Working on Sundays

I know I should not do it, work on weekend, however, I have no choice. The life of a small business owner!!! I am watching Law & Order but can't concentrate.

This friday, we handed in three proposals! Wow! What a week!

Today I am reading the new February issue of Black Enterprise and The Network Journal.

Some great articles this month!

Anyone else care to share thier weekend reading?

Below is an article from the current issue of the The Network Journal? Perhaps there is a market in consulting churches.



New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Spiritual - and economic - revival Saturday, November 6th, 2004 The Rev. Dennis Dillon would like to see every black church in Brooklyn involved in some kind of economic development program - and, he says, that definitely includes the hundreds of small, under-the-radar congregations in every poor neighborhood.
"Even the little churches can take on a project," he said this week. "God's Battalion of Prayer, a [Pentecostal] church in Flatbush, runs a bakery. Another church makes greeting cards. The opportunities are all over out there."
It is this thinking that inspired Dillon, the publisher of a free weekly newspaper, The New York Christian Times, to organize a day-long workshop Monday that he hopes will lead to more economic cooperation between the business and religious communities.
The Black Church Means Business Conference will begin with breakfast at the New York Marriott in downtown Brooklyn and continue with seminars all day. Dillon will wrap up the event with a dinner speech.
"We've already got about 300 churches signed up," he said. "We're going to talk to them about franchising, fund-raising, incorporation, tax laws and a lot of other subjects they don't teach in seminaries."
Dillon, 45, organized a similar conference 10 years ago. He called it a success that, among other things, led dozens of smaller churches to start modest projects that help their pastors pay the bills and give their flocks a stake in the community.
For the big churches, with their large memberships, budgets and ambitions, projects range from affordable housing and schools to nursing homes and senior centers. Projects also can include businesses that, Dillon said, currently range from car services to print shops.
"What we can do is show churches what they can do and then motivate them to do it," said Dillon, who also is pastor of the nondenominational Brooklyn Christian Center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which he founded two years ago in a former window factory.
The Christian Times, which he started 15 years ago, is distributed through churches. Its motto is "Good News for a Change," and its circulation, he said, is about 44,000. It isn't a religious publication in the usual sense because, despite its name, it focuses more on community news - including health, personal relationships and immigrant issues - than on church happenings.
"It has a spiritual foundation," Dillon said. "But I want black church communities to think as much about the here-and-now as they do about the sweet by-and-by."
One of the messages he preaches is that business begets business. "Open a store and another store will open nearby," he said. "You create a commercial center, one business at a time."
In a way, it is the same thing with churches. There are several in the neighborhood where Dillon established his own congregation, but he said his church, which calls its Sunday worship "celebration" instead of "service," fills a niche.
"Our ministry is specifically intended for up-and-coming professionals who want to know how to succeed as well as how to live," he said, "and we do some things no one else does."
One, he said, is to open a scholarship fund for every child dedicated in the church, with the first $100 donated by the church itself.
Dillon's double role as publisher and preacher fulfills an ambition that he said he first expressed to his mother when he was 12. "I want to preach and write," he told her, and she said, "You can do it."
Dillon was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moved to Hackensack, N.J., as a teenager, studied journalism at Sheridan College in the Canadian province of Ontario and returned to New Jersey, where he spent a few months as a reporter for The Record of Bergen County. He said he got the idea of launching his own publication while working for a black-owned newspaper in Englewood, N.J., where he was managing editor when he left for New York.
"The Christian Times has grown in some surprising ways over the years," Dillon said, "and I believe the church will, too."
The average attendance on Sunday is about 80, with members traveling from as far as the Bronx, he said. Parking is no problem; on the block of Atlantic Ave. the church occupies, there are few cars on the weekend.
"One of my prayers," he said, "is for traffic jams on Sundays. That will tell me we're doing it right."