Quote Library

I decided to put this online so I could add to it easily.

You’re the highest risk that God has taken. The safaris of Africa or the deep oceans of the Atlantic are wild, but they could never be a rebel or curse their creator. We, on the other hand, could and did. When God chose to create us, He knew that we would spit in His face, profane the sacred and laugh at His laws. But he also know that if He didn’t take the risk of rejection, the risk of watching His son brutally die on the cross, he would have never gotten love.
Risk, it seems, is woven into every cell of our bodies. And if we don’t give in, are bodies get weak, minds depressed and spirits broken. Risk comes in different packages for each one of us. You know what I’m taking about, when your at the church picnic and you eye that person, of the opposite sex, that catches your imagination, but are to fearful to do anything about it. When you feel that nudge, from the Holy Spirit, to tell someone about your love story with God, yet you shy away. And when you hear the gentle whisper of our Father leading you to unfamiliar ground, out of your comfort zone.
Risk is a funny thing. If you fail to do it you might regret it for the rest of your life. But if you do take on the challenge and let your inhibitions go, it could be the scariest and the most Christ-like thing you ever do. - John Eldredge

Anyone can devise a plan by which good people go to heaven. Only God can devise a plan whereby sinners, which are His enemies, can go to heaven. -Lewis Sperry Chafer

It is God and God alone who determines absolute truth. Truth is objective because God exists outside ourselves; it is universal because God is above all; it is constant because God is eternal. -Josh McDowell

'For the first few days after the September attack, it looked like the W philosophy was to speak incoherently and carry a big stick. That changed, and maybe his presidency did as well, during an un-scripted moment at Ground Zero. Bush was speaking through a megaphone with his arm around a retired fireman when some called out "We can't hear you." Without missing a beat, W responded, "Well I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon." And thus, a presidency.' - Dave Pell, NextDraft

Jesus did not intend His church merely to provide bigger and better amusement for bigger and more upscale audiences. His vision was of a church that would inject His light and life into a dark and dying world. So we had better take the vision of Jesus seriously, or we won't just be amusing ourselves to death. We'll be amusing people to hell. -Leighton Ford, author and speaker

Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and schools combined; without the eloquence of schools, He spoke words of life such as never were spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of any orator or poet; without writing a single line, He has set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and sweet songs of praise, than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times. Born in a manger, and crucified as a malefactor, He now controls the destinies of the civilized world, and rules a spiritual empire, which embraces one-third of the inhabitants of the globe. There never was in this world a life so unpretending, modest, and lowly in its outward form and condition, and yet producing such extraordinary effects upon all ages, nations, and classes of men. The annals of history produce no other example of such complete and astonishing success in spite of the absence of those material, social, literary, and artistic powers and influences which are indispensable to success for a mere man. -Philip Schaff (1819-1893)

'Of one hundred men, one will read the bible, the 99 will read the christian' - Dwight Moody

"Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions."

"The strategy was flawed because it had an assumption. The assumption was that the people in leadership are actually leaders. [I thought] all I need to do is give them the right information and they can draw the right conclusions….Most people who are in positions of leadership in local churches aren't leaders. They're great people, but they're not really leaders." - George Barna

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Noted Christian author and speaker Tony Campolo tells a story of his visit to Honolulu for a
Christian conference several years ago. His first night there, Tony awoke sometime after three (a six-hour time difference had confused his sleep pattern) and left the hotel in search of a place to get something to eat.
Eventually he found a tiny coffee shop, with one man behind the counter who served him coffee and a doughnut. Tony was the only customer until, quite suddenly, the coffee shop was overrun with women. Some sat at small tables; others sat at the counter near Tony.
From their conversation, Tony learned an astonishing amount about Honolulu's night life, for the
girls were discussing their night's work and their male clients. The girls were prostitutes.
Here's the rest of the story in Tony's own words:

I overheard the woman sitting beside me say, "Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm going to be
thirty-nine."
Her "friend" responded in a nasty tone, "So what do you want from me? A birthday party? What do you want? Ya want me to get you a cake and sing 'Happy Birthday'?"
"Come on!" said the woman sitting next to me. "Why do you have to be so mean? I was just telling you, that's all. Why do you have to put me down? I was just telling you it was my birthday. I don't want anything from you. I mean, why should you give me a birthday party? I've never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?"
When I heard that, I made a decision. I sat and waited until the women had left. Then I called
over the fat guy behind the counter and I asked him, "Do they come in here every night?"
"Yeah!" he answered.
"The one right next to me, does she come here every night?"
"Yeah," he said. "That's Agnes. Yeah, she comes in here every night. Why d'ya wanta know?"
"Because I heard her say that tomorrow is her birthday," I told him. "What do you say you and I do something about that? What do you think about us throwing a birthday party for her--right
here--tomorrow night?"
A cute smile slowly crossed his chubby cheeks and he answered with measured delight, "That's
great!"
"Look," I told him, "if it's okay with you, I'll get back here tomorrow morning about 2:30 and
decorate the place. I'll even get a birthday cake!"
"No way," said Harry (that was his name). "The birthday cake's my thing. I'll make the cake."
At 2:30 the next morning, I was back at the diner. I had picked up some crepe-paper decorations at the store and had made a sign out of big pieces of cardboard that read, "Happy Birthday, Agnes!" I decorated the diner from one end to the other. I had that diner looking good. The woman who did the cooking must have gotten the word out on the street, because by 3:15 every prostitute in Honolulu was in the place. It was wall-to-wall prostitutes ... and me!
At 3:30 on the dot, the door of the diner swung open and in came Agnes and her friend. I had
everybody ready (after all I was kind of the emcee of the affair), and when they came in we all
screamed, "Happy birthday!"
Never have I seen a person so flabbergasted ... so stunned ... so shaken. Her mouth fell open. Her legs seemed to buckle a bit. Her friend grabbed her arm to steady her. As she was led to sit on one of the stools along the counter, we all sang "Happy Birthday" to her.
As we came to the end of our singing with "Happy birthday, dear Agnes, happy birthday to you," her eyes moistened. When the birthday cake with all the candles on it was carried out, she lost it and just openly cried.
Harry gruffly mumbled, "Blow out the candles, Agnes! Come on! Blow out the candles! If you don't blow out the candles, I'm gonna hafta blow out the candles." And, after an endless few seconds, he did. Then he handed her a knife and told her, "Cut the cake, Agnes. Yo, Agnes, we all want some cake."
Agnes looked down at the cake. Then without taking her eyes off it, she slowly and softly said,
"Look, Harry, is it all right with you if I ...I mean, is it okay if I kind of ... want I want to
ask you is ... is it OK if keep the cake a little while? I mean, is it all right if we don't eat it
right away?"
Harry shrugged and answered, "Sure! It's okay. If you want to keep the cake, keep the cake. Take it home if you want to."
"Can I?" she asked. Then, looking at me, she said, "I live just down the street a couple of doors.
I want to take the cake home, OK? I'll be right back. Honest!" She got off the stool, picked up
the cake, and, carrying it like it was the Holy Grail, walked slowly toward the door.
As we all just stood there motionless, she left. When the door closed, there was a stunned silence in the place. Not knowing what else to do, I broke the silence by saying, "What do you say we pray?"
Looking back on it now, it seems more than strange for a sociologist to be leading a prayer
meeting with a bunch of prostitutes in a diner in Honolulu at 3:30 in the morning. But then it just felt like the right thing to do. I prayed for Agnes. I prayed for her salvation. I prayed that her life would be changed and that God would be good to her.

When I finished, Harry leaned over the counter and, with a trace of hostility in his voice, said,
"Hey! You never told me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to?"
In one of those moments when just the right words came, I answered, "I belong to a church that
throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning."
Harry waited a moment and then almost sneered as he answered, "No, you don't. There's no church like that. If there was, I'd join it. I'd join a church like that!"
May our churches become the type of churches that would throw a birthday party for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning, and may we all become the kind of Christian who would bring the cake!

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"He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." --Jim Elliot

Ministry is what we leave in our wake as we follow Jesus - Gerald Hartis

The soul dies a bit every time it is involved in a lifestyle that competes. - Gordon McDonald

Corporate Lesson 3
A sales rep, an administration clerk and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. They rub it and a Genie comes out in a puff of smoke. The Genie says, "I usually only grant three wishes, so I'll give each of you just one."
"Me first! Me first!" says the admin clerk. "I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world."
Poof! She's gone.
In astonishment, "Me next! Me next!" says the sales rep. "I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of pina coladas and the love of my life."
Poof! He's gone.
"OK, you're up," the Genie says to the manager.
The manager says, "I want those two back in the office after lunch."
Moral of story: always let your boss have the first say.

Jesus promised his disciples three things--that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble. -G.K. Chesterton

The day people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them." - Colin Powell

"argue for your limitations and sure enough they are yours" - jerry weast

How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo? - Philip Yancey

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. - Albert Schweitzer

The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. - Frederick Buechner

When the church becomes an end to itself, it acts pious and begins to turn sour. Anyone with a sensitive nose will smell that and find it dreadful. - Karl Barth

It's easier to count bottles than describe the wine. -- Thomas Stewart, writing in Fortune magazine

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. - G.K. Chesterton

Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders. - Tom Peters

"In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It's called Karoshi. I don't want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon."-- Scott Adams, Dilbert

"This is the American Dream. Work. Buy. Display. Repeat." C. S. Lewis

We need to clear in our heads about what discipleship is. My definition: A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do. A disciple is not a person who has things under control, or knows a lot of things. Disciples simply are people who are constantly revising their affairs to carry through on their decision to follow Jesus. – Dallas Williard

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all." - Michelangelo (1475-1564)

"My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition."-- Indira Gandhi

"The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish. To you, as the trusted family counselor, the father will come with his anxieties, the mother with her hidden grief, the daughter with her trials, and the son with his follies. Fully one-third of the work you do will be entered in other books than yours" - Sir William Osler

"If Jesus loved people like we do, he would have lived a long, prosperous life."
--- a quote by someone I don't know

C.S.Lewis
"If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them." MERE CHRISTIANITY, p.82.

Yet, you and I have no rights. We are dead. Our lives are hidden with Christ in God. We’ve been purchased with a price, the precious blood of the Lord Jesus. To surrender yourself totally, irrevocably, without reservations to the living Christ is the greatest privilege man can know in this life. To live the self-centered life is to live in self-imposed spiritual poverty. I'm eighty-one years old, and even though I've preached for many years, I'm just now beginning to truly understand the importance of being dead to Bill Bright. Bill Bright has no rights in my life. Christ has purchased me. I belong to Him. Now every morning you and I must get on our knees and acknowledge we belong to Jesus Christ. Only then can true revival begin. – Bill Bright

Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. - Washington Irving

"Integrity is the unwillingness to violate one's own identity."-- Erich Fromm, psychiatrist and author

It has also been "well said" that "a fish rots from the head down". First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people.
The fact of the matter is that it is the leaders who set the ethical standards. The followers will follow, because that`s what followers do...they follow.

The most enlightening part of Ron Martoia's session for me was his observation that there are 67 dialogs in the gospels between Jesus and someone else. In 50 of those dialogs, Jesus asks a question he doesn't answer. We aren't called to be walking encyclopedias. We are stewards of mysteries. Colossians 4:3 says we're called to "proclaim the mystery of Christ." Translation: we talk about unanswerable and unfathomable questions.
Mark Batterson, Pastor of National Community Church

"Optimism is the truest form of moral courage"-- Ernest Shackleton

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. - H.L. Mencken

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does. -- Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review

Awkwardness is natural. If people aren’t feeling awkward doing something new, they’re not doing something new. -- Ken Blanchard

Don’t punish a learner. If you do, you’ll immobilize him. -- Ken Blanchard

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. --Chinese Proverb

John Chancellor said, "If you want to see God laugh, tell him your plans."

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." —General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff. U. S. Army

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed"—William Gibson

"A man without a smiling face must not open a shop." —Chinese Proverb

Robert Bellah, a sociologist who teaches at the Univesity of California, Berkely, is very interested in the influence of religion on the community. In an interview in Psychology Today he said, “We should not underestimate the significance of the small group of people who have a new vision of a just and gentle world. The quality of a culture may be changed when 2 percent of its people have a new vision.” – John Stott

It seems to me that the Christian life, when properly lived, is a rhythmic alternation between turning toward God in worship and running toward the world in love and with a passion for justice, between congregation and disperal, liturgy and labor, worship and work, adoration and obedience. – Nicholas Wolterstorff

"You aren't wealthy until you have something that money can't buy" - Garth Brooks

"An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it" - William Bernbach

"The two most powerful words in any language are: What If" - Kraig Kramers

"The quality of your leadership is reflected in the caliber of people choosing to follow you" - Dennis Pear

CNN: Nazi hunter Wiesenthal dead at 96. In his book "Justice, Not Vengeance," Wiesenthal wrote: "Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. —John Quincy Adams

"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe." —Winston Churchill

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B." —James Yorke, mathematician, on chaos theory in The New Scientist

I love the story of the night Michael Jordan scored 69 points in one game. It was a blow-out and at the end of the game the coach pulled M.J. out and put in a little known sub who scored two meaningless points in the closing seconds of play. A few weeks later a reporter asked the sub, "What is the highlight of your professional career?" He said, "The night Michael Jordan and I scored 71 points together." This is how I feel about what Jesus is building at Trinity Church. He is doing the work and it is a privilege to partner with Him in His Kingdom.
Mike Sprague

Walt Disney's widow was being interviewed after the completion of Disney World in Florida. The reporter remarked, "Isn't it a shame that your husband never got to see this?" Mrs. Disney quickly corrected him. "He did see it. That is why it is here!"

"Design is treated like a religion at BMW."

"Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation." Steve Jobs

"Every Starbucks store is carefully designed to enhance the quality of everything the customers see, touch, hear, smell or taste," writes CEO Howard Schultz.

"The leaders of Great Groups love talent and know where to find it. They revel in the talent of others."Warren Bennis & Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius

"I have always believed that the purpose of the corporation is to be a blessing to the employees." —Boyd Clarke

"People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they're really proud of, that they'll fight for, sacrifice for, trust." —Howard Schultz, Starbucks

"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it." - Abbie Hoffman

"When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The most important thing about education is appetite." - Winston Churchill

"an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered." -gk chesterton

"When life gives you lemons, cleanse your palate with lemon sorbet.
Passion isn't the frosting on top. It's the whole damn entree."- Sally Hogshead

"It is still God's policy to work through the embarrasingly insignificant to change his world and create his future" - Tom Sine

"On my door there's a cartoon of two turtles. One says, 'Sometimes I'd like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it.' The other turtle says, 'I'm afraid God might ask me the same question.' Those who have Jesus' heart toward hurting people need to live out their faith by alleviating suffering where they can, by making a difference, by embodying his love in practical ways."
--Peter John Kreeft

"Poverty, at its very core is a mindset. It’s the cruel message whispered by Satan himself: 'You don’t matter. Nobody cares about you. Give up!' More than anything else, the poor feel overwhelmed. Without money, shelter, food, education, justice, or skills to address their plight, they succumb to a downward spiral that leads to despair, then apathy, and ultimately to fatalism." Wess Stafford, President, Compassion Int’l.

Robert F. Kennedy, borrowing from George Bernard Shaw: 'Some people see things as they are and say: "why" I dream things that never were and say "why not?"'

"First step in leadership development -- buy a mirror." - author unidentified

"Don't skate to where the puck is; skate to where the puck will be."- Wayne Gretzsky

"Certainty is the death of imagination." Milton Glaser, ABC Corporation

"When it comes to leadership, the crazy are those who don't hear voices." - Alex McManus.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom - George Patton

"Do one thing every day that scares you." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"A church that is centered on itself is not a church." - Deitrich Bonhoffer, The Cost of Discipleship

"Explode through the hole. Don't be timid. If you're going to make a mistake, make it at full speed." - Charlie Weis, Notre Dame

"Measure self-worth not by what others think of you but by what you think of them." Phillip Yancy, Reaching for the Invisible God, p. 92

"Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both and keeping them bot furious." GK Chesterton, quoted in Reaching for the Invisible God, p. 92

"Occasionally we talk of our Christianity as something that solves problems, and there is a sense in which it does. Long before it does,so, however, it increases both the number and the intensity of the problems. Even our intellectual questions are increased by the acceptance of a strong religious faith...If a man wishes to avoid the disturbing effect of paradoxes, the best advise is for him to leave the Christian faith alone." Elton Trueblood, quoted in Reaching for the Invisible God, p. 94

"We may not be interested in chaos but chaos is interested in us." - Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century

"A leader is a dealer in hope." - Napoleon

"If you are going through hell, keep going." Winston Churchill

Inches make champions. - Vince Lombardi

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. - Seneca

Do first things first, and second things not at all. - Peter Drucker

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Money can't buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery." - Donald Trump

"Any movement which has benefited society in the long haul has at its core a group of people committed to a cause that they consider greater than themselves and to one another as friends." - James McGregor Burns

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you & I make every day are of such infinite importance." - CS Lewis

"If you simply aim at doing the right thing, you will never get where you need to be. You need to aim at being the kind of person who does the right thing." - John Ortberg

"There is no heavier burden than a great potential" - Charles Schulz

"Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward." - Kierkegaard

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" - Victor Hugo

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill

"The language of business is not the language of the soul or the language of humanity. It's a language of indifference; it's a language of separation, of secrecy, of hierarchy." - Anita Roddick

"Without risk, there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith" - Kierkegaard

"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong - or absolutely right." - Albert Guinon

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missles and misguided men." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." -Voltaire

"One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo and the status quo no longer belongs to us.If we want to be fair we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo" - Francis Schaeffer

"If your church is full of members, you get an occasional missionary. If your church is full of missionaries, the rest is geography". - Erwin McManus

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo

"You can't behave in a calm, rational manner. You've got to be out there on the lunatic fringe." - Jack Welch

"I don't use the word 'evangelism' because if you're not a Christian, it sounds like a disease...and if you are a Christian, it is one." - Rob Bell, "The Revolutionary Voice", YS Convention ATL 2004

"It is a shame children must die for you to live as you wish" - Mother T.

"Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten." - Motto of the Gucci family

"Never let us negotiate out of fear but never let us fear to negotiate." - John F Kennedy in his inaugural address

"Let others complain that this age is evil. My complaint is that this age is paltry. It lacks passion. " - Soren Kierkegaard

"To become an 'admirer of Jesus' is much easier than to become a follower." - Soren Kierkegaard

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." - Howard Aiken

"The people around us are not interested in our Christology, but from time to time they show interest in our neighborology." - Japanese Theologian, Kosuke Koyama

"Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust." - Stephen M.R. Covey (son of Stephen Covey)

"It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more." - Woody Allen

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein

"You are not obliged to finish the task, nor are you released from undertaking it." - Rabbi Tarfon

"Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly." - Voltaire

"Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes." - D Bonhoeffer

"No leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him- or herself freely and fully. That is leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves." - Warren Bennis

"Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you." - Fran Lebowitz

"There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great." - G. K. Chesterton

"The church is at its most false when it seeks to preserve a separation from the world." - D Bonhoeffer

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Albert Einstein

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide

"Do not be afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still." - Chinese Proverb

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." - Karen Lamb

"Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws." - Plato

"If you want to make enemies, try to change something." - Woodrow Wilson

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

"It is generally much easier to kill an organization than change it substantially." - Kevin Kelly

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that he didn't trust me so much." - Mother Teresa

"That which we would change, we must first love." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world." - author unidentified

"Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal" - Nathaniel Hawthrone

"Hell begins the day God grants you the vision to see all you could have done, should have done, would have done but did not do." - Johann Wolfgang Goethe

"I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose." - Ludwig van Beethoven

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul." - G.K. Chesterton

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Winston Churchill

"Your enemies will define you so make them interesting." - Bono

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point." - C.S. Lewis

"Most of us prefer the hell of a predictable situation rather than risk the joy of an unpredictable one." - Maxie Dunnam

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

"If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean." - Antoine de Saint Extupery

"The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live." - Wolfhart Pannenberg

"He who has a why can endure any how." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"God never pulls you in without sending you out." - Tim Keller

"Orville Wright never had a pilot's license" - Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter

A volunteer is someone who executes someone else’s vision. A leader is someone with a vision of his or her own. - Mike Breen

Talk doesn't cook rice. - Chinese Proverb

"Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve." -J.K. Rowling

"If what I do has no consequences it doesn't make me free. It makes me meaningless." -Dick Foth

A team is not a group of people that work together. A team is a group of people that trust each other. - Simon Sinek

Don't let your budget determine your vision. Faith is having vision beyond your resources - Mark Batterson

"The world doesn’t need better leaders, the world needs better people who lead." - Erwin McManus

Here's the question: If you left your leaders by themselves, would they know what to do? - Mike Breen

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

"The bold adventurer succeeds the best." - Ovid

“We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop.” - Peter Drucker

Are you a missiologist?

You start to become a missiologist when you want to explore how Jesus and the Bible call us into mission. Missiologists get drawn into looking at the many nuances of mission, such as:
What makes mission good or bad?
What kinds of mission create dependencies?
What kinds build capacity for the local community?
In what ways can mission efforts collaborate by forming networks?
What are the new successes - and new mistakes - people are making in mission?
What is the impact of short-term mission teams on the communities they visit?
Do we support nationals in mission or send in missionaries?

Also missiologists:

- Will want to read what other missiologists are thinking.
- Will want to reflect on the principles of mission with seriousness no matter whether we can influence just a few or a great number of people.
- Almost naturally produce materials others can use in guiding, preparing, preaching, teaching, and training in mission.
- Sense that God definitely wants to mobilize the whole Christian Body for the missional purpose of Christ's Church.
- Have a conviction that God means much more than assisting a few who might become exceptionally involved in missional activities and commitment. God's entire church is a missionary church.

Read more here.

Momentum Mag - Nov/Dec 05

A few snippets from Momentum Magazine, a new magazine dedicated to online help believers passionately, quickly, and effectively reach the least-reached 27% of our world.

On Urban megacitites:

In 2000, the largest cities: Tokyo (26.4), Mexico City (18.1), Mumbai (18.1), Sao Paulo (17.8), New York (16.6), Lagos (13.4), Los Angeles (13.1), Calcutta (12.9), Shanghai (12.9), and Buenos Aires (12.6). Together these accounted for 161 million people, or over half the population of the United States.
By 2010, the largest cities will be Tokyo (26.4), Mumbai (23.6), Lagos (20.2), Sao Paulo (19.7), Mexico City (18.7), Dhaka (18.4), New York (17.2), Karachi (16.6), Calcutta (15.6), and Jakarta (15.3), accounting for 191 million people.

Some good questions posed as a learner about what someone from another culture thinks about Americans:

1. What do you think are the key characteristics of a real American [or other culture] man or woman? What makes a [American] a "good [American]"?
2. Finish this sentence, "A good [American] would never . . ."
3. Finish this sentence, "A good [American] is always . . ."
4. Finish this sentence, "A good [American] would give up almost anything if he or she could have . . ."
5. Finish this sentence, "A good [American] would think that life is not worth living without . . ."
6. Finish this sentence, "A good [American] dislikes and avoids people who . . ."
7. An [American] proverb says [such and such]. Can you explain that for me? Perhaps you can use an example of a situation when you would use that proverb.
8. A [American] proverb says [such and such]. Why is that so important to [American] people? Are there other proverbs that make the same point?
9. In my country we have a proverb that says [such and such]. Do you think most [American] would think that is good advice? Why or why not?

Some Indonesian proverbs:

Where there is smoke, there is fire.
Where there is sugar, there are ants.
There is a shrimp behind the stone.
Water with ripple is shallow.
Water dripping from the roof will eventually go to the reservoir.
Seaweed chopped up by water but not cut off.
Milk is repaid with poison.
Never think that still water doesn’t have crocodiles.
As if kerakap leaf on a rock, unwilling to live, unwilling to die.
Like the fingernail and the flesh beneath.

Great magazine, the first two issues have been some great reading. Magazine sections in html here.

Image: World's children population with respect to the 10/40 window. Also from the current issue. Click for full size.

Last day of Ramadan

Today is the last day of Ramadan, so I'm sort of fasting during lunch. Sort of meaning - OJ, one bag of sunchips, two small pieces of Mr. Goodbar. Some really great info about Ramadan at 30-days of Prayer.

Hodos #1

I've started to be a part of a group blog called Hodos with my friend MM and a friend of his. It's kind of interesting to be in a group blogger and these guys bring up some good conversations.
Here is a post I just wrote for that blog.

=====
Mark writes in the previous post about the quest for the radical middle - being radical because of what God has done in us - and has jotted down a few areas for being radical and standing apart. I'm going to throw one more idea in the ring - and that idea deals with culture.

Of course, the term 'culture' can be a huge and massive concept. Specifically, I think we need to think about the idea of engagement with the culture that we live in. As the Mosaic crew likes to say, "Relevance to the culture is not optional."

Foreign missions work has known for a long time that to impact a community, one must contextualize into the community. This entails studying the local culture, learning the language, experimenting with food. It also means understanding subtleties of religious background and beliefs, worldviews and superstitions. Cross cultural workers study local legends, myths and belief systems.

We need to understand that contextualization is not just a requirement for cross cultural ministry. Rather this idea of contextualization should be standard for all of us as Jesus followers. After all, Jesus embraced his context. And when we look at through the stunning stories of Scripture with the lens of culture, we find that they are pretty serious about engaging with the worldview of the people they are relating to. Paul preaching in Athens, Daniel serving in Nebuchadnezzar's court, and Esther relating to the king - they all were students of their context and culture.

Here are a few ideas:
- Be students of the culture. Donald Larson, in one of the papers for the Perspectives course, categorizes three postures for being students of a different culture - Learner, Trader, and Storyteller.
- Consistently watch some movies. Movies have a huge role in our culture today, film is the dominant medium for story telling. We could learn a lot about how to tell a really good story just by watching some movies and good films give us some great opportunities to dialogue about the human condition.
- Listen to some music that you don't like. We are all aware of the phenomenon where rap music that started in the inner city has permeated all youth subcultures, including rural America.

Mark Batterson, pastor of National Community Church in Washington DC, has more ideas along these lines in a post entitled Cultural Exegesis, especially along the lines of music and film and the dominant roles those cultural elements play in our culture today.

"We've had more than one noted evangelical leader tell us, 'You can examine culture and understand contemporary trends if you like. As for me I'll just preach the Bible.' In many cases where we ignore principles of contextualization our preaching of the bible may well have as much impact as preaching in Swahili to English speakers."

- The Shaping of Things to Come
=====

Neil Cole interview - Growing God's Kingdom

Neil Cole is the Executive Director and a founder of Church Multiplication Associates. Neil has been in pastoral ministry for fifteen years and is an experienced church planter, author and consultant. Neil is also a founding leader of the Awakening Chapels and of Organic Church planting movements. His most recent book is entitled, Organic Church, Growing Faith Where Life Happens.

On church growth success:

For instance we don’t care if our churches live a year, twenty years, or a hundred years. We care that while they live, they give birth. We may start a church that lasts a year, but while it lives, it births two daughter churches. That is a success. We think that if every church reproduces in that way, then the Kingdom of God will continue and grow.
But if we think that every church has to last forever, we will try to do everything we can to keep it alive artificially, and that’s not good. We find fruitfulness most often in the small, not the large.

On economics of the "Organic Church":

If we could get our leaders to learn to live by faith not by finances, then finances in the church would be a breeze. But the moment you make your decisions based on the need for security, dependence on organizational support, those kinds of things, then you are already making decisions based on the wrong things. You are not living by faith.

On words of encouragement about the "Organic Church":

I think we are making a shift from the day of the ordained to the day of the ordinary. A day when common Christians are empowered to do extraordinary things for God and they are no longer going to wait for their pastors to say, “Go.”
I think the layers and layers of decision-makers between God’s people and God will be removed, so that God can have direct communication with His people without any filters, without any middlemen to interpret. When we reach that state we will see massive global implications.
I think God is setting us up that way. Some of the trends that are happening today are global in scale. They are not just regional or national, but all across the world people are saying and discovering these things. That has never happened in history, except maybe in the first century. We are on the verge of seeing something akin to the Book of Acts happening in our day, if we are faithful to God’s voice.

Very compelling article, read it here from Next Wave. I also quoted from Neil Cole in this post about Paul's journeys.

Theresia, Ida, and Alfina

The names of the three Christian teenagers that were beheaded in Indonesia last Saturday morning. More info here.

I just got off the phone with the The Embassy of Indonesia in Washington D.C., and wanted to give you an update.
According to the woman I spoke to at the Embassy there are currently six suspects in the brutal beheadings of the three Christian Indonesian girls last week. However, due to the investigation, no other details are being released at this time.
I was thanked for calling and showing my interest in what has happened in Indonesia because the Embassy is taking reaction from the American public.
So, if this situation upsets you as much as it does me please call the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC and tell them that you are concerned about the persecution of Christians, and that you'd like to see them do everything they can to make sure these killers are caught and prosecuted.
Please call 202-775-5200 . Thanks!

From Stacy at the Christian Persecution blog. If you are really, really inclined, this post here has a picture of one of the beheaded girls. WARNING - VERY GRAPHIC. But it is a reality that some people live with every single day.

Conference call stats

Look at the stats on this conference call.... I wasn't on there quite the whole time....

Conference start time = 11/01/2005 - 09:56:46 AM (CST)
Conference end time = 11/01/2005 - 10:27:39 PM (CST)

The SPACEintern doesn't sleep, she dreams

More fun with the SPACEintern tonight. We sat down to map out the Spring and what it looks like. Since she has taken on the responsibility and risk of being our first intern, I wanted to give her a chance to see her dreams and visions come to fruition. It was great fun to sit and dream a little bit.

A few of the cool things that we did or talked about during our dream session:
- a matrix of all potential summer mission team leaders and mission localities
- a slightly different way to do summer mission prep
- some concepts and principles she wants to capture for her senior intern project (basically another Black Hole, but for her class)
- a few launches/excursions centered around the beach (???)
- the first ever SPACE weekend expedition in late January (much more to come about this)
- all the people I need to get in touch with to make some of this happen

Of course, there is much more to tell about all of these things. But I can't divulge many of the details to some of you readers, since that would taint your SPACE experience. But don't worry, soon enough.

We did a lot of dreaming and not too much concrete planning, which was totally fine with me. Overall, two things stood out to me. #1 - She bleeds this stuff. #2 - The harvest is ripe.

Happy Halloween 2005

God hates gluttony

As we neared the church, however, our joyful anticipation quickly turned to horror as our eyes began to focus on a pick-up truck, parked sideways, off the road but purposefully obvious, so passerby either direction could view the homemade built up sides of the truck, emblazoned, in all-caps: "NO GAYS!" "GOD HATES HOMOSEXUALITY!" "GAYS WILL BURN IN HELL!" etc., etc. Of course, there were the Bible verses, and also a couple of giant photograph posters of young men kissing, with ugly slash marks crudely painted over their handsome faces. Tim and I were pretty much dry-heaving as we turned to enter the parking lot.

We were late, as usual, so had no time to alert the pastor. Trembling with quiet rage, we took our seats and spied around the room to locate the creepy culprit. Sure enough, to our left was the despicable fellow in a glaringly white sweatshirt, screenprinted both front and back with a huge red circle with a slash across it, over the single word in black, "GAYS".

My eyes scanned the room, from this horrid human being, to an angelic and unassuming friend of ours who happens to struggle with lesbianism.

Looking upon my sweet friend, I lost it.

I was livid.

Now, just so you know, the old, pre-Jesus me would have immediately "thrown down," if you know what I'm saying. I know the pattern well: my face turns hot red, my hands start to shake, and pretty soon somebody goes down. And it's not me.

So my ancient physical mad girl symptoms began manifesting themselves, and I was begging Jesus for help. I leaned over to Tim and whispered, "Do you have a coupla safety pins on ya?" He didn't. I asked him for the car keys.

In the safety of the car, Jesus quieted my soul and, I believe, helped me locate two safety pins, two niced sized pieces of paper, and one black magic marker. (Our car's really messy.) I made a giant circle on each paper, wrote "GLUTTONS" in the middle, and ran the big slash mark across. I pinned one to the front and one to the back of my shirt. Then I slowly and deliberately made the trip back to my seat, to the joyous sounds of our friends' stifled, thankful laughter.

Read the whole post here.

Post 30 hour work day

I just finished a marathon weekend of work. It was absolutely ridiculous. Our software release that was scheduled for roughly 8 hours of work turned into about 28. I was literally at work from 10pm Saturday night to almost midnight Sunday night. And we are still dealing with the fallout from some very costly mistakes from the weekend. All the mistakes were in implementation - the execution of a plan. Unfortunately for me, all the mistakes centered around implementation of something my team was responsible for. It ended up being very costly for a whole team of people, not just mine. In other words, a real drag.

Corporate America makes no promises to us. It will not tell us that it cares for our families or our personal time or that we have a well rounded life. In this case, I knew that I needed to stay around, until I was physically unable to do so anymore. My boss didn't need to tell me how important it was. And the culture of our organization is, "The business needs come first." Whether that is a good mantra or not (believe me, I have an opinion), it is what it is. Therefore, I stayed, tried to be engaged in the solutions and tapped the homemade dessert resource (my wife D.)

On this weekend, we totally messed up the customer experience. We broke a bunch of things and really didn't even give the field users a reliable system. I know its just a job (the spiral down from a career to just a job has been full bore of late - another post at a much later time), but it still matters when we blow it big time. And it should still matter.

Londrina, Brasil religious study

Those of you that know about my trip this summer to Brasil know that my team and I went to a city called Londrina, in the state of Parana. Tonight I somehow I ended up at a site called Brasil 2010.

Project Brazil 2010 is the saturation church planting effort originally associated with the AD2000 Movement. Its goal is to mobilize all the denominations in Brazil to plant churches until there is "a church within easy access of everyone in the nation in this generation".

I stumbled on to this religious presence study in Londrina. Interesting study.

The methodology for the study included:
- dividing up into teams of two people and covering each block and each street of the city to find the churches and sites for religious meetings.
- visiting each Protestant church during its principal weekly meeting and to count to the number of people present.
- verifying, analyzing and double-checking the data with the available demographic and population data in the mayor's office.
- dividing the city into 17 geographic regions and comparing the evangelical presence between the regions to determine which parts of the city had greater or less access to a church.

The summary of the results include:
Population of Londrina: 424,000
Number of Protestant Churches: 353 (of 388 churches found, 35 or 9% of them were closed)
Average of Attendance: 82 people per church
Percentage of the Population in a church on Sunday: 6.8%
Average number of inhabitants per church: 1,201 (one geographic region represented 6,200 inhabitants per church)
Churches with 100 or fewer people at their services: 80%
Churches with more than 250 people at their services: 5%

The study makes me think about the following:
- About 10% of church buildings are closed. What does that infer about the culture?
- Majority of churches are small. Not only in Londrina, but worldwide, right?
- The study focuses on pure quantities, not at all on the quality of faith communities. We don't know anything about the quality of these churches, and of course, this would be a very subjective opinion.
- Less than 7% of the city go to church. From what we saw there, not too surprising.
- That is some serious leg work to get the results of the survey, literally.

Debunking Youth Ministry's 18 month myth

'Youth pastors stay at their job for an average of 18 months.' Not true, read more here.

Chain Reaction summit

Friday night I got to be a 'fly on the wall' and listen in on the discussion at the Chain Reaction summit. It was a really cool time, just being able to listen in and hear the team process experiences and emotions from last summer.

Basically, it was an intense debriefing time, helping the leaders process, while the directors took detailed notes, all in an effort to set the stage and plan for this coming summer. Jeremy was the facilitator and included four discussion points for the leaders: Expectations, Preparation, Implementation and Take Aways.

What was most fun for me was to hear the convictions on these people's hearts, including:
- Students matter and can make a difference; it's worth it to invest in students.
- Helping local and indigenous ministries in communities is vital.
- The overall goal is having students live missionally. Empowering them to make a difference themselves, not just experiencing a Chain Reaction week, is the big picture.

Definitely lots of fun for me to be around people that exude passion about investing in students and making a difference in their communities and around the world.

Rosa Parks

"Rosa Parks has met that standard of extraordinary service to her country. She didn't have a weapon on her. She didn't have an organization behind her. All she had was her conviction." - Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.)

WaPo article here detailing the tribute.

Like getting water to run up hill

Found someone's rough notes from an Erwin McManus talk or something....Lots and lots of stuff here....

Invest in people who are willing to invest in others.
Don’t have everything down… if you do, then no one will join your team.
The quality of leaders that you call will be proportionate to the level of influence that you let them have or the impact that you can make.
If I can get a person to love God and follow Jesus, then they will naturally want to go find a non-believer.
If I can get people to be fully alive, then they will lead all over the world.
The presence of God will make people yearn for God
People don’t share the gospel because they don’t have a life worth transmitting
Getting people to be evangelistic is like getting water to run up hill.

Loads more here and here. Dig it.

A Picture of a Mission Leader

From Out of the Comfort Zone by George Verwer
1. Vision
2. Sensitivity and understanding
3. People of prayer
4. Encouragers of others
5. Committed to high standards in communication
6. A reader

Weekend Update - Chain Reaction and day job work

A long work weekend ahead of me this coming weekend. My team will be on from 10pm Sat night to probably 4 or 5pm Sunday afternoon. I'm getting too old for these all night work marathons. Nobody at my company can remember the simple fact, "People are finite."

Friday evening I will be traveling to York, PA to meet up with Jeremy and the dudes from Chain Reaction for their summit. I've got a few goals, specifically:
1 - To try and capture their ethos. I don't meet a lot of people (or even hear of them) that are specifically called to student missions. Sure there are a lot of missions people. And a lot of youth pastors. But I don't think there are a lot of people that specifically find their calling and context to be the intersection of students and mission. But I think these guys are. So I'm going to be taking a lot of notes and not speaking very much. I want to take notes about what drives them, what is their passion, and what God is speaking to them about.

2 - To see how they plan. I want to see what goes into putting together an event like a Chain Reaction week. I know for sure its huge. As a person who puts together missional experiences, it will be fun to see what kinds of details they take care of and the subtle nuances associated with them. I also think they have lots of connections within the communities that they serve in. So getting some insight into that would be great too.

3 - To see whether Chain Reaction would fit within our context. I'm always looking for other opportunities that could benefit our students - that is a must. There are boundless student mission agencies out there, but their goals, methodology, and values don't - and won't - always fit our context for students at GCC. It will be fun to listen and dream about whether it might be a good fit to send a team and what that might look like.

I kind of feel bad that I'm not helping out with one of the two student retreats we are having this weekend. But I had to work anyway. And I've already spent too many nights away from the fam for SPACE this year. And I'm beginning to be philosophically opposed to retreats (well no not really, well maybe, well another post.)

And of course, Halloween is Monday, and we love it. D writes a bit about it here, and here is a thoughtful article about engaging our culture in light of the festivities.

The Critical Period

Forbes has a series of short interviews with great thinkers on the nature of communications. Here is a snippet from "Noam Chomsky On Why Kids Learn Languages Easily."

The primary assumption goes back to Eric Lenneberg, who pretty much founded the contemporary field of biology of language. His thesis--which was pretty much everyone's--was that language development was like other forms of growth and development. Almost invariably, growth and development has what's called a critical period. There's a particular period of maturation in which, with external stimulation of the appropriate kind, the capacity will pretty suddenly develop and mature. Before that and later than that, it's either harder or impossible.

Sounds like various forms of growth and development have specific critical periods where maturation can occur. Just off the top of my head, I have a few questions as I think about this concept as it relates to mobilizing students and spiritual formation when young people.

1 - Can we re-enact a critical period where students grow and develop spiritually? Maybe it looks like taking them out of their current context, like on a retreat (we have two retreats this coming weekend - maybe a later post) or a mission experience. Maybe it looks like informal times of hanging out and building trust and relationship.

2 - Are we good at identifying when students are in the critical period? We know that life's difficult circumstances can catalyze times of spiritual growth and we know that day to day life can be rough for students in our care. How good are we at perceiving these critical periods in our students lives?

3 - And of course, acting and executing to help students learn and grow during the critical periods are the essence.

Patagonia's art of leadership

"This kind of independent thinking applies to our management philosophy as well. In fact, our employees are so independent, we've been told by psychologists, that they would be considered unemployable in a typical company. We don't want drones who will simply follow directions. We want the kind of employees who will question the wisdom of something they regard as a bad decision but, once they buy into something, will work like demons to produce something of the highest possible quality, whether a shirt, a catalog, a store display, or a computer program. How you get these highly individualistic people to align and work for a common cause is the art of management at Patagonia."

I've been in love with Patagonia for a long time, ever since about 1989. Not only do I love the products that they make, but the principles they embody as a company. I'm afraid to admit it, but I have a ton of their stuff. Three fleece jackets (one of them known as the yak fur), a sweatshirt, two rain jackets, a big duffel bag, a laptop bag, countless pairs of socks, long underwear, tshirts ... the list goes on. I love their stuff, because its really well made, their gear is well designed in terms of fit, functionality and purpose and they do what they believe in - their commitment to the environment shows up in how they run their company. The only negative point about their gear is that it is really expensive, but I got most of mine on discount when I worked for an outfitter.

The quote above is from a post that Influx had about Patagonia recently winning a design award. The post also talked about the corporate culture at the company and was a good reminder to me about leadership. Leaders don't create clones who just follow a plan. Leaders exude a purpose and a passion. The plan can come later.

I want to make clear that what focuses the speed of the church is not a plan but a purpose and a passion. This may sound strange, but you can focus the energy of a movement without knowing where you are going. You do this by knowing why you are going. ... Too many times as leaders we feel pressure to tell people things we don’t know. In other words, we make them up. Spiritual leadership is not the ability to define everything the future holds. It is the willingness to move forward when all you know is God. The apostolic leader finds his direction from the compass of the purpose of God, is fueled by the passions of God, and, while he’s moving to do what he knows, God clarifies and directs. - Erwin McManus, An Unstoppable Force

Nov Launch prep

Getting geared up a bit for our November launch. This is becoming an annual deal, which is kind of funny. The first year we did, it was totally an experiment, and I had no idea that it would generate such momentum. And... it was never my idea, I picked it up from somewhere...and never thought it would be something we ended up doing every year.

The gist is that we drive around in a school bus around the community, hop out and rake people's yards for about 10-15 minutes, get back in and drive to another house. We do this for most of the day, stopping for lunch and stuff. Last year, lunch was at my house, which was really cool, since my kids love a house full of activity. (A later post sometime - how much my kids drool about SPACE experiences and the impact we hope it makes on them.)

A few key things that I'm working on:
- Getting a school bus or two (note that there is a high fluctuation in prices from last year to this year, probably due to the cost of fuel - except I just got an exceptional quote from one place)
- Getting a list of potential yards to rake. We target people in our body at GCC, but also are open to people that are sort of connected to in one way or another. To get this list, we talk to one of the pastors and also reach out to other people at GCC that are involved in some of the service ministries, like GraceCares. Eventually, we will go and physically look at each yard and also map out a route that takes into consideration direct routes, length of time to rake, where is lunch, etc. This year, we have also invited another local youth ministry to come along with us, so they will have a few families in this mix as well. One thing I learned in detail in Brasil - natural connections. So every year, there are people on the list that don't go to GCC, but are connected to us via natural connections and relationships.
- Lunch. Have to figure out where to have lunch. This year, we are asking kids to bring their own lunch. Last year we did Subway, the year before we did pizza. Kids bringing their own lunch is a little bit easier. We will provide some kind of snacks though.
- Gathering time and token gift - part of the overall design of the experience.
- Another aspect that is different this year is to have a little bit of worship at the very end. We will see how that will work, I'm hesitant because I know it will be a long day already. Maybe we can pump the kids up with sugar snacks at the end of the day.

Previous year's posts: 2004, 2003

Resource - Washington Post Teenager Poll

Today's Washington Post Magazine is devoted to the results of a survey they did with involving teenagers and a variety of subjects. The survey was conducted with 800 high school age students and sponsored by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Survey pdf file here.

It's a must read if you work with students around here. It's also probably a pretty good representative picture of students and their opinions around an urban/suburban metro area.

97% Have had a friend of a different race
65% Have taken an Advanced Placement class in school
58% Have visited or lived in a foreign country
57% Have had a friend who was openly gay or lesbian
53% Have had a friend who dropped out of school
48% Have known someone who was in a gang
47% Have had a friend who became pregnant
45% Have dated someone of a different race
21% Have had a friend who was killed or injured by gun violence
19% Have personally been a victim of crime or violence

Percentage of local teens saying each is "very important."
75% ... Being successful in a career
65% ... Having a family of your own
65% ... Having lots of close friends
64% ... Making a difference in the world
62% ... Having enough free time to do things you want to do

Break out articles include looking at:
- Stress levels of high school girls from academics (60% of local students who experience stress say school is the biggest source of stress in their life)
- African American boys and their expectations to be rich and famous
- Acceptance of gay students
- Religion and its importance to students (65% of African American students ay religion is important in everyday life versus 35% of Caucasian students)
- Race and relationships (45% have dated someone of a different race and 80% would consider marrying someone of a different race)

Here are a few ideas which are relevant for our ministry with students:
1 - These kids are unbelievably busy. They get stressed out. They have a lot going on. If we are trying to draw students into our student ministries, we have a lot to compete with. If you are building an attractional program, it better be really good. The relational aspects of our ministries need to be sensitive to these time constraints. Maybe this idea deserves a new approach to relational peer ministry. What would it look like for some of your core kids to offer homework/study hall/tutoring opportunities within the context of "there are a bunch of us that go to this church and thought it would be a good way to serve..." (totally off the top of my head)

2 - These students are a lot more multi-cultural already than most of us are. In most senses, they probably move in and out of different cultural contexts a lot better than we do. How does that relate to your Sunday high school church, small group Bible study or outreach opportunity? Do we see such a mix of cultures in our youth group environments? Me neither. How can we capitalize on their daily experience as we prepare them for summer missional experiences? (That is a question I will be thinking about more from reading this survey.)

3 - They want to make a difference, even in the midst of a violent, fast changing and tragic world. I only saw one fight when I was in high school. I didn't know any gay people. I was a bit apathetic about my future. I didn't travel to another country. My high school was mostly white kids. I didn't know anyone who was pregnant. Evidently, I was a bit sheltered and too complacent. 64% of these kids want to make a difference in the world. If you ask me, that's plenty enough optimism.

Missional follow up

A few days ago, Em got a postcard in the mail from a church down the street. Here is the card (edited without personal info, click for larger size) "...Remember to attend Sunday school and church and have your mommy or daddy call us to let us know how you are doing."

Now I'm not into churches sending out mail at all. I think churches should grow subversively, from word of mouth and relationships, not mass marketing. But despite my opinion, I thought the card was really, really thoughtful. They were really thinking about Em. For people that are not connected to a church, wouldn't it be cool to feel like, "Wow, they are thinking about me."

The card came about from Em raising her hand at the DC Festival. (See D's post about it here and mine here.) This is a great example of the staff and volunteers of the Festival implementing a viable followup strategy. They must have rotated the response cards from the event to local churches by geography and then empowered those churches to follow up with specific people. Actually doing the ministry activity is one thing - implementing and executing a follow up strategy is just as difficult if not more.

A viable follow up strategy is one element we strive to have with SPACE mission trips. If there isn't a viable strategy, we will try to avoid the experience. Some examples of good strategies that I have seen:
- a missionary family continues to build relationships with students they met from a summer team visiting
- continued presence by a local, indigenous ministry in parks after we spent an afternoon hanging out with little kids
- skatepark outreach with follow up being a weekly drop in skate center at a local church

Using Flock

I've been playing around (just a bit) with Flock, a new browser. What is cool - a built in blogger component integrating Flickr pictures. Pretty slick. However, very buggy right now. Crashes a lot. Thanks to Jason Clark for the tip.

Technorati links in real time

I was checking my stats tonight and noticed someone came from the Washington Post. So I clicked the referring link and saw that it was an article that I had linked to in this post, talking about safety while taking students into DC post 9-11. Notice that there is a section that lists real time blogs that are linking to the article you are reading. I noticed a few months ago that Time and Newsweek were also doing this. The links are gathered via real time searches in Technorati - one of the top blog search tools.

Yet another movement in the way blogs are changing the way we gather and process information - real time listing of blogs in association with news articles, both talking about the same thing. Click the image for full size.

Marko on middle school missions

Mark Oestreicher, president of Youth Specialties, writes about his experience and principles for middle school mission trips here.

No airplanes
Tons of prep
Careful leader:student ratio
Stepped approach
Partnership with local, indigenous church

Nice. Good post with some great principles.

Repost - 7 world changes

I'm reposting this, because it's so good and because I don't have much to say right now. Originally posted in May, 2004.

7 world changes relevant for missions
The full article here.
1. 24x7 global communications
2. Largest population migration in history. More than 50% of the world now lives in urban areas.
3. Global economy.
4. The center of the Christian faith is shifting from the West to Latin America, Asia and Africa.
5. There are now more than 3000 mission agencies and entities.
6. Churches are reclaiming the front line of missions.
7. The laity are being empowered and released. A release of God's people unparalleled since Acts 8.

The College Transition Project

Fuller Seminary's Center for Youth and Family Ministry just released a study titled "The College Transition Project." See the pdf here.

It is the results from "a survey to 234 students who had graduated from the youth ministry of a Presbyterian church within the last four years. This particular youth group was comprised largely of middle-class Caucasian students. The responses on the 69 questionnaires that were returned were both interesting and surprising." The survey and results specifically address students transitioning from youth ministries into college and the hows and whys they either stay involved or leave churches.

I've jotted down a few quotes and thoughts from the survey and would encourage you to read the survey for yourself. There is some interesting statistics as well as some good and thoughtful analysis and action points.

1. Context

Based on the responses to our survey, the big three topics that seem to deserve special attention are developing new friendships in new contexts, how to live responsibly when you're away from home for the first time, and how to find a new church or college ministry in which you can be both nurtured and challenged.

Context seems to be a recurring concept in the results of the study. Maybe that is why missional experiences are so formative for students - when one has to go live in another context for a little while, see that the world is much bigger than you, and realize that your perspective of church is not the only perspective on Church. Not only does the Bible tell us that we must go and make disciples - giving us the imperative to go and do, maybe God realizes that one of the best ways to grow disciples is when they must go and reproduce themselves, whether that's in another country or a new college campus.

2. Places to work through doubt

Perhaps the most significant finding of the College Transition Project to date is that students who felt like they had a safe place to talk about doubt showed greater faith maturity.

This idea is definitely compelling to me. I can't say that I have ever set out specifically to engage students that had doubts. It is an idea that is well worth our time to think through.

3. Well-processed tough times

Perhaps it's the depth that comes from the well-processed tough times that builds roots that can withstand the shifting winds of college life.

Maybe it also has to do with youthworkers providing specific, formative experiences that deepen the faith of students, and being able to help kids process through those experiences. In other words, more than just pizza and karoke night.

Missional Leadership Lessons #3

Our leaders must be able to speak with engagement. And I don't mean that they just talk. But they speak. They:
- Speak life into their students. They know their students well enough to encourage, challenge, coach and correct. They are making disciples - a big part of that is conversation.
- Speak about the mission at hand, to other adults, leaders, students, potential prayer supporters, churches, missionaries, pastors, friends, people who would never understand why they are doing what they do. You can't shut them up about what they are doing and why.
- Speak formally. Sometimes they get invited to share formally.
- Speak informally. Sometimes they don't get invited and they still talk.
- Take advantage 'teachable moments.'
- Are able convey the essence of the trip when they get home.

Life is filled with teachable moments - an unplanned event that can be used as a learning opportunity - we only seem to recognize them when we are outside of our normal context. Discussions look like:
- our current approach to evangelism after we just saw a street evangelist with a bullhorn
- whether the stuff they gave to the homeless guy would really help him and whether he was a scammer
- were those really street kids at the park and what does that mean for us?
- what a tiller does and why it helps plants grow

Speaking with engagement - much more than just talk.

Some questions:
1 - How do you teach people to recognize and take advantage of teachable moments?
2 - All of us are at some time guilty of just talking to hear ourselves talk. How do you personally maintain the balance of speaking at the right time?

Photo: JAB and FZ speaking to a living room full of Brazilian high school kids about how Jesus has made a difference in their dating relationship.

Missional Leadership Lessons #1 and #2 in this series.

Resource - "cutting her body"

People who cut often have feelings of inadequacy from growing up, difficulty with problem-solving and communicating pain, and also suffer from depression, impulsivity and aggression. It's also common among people who grew up with abuse, neglect or invalid feelings for one reason or another. A cutter typically has poor interpersonal relationships and a shaky sense of self.

Important article for all youthworkers to read.
HT: Thunderstruck

Ever lost a student?

D and I saw the movie Flightplan tonight. Even though some of the reviews weren't that great, I enjoyed it. One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed (well, enjoyed might not be the right word) was the level of panic that the main character had looking for her child.

This summer during the LC missions trip, while we went out for ice cream, one of the students thought it would be funny to call his mother from the Dairy Queen telling her that the leaders accidentally left him at a gas station. He left her a message on the answering machine. Two hours later when she picked it up, she freaked. I could relate. Needless to say, I nor his mother thought it was such a good joke. I think he got the picture too.

As a fourteen year old junior counselor at a wilderness camp, one afternoon I took some bad advice and took my group the wrong direction on a hike down from a collection of rock outcroppings called Big Schloss. One counselor (me) and 9 eight year olds hiked an extra 6 miles that day, while the rest of the adult leader team searched the ridge for us.

The widow in Luke 15 sweeps the whole house to look for the lost coin. The WHOLE house.

All of this reminds me - we should instill two things in our next generation of mission leaders. First, we need to instill this enormous sense of responsibility for those in their charge. Watch the first 30 minutes of the movie and pay close attention to how absolutely deranged the main character is. She is mental about her child. Pay close attention to your charges, or you will have to deal with a parent like that. Secondly, we need to instill this enormouse sense of responsibility for the lost. For those that may not yet know Jesus, do we - and the teams that we lead - sweep the whole house looking for them?

MM and Alex McManus

My friend MM got himself in on a Baptist annual meeting tonight to hear Alex McManus speak for the first time. After Skyping with MM for an hour, I'm happy to report that he had a great time. When MM posts some notes, I will link to them.

Alex is doing a round table tomorrow (Tuesday), also in Orlando. In case you haven't heard about it but can go, register here.

Update - MMs notes are here with a picture of him and Alex. Cool.

Their appreciation is most important

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them - Work - Family - Health - Friends - Spirit, and you're keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls -- family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed,
marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered.

- Bryan Dyson, CEO, Coca-Cola, Georgia Tech commencment address, 1996

The Sheng family helped out this morning at the Extreme School Makeover that GCC organnized. D has most of the details here. It was a lot of fun and most of the fun was doing it as a family.

I get a lot of great thank you and appreciation notes. Mostly from students, sometimes parents. I got a lot of great great notes this past summer. And it is so easy to let it get to your head. Ministry, just like work, will bounce back. It is not an end all/be all. Let's not forget our families as we engage students to change the world.

New Tribes Mission being expelled

New Tribes Mission is being expelled from Venezuela, because of Pat Robertson's comments back in August. Sad. I posted a little bit about NTM's very deliberate and hardy missionary training strategy here. Read more here. Lets hope there is some way that NTM and the government can come to an agreement.
HT - Jeremy

Ride On

K riding a bike for the first time. Thanks to the expert teaching ability of her father, moi.

From planning to designing

Walt Disney's widow was being interviewed after the completion of Disney World in Florida. The reporter remarked, "Isn't it a shame that your husband never got to see this?" Mrs. Disney quickly corrected him. "He did see it. That is why it is here!"

"Design is treated like a religion at BMW."

"Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation." - Steve Jobs

"Every Starbucks store is carefully designed to enhance the quality of everything the customers see, touch, hear, smell or taste."
"People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they're really proud of, that they'll fight for, sacrifice for, trust." - CEO Howard Schultz.

I'm not much of a visual guy, at all. I don't draw or paint, and I don't do anything very artsy at all. In high school, I just about failed out of mechanical drawing. Too much attention to detail, I think. (Which is strange considering my current vocation.) Ceramics was just an easy class to take as a senior and, no, I didn't bring any of my projects home.

But these quotes - and my experience of late - is convincing me that this idea of "design" is much, much more than the way something looks. It's more than art or color or aesthetics only. We need to turn ourselves into designers - whether it is the design of a small group Bible study, of a retreat experience, or a mission trip. Not just planners, but designers. Think about how even the simple distinction of the language used changes the whole intent of the task. We move from being mere organizers of tasks and activities to agents of change that affect people based on how an experience (not just art or architecture) impacts someone.

A few things come to mind about this in regard to students:
1 - Gathering and transit times. We should capture that time and engage students in some way related to the event. D hit this on the head after the Sept launch. An important distinction to note is that the thinking about this time has transitioned from, "How do we occupy students before things start moving?" to "What else could we do to fully engage them in this experience of blessing others?"

My Brasil leaders got it this past summer in two ways. First, they put devotional packets together for the overnight plane ride. Secondly, they had the team put together a 'mailbox' that was used throughout the rest of the trip. The team put those together during a six hour layover in the airport. Not only were these great contributions to the overall experience, they were a great use of time.

2 - A token reminder. When SPACE first started, we used to give every student something to remember the experience with. A checker piece to remind them of being strategic. A old, beatup spoon purchased from a thrift store to remind them of the homeless. These token reminders can be pieces of the experience students take with them once its over. We are going to start this again.

3 - Key people. Key people make the difference in the environment. They can either be welcoming or distant, engaging or disconnected. These key people, both leaders and students, set the pace for the environment. We must communicate this idea to our key people - that they can set the tone and be proactive about creating and shaping the event, study, etc. The design, not the plan, should be communicated to them. Instead of saying, "Here is the plan," maybe we should say, "This experience should look and smell like _____. The essence of this day is about this ____."

And we know that, in the end, the design of the experience is not just for our participants. We know that, like the last quote above, if we call people to epic movements, if we call them to be a part of changing the world, to serving strangers, to reaching out, they might just in fact be more than participants themselves - and contribute to propagating experiences for others to make an impact.

Photo: Columns and the dome inside the National Gallery of Art.

Article - Journeys to Significance

From Leadership That Lasts: Journeys to Significance - An Examination of Paul's Improving Missionary Advancement, By Neil Cole

Leadership is influence. Not all leaders are good ones. There are some leaders that God doesn't want to multiply. The best leaders are not those who win the most followers, but those who create other leaders.

Most studies of Paul's missionary methods do not take into account the fact that Paul is himself a learner who improves in his influence as he follows the Lord of the harvest.

Paul's First Journey

This trip covered 1500 Miles in one year without frequent flier miles! Paul and Barnabas functioned as a team of traveling evangelists leaving new disciples behind in every city. This method saw great fruitfulness, but left behind weak churches that had an overwhelming leadership vacuum.

Paul's Second Journey

Paul, like most of us, when he saw a great need for leaders his first response was to recruit more leaders. This is a shortsighted and short-lived solution. The problem is that we are all recruiting from the same pond. Eventually the pond dries up and we are only left with the muck at the bottom. But as he left leaders behind to care for new churches he soon found out the disadvantages of recruiting leaders as opposed to raising them up.

Paul's Third Journey

Employing the lessons learned on the third journey, Paul began a true multiplication movement by releasing workers for the harvest from the harvest and started all the churches if Asia Minor without going to all the locations himself.
Paul integrated evangelism into the spiritual formation of his disciples as a foundation for training leaders for ministry.

Paul's Fourth Journey

One sure way of spreading the church is to take out her leaders! Being locked up provoked others to take up his mission.

A truly fascinating article, you should really take the time to read it yourself. I'm convinced of some of these ideas more than ever - the need to raise up your leaders rather than try to recruit people to fill the need; the importance of releasing leaders to do ministry that God has birthed in them; the non-programmatic approach to mentoring and doing life together for spiritual formation. (In fact a good friend and former ministry partner and I have gotten quite an email discussion about this idea in the last week.) An excellent article that puts the right kind of focus on leadership - true leaders grow other leaders that are on mission.

HT: Fuel Movements

The spontaneous expansion...

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world.

- Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church
HT: Fuel Movements

Misc Thursday

"A focus on the church service as connecting point perpetuates the idea that following Jesus is about going to church." Read more from Ryan. HT Jordon

DCist maps - Google maps of DC with overlays of the Metro lines.

People particularly want to know if Aslan comes off as a Christ-figure, or just some warm and fuzzy magic lion. Well, I personally cried every moment Aslan was on the screen. But then, I walked in with my character development done by my Jesus thing. I so wanted to be Lucy and Susan, with their heads resting on his body on the stone table. I wonder if people who don't love Jesus will feel the same? So, I am going to say that Aslan is absolutely discernible as a figure of Jesus -- for those who have eyes to see.

From Barb who has seen a prescreen of Narnia

In December 1800, after seven years of missionary labor, Carey baptized his first convert...
...over the next 28 years, he and his pundits translated the entire Bible into India's major languages: Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, and Sanskrit and parts of 209 other languages and dialects.
By the time Carey died, he had spent 41 years in India without a furlough. His mission could count only some 700 converts in a nation of millions, but he had laid an impressive foundation of Bible translations, education, and social reform.

An article about William Carey, one of the first missionaries to India. A few things that article didn't mention about him - he was a botanist, conservationist, writer, father of printing technology in India, first to make indigenous paper, astronomer, started libraries, introduced the steam engine to India, a shoemaker, etc. Yup, amazing stuff. Another older article about him here.

MTI - Mission Training International. They have an intriuging debrief program called DAR - Debrief and Renewal, where it is on site, lasts for a week and done in the context of community. Would be fun to go and learn from them.

I just changed my delicious 'missions' link on the sidebar. It used to be a link to the rss feed, so that you could just plop it into your newsreader. But I think it might be more useful as just the straight browser link. If you really wanted the rss, there is a link to that at the bottom of the page. And for those of you that don't use del.icio.us, you really should.

D has a blog

I haven't written about this yet because she didn't want the publicity. Too late now. My wife, D, now has a blog. If for nothing else, it should give you readers some very balanced and interesting insight into life in our household.

Here are two of my favorites posts so far:
- my fixation with being old
- the real truth about how SPACE events are planned

The best way to learn the gospel

is to do the gospel.
The title of this post is taken from PM's post. Check out his 2006 summer mission plan. I notice I am always about 6 months behind him in planning. Ha.

And - he is right. The best way to learn is to do.

Next launch

I've spent a bit of time in the past two weeks doing some setup for the future. I'm tired and I've spent too many evenings away from my kids. I sort of hinted at something for next summer in this post here. Can't talk about that quite yet.

But here is something I can talk about. Tonight, one of the other SPACE leaders and I met with the youth director (or something) at another area church. We have invited them to our November launch, the one where we rake yards and travel by bus. It was fun to meet her, she seems a bit overloaded since its really only her 2nd month in responsibility - she just started at this church in August. I can't really imagine what that would be like.

I think this is going to be really something pretty cool. It will be neat to see how our kids see some other kids from their schools that they might not know were involved in a church. We make an impact whenever we expand the number of kids that intentionally bless others.

Almost immediate feedback

One cool, dynamic element to bloggers is this almost immediate feedback loop. You can read up on details and details almost real time. A good example has been people posting their notes about the Catalyst conference.

Here are a few posts from people that I met from UMCP Tues night and some fun commentary on both meeting me and hearing my talk.

- FZ, of course.
- Änna (I even figured out the umlaut)
- Bert
- Sara

Expansion - Megashift

These should astound you, like they did me. From Shane, who got them from the book Megashift. Sounds like a good read.

- Between 1990 and 2004, Christians in Cambodia grew from 200 to 400,000.
- Kazakhstan went from 100 evangelicals in 1990 to 6,000 in 2004.
- Guatamala is now 44% born -again Christians.
- El Salvador is at 53%
- About 25,000 house churhes were started in India in 2002.
- China has the largest church in the world with 115 to 120 million true Christians, mostly in house churches. They have about one million active church planters.
- As of 1970, Nepal had 5,200 Christians. As of 2000, its 543,340
- More than 100,000 members of the Hmong tribe in northern Vietnam have turned to the Lord after listening to Christian radio programs (no missionary visits). This was discovered by accident because none of them were literate enough to write the station and report their massive response.

InterVarsity - Univ of Md, College Park - Speaking Notes

Here are my speaking notes from tonight. I thought it went a little bit better than average. There were a few things that I wanted to say, but totally forgot. It was definitely fun though, and fun to meet and see everything that is going on there. It was also fun to see JAB squirm for his phone when it started to ring right after I started speaking. Funny.

The band for worship seriously rocked, that was a lot of fun, they were really good at both playing the music and setting the environment for worship. It was also fun to meet a few of FZ and JAB's friends, neat to see the context of their friends at school. And I've read up on some of their blogs so that is kind of funny and weird too. You know that whole blogger weird, but fun, dynamic. It was great to see a few CpR graduates as well as my neighbor there. It was also fun to see a few kids from our old church, sort of. One of them was part of a ministry a good friend of mine ran, the other one's brother was in D's first grade class when she was a teacher. Yup, feeling the age. Even the person in the crowd yelling that I looked like I was 12 years old didn't help. Ha.

Cool to see them launch their 'justice' component - Aqueatas (I know I'm totally misspelling it - I've practice for 4 weeks just trying to pronounce it.) They are having a night where they show the movie Crash and talk about it. Oh man, I would love to hear that discussion...

There is some serious momentum with the juniors there, I get this sense that they will collectively make some impact this year, Senior year and after they graduate. Definitely ones to watch. All in all a lot of fun.

Photo: The front of the Art/Soc building where Intermission was held.
==

Intro
me: D | the girls | job | SPACE
Scripture : transformation, more questions than answers | regurgitate in community

Mt 25
three passes

Pass1 - Invest
- what do i have?
you are the haves: living in DC | UMCP | IV
6.5B people | 3B less than $1 a day | 1B in extreme poverty
it is your job to care about the world - you have something to invest
not if i can invest but what can i invest

- a certain level of risk is ok
SPACE nursing home, playing football
not sure how it ever ends up

- payoff
living in phenomenal times
world is waiting for the church to DO and not just to KNOW
care and not just believe
500 year impact
aquetas

Pass2 - Fear
Courage is not the absence of fear but the absence of self - McManus
Being on mission always clarifies
Servants probably knew what the mission was
Story - Glenn and the food fight party
Story - GMcM - saying to me lets go somewhere more risky

Pass3 - Kingdom
what is the kingdom of heaven like? what does it look like here on earth?
engagement, every moment, every motive, every desire, every action and thought
maybe the more you let God reign, the more abundant He makes that
You will look different if you do that
You will look like a nut
John the Baptist, Paul

Close - Pursuit of the kingdom on earth
some will invest some will not
the ones that do, that put their self aside, and allow God to grab hold and be in the moment

F in Brasil
explosion of the Gospel
natural connection
person of peace/gatekeeper

InterVarsity - Univ of MD, College Park - tonight

I speak at IV - UMCP tonight. I hope FZ still has some credibility when I'm done. Ha.

Resource - Andy Stanley - Drive Conference videos

I don't know too much first hand about Andy Stanley and Northpoint Church. But what I do know, I like. Here are four videos from their Drive Conference, their conference for Senior pastors and staff. I watched #2, "Creating Irresistible Environments." It was really, really good.

Post DC Festival

Well we spent a lot of time at the DC Festival this weekend. Our original plans were to take a small group of SPACE kids down to help serve at the Festival. We had a team that had pre-registered to help with some of the sports clinics and stuff like that. Instead, all of the children's activities, the sports clinics, skate park, etc. were closed all day Saturday due to rain. And did it rain. The Festival ran a modified schedule instead, with just a smaller stage show.

Instead of bagging the idea, we asked the kids what they wanted to do. Of course, they wanted to go anyway. So we went. And it was still raining. We did help out a little bit, passing out some gift bags to people in the show for a few hours. And the students got to see Kutless and Toby Mac, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday was a much nicer day, so D and I decided to take our girls to it too. Everything was open and it was neat to see it all in full swing. Our kids had a great time and we even spent a few minutes in one of the art galleries at the end of our day - injecting just a bit of culture in them. The Metro, being in the city, the Festival, the grand art gallery, they loved it all.

One of my goals was to expose our SPACE students to this style of a large, attractional, evangelistic festival, specifically to have them evaluate whether this type of thing works in our culture or not anymore. In my first video clip related to this blog, I interview three of our students. I think its working - click here to watch it. If it doesn't work, please let me know via the comments.

Related to that topic, I can say that in the children's area, the workers there took every opportunity to love the kids AND share the Gospel. My kids heared the Gospel explained at least three times - the stage show, the Gospel braclets and the spin paint. There was always an opportunity for a decision and there were plenty of counselors right there in the area. They also gave out children's books which included both fun games, a response card and a Gospel presentation. My impression was that volunteers knew straight up why they were there - their goal was clear. In fact, their goal was so clear that Em actually raised her hand during the stage show when they asked the kids if anyone had prayed that prayer. We haven't had time yet to really talk to her and see if it was indeed significant but she heard both the message and the opportunity to respond loud and clear.

Kudos to the DC Festival staff and volunteers. One of our old friends works for the organization and they moved here two years ago to plan this weekend. It really took a lot of work and must have been very satisfying to see all the events on Sunday instead of all the rain on Saturday. A pretty neat experience to be looking at the Capitol building while the Gospel was being presented.

Photos: Luis Palau on the main stage, with the US Capitol in the background; some of our team serving in the rain; the childrens maze with the Monument behind Larry (thats a little weird); D and the girlies in the National Gallery of Art

Loads of rain

Lots of rain today - modified DC Festival schedule. Should be somewhat fun but very wet. Whoever said SPACE runs according to plan?

Charismas 30 Emerging Voices

I think this article about 30 Emerging voices under 40 was published last summer, but just got online recently. Anyway, its a ton of fun to read. I got stoked just hearing about all of these different people, the passion they have for engaging the world, and the many different ways 'ministry' looks to them. Very very cool.

A few highlights from the list:
- Jeremy is on the list.
- The founders of Overland Missions. I can't imagine a trip with this missions outfitter. Would make boot camp look like a resort.
- The editor of Relevant Magazine.
- A church where the congregation washes clothes for street people once a month.
- YWAM founder Loren Cunningham's son.

Friday misc links

IV's Entry Posture Diagrams for cross-cultural mission training:
Openness, Acceptance, Trust, Adaptability -> Understanding, Deepening Relationship
Suspicion, Fear, Superiority, Prejudice -> Alienation, Withdrawal, Broken Relationship
PDF here.

Steve Addison's Indigenous Christian Movements post.

Some blogging from the Catalyst Conference:
- Out of Ur Blog - new blogfrom the editors of Leadership Journal
- David Trotter
- Tony Morgan
- Joe Dworak
- Here is Technorati search results

Read Marc's post (with a downloadable article) about Jesus among the wiccans.