DanLacher.COM

Have you ever been curled up in the fetal position wondering if you made the right decision to enter full time ministry?

Anne Jackson brings this very issue to light in her book Mad Church Disease: Overcoming The Burnout Epidemic.  Instead of internalizing the fears, anger, sadness, and other emotions that can sometimes lead to and result in burnout, she encourages us as leaders to look to accountability people who can help us see the path that God has for us and stay closely on it.

Since I had allowed spending time with God to be replaced by spending time doing things for God, my spiritual tank had been sucked dry. When that happened, I began to lose perspective on almost every area of my life.  My defenses were down, and I allowed myself to start believing little lies the enemy would throw into my path.

Mad Church Disease is a well written path through the troubled road that one might walk in ministry.  Anne writes from the heart with very authentic and real life examples from her own walk as well as friends that have walked the road as well.  We applaud her courage for bringing the epidemic into the light and encouraging the rest of us to respond well to the challenges that ministry presents.

Thanks Anne for aiding in keeping us aware of staying fully grounded in God’s Word and time alone with our Savior.  Reading this has also helped us be aware others whom may be facing these challenges as they lead in their ministries.  It reinforces the need to surround ones self with authentic accountability and ensuring that one takes time away to relax and recharge.

We are recommending this book to our other ministry leaders that we serve along side.  It would be well for every ministry team to read and understand what could happen and guard against it.

God Bless,
Dan Lacher & Lauri Potter

I have been working with Ustream as a very low cost solution for live streaming events, specifically worship, from Messiah.  We then embedded the Ustream video and chat into our own site at full resolution instead of being compressed down to a small image.  We have been fighting the battle though of users that enter our site being assigned a Ustream guest name similar to “ustream-12345″.  This works fine for the guest that desire to come in an remain annonymous, but we also have the flip side of folks that desire to worship online and have thier name or nick name displayed in the chat.

At first I thought the solution to this would be to first go to Ustream, get logged in and then return to the live streaming page.  This did not yield any change in the results.  Futher searching through the help and forums from Ustream did not reveal anything further to the solution.  I was finally albe to connect with someone on the Ustream live help chat and obtain the solution.  So instead of keeping this nugget of knowledge to myself I am sharing it with you all.

There are one solution that will help with any guest as well as guest that are registered users on Ustream.

• For those guest that desire to change thier assigned name from “ustream-12345″ to soemthing more understandable they simply type in the chat box:
  /nick MyName
  This will change the “ustream-12345″ to “MyName-12345″
• For guest that desire to use their full Ustream username then the also have to supply their Ustream password:
  /nick UstreamUsername:UstreamPassword
  This will change their nick to their Ustream one for the chat.

Solution accomplished for those that are using a Ustream embedded chat outside of the original Ustream show page.