Friday Burn

::: The Worst Day to Fly in the US
Hint - it's not what day you think it is.
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::: 23 Maps and Charts on Language
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::: What I Learned from Building an App for Low Income Americans

Many of the housecleaners I met were already entrepreneurs. Our office cleaner at Significance Labs, Jason, employed five or six people in his cleaning business while also holding down another full-time job. The best thing about my time at Significance Labs was meeting incredible people like Jason and Angel. The most fun I had last summer was sitting in a room chatting to housecleaners.

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::: "A good traveler is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu via @DavidLivermore

Photo: Lunch, Teds Bulletin, Washington DC. Ember guides, spawn, ProtoGuides and guests.

Tricia and Global Impact 2014

On the left is Tricia who was an intern of mine in 2007-2008. She sent me a text last weekend telling me that she was helping out on a student retreat called Global Impact. It was an event that her church put on for high school and middle school kids, focused on helping kids learn to live 'on mission' both locally and globally. Sounded like my kind of thing.

Tricia was a fantastic intern but has since gone on to do some amazing things for the Kingdom - we are proud of her and her weekend serving students dressed up like a Nepalese bank teller. And of course, thrilled to hear about student ministries putting on weekends like this.

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.

Friday Burn

::: The Problem With International Development
Must read.

And this is where I landed after a year of absorbing dozens of books and articles and speeches about international development: The arguments against it are myriad, and mostly logistical and technical. The argument for it is singular, moral, and, to me anyway, utterly convincing: We have so much, they have so little.

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::: Whole Foods is Moving into One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago
Fascinating article about business versus philanthropy, gentrification, and food deserts. I heard Bob Lupton tell a story about a grocery store executive that told him that his company wouldn't put a store in a neighborhood because they wouldn't make any money - the demographics didn't show enough disposable income.
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::: 1 in 30 kids in the US is homeless.
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::: The pastor's question: "How's my church doing?" The missionaries' question: "How's my city doing?" @bobrobertsjr

Photo: Ember spawn and friends. Baltimore, October 2014.

Book Notes - Creativity Inc.

Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position.

The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being.

By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless… Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn't matter if you are getting the story right.

Sending out a sharp impulse - like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish - can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve [Jobs] used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.

Because making a movie involves hundreds of people, a chain of command is essential. But in this case, we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.

The first principle was "Story is King," by which we meant that we would let nothing - not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities - get in the way of our story… The other principle we depended on was "Trust the Process."

Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right…. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it…. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

But always, its most essential element is candor. This isn't just some pie-in-the-sky idea - without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation - you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

It is natural for people to fear that such an inherently critical environments will feel threatening and unpleasant, like a trip to the dentist. The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive.

Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level wit you, and when you find them, hold them close.

By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. Making the process better, easier and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on - but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objective trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires - they want to be heard but they don't have to win.

It is management's job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy - as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. I'm here to say that it can be done - but it is an unending job.

Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see if for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.

...One of my core management beliefs: If you don't try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.

There is a fantastic chapter in the book about Steve Jobs since he was a huge piece of the company. It is very much worth the read. I've never personally been a huge fan of Jobs - for all the innovation that Apple is, he seemed to me to be a massive jerk. But after reading that narrative about him from someone that knew him well, I've kind of changed my mind.

Highly recommended - the book is a great read.

Ember at #CatalystNext in DC this Thursday

I will be with a team at the Catalyst Next one day conference this coming Thursday at the Lincoln Theater - would love to meet you if you are there. Long time readers know that I'm a fan of Catalyst, especially when they push the edges and concentrate on the future. In 2009, I attended their first Catalyst West conference and the absolute best part of that was the lab day called Origins that was put together with MosaicLA. That day was very much about looking at today and envisioning the future. I'm hoping Catalyst Next is so futuristic that most of us get inspired about the present. And in classic Ember form, I'm sure that we will be just about the only ones with high school kids in attendance. This is a conference about the future.... right?

It's often said that the future is now but is the church listening?

Our culture is constantly advancing, constantly shifting, constantly adapting, and if you want to stay ahead you have to know what’s coming before it gets here. Catalyst Next is a gathering created just for you. We know you’re a change maker. A forward thinking, innovative leader who wants to be ahead of the curve in addressing the issues and questions our culture is grappling with. This gathering will help us answer those very questions. Whether you are leading a church, non-profit, or business, we invite you to join us live in D.C. or by stream, for a day of intentional conversations around what’s next for the Church as we embrace progress and spearhead change for the sake of advancing Kingdom initiatives.

Catalyst Next is a gather geared towards young innovative leaders who want to be ahead of the curve in addressing the issues and questions our culture is asking. If you’re a change maker who is serious about bringing Kingdom change to your world than this event is for you.

Friday Burn

::: Bilinguals Have Stronger and Faster Brains Than the Rest of Us
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::: 12 Maps that Sum Up London
Data for the people - so good.
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::: Why Cliques Form at Some High Schools and Not Others
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::: Professional Women's Basketball in Sopron Hungary
I was there in 2007 and 2008.
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::: The church's responsibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself. - Bonhoeffer via @AshleyPDickens

Photo: city center, Sopron Hungary. Summer 2008.

#qznextbillion - A Dream Forum for the Futuristic

Quartz was kind enough to give me a discount ticket to their Next Billion forum last week. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend but tracked the talks via twitter as best I could. It seemed to be a fabulous event - here is the summary and here are all the talks.

I'm hoping to catch up on some of the talks soon - this one on Housing the Last Billion looked fantastic. And this one from dana boyd, who has done a ton of research on technology and youth culture, also looks great.

You might think some of this sounds far fetched and too futuristic. I would argue that most of it is incredibly relevant to emerging global student leaders. Issues like the global poor, sustainable design, the role of technology including how fast it gets adopted, and innovation and creativity are central to how the next generation of Kingdom centered leaders lead. And I'm grateful to be able to learn from some of the experts in this kind of stuff. Ah the Internet.

The Next Billion is in London next year....hint hint. Some of my favorite tweets from this year.

In 10 short years 80% of the global poor will become part of nomadic #cities: ones that don't exist yet. @casinclair #qznextbillion

— jeff nelder (@jnelder) November 5, 2014

Basically @biolitestove is inventing fire 2.0 (who knew you could disrupt fire?!) only at #qznextbillion pic.twitter.com/g3uWC3kinB

— Beth Temple (@bethtemple4u) November 5, 2014

First conference I've been to where you make smores with a camping stove that also charges phones. #qznextbillion pic.twitter.com/dNCcmRqrEW

— Anna Codrea-Rado (@annacod) November 5, 2014

Critical to understand generational vs. life-stage differences when designing for people's tech habits @zephoria @qzevents #qznextbillion

— we are experience (@weareexperience) November 5, 2014

Early adopters aren’t just geeks, freaks, and queers anymore. They’re experimenters, more mainstream. @zephoria #qznextbillion

— Rebecca Mir (@mirseum) November 5, 2014

"We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase" -J. Donovan says to kids who might create the next big thing #qznextbillion

— Gully Flowers (@gul_ly) November 5, 2014

@mabb0tt "France leading on drone driven precision agriculture." Major implications for developing world #agriculture #qznextbillion

— Anthony Reddish (@anthonyreddish) November 5, 2014

@att Mobile data traffic 2007-13 50,000% growth #qznextbillion

— Kajal Sanghrajka (@Kajalnycmba) November 5, 2014

For every 10% increase of internet coverage in a country contributes to 1.4% GDP growth. @michaelpcassidy Project Loon #qznextbillion

— Robert Fine (@bobfine) November 5, 2014

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.

Friday Burn

::: We Can Eradicate Malaria in a Generation

Based on the progress I’m seeing in the lab and on the ground, I believe we’re now in a position to eradicate malaria—that is, wipe it out completely in every country—within a generation. This is one of the greatest opportunities the global health world has ever had. Melinda and I are so optimistic about it that we recently decided to increase our foundation’s malaria budget by 30 percent.

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::: The Rapid Spread of Christianity in China

Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire.

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::: The Future of Innovation Belongs to the MegaCity
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::: "What makes a leader is character. What makes a non-leader is ego" @rayortlund #A29NC via @johnwbryson

Photo: with guides Wendy and DK. October 2014. Baltimore, MD.

The Art of the Introduction

One of the very best leadership skills you can cultivate is the art of writing an introduction. Most leaders miss this because they don't realize the value of their network. Instead, you should understand that there are people in your circle of friends that would love to know one another and could do some amazing things together. You are the one that understands the potential of them working together and that is best unleashed by writing a stunning introduction.

There are some people in your network that you would die for. They have mentored you. You have mentored them. You have the highest regard for their character and competency. You have worked on projects with them and you look up to their caliber of work. You would love to see them succeed at the highest levels. These introductions are reserved for them exclusively, not for the person you just met at Panera the other night. And introductions like these are not done on social media. A tweet tagging both them and saying, "You two should know each other…." Please no.

My introductions are organized as follows: a greeting, three paragraphs and then a 'thanks for connecting' sentence or two. It's done over email and I always try to follow up with a quick thank you after I know people have connected. Over the past few years, I've probably averaged writing an introduction once every one or two months. The intro to the email is a quick 'Hi there, you both should know each other, hope you are doing well', normal greeting stuff.

The second and third paragraphs is the substance and it's where I outline how I know both people. I write about where and when and how we met. I tell each other what kind of projects we have worked on together. I talk a little bit about each person's family. I describe their passions, talents and skills. Simply, I try to gush about this person. If you can't highlight them, this intro is not appropriate.

The final paragraph outlines why they should be connected and it's usually due to some recent circumstance in one of the people's lives - they started working on this project, they recently moved to this location, I was reminded about each of them and how they should know each other. Finally, I close the email, thanking them for connecting in the future.

Like a good letter from an old friend, introductions can be an art form. And in today's hyper connected world, where everyone knows everyone else because of the interwebs, an intentional, beautifully written introduction stands apart. There are some people in your circles that would impact humanity exponentially, if only they were connected. One of the best tools you have at your disposal as a leader is introducing them to each other.

Catching Up with Caroline

In July of 2004, I took a small group of middle schoolers to serve with a missions support organization for a few days. This organization specialized in logistical and automotive support, helping teams all over the world. My hope was that this would catalyze a global view of the world for some of these kids. Caroline, 2nd from the right, was one of those students. Fast forward ten years [ten years!] and Caroline has been fully engaged in the global missions space, having served with YWAM Perth for a number of years working in maternal health. It's been fascinating to watch her journey and we were fortunate to be able to catch up with her for an evening now that she is home for a season.

Our conversation, with the ProtoGuides, included concepts like:
- Midwifery blasts open doors to be able to build relationships with families from the developing world.
- Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world.
- Support raising is a faith venture and one that has never let her down.

Caroline is one our first students turned into full time missionaries and we continue to marvel and be amazed at her crazy life.