Steve Lavey | 20 Million Minutes

Global…..Cooling? May 11, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Methods & Strategies, Adaptive Reuse, Energy Efficiency, Sustainability , add a comment

This past April, the USA had an average temperature of 51 degrees, which was one of the coolest in the last 114 years — where is the global warming? Look at the data here.

Which Choice Do You Make? Food or Fuel? April 25, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Methods & Strategies, The Cultural Conversation, Entrepreneuring, Sustainability , 1 comment so far

Look at this article and then reflect on which choice you would make — it is obvious what choice Al Gore would make but what would you do if you were the country’s policymaker?

NEW YORK SUN – The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels. With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food. “I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels. Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.” “We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.” Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects.

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.” Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.” Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis, according to his spokeswoman. A spokesman for Mr. Gore’s public campaign to address climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, declined to comment for this article. (more…)

Are you part of an Expeditionary Force? April 20, 2008

Posted by Steve in : The City, Breaking News, Church, Urban Church, Methods & Strategies, Missional, The Cultural Conversation, DifferenceMakers, Culture and Faith, Faith at Work , add a comment

The Missional Challenge has an excellent article about the local church becoming a Expeditionary Force in the city — take a read…..

Dr. Ray Bakke describes the church as an expeditionary force in The Urban Christian (1987). He views Christians as ministers to their worlds of relationships. For example, a banker who is a Christian doesn’t simply serve at his church by teaching Sunday School or being on the Finance Committee. Instead, he would “identify a mission within the bank, perhaps running a Bible Study with his colleagues or even planning resources to help build up neglected neighborhoods.” (p 132)

Bakke sees several advantages to an urban church which sees itself as an Expeditionary Force, emphasizing its role to “go” on mission into the city:

It legitimizes the call to lay mission

It reaches more widely and follows the urban twenty-four-hour clock

It fulfills the need of specialized urban people to affirm their personal vocations as their ministry

“In this model the pastoral task is to help these members identify, plan for and equip themselves for their diverse ministry opportunities.” (p 132)

Where are you in your vocation as a missionary force?

Can you imagine the missionary force that could be released in every town and neighborhood in America if local churches would begin to see themselves as an expeditionary force? <MORE>

Willow To Eliminate Mid-Week Service April 17, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Chicago, Breaking News, Sunday Services, Church, Urban Church, Methods & Strategies, The Cultural Conversation, Culture and Faith , add a comment

(Christianity Today.com) For three decades Willow has been focused on making the church appealing to seekers. But its detailed and thorough research (summarized in their new book REVEAL) shows that it’s the mature believers that drive everything in the church—including evangelism. Greg Hawkins, the Executive Pastor says, “We used to think you can’t upset a seeker. But while focusing on that we’ve really upset the Christ-centered people.” He spoke about the high levels of dissatisfaction mature believer have with churches. Drawing from the 200 churches and the 57,000 people that have taken the survey, he said that most people are leaving the church because they’re not being challenged enough. Because it’s the mature Christians who drive evangelism in the church Hawkins says, “Our strategy to reach seekers is now about focusing on the mature believers. This is a huge shift for Willow.”

One major implementation of this shift will occur in June when Willow ends their mid-week worship services that had been geared toward believers. Instead the church will morph these mid-week events into classes for people at different stages of growth. There will be theological and bible classes full of “hard-hitting stuff.” Hawkins said most people are very enthusiastic about the change.

On the seeker end of the spectrum, Willow is also changing how they produce their weekend services. For years the value people appreciated most about the seeker-oriented weekend services was anonymity. This is what all their research showed. People didn’t want to be identified, approached, confronted, or asked to do anything. But those days are over. “Anonymity is not the driving value for seeker services anymore,” says Hawkins. “We’ve taken anonymity and shot it in the head. It’s dead. Gone.” In the past Willow believed that seekers didn’t want large doses of the Bible or deep worship music. They didn’t want to be challenged. Now their seeker-sensitive services are loaded with worship music, prayer, Scripture readings, and more challenging teaching from the Bible.

Willow has been wrestling with the research from REVEAL since 2004. Hawkins said, “We’ve tried incremental changes for four years, but now we know we have to overhaul our whole strategy.” Small steps are no longer the method; Willow is revamping everything. “It would be malpractice for us to not do something with what we’re learning.”

In the larger REVEAL survey taken by 200 churches, people were asked what they want most from their church. Three of the top four responses were:

1. Help me understand the Bible in greater depth
2. Help me develop a closer personal relationship with Christ
3. Challenge me to grow and take the next step in my faith

Hawkins said that sometimes Willow gets accused of managing the church based on market research; of simply giving people what they want. “Look at what they want!” he said while pointing to the screen. “They want the Bible, they want to be close to Christ, they want to be challenged. Yes, we will give them what they want!”

15,000+ visitors April 16, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Methods & Strategies, The Cultural Conversation, Culture and Faith , add a comment

Today , I surpassed 15,000 visitors to my blog (since I installed my NEO counter more than a year ago). What are all these people doing coming to my blog? What do they find interesting? The most amazing thing to me is that those visitors come from more than 129 countries. The largest visitor groups hail from:

USA 11,648

Canada 514

United Kingdom 502

Germany 234

France 220

Australia 185

Brazile 102

Cote D’Ivoire 66

The most interesting visitors hail from:

Burkina Faso 20

Kenya 16

Iran 13

Iraq 6

Guinea 4

Rwanda 4

Idol: Shout to the Lord? Wow! April 12, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Powerful Passages, The Cultural Conversation, The Arts in the City, Music That Moves, Culture and Faith , 3comments

For the millions that watched this week, the American Idol Gives Back show ended surprisingly with the globally popular worship song “Shout to the Lord” by Darlene Zschech.

I’m sure you’ve seen all the blog uproar over this issue. Evangelicals on a blog raised the roof with the producer’s decision to downplay its “Jesus” message by replacing the word “Jesus” with the word “Shepherd” in the first line, contending that the deletion of Jesus eliminated it from being a Christian song in its entirety. (The next night, they sang the song again — this time with the original wording.)I didn’t think too much of it when I first heard it, assuming that, as usual, the entertainment powers had cut it out — I was more surprised that Hillsong would allow it (they didn’t).

But I came across this excellent post by Josh Harris, that has several comments from entertainment insiders who are Christians and the impact this small song has on all the Hollywood types — -check it out. It changed my perspective on the matter, prompted me to pray for all those hard-working brothers and sisters in Hollywood and really challenged me about integrating my faith into the culture I am in.

Hey all you “culture and faith” folks out there, what do you think? Is this a step for Hollywood or a debacle for Christian songs? Please comment and let’s engage on this topic.

Bono to Visit Park Building April 1, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News , 1 comment so far

Appararently, Bono is coming to Chicago later this week for some meetings with folks in the Mayor’s administration about affordable housing and adaptive reuse of existing structures, and he is a big fan of warehouse redevelopment so he is going to visit.

Check out his itinerary here

Crosby Update and Work Days March 31, 2008

Posted by Steve in : The City, Breaking News, Inside Park, Adaptive Reuse, Church Construction, Missional, The Cultural Conversation , add a comment

Finally — after many delays, we are GOING TO PULL AUDIO-VIDEO wire this Saturday (woo Hoo!) as we gear up each weekend in April to get all of our audio/video stuf installed. It is starting to get real exciting!

Crosby Work Days

Crosby Work Days are back in full swing as we are counting down the days to opening our new ministry center at 1001 N. Crosby. Volunteers have already done a great job helping us paint the garage, and this Saturday, April 5, we need 20-25 volunteers to help with wire pulling throughout the day from 8 AM-6 PM. Come on out all you home renovators and construction-types and be part of this historic time! Please register to volunteer so we can plan accordingly.

Additional work days will be held on April 12 & 13, April 19 & 20 and April 26 & 27. Work times will be from 8 AM-6 PM on Saturdays and 1-5 PM on Sundays.

Check out the photos below:

Third Floor Worship Center Lobby With

HUGE windows looking on onto Crosby

Stage and Catwalk are coming along nicely

Can You see the boxes for the sub-woofer on the open stage area?

The Chicago brick is being put up and the greystone tile is coming next — It

is so cool to live in Chicago!

All the platforms are almost done for the permanent 517 seats on the tiers.

The Sustainable House March 25, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Adaptive Reuse, Energy Efficiency, Sustainability , add a comment

I am a big fan of using the sun and wind as energy sources rather than paying the local utility, and working to create a sustainable house. I love to imagine what one of these “energy-free” houses would be like and I think I found one in Enertia. I saw them tonight on the Science Channel.

In the Enertia Building System, solid Energy-Engineered wood walls replace siding, framing, insulation, and paneling. An air flow and access channel, or Envelope, runs around the building, just inside the walls - creating a miniature biosphere. Here solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house, storing it in the massive wood walls. Thermal inertia causes the house to “float” between the cycles of night and day, and even between the seasons.

Many aspects of the Enertia® House are unusual and innovative - but backed up by science, common-sense, and prototype homes across America. In fact, each aspect listed below increases the energy efficiency of the building. The effect is Synergistic - equal to more than the sum of the parts. The Enertia® House can make more energy than it uses!

What do you think? I love this idea. Could you do one of these in Chicago?

Wow! Stock down 99% in 16 days– How Was Your Week? March 16, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News , add a comment

Just four days after Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz assured Wall Street that his company was not in trouble, he was forced on Sunday to sell the investment bank to competitor JPMorgan Chase for a bargain-basement price of $2 a share, or $236.2 million. The stunning last-minute buyout was aimed at averting a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and a spreading crisis of confidence in the global financial system sparked by the collapse in the subprime mortgage market. Bear Stearns was the most exposed to risky bets on the loans; it is now the first major bank to be undone by that market’s collapse.

JPMorgan’s just announced acquisition of Bear Stearns for a bargain- basement price of $2 a share, or $236.2 million. represents roughly 1 percent of what the investment bank was worth just 16 days ago. It marked a 93.3 percent discount to Bear Stearns’ market capitalization as of Friday, and roughly a 98.8 percent discount to its book value as of Feb. 29. In January 2007, Bear Stearns traded at $171/share, with a nearly $23 billion market capitalization. SO HOW WAS YOUR WEEK? Wow, I am shocked — Alan Schwartz presided over the loss of 99% of value in a month…..

“The past week has been an incredibly difficult time for Bear Stearns,” Schwartz said in a statement. “This represents the best outcome for all of our constituencies based upon the current circumstances.”

Trek Founder Passes Away at 73 March 14, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Tour De France, Breaking News, Cycling , add a comment

The sport of cycling has lost a true pioneer. Richard Burke, a founder of the Trek Bicycle Corporation, which capitalized on the luster of Lance Armstrong’s victories in the Tour de France to reshape the way top-of-the-line bikes are manufactured, died Monday in Milwaukee at 73.

It was on a $6,500 carbon-fiber Model 5500 bike built by Trek that Mr. Armstrong won his first Tour de France in 1999, the first of his seven straight Tour titles. With that, Trek became the first American bike company to win the Tour and the first to build a carbon-fiber bike that won the Tour,” John Bradley, a senior editor and the cycling expert at Outside magazine, said Wednesday. “It was a watershed moment.”Racing bikes must be as light and stiff as possible. Before being made of carbon fiber, which has the best stiffness-to-weight ratio, the bikes were made of steel, titanium or aluminum. (more…)

White Label YouTube? March 7, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News , add a comment

Word is that Google is preparing to announce a new “white label” video hosting service that would let Web publishers use YouTube’s video infrastructure to run their own video sites. How would this work? Don’t know, but here’s a guess: Instead of going to YouTube to upload videos, people would be able to upload videos directly to Google’s servers through a partner’s site. The publisher wouldn’t lose their user’s attention — or any pageviews — and would be able to sell ads around the videos. YouTube would host the videos, and probably serve ads on the videos.

I-Phone Joins the Suits March 6, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Technology, Tech Tips , add a comment

Apple made a major announcement today – they will begin offering “enterprise” support for the iPhone – meaning direct support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync!

One of the most requested corporate features is support for Exchange, Jobs said. To meet the demand, Apple licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol for connecting the iPhone’s e-mail client directly to an Exchange server. As a result, e-mail, calendaring and contact items can pushed directly to the smartphone, a feature that Apple demonstrated at the event. In addition, Apple will be adding Exchange as an e-mail option on the iPhone, along with Yahoo and Google mail and other options. Apple will build software for easy configuration of the device to an Exchange server.

Apple is currently testing the iPhone enterprise features, including the Exchange support, with Nike and Disney, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide product marketing, said. “It’s real and it’s exciting,” Schiller said of the new technology.With this announcement, Apple has moved with great intentionality to take on the Blackberry by allowing its iPhone to link up to corporate email systems. Until now, the Blackberry has been the preferred gadget of the business community as it allows executives to synchronize Microsoft applications, such as Microsoft Outlook email, contacts and calendar, with the smartphone. Many businesses shied away from using the iPhone as it does not work well with their email systems.

Apple hopes these steps will convince corporations to adopt the iPhone as the device of choice for mobile workers.

Barna — A New Perspective on Unchurched March 6, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Church, Urban Church, Methods & Strategies, Missional, The Cultural Conversation, Internet Resources , add a comment

According to a new study released by The Barna Group, popular measures such as the percentage of people who are “unchurched” - based on attendance at a conventional church service - are out of date. Various new forms of faith community and experience, such as house churches, marketplace ministries and cyberchurches, must be figured into the mix - and make calculating the percentage of Americans who can be counted as “unchurched” more complicated. The fact that millions of people are now involved in multiple faith communities - for instance, attending a conventional church one week, a house church the next, and interacting with an online faith community in-between - has rendered the standard measures of “churched” and “unchurched” much less precise. According to Barna, one way of examining people’s participation in faith communities is by exploring how they practice their corporate faith engagement. Unveiling a new measurement model, Barna identified the following five segments:

Unattached - people who had attended neither a conventional church nor an organic faith community (e.g., house church, simple church, intentional community) during the past year. Some of these people use religious media, but they have had no personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community. This segment represents one out of every (more…)

Now Get 20 Million Minutes By Email! March 6, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Internet Resources, Entrepreneuring , add a comment

Are you flying around all week at work and would rather have any new posts from 20 Million Minutes sent directly to you by email or RSS? After a number of requests, we have now added both of those options to the 20 Million Minutes blog! All of our feeds have been migrated to Feedburner, which provides better options for you.

EMAIL:You can get an email sent to you whenever there is a new post. Just click here to go the the Feedburner feed and put in your email to get 20 Million Minutes delivered by email. Then, whenever a post is made to this blog, you will receive an email, right to your desktop once a day. It is that simple!

RSS FEEDS:

For those of you who are more tech-savvy, and are using a newsreader program to aggregate your information feeds, you can add this manually to your RSS news reader with the following URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevelavey or click here to go to the feed page and just click on the graphic of your new reader for easy, one-touch adding of this feed to any of the popular newsreaders (yahoo, google, newsgator, etc).

PASS IT ON TO YOUR FRIENDS!

If you know of someonethat would like to learn more about the city, faith and culture, church growth strategies, multi-site churches, etc, please pass on this post to them.

Think You Know Chicago? Test Yourself March 5, 2008

Posted by Steve in : The City, Chicago, Breaking News, Urban Church, Chicago Fact, Chicago Photo , add a comment

As you most know, I love Chicago and everything about it. I found a great new show on our local PBS station WTTW, called Hidden Chicago, where Geoffrey Baer takes you all over the Chicago region in search of often-overlooked fragments of our city’s history. Many are in places you pass by every day. But when you learn their hidden stories you’re sure to say “I never knew that!”.

Leave a comment and tell us your favorite hidden chicago tidbit……

Test Your Own Knowledge of Hidden Chicago:

Q: Where will you find an actual ticket booth from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893?

A: In the back yard of a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Oak Park. It was moved there after the fair for use as a children’s playhouse and later became a garden shed.

Q: Where is the monument that Benito Mussolini gave to Chicago?

A: Along the Lakefront - just east of Soldier Field on the site of the 1933 World’s Fair. It’s a 2000 year old Roman column commemorating the arrival at the fair of a fleet of Italian seaplanes under the command of General Italo Balbo.

Q: Is there really a cowpath among the skyscrapers in the Loop?

A: There were no cows living in the loop when the highrise building at 100 W. Monroe was constructed in 1928. But a passageway through the building was left open anyway because the deed required it. It was part of a strip of land that a farmer named William Jones retained for his use when he sold this land in 1840. According to newspaper accounts Jones wanted to be sure he still had a way to walk his cows to pasture. It’s behind black metal doors and not open to the public.

Q: What’s that metal blob hiding in the bushes behind the Chicago History Museum at North and Clark?

A: It’s all that’s left of a storefront that melted in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Q: Where was the first movie version of “The Wizard of Oz” filmed?

A: At Selig Studios located at the corner of Byron and Claremont (map) on Chicago’s North Side. The yellow brick structure is now used for condominiums. Chicago was the silent movie capital of America before the industry moved to Hollywood. Another studio, Essanay is also still standing. Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson and others worked there. It’s now St. Augustine College in the Uptown neighborhood.

Q: Why is there a mural behind the clutter in the manager’s office at Meyer’s Ace Hardware in Bronzeville?

A: This building once housed one of Louis Armstrong’s favorite jazz clubs, the Sunset Café. The mural decorated the back wall of the stage, which is now the store manager’s office.o

Get Rid of Those Catalogs — Easily March 5, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Adaptive Reuse, Internet Resources, Culture and Faith , 2comments

My wife and I are studying “Restoring Margin in our Overloaded Lives” in our small group study and what a time a personal reflection — we are looking at all the things that barrage and steal away our time and our attention.

Sue got wind of this site that let’s you opt out of catalogs you receive in your mail almost every day. CatalogChoice.org is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox so use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.

Who They Are

Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.

Their mission

The mission of Catalog Choice is to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings, and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. We aim to accomplish this by freely providing the Catalog Choice services to both consumers and businesses. Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs. If you can believe it, the Catalog Choice community has already opted out of 8,072,914 catalogs, improving their lives, and conserving our planet’s natural resources!

Background on Catalog Shippers

While catalog shopping may provide some environmental benefits, the millions of unwanted catalogs Americans receive in their mailbox represent a significant environmental burden, devouring natural resources, generating pollutants, and clogging municipal waste systems—for something that quickly ends up in the trash or recycling bin. While catalog companies make it easy to receive a catalog, consumers frequently find it frustrating and time consuming to get their names off these mailing lists, especially when they receive catalogs from multiple direct mailers. The industry mails more than 19 billion catalogs a year to Americans—approximately 170 catalogs for every U.S. household !

Do it NOW - Clean out your mailbox! Click HERE

Park Community Church on Comcast March 4, 2008

Posted by Steve in : The City, Chicago, Breaking News, Inside Park, The Cultural Conversation, The Arts in the City, Culture and Faith , add a comment

Check out FAITH TODAY’s preview of a 10 minutes piece on Park Community Church its growing impact on the city that is playing on Comcast On Demand.

older posts »

Steve Lavey | 20 Million Minutes

Global…..Cooling? May 11, 2008

Which Choice Do You Make? Food or Fuel? April 25, 2008

Are you part of an Expeditionary Force? April 20, 2008

Willow To Eliminate Mid-Week Service April 17, 2008

15,000+ visitors April 16, 2008

Idol: Shout to the Lord? Wow! April 12, 2008

Bono to Visit Park Building April 1, 2008

Crosby Update and Work Days March 31, 2008

The Sustainable House March 25, 2008

Wow! Stock down 99% in 16 days– How Was Your Week? March 16, 2008

Trek Founder Passes Away at 73 March 14, 2008

White Label YouTube? March 7, 2008

I-Phone Joins the Suits March 6, 2008

Barna — A New Perspective on Unchurched March 6, 2008

Now Get 20 Million Minutes By Email! March 6, 2008

Think You Know Chicago? Test Yourself March 5, 2008

Get Rid of Those Catalogs — Easily March 5, 2008

Who They Are

Their mission

Background on Catalog Shippers

Park Community Church on Comcast March 4, 2008

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