Book Suggestion: Comeback Churches

About 2 years ago my friend Jaime Puente suggested this book to me. I quickly bought it on Amazon and read it in a few days. It fascinated me primarily because I've only worked in established and traditional churches. As I look at some of the fastest growing churches they are primarily new church plants and rarely established churches experiencing resurgence. While there are hundreds, probably thousands of dying churches in America, there are also many who are experiencing resurgence. In this book Ed Stetzer and Mike Dobson study some of these churches and what makes them unique in their resurgence. The reality was very common: a willingness to change. We have all heard the saying that if you keep doing the same thing you are going to keep getting the same results. I don't know where you see that more than in the church. We must be willing to change! This is a great book if you are a part of an established congregation or considering serving in one.

New Facebook Technique: Sniping

Last night when I was on Facebook I was sniped by my friend Jaime Puente. He taught me a new technique that he coined "sniping". You see Jaime has a goal to get people to go and vote for his commercial, "Casket". If you read my previous post about Vote for Casket you can find out more about his project. So he needs people to go daily to the website www.CrashtheSuperbowl.com to vote for his commercial "Casket" so that it will be aired during the Superbowl. Instead of just sending out a mass message he's chosen rather to snipe. His technique is to watch the Chat board and see who is online. As new people pop in he immediately sends them a quick message (a snipe) that says: "Have you voted for my video yet today? Go to www.voteforcasket.com. While this could obviously get obnoxious if overly used, when you need action asap this technique is genius! I'm definitely going to try this during a live feed of one of our services soon! I apologize if I snipe you and it's unwanted, but I hope if I do that it leads you to respond to my request. It definitely has more effectiveness than hoping that your status shows up on someone's news feed.

How about you try it? I believe getting people to vote for casket is a great cause. See how many people you can snipe and vote everyday for this commercial! You can used bit.ly to create your link and see how many people actually go to the site. Leave me a comment and let me know how well this technique works for you.