Parent Launch - The World Race Gap Year

We spent this past weekend in Atlanta participating in the Parent Launch for Emily for The World Race Gap Year. I was a teary mess most of the weekend - saying goodbye to Emily was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.

We cannot say enough great things about the ethos and execution about Adventures in Missions and The World Race. Since of course this kind of thing is my jam too, I went through the weekend both making mental notes about how good their ideas were and being in total admiration of their execution of these great ideas. They really do an incredible job in preparing both the Racers and their parents - this weekend it was around 300 Racers and most of their parents. Our time as parents included sessions about insurance, risk, our journey as parents, releasing our kids, Q&A with past Racers and parents and Adventures' thinking about discipling this generation. I heard this multiple times and believe it - they love this generation.

+ The Race is not incredible every day. Some days, it is just tough work. There is fruit on the other side of brokenness and sometimes we need to be challenged to push through rather than quit early.
+ Jesus apprenticed the disciples through a journey. It was a rite of passage and these are now rare in our culture.
+ We are stewarding the collapse of the church in the US [in the context of the Nones and Gen Z.]
+ 12 percent of this generation has an anxiety disorder.
+ The Holy Spirit is still the best at giving the answers.
+ There should be a transfer of the primary voice in your kids lives from yours to the Lords. [Peterson]
+ Put what God is doing in their life above wanting them home.
+ Pay attention to stirrings in your heart this year - one of the worst things you can do is to be in the exact same place you are now when your Racer comes home.
+ Release your racer from their past experience with God. Don't expect God to move in the same way.
+ There was a worship and teaching session the night before everyone left with all the Racers and parents. It was unforgettable - I haven't seen such intensity and passion from young people in a long time.

I could not imagine a better experience for Emily after finishing high school and before college and we are so thrilled for her. Thanks for so many of you who have supported our family in this. Follow along with her updates here.

Cultural Navigation in Chinatown

If you've followed along here for any length of time, you know that Ember highly values pre-field team training for any and all kinds of mission teams. The odds, statistics and anecdotes are true - the better your team is prepared, the better your experience. Leaders that ignore this step probably shouldn't be leading these teams.

Last night, some of our guides walked a short term team through navigating some areas of culture, specifically food, people and architecture. A lot of helping people understand culture is modeling how to be observant. Observe first, then interpret and then futurecast. It was a perfect night in Chinatown DC.

Remember, it's not too late to try to get your team ready.

Shock

Come chat with me about this, March 2. Register here.

Better Practices - Decompression

This is a series of posts that outline our better practices - tactical things that you could do right now that The Ember Cast has found highly profitable for growing global leaders. Feel free to use these ideas with attribution, meaning just say, "I got this from The Ember Cast."

Decompression and debriefing is one of the most difficult things to execute as a leader and the research is clear: if you do not decompress the experience with your team, your cross cultural trip will have zero impact. It will be as if your team never left their house. It is that important.

It's difficult because it comes at a time in the lifecycle of a trip when everything is winding down. Your team has just completed most of their tasks. You are probably traveling on your way home. The team has been away for more than a few days. Everyone is looking forward to being home. It is precisely at this moment in the trip when decompression requires you to stop imagining what it will be like to sleep in your bed and instead ramp your energy up for a few more days to properly engage your team for finishing well.

Here are a few suggestions for making this work well when your trip is winding down and you are sick of your team, salivating for some good Dim Sum and ready to sleep in your own bed.
+ The theme of good decompression is 'change.' You put this experience together for your students so that they would be different from it. They would be more joyous, more giving, more selfless. Do not be afraid of asking significant questions that will lead to change.
+ Resources for decompression are very scarce. Seth Barnes has given the world gold with his series of posts on the subject. Save off a subset of his great questions to use with your team.
+ If you can plan for one or two days at a neutral location, on the way home, where you can relax as well as have time to process what you have experienced. Granted it is difficult and expensive to add this to your trip. At times we have done this without other locations too, in airport terminals and restaurants, on public transport, on flights home. The key is not locale, the key is to do it.
+ I like to do this over a whole day, meaning I plan 5-10 questions, and we give the team free time at the beach or pool or whatever and we have a mini session for each question, time to journal and share, all spread over a whole day, one question every hour.
+ One of the questions I always use is asking the students to write a 20 second summary, 2 minute summary and a 20 minute outline of the trip. This is a fundamental one that helps them process the trip for themselves as well as for people who ask them about it. Most people will only listen for 20 seconds. A few will listen for 2 minutes. One day, they may get asked to write a report or give a talk for a missions agency.
+ We have a two page 'toolkit' for Decompression. It's ready to be printed out and delivered to your team. You should have one too - if you prep it now, it will be much easier to execute when you are only hours from home.

London, 2015.

Frames and Gutters

Last week, The Ember Cast also had the opportunity to work with a team of ladies headed to Caribbean for a week long cross cultural service experience [last post, busy week]. This team is serving with local hosts involved in education, kids programs and poverty alleviation, as part of their church's long standing partnership. It is always an honor to spend a little time with teams like these and share some of what we have learned about high performance cross cultural teams.

Our session included:
+ Frames for Teams
+ Personality assessment results both for individuals and teams
+ Gutterball - [going upstairs]

The statistics prove it: your team will be more effective with intentional team preparation, your team members will be more engaged when they come home, and team training is one of the best investments you can make with your time and energy. Our team doesn't have any more availability for this kind of thing for summer teams this year but we always have ideas.

Cultural Navigation

One of the best skills for anyone traveling to another culture to understand is cultural navigation - simply peeling back layers of a given culture to discuss deeper meanings. It's a simple skill that we believe anyone, especially students, can learn easily and a skill that translates across all kinds of life experiences.

Our latest training session on this topic included a brave team, our 2018 cultural navigation tip sheet and some of my secret 'plants' [Kate, Audrey, Emily] inside an ethnic grocery store. Gracious thanks for this team traveling to the Middle East later this summer for their willingness to experiment with us on this one. Tip: you can use any ethnic context [store, neighborhood, restaurant, etc] to practice this.

IG Team Meeting #12

Kids Camp thing.

+ Crafts: photos of kids on cards with tissue flowers for Mothers Day
+ Adam and Eve
+ Skit
+ Music
+ Chick Fil A [Lord I have spent so much $$ at Chick Fil A this Spring]
+ Ember Guides Hope and Nat jumping in to help.
+ Other special guests.

IG Team Meeting #2

+ Icebreakers during the drive from the 25 Best icebreakers ever
+ Serving with a refugee weekend program which included games with kids, futball with high school kids [Sam made numerous goals and was the only girl], English lessons and lunch.
+ Our team knows that in some contexts like this, we will have to be very friendly and make our own fun. These are integral skills for people that are interested in starting things from nothing in different cultural contexts. This day was good practice.

* Missing a few pieces of our team

Missions Team Training for 2050

What does the world look like in 2050? And how should global leaders prepare for it? I'm not sure anyone can answer those questions but Ember is putting a stake in the ground as an attempt.

We've been outlining a leadership experience as the next iteration of mission team training. Specifically, this means looking at the ideas of vision, culture and teams all within the context of future. It would take place in a global city and last for a full weekend.

Vision - What does the future of missions look like?
Culture - How do I engage the future and teach my team to do so?
Team - How can I prepare my team for the future?

Granted, we know this is not for everyone. There are some people who don't do any training with their short term teams. This is short sighted and neglectful. Objective evidence proves that teams that do even a minimal amount of team building are better prepared for the field.

There are other people that walk their teams through various aspects of training - culture, skills, team building. You are to be commended for preparing your teams well. This is now the expected, the status quo.

There are a few people that will desire to be inspired for making their leadership better, for being better prepared for the future, for getting a glimpse of what opportunities, possibilities and challenges will be. This weekend might be for you.

This is still considered exploratory and emerging but ping if you are interested.

Ember Advance 2017

A long tradition for us and our student missions efforts this past weekend: Ember Advance. I love this it so so much. This year, for the morning, our team assisted one of our clients in their student missions training efforts. This included:
A time where teams prayed for other teams.
3 rounds of workshops with missions practitioners [including world class content about: being a team that your hosts like, the Abrahamic covenant, and embracing faith versus the idol of control].
Team building with their teams.
Debriefing over lunch on how the morning went.

After that, the Ember team, which was most of the Italy team and guest EQuis, did the Myers Briggs, played some of Tess' Christian college games and went downtown to church with National Community Church. We had dinner on Barracks Row and then walked to the Capitol to see it at night.

Our big goals for Ember Advance included serving our clients with a fantastic student missions training experience and spending lots of time hanging and serving together as a team and I'm glad to say both goals were exceeded. We expect a lot from the students that are involved in this experience and each one of them made me proud as they ran team activities with confidence, humility and the end goal of building better teams.

Big thanks, like almost every year, to Amy who jumped in with lots of team building advice. She is a master at this having trained thousands over the past two decades.

In a previous life, this was called Mission Advance. I have a private, big dream to reinvent this whole thing for 2018.

Advance

Eleven years ago, we executed a student missions preparation weekend based on a few simple ideas. First, make teams travel some short distance before their actual trip. Second, give them a chance to interact with some missions practitioners. In late June of 2006, Mission Advance was born at Cape Henlopen, DE, USA. I still have the fondest memories of that weekend - sending teams to the boardwalk to serve, the sandcastle building contest, how it rained for 16 hours straight, being one of the last cars allowed to leave the eastern shore. Ah the memories.

The idea of Mission Advance [not retreat] still lives with The Ember Cast. It is one of our core distinctives - this ability and availability to facilitate a preparation weekend with student teams around some of these ideas that are still important when it comes to student missions.

We do it again this coming weekend with one of our clients. Lots of students, team building, and missions practitioners. After this kind of morning, the Ember Italy team takes a little field trip. The best thing about Ember Advance is that you could do the same thing with your teams.

Photo: Ember BOD Joyce, 3rd from the left. June 2006, Bridgeville, DE.

2017 Support Letters - #2

One non-negotiable of Ember's summer teams is that support letters have to look beautiful.

2017 Support Letters - #1

One non-negotiable of Ember's summer teams is that support letters have to look beautiful. We want them to look like someone took a lot of time and energy in putting them together and that the readers are hopefully impressed when they open them.

Tess has taken all the responsibility for multiple years for helping guide students to not only write good letters but make them beauuuuutiful.

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.

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.

To Know The Will of God

we need an open Bible and an open map. – William Carey

Frames for Teams

Our latest "frames" that we use for working with teams...

+ A team is not a group of people who just work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. Simon Sinek via Craig Groeschel

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

+ It's really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback. - Steve Jobs

+ In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust...As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, the communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. - Ben Horowitz

+ "For the Christian, there are strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.' The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument which God reveals to us to each the beauties of all the others." - C. S. Lewis

+ I'm choosing to take something important to me and make it vulnerable to your actions. - definition of trust - Feltman via Brene Brown

Put Young People Up Front

This is MK, leading a team building exercise for a team of young and older people. It's a good example of Ember's habit of putting young people up front. Most of the students we hang with have the character and competence to lead so not giving them those opportunities would be foolish.

Instead, I get out of the way and let them lead the charge. It requires mutual trust, lots of communication and delegating authority. Believe it or not, it gets easier the more you do it.

This past weekend, our Guides, who were all less than 21 years old, ran team building activities for 6 overseas teams with over 60 people from all age ranges. If you are leading something and are over the age of 40, you should get out of the way. You can't do it all nor should you.

2016 Ember GCC Impact Advance

Details from Ember Advance, this past Saturday. The 'Advance' tagline was stolen many years ago and this type of event is one of my very favorite things to do. We actually combined an existing student missions training engagement with some extended time with the Italy team to make up this year's Ember Advance. I'm thrilled with every outcome from this day.

Very few churches spend a lot of time and energy preparing their short term teams and we had the privilege of helping facilitate this training experience for our home church and their six student teams headed all over the world. This was a follow on piece to a leadership overnight that we had run in January. The concept behind the event is simple - teams spend extended time together before they actually get to the mission field and this year's time was spent on learning some global missions concepts and team building. After the training event, the Italy team did a few more things as a team.

Here are the major elements from this year.
+ GCC Impact Prayer Time - Teams spent a little bit of time praying for the other teams.
+ GCC Impact Mission Roundtable - Ember Guide Tess spoke on Context and Worldview; Tae, new missions pastor at GCC, spoke about spiritual warfare; and I used an illustration about potatoes to talk about dependency and erupting talent. I heard the first two rocked.
+ GCC Impact Team Building Exercises - A 90 minute rotation for 3 blocks of interesting, fun, and purposeful team building activities.
+ GCC Impact Lunch/Ember Debrief - While the GCC teams had lunch and team time together, our team had a fantastic debriefing conversation which will help make these events even better.
+ Italy - StrengthsFinder session - You know how I love this. It's difficult to do this with a team in less than 90 minutes but that makes for a long session.
+ Italy - Field trip to NCC - We visit National Community Church almost every year because I believe they are one of the most innovative churches in America and because it's healthy for our students to see other expressions of Church. Saturday night's message on discipleship by Heather Zempel was easily one of the best messages I have ever heard on the topic.
"Imagine a church that makes Jesus' last command their first concern."
+ Italy - dinner in DC - Talking a little bit about the concept of oikos.

Special thanks to the Ember Italy team for working and serving hard at this event. Beautiful day.

In Real Life Team Training

Ember has one of our biggest engagements coming up this weekend - we are hosting a short term student training event. We've expanded this on our side to be what we know as Ember Advance, so after the training event, our team and special guests will do some more team stuff and a field trip. These types of Mission Advance events are my absolute favorite.

If you are curious as to how and what we do for these training events, we have a limited number of spots for you to come hang with us and see it for yourself. Get in touch if you are interested.