The Ragamuffin Blog

Supermarket Superhero

I love creativity. I love stories. And I love when people come together and combine the two to create something beautiful and meaningful. This is a short film made by some of my friends. Enjoy. 

New Mosaic Website!

Today we launched the Mosaic Lincoln website! This may sound funny to say, but as a pastor, it is really easy for me to get website envy. You know what I'm talking about? I see websites like that of Mars Hill Church in Seattle or Elevation in Charlotte and I have repeatedly tell myself, "Thou shall not covet," "Thou shall not covet," "Thou shall not covet..."   

However, part of the beauty of church planting is that it forces you to discern between what is necessary and what is not right from the get-go. Without a super sized budget to get all of the things I might otherwise be tempted to spend money on, we are forced instead to get creative. And let me tell you, it is amazing what is possible when a group of people get prayerfully creative! 

I am proud of our new website! Not just because I think it is sharp, clean and immersed with helpful and engaging media, but because it was built almost entirely with free, online tools that are available to anyone, anywhere! Rather than dropping a lot of money on a website, we were forced to get creative. And thanks largely in part to the hard work and creativity of our Associate Pastor, Kevin, the result was a great website that hardly cost us anything out of pocket! I wonder what else would be possible if we resisted the urge to spend and instead, opted to get prayerfully creative in our lives and ministries!

Leading in Layers

I am finding that we leaders often have a tendency to try to get everyone in the same room. We try to get everyone on the team, to catch the vision, to join the conversation, to work on the project. At the very least, it makes things simpler. It shortens communication lines, it lessons the workload of the leader, and if numbers are one of the measuring sticks you use to gauge your success, getting everyone in the same room affords you a visible way to see what kind of progress you are making. It makes us feel good. And as a church planter, I can tell you that this is a constant temptation.

However, although it can be helpful in some respects, striving to get everyone in the same room also creates some problems. This is especially true of anyone working with creatives. Generally, creatives are no more effectively led through mass leadership than they are reached through mass marketing. They can be a unique bunch. And they tend to like it that way. So you can't get too frustrated when your attempts to continually coral them into the same room to have the same conversation about the same things inevitably fails.

The reality is, highly creative or no, some people will need a different environment to thrive in than the one you are currently trying to get them into. Even if you succeed at getting them there, it may squash the very thing you are trying to unleash. 

I am learning that leaders who desire to maximize their influence and effectiveness must learn to lead in layers. This will require embracing the reality that each person you hope to connect to your cause is on a unique journey and in some respect, must be uniquely led. Their unique journey has brought them to this point, and it may need to be no less unique moving forward. This may mean that they may never be in the room that you desire for them to be in right now. The trick, however, is learning to be okay with that and to find the layer that works for them to serve in a meaningful way. If we can learn how to do this, we'll find ourselves connecting people to our cause we'd never imagined and we'll find them serving in ways we could have never dreamed.

Mosaic Lincoln Video

I'm excited to share with you the first Mosaic Lincoln vision video. Considering that we did it all on a VERY small budget (close to nil) I am pretty happy with how it turned out. A thousand thanks to Bill Radtke and Jay R for volunteering so much time to making this happen! Also, as you'll see on the video, our temporary website is now up and live at www.mosaiclincoln.com! As we move forward and our needs grow with our community, we'll invest in something more versatile and comprehensive. For now, however, I think this will serve us well and again, it was free!. (For church planters or anyone else out there looking for a free, flash web option, check out www.wix.com.) 

On a side note, isn't amazing how creative we become when we need to do something we believe in and don't have a large budget to do it with? I think there are always more options out there than we initially perceive and you know, perhaps we'd do well to resist the urge to throw a lot of money at the things we want but rarely need. (Of course, God knows I am preaching to myself on this one!) 

If you are not already on our Prayer Team and would like to get monthly Mosaic Lincoln updates and prayer requests via email and vodcast, you can join here! 

CrowdSourcing

 For anyone looking to start a business, plant a church, overhaul your website, re-brand your company, or get help with just about any creative print or corporate identity endeavor, I want to share a great and cost effective resource I recently came across. 

In exploring various designers and design firms to create our logo for us, I became less and less excited about the idea of hiring a single designer or firm to do it. I just didn't like our odds of getting something we'd be really happy with, at least not on our budget. Then I came across a great solution: crowdsourcing. 

Crowdsourcing is essentially taking a job you'd normally hire out to a single individual or company, like getting your logo designed, and opening it up to an entire creative community. As the contest host, you write a creative brief about who you are, what you're looking for, decide how much the winner will be paid out and launch the contest. Then as designs begin to come in, you rate them 1 to 5, give feedback and ask the designers to change or tweak their work. 

Although I am sure there are more, I came across two online creative communities like this. The first is ZenLayout. ZenLayout draws a lot of designers from Europe. I found their logo designs to be pretty quality but a bit more traditional. The second (and the one we went with) is Guerra Creativa. Based out of Argentina, Guerra Creativa draws a lot of designers from South America. Many of the designers speak English, and thanks to Google Translate being incorporated into the site, you can easily communicate with those who don't with the push of a button. The quality of designs from GC are excellent and less traditional.

In our 3 week long contest, we had roughly 70 designers submit over 200 designs, a number of which I would have been delighted to have as our logo. We were also able to get our print design thrown in for free by the winning designer. And the total cost (just about $300) was far less than what it'd cost to hire a large firm or professional designer for. 

Some Creative Inspiration

Alright, so it's the end of the quarter and I'm up late with seeds and a Red Bull writing a final paper and I need a break, so...confession time. The older I get (and I'm not very old mind you), the less I find myself wanting to read the latest and greatest Christian book to come out and the more I find myself gleaning from the progressives and innovators from other spheres of influence. 

I mean, I still learn from the "top dogs" of mainstream Christianity and others out on the fringes, but it' is hard to find Christian leaders who are doing anything new. I find that to be more than a little frustrating. I mean, the church should be the most creative place on the planet! We should be pioneering on all types of fronts. But too often it seems we just "copy and paste" from others. And there is a lot of recycled junk floating around out there, don't you think?

Well, in that spirit, here are some fun things to get your creative juices flowing! Much love!

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Theology in Film

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends." - Ratatouille

I know, it's tempting. I've done it. You've done. We've all done it at one time or another. But resist that natural urge to criticize the things you don't subscribe to. It's a waste of your time and energy. Instead, go create something beautiful with your life that serves humanity. Life's too short to be a critic.