DC festival

Our next SPACE experience is a small-invite only team to go serve at the DC Festival.  The Washington Post has a write up about it here.  The major question on the table is -- "does this type of festival work for mission and evangelism in the 21st century?"

single parent

I'm a single parent this weekend as D is flying the cuckoos nest for a long weekend going to Women of Faith with her mum and sister in law.  Should be a fun time with the girlies.  Here is what I'm thinking:
- lots of pizza delivery
- lots of watching football on TV
- both of them helping me finish hanging shower doors
- various trips to Home Depot to get the things we forgot

Actually.... haha... just kidding on the list above.  It's probably going to look a lot more like Mac and Cheese and Barbie movies.... Wish me luck.

People of Peace - round 3

I've posted twice before about this people of peace idea, here and here. The original idea came from reading The Shaping of Things to Come.

Eric writes about people of peace that he has seen in their college student ministry, and lists some specifics about them. His experience has been really good for me for getting some tangible things about this idea.
- Receptive, Relational Connections, Reputation, Reborn

MTF was fab

Had a great time last night with the MTF.  It's not often that you talk to people about missional stuff, but to talk to a group of people that understood, that got it, and then to have them be enthralled, enthused, and pumped about it - talk about energy and momentum.  Very cool.

Three team leaders (myself, Trinidad and Guatemala) gave reviews of our trips.  I also talked a bit about the other SPACE things from the summer.  People from the MTF asked us some great questions, laughed and joked about some of the stories, asked us how else they could have helped the teams and *really* affirmed us for the work we had done this summer.  It was very, very cool.  I also highlighted a few of the things that are cooking for next summer - very fun to think about what might come to fruition then.  And I really emphasized the priority that the MTF and I must focus on for the next level of leadership development.
The MTF - they love SPACE.

MTF sharing tonight

Tonight, I get to go give the end of summer update to the Missions Task Force, the body of people at GCC that are responsible for anything and everything dealing with missions. It should be fun, they are a group of people that love what we are doing with SPACE and are huge supporters. Not to mention that a few of them have kids that have been part of some SPACE experiences.

In actuality, I'm really supposed to be a part of the Task Force. I kind of feel bad about that. I only show up to meetings when I want/need their approval for some wacky idea that I have. Literally. I think I have gone to a total of one other meeting when I wasn't on the agenda. It's really incredibly self-serving of me. So tonight I'm bringing dessert - except D is making dessert for me to bring. [As more details come in, I'm not feeling much better about it...]

They have a pretty difficult job including tasks such as:
- Performing some kind of missionary care for our families that are away, such as tracking when people come home and how people in the Body can serve our families when they come home.
- Promotion of our different mission efforts so the whole Body knows the info. Most recently, they published a really cool series of prayer cards for all the families and gave them out to the whole Body in litle photo albums. The cards look really slick. Apparently there is a graphics company in NC that specializes in prayer cards. The cards have maps, flags, all the cool stuff.
- Accepting new missionary support requests along with managing all the other budget tasks.

Anyway, I know I'm going to have fun tonight. These people love hearing stories about how we are engaging students for God's mission here and around the world.

Photo: Some students checking out the world mission map in the GCC lobby.

Follow up to 9/24 SPACE launch

Just a follow up post (mostly for my own reference) to our Launch this past weekend.

Improvements:
1 - Consider some kind of activity for students for when they first get there and we are getting organized. Activity centered around the topic at hand. Use the time to continue to build the environment.
2 - Middle schoolers in a thrift store. Not a fabulous idea, but it was fine.
3 - Snack for when we get home. Use this time to debrief. Could have been great to talk about the issue of hunger.
4 - 21 kids had never been to a SPACE event before. Should build on those relationships.

(Overall, it went really well. But we must always been looping back around to talk about how we can make it better, especially using the perspective of creating an environment for growth, versus an event to attract.)

Two images for locations (click for full size):

image 1 - the park next to the church

image 2 - hot dog park (football game), down the street from Helping Up

made via GoogleEarth

More locations:
- shelter and soup kitchen somewhere up Gaye Street.
- Beans and Bread

SPACE 9/24 Launch

Great day on our SPACE Launch. The experience today was centered around serving the homeless. So we started the day by having kids make a lunch. Along with the lunch they brought, they would enter the city with two lunches. The group then split up and went to two different localities in Baltimore - Fells Point and around the corner from City Hall. My group did the latter and found a small group of homeless people staying in a little park adjacent to an old church.

The goal of lunch was for our kids to eat with some people - not just give out the food and take off. We wanted them to have a chance to sit and talk with some people, to get to know them a little bit, to see behind the stimga of homelesness. I'm pretty sure we achieved that.

After lunch, my group was making our way to the next meeting point when we drove past the other group. We turned around and met up with them - they had organized a pick up football game with some homeless people. Everyone had a blast playing touch football for about 45 minutes. I think some of the homeless guys were really blessed by our kids just hanging out.

After that, we served at a thrift store that Helping Up Mission runs. We sorted and hung clothes, did some light cleaning and stuff like that. Very cool, a great combination of total exposure to homeless people as well as working with a local, indigenous ministry that serves the homeless day in and day out.

We had a ridiculous number of kids show up - most of them who had never been on a SPACE Launch before. That was very cool. They response we got was great, they all seemed to love it. The touch football game was truly classic.

Click on the link below to hear an audioblog post while on the Launch with the SPACEintern, a student named Tricia and myself. You can also click on the pictures in this post for full sizes.

Surveys

Those of you that know me know that I love making students do surveys.  I think its a great way to help students learn to interact with people.  Here is one of the surveys we used in DC this past summer, focusing on culture and religion.

One of the point was to get kids to interact and see how many cultures they got exposed to - right in the confines of the Mall in DC, while at the same time being unconfrontational with people.  Not trying to save people or doing your typical methods of street 'evangelism.'  (Which by the way, I've told the SPACE kids that we aren't allowed to use that word.)
1. What country are you from?
2. What tribe/people group/location?
3. Are you religious?
4. If so, what religion?
5. How does that affect you day to day?
6. Did you religious beliefs originate from your cultural upbringing?

I was just poking around the Off The Map site and saw these questions:
1. What is the difference between spirituality and religion?
2. Which spiritual person do you most admire?
3. What would you say to Christians if they would listen?
4. Has anyone ever tried to "save" you?

Read the whole page and see their recommendations for using these questions - its a total 'no strings attached' approach, which I think is right on for our culture today. Might be something to try soon.

More Mission Leader questions

I was poking around the Intrepid Travel website this morning from a post on Gadling about Intrepid group leaders.  I noted the following interesting questions they ask potential group leaders.  Fun to read these and think through them as I continue to process through leader applications for our summer trips for next summer.

My favorite questions included:
Of the places you have visited, which has had the most impact on you and why?
Entertain us with a funny incident that has happened to you on your travels!
If you were taking a group of friends on the trip of their lives where would you take them, what type of things would you include and how would you travel?
Intrepid leaders are masters in managing groups of people. From your experience working with groups (eg. as part of your employment, voluntary work or community work), tell us about the role you played in the group, and how you dealt with any conflict.
In your past career or private life have you been responsible for large sums of other people's money?
You're leading a group of 12 passengers on a 3 day trek in a remote area. One of the group falls and breaks their leg, and needs to be evacuated. The rest of the group need to continue or they will miss their connecting train and flights home. You mobile phone is not working so you can't call the Ground Manager. What would you do? How do you meet all the group's needs?
You're taking a small group of 6 on a 3 week overland trip. One of your passengers knows the region well and is constantly dominating the group with his stories and recommendations on what the group should do. By day 4 the others are either getting annoyed at his domineering behaviour or wondering who is leading the trip - you or him. How would you handle the situation?

Only 2%

Things are gearing up for tomorrow. It should be really fun and, like always, calls are coming in last minute for kids to go. And thats totally okay. Like one of my ministry friends thinks, turning away kids when you have space because they missed a sign up deadline is kind of lame.

We've got a great group of kids coming. I know most of them from other SPACE experiences. There are also a group of kids coming that I have never met, so that will be a lot of fun too.

Overall, I'm reminded of this quote that I posted last weekend, but I like it so here it is again:
"The quality of a culture may be changed when 2 percent of its people have a new vision." - Robert Bellah

Thats a pretty wild idea - that you only need to impact 2% of a whole population to change the whole culture. Whether you are a family living intentionally in an unreached city, a college student reaching out to other college kids, or a new youth pastor trying to infect a group of kids - 2% sounds like such a small milestone. Of course, it probably needs to be the right 2%... but the whole idea is intriguing and really encouraging.

I'm pretty sure we will have over 2% on Saturday. It's not just getting the 2%, it's impacting the 2% so that they go on and impact others.

SPACEintern conversation

The SPACEintern and I went running some errands in preparation for Saturday's launch.  We had to get some food and stuff.  It was a good time, because we got to articulate some of the plan for Saturday as well as talk a little bit about the reading that she is doing for the mentorship.  Well, the reading that she is supposed to be doing.  No just kidding.  However, if you keep up with her blog, I think pretty soon you will begin to see a lot more detail on it.  I suspect she is much more into writing notes with paper and pencil. 

Here was one of the more humorous interchanges:
SPACEintern:  I go to a mentor class every other Tuesday, with all the other kids that have mentorships.
me:  Oh really?  How is that going?  How are the other mentorships going?  Are they doing a lot more work than you so far?
SPACEintern:  Well... <funny pause>  Let's just say... <another funny pause>... the other mentors are a lot different than you...
me:  <a hilarious amount of laughter that goes on for minutes>

Misc Thurs

Jason Kottke writes about a conference speaker - "[Nicholas] Negroponte also shared a story about outfitting the kids in a school in Cambodia with laptops; the kids' first English word was "Google", and from what Negroponte said, that was followed closely by "Skype". He also said the children's parents loved the laptops because at night, it was the brightest light in the house."
We shouldn't underestimate the power of technology and the impact that it has to bring cultures closer together.  We probably have more in common with other cultures than we think.  The quote also makes me think about how dominant American culture really is.  When we were in Brasil, it seemed like a lot of their pop culture was largely American.  Films were shown with Portuguese subtitles, they listened to a lot of the same music our students listened to, and they loved Nike stuff.  I actually kind of regretted it, in the sense that their movies should be in Portuguese with English subtitles.

Missionary-blogs.com
New aggregator for missionary blogs.  Via Dennis.

One Look Reverse Dictionary
"OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box and hit the 'Find words' button. (Keep it short to get the best results.) In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first."

Typical sights at the Sheng house

Diversion from Day Job

Yup, one of the many cupcakes from yesterday.

Doug Fields Youth Min Free Stuff

Click here.  Thanks Ian.

Missional Leadership Lessons #1

A missional experience is a great context for leadership development. With that tenet in mind, I am starting this will be a series of posts (maybe only 1) about missional leadership lessons. I'm also using this as a rough draft for some stuff for the summer of 2006.

Lesson #1 - Student mission leaders need to embrace a fluid and dynamic context.
Every experience this summer was fluid. It was constantly changing and required an embrace of being dynamic. Personally, this is rather difficult for me. I like having a plan, of knowing what lies ahead, having the details. So much for what I like. I was delayed for 4 hours flying into AZ, arriving finally at around 3.30amEST. My team was delayed by 24 hours flying from DC to Brasil. In Brasil, every single day was different. Three groups of people lived in three different locations and plans were modified based on what would work best for our overall mission - mission clarifies. Every student knew that they had to be mobile. Every leader knew that they had to support the team being mobile - they had all the emergency info, passport copies, etc with them at all times. We could be anywhere at any time, the mall, the movies, a soccer game, someone's house having tea, whatever. In a little over a week, I spent nights in SC, GA, AZ, MD and PA. That is my backpack, a good friend that I have had for over 15 years. It's symbolic of this idea - you can move quickly because things are fluid and changing, based on the mission.

Nobody usually gives us the freedom to be so dynamic. There are not many contexts that would allow you to change plans at the last minute, decide to spend a little more time here or there because of a gentle nudging of something mystical, or abandon a well-proven plan for something more engaging or creative or experimental. In many ways, fluid and dynamic situations can be a lot more fun but only when leaders embrace the unknown in the right way. Like I wrote in a post before, when circumstances are out of your control, you don't bear the responsibility for them anymore.

A few follow up ideas:
- How do we 'teach' or model this idea to future leaders?
- What are some of the best ways we as leaders can engage and embrace this concept, even when it is personally difficult? How can I grow in this area?
- Like I mentioned above, each leader had a copy of everyone's important papers, including a copy of their passport and visa, emergency contact info and medical identification and history. This ensured that our team could be split easily and quickly and that no one had to rummage around to get the right paperwork in order, in the small chance that there was an accident.
- I brought that backpack everywhere. But I realized there might be times when it was too much. From now on, I'm also going to bring a gymsack like this too. You can always pack stuff in here and put it all in your backpack, etc. (Specifically, there was a time when our luggage was at the airport and we had to lock our carry ons in the hotel. But I still needed to carry some minimal stuff and didn't have a bag.)

Thanks for the birthday wishes

Thanks to all of you that left birthday well wishes in comments and emails.  One more thing that is happening tonight - CUPCAKES.  Yummy.

36

Well, I turn 36 today.  So I'm going to celebrate by:
- putting some hair gel in my hair because I'm not bald
- going to work (well, that might not be explicitly celebrating...)
- maybe trying to convince a random stranger that I'm still in high school - just for kicks
- having hamburgers on the grill with steak fries and baked beans for dinner with the fam
- not grouting any more shower tile for now
- watching a film with D
- knowing that God continues to use us intimately in His plan for the world

SPACE Fall 2005 prayer update

"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 dispersal, liturgy and labor, worship and work, adoration and obedience." - Nicholas Wolterstorff

Dear SPACE friends,

Thank you so much for covering SPACE (Students Prepared to Act for Christ's Empire) with your prayers.  As we get started for this school year, here are a few short items that we would love for you to be praying about.

- Our first SPACE launch of the school year, this coming Saturday, involves an experience based around serving the homeless in downtown Baltimore.  Pray for safety, logistics and students hearts that are transformed - both by God engaging the world through them and the reality of the city that lies in their backyard.  Other launches this fall include serving with the Luis Palau festival in DC in early October and in November, doing our annual "Mulch Shuttle", the school bus that rakes neighborhood yards.

- Our first ever intern, Emilie, has already been shot into orbit.  So far, she's been involved in our leader planning and visioneering during our annual youth ministry leader retreat, she's been given a load of reading centering around missional strategy and issues (including lots from the Perspective textbook) and she's busy with tasks to support this weekend's Launch.  She brings an immense list of talents to the team including excitement and energy, the value of being a student leader, and a heart that is captivated by a generation ready to serve the world.  Pray for her growth and the impact she will make as she assists in preparing students for living on mission.  (You can also follow her mentorship real time at her blog - http://superkulejenta.blogspot.com)

- Continue to lift up our GCC missionaries who hosted SPACE summer teams this past summer - EE in Trinidad, G and M McM in Brasil, and AM in Pennsylvania.  Pray for continued impact even now, from our times of serving with these awesome laborers that are part of our family all around the world.

Thanks again for thinking about these students and how they will run toward the world in love.
- tony
tonytsheng.blogspot.com

Sunday message quotes

Two quotes from the message this morning.

Robert Bellah, a sociologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkley, 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 dispersal, liturgy and labor, worship and work, adoration and obedience.  – Nicholas Wolterstorff