We’ve reposted information about the day tickets. The new price is available on the tickets page and provides the information about when it’s best to buy to get a great deal.

Sorry about that. 

It’s time to start planning your summer calendar. Epworth Forest CC will be opening registration for That Thing on Tuesday, November 3, 2009.

See you online Tuesday morning!

it’s time to book yourself up for 2010.  Starting this Tuesday, November 3, you can start booking your lodges.  

If you haven’t had a chance to choose a lodge, check them out on the lodge finder.

YOUTH SPECIALTIES!!  If you’re down in Cincinnati this week for Youth Specialties, stop by and say hello.  We’ll have a booth in the exhibit hall and we’d love to see you.

So, we’ve added a little widget to the new website, we call it the Extra Tix Widget.

It’s a great little space to browse for/purchase overflow tickets or to sell them.  But, it’s also designed as a means to help groups connect with other groups even before you purchase tickets.

So, check it out; jump on gotothatthing.com and look for the little "Tix" logo at the top of the page or find it on the tickets page. It’s got some nonsense filler data for now so you can see how it can be used.  But, keep the widget in mind if you’re looking for a few tickets or you realize you have a couple open beds. The closer to capacity you can max out a lodge, the better the cost for your students. 

It’s Sunday and my weekend rituals involve a lot of football this time of year. But today, it’s just disheartening to watch. The winless Titans are just falling apart and had the misfortune of playing the patriots in about 2-3 inches of snow. Up 38 - 0, in the final moments of the half, The Patriots decided to push their winnings and continue throwing for the end-zone while they had to cross the entire stretch of the field in about a minute.

I can only say the Patriots, their coaching staff and their quarterback, came out looking like some of the worst role models ever during that marvelous 64 second drive. 

Most weeks, against most teams, that would have been a normal decision. Here though, in the snow, against a winless team, one that wasn’t pulling together a single drive for anything; it was simply running the score, playing to improve personal records and crushing spirits. It was sad to watch and I can’t imagine the sense of disappointment, desperation and probably even embarrassment the players were feeling. High School football games in Connecticut have rules and will suspend coaches who win enormously while running score up like that.

Here’s the big question to this whole thing. Imagine you’re the coach of the Patriots going in for the half time talk. What do you say? Do you tell them that they’re obviously the better team and now it’s time to show character over athleticism? Do you go in and pump ‘em up for more?

Exactly what kind of role model are you?

Now, what if you’re Titan head coach Jeff Fisher, what are you going to do at the half when you go in to speak with the guys in the locker room? Do you call them failures and tell them to man up? Do you tell them they’re professionals who’re getting paid millions to win and they are so failing? Do you encourage them, speak to their hearts and tell them that some days, it’s just not going to go well; the next half and tomorrow, are all new?

Exactly what kind of role model are you?

As I’m finishing, it’s 59-0 with most of a quarter left to play…

Did you know that you start booking your lodges starting Tuesday November 3. Check out the lodge finder to start making your selection. 

In case you haven’t heard, we’ve updated the fee schedule to make it easier and decrease your church’s burden. The complete schedule of fees is located underneath the list of lodges on the lodge finder page.

I had an opportunity to attend catalyst last week.  Far and away, one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I highly suggest it for anyone church leader or not. To sum it up, it’s about higher and better leadership using Christ-like principles. 

The most practical application stuff came from Andy Stanley from Northpoint. Folks like Rob Bell and Francis Chan really encouraged and challenged my heart. Other speakers really just pumped me up for what’s next. So, here’s a few thoughts that won’t give justice to the full context of their messages, but my favorite take-aways.

Andy Stanley
• Before Joshua takes Jericho, he is walking and sees a man with his sword drawn before him.  He asks, "Are you for us, or for our enemies?" The angel simply answers, "No."
• The question for us is are we inviting God to join us and our mission? Did we miss the point that we are meant to be following God’s mission? (Joshua 5)
• Leaders are not just in authority, but true leadership needs to be under authority.
• "God takes full responsibility for the life wholly devoted to Him"
• Serving in ministry, we often get so caught up with who’s for us and who’s against us; who loves what we’re doing and who’s upset about our decisions and goals…instead, let’s focus on who we are for.  "If I win, I win and if I lose, I win." When we are for God, and that purpose and that mission consumes us, we have nothing else to worry about.
• "Living to make my mark is too small a thing to give my life to."

Malcom Gladwell
• Humility is the ability to listen to others

Shane Hipps
• The medium is the message. The way the story is told and interacted with is the message.

Rob Bell
• When is your sabath?
• Is your family getting what’s left after you’ve given it all at the church?

Priscilla Schriber
• Check out Korn’s lead guitarist Brian Welch and his amazing spiritual transformation; very cool story about how at the bottom of the well he walked into a church and was loved into the kingdom. Did an interview on CNN Headline News about it all.
• A Life Interrupted; "and they left everything to follow Jesus"
• You are not God. Do you lead your life as if you believe you are?

Margaret Feinberg
• Are we teaching people for the sake of being informational or to be transformational?

Andy Stanley
• The minute you decide you have to micro-manage a staffer is the moment you should realize you’ve made a hiring mistake. - Jim Collin’s, How the Mighty Fall
• In order to discover who you can’t trust, you must first trust.
• How many times do trustworthy people make the same mistakes? They don’t. Trustworthy people learn from mistakes, correct them and don’t repeat them.
• In a healthy culture of trust, staff shouldn’t and won’t guard their silo’s and areas of authority and power. Instead, they will communicate around the lines of authority in order to get things done best for the organization.
• When you can’t choose to trust, you must choose to confront.
• Confront fairly and confront quickly. If it festers, it will grow and it will explode at some point in a way that it shouldn’t. Before you assume the worst, you have to ask for all the facts.
• To develop a culture of trust, the leaders themselves must be trustworthy.

Here’s something you really have to see.  Danni suggested it to me and man…it’s good food for thought.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8 

I’m in Atlanta today going to Catalyst. As I left the office I picked up a book for the plane ride called "rejesus" by Frost & Hirsch. I’m a little ways in and absolutely loving the book. I wanted to give you a couple of lines out of it that really stand out not just because they’re powerful words, but because they so well define the direction That Thing is going.

"It appears that a good church upbringing will do many marvelous things for you, but one of the unfortunate things it also does is convince you that Jesus is to be worshipped but not followed." As this new program has really come into its own, we’ve identified our target audience as the churched. Now, this may incorrectly imply that evangelism has gone out the window, but we all know there are tons of people in our churches who still need Christ as their savior; so it is still vital. But I love this line; how many of our students see Jesus as an untouchable deity and can’t identify with him so as to emulate him in action.

"The difficulty for the church today is not in encouraging people to ask what Jesus would do, but in getting them to break out of their domesticated and sanitized ideas about Jesus in order to answer that question." Have we, as leaders of the student-body of Christ, settled for correct answers for the time being in hopes that they’ll learn to apply them down the road. 

"If your answer to the Question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ is that he would be conventional, safe, respectable and refined, then we suspect that you didn’t find that answer in the Gospels." I’ve seen it on countless church marquee’s and heard it over and over again, "The safest place to be is the center of God’s will." Jesus was at the center of that will, so was John the baptist, the disciples, Paul…just to name a few, and I can’t imagine one of them would tell us there was anything safe about the remainder of their lives. Christ, the prime example we’ve set forth to be like, was a counter-cultural revolutionary. He touched the untouchables, he broke the establishment, he was an image of hope to and for the lost, and he upset people everywhere. This program, That Thing, is about looking back at who Jesus is and seeing the wild man of the gospels that students can relate to and want to imitate; we are meant to carry hope into the world. 

"It reminds us of the quip made by the archbishop who is reported to have said, ‘Everywhere Jesus went there was a riot. Everywhere I go they make cups of tea!"