This is What Trust Looks Like

The key ingredient to building trust is not time. It is courage. - Patrick Lencioni

+ Trevin tells me [in a very constructive tone] that sometimes I talk really fast and in choosing a cross cultural tool to teach on, I should choose something that I know less about so I can teach it with more depth. And I should try to talk a little slower. Amy says, "Wow, that is some unfiltered debate." I am not offended or put off at all. In fact, I value the feedback and let it marinate in my mind for a few days. In the end, I choose a topic that I don't know that well. But I still probably talk too fast.

+ During some team building rotations, I was a floater, meaning I was off watching everyone do the work and also in charge of telling teams where to rotate to next. At the first switch, I totally screwed it up. I call Amy, who is down in the woods waiting for her next team to arrive. She says, "It doesn't matter who it is, just whatever works so that someone rotates into something they haven't done before."

+ In the fantasy world of infinite time, any time our team does a teaching or presentation, we would practice it. In reality, sometimes we don't have time. Trevin and Amy are tasked with delivering a talk to student mission trip leaders. Kristen, Trevin and I divide up workshop topics on cross cultural tools. Everyone runs with these tasks and although I feel a need to listen to at least part of their talk, I decide to not worry about it. Because I trust them. The feedback I get about all the sessions read something like this:
"Kristen did a wonderful job presenting the information."
"Trevin's was solid... needs more refining, but the message was excellent....He was well received and people were talking about for the rest of the day."
"I really enjoyed the combination of academic (definition/diagram/handout) and stories to model the process. The Circle seems like a good tool to use all-the-time!"

We put a lot of value in our guides, knowing they are talented, have lots of cross cultural experience and can relate and inspire the next generation. Probably better than all that - they are courageous.

Summer 2010 Listening - Trevin

Ember guide Trevin traveled to South Africa for 6 weeks this summer. He's had an incredible trajectory, starting in 2006 when he was on one of our teams serving in DC for a week. The subsequent summers were England+Hungary, Hungary+Cameroon and, last summer, Belgium, where he connected with some people planning World Cup festivities for 2010 in South Africa. Intersect that with his interest in international community development and his love for soccer and he initiated some plans that he executed this summer.

Some of Trevin's time was spent with an org called Keep Them Safe which used the opportunity of the World Cup to gather and create momentum for the community via sports, the arts, culture and entrepreneurship. Trevin visited and helped local teams with this org in a different spots within South Africa including locations and around Cape Town and Pretoria. Although all of his stories are great ones, I loved hearing how he concentrated on observing and identifying local, indigenous leadership with Keep Them Safe. He embodies two key characteristics of leaders: they identify other leaders and they contextualize.

Plenty more stories and pictures on his blog - make sure to read the one about the bread of life.

Lots of people dream, some people initiate, even fewer execute. Finding the ones that do all three is arduous and joyous. Empowering and releasing them is even something else - let's continue. The world is desperate for them.

Student Missions Prep - The Tipping Point

Part of why Ember exists is to help student mission teams get ready for their missions experience. If you are like us, you know that there are lots of student mission teams that are woefully unprepared. One of our core competencies is helping prepare student teams and its always a joy to be involved.

GRACE termed their student missions preparation day The Tipping Point [which is a great book by the way] and it was our privilege to help facilitate a day like this for around 90 students and leaders broken into 9 different summer teams. GRACE has lots of mature systems when it comes to student missions and this day is part of their system.

Here's a rough outline of the day, feel free to steal what you want. If you want deeper details - get in touch. Our prep days like these are always customized and contextualized and we would love to help you.

+ Team Leader session
Trevin and Amy dived into the idea of kairos moments and how they related to the context of student mission trips and the larger context of discipling students. This was a phenomenal session and I loved both the content and their style of delivery. The content was something that leaders need but maybe didn't quite know that they need - who doesn't want to learn about helping students mark pivotal times in their journey and making significant decisions in light of those moments. Their style of delivery was Amy explaining the concepts interspersed with Trevin telling his stories of traveling around the world and how those experiences molded his missions perspective. Some of this content was taken from Building a Discipling Culture from 3DM.

+ Round Robin Prayer Rotation
Students rotating through each of the teams, praying for the summer experiences.

+ Tools of the Trade
There were three breakout sessions of 20 minutes each, based on cross cultural tools. These are simple, reproducible tools that students can use to understand another a new culture and also tools that will help them navigate the culture that they live in. Our hope is that they help prepare these students to both be an agent of change this summer on their missions trip as well as here at home. The three tools were mapmaking, person of peace and redemptive analogy, which are all concepts in our core curriculum. A great resource for this is the book Tradecraft.

+ Team Building Initiatives
The final element was team building initiatives. I've been pretty impacted by the book The Advantage and the emphasis on the idea of trust. So when we were imagining this element, I asked Amy if there was a way that we could help teams explicitly learn to trust each other. We all know that trust is earned over time and experience so doing the same thing in an afternoon was a challenge. I think the exercises helped facilitate did that, but of course, we'll know at the end of the summer.

I'm so proud of what our team did this day. Amy, Trevin, Kristen, Dustin and some other guests did a phenomenal job as well as some of our Ember X team who jumped in to help. These missions prep events are some of our most catalytic events and I'm expectant to see how these student teams throw fire this summer.

Bi-Vocational Ember Guides

Congrats to one of our Ember guides, Trevin Hoekzema, who has landed a gig as a missions administrator at Bay Area Community Church outside of Annapolis. I've got the utmost respect for Bay Area's missions pastor, Casely Essamuah, who Trevin will directly report to.

Ember has had a very informal relationship with Bay Area and we love their global awareness and focus. They've got a great view on what the world looks like, lots of good efforts in getting a large church involved and have some significant investments in multiplication efforts outside their church.

Bi-vocational ministry is a significant strategy for Ember. Trevin, like all of our guides, fits into this and we are excited at what he brings to Bay Area as well as how his experiences there will help Ember catalyze the future.

Over The Edge

Ember was honored to be a small part of Bay Area Community Church's first annual missions conference titled On the Edge - what a fantastic event! The intended audience for this event included people already committed to go on one of their 20 missional experiences this year, or people interested but not sure where to commit to, or people not wanting to go but just to send others. Huge congrats and thanks to Casely, Trevin and Michele and their global missions team - this team continually raises the bar for local churches engaging their communities to serve across the planet. It was also great fun to have our friend Shane as part of the event and around for the weekend.

Here are some best practices that I took from having a behind the scenes view:
The team hosted a dinner for their trip leaders on Friday night, with very specific direction and encouragement for the conference on the next day.
Every time Trevin talks about some kind of task, he prefaces it with describing specifically what the win is. "The win for this is..."
The team published a mobile friendly link for people to commit to a team. This eventually links to the longer application process.
There was a set of required workshops for first time participants. The team wanted to be very specific about content for this set of people.
World class presentation for handouts, brochures, lobby banners, etc. Everything BACC does in terms of presentation is excellent.

These kinds of missions mobilization events are not normal. They only happen with lots of dreaming, planning and passion.

Photo: Clancy, Shane, Casely, Michele, Trevin.

2015 Dream Session #5

This is Trevin - long time readers will remember that he was Ember's first guide. Trevin traveled with us pre-Ember and is now on staff at Bay Area Community Church where one of his responsibilities is coordinating their local community service projects.

Bay Area also has about 17 overseas short term teams this coming year and Trevin will be leading one of them. Because we both believe that team training is just as important as what you do on the field, we might be scheming to do some of that Mission Advancing together.

You might or might not have a team or destination yet. But a good part of dreaming is thinking about how to prepare them well.

Ember 2017 DTA Leadership

The Ember Cast is always honored to help our clients and partners with some of their student missions training opportunities. We had one such opportunity last weekend, traveling with some leader teams to Annapolis to spend about 24 hours focusing on successful student missions leadership.

Concepts during the weekend included: Frames for Teams, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Island Survival, the Tuckman Team Model and Culture Mapping. Friday evening was the majority of this leadership content while Saturday was up and about all over downtown Annapolis. Our time in DTA was driven first by a hybrid cultural scavenger hunt/geocache challenge - latitude and longitude on index cards. Later in the day, Ember Guide Trevin gave us a walking tour of some of the lesser known parts of the city, including the more marginalized neighborhoods contrasted with the more affluent which also included the context behind Downtown Hope, a church plant right in the middle of the arts district.

If you are wondering how this weekend was designed, there were three subtle but prominent pillars to the experience:
Disciples are made on the road, not in rows - one of our core Ember mantras [Kim Hammond]
Highly Reproducible - everything that we modeled could be reproduced by these leaders.
Less is more - instead of too much structure, less gives leaders more opportunities.

Special thanks to Ember Guides Tess, Trevin and Ember spawn Emily for making this weekend happen. And you can do this too. And you should, if you have short term mission teams traveling this summer.

Ember Orlando

Phenomenal time with middle school kids and staff at Lake Aurora Christian Camp last week. My friend Chris Marsden is one of the trustees at the camp and in mid March, approached me about Ember being adopted by his week of camp as the 'missionary' of the week. He's been a constant encouragement since even before Ember started so it was great fun to work together on a project with him.

The original intent was to do some video teaching since 'missions' time was only 1 hour every day. Since I wasn't leading a student team this summer, I decided that we could probably make it work to be at camp in person for at least a few days and also combine it with a family Orlando visit [you know us and Florida...] We were fortunate that Trevin Hoekzema could be an integral part of the planning and execution of this project too.

I'm most proud of the content of our teaching. Obviously, teaching to middle school students is challenging enough as it is. The content of what we chose made it even more tough - adults don't always get concepts like contextualization and global migration. But that's the part I loved the most - we taught about concepts that most adult Christians have never heard of, much less students. Like I've felt and said for years, there are significant concepts about 'missions' and global leadership that no one is teaching to students. I also loved having our two girls talk for a minute or two about their experiences and how they made a difference as 'kids'.

In terms of execution, Monday bombed. Tuesday and Wednesday worked much better, probably because Trevin and I went back and spent a good amount of time putting some visuals together, including pictures, some additional video content and more interaction. We did a quick review at the end of Wednesday and were amazed at the amount of material some of these kids could recall.

We are probably going to try to package up some of this material. Not a full blown curriculum per se, but something a little more transferable. I'll post some ideas about that later, in the meantime, let me know if that might be something you are interested in. Thanks to those of you that prayed and helped finance this. I'm keeping my eyes on the community around this little obscure middle school camp knowing that God will finish what He started.

[Twitter hashtag #emberorlando and more photos here.]

Connecting the dots

Bay Area Community Church is an church we love to work with - they have a high value getting their people involved in global missions. Trevin, one of our Ember guides, recently took a part time job there and he's serving as a point person for a short term training thing we are going to do there. And their missions pastor is one of the best around, with the unique perspective of a man raised in Africa serving in suburbia on the East Coast.
Because...
I was sent a job opening at Bay Area and passed it on to Trevin.
Because...
In April 2011, I ran a short workshop talking about mission trips, how to build teams and how they change us. It was my first time working with Casely, missions pastor at Bay Area.
Because...
I met LeilaB, who introduced me to Casely, missions pastor at Bay Area Community Church. Leila, at that time, was working as Casely's executive assistant.
Because...
I attended a dinner at Dave Shive's house with a bunch of young 20 something adults where the main conversation topic was old school churches, global missions and the emerging generation. Dave is a well known missions guy around DC and Baltimore, teaching at Washington Bible College for years as well as a Perspectives instructor, also for many years.
Because...
Dave and I met at the Advancing Churches in Missions conference in November 2010. It was one of the last formal gatherings the organization would host.
Because...
I was invited to give a workshop at the ACMC conference in November of 2010, the day after I held the very first board of directors meeting for Ember. Lots of energy that weekend.
Because...
In the summer of 2010, I got an invitation on LinkedIn from Joe Steinitz, who was well connected in the global missions arena around the Baltimore/DC area. We had lots of mutual friends and had met here and there on a few occasions.

Seth Godin is right - we have moved from the industrial economy to the connection economy. Don't miss that.

[This post inspired by this post.]

One Simple Lever

Trevin and I spent some time working together this past Saturday. He's our first guide and as someone who is half my age, I rely on his perspective a good bit when it comes to engaging the emerging generation.

On this afternoon, we worked to clarify who and what an Ember guide is, nailed down some logistics for two possible Ember field trips in June and September and outlined core better practices we would like to share with others. Oh and we worked on some Chick Fil A and D's awesome guac.

Ember's fantastical board of directors is really interested in growth - their belief, like mine, is that there are emerging global leaders that are high school aged right now and engaging them is a simple lever that has the potential to change the world. Growth means finding more resources to help us pull that lever but we probably don't have an unlimited amount of time.

Yeah, you would like working with the team I work with too.

Photo: Trevin on the right, Kt my 13 year old on the left.

Societies of World Changers

On the left is AHons, a college sophomore at a small private college here in Maryland. She runs the "Educators for Justice" society at her college campus and invited Trevin to come and speak to them about his recent global experiences.

A few other Ember peeps went along since this was a possible entry point for us to facilitate something for these group of college kids who are, obviously, already interested in concepts like wealth, poverty, aid and development, and charity. So some of our time with AHons before the gathering was in discovery - her community's values, goals and context.

Trevin did a great job with his talk and a few of the students had intriguing questions like, "How do you build sustainability into a missions vocation," and "Do most people that do this follow the model of work-for-a-time and serve-for-a-time?" These questions should, in fact, inform us about this emerging generation. For starters, they are intent about making a difference in the world.

These emerging global student leaders are all around us. Sometimes there are 'societies' of them. Other times, we have to dig for them. But they are there. And Ember exists for them.

The proof might be in ...

the leaders that aren't leading yet.

Fun conversations this week with Tayest [SPACE alumni] and Trevin [our first Ember guide.] It's one thing to traipse the world engaging different cultures, serving and encouraging people and being involved on mission. It's a completely different level to empower and help others into doing the same kinds of things - start with lots of dreaming, listening, encouraging and connecting. It also requires movement thinking and catalytic leadership - like finding ways to jump start indigenous initiative. Complex, nonlinear and oh so exciting and generative. Something like this tweet:
@trevinhoekzema : spent an hour on the phone with AR, talking, catching up, dreaming... #Duke is doing an amazing this with its Engage program.

Ember hits Salisbury in November working on a community project based on demographic data - so privileged to work with these two catalytic leaders. Even more fun than working with them - we do this for leaders that aren't leading yet. They are out there, on the brink of being engaged and sometimes they need a bright spot like Tayest and Trevin to kick them into the future.

Ember February Staff Dinner

We have started a new experiment this year as part of some Ember staff development: a monthly staff dinner with special guests. The goal of this is to gather our staff to hear from some of the most creative, missionally imaginative and innovative people we know.

This months guest was Trevin Hoekzema, our very first Ember guide way back in the day. He's currently in a pastoral residency program at Bay Area Comm Church, which allows him to get a seminary degree while being mentored by BACC's staff. He's working on the Masters in Global Leadership at Fuller which is the only seminary degree most readers of this blog should look at.

Some highlights of our conversation:
Successes:
Redirected Christmas time efforts to come alongside some local ministries doing better work than previous efforts.
Deep engagement for short term mission leaders and team members.
Organized first ever short term missions one day conference [Edge]

FutureCasting Missions - what is present or future now but something we don't know about:
Discipleship making movements
Discovery Bible Study
Fuller emphasizes spiritual formation more important than knowledge
'Guide on the side not the sage on the stage'
The West will no longer lead the missions movement

Advice for students:
Talk to every missionary you can
Always eat the chicken feet

Left to right:
Terah, boutique houseware artisan entrepreneur
Trevin [sorry for the bad picture]
Emily, Ember spawn
Hailey, Ember 2018-2019 ProtoGuide
Sherrill, almost published author and illustrator
Gary, attorney
Deanna, Ember creative director
Mandy, The Well in Curtis Bay

Youth Group Conspiracies

One of GRACE's high school small groups snuck their students away this weekend. I don't think that's too uncommon - leaders conspiring to have fun with their students. What was uncommon was their leaders conspiring with the boys parents to fly them to Boston for the weekend. While there, they worshipped with another youth group, participated with a local community in a service project, and did some sightseeing. Of course, there was much much more. [I got these details from Trevin, one of our Ember guides, who is also one of the leaders with this small group.]

Love how these youth workers aren't interested facilitating holding tanks with pizza.

Making Friends at Urbana 09

If you know about missions and are in the US, you know about Urbana. Starting in just 6 days, it's one of the largest college aged missions conferences. I've never been but heard great things about it. This year, I've got some friends that are going that you should meet.

Dennis - youth min professor in Mexico City
Emilie - former SPACE intern
Trevin - current Ember guide
Patti - short term coord for Grace

Also, this looks like a cool place to connect if you use twitter.

October Kindling

+ The transition for our family to having a high schooler and a middle schooler has been interesting. But everyone is doing well overall. I might unpack this later.
+ Both girls went on our church's youth retreat this past weekend. It was a combined middle/high school retreat which they don't always do.
+ I've always been amazed at the logistics it takes to run something like that - think 6 buses and hundreds of volunteers.
+ CStolte, Ember 2011-2012 intern, helped out in our Ems 6th grade girls cabin. Love that.
+ Trevin is speaking tonight at Mt Saint Mary's University to their Educators for Social Justice club. Who knew there was such a club? I'm going along for the ride.
+ Our intern is doing the work. This past month has been focused on some missions concepts that she's reading and reflecting on.
+ Some Ember peeps are hitting Perspectives next week in Baltimore. Love taking people to drop in and listen to some of those classes. Everything changes after taking that class.
+ Had lunch last week with DanP from Serve the City Baltimore and Ember guide Amy. Dan is a fabulous leader who spent time in London on a church planting team before coming back to his hometown to run STC. We had a great conversation about student missions, culture and leadership.
+ I'm speaking at Cru at Howard Community College later this month. Stop by if you are around.
+ I'm futuristically trying to imagine summer 2013. Excited already.

Notes - #CatalystNext

We took a team of people to learn at the Catalyst Next conference last week at the Lincoln Theater in DC and it was a great time. I love the Catalyst organization and they always put on fantastic events. The audience was probably mostly people in full time vocational ministry and there were maybe about 1000 people there.

Our team was made up of adults involved in ministry bi-vocationally [board of director Matt, guide Carver and myself] and high school students - 3 seniors and one junior, two of those being current ProtoGuides and the junior being my older daughter. I'm pretty sure Ember had the only high school kids there. We also met up with some old and new friends - a leader of the young adult ministry at LifePoint Church in Reisterstown, and Ember guide Trevin and his co-workers from Bay Area Community Church. We all had lunch together which was a great time of connecting. Two of the seniors have some serious plans to join a church plant next year when they enter college as freshmen so the church planting roundtable was especially relevant to them.

The event wasn't quite as futuristic as I personally would have liked, but I realize that is sometimes too far out there. One solid principle about the future is that you imagine the future by seeing the present clearly and I think Catalyst Next did that extremely well. There was a little undercurrent of 'we have to explain what our current culture looks like to the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.' Certainly understandable.

Every one of the talks was excellent, exactly what you would come to expect from a Catalyst event. They were all geared towards what is next and I loved that. The day was organized into segments and then after each segment, Jon Tyson would come back with Mark Batterson, Jo Saxton and Gabe Lyons to do a little discussion on the talks.

Here is the rough outline of the day:
Mark Batterson - leadership [see below]
Jo Saxton - leadership [character, community, commission]
Gabe Lyons - culture [see below]
Trip Lee - culture [to give up hope on a specific culture/peoplegroup/subculture is to discount the power of the Gospel]
Jenna Lee Nardella - justice [the long arc of justice and sometimes you cannot make it rain]
Raj Shah - justice [lots of great content on global poverty]
Missional church planting roundtable - Jarrett and Jeanne Stevens, Gideon Tsan, DA Horton - what is your context, something you have learned from, what is next
Jon Tyson - closing [see below]

Here are notes from the 3 talks that resonated most with me:
+ What is Next in church leadership
Mark Batterson
“The greatest opposition to what God is doing today comes from those who were on the cutting edge of what God was doing yesterday.” - RT Kendall The Anointing
Heb 11:7 - Noah, the ark and building something that was never built before
II Cor 10:5 - Take every thought captive and obedient to Christ
Noah - inventor, maker. Made the rake, hoe, oh and the ark.
1.5 football fields long
a ship that big would not be built again in human history until the late 19th century
35:3 design ratio is still the standard
569 box cars
125,000 animals - 60 National Zoos
120 years to build - long obedience
1st thing Noah did was to plant trees
It all came from an idea in his mind
Everything starts as an idea - so often II Cor 10:5 is used to instruct us to take bad thoughts captive, but it's also a command about good ideas.

Church is a 2 way street - dreams and passions go both ways
We have a dream for our church that people help us fulfil and we hopefully help them fulfill their dreams.

*TTS - Like always, Batterson gives a phenomenal talk about the future, leadership and the most audacious dreams and ideas. And every time I've seen Mark Batterson not speaking, he is taking notes. Including today, while on the panel. The best leaders I know do this.

Discussion:
Be a first class noticier
Scripture is meant to be meditated on - for it to quicken you, you must let it burn in you
Every piece of Scripture has 70 faces and 600,000 meanings - rabbinical saying

+ What is Next in engaging culture
Gabe Lyons
Context - always start with this
*TTS - ^^^ yes. Ember mantra - "Context and culture matter."

Today - the combination of postmodern, pluralism and postChristian
the nones

New Attitudes
No authority
Happiness is the ultimate goal
Good of the individual trumps good of community
God exists for the benefit of all, if He even exists
Meaning can only be found in this world

New Rules of Social Engagement - "Sex and the I World"
One may not criticize someone's life choices or behaviors
One may not behave in a manner that coerces or causes harm to others
One may not engage in a sexual relationship with someone without consent - as long as it is consensual, it is okay.

Countercultural - the church is called to swim upstream in this

*TTS - The intro to this talk was such a great description of the context that we find ourselves in right now.

4 questions - filter for culture
What is Wrong - stop and confront
who am I, what is my identity

What is Confused - clarify and compel
identity is found in Jesus, not by looking inside
is life about pleasure or purpose
love - affirmation of anything anyone wants to do or do we want the best for them?

What is Good - celebrate and cultivate
God's design for humanity is to flourish

What is Missing - create and catalyze
we have made an idol of marraige
first family - church family - extended family - oikos
clear and confident in theology
loving to friends and neighbors
you can be both but this requires lots of courage

The slavery and women in ministry issues both get more expansive from the OT to the NT
sexuality gets less expansive

*TTS - This was a fantastic talk and really engaged the issue of homosexuality and the evangelical Church. The 4 questions were great perspectives. Extremely well done.

Discussion:
Batterson - some topics are good for teaching about from up front - one way dialogue. Others need a two way conversation. This is one of those. NCC hosted a small group on this topic called Grace+Truth because we need both when it comes to this issue. Over 200 people showed up to it.

+ Jon Tysons closing talk
The need of the hour is to make disciples. If we get discipleship wrong, everything else goes awry.
Willard - what is your plan for making disciples and is it working?

We did a good job of forming people into Trinity Grace culture but not Jesus.
Our culture is incredibly effective at making disciples into its image.

"Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing - its disciples. Your church is only as good as her disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs, or property are; if your disciples are passive, needy, consumeristic, and not radically obedient, your church is not good." (Neil Cole) [*TTS - So good, I think I've posted this before somewhere here]

Faith to Doubt
Love to Insecurity
Community to Individualism
Contributing to Consuming
Rest to Exhaustion

5 Shifts - The From > To Imperative
*TTS - there was a ton of info in here - no way to get it all down.
Death -> Life
Eph 2
- gospel, story, walk

Shame -> Acceptance
Rom 8
difference between shame [who I am] and guilt [what I've done]
image management
Brene Brown
disciple people into their identity
- community, freedom, authority

Self -> Others
Phil 2
the small self - Rohr
- gifts, reconciliation, presence

Consumer -> Mission
I Cor 5
- sharing, vocation, stewardship

Performing -> Abiding
John 15
- source, power, fruit

In all of this, Jesus says, I will be with you always.
Gal 4:19 - My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you...
an urgent heartbreaking pastoral concern - spiritual fathers.

*TTS Right before Jon started, I whispered to our team that this was the money talk. I was right. Jon's talk was a powerful exhortation to leaders to take the issue of discipleship seriously and to evaluate how we are growing people and whether it is working or not. He has obviously done some deep thinking about our culture and what it means to grow people in the image of Jesus and his talk was a gift. I knew it was going to be good because I've learned a lot from him from a distance. [See : City Collective, the city parish model and Sacred Roots.]

+ My Reflections
- I'm pretty sure Ember had the only high school kids there. If you are a student pastor in the DMV and knew about this event, you should have brought some kids you were personally investing in. And if you aren't personally investing in any students, well, you should find a new line of work. This was a great learning experience that was easy to execute.
- Jon Tyson's closing talk. Ember needs to evaluate all of our experiences and reflect on whether we are creating disciples of Jesus or just creating kids that know a lot about global missions. Some of this is also a reflection on my leadership and whether I have the capacity to even think deeply on this subject and how it relates to the students we are entrusted with, in a similar manner to the deep thinking that Jon Tyson has done about discipleship in New York City.
- Batterson: "Church is a 2 way street - dreams and passions go both ways." I love this and Ember is really trying to engage our students with where we are headed as an organization as well as catalyze the passions, talents and dreams of them. We aren't doing the latter a ton but there were definitely a few students this past summer that fit this description. That's why we almost always visit the topic of missional imagination when we decompress an event or experience. I'm a bit sensitized to this too from some recent ministry experience as well so there's probably more in this.

DecEmber Kindling

+ Been spending a good amount of energy in getting some infrastructure up for 2012. Including recruiting meetings with some guides, getting an application process together and setting our guides up for success.
+ Tayest highly recommended Toxic Charity to me. Her words: "make the guides read this." First time getting book recommendations from college kids. Love it.
+ In July 2007, a group of high school kids traveled with me to Hungary. We went to NYC in January 2008. Traveled back to Hungary in July 2008. This spring, they finish college and a majority of them are doing missional stuff. Most fruit of your youth ministry doesn't show up for at least four years. Edit: I don't know what I was trying to say here. See Michelle's comment below.
+ The career list includes applied economics, nursing, international development, education. Whatever your field of study, missions can use it.
+ We've had a house guest for the past few months but only during the week and he's graciously donated some funds to Ember. One part of my Creative Revenue Plan. This was a nice surprise that just landed in our lap.
+ Trevin and I hang out next week with the middle school kids from Ember Ocean City. Looking forward to meeting them face to face. This student ministry has gone through 11 months of transition.

A Snippet - The DecEmber Update

If you want to read the whole thing, let me know. Would be happy to send it to you.

"When a great adventure is offered, you don't refuse it." - Amelia Earhart [quoted by Chris Guillebeau here]

Dear friends --

Yes, almost every week lately I feel like life has offered us quite an adventure. And this year has been full of it with regards to The Ember Cast, our latest endeavor when it comes to student missions leadership. This year included a weekend immersion in both Chinese and homeless culture in Philadelphia; a week long hands on experience in church planting and community impact in Queen Creek, AZ; and coming alongside some college students devoted to serving the marginalized in Salisbury, MD. Even more thrilling is working with some amazing emerging global leaders: John and Andrew in the Ember internship last Spring; Donna, Ryan and Emily this summer; Trevin as our first Ember guide; and Taylor at Salisbury. The real adventure is probably more centered around people like these - high school and college students, Biblically based, and passionate about impacting the future of humanity for the better. Helping people like them is why Ember exists. [More details about 2010 will be included in our annual report - coming soon.]

We've accomplished some interesting things in terms of the organization as well: a bank account; raised 100% of the required funding to support the AZ team; and approval from the IRS to act as a 501C3 - all things that are mostly out of the realm of my formal training as a database engineer. But that's part of the fun of the adventure right? And I've found an amazing group of co-conspirators in the Board of Directors that has been assembled to assist with the leadership of Ember.

Our immediate next step is to raise some additional funding for some more operational issues. These primarily include some accounting/finance software and purchasing insurance - some of the necessary elements of any business I've learned. To that end, it's indirectly helping us identify and resource emerging global leaders.

Visiting with Gilles

In 2006, I spent ten days with a team of high school students in Cameroon, a country in Central Africa, working with Gilles and Wendy Naine. Gilles and Wendy had moved there with their family because of their experience and passion for high school students, their background and fluency in the French language and a desire to impact a country in Africa. Our student team went there through a partnership at our church and the project at hand was to help be a catalyst for the Naines' relationships with students in their circles. It was a fantastic ten days. Two years later, they would host another team that I helped facilitate but not lead.

Gilles was in town last week and we had a chance to catch up with him and introduce him to some of the ProtoGuides. Loved our conversations which included stuff like:
+ how preparation of short term teams is so important.
+ worldviews
+ third culture kids [Gilles was the first one to introduce me to this term.]
+ indigenous leaders and how things change when they take ownership
+ it is possible to gather a church without disciples
+ the pygmy indians

Some of the students we worked with in 2006 still remember our time together. Gilles is one of the best global leaders that we know and it's always great to catch up with him and introduce him to more emerging global student leaders.

Photo: Trevin, Gilles, moi, Deanna, KatieV, Shannon.