Welcome to the Residency.

So, as I promised yesterday, I am back into blogging again. My purpose for this season of blogging will be to chronicle my journey over this coming year in my new role. I'm sure I'll have many of the same types of blog features that I've had through the years like movie/book/etc. reviews, rants about whatever, and quirky fun stuff. But I also want to keep a running log of my experience here.

For sake of recap...a little background. Roughly 6 months ago, my wife and I heard the clear call of God that we should work towards planting a church somewhere in a community that was lacking one. After much soul searching and counsel, I decided to first step into a 1 year leadership residency at Kinetic Church in Charlotte NC. Kinetic  is about 6 years old. Their lead pastor, Dave Milam, offered the opportunity for me to come onboard as a full time staff member and work alongside him and the other church leadership. The goal is simply to see the inside of a church plant and learn a little about what's under the hood. So, here we are. Living outside of Charlotte in a town called Kannapolis.

I want to take some time to talk about what I've done so far and what It's taught me. I guess I can boil this first week down into a couple of experiences. First, preaching. I preached on my first Sunday at Kinetic. It went pretty well in terms of delivery, crowd attention, even content. But the goal is to critique and improve.  So, today Dave and I watched the tape of the message. We got about half way through before our time was up but I learned a lot in the time we had. There are mannerism and habits that I  can identify (some that I was aware of and others that Dave helped me see) that I can work to harness. Many of the things we do while doing public speaking are not in themselves evil. Things like pacing, hand gestures, poses, eye contact, etc. Can all be used to great effect OR when misused can prove to be distracting or discrediting. So the lesson is...watch yourself and be deliberate.  Also, there are certain words that we use that are (as I heard on a radio broadcast yesterday) poor economy of word usage. Words like, "thing(s)" or "that" are often used without actually adding meat to a sentence. For example, "there are two things I want to tell you about grace" vs. "there are two principles I want to tell you about grace." Both give the same basic promise but to call the "things" "principles" adds meat to the bones.

Today I was enrolled in a stand up comedy class! Dave enrolled me to give me a chance to take an unconventional look at public speaking. I'm actually really excited about this. I won't lie, it makes me a little nervous to know that a bunch of Kinetic people will probably crash my graduation when I'll have to do a 5 minute routine. Haha..but hey, everyone's funnier in a comedy club.....right?

The second element I worked on some this week was Small groups. Over the course of this year I want to consume as much knowledge and understanding as possible about small groups. It seems that the greatest and most meaningful growth in a church can happen at this type of level. I met with Daniel Perkins today to talk about Small groups. I'll be leading one this fall. There is so much I could say about that right now but I'll save some for later. Daniel really opened my eye to some good ideas for small groups.

I've really enjoyed my first week "kinda" working here. (They've allowed me to kinda ease into the work load. I'll start full-on on Monday.) The other guys on staff (Daniel Hodges is the worship Pastor and Dave) have been great. The elders are young guys with big hearts and wisdom that is clearly seen. The ladies at the church have been all over making my wife comfortable. Lindsey has absolutely loved hanging out with them.

Tomorrow we finish watching my sermon and I'll be getting on my feet a little bit in figuring out what to do with myself every day.