Cody Thomas

Recently, I have been feeling a mixture somewhere between conviction, regret, and frustration.

Do not misunderstand though. I love life right now. Marriage is wonderful. My wife is amazing. My design business is continually growing, which means I have cut back my hours at Chick-fil-A down to two days a week! I love my church and see great potential for the Kingdom there.

However, despite all of the good, I have still felt this mixture of unsettling emotions lately, and I think I know why. I think that I am tired of living with a lack of discipline in my life and tired of not seeing myself be a better leader in certain areas of my life.

Conviction because of the wrong that I see in myself.
Regret because of all the things I don””t do.
Frustration because of continually seeing the tension between who I am and who I want to be.

So, I have decided to take some action in order to right the ship that is my life. I am tired of seeing such a gap between who I am and who I want to be. I know that tension will always exist in my life, but I do not want to become complacent with it. Here are some steps I am taking.

Marriage:

• 10-10-80 approach to finances. I handle the finances in our house. I work with the budget. I pay the bills. But I have not done the best job with it. The most convicting part about my leadership in this area is the lack of tithing. We have not tithed 10%. Not even near 10%.
  My plan: Start the 10-10-80 approach with our finances. For every paycheck, I will immediately write out a 10% check to the church and transfer 10% into savings. Then, pay bills with the remaining 80% and live off what is left.
• Get into the Word with my wife. As the spiritual leader for my family, I have not done a good job of helping us grow spiritually or keep spiritual disciplines. I am tired of us neglecting our personal spiritual growth.
  My plan: As we were packing away a bunch of stuff to put into a storage unit (this apartment just is not big enough), I found two copies of the One Year Bible, which is a Bible with readings each day from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs and goes through the whole Bible in one year. One is the NLT translation. The other is the ESV. I decided we would each read those Bibles each night and discuss what we read.

Design work:

• Wake up and get working earlier. Right now, my wife gets up at 6am to get to work by 7am. If I am working at home, I generally sleep in until 8am. Then, I will just go straight to my computer and start working. However, I am still kind of dazed as I am trying to wake up. This makes it very hard to work efficiently, let alone be very creative.
  My plan: Get up at 6am with my wife. Get a shower immediately to wake myself up. Brew coffee and eat something. Get to work by 7:30am.
• Be strategic with my day. Right now, I am not the best with time management when I am working from home. There is no boss yelling, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!” I find myself easily distracted while working on design projects. (Do not worry. I do not charge for the time I get distracted in the middle of a project.). The problem is that I can do a lot more with my work time if I focused my time more.
  My plan: This plan is not quite as tangible as the others listed so far. I am not exactly sure yet what the answer is for creating more strategic time management. I have begun using Google Calendar to break up my day (i.e., 1 hour on Project X, 2 hours on project Y, 1 hour learning this new web feature, etc.). This has helped me stay on task and not spend all day on one thing either. However, Google Calendar has not been the complete fix. So, I plan to continue researching time management and task management strategies/applications.

These areas of work will be enough to tackle at this point. There are still other areas of life that I want to improve upon, but these few changes listed here will take a lot of energy and attention to implement. I will focus on these for now.

What areas of life are you most unsatisfied with? What tangible steps can you take to change it?

For many churches, a church website is viewed by pastors and church leadership as an afterthought or something insignificant to their ministry. Many churches don’t even have a website. Of the churches that do have a website, most of those are ineffective websites. Why are they ineffective? Here are just a few reasons:

• Poorly designed. Either the design is a free template design that looks bad or someone (who is not really a web designer) tried to design a site. Either way, it ended up looking bad or looking like websites from 1992.
• Lack of relevant information. Many church websites are out-of-date in their info. Their front web page is still advertising their Christmas musical from 2 years ago. Do you think a visitor will stick around on the site? No.
• Static information. Many churches see a website as just a digital billboard. It’s a place to advertise their service times and pastor’s family picture. A website should have more than just static information that never changes. If the information never changes, no one will continue to go to the site.

So, why should web design matter to churches? What’s the big deal?

I believe that the web is one of the greatest tools of our day for the advancement of the Kingdom and the Gospel. However, it is not being utilized by a large majority of churches. Web sites are not just for advertising your church service times. It can also exist for connecting people to each other in community, allowing people to be the body of Christ for each other throughout the week through interactive web tools, allowing visitors to see enough of your church so they will feel comfortable enough to come visit your services, keeping in touch with your church throughout the week, connecting people into discipleship programs, praying for each other’s needs, allowing people who would never set foot into a church building to experience church in their comfort zone in hopes that they might begin to trust the Church again, and more. That list could continue for a long time and that list continues to grow as churches advance into the web frontier.

To help you understand the importance of web design and strategy for churches, here’s an article by Terrell Sanders (featured on Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox):

1.  Your target audience for church growth is Internet-savvy.

Most church growth comes from what we call the 18-to-18 range – people from 18 years old to families with 18-year-old children. This also happens to be the group with the highest Internet usage. According to research by the U.S. government, teenagers and families with children at home are the most frequent Internet users of any demographic group. Using the Internet to communicate with families and young adults is a natural fit.

2.  Your Web site will be your “first impression” for many people.

Most people under the age of 40 grew up with technology, and they automatically go to the Internet for information. We have found that many families relocating to a new city will research both where to live and where to worship over the Internet.  They will often make their “first cut” shopping list before they ever come to town.

3.  If you’re not on the Web, you don’t exist to many people.

As a corollary to the previous item, people who use the Internet as their primary research tool will not know you exist if you don’t have a Web site.

A 20- or 30-something person is much more likely to use the Internet to find church service times than to look in the yellow pages or newspaper. Our informal surveys have shown that many young college graduates don’t even have yellow pages in their homes. My teenage daughter didn’t know theaters listed movie times in the newspaper – she gets them off the Web.

4.  Seekers will visit your Web site before attending your services.

The Internet provides a perfect tool for people wanting information anonymously.  Seekers who are not ready to “come to the building” will visit your Web site to see what you believe and why. Savvy organizations are using the Web to educate visitors and encourage them to take the next step. Online sermons and photos of services and events go a long way toward making a seeker feel secure enough to make a first-time visit.

5.  A whole generation exists that will seek “religion” online.

In his book Boiling Point, George Barna projects that 10 to 20 percent of the population will rely on the Internet for all of their spiritual input and output by 2010. Whether you like it or not, the prediction seems to be right on track. When these people go to the Internet with spiritual questions, who will be providing the answers? What will they be taught?

6.  The Web site is too critical to be run by a volunteer.

I can tell you stories of churches from New York to California who were disappointed or burned by volunteers who built their Web sites. What happens if your volunteer Web developer gets transferred out of state or leaves the church angry?

How do you gracefully fire a volunteer when the church’s need exceeds his or her abilities?

Church leaders frequently ask me to help them justify why they should pay large amounts of money to develop a professional site when they have a volunteer who will do it for free. I ask them if they use free volunteers to install and maintain their roof and plumbing. In three years, no large church has ever admitted it used volunteers for their roof or plumbing – it’s just too critical to depend on volunteer help.

7.  You can’t afford a cheap site.

With a high percentage of your potential visitors viewing your Web site before they visit your congregation, you can’t afford a poor quality site. All the time and money you have spent building your congregation’s resources and reputation are worthless if people won’t visit the first time. Visitors are judging the values and programs of your church from your Web site. Are your key programs properly represented? Can a Web visitor see how active your youth group is from your site?

8.  People are viewing your current Web site right now.

I can almost guarantee you that people are viewing your current site every month.  People moving into your city are researching churches before they move. People interested in changing congregations are viewing your site. Seekers who have been made aware of your church are looking for more information on your site. You may not be providing the information, but people are looking for it.

Start asking your visitors how they found out about your church. You’ll be surprised how many young families found you on the Internet. Good or bad, your Web site is generating impressions every week. The big question is – are you satisfied with the impression they are getting?

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Terrell Sanders is the president of Main Street Enterprises, an Internet consulting and development company for churches and non-profit organizations. ©Copyright 2005. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This is a new era for the Church. The mission is the same. The message is the same. But the methods must be evaluated and revamped. The strategy for reaching your community with the Gospel must be modified to reach an increasingly web-based culture. Generally speaking, the most effective churches of the next several years will be those who put more of their resources, time and money into developing and expanding their web strategy.

Church leaders, it is up to you. I would be more than happy to talk with you further about web strategy for your church and possibly see how I can consult, strategize, design and even partner with you as you pursue with reckless abandon to advance the Kingdom in your community.

Back in the day, more specifically antebellum America days (late 1700s-early 1800s), church denominations utilized a system of pastoring called “circuit riding”. Here’s how it worked. In that time period, much of frontier America was made up of small towns, or barely even that. Most of the frontier was very sparsely populated. Most areas barely had enough people to create a decent sized congregation and especially couldn’t pay for a full-time pastor to stay there. So, these “circuit riders” would be appointed a circuit of rural villages and unorganized settlements. They would travel this circuit of settlements, ministering to each town’s congregation as they were passing through.

This form of pastoring, although probably not the most ideal, seemed to work well for these small settlements. There was no way to pay a pastor to stay there full time, so it only made sense that each congregation in an area covering five or six towns could provide some financial support, which, when put together, could support a pastor for all of them.

Well, these are different times and we certainly live in a different America. Yes, lots of America is fairly rural, but nothing like the frontier. So I don’t think the need of circuit riding senior pastors is quite necessary so much. However, I want to propose something else.

With the emergence of so many “megachurches” in America over the past decade, I think we have seen the extreme benefit of having a large church support staff with people working in very specific skilled areas. I mean, think about it. How much better would ministry be if the youth pastor wasn’t also the “Weekend Service Production Director”, “Worship Leader”, “Web Designer”, “Graphic Designer”, “Tech Guru”, and “Video Editor”? Instead of the youth pastor (who should be freed to actually spend his/her week on reaching students) designing the church’s website just because he/she knows what a blog is, how much better would ministry be if you had people who are actually gifted and skilled in those areas doing those things?

I know much of what I mentioned is technology-based skill sets. However, with the exponential rise of the use of the web and technology in general as a means of advancing the Kingdom and sharing the Gospel, I think that those skills are vital to a growing church. In today’s age and society, the web is the largest new frontier for advancing the Gospel and creating community. Also, the use of graphic design, sermon series branding, video media, etc. is becoming more and more a vital source for marketing and using art/design to tell the redemptive story of the Gospel. Graphic design and video media are the stained glass windows of today.

So here’s my point. Back in the 1700s, these frontier congregations couldn’t afford to hire a pastor for their church. However, denominations knew that they had to advance the Gospel into the frontier that was open to be won, so they banned together to be able support a “circuit rider” for their area. Today, most churches certainly can NOT afford to hire tech or design people. They don’t have a budget for a video editor or a web strategist. I believe that today’s churches need to realize that their is a new frontier (web/tech/media) to be won for the Kingdom, and they can do so by banning together to support what I would call today’s circuit riders.

What if five, six, or maybe a dozen or more churches in one area or one denomination banned together to each pay a “circuit riding” web designer/strategist who did work for each church dividing up his/her days or weeks between those churches? Or what about a “circuit riding” graphic designer who designed all the sermon series brandings, bulletins, flyers, and more for all the churches in a denominational district or area? Or maybe a “circuit riding” designer who did both web and graphic design? Many churches couldn’t afford a good full time designer, but they might be able to afford a good designer a few hours a week. And if just a few churches did that, we would have a modern circuit rider…or maybe “circuit designer”.

I truly think, if taken seriously and done strategically, this concept of “circuit riding” ministers of design and ministers of technology has the possibility of creating better equipped churches for reaching more people with the Gospel and advancing the Kingdom.

Alright people. Bring your thoughts.

In my previous post, I talked about some new perspectives on my understanding of a “call to full-time ministry” and, more specifically, my own call to ministry. (For context, you should definitely read that post before diving into this one.)

So, where does this leave me now? Where am I at and where am I going?

So far, this refocusing journey has culminated in me making a few big decisions/goals.

1. Launching my own freelance design company. Actually, I have already been doing freelance design work for about a year now as a self-employment job. It is my goal this year to launch a media/design studio as an official LLC. I’m open to do graphic design and web design/strategy work for any business, but I really want to focus on partnering with churches in order to help them advance the Gospel wherever they are. Pastors, if you are interested in hearing more about me partnering with your church to do design work (sermon series branding, print media, etc.) and/or web design and strategy, just shoot me a quick email to get the conversation started.
2. Getting a legit degree in web design & new media. I’ve been doing graphic design for some time now, and learning web design quickly. However, I want to continue that learning process in the right way. In February, I will begin a Master of Fine Arts degree in Web Design and New Media at the Academy of Art University. (If you don’t know what “new media” means, click here.) The school is in San Francisco, but I will be doing my entire degree through their online school. I will be doing the degree part-time (only 2-3 courses per semester) and I should finish the degree in about four years.
3. Hoping to work on a church staff someday. Although this isn’t a decision in my life right now, it is still something that I hope could be on the horizon someday. I still have a strong passion for the local church and I feel that God has called me to serve in a church staff capacity. I see myself serving in a hybrid position, somewhere between a “Pastor of Technology & Media” and a “Church Communications Director (CCD)”. The first is more focused on the technical side of media and communications (the person doing all the graphic/web/video design) while the second is more of a strategist position, overseeing all communications from the church (overseeing a team that does graphic/print/web/video design) while exploring better communications methods and strategies for the church. Every comm. director position is different depending on the needs of the church and the skills of that particular person. It’s hard to find one person that excels at all forms of design/communications (graphic, web and video) while also being a great leader of volunteers and a strategist/idea generator. I definitely have more thoughts and ideas about all of that. I’ll have to save them for other posts.

So that’s where I’m at. And that’s where I’m heading. I can’t wait!

I know I have been absent from here for awhile now. I haven’t posted in almost four months. But I’m back and I hope to get back to some more frequent writing on here. First off, I want to tell you guys about some new paths in my life. However, for you to know where I’m going, you have to know where I’ve been.

Let’s go back to my teenage years. Before I was 15 years old, I had my path planned out. I was a computer nerd. I wanted to go to college to get a degree in some field of computer science. I enjoyed learning about computers, software, and web design. Just to date myself, I was designing personal web sites on Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire back in those days. Some of you reading this aren’t even old enough to know what those hosting sites are. I used to spend my spare time with Netscape Composer and Microsoft Frontpage Express 2.0. Seriously, does anyone still use Netscape software?

I loved being a nerd. I planned to make a career being a nerd. But then it happened. I had an experience that I felt was a call from God, a call to stop living nominally for Him. A call to learn to live a life for Him. This event led me into a journey of trying to figure out what that call meant for me. Over those next few months, through what I knew, what I was learning and through my mentors, I felt that God was calling me into full-time vocational ministry.

But here’s the dilemma. The church (in general) has an extremely small scope of what full-time ministry means. In general, there are two or three basic tracks: preacher, youth pastor, or maybe music minister (and most churches don’t even consider their music minister as a “pastor”). So, not knowing any other way, I was put on the “preacher” track because “that is what you do if you are called to the ministry”.

No one thought to consider that maybe God wanted me to use the gifts and passions I already had. No one considered that maybe God wanted to use me to equip the local church and grow His kingdom in ways that didn’t involve a Sunday morning pulpit. No one realized that you don’t have to stand in a pulpit or lead a youth group to advance the Kingdom and the name of Jesus.

So, I began a journey that led me to college to get a degree in Christian Ministry. I’ll cut out some details, but this journey led me through some amazing experiences and leadership positions. After college, I went to seminary (thinking that was the next step for me) only to realize it wasn’t what God had in store for me. What followed after my year at seminary was a journey of searching, losing, frustration, and a forced destruction of the pride that I had been slowly building for years. I knew leaving seminary for an unknown adventure with God was going to be hard, and I knew He had some humbling in mind for my journey.

Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel (for those who have made it reading this far). Through this journey, I feel that God has expanded my perspective on the “call to ministry”. I don’t want to dive deep into that here (maybe a blog post in the near future). I feel that God calls many into the ministry and never intends them to step a foot behind a pulpit or ever lead a youth group (despite what every small church staff looks like). I feel that many are given skills and passions, but if they feel a call into ministry, we make them drop those skills and teach them to be a preacher.

And that is exactly what I feel has happened to me (and countless others who get pushed through the exact same “preacher track” at small, Christian universities). I could blame my mentors back then, but they didn’t know any better. To them, “call to ministry” meant you were going to preach. Period. They only did what they thought best to prepare me.

However, when I look back, I wish someone would have told me that God had already been preparing me for His vision for my life. All that time being a nerd, designing websites when I was 14 because I thought it was fun, was really preparation, not a distraction. I was told I had to pursue a pulpit to serve God, when, in fact, 10 years later, I’m beginning to realize that someone should have told me to pursue a computer to serve God and advance His Kingdom.

I’m beginning to realize that a call to full-time ministry doesn’t always mean a change in vocation. Instead, I feel that a call to full-time ministry just changes your vocation to become an avenue for the advancement of the Gospel, His Kingdom, and the local church.

Sometimes you don’t have to stop being a web or graphic designer to serve God and His Church. You just become a different kind of designer. A designer with a purpose bigger than himself.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to watch some of the streaming video interviews on StoryUnfolding.com. They had an awesome group of writers, musicians, and storytellers all in one room to talk about telling the greatest story–the story of Jesus and our redemption.

One part of the conversation stuck out to me more than the rest, a portion of the conversation when Shaun Groves was speaking about relevance. He agrees that the Church and its storytellers (preachers, musicians, writers, etc.) need to be relevant to be able to reach people with the story. However, Shaun said that his idea of what is relevant is drastically changing.

He admitted that years ago, he was the worship staff guy at a big church that was always pushing to be “relevant,” pushing that the next series needs to be named after whatever movie is top of the box office currently or tons of other ways to be relevant to what’s in culture at the time.

However, Shaun began to notice how that sort of relevance wasn’t true relevance. He told a story of a time when he was doing a concert. At the time, he was playing tunes that were absolutely “relevant” with the sound of popular music of the day. He was “hip,” but the guy opening for him certainly was not (some bearded guy screaming about the kingdom of God). However, Shaun noticed that all the people wanted to hang out with the guy who opened (the completely not relevant singer). If they wanted an autograph, they wanted his, not Shaun’s. They swarmed the other guy and didn’t care much for Shaun. Why? Because the other guy had been coming there to love on these people day-in and day-out.

Shaun believes that fitting in with current cultural trends (music styles, movies, etc.) isn’t the best form of relevance. He believes that being relevant to your people doesn’t mean mimicking a movie they might have seen. Instead, being relevant to your people is giving them something that is relevant to their current situation. Being relevant to neighborhood kids in the middle of a hot afternoon is going out to the street and giving all of them ice cream. Being relevant to a single mom is offering her free babysitting. That list could go on and on.

I’m beginning to understand this form of relevance myself. If we would be honest with ourselves, most people really don’t care that you’re doing a sermon series based around the TV show “Lost.” More people will care when you meet them where they are with love, being relevant to their needs, not their taste in TV shows. That’s the meaning of relevance.

Here’s some updates about life for me. What I’ve been doing, what I’ve been thinking, and what’s next on the horizon.

• In three days, I will be married for two months. Wow. Sometimes it still blows me away that we are married. It took so long to get there (I don’t suggest engagements longer than a year by the way…16 months was way too long) that it’s hard to believe the wedding has already come and gone.
• Marriage is probably the greatest litmus test for pointing out my selfish tendencies. Nothing in my life has been able to so easily and so often point out my selfishness as marriage has. Now don’t get the wrong idea. Kindel doesn’t point out these selfish tendencies to me. She’s not nagging me or calling me out all the time. It’s not like that. It’s just one of those things that I feel so often when it happens, like my own conscience became so much more sensitive to pointing out selfishness. It’s like having a car alarm and turning up the sensitivity so high that it goes off just from loud noises in the parking lot.
• So what am I doing about my selfishness? I’m learning to serve and love. The key word here is learning. I’m certainly not doing all of this right and I know I fail sometimes. But I’m learning to serve my wife more and more and love her more and more. I thought I loved her before we got married, and I did love her. However, I now feel like I am only beginning to learn how to love her.
• Design work is picking up. I’m excited to get to do more design work. Not only because it allows us to pay our bills and put food on the table, but also because it allows me to grow as a designer. With each new project, I learn new functions in the software I use, new techniques to design more efficiently, and gain more perspective. My “designer’s eye” is not perfected by a LONG shot, but it continues to get better. Currently, I’m designing three new church logos for 2 different churches, branding sermon series packages for two churches, and doing some oddball design for a couple churches.
• Barista life to begin again soon. I should be going back to work at the coffee shop in less than a month. Gotta pay the bills.
• New website concept coming soon. This week I’m starting to work with a programming guru to put together a new website idea. More details to come later.
• Last week, I read The Call to Discipleship by Karl Barth. It’s an excerpt from his large book, Christian Dogmatics. It was a good read, but definitely a hard read. It was originally in German and translated into English. The sentence structures were very complex and many times confusing to follow.
• Now I’m reading God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It by Jim Wallis. So far, it is awesome! It is great to read the perspective of a Christian who doesn’t buy into the concept that God is partisan. It is also great to read someone who brings to light that abortion and gay marriage are not the only moral issues. War, poverty, education, and healthcare, for example, are all moral issues as well. So far, Wallis has done a great job of presenting an un-partisan view of politics with Scripture as its basis. I can’t wait to keep reading. I already recommend it.
• Free entertainment. By the way, the copy of God’s Politics that I am reading is from the public library. After Kindel got her name change done and got a new driver’s license, we went to the public library to get library cards. Instead of renting DVDs so much, we can go check one out for FREE. Plus all the books. Definitely an entertainment budget saver!
• I think we’ve finally settled into our apartment. It took almost two months, but I think we finally did it. There’s still some work to do here and there, and there is still parts to improve upon, but, for the most part, I would say we have finally settled in.

Overall, life is good. We are depending on God for direction like never before.

What is the greatest threat to the institution of marriage?

• 3-5% of the American population claim to be homosexual (not just inside the church)
• 26-33% is the conservative divorce rate inside the church
• 50-60% of Christian men have intentionally looked at porn recently (most of whom are addicted)

The Religious Right wants us to think that same-sex marriage is the greatest threat to the institution of marriage. However, by looking at the numbers, I would say that WE (the Church) are the greatest threat to the institution of marriage. I think we need to clean up the mess WE have made of marriage and start calling out some serious problems within the church.

How can we expect the world to listen to us as experts of marriage when we treat it like this?