So, Catalyst says, "Lanny would you do a video blog for us"....I say.."sure, what do you want me to talk about?" they say, "We don't care, anything you want." So i go down to my basement and turn on my super small HD handheld camera on a little spider tripod and pick up all my gadgets and show you stuff that's in my closet that probably isn't in yours. If this doesn't enhance your overall spiritual life, then ...wow...what could?

7 DAYS OF SERVOLUTION is like ONE PRAYER for serving others.

Dino Rizzo at Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge is partnering with nearly 100 other churches around the US to serve their local communities over an intense 7 days of concerted effort.

Dino will be interviewed Live today at 1PM EST here: http://servolution.org/live/

SWEET! BE THERE! GO CHURCH!

this is huge.

If you're on twitter, you probably don't know about the twitter feature: favorites. It's for you to flag your favorite tweets (from any user) and look at them later.

Unfortunately, no one seems to use this feature. Maybe it's not useful in its current form - but one of the cool things about Twitter is that members are constantly coming up with new applications and conventions (like using RT to retweet, and hashtags).

Therefore, I propose that we all start using the "favorites" feature to flag our favorite tweets. And someone needs to come-up with an application that will aggregate all of our favorite tweets onto one page, including some kind of ranking system that will bubble up the tweets that were favorited multiple times.

Until then, here's a link to our favorites page. (yes, they're all from us -- I needed some favorite tweets fast).

Or see below:

NewSpring sharing their communication guidelines: http://bit.ly/RO918 

yet another list of twitter apps! http://is.gd/j9Xz is there no end? 

!!! - What Matt Chandler said at the SBC conference in Jacksonville: http://sbcvoices.com/we-wan... - !!! 

Not revealing the entire speaker roster yet. Still working to finalize. Will be revealing the full speaker lineup with a special webcast in March. Stay tuned for that.

But for now, one confirmed speaker for Catalyst in October I want to highlight is Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva. Kiva is an amazing organization. If you are not aware of Kiva and their work, visit their website and check it out. It is the most innovative approach to connecting people to projects and donors to causes that we have run across. It allows for individuals all over the world to connect directly with entrepreneurs in third world countries and provide them small loans- loans that go a long way in helping lift them out of poverty. Over 60 million dollars have been “loaned” over the last year through the microfinancing system that Kiva has set up. 

Jessica is a young leader making a difference for hundreds of thousands of people around the world. She is a Catalyst. We’ve been inspired by her and her story, and can’t wait to introduce her to the Catalyst community in October in Atlanta.

Pastor Phil Pike recently blogged about the alarming stats of burn-out among pastors.

here are some:

• 80% of pastors believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastor’s children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.
• 90% of pastors feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the demands of ministry.
• 80% of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
• 85% of pastors said their greatest struggle is dealing with problem people such as disgruntled members, elders, deacons, worship leaders, worship teams, board members, and associate pastors.
• 90% said the ministry was completely different than what they thought it would be before they began.
• 80% of pastors’ wives wish their spouse would choose another profession.
• 70% of pastors constantly fight depression.

In light of Anne Jackson's recent book on burn-out in ministry - could it be that we have unrealistic expectations of our pastors? Could it be that we're forcing them to bear too much weight - requiring them to be super holy and professional, witty, intelligent, please everyone, etc? Perhaps if we took some of their load and more evenly distributed it among the other members of the body our pastors wouldn't be so overwhelmed and burning out?

In this Q TALK, Rick McKinley shares some of his thoughts on empowering the body of Christ to do things differently than we have in the past, to reach more people.