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For the last decade, it has been such an honor to be a part of a church that is not only passionate about innovation and seeking out the best for God’s Kingdom, but is leading the way for other churches and ministries interested in redeeming technology and the arts. Over the past few years

New Hope has been on several lists; America’s 25 Most Innovative Churches, 100 Fastest Growing U.S. Churches, 100 Largest U.S. Churches, 50 Most Influential Churches. What an honor to be on such lists with other churches who are pioneers in all these areas.

Churchrelevance.com recently compiled all these lists together and created a new listing of the top 26 U.S. Churches to learn from in ALL AREAS. New Hope Christian Fellowship was listed as #5 on the list. As a leader at New Hope this is both an honor and a great responsibility to ensure that I am constantly keeping myself at the feet of Jesus, and watching what the Holy Spirit is doing.

Here is the article at churchrelevance.com.

Well last year I didn’t keep up with this blog like I thought I would. So many things distracted me from posting like I had planned. But this new year, this new decade, I think I am going to set aside a time each day to write a little something about what is happening in all the things that I am involved in. So many interesting nuggets of wisdom and technological insights pop up each day and I want to write them down both for my recall later, and the hope that someone else might get some use out of them. I am looking forward to a great year!

Make Spiritual Deposits Daily

Do you ever find yourself feeling spiritually depleted? I know that sometimes I do. When I pray and ask God why, it seems that He is showing me that the reason for this is that I am trying to make a withdrawal from something that I have not made a deposit to lately.

In the natural, in order to withdraw money from a bank account you must have the funds in your account to draw from. If there is no money in your account you will not be able to take any money out due to insufficient funds. In the same way, we can become spiritually depleted if we have not made any spiritual deposits by fellowshipping with the Holy Spirit, by spending time at the feet of Jesus, or by feeding ourself with the Word of God and prayer.

Ephesians 5:18 And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit.

The original definition of this word “filled” means a continuous replenishment, an ongoing and repeated filling. Just as you would have to continually replenish your bank account, the same principle applies to your spiritual life. Not only will you become spiritually drained and famished but you will not have anything to fight with when adversity and trials come your way. The Holy Spirit wants the fellowship that He once had with you but you must always remember that it is a relationship not a religion. Jesus has great plans for you. He is getting ready to do awesome things among us which some of us are experiencing already.

Proverbs 4:20-23 My son, give attention to my words; Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes; Keep them in the midst of your heart; For they are life to those who find them, And health to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life.

The growth of our Internet Campus continues to amaze us. As it grows we learn more and more about the emerging virtual church. Some things we have planned, others things have just happened. When we first added a chat room alongside the “live” service, we didn’t really know what to expect. Some people felt it was a distraction, other absolutely loved it and looked forward to chatting with the regulars. People chat about the service, about current issues, and even ask for prayer. It is a great tool that is being used to connect people online.

A current development, that wasn’t thought of in the beginning, is that of people inviting relatives and friends to login at the same time and watch the service together. This breaks all time zones and distances and brings people together to attend service. I have to admit it is a neat experience.

Wow, what a great Easter! Online! We had tons of people join us online at New Hope Internet Campus this past weekend. We started on Friday night with our Good Friday service. Due to problems with our internet feed, we ended up streaming via a Sprint Aircard and had to utilize justin.tv. This was a first for us, but it turned out good. Because justin.tv is a very popular site that anyone with a video camera can stream on, we opened ourselves up to many unchurched people. Since we were routing all of our streaming video traffic to their site, we quickly became the number one site on their main page. Lot’s of people checked out our services, and we were able to engage in some very interesting conversations. Lot’s of people had questions about God, and about Christianity. Our Good Friday service turned into an evangelistic outreach! The great thing is that several of the people who found us through this very secular website, came back and joined us for our Easter Services Saturday and Sunday! What a success!

Speaking of our Easter Services, they were over the top!! Our high speed internet connection worked flawlessly. We also streamed via justin.tv as part of our evangelistic outreach. Several more people stopped by and were Blessed by the services.

I have talked about having a pioneer spirit on many of my past blogs at different sites. Last week, Pastor Wayne shared about having a pioneer spirit and it hit the nail right on the head!! Here is a few of the points that he made:

1. •Japanese Word “Kaizen” means to be continuously improving, “Quality” is a way of life, making improvements and upgrades is a part of your everyday living.

2. •As staff, we need to be constantly improving, always asking ourselves “What can I do to better myself?”
3. •Once you reach a place and think it’s static, you’re obsolete. The world will go right by you.
4. •Obsolete is a mindset. We have to change our mindsets.
5. •Life is when the current is walking against you. When you start giving in to the current rushing against you, all of a sudden you’ll feel like you’re in the middle of Niagara Falls.
6. •Keep a mindset that you’re going to improve.
7. •In ministry, you have to keep a pioneer spirit.
8. •As soon as you move from a pioneer to a settler, you’re finished.
9. •Settlers build their settlement and make it better and better but before you know it, you’re making things better but it’s just for yourself.
10. •Take joy in improving and getting better.
11. •Stay in step with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a pioneer ~ not static, isn’t a settler.

This is right in-line with the lesson we learned this weekend about using justin.tv as an improvement. Now we are glad that the internet gave us problems on Friday. We were forced to pioneer, and then God used that to actually improve us!

In Christ!

This weekend was amazing on the Internet Campus! We had 723 people joining in over the 5 services. We had people from all over the globe connecting with each other, praying with each other, it was a real feeling of family online. The topic of having our first online Bible study was brought up again. I think it is a great idea and I can’t wait until we get the technology in place to run the online Bible Studies. Also, many people talked about the all night prayer event coming up this Friday. It will be awesome. We will be coving it the whole night. Last year was so exciting we didn’t even get tired. Well, until 6am when things came to a close, then I was super tired! Don’t worry though, we will be back online at 5pm for our first service on Saturday! It is really neat to see how God is going to use the Internet Campus to reach the world! Blessings!

We find intimacy with God through communicating with Him in prayer. We go to Him in faith, knowing that He hears and answers all our prayers. On March 14th we will be holding an all night prayer meeting at our Sand Island Ministry Center. The night will begin around 10pm Hawaii time. We will immediately start streaming the event live! Last year we had tons of local people that couldn’t make it in the Ministry Center, as well as other from all over the world join us online. Just like last year, we will be accepting prayer requests online, as well video and photo updates throughout the night. We are really looking forward to the all night prayer and connecting with our prayer partners world-wide.

One of the most important things you need to insure you follow if you are going to have a successful website, blog, or other internet presence, is to BE INTENTIONAL about what you do. For example, you can’t just build a webpage and let it sit there and hope someone sees it. Even if you have lots of hits already, you still must be intentional about maintaining it and connecting with new people constantly. We can learn a big lesson from a company you might have heard from, it is called Coca-Cola. Even though they are probably the largest soft drink company in the world, you still see commercials and ads about Coke everywhere. They are very intentional! They know that with so many choices and distractions out in the world, they need to be always in sight! Doesn’t the church need to be the same way? We need to be intentional about being in people’s sights! With our Internet Campus, we constantly take steps to be intentional and stay in peoples sights, or should I say searches. This weekend showed the fruits of that labor. We intentionally put ads on google during all of our 5 services, that if someone, anywhere in the world typed searches on things like, marriage problems, divorces, hurting, etc, they would get a link that would take them right to our online services. We had about 76 people click through and watched our services online. It was great! But it was intentional. I encourage everyone to be intentional as you work to expand the Kingdom.

I have been playing around a lot the past few days with the AppleTV. It is really amazing if you think about it. Today I had it playing worship music while the screensaver feature showed pictures from Flickr of our recent family ski trip (or snowboarding trip if you ask the boys). It is cool how it connects right to Flickr and gets the photos I had uploaded with ease. Twice this week we rented movies on it. One in SD and the other in HD. Both started right away and looked great. On the HD rental about 30 minutes before the end, one of my sons started a huge download on his laptop and that caused the movie to buffer for a second. We quickly remedied that situation New rule: No one goes on their laptops when we were renting HD movies on AppleTV.

We are testing the AppleTV as a way to deliver our weekend services to places all over the world in a quick timeframe. I am trying to figure out as much about it as I can so that if anything goes wrong we can be quick to correct it. So far so good!