Skype call earlir this week talking between Aix-en-Provence, France, Columbia, Merryland and Austin, Texas. Some of the players for Ember X include Jim - camp coordinator, Mark and his wife Alice - logistics for short term teams, Teal - our good friend who is bringing a team from Austin. He and his family lived in Aix for 5 years while he was the executive pastor of ICCP. And moi. Loved the overall spirit of everyone on the call - gracious, thankful, on mission for helping those distanced from Jesus.
Ember is delighted to help facilitate our good friend Wendy serving with Amadeo Church in Queen Creek AZ this summer for 6 weeks. Wendy has been the ring leader with a community of college students at Salisbury Uni who have a consistent presence among different community impact projects near campus. and we've worked with her 5 or 6 different times through various missions/service/leadership events and weekends. She's the kind of global leader you want to hang around - funny, compassionate and convinced that she should serve others because she has been served.
Ember partnered with Serve the City Baltimore last Saturday and hosted a few teams for a service day at The Samartians Women, which is an organization that serves women recovering from trauma. Located in Catonsville, they have a large property that is used for a residential program, an urban farm, and a vocational program. Our teams spent some time helping with various landscaping projects, cleaning up part of their vineyard, getting part of their urban farm ready for crops, and seeding plants in the greenhouse. The farm is a pretty significant piece for TSW: what they grow gets contributed to help the food desert in Baltimore [a new term for me] and the farm is also a piece in their culinary arts program, helping give recovery victims tangible skills. It's a good example of helping move people from self to service to systems.
During lunch, we had a few Ember guides share about their global leadership experience. Trevin shared about context and persons of peace, including stories of his time in Ghana and South Africa. Leslie [who is also a board member] shared about the concept of who has the power and expertise in service relationships - sometimes you come in with the power and don't know it. Both talks were short and to the point, interactive and, I believe, well received, given the kinds of questions. Another reason why these teams we hosted were awesome. This is one of Ember's sweet spots.
The most fun I had all day was connecting with people we've worked with in the past. I felt like it would have been great to have meetings with so many of these people all day and I actually did that, mostly getting people to wheelbarrow stuff with me and talking while we did it. You call it talking, I call it working. Developer, futuristic, woo and wheelbarrows. Kristen, Wendy, Sam, Brooke, Carolyn, Alex : Ember X, Mt St Marys, Salisbury - throwing fire.
::: Global Cities of the Super RichJesus did not send out the 70 with a mission to find a partcular few who would be persons of peace, per se. He had sent them out to represent the Kingdom and proclaim its message, which would inevitably lead them to those whom God had prepared, immediate or not.::: indigenous
Now, the person might well be a person of high reputation, as were Cornelius, Lydia, the Ethiopian enuch and others. But consider the demon-possessed slave girl with the spirit of divination, or the Gerasenes man among the tombs with an unclean spirit. No one was able to bind him anymore. But everyone knew of him. He was a person of reputation, and he manifested himself to be a person of peace. [Expanding on the idea that persons of peace have a reputation but it might not need be a good one.]
Model - Assist - Watch - Leave::: mapping
Mapping is an invaluable skill for all ministries... As you study the city, you come to understand its people. This is the first step in incarnation - putting yourself in the shoes of those to whom you want to minister....Ideally your map would have at least three layers: geographic, social and spiritual.::: exegeting culture
Andrew Jones, missionary, blogger, and global nontraditional church guru, has often said that his job is to 'throw parties and tell stories.' Thom Wolf taught that the missionary's role is to retell people's stories back to them in light of the gospel. This is very good missionary tradecraft indeed: find out what people are talking about, and show them how it all relates to the Most High God.: contextualization
For the sake of mission, contextualization means adjusting how we communicate the gospel so that people do not need to join a new culture in order to hear and understand the message.
::: Is the future of church planting bi-vocational? 
Many missionaries employ a methodology that relies strictly on a one-to-one proclamation of the gospel. The thinking, of course, is that a decision to follow Christ is personal and individual. However , as tribally-connected people, we are limited in our capacity to process major life decisions on our own. Tribal people do much of their thinking in community.- Tradecraft: For the Church on Mission
First Ember X team meeting this past weekend, except two of our great team were missing. Love this team.
::: I don't want a big tree. But I don't want a small tree either. I want an orchard.
A parting gift from Yonkers... Illegal right turn on red.... But trust me with your kids...
High performance teams go through the following stages, outlined by Bruce Tuckman: forming, storming, norming, performing. As a team leader, it's pretty vital for you to understand this cycle. Your team will go through it. You get to choose whether they do it before you get to the mission field or when you get there. 
::: Why I Left World Vision for Finance
