kylegilbert

A few months ago, I was impressed to see Firefox open up a graphic t-shirt selection online, and I was inspired to do the same sort of thing for Faith Promise. Well, now I have! Our Communications Team has put together some designs, and I’ve posted them up so that people can order their own custom colors, sizes, and styles. I got my own order in the mail last week, and I love it. I’m hoping that these t-shirts will be a helpful resource for many in our church to start conversations with people who are unchurched or disconnected from God.

Its been a fun project to work on in between other projects, and we’ll be adding new designs to the lineup over the next few months.

PS – I do still have arms and a head, but it was really late, and I took this photo myself.

This is powerful:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced some painful failures.  I poured my heart into a ministry, and I watched it crumble before my eyes.  Despite my best efforts, things did not go as hoped.  People (including myself) walked away disappointed.  And in the end, I really began to question a lot of things.

God, am I just in the way of your ministry?  Do you really have a plan for me?

Through the brokenness, I began to discover that there is a God who delights in our weakness.  He is quite comfortable with us coming to the end of ourselves and facing our fears.

But this time, when I looked at my failure, I realized there was something on the other side.  Failure is a doorway to greater things.

Seth Godin, in his book Tribes, puts it this way, “[They] have actively talked themselves out of the fear.  I mean, the fear is still there, but it’s drowned out by a different story….  The only thing holding you back is your own fear.”

God is teaching me this lesson in a dozen ways at the same time, but especially  through the great leaders around me at Faith Promise.  From what I can tell, I’m beginning to make some solid progress.  I’m turning over a new leaf.  I’m ready to fail, because I realize that failure is a part of making progress.

I put together this design for our marketing campaign for our one-service Easter celebration at the Knoxville coliseum. We already had a great design for our invite cards, but we needed something a little bit edgier and attention grabbing for advertising to the college and downtown audience. As I was thinking through what we could say that would stand out, I decided that it would be interesting to juxtapose two of the most bold statements that have ever been uttered by human lips.

The first is from Nietzsche’s work called The Madman. In it he uses these words ( “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”) to say that humanity can no longer justify belief in the existence of God. In his opinion, belief in God is intellectually reprehensible.

The second statement is one of many places in Scripture where Jesus asserts his divinity. He also claims to be the exclusive door to eternal life.

It’s amazing to see these two statements side by side, and I hope that it will compel people to either seek the truth or live out what they believe.

One part of my job that I really enjoy is working with amazingly talented people at Faith Promise and leveraging the internet and social media to promote the ministry that is happening there.

This weekend I had the opportunity to put together a really cool website. Sacred Storm is the dramatic Easter production that our church has done for the past few years. I’ve not personally watched it, but from the photos and the testimonials of my friends, it’s pretty amazing. This year, we’re doing Sacred Storm the weekend before Easter (six productions), and if things go well in the development of our Internet Campus, we’re going to rebroadcast it the afternoon on Easter Sunday – probably 3 pm EST.

I love futuristic technology, and this Microsoft video is pretty amazing. I find it interesting that you can market a brand not just by demonstrating the products and services you offer, but by opening people’s minds to new concepts (even if they never really happen).

This is pretty bizarre.  I guess it might be nice when you wake up in the morning on a cold camping trip, but I know I would laugh if I ever saw somebody pop out of their tent wearing one of these.

The funniest thing was that one person left a review and mentioned that they liked to wear theirs camping to play guitar at night.  Can’t you picture it?

Maybe we could convince Justin Petrowski to wear one of these up on stage some cold weekend.

Inspired by Jesus’s parable of the “House on the Rock”, my daughter and I decided to build our own the other day.  Unlike Jesus’s, we decided to build in our own hidden bunker in the rock and equip the house with a canon, a couple of armored windows, a hatch-opening roof, and a surface-to-air missile.  She picked out the front door, not me.

Great weekend at Faith Promise! The rap below (featuring the Pastor’s two sons) came right before Pastor’s hard-hitting sermon.