Ryan Hardesty

Finally there has been some rock solid proof for global warming.

At first glance the difference between reacting and responding may not be obvious. If you look a bit deeper into these words you will began to realize that the difference is as far apart as life and death.

When I was young a close family member of mine had severe asthma. Asthma is a respiratory condition marked by spasms in the bronchi of the lungs, causing difficulty in breathing. Her doctor had prescribed her a steroid inhaler and because of the severity of her condition she was required to carry it all times. When she began to have an asthma attack she would use the inhaler to administering the drug suppressing her bronchial spasms and allowing her to breath freely again.

After years of using this method to keep her asthma under control she went to the pharmacy to have her prescription filled. They filled her prescription and she inserted her new cartage into her inhaler and put it back in her purse. The next day she started to have an asthma attack, as she had a thousand times before, she took her inhaler out of her purse, put the inhaler to her lips and inhaled the prescribed drug that the cartage held. This time her lungs did not open back up. Instead they began to close, constricting her breathing even more. The cartage the pharmacy had given her was not what her doctor had prescribed. They had mistakenly given her the wrong drug. Her lungs began to react to the drug by increasing the severity of her attack. She was rushed to the emergency room by ambience arriving in a comatose state. She never woke up.

Instead of her lungs responding to the drug that the pharmacy had given her they reacted. This reaction cost this wonderful, loving person her life.

More often than not we react rather than respond to the situations and opportunities we encounter. If you are reacting to the people around, new information or technologies you are just indulging your emotions, saying and doing what you want rather than what you should.

Understanding that your core values are the ones you have, not the ones you think you should have will help you to keep from reacting and instead will allow you to respond and continue building on the foundations you have already built.

The industrial age has implanted this bigger is better mentality in our culture but does bigger always mean more successful?

In 2006 my wife and I moved from sunny San Diego to Roseburg, Oregon. As soon as we got to Roseburg we began to look for a church, Roseburg is a town of 30,000 people and what seemed like 25,000 churches. I am sure anyone who has ever relocated realizes what I am talking about. It seems like there is a church on every corner and you have no idea what you are getting yourself into until you walk through the doors. It took my wife and I nearly six months before we found a church where we both really felt at home.

If the churches in Roseburg had understood the concept of thinking small it would have saved my wife and I six months of church hopping. Nearly all churches project themselves to be one-size-fits-all but almost none are able to deliver. A church that thinks small is one that will end up with the right people in the pews every time. In the business world this is called having a niche. Thinking big is what keeps most churches small and stagnant.

When my wife and I were in college we began attending a church called Flood. This church was located just down the street from San Diego State and it understood the Think Small concept. This was a church for college students and they had college students attending in the thousands. Their concept was to create an environment where our generation could experience the living God. When you walked into the service it was dark, the kind of lighting that you would find in a downtown club, and the band was playing loud enough that you could sing at the top of your without everyone hearing your “pitchy” worship. Flood was thinking small and the results were amazing. Flood did not have a Sunday morning service but they had three Sunday night services, they didn’t have Sunday School but they would hold special classes lasting a few weeks during one of their services, they did not have a youth group, a nursery, a Wednesday night service, or their own building but what they did have worked.

This thinking small concept is not exclusive to Flood. One of Orange County’s most successful churches is Saddleback, a church of over 50,000 people. They also understand the concept of thinking small. Saddleback has a very small targeted audience, his name is “Saddleback Sam”. This is a character that they have created to help them understand who they are trying to reach as a church. They have every detail of his personality, family and work mapped out. Saddleback Sam is used to keep the churches focus small.

"Saddleback Sam" is a well-educated young urban professional. He is self-satisfied, and comfortable with his life. He likes his job and where he lives. He is affluent, recreation conscious, and prefers the casual and informal over the formal. He is interested in health and fitness, and he thinks he is enjoying life more than 5 years ago, but he is overextended in time and money, and is stressed out. He has some religious background from childhood, but he hasn’t been to church for 15 or 20 years, and he is skeptical of "organized religion." He doesn’t want to be recognized when he comes to church.

Saddleback understands that “Saddleback Sam” is whom they as a church can most effectively reach. Thinking small has helped lead Saddleback to their enormous success and it helped lead their pastor, Rick Warren, to write Purpose Driven Life, one of the most influential books of this decade.

Next time you start to think that creating a one-size-fits-all church is the best way to reach out to your community, remember that sometimes thinking small is the best way to BIG results.

It is not about what you know, it is not even about who you know, it is about who knows you. Today a pop-punk band can be shot to superstardom with the endorsement of a single web developer (see The Plain White Tees and Tom from MySpace). The old rules no longer apply. As I watched this all unfold over the last decade I began to understand what is coming. The increased media has caused us to return to depend on a form of word of mouth that I call Word of Mouse. This is the oldest and the most pure form of marketing and today seems to be the only thing that people trust in this ad-saturated world. So the question is, how do you ignite a rock ‘n’ roll epidemic in the new word of mouse world?

Last week I met with the band Spero Lumina to discuss their upcoming album. Every once in a while you come across a band that you know is going to change the music landscape forever. Will Spero Lumina be the next Nirvana? Maybe or maybe not.

Over a couple hours in the parking lot of their reheral studio we dicussed the evolution of the record industry. Spero Lumina is about to do something no other band has ever done. They are going to allow there fans to experiance the writhing, rehersing and recording of their debut album. Imagin if you had been able to sit with Sting of the Police as he wrote Roxanne in his basement at 2am, or bobbed your head as Metalica constructed the driving rifts that would one day become Inner Sandman? Spero Lumina is about to bring those kind of experiances to you. Spero Lumina is about to change how we experiance music.

Check out www.SperoLumina.com to watch this revolution unfold.

Who could have know that the day Al Gore invented the internet he set in motion the events that would one day destroy the record industry we once knew. The record industry did not understand the internet, they saw it as a threat filled with piracy and diminishing profits. What they did not see is what the internet brought to the music industry. Because they were so slow to react Apple has snatched up most of the profits in the industry and is now the largest music retailer in the world. Apple simply saw that the industry was changing and it was no longer about vinyl, tapes, CDs, radio, MTV, or record stores, it was about developing a new way to deliver music and iTunes and the iPod delivered.

The music industy is still changing, if record labels are going to stay in the game they have a lot of catching up to do.

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison

Creating something out of nothing is a lot harder than you might appreciate and more often than not it ends in failure. Thomas Edison was not only a creative genius, he also believed innovation could be forced and so do I. There are certain elements that have to be perfectly aligned for the natural phenomenon we call a storm to occur. Much like a storm there is a science behind innovation. This is a tried and true process that forces creativity and produces amazing results.

Why do some organizations create one-hit-wonders and others seem to create new and innovative products year after year? Is there a method to their creative process that allows them to create successful product after successful product? The answer is yes. The process is simple, but it is not easy and more often then not you crash and burn in the process.
Start with an idea: light at the flip of a switch, a carriage without a horse, landing a man on the moon, a phone that you carry in your pocket. These all out started as ideas. In every case the cards were stacked against them. The only thing separating a great idea from a great innovation is the perspiration, as Thomas Edison describes it, and determination to see that dream fulfilled.

Edison is quoted as saying it would take a matter of a few weeks to invent the bulb. In reality, it would take him almost two years of failed attempts, new discoveries and prototypes before he would find success. It is said he tried over 6,000 different carbonized plant fibers, looking for a carbon filament for his light bulb. By concentrating and inventing a whole lighting system rather than just a single light bulb, Edison succeeded where others had failed. Edison chose to look at the big picture and created a lighting system including wiring, plugs, connectors, etc., to operate more than one light bulb at once. Through years of perspiration his moment of fleeing inspiration became a reality and changed out world forever.

There are thousands of stories just like this. It is not enough to have a million dollar idea; you have to put your blood and sweat into it. You have to see the big picture. You have to meet your inspiration with perspiration. It is not enough to have a good idea.

You can’t have a tribe with out a leader and you can’t be a leader without a tribe. When I think of a tribe images of nomads in loin clothes come to mind and a tribal leader with some kind of fancy headdress and gouty bone jewelry. I am not sure if that is the image that Seth Godin intended to conjure in the mind of his readers when he wrote Tribes but his concept of tribal leadership in some ways does take us back to the most primal roots.

Leadership is one of the most powerful ways to build trust and relationships. Most leaders in the church are those members who are committed to build relationships with the other people in the congregation. These people may not have a title but they host small groups in their home, plan community outreach events and most importantly they lead tribes. A tribe can be as small as three people or it can be made up of thousands of people, the size makes no difference. What makes a tribe is a common goal or vision for the future. Who is qualified to lead a tribe? You are!

I get caught up in writing about technology and tools to help you lead and engage your community but I often forget to write why you should lead. Leading a tribe is not about being the boss; it is not about being in charge, or having power. Leading a tribe is about unifying a community, facilitating the creation of a vision and passionately guiding them toward that vision. This is one of the most rewarding things that you have the opportunity to do in this life. Today there are all kinds of tribes all over the place. They no longer have physical boundaries or restrictions because of the Internet. Though I often tout the powers of digital communication and the efficiency at with it allows us to build and nurture relationships there is something that it can never replace. There is no replacement for a local community, a locally founded vision for the future, and a local body seeking that vision. Something special happens when we physically engage with one another. God designed us for community; God designed us for tribes.

Please let me know the tribes that you lead in the comment section.