#7: I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

After 10 years of Forefront we’ve now done over 120 message series. Thought it might be fun and interesting to share with you my top twenty.

Okay, okay, this is no surprise, but it is one of my favorite series. My book partly came from this series, and partly became this series. One of the things I liked about this one is that I think every Christian can relate to it. All of us have times when the passionate relationship we’re supposed to have with God becomes a boring religion. When that happens something needs to rip us out of that rut and throw us back into the adventure of truly following Jesus. I think this series did that for a lot of people.

Part of my motivation for writing the book was that maybe it could be a resource for other pastors, especially church planters. And so this series is also one of my favorites because it was the first we ever did specifically to share with other churches. We’re willing to share everything we do, and have shared a lot of our stuff in the past, but much of what we do (creatively) is very Forefront-specific. Our videos feature our staff, or have inside jokes, or are extremely edgy beyond most churches comfort zones, or other factors that would make them unusable for other churches. This series we made sure that everything was “generic” enough that most any church could use it. Then we made all the resources available for free to other churches.

And many churches have done the series! I had a guy come up to me at the National New Church Conference and say, “Thank you so much for the T-Shirt series. You have no idea how great it was for me to have six weeks to not have to worry about our Sunday mornings, because they were basically all done by your church. It allowed me to focus on other things and get ahead. As a church planter, that was such an unbelievable blessing.” That’s cool!

– featured on newchurches.com