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.

Detailed Short Term Mission Team Preps

Had a fantastical time with Ember guides facilitating a short term mission prep experience this past weekend. Here's the big picture on some of the values, activities, working documents and systems behind this training experience for the student teams at GRACE [my home church.] As always, feel free to steal what you can contextualize.

Friday night was a leader only experience - participants were leaders that were leading various student mission trips this summer - Uganda, New Orleans and Baltimore. The targeted concepts included navigation, team work, and an urban/cultural immersion. As our Ember team prepared, we landed on the idea of having the leaders travel to multiple locations in Washington DC and doing some kind of learning exercise at each location. Each location was distinctly different in cultural context, a key to this experience. Another key to this exercise was also done in the context of being a 'mapmaker' - you can be taught how to engage a specific culture or you can learn how to navigate cultures and make your own maps.

Leader teams departed right from the church with a set of minimal instructions and made their way to the first destination where our guides met them. From there, our guides traveled with them to the next 2 destinations, observing and debriefing when appropriate, and then all teams met back at Union Station to talk about the whole evening. This included conversations about being sent and being God's people on the move, being a mapmaker and different facets of teamwork. There is no better place to talk about movement than Union Station.

Saturday included a general mixer, some team building exercises and a series of quick 10 minute teaching rotations on sharing your story, global world realities, case studies in culture and contextualization and movement thinking. We wanted teams to experience working together as well as get some informal teaching. The more teams spend together before they hit the mission field, the better. The team building activities are always a big hit - high school kids should learn by doing.

From an Ember guide perspective, the working documents needed for this project included: instructions for Friday night activity [just enough directions - not too many], a debriefing how-to guide, and instructions for each of the team building activities. Regardless of the documents, each guide needed to be 100% engaged - observing the leader teams working [or not working] together or how teams did the team building activities, etc.

Our 6 Ember guides did amazing [amy, trevin, lexi, carolyn, kristen.] They navigated the unknown, improvised when needed and engaged every leader and student to think about the values each activity tried to impart. I'm not only proud of the work they did, but I'm proud of the culture of Ember that they are propagating. They trust each other which provides the foundation for unfiltered debate as we evaluate the event. Our evaluation was over lunch right after the event ended. An added plus if you are a guide: I write a feedback letter to every guide after every event where they have served.

See some pictures here. If you are involved with student mission teams and are interested in missions team preps, get in touch.

[Related: Mission Advancing, NY Mission Cast, Mission Preps with Bay Area]

Perspectives - Don Richardson

Don Richardson spoke at a Perspectives class last week and I dragged some of our Ember team to it. It was every bit what we expected - great content from a global missions patriarch. Don also coined the term 'redemptive analogy' that I use all the time. Below are some of my notes. Long time readers know that Perspectives started all this silly student missions stuff in the spring of 2003. [If you knew that date, you HAVE been reading a long time...]

For the Sawi, treachery was their highest value. Judas emerges as a hero.
When people live as tribes, tribialism prevails. You only care about yourself.
Cultural compasses:
Indian prophecy of an upside down tree.
Chinese encoding of characters.
Extended family - peace through a new birth.
Abstract concept of new birth.
Jesus spat - nothing related to Jewish culture. He didn't have to use saliva to heal. Marilyn Lazlo - Wycliffe translator and the tribe that related to Jesus healing with saliva. Did God look 2000 years in the future to this tribe?
Could there be some details in the Scriptures not for you but for someone else.
People say missionaries shouldn't go to unreached tribes because they ruin a culutre. This assumes no one else will go - evil corporations, political commercial etc.
87 tribes went extinct in 57 years.
Survivor International - anti missionary organization.
Polygamy - older men sacrifice their daughters to increase their harem. Young men take daughters and leave to different villages. 90% of violence within clans are due to polygamy.
Tribes were addicted to soap and salt.
Missionarys are the object of novelty. Young single men gravitate towards the missionary, while older men feel slighted. Missionary becomes a bad influence in the eyes of elders. Must find a way for the elders to know they matter.
Animistic societies - if people die, its witchcraft. Someone needs to be blamed, who is guilty. Quota of pain - antiBiblical.
Natural symbols suggesting eternal life. Lizard sheds skin. Caterpillar into butterfly.
3 measures of exponential growth - 1st 250 years after Pentecost, the early church
# of believers
# of ecclesia - households
# of culturs in which there were churches
The creeds are missionless. They were written during a dead time for the Church.

Also, there were probably 50-60 people there, lots of different ethnicities. The average age was probably 50, there were maybe 5 high school or college students, I brought 3 of them.

Youth Sunday at GRACE

+ CStolte, 2012 Ember intern, helps lead worship. [didn't get a good pic...]

+ Scott Murrill, current senior high youth pastor, has his last youth sunday - an era ends soon.

+ My daughter shared from the stage. Very, very proud.

M-M-M #theimn2011

Amazing time at the M conference hosted by Kensington Community Church in Troy, MI, outside of Detroit. Like every event by Alex McManus I have attended, I was challenged by the content and inspired by the community. Long post here that includes some notes, mostly for me, and some observations.

: Alex McManus
The future will be unimaginable but God will still be with us.
Think big : Start small : Build on your successes : Pray : Never Give Up
For someone like me, church is hell because they want to hold on to the past. [Alex is way futuristic]
Structure versus essence of Christianity
The Scriptures serve as energy and propulsion to get us somewhere.
Massive movements exist across cultures.
What will win the world is a massive migration of many Christ followers reaching 5 or 10 people each.
The only trouble we have leading without an ego is that we don't want to.

Robopocalypse
Our Post Human Future
What it means to be human is the most important question of the 21st century. The depreciation
of humans and appreciation of technology.
Without Jesus we become subhuman.
2 years ago South Korea established a policy for the ethical treatment of robots.

Stories that we like - stories that close the gap of the world as it is and as it ought to be, and personal stories
What is the conflict - no conflict=no story
What am I fighting for
Every hero is called to a quest
The human story is a story of becoming. Not 'human beings' but 'human becomings.'
If the Bible isn't true, it ought to be.
Looking at the Bible versus looking through the Bible.

: Steve Andrews - one of the lead planters at Kensington
God has given you great people.
Every community wants to crown a king - don't be that king.
If you are over 40, everything you are doing should be empowering the next generation.
Ego is their first red flag for potential leaders.
No listing on their website of who is in charge.

: Dave Nelson - lead pastor of K2, Salt Lake City
The Christian church has given Utah to the Mormons. We will work on the other 49 states.

: Vince Antonucci - lead planter of the Verve Church, Las Vegas
[Vince's delivery of this talk was technically literally perfect. Eye contact, intonation, not one filler word, engagement with the audience. Truly an art form.]
How is it possible that I lived until 20 years old never hearing about Jesus?
How are there less people going to church now than 30 years ago?
We are reaching people but we are not reaching lost people.
They did 300 interviews of all kinds of people before they even started a church.
The church's first purchases were a moonbounce, cotton candy machine and a karoke machine because they heard people were desperate for community. [MPM looks at me and says 'ice cream truck.' Yeah, it's an Ember thing.]
Your assumptions create your crowd. Every word, image, song, etc is highly critiqued from a nonchurch point of view.
Tommy - church planter apprentice who works part time in a tattoo parlor and is going to launch a tattoo church.

: Rex Miller
Language is a technology.
The word - spirit, spoken, print, broadcast, bits and bytes
The medium shapes our worldview. The dominant form of the word shapes our world.
Left brain vs. right brain
Eras - oral, print, broadcast, digital - music, art, architecture
We are currently in a space between spaces, a dangerous time. This is the time to discern about digital culture.
The kinds of people most open to change: eager, adventurous, afraid, fed up
New technologies don't eliminate - they marginalize - the old ones.
Next era is cloud/mobility.
'Literate' is now an obsolete word. [I'm not sure I agree with that.]
Churches need to get away from tax exemption because of it ties us to the government. Instead, get involved with commerce, culture, charity and community.
6 megashifts - turbulence/uncertainty, smaller footprint, generation tsunami, digital natives, mobility, death of industrial mindset
The S curve [very much related to the diffusion of innovation]
2018 - massive shift in population of Millenials vs Boomers. mindset will change as well.
Any change that is fundamental raises conflict. Implementing change is a function of a non-anxious leader.

: Erwin
Transactional versus transformational - speak to them versus speak for them
We must first read the story before we begin to write it.
Economics is an agreement of values.
You don't have to see the future to create it.

The best storytelling is where the person has an aha moment - it's self discovery.
retell -> remember -> relive - it must cost you something emotionally
communication patterns - linear, sequential, systemic

Christians are still arguing about things that the world thinks is reality.

Divergent vs convergent thinking
The Scriptures are full of divergent patterns
Our education system focuses on convergent thinking. Exposure to cultures and traveling helps us learn divergent thinking.

Everyone has someone in their brain they talk to outloud. It is the composite of all the people in your relationships. The more different people you know, the more this composite is different than you.

You can either create safe spaces for people to share or you can create courageous people.

We don't realize what frameworks dominate our thinking. Examples of influencing culture from a minority perspective.
Whoever tells the best story wins. The truth is drowning in a bad story.
'Christian' now means plastic. Like 'Made in Japan' in the 80s.
You pick your clothes because of the tribe you belong to.
Containers of culture are all around us. Everything you touch creates and shapes culture.
Imagination is still seen as evil.
You want to create culture - you better start dreaming.
The Stories You Tell - The Things You Make - The Dreams You Make Real

Beauty isn't supplemental to God, it is essential. God created an array of aesthetics.
The new commodity is creativity.

: Dave Gibbons
Scarcity births clarity and creativity.
large transition right now - the amount of money transferred from west to the east
1500 pastors leave the ministry every month.
Your first day in ministry should be like walking into Narnia.
Medici effect - where multiple domains intersect.
1 - stepped into discomfort
2 - local indigenous leadership
3 - the role of the holy spirit

No longer about crapping on institutions - its now helping them to be adaptable and hybrid.

: Lorenzo Della Foresta - church planter, Mosaic Montreal
Montreal - churches everywhere but they are empty
.3% of people there go to any church
The most unreached in the Western Hemisphere
Average charitable giving in Quebec is $130/person/year
If you need money to do it - you are probably not the one who should.

Dan Sadlier
My team also had lunch with Dan Sadlier and Josh Korn. Dan, up until recently, served as the director of high school ministry for Kensington's 5 campuses and Josh is one of the high school campus directors. I wanted to sit down with them to hear the story of Detroit Reverse, a suburban and urban youth ministry partnership. This idea is something everyone wants to do but few people pull it off. Except Dan. Our lunch was one of the best parts of our time in Detroit and Dan is a global catalytic leader that many can learn from. Dan now splits his time between Vision360, Kensington's church planting team, and running the internship program there.

: I traveled with Trevin, two interns, two members of the Ember board - Dale Swinburne and Matt Maloy - and a local church youth missions catalyst, CPugh, who is an old friend. It was a phenomenal team to learn and interact with.
: My interns ATE. IT. UP. Sponges. Not only did they love the teaching but they were already processing it together on the way to the airport. And they are just really really nice people. Kind, gentle, welcoming. You should have seen them making friends everywhere we go.
: Kensington has seen 4th generation church plants.
: CPugh is involved in a new Ember experiment which deals with some youth missions mentoring and it was great to toss ideas back and forth for a few days. Tell you more about this later.
: About 140 people in attendance, almost all of them were church planters except our team.
: You probably inferred this from the notes, but no one in the church leadership world talks about this kind of stuff except the McManus brothers. This kind of perspective is critical for leaders that will engage the future. Of course, I loved it, but the real investment of my time at M was for the Ember interns and the people they will reach.
: My big takeaway was about the divergent thinking and if my own kids are going to be prepared to lead in the future. We have begun thinking about that as a family, possibly the 'travel more' idea.
: Yes we drove on 8 Mile.

wed pm #theimn2011

rex miller the millenium matrix
eras: oral print broadcast digital
we are in space between spaces - dangerous times
after gutenburg there were 200 years of danger.
this is the time for the Church to discern about digital culture.
'literate' - this word is obsolete.
2018 the massive shift when millenials take over. shift in population as well as thinking.

What it means to be human is the most important question of the 21st century. - Alex McManus

wed am #theimn2011

The future will be unimaginable but God will still be with us.

Great people are all around you. Kensington church has no info on its website about who is in charge.

The Christian church has given Utah to the mormons.

Massive movments exist across cultures.

Your assumptions create your crowd.
Vince Antonucci gave a top 5 ever leadership talk. Verve Church in las vegas.

dessert on fire

intern dessert ember style

East Africa Famine Response

Most of you readers have probably heard of the desperate situation in East Africa right now in terms of the famine - the worst drought in 60 years [Justin has a good summary]. Grace Church decided to contribute a small part to the relief efforts by working with Stop Hunger Now to pack meals and help fund the delivery of those meals. In unprecedented fashion, the whole church, from 2-3 year olds all the way up to families, were invited and mobilized to be a part of this project. The project was a major marker in the history of our church.

When I heard about this opportunity, I immediately signed up our Ember interns to be a part of helping out. Our role was to float during the middle and high school packing times to help people out - a 'May I Help You' role. [Like every internship year, this event is a good example of a valuable learning opportunity that pops up that I would have never been able to predict.]

I wanted our interns involved to learn a few things. First, a church like Grace is an anomaly among churches in America. Combine the resources of a megachurch with an effort like this and you experience something highly unique. Secondly, the task of mobilizing every person in our spiritual community is huge. We had over 900 people serving - but that's still not everybody. Finally, pay attention to the backdrop and logistical details of setting up for something like this. If not everything runs well, 900 people show up with nothing to do.

163,080 meals packaged, Stop Hunger Now has a great set up if you and your group is looking to do this same kind of thing. They do 2 or 3 of these kinds of events every week and the set up and logistics is really well done. Rough approximation - for about 200 students doing the meal packing, we were doing about 1000 meals every 10 minutes or so.

More images here, especially if you are interested in how the packing was set up.