prayer email
Posted by joezissss on July 18, 2008
welcome back, everybody! everybody!
hopefully you’ve enjoyed your break from my nonsensical ramblings about my life and why you should care, cause the break is over, and i fully intend to give you no good excuses why you shouldn’t be bathing michelle and i in prayer. but i’m not going to beg you or anything… i have my dignity.
ok, i lied. i have no dignity. i’m begging you-please pray for us. pretty please.
anyway, allow me to do a bit of catch up…
meeting place-through a friend of a friend, we ran into Krin. he’s the pastor of Ridglea Presbyterian Church on Camp Bowie. he’s a native Californian also. his church is a bit of a has-been church that was flourishing many years ago and has since dwindled in size and influence. he’s been leading the charge to bring life back into the church and is a huge ambassador for the Kingdom, challenging his denomination and his church family to move beyond the walls of a building and get their hands and feet dirty whilst serving the poor and underprivileged in Fort Worth and south of the border also. they have a 40,000 square foot building that includes a 120 seat chapel (the original church building) that is used for 75 minutes a week. as a friend of Eikon, Ridglea is renting it to us at a ridiculous price (no mortgage=good things) for worship gatherings, which we’re having the last sunday of the month currently. 2 services in, we’ve had a few new families and couples and young-uns check things out. our next service is next sunday night the 27th. we’ll have pictures of stuff up soon so you can peer at us suspiciously through your looking glass (read: computer monitor). ‘how can i see these pictures,’ you ask? read on, my preciouses…
website-michelle and i are taking some of the material we have compiled and revamping and editing what currently exists at eikonchurch.com. if you look now, you’ll see something that resembles something useful, but really isn’t. we want something that catches your eye and that has functionality and is informative. just like a normal site. keep your eyes peeled for that soon. by the way, we developed business cards, too. they’re pretty generic except for a little logo that a friend developed on them… it’s a wing with “Eikon” written in some awesome font. we also are having sample shirts, hats (i know, right???), car magnets, window decals, postcards, posters, etc. drawn up. we have a preliminary theme for our stuff, although our first look has yet to be finalized. on the website, i’ll post some options we’re considering for logos and themes and open them up to your critiques if you’re interested. i certainly am. i’m designing them. anyway, i’m looking a lot at something you may have heard of from the Center for Church Communication, called churchmarketingsucks.com and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. it’s a place for designers and marketers and artists can come and open up their work to comment and to vent about how utterly terrible church sites, designs, and marketing all are. if you shake your head at the status quo, you should take a gander. since i know nothing about advertising, it’s been a real head scratcher that’s making me ask good questions. like does anyone actually use the phone book anymore? in related news, we’re 3 in the googlesphere for the search “Eikon church” and 3 on yahoo for “Eikon Fort Worth.” sidebar: a few months after we decided on a name and purchased our domain for the website, a local megachurch decided that their new young adult doohickey (that’s a real word!) should be called Eikon. funny how brilliance inspires the uninspired, yes?
Eikon itself-Christina still has lupus, but has been so much better since Mark dropped in on us (he’s a big baby!). she’s lost some weight and is getting out and about like normal. we borrowed Autumn last saturday to run her ragged around town and give her parental units a break. we visited the water gardens. here’s proof that Fort Worth is a beautiful city. Rachel, Kris, and the twins are doing ok also. we’re actually on a kickball team with the older half of their family on wednesday nights. it’s been nice to see them get out a bit more. i know Kris is starting to look for an additional part time gig at night to help financially, so that’s something to be praying for. John and Becky are on the kickball team also. John is out captain and is doing a dandy job of captaining us. sidebar: you know the rep that Texas has, right? everything is bigger and better here? well, i’ve never played with a more wussy group of kickballers since grade school. these guys bunt so much it’s like lawn bowling. anyway, we’ve gotten to meet a bunch of new people the past few wednesday nights, so there has been some “cross-pollenization” of friends, which is great. we’ve been purposefully running with, dancing with, watching movies with, and dining with all sorts of people while introducing to the Kingdom. and i don’t think it’s even enough of a rumble to register on their sensors. discipling unaware disciples.
one last bit about marketing-a few years back before one of the most influential movies of all time came out, a viral campaign was started. the movie’s website was www.whatisthematrix.com. it still exists, but the matrix itself (not the movie) couldn’t be explained in a 90 second trailer without sounding incredibly confusing and dull. and so it started popping up everywhere: billboards, 15 second black screened TV spots, internet pop-ups. (more specifics here.) there was no mention of the fact that it was a movie, there were no shots of a trench-coat clad Keaunu waving his arms around in slow motion. just a simple rhetorical question. i’m thinking a lot about this. in the way that the Matrix trilogy redefined special effects and soundtracks and allowed philosophy to permeate mainstream media and even religion, perhaps what we’re up to here with Eikon is a bit of the same. not nearly as commercialized, which may grind on the fact that i keep mentioning ads, marketing, and the like. and i certainly have no guarantee that we will have a blockbuster church on our hands months from now. but i think that at the very core of who we are, who we will be, and how we will do it is fundamentally upstream, counterintuitive, insert idealistic adjective here, that perhaps a similar introduction to Fort Worth is fitting. not in a self-promoting manner, but if our vision becomes reality, even just a fraction, this city, perhaps even the church in America, will not look the same. we want to expose the world that has been pulled over our eyes for the lie that it is.
perhaps you’ve seen the Robert Kennedy quote, “some men see things as they are and ask why. others dream things that never were and ask why not.” it we’re up to what it is we THINK we’re up to here, it’s truly nothing new, but it is something different than what currently exists.
we remain very truly yours,
joseph and michelle
