Dan Gould

Tag: Grace Community Church

  • Send Me, I’ll Go – IS 6:8

    Well this week the Student Staff has been so busy getting ready for the B2S Retreat!!!  We have doubled our numbers from last year!!!  So Awesome!!!  I am really excited to see what happens this weekend.  Ken Freeman and Nick Thurmond will be here to kick it off tomorrow night.  The whole weekend we are going to be talking about Evangelism which is a really big church word that means reaching others for Christ.  This weekend has the potential to change the face of our student ministry.  I have been praying that students and leaders would have a passion not to sit quietly watching opportunities pass them by, but to be ready and willing to share when the opportunity arises.  I can’t wait to see this place packed this weekend!!!!

  • Not Just Another Sunday


    Well today was the day for Not Just Another Sunday. An idea that came up at a service planning meeting a couple of months ago, which would bring all the ministries together for one service 2 times on this day August 30th. I was pumped!!!!

    Our Student Band got to lead the adults in a worship song, others performed a skit highlighting Son City, and I get to play Sweet Child of Mine (in church) on Guitar Hero! By the way, I really did a poor job! 1. I don’t own Guitar Hero myself, 2. The calibration was off, meaning the video and the audio didn’t match. Regardless, Mike would have beat me anyways! However, did I mention I played Sweet Child of Mine in a church service? That’s still kinda weird to me!

    Anyhow it was an awesome service and fun to be a part of! Special thanks to all that helped make the service what it was today!

    Here is a pic of our students practicing for this Sunday! They rocked it and I think some of our adults were surprised by how good they are!

    If you attended the service, what did you think? What did you like the best? What could we have added or done differently?

  • Leaders Summit @ Grace – Day 3

    Well today was the last day of Leaders Summit for the staff at Grace. We had a great discussion on these two topics this morning People Skills and Developing Leaders.  As a Leader, both of these areas, as are the other 10,  are crucial to the advancement of the Ministry or Organization. Here is what we talked about in each of these sessions:

    People Skills

    I took a people skills test and was surprised that what i thought would be my biggest weakness was my biggest strength.  I am sure i messed the test up somehow.  I think my wife would be a better gauge than the test I took today.  However, it did make me realize how important the skill of working with people is in ministry. DUH! Right? But seriously, it’s easy to over look some things and think you are good with people.  The little things add up.  One of the things that comes to a challenge for me is remembering peoples names.  I am not very good at it but need to improve in this area.

    Towards the end we had robust conversation about relationships on staff.  The essence of the question really centered around this thought “how do we become more than co-workers?” Meaning, how do we become friends who work together?  I thought it was a great question and am glad to see that others are thinking in this direction also!  Exciting things can happen when we get to know the people we work with on a personal level as well as a professional level!

    Developing Leader

    This was different this time around than last time.  If you want to grow you have to develop more leaders, but that’s not the question, the question is how do you develop leaders?  Chris shared this chart with us and we dialoged about it for quite a while.  Many times in leadership development, we gravitate to one or two approaches.  Chris challenged us to think in a broader term.  Here was the diagram we used to spark this conversation!

    This afternoon they will talk about Execution.  Wish I could be there for that I am sure it would have been good!

  • RAIN DOWN By Delirious

    I can’t get this song out of my head since Tyler, our NEW Student Worship Coordinator at Fusion, taught it to our student band and led with it last weekend! I am so excited about Tyler being on board with us and believe that God is going to use him greatly at Fusion. Tyler doesn’t blog . . . yet, but has a myspace. Peep him out and leave him a comment! Enjoy the video!!!

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

    more about “RAIN DOWN By Delirious“, posted with vodpod

  • Leaders Summit @ Grace – Day 2

    Well day two of the Leaders Summit went much better than the first day.  It seemed that Chris (one of the speakers) was more relaxed and able to connect with the audience (our staff) a lot better today.  Again we covered some things that aren’t new when it comes to leadership and then other concepts that really challenge and stretch you.  For me, I am able to look at where I was four months ago compared to where I am now.  I am thankful that i see some consistency with my answers.  That tells me that I am not delusional or lack self awareness.   Here are the four areas of leadership that we covered today

    Change Agent
    Character
    Emotional Awareness

    I might be missing one?  I am sure that says something about my learning ability.  But anyhow, the three above had some great times of learning and discussion, even some quiet moments as we avoided awkward conversations or what some call pink elephants. However, I believe today was a healthy learning day for all of us and it will be interesting to see how we apply some of the principles that we learned today.  I also enjoyed getting to know some of the staff that I don’t know to well during our table discussions.

    I still have a lot to learn and process!  I will post more of my learning about each skill at a later time!

  • Crazy Good

    This week has been crazy busy, but as I write this I can’t help but think how good the week was.  Here is a brief shakedown of my week:

    Monday – All day leadership training at Grace click here to read more!

    Tuesday – Student Staff Meeting, Interview and audition/practice with perspective Student Worship Candidate.

    Wednesday – Jackson had a doctor appointment in the AM, this always make for an exciting PM and it did.  At about 6:00 pm as we were getting ready to leave for a ball game with students, Jackson starts crying and throwing his head back as if he is in pain.  He would calm down for a little while, like a minute, and then start again.  Each time he would wear himself out causing him to have to try to catch his breath because he was crying so hard.  After about thirty minutes I got him to calm down by talking loudly to him saying, “Daddy’s here, you are going to be ok, Jackson Daddy’s here, you are going to be ok!”  It amazes me how a comforting voice can can change how others feel.  He started to calm down after that.  However, it was really scary.

    From this, we went to the ball park.  It may sound bad but our thought was if we were going to have to take him to the hospital, the ball park is closer to the hospital than our house is.

    The Rough Riders Stadium is nice.  For 15.00 dollars, we saw a game, ate all you could eat hot dogs, burgers, chicken sandwiches, and BBQ pork, chips, and drink, AND got a Rough Riders hat.  Pretty sweet deal.  the home team won, the weather was perfect, and everyone had a good time!

    Thursday – Plowed through small group curriculum for the year for each age group. Made training books for Small Group Leader/Coaches and our B2S Retreat curriculum and held band practice with potential Student Worship Coordinator.

    Friday – NOTHING – Blogging and then hanging out with the family! Well my wife just asked if we could go shopping for the Cafe’, so . . . I guess its not nothing!

    Here are some pic of our Fusion Family Night at the Rough Riders Game!

  • Leaders Summit @ Grace – Day 1

    Today, the team from Leaders Summit met with the staff at Grace Community Church for what will be a three day leadership conference.  This will actually be the second time I have gone through the material.  This is really good stuff, some of it basic, while other very thought provoking and even convicting.  It is interesting to see how our team responds to this.

    To be honest, I don’t know if I agree with all of the things that are said.  Like the example of not watching live TV in order to maximize time.  Please don’t get me wrong, I am all about maximizing time, but this sounds a little rigid and very scheduled.  Almost driven to the point of not having fun unless it’s scheduled.  That scares me!

    However, it’s easy to get caught up on the things that we don’t necessarily agree with, or get caught up on the way things are said, that we miss the point.  The principles we are learning are very good, the method however, may be different for different situations.  Example, if you don’t want to write in a journal because you have an on-line journal called a blog that fine.  The principle is capturing the thoughts that come, so you don’t lose them later.

    It was interesting to see what I wrote a couple of months ago and what I wrote today.  I do like the fact that we are meeting on Mondays from 9am to 3pm over the next three weeks instead of 2 days in a row starting at 8am and ending at 5pm.  I feel like I will actually get more out of it especially where my brain shut down during the last sessions toward the end of the conference last time.  We will see what happens.

    Today we talked about why it’s important to study leadership.  Based on our self assessment, click here to take one for yourself, we were able to see possibly our strength and weaknesses as it pertains to the hard and soft skills of leadership.  Here are the three Leadership Principles we talked about today.

    1. Vision
    2. L3 – Life-Long-Learning
    3. Team Work

    I am excited to learn and begin/continue to apply these leadership principles to our student ministry.