My Scott Distler playlist

Following up on the last post, here is my Scott Distler playlist...

The Hope of the World, September 5, 2004

Let's Dream Big, Sunday, October 31, 2004

Mortgage Burning, Sunday, April 23, 2006

The Need for Connection (part 1), October 22, 2006

Pastor Appreciation Month

October has been designated as Pastor Appreciation Month and one of many things I appreciate about my Pastor and boss, Scott, is his passion for the ministry of the universal church. I figured this picture was a fair rebuttal to the grandma photo of me that he posted last week. Through the two plus years that we've served together, a couple of the messages he's preached have really resonated with me and the mini-library is growing. A couple of times a year he feels led to speak on and exegete scripture's definition of the role of the church, its foundation, its purpose and how it applies to us today. Maybe it's just my ears, my observations, but he seems to find a different gear when he discusses the role of the church. Like Scott, I'm passionate about the local church.

Since birth, my life have been intertwined with the local church. My Dad served an Assistant Pastor during the first 3-4 years of my life and for the 22 years following that, my parents served as church planting missionaries. I went to Bible College because I knew I wanted a Biblical education as my foundation before pursuing anything else. One of the courses in my studies devoted an entire semester to understanding what scripture says about the local church and from the first day to the last, the study hit a nerve. Even with all of that background and involvement with the local church, at the end of college, I still had no clue as to where God was going to lead me. Out of the blue, the local church I had attended for the previous two years, offered me an administrative position and I've been serving in the local church ever since.

The thing I appreciate about Pastor Scott's messages on the local church is his ability to capture what I believe "with every fiber of my being" and communicate them in easy to understand terms. And I appreciate his enthusiasm and passion, it gets me fired up to get back to work! I find the messages so inspirational, I listen to them often to remind me of our focus, to rekindle my passion, to lift me up and to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Tomorrow, I'll share my Scott Distler playlist.

Just 7 Short

In case you missed it, I made Scott's blog yesterday. I should note that I chose that particular hat on my own without any persuasion or influence - the game may have been more interesting if we were forced to wear particular hats, but we weren't - freedom of choice.

What's really interesting is that yesterday's entry on Scott's blog fell 7 visits short of setting the all-time high mark for visits to his blog in one day. Apparently people like to see me in funny hats.

I've become adept at hiding aspects of my personality. In college, most thought I was a 4.0 student and a brainiac - mostly because I wore glasses and carried a notebook computer with me to class. What they didn't know is that when Dr. Ceperley would go on tangents about the Tohu and Bohu as we studied Genesis, I'd start playing Tetris. Not the best game, but it's what my computer could handle at the time while allowing to quickly switch back to notetaking. Oh, and the truth is, my undergrad GPA was more in the 2.0-3.0 range.

Being a Business Manager does help matters as the title and position carry a stigma of being the gestapo, the person who declines requests, says no and doesn't know how to have fun. In the past several months, I've had co-workers tell me that they didn't think I'd find the humor in the funny email that was being passed around. And at another time a different co-worker exclaimed, "I didn't know you knew how to have fun!"

I'm having fun, may be more fun than you realize.

Emergency 911 at Grace Church

On Sunday a person collapsed during the middle of the worship service. The congregation was standing singing the first several verses of How Great Thou Art when I noticed Matt running toward the back of the Auditorium a few aisles over from where I was seated. I instantly figured something was wrong. I proceeded to leave my seat to make sure appropriate help was being given and if there was anything I could contribute. Since I happened to be sitting in front of an attender who works in the medical field I grabbed them by the arm (yes, I literally grabbed them and pulled them down the aisle, not sure why, but I did) and pointed them to the person in distress. While it was clear plenty of medical attention was being given to the individual, I went to make sure 911 was being called. I then waited in the driveway to meet the EMTs, with so many different entrances to our facility, we like to help them quickly identify where they need to go.

Back in the Auditorium, the service was proceeding as normal. We don't draw attention to these kinds of situations for the most part - so long as the individuals are getting appropriate care, there's not much else we can do, but keep worshipping. When the medical staff have had a chance to assess the situation and feel the patient is stabilized, they usually try to move them out of the Auditorium as quickly and discreetly as possible. This past incident, that wasn't possible, so care continued while we awaited the EMTs.

The EMTs arrived just as Pastor Scott was beginning his message. You may have wondered why he read so many verses in the scripture reading during the service, it was partly to give the EMTs time to move the patient out of the room without attracting any more attention. Before long, the patient was on their way to the hospital for further treatment and care. I'm happy to report they are recovering and they aren't experiencing anything life threatening.

We're blessed at Grace with a good number of attenders who are medical professionals who have loved ones and friends who have an amazing ability to summon them in a moments notice when medical emergencies occur. As the EMTs wheeled the patient out of the Auditorium this past week, I counted something like eight Grace attenders who had been caring for the patient while they waited for the ambulance. Our response and systems will always benefit from improvement, but by the grace of God in each emergency that's occurred to date... medical professionals have reached the patient within seconds to begin care, the injured received appropriate first aid and each patient has made a full recovery.

Lititz/Warwick Joint Strategic Plan

Last week the Lititz/Warwick joint comprehensive strategic plan updated the public on their work and the status of the plan and what they've accomplished so far. It's a guide that both Lititz Borough and Warwick Township use in the direction of the area, roughly in five year increments; the plan was last updated in 1999. Many of the advancements we have experienced in the region can been traced back to components of the plan where through various studies and analysis, needs were identified and decisions were made to address issues in a cooperative effort. The Warwick Recreation Commission is a prime example of one of the things that came directly from the strategic plan. So as they've looked at the next 5 years, it should be of interest to us to see where our community is headed and what role we can play as a church in helping them further their causes.

Churches can often be viewed as merely resource consumers in a community since they are tax exempt organizations and don't contribute to the economics of a region. That however is a gross misconception when you consider all the resources that churches contribute to a community and I think it's one of the areas in which Grace Church excels. When you think about our daycare with over 100 children and our K-12 Christian school with just under 300 children; those are all kids that were we not in existence, the community would have to be providing services for them in some way, shape or form. It would be close to 300 more school students that the school district would have to be able to absorb... things of that nature. Of course, there's also the religious services that we provide and the counseling, the benevolence, of course the use of our facility. We have many outside groups that use our facility on a regular basis.

So we are an integral part to the community and therefore we want to be in line with the strategies and goals that the community is setting and trying to partner with them to meet the needs that they've identified. What was interesting from last week's meeting was they've had great success with the recreation initiatives that they identified in 1999 and that's coming together well. That's an area where, because of the resources we have, Grace Church needs to be a player. To date, we've participated. I was on the initial committee that explored how that recreation commission would be set up. I think we need to look seriously at becoming a partner now that it has been created and having representation on the group and again, partnering with them through that commission. With that success, they are now looking to build on that from a social perspective and looking to create a committee to follow the same path in regards to the social activities in the region. Again, this is an area that we are already providing services and I think it would be very wise for us to have involvement and partner with them as they look to now coordinate and facilitate in that arena.

There wasn't anything really groundbreaking on the land development side. They are firmly committed to preserving the agricultural heritage of the region and therefore are not making changes to open the floodgate for serious amounts of growth and development. That's an issue that impacts our future, particularly since Grace Church's location is just outside the urban growth boundary. It's also important because the main tract of the Grace Church property is in a residential zone and our secondary property is in agricultural zone. We understand the concerns that the region has for preserving the agricultural heritage. We support it and so we're looking to partner with them on how that desire can be aligned with what we anticipate to be our future growth. There's many other elements to the plan, not a whole lot of things that interested me, but it is significant enough that either due to our interest in Grace Church or our involvement in the community as residents of Warwick Twp and Lititz Borough, we need to participate in this process. On Monday, December 4, at 7 pm at the Warwick Middle School is the next formal meeting regarding the document and the plan. It will be a public hearing where the public can make comments. I would encourage all of us to attend and to participate.

Lititz/Warwick Joint Strategic Plan website

A Picture Directory with No Pictures

Hopefully, you're experience with this year's Picture Directory has been favorable, but the reports I'm receiving indicate that a lot, if not the majority of people at Grace have had less than favorable experiences. It's unfortunate and worthy of some explanation.

After using the same directory company for years (maybe even the history of the church) I decided to look at some other companies for two reasons. First, I had heard some reports of dissatisfaction with the way families had been organized for their picture, that the quality wasn't good. Second, the company's approach required a tremendous amount of administrative support by volunteers and paid staff.

We looked at several companies and checked references before selecting the company that we've used this year. While everything came back positive, our experience has been the complete opposite.

Here's where we are today... I spoke with the Vice President of the Church Directory division yesterday, outlining each of the problems and frustrations we've encountered. I explained to him that we're completely dissatisfied and asked him to do whatever it take to correct the problem. He assured me that our experience is not the way they like to do business, and that he was unaware of the problems we've been having. He said he needed to investigate the issues I reported, after which he would return my call with a plan of action to turn things around.

While to date, the company has not delivered the product and services they advertised, I feel terrible about the frustration and inconvinience they created for those whom I serve. For that I apologize. I will keep you posted on how the project progresses.

New Posting Time

Did you notice the new posting time? It's now 8:10. As promised, I said I would change the posting time depending on the outcome of our game night. In actuality, I'm being gracious. Due to darkness our last gamenight was called after only 2 games with the guys having won 1 game and gals having won 1 game - we simply were too tired to play a tie-break. When deferring to the aggregate scores of the two games, the guys were outscored (but to my knowledge that's never been an official determinant of a winner in this league). In any event, our lowest game score was 810, thus the new posting time.

An iPod, a Time Share and a Picture Directory

What are all things you can get "for free"?

I like to get things for free and am often willing to endure things I generally consider unpleasant for the sake of receiving a "free" item. I recently was offered a free iPod Shuffle if I participated in a 1-hour software demonstration. Since the software was mildly of interest to me, I decided I could afford to give up an hour and getting a Shuffle was a bonus incentive. No harm, no foul and I'm hip with today's youth with my iPod (though Apple just released new versions which make mine out-of-date).

For vacations, my wife and I have found Time Shares to be a frugal way to get out of town for a week at minimal costs. Oh, we don't own one, but friends of ours do and offer to let us take advantage of the extra vacations. But at each time share, we're offered a morning-long sales pitch for which the resort will give us free stuff (a round of golf, a dinner or something like that).

At Grace, we're about two-thirds of the way through getting pictures taken for the church pictorial directory. The picture directory is another "free" deal. Get your picture taken and you get your picture in the directory and a free copy of that photo. But in exchange you have to sit through the sales pitch designed to get you to buy even more pictures.

With the church picture directory, I'm guessing that most of us aren't interested in buying the pictures. We simply have our pictures taken to participate in the directory. I'm trying to get statistics from the directory to test my assumption, but I'm pretty sure that's what I'm going to discover. But are we really being fair to the sales people who are trying to make a living based on selling us pictures? I'm finding the picture directory experience to be more and more awkward. I feel like I'm taking advantage of these people, even though their company made the initial offer of get a picture for free, they're assuming that we won't settle for the minimum offer and that they'll actually make some money off of us.

All that to say, I think this may be the last picture directory we do at Grace in this format. I wonder if others find it as awkward an experience as I do.

Security dilemma

Securing a church facility which includes daycare and school ministries is extra challenging in our times. Daycares and schools across the country have increased security in light of Columbine and the other tragedies that have occurred over the past decade. It's not uncommon to find such facilities in a lock-down mode with no open access to the public. In a day when we have to anticipate minors not responding to conflict appropriately, when we have to anticipate child-custody issues, when we have to acknowledge the sensitivity of private information in the information age... all things that are inherent with daycare/school ministries.

At the same time, churches have played a safe-haven role in the community... a place where anyone can go for help, a place were anyone can seek, to a certain extent, asylum, a place worshippers call their church and can go anytime.

It seems these two paths are on a collision course, if they haven't collided already. At Grace we introduced new daytime security measures last spring and we're hoping to introduce further improvements in the next month or so. Our biggest dilemma has been trying to navigate these two forces: the security needs of our daycare/school ministry and the open-access needs of the church.

We had reached a concept of keeping the main lobby an open access area, meanwhile isolating it from the rest of the facility. The downside to the concept is that it would create obstructions in the main hallway, obstructions that I fear would negatively impact people flow on Sundays. The traffic flow on Sundays is of great concern to me. We have a lot of people moving about our building between services and I find it challenging to get from one end of the building to another - it's like the Christmas shopping season, it's so crowded. Putting doors across our main hallway just doesn't seem like a good idea with the volume we already have.

But not to obstruct the hallway means that open-access to the building will be sacrificed. I don't like that, but I'm struggling to find another solution. Instead of being able to walk in the church doors, the entrance will be monitored with a intercom/bell-type system where the receptionist will have to buzz people in. Remember, this is for business hours only. On Sundays the doors would all be open.

That's where my thinking is right now. It's a dilemma. I'm torn between giving up the open-access and obstructing the hallway traffic flow.

Reimbursements and internal controls

I inherited an accounting department with strong internal controls and I've benefited greatly from it. I applaud Tom for his efforts to get our church to that level. But I'm constantly pressed to make exceptions and to loosen the controls for the sake of convenience. It can be tough to hold the line when you see ministries having to go through what seems like laborious paths to achieve a simple destination, but when I hear of stories of the person who received some $35,000 in fraudulent mileage reimbursements it affirms our hard-lined approach. The internal controls are not a nuisance, they're a protection. And while they protect the church, they also in a large way, protect the individuals, even though they don't always recognize it.

They're back!

It's the beginning of day 4 of the 2006-2007 school year; the students returned on Monday. The building is abuzz once again with activity, school bells, and lots of activity. It seems a lot of people assume that I resent the return of the school year as they ask questions like, "Did you miss us?", "Don't you wish the building was still empty and quiet?" It's actually the opposite, in some ways, I wish the summer break wasn't so long.

See from my perspective when the building is empty for 16 straight weeks, we cram to get all sorts of projects accomplished before school begins in the fall. While it's a logical response, it makes for crazy and hectic summers. So in many respects I look forward to the return of school because with it comes a more normal routine.

And most important, the daycare and school represent between a third to half of the lives our entire ministry impacts on a weekly basis. They are a big part of our ministry and key reason as to why I'm here.

AFF - The Draft

It's the return of our Adult Football Fellowship (AFF), kicking off the first week of September. We convened for our annual pre-AFF organizational meeting last Sunday (aka the Fantasy Football draft) to set our teams for this coming season.

I meant to look for some articles online to help me improve my draft selections (I'm notorious for having a very weak draft strategy), but I ran out of time. Inspite of the lack of external help, I think I ended up with a half-decent team this year. This format for year's league, The Pulled-Pork League, is each team will play 4-Quarterbacks, 4-Running backs and 4-Wide receivers each week (a non-traditional format). By the luck of the draw, I had the first pick with which I selected Peyton Manning. My team rost includes:

Peyton Manning
Matt Hasselback
Trent Green
Drew Bledsoe
Byron Leftwich
Tiki Barber
Steven Jackson
Reggie Bush
Brian Westbrook
Kevin Jones
Larry Fitzgerald
Roy Williams
Deion Branch
Darrell Jackson
Derrick Mason

Side note: My SpeedRacer team has been in first place for several consecutive weeks, but has slumped as of late dropping into second place in the Grace Racers NASCAR fantasy league.

The guy in the blue shirt

What I learned at last week's Twp mtg

I was at last Wednesday night's (8/23) Warwick Township Planning Commission meeting and I learned some interesting things. Since the meeting is a matter of public record, what I'm sharing isn't private info. So here's what I learned...

A Turkey Hill gas station is planned to be built on Newport Road near entrance to the Newport Square development.

Turkey Hill is actually owned by Kroger.

With the high price of gas, gas stations are seeing a huge increase in drive-offs.

The gas stations make a ton of money off of the cold drinks they sell, so much so that in designing gas stations the aim is to fit as many refrigerated units in the store as possible.

Because the new gas station will be nestled in a residential area, the planning commission was concerned that the station wouldn't be lit up like other large gas station complexes that can be seen from outer-space.

While to some sitting through a plan review discussion like this that took about 45 minutes may seem a bore, I learned information that fascinated me and I enjoyed watching our local government at work. I continue to be impressed with the organization in Warwick Township and their commitment to excellence.

A blog year in review

Administering Grace was launched August 18, 2005, just over a year ago and I thought you'd enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at the behind-the-scenes blog.

I've posted 133 entries in the past year.
The two entries that generated the post comments were:
Grace Church Video Phone System on March 2
The Sword-Wielding Pastor on March 6

An average of 14 people check the blog each day, a blog-record 51 checked it on January 9. If I were all about numbers I'd keep posting on topics like last Friday's because that generated a lot more hits that usual - 46 today as compared with 20 hits last Monday.

An average of 94 people check the blog on a weekly basis with a monthly average of 378.

The highest percentage of readers visit the blog between 9 and 10 a.m. and Monday is the day when people read the most.

While read predominantly by people in the United States, the blog has attracted readers from Canada, The Netherlands, Japan, India, The Russian Federation, Philippines, France and Australia.

Inspite of my recommendation, the vast majority of the readers access the blog through Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Through all of this, hopefully those who are connected with Grace Church on a regular basis have gained a behind-the-scenes insight into why we do some of the things we do at Grace and learned a little bit more about the Business Manager.

$1M Bill

While I am all about confidentiality when it comes to church giving (as I explained yesterday), I couldn't pass up the opportunity to let you see what came through in this week's offering.

Now over my few years of ministry in the church, the offering plate has been a magnet for the unusual. In each instance, I've assumed that the donor, following the New Testament example, was giving of what they had with the purest of motives. It's not uncommon to find foreign currencies representative of multiple nations and in one case we even received a wedding ring. I can promise you that we value each gift and treat it respectfully as the Lord's, regardless of how unusual it might seem.

In the case of the wedding ring, we first were concerned that it may have fallen off the persons finger by chance so our first priority was confirming that it indeed was meant to be an offering to the Lord.

All of that said, I haven't decided what to do with what we received this week...

Hibernation begins next week

If you've read my bio you may have taken note that I play in an over-30 soccer league. It's one of the highlights of my week between the months of April and August each summer.

It's a wonderful league in that the focus is on having fun and not getting injured. The regular mantra among all of the players is "remember we have to go to work tomorrow!" It's a family oriented league too, which means in those rare moments of frustration and expletives start to fly, there's usually one or more teammates that begin yelling, "remember the children, remember the children."

Though April is often a month full of sore muscles which make it difficult to walk, by the time August rolls around, I hate to see the season end. And that's the case this week as it's the last week of the season. I've had a blast (as I always do) playing this year. We don't keep track of wins/losses, but it seems like our team lost more than we won, but we had fun none the less. We had a good combination of teammates who got along well and had fun playing together. To my knowledge, no one's been injured this season that didn't have a pre-existing injury.

For me personally, I continued my streak of scoring at least 1 goal a season, scoring a few weeks ago. Though I'd hope to get playing time in a mid-field position, the team needed me to defend which allowed me to improve my defending skills.

Starting next week, my winter hibernation begins (some call that the NFL), but I'll emerge from the cave once again next April ready to pull the boots on once again for another invigorating season of over-30 soccer.

Giving envelopes - why we use them and how we protect donor information

The main reason we use giving envelopes is to provide donor confidentiality. If you watched the movie Mission Impossible, you can think of the giving envelope numbers as the Grace Church NOC list. If you don't have the list of names and envelope numbers, you have no way of identifying the donor of each giving envelope. The list of donor names and envelopes is a list we keep highly secured. We have one individual designated with handling the list on a regular basis. To serve our donors when troubleshooting giving questions, two staff members can access the list, but we attempt to get the donor's permission before doing so. As they open the giving envelopes and count each week's offering, the members of the Count Team obviously see the information firsthand. Everyone who is involved in handling the finances are required to sign a financial confidentiality agreement. My predecessor, Tom Avey, worked very methodically to set up financial systems and procedures that handle sensitive information in a highly confidential manner and I've worked to maintain those standards.

The second reason we use giving envelopes is to help us track donor contributions for IRS purposes. The IRS requires us to provide donors with receipts of their tax deductible contributions. The envelopes help us keep track of individual donor's accounts and their weekly donations.

If you would like to request numbered giving envelopes so your donations are more confidential and to help us track your giving record, please contact Brenda through the Church Office. Use of numbered giving envelopes is not required, but I do suggest it for higher confidentiality and to assist us with record keeping.

My Review of Open Office

I told you about Open Office back in April and I concluded my testing today.

Since we use Microsoft Office XP, that was my standard of measure; was Open Office capable of doing everything I do with OfficeXP? Let me break it down into the sub-applications: word processing, spreadsheet, etc.

As a word processor, Open Office is just about equal with Microsoft Word. There weren't many features that Open Office couldn't do and it's seamless interfacing with the other programs in Open Office make it a better product in my mind. It's clear that the most time and effort has been spent perfecting the Open Office word processor. In addition, it's great to be able to save files in just about any format you'd need including Word format, and even straight to a PDF.

As a spreadsheet, Open Office was again just about equal to Microsoft Excel. I did find that Open Office did support some of my more elaborate charts that utilized two y-axis, but I only have one of those in all my files so it wasn't a big deal. Open Office had all the formulas I needed and supported everything I wanted to do.

I didn't have a need to try out the other aspects of Open Office, so I can't comment on those.

In general, Open Office is a feature-rich, stable office application platform. Because it is so integrated it does take a while to load, but that's a worthy tradeoff for the synergy you get in return - much better integration than what OfficeXP affords.

In the end, I've decided to wait before making a switch to Open Office for all of our offices here at Grace. It's a definite possibility in the near future, but not something I'm ready to tackle right now. I am using Open Office at home as it's a cost-effective way to have a powerful office application suite on my home computer and it's definitely up to snuff in that arena.

Find out more at openoffice.org

Our greatest expense

I keep up on a blog by former employees of the search engine Google and recently, one of the Xooglers recounted a meeting in which Sergey (one of the co-founders of the company) addressed a group of the employees…

Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.



I found that insightful and wondered what the greatest expense is in the church.