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In less than a week, the usca aiken convocation center will be jam packed for Easter. I can’t wait. If you have any unchurched friends, please invite them to come as they are at either 9 or 11 AM.

We have a lot of video elements for this event. For our bumper, countdown and video background for verses, we outsourced that to Ken Wilson. He did an outstanding job! The pieces he put together are smokin! You’ll have to wait till Sunday to check them out though.

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They showed this video at C3. Everyone was rolling. Too funny.

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Today, if everything goes right, we should have about 36,000 direct mail pieces hitting the mailboxes around the Aiken area. Here is what it looks like:

Mailer Front
Mailer Back

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Yeah, that just happened. What an unbelievable run. A team that won 3 regular season games against SEC opponents won 4 straight in the tournament, including 2 in one day. With the amount of talent we lost this year, to win the tournament. Just unreal! How Bout Them DAWGS!!

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We’ve been doing a lot of different kinds of marketing for Easter at the Convocation Center. A new one for us is radio advertising. We’ve taken a shot gun approach to this in that we targeted talk, classic rock, urban, and country radio. I really wish we would have targeted top 40 as well, but that didn’t happen. Anyway, here are some spots that we created (thanks to Chris Rieke and Danny Neu for making that happen). These started airing this past Wednesday and will run all the way up until Easter.

Pleasant “Banter” Track:

Sunday, Sunday “monster truck” spot 1:

Sunday, Sunday “monster truck” spot 2:

Urban spot:

“Pleasant” Spot:

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Here are my notes from Tony Morgan’s breakout at Unleash at Newspring Church. Tony started off the session by saying that his gift wasn’t speaking but rather writing. I thought he did a really flamboyant job during his breakout (that’s an inside code word from the breakout). He entitled his talk “The 10 Steps to Becoming Blogging BFF’s”. The BFF is in honor of his teenage daughter. So if you’re a blogger or thinking of entering the blogging world, here are some tips:

1. Determine your primary audience. His blog for example, tonymorganlive.com, has two primary audiences: Church Leaders and The Newspring community.
2. Post Regularly. Need to post almost daily. If you’re not out there sharing your life and inviting people to joint the dialogue, then you’re missing out on the community and networking aspect of blogging.
3. Keep your post short. People are busy. People want quick hits and not your life story. Use bullet points where possible. Not a bunch of paragraphs where people have to scroll and scroll to read.
4. Don’t sell yourself. Be honest and tell real stories. Shouldn’t be about all of your successes. People flee from people who feel like they have it all put together.
5. Use humor. Be careful here. Self deprecating humor is better. Don’t take shots at other people or attacking them.
6. Stop attacking other people and ministries. Do people know you for what you are for or for what you are against? Don’t point fingers at specific people and churches.
7. Remember that blogging isn’t private. There are some things that are appropriate and some that are not for blogging. Some people have blogged something 8 years ago and it come back to bite them. You would be surprised who reads your blog at times: media, family, other churches, etc. If in doubt about a post, have someone else that you trust read it.
8. Be a thought leader. Some blogs all they do is transfer info from other blogs and that’s it. People want to hear “your story”.
9. Don’t listen to all of your critics. Ask what is their relationship to me and what is their motivation toward me.
10. Reveal the real you.

Some other quick hits:

• Engage the community
• Reveal authenticity in your ministry
• Make growing ministries/churches seem small through using social networking platforms (myspace, facebook, etc.)

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So while I was ill for what seemed like forever, I watched way too much TV. I kept seeing this Trident commercial and it had this song with the lyric “So kiss me again, cause only you can stop this stuttering….” I don’t know what it was about the song, but I had to have it. Just had a contagious little groove. So I bought it tonight. It’s just a single by Ben’s Brother. Check it out:

Stuttering on iTunes:

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I successfully moved my blog to the new server today. Had to actually do a good bit more digging in the backend of the site to make it happen, but hopefully down the road I can more rapidly deploy posts as well as audio video.

Few quick hits:

• UNleash at Newspring was incredible. We had about 40 or so creekers there. For those that had to leave early and missed the last session….I’m so sorry but you missed the best part of the day…seriously. Fortunately for you I’ll have a copy of the cd from the last session that you can listen to. Should be in next week.
• I got home from UNleashed last night and just sat in silence for a while trying to process everything. Got some notes that I’ll be posting over the next few days.
• What an incredible job the Newspring staff did, both paid and volunteer alike. Everything was excellent. Our folks are ready for next year already!
• I praise God for what He is doing through Perry and the people at Newspring.

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Just wanted to let you know that I’m probably going to be changing hosting servers for ajwired.com over the next few days. You may not tell any difference at all. If you do, then just hang tight. The new server should increase some capabilities among other things.

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This morning I was reading in Malachi, chapter 1. The Lord was addressing Israel and confronting them because they were showing contempt toward the Lord (vv 6-14). They were doing this by offering defiled sacrifices to God. Instead of offering God their first fruit, their best offerings, they were giving God the left overs, the crippled, blind and diseased animals:

7 You have shown contempt by offering defiled sacrifices on my altar. Then you ask, ‘How have we defiled the sacrifices?’ “You defile them by saying the altar of the Lord deserves no respect. 8 When you give blind animals as sacrifices, isn’t that wrong? And isn’t it wrong to offer animals that are crippled and diseased? Try giving gifts like that to your governor, and see how pleased he is!” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. Malachi 1:7-8

They were giving God easy sacrifices…easy offerings….and they stunk in God’s sight. He even says, “Look, try giving to the local governor what you’re bringing to me and see how he likes it!” That’s when I began to ask myself, “Do my offerings stink to God?”

How often have I given Him the leftovers, the second best when the God of Heaven, my Jesus, deserves my very best. My prayer today is that I would give God my best offering…in how I love Him, in how I love my family, the people I work and serve with, in how I do my job.

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