Archive for the Big Day Category

I am a C-hicken I am a C-hicken. I am a C-hicken H-icken. I am a C-hicken H-icken R-icken – I – S-icken T-icken – I – A – N-icken. Weird. I know. Blame the Indiana churches where my wife grew up. They sing weird, non-spiritual songs like, “I Am a C” with a twist. And we have transported the crazy songs to the west coast. One tradition we have at our Preaching Rally is to test our guests’ ability to sing “I Am a C” by singing the vowels normally, but adding “icken” to the end of each consonant.

You walk into a room, and in the corner is a crowd of teens stealing looks at you and talking in hushed tones. Three of four of them look your way and break out laughing, trying to hold back, but not trying very hard. Awkward. The banner of Christianity is to love God and love others, yet our tendency is to love ourselves and not care about others. It is not that we hate other people, we just have a hard time actively loving them. In a church setting, or when you are hosting an event like the Preaching Rally,

Temecula, California is a beautiful place to live, but all that beauty comes at a cost: city ordinances. Any new construction requires all sorts of red tape. Our five acre strip of land was a possible habitat for the kangaroo rat. An environmental study and a few thousand dollars later, we were approved to build on our land. Ordinances. California is known for its earthquakes, so sheer panels are required almost everywhere. Around doorways, the nails are supposed to be one to two inches apart. By the time the nails are in, there’s no more wood left! Ordinances. Other ordinances

Oh man. The church is a dump, literally. And it is the morning of the Preaching Rally. In just a couple hours, hundreds of guests would be here. There’s trash scattered everywhere outside. Apparently, someone had come the night before and destroyed the place, dumping trash bags, flinging papers, flooding the front yard with the church’s hose and spraying graffiti everywhere. It was a mess. When my mom arrived at church, she seemed unconcerned. As the family freak-outer, she was uncharacteristically calm. She got right to work. She grabbed a black trash bag, picking it up with both hands. She

While the website is helpful, it is not our primary communication tool. Our mailings are our biggest outreach tool. Our guests refer to the mailings more than the emails or Preaching Rally website. I am no social media guru. In fact, I have a barely-running Twitter account that I still do not know how to use well, and I am active on exactly zero other social media sites. But I am smart enough to realize that my way is not the best way to promote an event. People live on social media, and I know I should go to where

Things I Hate I should not hate things, but I do. I am weird–I keep an Evernote list. I hate lots of random things: over-baked chocolate chip cookies, showers running out of hot water, wet towels, and filling out forms over and over again. I go to doctor’s offices, dentists, and sometimes different divisions within the same company and have to fill out the same information over and over. I think, “Come on… Don’t you have this information already? Why do I have to fill this dumb form out again?!” I am a terrible person, I know. I should be

WHY We Have a Website You do not HAVE to have a website for your event, but it IS a nice feature. Here are a few reasons why we chose to create a website for our Preaching Rally: It’s not much work. Really, it’s not a whole lot of work to set up. It takes a lot less effort than one might think. You can quickly build it yourself (below, I show you how to do it in about 20 minutes), or you can hire out the work. There are paid and free options for website hosting, but to get