Making friends everywhere we go

Kids week staff kick off

Kids week staff meeting. Every morning at 7am. Dedicated devoted passionate.

Sunday

Day off today which meant doing some local exploring. We went to Les Baux and Carriers de Lumieres and both were amazing. Seriously - the pictures don't do either of them justice.

ICCP had church in the park this evening, which is what they always do the Sunday before Kids Week starts. Of course part of this week is to experience a different expression of Church.

We talked tonight about worldview and context, which is always fun. Visiting the sights is always fun, but we always try to teach some of those concepts even when we are being tourists.

Saturday

Full day of work at the kids week property today. But we are done and ready for kids that show up first thing Monday morning.

Almost every night, we have team time where we talk about the day. Most team times, some of our team will lead us in a devotional. Sometimes we will also talk about a missional concept. Tonight, Tess and Katie V led us as we talked about praying with intention. and of course, it's awesome to be lead by our students. We also talked about our roles for next week - everyone is super excited to jump in for Kids Week.

If you didn't know it yet, your students can read and understand the Bible and communicate that clearly to their peers.

Independence Day

We had a full day at the Kids Week property for another day of work week today. Lots got done with still lots more to do and our team is still doing great. We have one person who slept all day to try to get over a little cold but I think she's on the mend.

In the evening, we went back into the city of Aix-en-Provence. ICCP was hosting a worship night so we dropped in on that for a little while. Then we went and watched France play Germany in the World Cup. Almost everyone in town had the game on tonight and most of the big plazas had TVs out for people to watch the game. Even if you aren't a fan, watching the World Cup in a European city in such a fun experience.

We then had dinner at a little shawarma place owned by a good friend of Teals. R is so generous, welcoming and warm and it's fun to see the fruit of a good, deep friendship cultivated over many years between people who live on the opposite side of the globe from each other.

More pictures here and here.

Happy 4th of july

Someone hung a British flag here today for the 4th of July. That's what you get working with an expatriate community.

Aix has a huge international community. Lots of corporate offices here as well as a lots of global nonprofits using Aix and Marseille as a sending base.

Thu

Dinner tonight after our first day for work week. Long day with lots of manual labor but the thematic elements are coming together. Team doing great and having a blast.

The dragon

First view of kids week- the Dragon. All our travels were great and everyone is safe healthy and jet lagged.

Ember team landed at MRS

On to kids week.

Made it to London

Lots of time to make our connection. Lots of people watching ie people watching us.

At the gate

We never wear team shirts, it's kind an edict I have. Never wear the same thing when we travel. You know those teams, you avoid them in airports.

I'm not against team shirts per se but you can do better to build a team. The shared t shirt is easy. The shared team identity takes a lot more work but you know it is so worth it.

I Just Love Airports

I hear this statement all the time from the students that orbit Ember [but it is not totally me - the one who gets motion sick.] They proclaim it like a badge of honor. Compared with the more general population that never leaves the country or is too anxiety-ridden to get into a plane, saying it out loud seems like an attempt to set them apart.

And it does. We exist for these kids. Not for the ones that don't care about how the world outside their neighborhood looks or those that couldn't care less about how cultures cluster or those who decide its too much trouble to get on a plane. And granted, it is a ton of trouble. But it might be worth it.

And because we exist for them, we put a lot of stock in them. We are thrilled at their efforts to make the world better. They matter and we do our best to help them do it better. Oh...I'm off to the airport in 8 hours.

Ember 14X - Meeting #6

Our final team meeting... This was the first meeting where we were all there face to face in real life. It's what you deal with when you work with distributed teams. Topics included:

+ final important details that are outlined in the travel doc including what not to forget [your passport and the Holy Spirit, like KYoungstrom says]
+ sharing what God has been saying to us about this trip
+ praying for the experience

We had 6 team meetings for this team and that was probably the minimum we could have had. But like most teams, I love these kids like my own. And like every time 2 days before we depart, Dea and I ask ourselves if we are crazy for doing this again.

Thanks for praying for this team, specifically for courage, initiative and be dangerous.

97.14%

4 days from departure, and our funding is at 97.14%. Phenomenal. 14% of that is from creative revenue and we are about $700 away from the official target.

This year, I'm a lot more relaxed about the budget because we started this season with a good amount of funds and we made some larger estimates and $700 among a team of 11 proportions low.

And of course, we are so grateful to around 200 people that donated. I think you will get a great return on your investment. It will just take a few hundred years.

Currencies of Generosity

We tend to think that generosity is all about money. We hear "giving"
and we think about a cash gift or perhaps some other material transfer, such as in-kind donations. We think about tithing, about foundation grants, about microlending, about child sponsorship checks, about pallets of relief supplies paid for by $10 texts to the Red Cross. And generosity does include all of that.

But the truth is, generosity is deeper than money and wider than philanthropy. It is more than just writing a check or dropping your loose change in a can called Help. It isn't best measured in
transactions completed or numbers reached.

Just as there are many economic currencies around the world - dollars
and dinars, pounds and pesos, yens and yauns - so there are many 'currencies' of generosity. What are they? Well, there is the currency of giving one's time. The currency of physical energy. The currency of wisdom sharing. And that's not all. How about the currency of listening? The currency of empathy for those in pain? The currency of willingness to share one's connection and network with another? - Stephen Graves

Love this. Core to the idea of thinking about different missions support paradigms.

Friday Burn

::: Character, Competency, Chemistry and Chicken
An interview with Dee Ann Turner, VP of Talent at Chick Fil A.
Link


::: Counter-intuitive discipleship values

Focus on a few to reach many
Dream big but build small
Group memory is greater than each individuals memory of what is learned – discipleship happens best in groups rather than as individuals
Raise up leaders before they are ready – start with the torch in their hand, don’t pass it to them later
Don't grow bigger groups, multiply more groups

Link


::: Which Cities are Growing Faster Than Their Suburbs
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::: Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar

Stephanie L. Kwolek, a DuPont chemist who invented the technology behind Kevlar, a virtually bulletproof fiber that has saved thousands of lives, died on Wednesday in Wilmington, Del. She was 90.

The chief executive of DuPont, Ellen Kullman, announced the death, calling Ms. Kwolek, who spent 15 years in the laboratory without a promotion before her breakthrough, “a true pioneer for women in science.”

Kevlar is probably best known for use in body armor, particularly bulletproof vests. A DuPont spokeswoman estimated that since the 1970s, 3,000 police officers have been saved from bullet wounds through the use of equipment reinforced with Kevlar, which is far stronger and lighter than steel.

Link

Photo: National Community Church, June 2014.

2014 on the move

Here is who and what we are tracking this summer....

+ Ember 14X - of course you have heard about this.
+ John, who leads on Ember 14X and then travels for at least 9 months through Greece, Turkey, Nepal, SE Asia... He is doing some 'global recon' as to where and how he might be strategic in a specific place and season.
+ Katie and Olivia - 2 weeks in Madrid working with Mountainview Church
+ Wendy at a House on Beekman
+ Andrew who is in Philly right now but on the way to East Africa.

14X Leaders

Love this 'leader' team. And I say leader in quotes because everyone on this year's team has lots of initiative, influence and passion and to call some leaders implies that others are not. Not totally true this year and it doesn't always happen every year.

We are farming out responsibility and authority for certain things to each person in this group. We need them to do some leading and guiding and they are not only ready for it, they long to take what they know about leadership and apply it. When creating leaders, the best thing you can do is... well... have them lead.

The two quick lessons I try to keep in mind with this kind of thing:
- Give them authority along with the responsibility.
- High invitation, high challenge.

Friday Burn

::: Genetically Modified Mosquitoes

But now Brazilian health officials are running a pilot program using genetically modified mosquitoes to breed the population to death.

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::: The "Becoming Sweetie" campaign had a lofty aim: to mobilize the world to end webcam child sex tourism.
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::: Cool Kids Lose

Dating, flouting authority and surrounding yourself with good-looking friends may make you popular when you're 13, according to a study published online Wednesday. But don't believe the media hype, psychologists say. Kids who try to act cool in early adolescence are more likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol, and have trouble managing friendships as they grow older. And their popularity tends to fade by the time they're 22.

Link


::: A Super Banana

A super-enriched banana genetically engineered to improve the lives of millions of people in Africa will soon have its first human trial, which will test its effect on vitamin A levels, Australian researchers said Monday.

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::: Delta Discovers there are No Giraffes in Ghana
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Photo: Capitol Hill, DC. June 2014.

Wendy, Amy, A House on Beekman

On Saturday, Wendy leaves for a 6 week long internship in New York City with A House on Beekman, which we are thrilled about. We visited them in January of 2013 and are so impressed with their resolve, their humility and their approach to community development.

That is Wendy on the right. Last summer, she pretty much went sight unseen to live in Queen Creek, AZ, working at Amadeo Church for the whole summer, taking my good word for it that she would love the community there, learn a ton and that Ben Cloud was a good dude. It worked out great. And this summer, after living in NYC - where she has never visited before, serving in community and experiencing how to serve kids in one of the poorest communities in the US, and learning from some of the best, it will work out great again. Thanks Wendy for trusting us and being brave.

Amy is on the left. We met her and her family in 2010 when they let us crash at their house. They just finished a season in New York and are en route back to Queen Creek. They spent lots of time at AHOB, so Wendy had the great opportunity to pick their brain about New York, the subway, bedbugs and life in the South Bronx. Easily one of the most missional families we know and always fun to spend time with them. They are the kind that agree to host an Ember team in their house first and then figure out how to take the dining room table down second.

Oh and that is Evie in the middle.

2014 Creative Revenue Plans

Ember believes that missionaries of the future will rely on a 'portfolio of revenue.' [credit for this term goes to Ben Arment.] In other words, they will need to actually make some money outside of personal donations. As part of this summer, our team is required to dream and execute a Creative Revenue Plan - a way to make some income based on their talents and gifts. This unique income will go directly towards the funding of their missions experience. Prayer and financial support letters are also required.

This summer our team made around 12% in creative revenue, which is right along our target goal for this. The plans this summer included:
+ babysitting
+ tutoring
+ job as a lifeguard
+ lawn mowing
+ making jewelry

We do this because the global leaders of the future aren't going to be as easily 100% funded by supporters. Between the global recession, cause and donor fatigue and the nonprofit space becoming more and more transparent, cross cultural leaders of the future will have less and less funding from checks in the mail. The global catalytic leader of the future is very very entrepreneurial and this is one of our best ways, so far, of helping them prepare for this reality. Every year, watching this process with students is one of my favorite experiences.

Friday Burn

::: 10 Things Culturally Intelligent Travelers Do
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::: The Hofstede Dimensions for France
6 dimensions of culture, including power avoidance, pragmatism, individualism. And compare it to another of your favorite countries.
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::: The Leading Causes of Death in 1990 and Today
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::: Ten Days in Kenya with No Cash and Only A Phone
Link

Photo: Andy and Farrell, Baltimore city tour, Patterson Park pagoda. June 2014.

StrengthsFinder Domains

I'm helping facilitate a team building gathering tonight for some people at our church centered around the StrengthsFinder assessment. It's been a while since I've something like this for Strengths.

Like most SF people, I have a master spreadsheet of everyone I know [and more] who have taken the assessment. Last night I found this spreadsheet which organizes people around the 4 domains, which is another insightful way of looking at teams.

And one of my favorite quotes about teams, which we'll use tonight as a frame:

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

Ember Advance 2014

First.... we missed the rest of our team like crazy - MK, John, Tess, Measu.

Ember Advance is our short term missions prep overnighter where we dedicate 36 hours to bonding as a team and learning from world class practitioners about mission, context, leadership and culture. As always, steal what you want from this post.

+ Friday night.
Neighborhood tour of Fells Point, Baltimore with Andy and Farrell, who served with me for a few iterations with SPACE, like Brazil 2005, among other projects. Here's some quick points:
- physical size, population, demographic breakdown, crime rate
- view from their rooftop terrace
- neighborhood walk, pointing out significant cultural icons and historical sites
- Baltimore versus DC ethos

+ Saturday morning.
We heard from 4 global missions legends in the DMV area. Dave Shive, KM, and Dustin and Kristen Youngstrom. All were fantastic in the content of what they spoke on and their ability to connect with young people interested in cross cultural adventures.
- think about how the world has changed in the past 100 years when it comes to global cultures and connectivity.
- MH370 may have large implications for how missions will change.
- Is 53 - He bore our suffering - that is a vision that some people will want to hear
- Jesus entry into humanity didn't begin when He was born
- huge impact on people when you love elements of their culture

+ Sat aft/evening
We attended National Community Church's Barracks Row Saturday night service. If you've been around here long enough, you know that we love to visit NCC when we can because it's one of the most innovative churches in DC and innovation is something Ember highly values. We also had the privilege to have Jenilee Hurley, NCC's student pastor, talk to us for a few minutes about creativity and innovation, which was fantastic.

Ember Advance is one of the best things we do.

Friday Burn

::: The Most Attractive Cities for New Graduates
Paris, DC and... Minneapolis...?
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::: Names and Ages
Fascinating read on the distribution of baby names over time.
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::: 27 Myths about the Developing World
Link

Photo: The very first Mission Advance, summer 2006.

Needing Institutions

Platinum leaders know that they need institutions. Sometimes they just make their own.

- D Michael Lindsay, View from the Top

Ember Mantras - 4

"Get the right people on the bus." - Jim Collins

What we do and who we are isn't for everyone and we are okay with that. Like Seth Godin says, "People like us do things like that." We have an internal guide to our culture which we review with everyone that joins us and we step through that before they begin. I recognize that it's my responsibility to be the primary person that shapes the culture and values of our organization. It's one of the reasons why I started Ember in the first place - with autonomy comes responsibility.

Friday Burn

::: Teenagers today are the best behaved generation on record.
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::: Cities of Opportunity
Global cities, ranked by opportunity.
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::: Baby boomers - time to invest in that 22 year old.
Better inves
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::: If you want to die a successful American, it helps to be born abroad.
Link

Photo: Most of the Ember 14X team, Union Station, Washington DC. May 2014.

Ember Advance - Tentative Schedule

Ember Advance is our first ever overnight missions prep experience and I'm excited to see it fly. We've done similar things before but never with this set of people and resources. I dream about this every year and every year, it gets better. Certainly the concepts matter a great deal. But what is even better are the people our students are going to meet throughout the weekend.

Feel free to steal what you want from this rough schedule. Even better if you understand the intentions and concepts behind each element.

Fri night
- neighborhood mapping in Baltimore - the Bs
- the Gospel narrative - the Ys

Sat
- brunch
- hearing from some missions legends - DS and KM
- Kids Week prep
- visiting one of my favorite churches in DC
- dinner and more

Mission Support Letters - Disruption Needed

Remember when mission support letters looked like this? And... I'm not trying to be mean... this is the result of a simple google image search. And I've certainly written my share of letters that look like that too.

I've said for a while now that missions support letters need to be disrupted. They are a really crass way of trying to engage your friends and family for support and they minimize your relationships with a tri fold brochure that usually isn't very compelling. However, this year, may mark a turning point. Here are two [1, 2]fantastic examples of letters from this year's round of support. Granted you don't always have to create something fantastic, but maybe you should...

Take aways:
+ Both of these took around 10-15 hours to create. Our new benchmark will be making our students spend this kind of time on these.
+ They both focused on something more than just the individual experience.
+ Both Trevin and Katie have grown up around this kind of stuff so pushing it further was pretty reasonable for them.
+ I'm not saying that you cannot raise a good amount of money if the letter you write doesn't look like this.

PS - I have a whole Google doc folder dedicated to mission support letters.

Friday Burn

::: NY Times Media Innovation Report
Huge report that came out last week.
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::: The Emerging Global Web
This is a must read. I haven't read all of it yet either.
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::: Every Country's Most Valuable Exports
Link

Ember 14X - Meeting #5

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

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

It Has Only Been Six Years

In the summer of 2008, John and Drew, as 15 year olds, accepted my crazy proposition - join me for an experience serving international church planters and their families in the beautiful context of Sopron, Hungary, a little vacation village outside of Vienna Austria. One year later, they were Ember's first leadership experiments, helping create and shape the ethos for a global student leadership internship we now call ProtoGuides.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, May 2014, six years after the first experience together, they both have just finished college and being embarking on a fantastic future. Drew was just commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the US Army, spending the summer traveling through the east and south of Africa. Drew will report to active duty later this year in Georgia. John starts a year long travel adventure, first giving his leadership gifts to an Ember team going to France and then through Greece and Turkey to start with, all as part of some 'global missional scoping', as he calls it.

It took 10 years for Christopher Nolan to finish Inception. We - you and I - are to be proud of what these two have accomplished in six. Hold on for the rest of it - we are in the for long haul.

Friday Burn

::: The Most Common Languages by US State
PS - I took German all through high school....
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::: Inc Magazine talks about Beats
Beats controls some 70 percent of the headphones market, thanks to lightning-fast marketing and a smart grasp of pop culture.
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::: Facebook Uses StrengthsFinder
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::: An Interview with Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, on his leadership research.
Innovation never occurs in the CEO suite; it always occurs in the margins of the organization.
Link


Photo: Emily saying something profound to John. Vienna, Austria. July 2008.

2014 Mission Support Metrics - 2

Here's an updated graph in terms of our funding for this year so far compared to last year. Looks like we might just make it.

We are roughly just over the 50% in time mark, with about 71% raised so that is good news. Our team has worked real hard to make this funding happen and creative revenue plans are being executed to about 7% of the total.

In other news, I bought plane tickets yesterday spending about $11K without feeling like I was going to throw up. Most other years, that process has me real queasy. In other words, you can overcome the fear.

ProtoGuide 2014 ends

Loved being a part of the Intern/Mentor reception at Hammond High a few weeks ago. Every year that I go, I'm always amazed at the talent of high school kids in our county and the types of internships they work at.

Ember is so fortunate for this program, for it lets kids study something really deeply outside of a normal class or outline. And in our case, we've tried our very best to make it experiential and contextualized to topics the students are interested in. And it's a win for us too because these kids keep us young and we love having their help for our various projects.

And we do love the name: ProtoGuide.

Photo: Terah, Tessa, Measu, me. [Tessa, who is on the Ember 14X team, interned with Terah at Grace Community Church.]

Friday Burn

::: Why Muslims Are Becoming the Best Evangelists
So much in here. Take a good read.
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::: Incomes Jumped $60K when a Nonprofit Taught People to Write Apps
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::: 15 Minutes before a Presentation
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::: A Case for Shorter Sermons
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Photo: Some of the Ember tribe, Perspectives class, April 2014.

Notes - Grace Comm Church Student Ministry Leaders

Loved hanging with student ministry leaders from our church.... Here are the slides - as always, steal what you want.

Ps fixing these fonts later.
7:29pm - Link to pdf with better fonts.

Dream Year Pitch Night - Annapolis

On August 11, I'm helping host a gathering in Annapolis called a Dream Year Pitch Night. The idea is centered around a new book called Dream Year, written by my friend and author Ben Arment. Dream Year outlines proven, actionable steps to launch a dream into a sustainable business and is a phenomenal resource for anyone out there starting something from nothing. I actually went to a Dream Year weekend retreat when I first started The Ember Cast so I'm a fan and a customer haha.

I know there are lots of you out there that have some kind of dream - write a book, launch a nonprofit, start a faith community, raise funds to help those less fortunate. If this resonates with you, please get in touch. I'd love to have you at this event - you'll be inspired by the dreamers around you, you receive some actionable steps to get your dream out of your head and into reality, and you'll get the kick in the pants you need to execute your dream.

I'll have lots of Ember friends joining me for this - would love for you to join me too. Find more info at http://www.dreamyear.net

Ember 14X - Meeting #4

We are fortunate enough to have one of the Kids Week family members here in DC right now.... so Sarah joined us for our meeting and we did 60 minutes of interview-style pick her brain. Everything from population density, vocations in Aix, the spiritual climate, and the history of Kids Week.

Our questions included:
- population and density of Aix
- any bad areas of the city
- how is the city laid out
- the city in your own words
- being a Jesus follower in Aix
- the vision and mission of your church there
- history and vision for Kids Week
- how could we prepare best for it

This is a resource that most teams don't have - someone who is indigenous to the local culture that you are traveling to and available for you to interact with. If you have someone or can find someone like this, capitalize on the opportunity. Welcome them, don't waste their time and make sure you ask the right questions.

Friday Burn

::: Global Poverty is on the Decline but Almost No One Believes it.
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::: System D: Entrepreneurship
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::: How to say Hello in 21 Different Languages
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::: The Deadliest Animal in the World
Link

Photo: intern mentor reception. April 2014. tell you more about this later.

Meeting Kyle Goen

Kyle Goen and I first met on.... the Internet. We connected right before I spent a few days in Brussels and unfortunately we missed each other there. Earlier this year, we had collaborated a little bit on a potential project but that kind of fell through too. But I was ecstatic to meet him for a quick coffee chat last weekend in Nashville. He and his family just moved back there after living in Brussels for 3 years. Kyle is currently in charge of sending initiatives for LifePoint Church just south of Nashville as well as working this concept out with The Upstream Collective. Obviously, I'm a big fan of meeting Internet friends in cities you visit.

Here's some great wisdom from our short time together.
+ You can leverage your American-ness when you move overseas but only for a limited time. Get Jesus in there fast.

+ Sending is a mindset.
Sending also doesn't always look like you sending someone out. The paradigm of sending and support is changing fast because the landscape of missions is changing fast. [Obviously, Kyle has a ton of experience on this. See this for more.]

+ Everything is an experiment. The Gospel is worth the risk.
This is one of LifePoint's favorite mantras - this is a church of 3000 people with a lead pastor who has been there 20 years. They have two sending hubs - Brussels and Bangkok - that look like international sites but are in actuality hubs for reproduction, training and mobilization. Both of them were started as experiments and now are flourishing.

Great to meet Kyle face to face, although our conversation was too short.

3 Days in Nashville

We spent 3 days in Nashville over the weekend, a new city to us as a family, and had a blast. Our older daughter was there for a school band trip so the other 3 of us decided to make a road trip out of it. We were in town at the same time as the Q conference and I thought their write up about why they chose Nashville this year was pretty instructive, as far as strategic cities go:

In 2013, Nashville was on the top end of many lists. Forbes ranks it number three as the next big boom town. A recent Gallup poll ranked Nashville in the top five regions for job growth. This country start-up town was also recently listed as one of the "5 best places to go in 2013" by Conde Nast Traveler. Infamous as "Music City," with more than 180 recording studios and 5,000 working musicians it comes as no surprise that Rolling Stone called Nashville "the nation's best music scene.

Music may be the reason people go to Nashville, but it's not the only reason they stay. In the 1990's the renovation of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, downtown Nashville Public Library, the Bridgestone Arena and LP Field began an urban renewal of the city. In 2001, Mayor Karl Dean was elected and then re-elected in 2011 because of his determination to make neighborhoods safer and bring higher quality jobs to Nashville. The city's unemployment rate is currently below the national average and its job growth has been predicted to rise 18 percent within the next few years. His efforts to revitalize the city have not gone unnoticed, as titled in a recent article by the NY Times,"Nashville's Latest Big Hit Could Be the City Itself."

Besides the normal tourist stuff, we also visited with good family friends Sean and Kari. Sean works in the music industry and Kari has a horse - both were topics they taught us a ton about. I also had the great fortune of having breakfast with Kyle Goen. Tell you more about him later this week.

3 days was not enough.

2014 Missions Support Metrics - 1

We are just at about 50% of our support raising for Ember 14X and we now have enough to purchase our airfare - it's a phenomenal milestone that our team has met.

I'll post some more metrics in early May, which will actually be the half way point between the time we started raising support and our departure date. So according to that timeline, we are a little ahead since we are at 50% of budget now before getting to 50% of time. The chart shows us being ahead of last year for a bit and then being a little bit behind. The two spikes both years were from a large donation from a family - very appreciative of every dollar. Yeah math details aside...

Kids who have a future as missionaries, church planters, or nonprofit leaders need to be able to to fund their ventures and support is one piece of that. Like my friend Ben Arment says, "Nonprofit is a tax strategy, not a business strategy."

Ember Mantras - 3

"Leadership identification and engagement is 25% of your job." [adapted from the research of Bobby Clinton]

Most people that talk about leadership development do not spend a quarter of their time looking for and assessing emerging leaders. It came seem counter productive, too risky to spend lots of energy on, and we've already got solid leaders to invest in.

Meet the potential leaders of the emerging generation - the ones who are cause driven, the ones who doesn't wait for institutions to say yes after lots of red tape, the leaders who are ready now, those that may not know how to do it today, but have the audacity to figure it out by tomorrow.

You will never have enough leaders. Begging, stealing and borrowing them will work for a short while. Instead, identify and create them.

Friday Burn

::: The Countries Where Youth are Doing the Best and Worst
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::: American Teens - Restaurants Instead of Malls
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::: How Americans Die
Fascinating read - beautiful charts.
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::: Jesus More Popular than Mao
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::: One Thing Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Every Silicon Valley Exec Should Do

My life is so different from the person who's going to be getting Internet in two years. One of the things that we do is ask product managers to go travel to an emerging-market country to see how people who are getting on the Internet use it. They learn the most interesting things. People ask questions like, "It says here I'm supposed to put in my password — what's a password?" For us, that's a mind-boggling thing.

Link


::: The Most Important Leadership Trait You Shun

And yet, few business people actively strive to grow in vulnerability, wanting instead to project strength and confidence to the people they lead, work with and serve. Ironically, they are limiting their potential for success. That's because it's not the smartest or most competent leaders, teammates and service providers that are the most successful ones. If that were the case, success would be much easier to predict than it is. In reality, the most successful people are those who achieve a required or minimum level of competence, and then enhance that with as much trust-inspiring vulnerability as they can.

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::: If the members of UPGs living in Metro NY were collectively counted as a city, they would form the 2nd largest city in the US. - @ethneCITY

Photo: 14X, in person and remote. Columbia, Merryland, April 2014. Dup picture when originally posted. Downtown Aix. July 2013.

Visioning

"The quality of a culture may be changed when 2 percent of its people have a new vision." – Robert Bellah

At a wedding this past weekend, [of some of the most missional people I know...] Emilie to my right and Leslie to the left of Deanna. Between 2003 and 2008, we traveled on teams together some 15 times, to destinations including New York City, Orlando Florida, Londrina Brasil, Yaounde Cameroon, Paris France, Vienna Austria, and Sopron Hungary among other places. I counted roughly being on 26 flights with these two.

Emilie is starting medical school in the Fall and was THE student that suggested we explore running an internship in global missions. Leslie is a social worker in Capitol Hill in DC and serves on the board of directors for The Ember Cast. Both were students that erupted into leaders in the very ministry that they grew up in and continue to live on mission right now. Countless students even today are benefiting from a student missions leadership culture that these two helped create and shape and mold.

One of the joys of my life has been seeing Emilie and Leslie grow up and sacrifice all of their being to serve humanity. We are all better because of them.

Ember 14X - Meeting #3

Team meeting #3, included:
- dessert at La Madeline. Yeah you know its authentic. Actually though, talk to some of the people that work there and you'll find that they are from all over the francophone world. And when we were leaving, there was a whole 10 person table of people speaking French.
- discussion about the concept of a person of peace and why they are important when dealing with the unengaged and unreached and who might some of those examples be.
- illustration of the diffusion of innovation principle and why that is important for leaders.

Unfortunately, not the greatest picture and a few of our team members weren't there.

Friday Burn

::: Hook Of Mormon: Inside The Church's Online-Only Missionary Army

In what marks a new phase in the evolution of one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, which has doubled in size since the 90s, the Mormon church is doing for religion what Amazon did for stuff: embracing the web to make shopping for a new faith easy, convenient and accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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::: A Rwanda Genocide Survivor
This past week marked the 20 year anniversary... this is a beautiful story.
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::: You are Doing It Wrong If...
Great read on the tools of disruption today and how they drive the culture of organizations. Make sure to read the list at the bottom.
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::: People don't resist change....people resist loss. - @willmancini via @ToddAdkins

Photo: Ember 14X, Columbia MD, Pleasanton, CA and Harrisonburg VA. April 2014.

Our 2014 Support Letter

Our 2014 support letter [pdf version] - having written and helped teams write these for years.... maybe I'll tell you what I really think of them one day...
+++
It is a privilege and honor for us to work with such passionate and talented young people and it is our hope that this summer's experience launches them on a trajectory for this kind of catalytic, entrepreneurial, creative ministry in any culture and any context.



[Related: My missions support letters - 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012,
2013]

Ember 14X - Mtg #2

- Finance update - we are around 11% of total funding, with 18% of that being creative revenue.
- Myers Briggs - we almost always take teams through it and then fill in the matrix together.
- Personal sharing - either how you came to being a Jesus person or a missions moment in your life - what Lencioni calls vulnerability-based trust
- Watched this video about 50 years after the Peace Child[vimeo link]

And... John joined us for a few minutes with Skype on my phone and MK joined us for the whole time on a google hangout. Remote teams are not easy but in this case, these two are worth it.

Friday Burn

::: Poverty is a Moral Problem
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::: The First Year of Texting - Human Trafficking Help
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::: Communication Patterns Around the World
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::: How Twitter Has Changed in 12 Years
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Photo: TRapp and moi, Aix, July 2013.

Perspectives Spring 2014

Fantastic time teaching and connecting at Perspectives last night. One of the best missions mobilization tools out there.

Here is some of what I found there: a guy who rents out his basement via AirBnB and gives a discount for people in ministry, the class host is an epidemiologist, one of the class attendees ran a very successful small business and sold it and is now thinking about the next phase of his life. And of course, I loved having some of our Ember tribe there and telling stories about them.

Here are the slides - as always steal or borrow what you want.

Ember Mantras - 2

"Catalyst is the primary paradigm."

A catalyst is something that comes into a situation that sparks a reaction and the reaction continues after the catalyst has left. We use this paradigm for almost everything that we do - service projects, facilitating and hosting teams, missional experiences, leadership coaching and more. If you can't do it yourself after we have left, we have failed. This paradigm requires us to think critically about dependency, ensures we view a long term perspective and keeps us future and action oriented.

You will never have enough leaders. Borrowing or stealing them is not the solution. Instead, view yourself as a catalyst and perhaps leaders will erupt from those you are already working with.

Friday Burn

::: This Flashlight is Powered by the Touch of Your Hand

Here's a little known fact: The human body, at any given moment, produces energy equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb. In that sense, we're always wasting our energy—energy that can be used to, well, power a light bulb. It's this line of thinking that led a 16 year old to invent the first flashlight powered entirely by body heat.

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::: Why Snapchat is Valuable
Believe me, I've read all the stuff about how Snapchat is only around to make money off those kinds of pictures. But this is a great read in terms of helping to articulate why it's popular for other reasons.

In a digital world where everyone's flicking through headshots, images, and text without processing any of it, Snapchat asks you to stand still and pay attention to the gift that someone in your network just gave you. As a result, I watch teens choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door. And when they do, I watch them tune out everything else and just concentrate on what's in front of them. Rather than serving as yet-another distraction, Snapchat invites focus.

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::: Are the Suburbs Making People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?
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::: The organizations that best adapt to a changing world first & foremost know what should NOT change - Jim Collins via @ToddAdkins

And today.... I celebrate following Jesus for 30 years.

Photo: dugout canoe, lifeguard shirt, not such a great swimmer... outside of Kribi, Cameroon, July 2006.

Raising Missions Finances as a Leading Indicator

The first amount of support that comes in is always exciting. It's a good milestone to have.

What's even more important - who is the first one to get support in and how fast did it come in? That's what tells you who is all in, who is a sponge that is soaking up everything you can give this team, who is driven and called to see it succeed. Raising support is not the easiest thing to do and if they can do it, and do it fast, that is a significant accomplishment. This tells you who, in the words of one of my mentors, is a person that must.

In this case, it was Tess and it took 10 days for it to start coming in. Yes, that is fast. Our experiment with Tess didn't work out, but she's on Ember 14X now and as you can see, this is the right place for her and the rest of us.

14-15 ProtoGuides

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

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

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

Friday Burn

::: In the Future Your Church Won't Need Volunteers

Yet churches that increase in favour and change the future of the city are thinking differently about volunteers. The Church of the future will move from recruiting volunteers to releasing trusted rulers. Volunteers meet the needs of the church. Trusted rulers serve/fuel the dreams of the city. Trusted rulers know their identity, understand their spiritual authority and introduce life to the city. According to scripture every believer is a trusted ruler, called by God to lead the earth into life. This is the original mandate that has never been rescinded (Genesis 2). Volunteers work for the church. Trusted rulers work for the city.

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::: Student Run Business Provides Low Cost Prom Dresses
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::: The Biggest Nonprofit Mistake of All Time
Adam Braun, incidentally, is the brother of Scooter Braun, American talent manager.

But for years I've been troubled by something that I consider the biggest mistake in the non-profit space: that 501(c)3 companies have allowed themselves to called "non-profit."

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::: We finally have a secret weapon to cut teen birth rates. It's the MTV show "16 and Pregnant"
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::: What separates young leaders is less about how, more about when (ie, when to step forward, and when to be the team player) - @richlyons via ‏@JoshuaSymonette

Photo: God is calling you but not on your cell phone.... Sopron, Hungary. July 2008.

Ember Spawn Proposal

Last fall, my older daughter expressed a desire to do something a little different this summer. She wasn't sure about an Ember experience and wanted something that was a little longer in duration, some deeper learning in a specific culture and perhaps more cultural distance.

If you know Katie, you know that she is a strong P, which is pretty much at odds with both her parents who are strong Js, and with that in mind, our answer was, "Give us a proposal. On paper." And she did. And it's good. Really good. So this is a little something that she is working on with a friend and one of those 'throw it and see if it sticks.' We all would be thrilled if it worked out the right way.

But don't miss reading between the lines either - this is a good representation of the emerging generation. They want something deeper. They are willing to sacrifice to get the experience. And they want someone to invest in them.

Book Notes - The Hard Thing About Hard Things

This will be the best book I will have read in 2014. In 1994, after finishing a masters degree in computer science, I went to work for a small technology consulting firm here in Merryland. It was during that time that the Internet became consumer worthy [I know to some of you, that seems ridiculous.] I remember the afternoon that some of us nerds got the corporate network connected to the Internet and fired up the NCSA Mosaic browser, the very first web browser, ever.

Since then, I've been following Marc Anderseen, the inventor of that paradigm shifting tool. And then I started reading the blog of his business partner, Ben Horowitz. Horowitz writes a blog about being a CEO, entrepreneurship, leadership and creating culture. It is fantastic and highly relevant for someone starting something from nothing. Highly recommended for people in my circles who do these same kinds of thing in various different domains - you know who you are. Lots of what I read in here applied to Ember too - although on a smaller or different kind of scale.

When I heard about Horowitz's book, I instantly pre ordered it. Herein are notes from it.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out curiosity.

The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that's needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.

In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled "What Are We Not Doing?" Ordinarily in a staff meeting, you spend lots of time reviewing, evaluating, and improving all of the things that you do…. Sometimes however, the things you're not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.

Early in my career as an engineer, I'd learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust...As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, the communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO's ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic. [Love this concept. My system is my weekly staff email.]

Being a good company doesn't matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong.
Things always go wrong.
Being a good company is an end in itself.

From Andy Grove
Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let's count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time - twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class.
Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinate's performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

Running a large org versus creating and building an org:
When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at running a high-quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are personally responsible for quality control), know how to create process from scratch and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.

The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating.

Screening for the right kind of ambition - a me or team prism.

Perhaps the CEO's most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer, and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate, and your company will degenerate into a bad place to work.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market.

The first rule of organizational design is that all organization designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts.

Choices like these cause migraine headaches. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don't like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don't become CEO.

In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

Over the past ten years, technological advance have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been. [Amen.]

High quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: Bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly. Low-quality company cultures take on the personality of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wiz: "Don't nobody bring me no bad news."

The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well and reference-checked great, that does not mean she will perform superbly in your company. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.

But what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you grow your company tenfold, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees - the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, salespeople, and finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That's the priority.

Friday Burn

::: Farewell Franchise Ministry

The multi-site model is basically ministry franchising. It's the Starbucks model of "local" church. Now the good thing about Starbucks is you get the exact same cup of coffee everywhere in the world. I was in England recently (not known for good coffee), and seeing the green Starbucks sign was like finding an oasis in the desert.
But the bad thing about Starbucks is that their conformity flattens the creativity of individual baristas or shop owners. It's an a-cultural expression. It all tastes the same. So whether you're in downtown Portland or in Mumbai, India, you get the exact same cup of burnt-tasting coffee.

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And related ...
::: But in multi-site, I don't know the pastor

Here is the heart of my response: Why is the Senior Pastor the one expected to administer all the pastoral care? Doesn’t that presuppose the very “cult of personality” for which multi-site churches are often criticized? “I need to be known by my pastors” is a legitimate request. “I need to be known by that pastor because he is special” is not.

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::: How to Identify An Apostolic Leader
These 5 are great. Yes on #1 and #3.
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::: Inside the Pixar Braintrust
Fantastic read about candor - or we call it unfiltered debate.

Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That's a blunt assessment, I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I'm not trying to be modest or self-effacing. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so--to go, as I say, "from suck to not-suck."

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Photo: CDG, July 2006.

Ember 14X Mtg 1

I love the process of assembling teams - the personalities, the talents and interests and gifts and watching them all come together to form one cohesive team. Ember 14X is no different and in this case, we are dealing with kids that have lots of cross cultural experience and have lots of experience in this missions trip kind of thing.

Our first meeting was going over some basic logistics about our distributed team, the idea of Aix and their kids outreach and getting started with support letters/creative revenue.

My challenge to them - make someone say wow when they see your support letter. As you know, the support letter paradigm is broken and could use some disruption. At a minimum, it should begin with some kind of design in mind.

[Related: 2013X team mtg #1, 2012AZ team mtg #1, 2010AZ mtg #3, 2008Hungary mtg #3, 2007Hungary mtg #3, 2006Cameroon mtg #3, 2005Brasil mtg #1]

Highly Distributed Teams in 2014

Some of the students on Ember 13X still maintain regular contact with people that they met last year in Aix - the physical distance being over 4000 miles. Not to mention that SAnderson is here in DC and has had to fly back to France to take care of some paperwork twice already in her 6 months of being here. This is our global hyper connected world today, thanks to the Internet and the ease of world wide travel and the emerging generation has not known anything else.

In January of 2008, I met Rachel J, she was hanging in Maryland with her good friend Emilie, who was one of our core leaders. After a weekend traveling to NYC with a student team, I invited Rachel to join us on the leadership team of a summer experience based in Hungary. One slight caveat - she went to school and lived outside of Seattle. The other caveat, her friend Emilie, who had already signed on as one of our leaders, would eventually meet us in Vienna, Austria, flying in with her brother Sven, coming in from Norway. Despite not having both of these leaders present during all the pre-field team training and some very challenging logistics for who would arrive when and where, Rachel was a fantastic leader and we made the right decision bringing her on board to help with the large task of leading a 26 person team.

In the summer of 2012, Olivia joined our AZ2012 team. We had befriended her family in 2007 - their two daughters were the exact same age as our girls. In 2007 and 2008, at the same staff missions conference, our two sets of girls had hung together during the conference, doing all the kids conferencey things together. Having Olivia join the AZ team was great - a missionary kid going on a missions trip. One slight caveat - she lived in Austin. Olivia was a great addition to our team, eventually helping lead kids in the outdoor water games as well as helping lead worship. I loved being able to make it work and that summer continued to lay the groundwork for what Ember did last summer and is doing this summer.

This summer MK is coming from California. She was on our team last summer and returns and we are thrilled that she is a part of it again. John comes from Virginia where he is finishing up his senior year of college. And of course, we are going to France, in another part of the world.

If we are going to embrace these ideas of virtual connections, friendship via technology and today's ease of travel, what you do with student missions might need to reflect this as well. You might have passionate, qualified, fantastic team members that need to be engaged over some physical distance. The extra trouble in logistics and connecting and timezones might be well worth it to get the right person on your team.

Friday Burn

::: Atlanta Bench Works
Run by my friend Jesse Phillips, they build outdoor furniture using scrap materials while helping employ some of the neighborhood's homeless.
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::: They keystone of Apple's design process - the ANPP

Every business is different, but ... selectively imposing seemingly rigid structures on even the most creative enterprise frees employees from having to worry about whether they're getting all those little steps right, so they can concentrate on being creative with the parts of their work that are different from all the other times they've done it before.

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::: How Can We Plant 1000 Churches by 2050?
Some of the math behind church reproduction from the Summit Church.

We knew from the beginning that to reach 1,000 churches in one generation would require more than just planting churches from the Summit, but planting churches that, in turn, would plant churches. So we asked a few of our staff to chart what it might look like, assuming that we continued to plant at our current rate (3 churches per year), and that our daughter churches would plant a church every 5 years.

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::: Why Blogs Still Matter for Social Entrepreneurs
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::: If you cannot be accused of exclusivity, you are not discipling. #HowardHendricks - @bradbridges

Photo: Pavillion Vendome. I got lost 50 feet outside of the gates to this place. Aix-en-Provence, July 2013.

Ember Board of Director Notes - February 2014

Some rough notes from the last board of directors meeting for The Ember Cast. Maybe this helps some of you that are in leadership in the small-fledgling-bi-vocational-nonprofit space.

+ Review of Summer and Fall 2013.
+ Anticipating Spring and Summer 2014.
+ Connection Economy
+ Financial Big Picture - although there should have been more metrics about Creative Revenue Plans.

I've got some specific actions from the meeting as well, which include:
+ Building a dashboard and outlining what metrics do we measure that tell us how successful we are. And I loved how one of our board members prayed about this, that it would be 'measured like how God measures it.'
+ A better financial summary - Excel graphs, big picture, high level one page.
+ Mark Batterson tweeted a few weeks ago, "If you are planting a church in dc, ncc wants to be a shareholder." In the same vein, we want Ember to be a part of launching lots of students.
+ Over the past few months, I re-listened to Seth Godin's Startup School as well as watched his New Business Toolkit class and these questions came out of thinking about that stuff. Some of this is also related to the dashboard item at the top.
How do we define entrepreneur versus freelancer and is my role mutually exclusive to each?
How does what we do redefine the idea of scale?
How is the Ember CEO successful?
+ I outlined a very rough financial model based on income versus expense. I have one item of research to do regarding whether we can charge for one of our specific offerings based on some of it's context.