This was shown at church a few weekends ago.

This was filmed right around the time of my surgery, and I could barely speak because of a cold. So if I look a little uncomfortable, that might explain things.

In addition to that, we used black pvc for our large hanging restroom sign and the keyboard covers for our touch screen check in computers and several sign and poster holders that we ordered online.

We’ve ended up with a solution that sets up quickly (we leave the clips on the ceiling grid during the week) and has a small storage footprint while still providing a strong impact.

This is just an example of some current communications at Faith Promise and our effort to provide consistency in our visual identity.

Over the past few days, we’ve finalized a couple of new graphics, and I wanted to share them here:

I’m pretty sure the graphic above is the first graphic I’ve ever personally created for a sermon series.  I used a photograph of a typewriter and drew it out digitally from there.

Our Graphic Designer, Heather Burson, creates 95% of the graphics around Faith Promise, and as usual, she knocked it out of the park with the graphic above.

Two years ago, Keri, the kids, and I flew to Knoxville, hung out with our friends, Josh and Kim Whitehead, visited Faith Promise Church, met up with Pastor Chris and Michele for lunch after the services, and visited a small group. That weekend marked the beginning of our transition from Fort Worth, TX to Knoxville, TN.

Wow, we had no idea what we were getting into!

Honestly, these past two years have been the best years of my life in so many ways.

Thank you, God, for the privilege and joy of serving at such a great church and with such an amazing staff.

(This is a repost from my guest post over on the Faith Promise Blog earlier this morning.)

Over the past few months, we’ve made plans for a major update to the Faith Promise Church website as we prepare for the launch of our Blount County Campus in October. As Brad Roberts and I worked through the process, here are a few things we had in mind:

Let’s help people easily find information that is accurate for their campus.
While the vision, direction, teaching, and core ministries will be consistent across campuses, there are many small variations between campuses, such as different location and contact info, different service times, and different ways of getting integrated into groups. We set out to make sure that people get the correct information based on the campus they attend or plan on attending. This means that depending on your campus, certain page contents, graphics, and menu options will be different.

Once people have chosen a campus, don’t make them pick again.
Rather than the annoyance of having to choose your campus every time you visit the site, we’ll store that information for you and take you straight into the site.

Make it easy and intuitive to switch between campuses.
Forced selections on a website make us feel like we’ve stepped into a choose-your-own-adventure book. (One bad choice, and you’re trapped inside a spooky house or dragged off into the woods by Big Foot.) Instead, we tried to make the campus selection feel like a light choice that can be easily switched at any time.

Provide a solution that scales well with additional campuses.
Rather than build a system that will only accommodate three campuses (Pellissippi, Internet, and Bount), we’ve built a system that will scale as we continue to add new campuses in the future.

While we were at it, we also enabled mobile video and overhauled the blog.
When you visit the Series Media page on your HTML5 web-enabled mobile device, you can now watch sermon videos. In addition, our church blog got a significant facelift.

As of this evening, we’ve rolled out the update. We’re still in the tweaking process, but you can check it out!

Carol lives in Utah, attends Faith Promise Church on our Internet Campus, and attends our online small group.  Yesterday, she was in town, so we had a cookout at my house then went to church together, where Carol was baptized.  It was an awesome day.

Check out the video here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To celebrate the 4th of July, my church held a large event at a nearby college (similar to last year).  The community was invited, and everything was free – including food, drinks, games, and inflatables.  In the middle of the event, we held a worship service, and we concluded the evening with a fireworks show.

Some of the highlights:

1. Approximately 9,000 people attended the event.
2. Many people responded to the message by making commitments of their lives to Jesus.
3. 36 people were baptized (I got to baptize about 30 of these).

During the course of the evening I met several people who are a part of my online small group face-to-face for the first time.  I also met up with several individuals who normally attend online and got to baptize one of them.

Volunteer Teams setting up one of the Drink Stations

Baptisms

Keri, her mom, and the kids

More photos on Facebook

We’re planning to relaunch our Internet Campus this weekend.  We worked with a fantastic design company to improve our interface and arrange things so that people will have an easier time finding their way around the features.  Like normal, my good friend, Brad Roberts built out the site, and we’ve both been amazed to see the project come together.

Some of the new features include:

• Greater emphasis on the chat room, built from scratch so that it will include all the features we’ve wanted for a while.  Most importantly, it no longer requires the Java plugin to work.
• A map that shows all the connections.
• Easier access to the sharing/invite buttons.
• And some really cool transitions – opening and closing the chat window as well as “turning down the lights”.

Our biggest hope is that these changes will help more people discover the truth of Jesus and connect to the growing community of Faith Promise Church.

For a few months now, we’ve had three three worship service times each weekend on our Internet Campus. Starting in May, we’re changing a time and adding a new service to our Sunday lineup:

• 9:00 am
• 10:20 am
• 11:45 am
• 9:00 pm

Father, please use our church and Internet Campus to bring glory to yourself. All our efforts are for you – that more may know and worship you.

Service times are changing at our Pellissippi Campus too. You can read more about the changes here.