"When I was in high school, just a few months ago…"

This is Shannon Linden, on the platform at Amadeo Church, outside of Phoenix, where she taught last Sunday during all 3 morning services. For those of you that might not know, Ben Cloud started Amadeo 9 years ago. Prior to that, he was a youth pastor that was an expert and hosting and sending students from and to the ends of the earth when I met him and I'm proud to say that we met each other on the Internet. The Ember Cast has partnered with Amadeo multiple times and we were thrilled that Shannon engaged with Amadeo for a gap semester experience.

Some of you might cringe at the thought of an eighteen year old teaching on a Sunday morning. Others of you might disagree with having a female in the front. Still others might despise both facts. This post [or blog for that matter] is not for you.

Shannon was one of our ProtoGuides last year and she's got a fantastic heart for the future of the Church and an iron will and commitment that helps keep her moving in Kingdom directions. We are thrilled at her direction and trajectory - the Kingdom will be rich because of her efforts over a lifetime. Ember will continue to resource Shannon the best that we can, like many of the emerging global leaders that we work with.

I'm infinitely grateful for places like Amadeo and leaders like Ben Cloud. Communities that host young people like this are rare. It is not an easy task to host a young person for a season, give them solid teaching and modeling about discipleship, putting them to work in significant and meaningful venues, and letting them stretch and contribute to your local and global efforts. Opening your pulpit to them is unheard of. At press time, you can find her talk on the sidebar on the right of this page.

We love you Amadeo Church. Thanks for taking such good care of Shannon and throwing fire with her.

Update: Here is the permalink to the message.

Prague Leader #2

I first met Katie Virostek in the summer of 2013 when she was on a team that The Ember Cast helped facilitate to travel and serve with our dear friend Ben Cloud and Amadeo Church, outside of Phoenix. Katie was a phenomenal member of that team and is one of those emerging global student leaders that we love to work with.

She's got lots of experience with Appalachian Service Project, meaning she knows more about home improvement than me. She also leads with a quiet but solid presence, is willing to sacrifice and be uncomfortable for a bigger purpose and takes joy in doing any job that needs to get done. Katie joined us last summer in Aix and worked with us all year as one of three ProtoGuides.

We are thrilled that she joins us on the Prague team this year, rounding out the third of three leadership roles. Our teams are usually pretty flat when it comes to any hierarchy between team member and team leader, but most teams still do require the talents of some who can project, structure, delegate and release. Her contributions have been vital these past few months as our plans have pivoted multiple times. That will probably continue to happen though - a lot can happen in the 4 days before we leave. And that's not even talking about after we land.

Photo: Katie in the upper right, running the famed Hula Hoop challenge.

Leading From the Younger

There is a false paradigm of age within lots of leadership contexts. If you are older, people younger than you are expected to give you respect because you are supposed to be smarter, wiser and more experienced. You knew it a long time ago and they don't know it yet. Trust me, I'm not saying we shouldn't learn from those who have gone before us.

If you want to grow your emerging leaders, you will need to revamp that paradigm. Instead, you will have to give them opportunities to exercise authority and responsibility and influence, in some cases, giving your leaders influence over those that are older than them.

When that happens, you'll get some feedback alright. From the emerging leaders, it will be uncomfortable, strange, and full of dissonance. Ember staff give me this feedback regularly. From the smarter, wiser, and more experienced, they will love learning from those younger than them. From the just plain older, well, you should probably just ignore their feedback.

The Ember Prague 2015 Team

Student Mission Team Training

It is one of my personal convictions that student mission teams usually aren't prepared well enough and this conviction has overflowed into The Ember Cast becoming pretty good at helping prepare these kinds of teams. We had the privilege to help architect a training event last weekend and here's an overview of what we did and why. If you are leading a team this summer, it isn't too late to prepare your team.

On Friday evening, we sent just the team leaders into DC to do a variety of things, all while doing some cultural observation and reflection with their leadership team. The cultural observation piece was very similar to our Culture Aixchange last summer and they were asked to reflect on two team concepts: this first quote in this post and the Tuckman model of team development.

This was not an Amazing Race type of thing, instead, it was designed to make them have to make decisions together, travel together and grow together. We decompressed at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where we talked about what they did together and why and also a variety of other stuff including: theology of place, innovation in ministry, cities as mission fields, and how they can model this kind of cultural decoding for their student teams this summer. This evening was probably my favorite part of the weekend.

Saturday was with all the teams and there were three elements to Saturday - a prayer time, tradecraft sessions [which we borrowed from the Upstream Collective friends] and team building. Prayer was having each time pray for other teams, not only having them invest some time in praying but also giving them a sense of the other teams' cultural context as well as what they might be doing. Our tradecraft sessions visited the topics of person of peace, contextualization and ambassadorship. Two of the three of these are considered important enough that they are on our core curriculum - meaning that we track how students understand this before and after they serve with Ember. The third team building element was getting them moving as a team performing certain tasks - it's like team building like you know - somewhat campy and goofy tasks. But we do this so teams 'storm' before they get to the field. And lots of storming with those hula hoops.

Lots of people worked together to pull this off. My utmost thanks to Kristen Youngstrom, the Grace student missions lead this year; Leslie B [Ember Board of Director]; HopeK [ProtoGuide 2014]; and TessP [Prague 2015 leader] for running the Tradecraft workshops; the Prague team for helping with the team building activities; and Kristen, Hope, Tess, and KatieV [ProtoGuide 2015] for helping out with the Friday night leaders adventure.

More pictures here.

ProtoGuide to AZ

In 2013, Ember helped facilitate a student team from Grace, our home church, to serve and work with Amadeo Church, in Queen Creek, AZ. Amadeo's lead pastor Ben Cloud was one of my first missions friends that I met on the Internet in 2005 and this team happened to be an amazing collection of all girls.

Two years later, I'm delighted to tell you that one of those team members, Shannon Linden, is going to spend a few months serving with Amadeo in a gap semester, starting this coming September. Shannon graduates from high school in a few weeks and has a heart for service, community impact and church planting. She's also been one of our ProtoGuides this year and we have absolutely loved working with her.

The Ember Cast exist to help these kinds of relationships and experiences flourish. Combine passionate emerging global student leaders with the most adventurous, innovative and creative leaders that we know and you will get why we do what we do - we throw fire.

A New Era of Mission Support Letters

Every year, we try to raise the bar on mission support letters. We want the letters associated with Ember to look beautiful, to be thoughtfully written and to be an investment in relationships. Between this year and last year, I think we've gotten some momentum around this and a new default expectation.

Here is a quick view for some of the letters that are going out for our team this summer. Each of them meets those goals above and I personally would love to get one of these in the mail. These kids spent a good amount of time putting these together and Tess was instrumental in helping coach them to make them stunning.

Support letters are a tool. Most people that you send one to are excited to hear about your life and to be a part of your ministry. But overall, you should be trying to elevate the person that is receiving it. It is not simply about a transaction.

Announcing Ember Prague 2015

Today, I am thrilled to announce The Ember Cast's first 2015 summer project. We are putting together a team to travel to Prague this summer to work with Christian Associates. The specific project is to run their middle/high school program during their annual worldwide staff conference. Christian Associates is an organization we love - they have a deep creative and entrepreneurial ethos and they embody the concept of missional imagination. If you've been around here long, you know that we served with student teams at these conferences in 2007 and 2008 and CA was a partner with us for the last two summers in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Camp Juice is the name of their middle/high school program and we will be hanging with a very unique blend of teenager - think a set of third culture kids whose parents are involved in the non mainstream activity of starting new faith communities or some kind of nonprofit or social enterprise. We have a few ideas that we think are pretty non mainstream as well, which should be interesting. I'll be the first to admit that this whole project is a pretty big stretch for me - I've never done anything like this before. It's a good reach though and I'm excited as our team comes together for the dreaming, planning and execution of this.

Not only do we hope our students dream big in executing Camp Juice, there is a pretty unique bigger context at work as well. We will have a team of students who are already mostly interested in the many facets of global missions, world cultures, nonprofit and social good and Gospel centered leadership. And they'll be gathered with a few hundred adults who are already doing these kinds of things in environments all over the globe. Although this shapes up to be quite a catalytic experience, our hope is of course that through this experience, Jesus continues to lead and guide their lives.

Thanks in advance for your support for this project.

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.

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.

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.

Ember 14X - Meeting #5

Disciples are made on the road, not in rows. - Kim Hammond

+ Union Station - one of the oldest transportation hubs in DC. People are on the move.
+ The statue of Christopher Columbus. Our hope is that Ember 14X gives you the inspiration to be a pioneer like Columbus.
+ Ebenezers Coffee Shop - creative revenue and expanding the idea model of missions.

14-15 ProtoGuides

Last weekend, I had lunch with the upcoming Ember ProtoGuides. This is the next iteration of ProtoGuides that start officially this coming September. It's an amazing group of ladies [all girls, the boys will come around eventually...] - one is traveling to Kenya this summer, another one started a Christian club at her high school, and the third is on my France team as well as working on a project with Appalachia Service Club this summer. I think there is at least one cross cultural missionary and/or church planter in the mix, but more on them later. For lunch, my purpose was just to listen to them - to hear what they were interested in learning, how Ember could launch them and what kinds of projects they wanted to be involved in. It was a fascinating conversation and touched on ideas such as:

+ Global Women's Rights.
+ The growth of churches or spiritual communities.
+ Experiencing and learning from different expressions of Church.
+ Connecting and building relationships with different missions-type people around the world.
+ How to plan missional experiences.
+ Sustainable community development and dependency issues like what is covered in Toxic Charity.
+ Social movements, demographics and context like what is covered in Church in the Making.

The ProtoGuide experience is at the core of what Ember does and what makes us unique. And of course, working with students like these is a huge privilege for us.