Our senior pastor, Tim Passmore, recently began tweeting and facebooking his Quiet Time takeaways each morning, or a majority of mornings anyway.  He challenged the rest of the staff about their quiet times and then our Worship associate, Andy Botts, began doing the same thing.  As a way to hold myself accountable I about to begin the same journey.  As I am about to begin to do this I challenge you to do it as well, i’ve created a page on my blog, http://bit.ly/quiettimes,  that will search twitter for the phrase “QT Takeaway” and I challenge you to start sharing what God is showing you each day and share with others as well.

Bill Hybels

• If God is transmitting to you everyday how concerned would you be with the quality of your antenna?
• Leaders move people from here to there.
• People oftentimes like it “here”… they don’t like the idea of going “there.”
• “Refill their vision bucket. Everyone’s vision bucket leaks.”
• Celebrate every mile-marker you possibly can on the way to the destination.

Jim Collins

• Good is the enemy of Great. // What do you settle for?
• Bad decisions made with good intensions are still bad decisions
• If you measure your success by money, you always lose
• here’s the link to Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” assessment tool:http://bit.ly/d9gYLY
• Be willing to embrace loss, endure pain, but never give up the faith to prevail.
• Do Your Diagnostics
• Count Your Blessings, Literally, use a spreadsheet
• Create an Inventory of the Brutal Facts
• Stop Doing Something
• Define Results and Show Clicks on the Flywheel
• Double Your Reach to Young People by Changing Your Practices without changing your Core Values.
• Set a Big, Hairy Audacious Goal

Christine Caine

• From trafficked girl: If your God is real and loving, why wouldn’t your God come sooner?
• God is calling us to go to places we’ve never been on pathways we didn’t know existed
• Check out http://bit.ly/clZwli to learn more about the A21 Campaign and @ChristineCaine‘s work for anti-human trafficking

Tony Dungy with Craig Groeshel

• Stubbornness is a virtue … if you are right
• Don’t mistake hours for productivity
• The informal part of the mentoring is much more important than the “scheduled” times
• esus Christ is the BEST mentor or leader that i’ve been involved with

Adam Hamilton

• Don’t let the devil ride because he’s going to want to drive.

Dr. Peter Zhao Xiao

• If China can only produce TV sets but not TV programs they will be unable to impact culture.
• There are now over 130 million Christians in China.

Andy Stanley

• Leaders learn to leverage the problems that never go away in a way to create progress for the organization.
• Every single healthy church should have the tension of calling seekers and teaching believers. We must be comfortable living with this tension.

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What’s the difference between Certified Frustration-Free Packaging and traditional packaging?

The Certified Frustration-Free Package (on the left) is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging (on the right).

Did you get that? They want to take away all the crap that gets in the way and allow you to get to what you really want. Sound familiar? In church it seems to be the same way many times there’s lots of crap we have to get through to get to what we are really searching for, the Grace and Love of our Savior.  But how many times have people not gotten to that because there’s so much crap in the way? They have to get through all the “church” to get to the Christ.  All the rules and regulations that people have created that actually stop people from the relationship.  When people are worried more about where to park, what to wear, or all the other things than being able to forget about all  these distractions and begin to on what God is trying to share with them that day.

So what are you doing to make it easier for people to reach Christ?