Lafayette | Jeff Mikels

Is it Discrimination to Discriminate against Discriminators?

My church office received an email today that called me out for what was printed in the local newspaper reporting on my involvement in the City Council meeting last Monday.

A woman named Kathy wrote this:

Dear Pastor Mikels,

Reading the newspaper Tuesday morning, I felt quite sad to read about your objections to our community protecting the rights of transgendered people and your positioning yourself as one who should judge them. I do not believe discrimination against anyone is right.

My Statement to the Lafayette City Council on Gender Identity

Last night, the Lafayette City Council met to consider putting an amendment into the Lafayette Human Relations Ordinance. Some time ago, the city codified a “Human Relations Ordinance” to fight against discrimination in our town. It created a Human Relations Commission tasked with the job of investigating cases of discrimination in our city and offering suggestions and education to individuals and businesses found to be discriminatory.

Lafayette Rocks 2009

Read the Rules: http://lafayetterocks.com Reply to the YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.

I Will Rise (LCC Easter Sunday 2009)

This was posted to YouTube by a lady who had never been to our church before, but came with the violinist. ..

Another New Church is Starting in Lafayette

This Sunday launches the Grand Opening month for Connexion Christian Ministries in Lafayette, and it’s time for me to evaluate whether I’m really in favor of church planting or just my own church plant!

Theory:

Church planting is the most effective method of evangelism in the world today. Only 20-30% of the people in Tippecanoe County go to church on a given Sunday. If all the churches were filled to capacity twice a Sunday, that would still total less than half the total population of this area.

New Church Brochures

I just finished putting together two new church brochures for our Grand Opening service on Sunday. By the way, if you haven’t heard yet, we are changing our church name to Lafayette Community Church. Read About It Here.

Professional Sunday Morning Video Presentations

In our new church effort in Lafayette, I set as a goal from very early on that we would attempt to do everything we could with excellence, and though we have had some hiccups with our children’s programming and with our music, we have been consistently high quality with our printed materials and with our video presentations thanks to some really great software.

On the printed front, we have been using Apple’s Pages for basic word processing and simple page design and Serif PagePlus 11 which is exponentially greater than anything else in its price range ($50 for features that easily surpass Microsoft Publisher and even rival PageMaker or Quark). However, that’s for another blog entry.

Game On! Announcing the SCGTC

On Sunday, I challenged my congregation to join me for a competition of spending time in the word of God. I called it The Southside Church God-Time Competition, and here are the simple rules:

At least 10 minutes a day with God, every day. Time with God means something is read (from the Bible), something is written, and something is prayed.

WHY Campaign

For 6 weeks, we will be exploring the six biggest questions in life.

Why am I here? Why should I believe in God? Why should I trust the Bible? Why is the world so messed up? Why is there such conflict between Science and the Bible? Why Jesus?

It’s going to be a powerful program combining dynamic Sunday worship experiences with casual but deep discussion groups. I’ve been looking forward to it for 3 months now!

In many ways, I’ve been thinking of this 6 week campaign as a re-launch of the church.

Flying Disc Giveaway Success

This week we executed a plan that I had been brewing since last year at this time.

You may already have read about our “Black Friday” Hot Chocolate Giveaway. On that day, we gave out nearly 500 mugs of hot chocolate or coffee to shoppers braving the local Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving.

032-03 — Dream Big & Work Hard (vision message)

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It’s my passion to see people get a big vision for what God is able and willing to do in our lives. I am convinced that God is bigger and more willing to do more incredible things than we give him credit for, than we expect, and than we are ready for. We just don’t have big enough dreams, but for those who do have big dreams the problem is often that they aren’t ready and willing to put in the effort required to see those dreams come true.

Grand Opening Slideshow

031-02 An Even Better Life Is Just Around the Corner

Click Here to Download.

Today’s message is a message that has been on my heart for a long time, but I didn’t know it until earlier this week. I had come up with the title long ago when we sent in our postcards to be printed, and honestly, I originally thought of the sermon being one about how great the afterlife was going to be.

031-01 How to Live Your Best Life Now

This is the first message in Southside Church’s Grand Opening series. It’s a short series entitled:

What’s in it for me?: How the Bible Makes Life Better

In this message, I talk about how the Bible contains the keys to living your best life now. There are three key things the Bible offers us that help us to live our best lives: Guidance, Encouragement, and something I call “The Secret.

150?

What an incredible day!

Last Sunday was our Grand Opening service as a church and I am excited to report that we had between 140-150 people there. We never got an accurate count, but this is how we came up with those numbers:

24 Elementary School Kids 6 Babies in the Nursery 9 Children’s Ministry Workers 100 Bulletins handed out (when we ran out)

I’ve tried to be conservative and stick with 140, but my wife is pressing me to say 150! and I’m usually the one who does the exaggerating!

If you want to hear the message I preached or watch the video, it will be posted here soon or you can get to it by visiting our church audio page.

God is bigger than we imagine.