CreativePastors Blog & Podcast

Ed has fun with Joel

During the opening session of the C3 conference, Ed shared a fun video featuring his impression of Joel Osteen—on the Lakewood Church stage. See what happens when Joel walks in on him!

Fundraising Followup

In November's Creative Leader newsletter, we shared a bold goal we were striving for at Fellowship Church: a church-wide cash gift of $5 million in the month of December. Ed presented this challenge during the Off the Chain series and with a campaign called, The Gift , which would be invested in our campuses, completing our camp and contributing to an effort by Fellowship of Maceio in Brazil to eliminate hunger and homelessness in two cardboard cities.

Ed shared the exciting results of the campaign during a recent weekend service. We stood and cheered as a ticker on the screen climbed upward, paused at the $5 million mark, and kept right on going. Once again, the people of Fellowship Church rose to the challenge with their faithfulness as they responded to God's leading and contributed not $5 million, but a cash gift of $6.7 million in one month! We can't wait to see how God uses these gifts to impact this generation and the next!

A Clean Slate for 2008

As we welcome a new year, many of us are excited about a renewed sense of possibility and opportunities for a fresh start. We're excited to share the journey of ministry with you and look forward to a great year ahead! This weekend, Ed will be kicking off a brand new series at Fellowship Church called Betrayal - check out the promo video here. It will be interesting to see what God does with these messages as we dig deep into the power of his love, grace and forgiveness. Stay tuned!

Satellite Update

The new location for the Fellowship Church Alliance campus is official! We've acquired a building in the heart of downtown Fort Worth, right along the Trinity River between the Cultural District and Sundance Square. Fort Worth is the 5th largest city in Texas, the 17th largest city in the United States, and was voted one of “America’s Most Livable Communities.” There are about 2 million people in the metropolitan area and Fort Worth is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. The potential for life-change in this area is exponential! We're so excited to be right in the middle of it all.

ineed2change.com Featured in the News

With the launch of the ineed2change.com website, visitors were invited to join a community for change by answering the question, "What would you like to change in your life?" Since then, more than 3,000 people have logged on and shared physical, emotional and spiritual changes they need to make. The submissions are short (140 characters or less), anonymous and honest, revealing addictions, harmful relationships or simply bad habits that people are looking to leave behind. The Dallas Morning News recently featured an article about the series and its impact on our community.

Ed kicked off the series last weekend with a message titled Making Change,  emphasizing that only our unchanging God can bring about real change and introducing the Holy Spirit as the true change agent.

FC Stage Sets Available

Our Media and Worship teams frequently receive questions from other churches about how to build worship stage sets similar to the ones we use at Fellowship Church. This week we have an easy answer. Take ours!

We’re in the process of changing our worship stage set and would like to make it available to another church. The set shown in these pictures will soon be ready for shipping, so make us an offer (to help with tear down and storage costs), and you’ll be the new owner of a professionally designed stage set – with plenty of time to get it installed for a fall kickoff! All transportation arrangements will be the responsibility of the recipient. Interested? Send an email to Kristen within the next day or two.

Ed Young Brings Unique Perspective to Chemistry.com

Singles who visit Match.com’s newest web venture, Chemistry.com, will find an altogether different point of view in Ed Young’s posts on The Great Mate Debate, a multi-contributor blog. Along with five other featured bloggers, Ed will be weighing in every week on a variety of hot relational topics, ranging from spirituality in relationships to monogamy in marriage. We’re thrilled about this opportunity to bring a God-centered perspective to the dating scene and engage in conversation with people from diverse backgrounds. Get the scoop on this new endeavor, along with Ed’s thoughts about the project here.

Doors Visualized

At Fellowship Church, we're in the middle of Ed's latest series, Doors, in which he's covering topics as diverse as debt, isolation, marriage and more. We've enjoyed working with the imagery for this series: the bulletin cover, doors on the stage, and printed doors on the wall of the worship center. But here's one visual touch that's especially fun—we painted doors in a spectrum of bright colors and suspended them from the ceiling of our atrium. Check out these shots from our Grapevine and Downtown campuses.

Multi-Site Update

Multi-site ministry is by no means a one-size-fits-all endeavor, and this weekend at Fellowship Church is a perfect example. It's Race Weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, so our Alliance campus will be attending services at our Grapevine location on Saturday due to the hundreds of thousands of fans that will be setting up camp in their area for the Samsung 500. And on a completely different note, this weekend we are launching a new Sunday night service at our Downtown Dallas and Miami locations. Identical to the Sunday morning service, the evening time slot is a great option for the many young singles who attend those campuses.  It's all part of our continuing effort to be  "One dynamic church. Five diverse locations that meet you where you are."

Easter Message Sneak Preview

Ed is excited to release a draft manuscript of this year's Easter message on CreativePastors. Here's a quick note from him:

Easter weekend is just a few days away and my team and I are continuing to tweak the message that will reach one of the largest crowds of the year at Fellowship. The Easter message will actually be the second part in a new series called Doors.

Last weekend we kicked off the series with a challenge to our regular attendees to invite their friends and neighbors to the doors of the church on Easter weekend. Almost anyone will give God a chance on Christmas and Easter. And as people walk through the doors of your church and mine, the doorway to eternity hangs in the balance. Christ is the door to heaven and everyone must make a choice to cross the threshold or slam it. And that's what the Easter message is all about: What are you going to do with the door?

We've been amazed as we have begun to plan and talk about this series just how prevalent the door is in our lives, yet how much we take it for granted. From front doors to garage doors, office doors to back doors, we are continually moving from one place to another. We are confronted with doors every day. Doors are everywhere, giving us access to everything we do. Yet, while we open dozens of doors every day—in both the physical and spiritual sense—we so often ignore the most important doors in life. We'll be talking about that throughout this series over the next several weeks.

Once again, I'm making a pre-release version of my Easter message available to you. I hope that it helps spark some ideas for you as you too prepare for new opportunities to show many, many people a doorway to hope, peace, forgiveness, and eternal life. Keep up the good work and let us know the great things God does in your church this weekend!