripture event on youversion. it isn’t a very long url but it makes no sense and thus is hard for me to explain to someone without writing it down for them. i could run it through another url shortening service and hope that the custom name i want is available or i could install (which i did) yoURLs on the sptapestry.org domain and know that the custom name i want is available. from now on the link to the youversion scripture event will merely be that sunday’s date. here’s this week’s sptapestry.org/2122012.
come on now, you know that’s awesome.
SIDE NOTE – we’ve actually determined that while youversion events are great, they are also actually not quite in step with our level of participation. youversion events allow individuals to slightly participate with the scripture of the message but they do not allow the church to participate with each other as we go through the scripture during the message. so drew is looking into developing an app for tapestry that will take the good we like of youversion scripture events and add a ton of interactivity for use during our worship gatherings. for example, drew is going to set things up where the scripture event becomes a conversation that you can comment on and then someone else can respond to your comment. youversion allows you to take notes and send me questions but doesn’t really allow for the threads to respond to each other’s responses and bounce reflections off of other people’s thoughts. this is going to be awesome. when he is done people who might not feel comfortable speaking up verbally during our worship gatherings will have yet another way to respond.
again, come on, you know this is awesome.