2015 in Cities

My favorite end of the year post..... And this year, good lord. 2015 was the best year of my life and I'm sad to see it end. It was a fantastic year driven by lots of significant moments and the travel was mostly just a sidebar to the amazing experiences with the people I love. Thank you 2015.

1 - Charleston, SC, USA.
2 - Reykjavik, Iceland.
3 - Fairfield, CT, USA.
4 - Nyack, NY, USA.
5 - Deep Creek Lake, MD, USA.
6 - Philadelphia, PA, USA.
7 - Seattle, WA, USA.
8 - Indianapolis, IN, USA.
9 - Prague, Czech Republic.
10 - London, England.
11 - Virginia Beach, VA, USA.
12 - Nashville, TN, USA.



[2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 in cities]

2015 in Books

Not Impossible
The Martian [the movie is as good as the book]
My Share of the Task
Eldership and the Mission of God [note]
Team of Teams
Gaining by Losing [notes]
Let My People Go Surfing [from a recommendation from Marko]
Charity for All
Delivering Happiness
Redeeming Sex [this deserves a re-read to take notes]
League of Denial [this could change American culture as we know it]
Small Cloud Rising
H3 Leadership [notes]

Merry Christmas from the Shengs

Merry Christmas 2015 - the best year of my life.

Happy 18th!

Dear Katie

Well, this is your 18th birthday, which mostly means that you could be rid of your parents' unreasonable rules if you really wanted to. I write that as mostly a joke - we know that you have such a strong belief in living a life of passion and that you don't waste time or energy on something you don't believe in. That makes some things super fun around our house. =)

We are immensely proud of the person you have become. You have given your whole heart to important things, using your gifts and talents and voice to serve those that don't have as much. That's a sign of true passion - one that uses longings not just for their own gain but to sacrifice for others. It is also a foretelling of the One who was passionate to the end, the One that we celebrate this time of year.

Around 18 years ago or so, we hoped our kids would be like what Psalm 127 details. And it has come to fruition - you are a heritage from the Lord and a reward from Him. And like an arrow in the hands of a warrior, fly straight and true for the Lord's purposes.

Love DAD

Welcoming back Shannon

Shannon is on the left here and we had a little Ember contingent welcome her back from Arizona as we planned for a little leadership outing. By all accounts, her time with Amadeo was incredible. She hugely blessed their community and her time there was significant in her journey as well. Every person we have sent there has had a similar experience.

During her welcome back, we had her walk through a few simple decompression exercises that we've used with great success:
+ your trip summarized on a 3x5 index card.
+ your trip summarized in 20 seconds, 2 minutes, and 20 minutes [this one is just an outline]
+ a list of people you met and want to continue to remember, and why.
Great fun for me was hearing some of our guides suggest the 3rd one when I didn't exactly have one more planned - they get it!

Shannon's holy discontent has become more clarified from her time at Amadeo - to build discipling cultures. Watch this one...

Friday Burn

::: Incredible Growth of the Bible in Iran
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::: Two Super Reads on our Most Influential Churches
Hillsong NYC
Mosaic LA

Photo: 2008 summer team numbers.

Planning for 2020

I've been working on a 2016 strategic plan for The Ember Cast here and there over the past few weeks. It's a thrilling experience - 2015 was a phenomenal year for us as an organization and I'm excited to see what 2016 will bring. There are already a few awesome engagements we have committed to.

I've toyed with strategic plans before but this is the first year that I've actually put a lot of this down on paper. The intention of putting it on paper has made me think clearly about what Ember will do this year and what Ember won't do. It's been a fun exercise and, of course, is subject to Board feedback and approval.

Depending on how rebellious you are, you might think running your own organization is total power and undiluted freedom. It might be that, but with freedom and power comes responsibility - responsibility to do what you created your organization to do. Execution requires intention.

The Well's Annual Christmas Toy Store

This is the before view of the annual discount toy store hosted by The Well in Curtis Bay. As part of the Christmas season, we served there as a family this past Saturday. I've been continually impressed by Mandy and her team at The Well - they've hosted two service experiences for us so far, and Saturday's toy store was no exception.

If you've read either Toxic Charity or When Helping Hurts but need to see it in real life, The Well has lots of good examples. The toy store is a textbook example - it is a discount store, people don't get the toys for free. They register their information, which includes their children and ages, pay for the toys, get assigned a personal shopper and go shopping. Once they have their toys, they get them gift wrapped. It's an annual tradition eight years running now and this year, when we got there 2 hours before it opened, there were already 15 people in line. They also have a small set of people that help out with preschool to middle school kids in case parents don't want to shop with them.

Lots of different church teams were there too to help out and I loved meeting some of those leaders - these are the like-minded people you want to hang with. My favorite part of the day was walking around the neighborhood with a local pastor - that story is for another day.

Friday Burn

::: The Most Instagrammed Places in the World
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::: Smartphones and Refugees
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::: The 9 Guidelines for the Design of London Tube Stations
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::: A scared world needs a fearless church. - A W Tozer via Chad McCallum

Photo: Hungarian keyboard, summer 2007.

Challenges to Movement Pioneers

When Bill trains movement pioneers, he reads out a list of challenges they will face, based on actual experiences over the years. He asks, "Which of these would prevent you from fulfilling your calling?"
1. My spouse decided to call it quits and go home.
2. My parents ordered me to return to my home country.
3. No local school is available for my children.
4. My financial support base is cut by 25 percent.
5. My financial support base is cut by 50 percent.
6. I am diagnosed with a serious degenerative disease.
7. My sending agency collapses.
8. I have to give up home country citizenship in order to do ministry.
9. I am publicly discovered in sin and dismissed by my agency.
12. My organization supervisor and I strongly disagree on strategy.
15. One of my children is discovered to have leukemia.
16. My spouse dies.
17. One of my children dies.
18. One of my coworkers is killed because of his or her ministry.
19. Someone from my agency that I sent to the field is killed.
20. The first believe from my people group is martyred.
24. I am offered the pastorate of a large congregation in my home country.

From Pioneering Movements - Leadership that Multiples Disciples and Churches by Steve Addison. I've subscribed to Steve's blog for many years - the blog and all his books are excellent reads.

Related: Movements Move

Politic

Last week, our older daughter Katie, gave some public testimony at a public hearing for the Howard County State Delegation. [You might have seen this on Facebook.] She testified in favor of legislation that would make it easier for local authorities to inspect county "massage parlors" engaged in suspected forced prostitution and human trafficking.

You may not like the system, but that doesn't mean you just sit around doing nothing.

Friday Burn

::: How Demographics Rule the Global Economy
Best read of the week if you are interested in understanding how the world looks.
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::: The Most Popular US TV Shows Around the World
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::: Why Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Should Use Their Money for Fundraising
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::: 5 Ways Freelance Creatives Make Unpaid Time Off Work
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Photo: Prague tram, July 2015.

Post 3416

In late 2002, I started an experiment with a thing called Blogger. 13 years, some 3400 posts and 2700 comments later, this blog is one of my most treasured tools. Some of my posts have been to tell you what we have learned, some of them have been about what could be possible and some of them have been just for me.

No matter who you are or what you do, you must be able to communicate your ideas. Writing it down for yourself or your friends or the public forces you to focus and frame the idea, to get the words right, to send it off into the world. That's why I believe that blogs are still one of the most valuable tools for leaders. It's why I make all our ProtoGuides write one and why lots of blogs are on their reading list.

It's never been technically easier to get your ideas out to the world and writing my blog hasn't cost me a dime. Quite the opposite, it's helped me connect with like-minded missions leadership catalysts all over the world and given me lots of other related benefits by being in those relationships. That value has been priceless.

So, happy 13th tonytsheng.blogspot.com!

Photo: Not sure what they are laughing at.

New Traditions

It seems fitting to write end of the year donor receipts at the end of Thanksgiving weekend. I personally do the receipts which I still think is an important task of the founder and executive director of a [fledgling] nonprofit. How else could you grasp the scope and depth of the people who have donated to your organization?

Besides 3 or 4 regular/semi-regular donors and some institutional giving, this year, we had just over 170 donations for just over $22,000. The grand total was around $27K and around 9% was spent on overhead such as marketing, insurance and other business expenses [but don't get caught in the Overhead Myth]. Obviously 2015 Prague was the bulk of that spending, which was around $25K. We invested around $350 in our network of leaders doing things outside of The Ember Cast. We spent $41 on copies. Tools of the trade include Quick Books, Excel, Word and MailMerge.

I believe I have a new Thanksgiving tradition.

Book Notes - Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send - JD Greear

Fantastic read and I've always been impressed about Summit Church and their incredibly audacious plan around church planting, global missions and church multi site campuses. I was sold by the subtitle of this book and loved reading how Summit believes it to be true.

At our church, we simplify these two questions [what skill, where and how can I do it] into a single statement: Whatever you are good at, do it well for the glory of God, and do it somewhere strategic for the mission of God.

What happens during the week establishes the difference between a disciple and an attender. And in our post-Christian age, the weekend is becoming less effective for reaching truly unreached people. Few and few lost people are moseying their way into our weekend services. Thus, equipping disciples to reproduce outside the church, during the week, is becoming vastly more important than having a great weekend show. As our society becomes more and more post-Christian, training members to 'go' will be far more effective than inviting the community to 'come.'

I devour books written by pastors and church leaders who understand how unbelievers think, even when I disagree with some of their applications. "Eat the fish and spit out the bones," I often tell our staff.

Luke goes out his way to show that the biggest advances of the gospel happen through ordinary people. Of all the miracles in Acts, 39 of 40 were done outside of the church. We need to expect that kind of ratio today, too. In our post-Christian age, fewer and fewer people casually “make their way” into churches. The de-churched are becoming the unchurched, who view Christianity the way you or I might view Islam. I wouldn’t meander my way into a mosque, even if their music was awesome or if their Imam was an engaging speaker doing a helpful series on “relationships.” We can’t expect cutting edge music and entertaining speakers to continue doing the trick. People in our day will increasingly have to be reached outside the walls of the church, and that means individual believers living filled with the Spirit is more important than ever.

Furthermore, it seems to me that a lot of missional ministry advocates have overstated the case against attractional ministry. I agree with them that our culture has changed and that people don't flock to city-wide revival services the way they did in the 1950s. But dare we underestimate the drawing, converting power of a Spirit-filled preacher of the gospel? When a preacher of God's Word 'lifts-up' the beauties of Christ, should we really be surprised when the community throngs to hear him?

The bottom line? Faithful ministries pursue both width and depth, because neither is really possible without the other. Depth in the gospel leads to width in the mission.

We must challenge our people to be leaders. Today we end every service with the benediction, "Summit Church, you are sent."

We must empower our people to be leaders.
...if the majority of what Jesus wants to do he wants to do in the community, it shouldn't surprise us that he puts his best vision into the hearts of the people who live and work there for the majority of their hours each week.
Thus, one of our primary responsibilities as church leaders is to help God's people uncover these ideas and to encourage them….
Ministries we own
Ministries we bless
Ministries we catalyze
We believe the great potential for ministry multiplication lies in this last category and each staff member is responsible to facilitate this where they can. We have as a goal the catalyzation of at least one hundred community-blessing ministries out of our church. We might be instrumental in getting them started, but we want them quickly to become 501C-3s with budgets and leadership boards of their own.

Church plants are like teenagers - they only want your money and affirmation and then for you to stay out of their way.

Making more and better disciples ought to be the goal of - and justification for the existence of - every ministry.

Every dollar you spend getting your members engaged in overseas missions will return to you fourfold. When believers see with their own eyes what God is doing around the world, their hearts open, and so do their pocketbooks.

David Garrison, who served for many years as church planting catalyzer for the Asian world, talks about the 'heresy of sequentialism.' Sequentialism is separating into components what really ought to be embraced all at once…. Global missions is part of God's essential recipe for discipleship, not something you get only in Christianity 401. It ought to be present in the first bite.

No blessing that God gives his people is separated from the responsibility to become a blessing to the nations. For example, at the Summit church, we build a global missions thrust into the first stages of our family ministries. Psalm 127 teaches us that our kids are given to us 'like arrows in the hands of a warrior' and (to use the words of Jim Elliot), what are arrows for but to be pulled back on the bowstring of faith to be launched into God's global battle? We quit doing 'baby dedications' and now hold 'parent commissionings', in which parents covenant with the church to raise up their children for the mission of God and to release them freely into that mission whenever and wherever God calls them. I make the parents promise 'If God calls my child one day to a difficult mission field, I promise not to stand in the way, but to bless and encourage my child to follow God." We don't need to dedicate a baby - the baby already belongs to God. It is the parents who need to dedicate themselves to raise up a child for the mission of God.

We challenge our high school students to serve for one month for one summer on one of our global mission teams, and we encourage all students to give one entire summer of their college career to serve in one of our mission projects around the world.

We encourage each small group to adopt both a city service-evangelism project and an international missionary.

I am not against a designated 'missions pastor.' We have a few of them, actually. But their jobs are primarily to catalyze the other pastors to lead them in global mission through their ministries. Our missions pastors should not do missions for the church; they should catalyze missions in the church. Big difference. They should not be leading in missions as much as creating opportunities for others to lead in missions.

Multicultural diversity is in the very DNA of the gospel, and a Spirit filled church will naturally drift toward this diversification. We see this reflected in how the gospel has spread down through history: Christianity has roughly 20 percent of its followers in Africa, 20 percent in Asia, 20 percent in Europe, 20 percent in NA and 20 percent in SA. Every other major religion has at least 80 percent of its followers concentrated on one continent. Christianity, statistically speaking, has no dominant culture. It is the most diverse movement in history.

Our church has asked God to allow us to plant 1,000 churches and bless 1,000 cities by 2050. We want to send out 5000 people as part of those church planting teams. We have started a pastor training school that will train pastors and church leaders. We have asked God to let us baptize 50,000 people in the Raleigh-Durham area. We have asked him to let us be part of major awakenings in Muslim and European nations. Each year we try to give away more money and send out more leaders than we feel we can afford. Only when our giving scares us do we know we are getting close to target.

Every time we send people out from our church, they leave gaps. It’s painful to think about sometimes. More than once, I have had to force myself to literally open my hands to God. Opened in surrender. Opened as a sign that I must take my hands off of one of the most precious earthly things to me—my church. Open as an offering of praise to Jesus’ worthiness and faith in his promise. Open in the belief that God builds his kingdom not as we hold on, but as we let go.

The slightest glimpse of what 'can be' creates more willingness to change than any sermons we can preach. If you want a ministry filled with people coming up with mission ideas faster than you can facilitate them, give people a glimpse of what can be and help them feel what God wants it to be.

Gospel-saturated people become visionaries. The gospel shows us the compassion of God for the world and his willingness to change it. The gospel is the single greatest catalyst for innovation in mission.

Those that know him well say that Jack Welch’s (the legendary CEO of G.E.) greatest gifting was his ability to spot and raise up leaders. An impressive number of CEOs came from G.E. Welch gave away some good leaders, but the leadership culture he created attracted many to replace the ones he “sent.” He knew that multiplication was greater than addition. And that is what we desire as a church, because the greatest ministry power happens not as we add to our numbers, but as we empower and release people into the world It happens when we open our hands to God and say, “We don’t want to be a group of people gathered around a leader, but to be a leadership factory.”

'The deader your gospel the flashier your package' Vance Havner

Book Notes - H3 Leadership: Be Humble, Stay Hungry, Always Hustle - Brad Lomenick

Great read by one of the current day leadership sages, Brad Lomenick. Great read and I loved the perspective from someone who has worked with some of the most effective leaders of our day.

Let your team manage up more than you manage down

Start a "Better than I do" List. Leaders need to be reminded often that they aren’t the only ones who are good at what they do. Keep a running list of people who do what you do better than you do. Whenever you find yourself reading too many of your own press clippings, spend some time reviewing this list to regain perspective. This has the added benefit of giving you a contact list where you can find people to learn from.

Reward Those Who Push Back - Healthy organizations incentivize moderate levels of dissent.

When I walked into the green room and encountered the Hillsong United band after their first set, I was nearly knocked off my feet. The band members were huddled together around a tiny television with a closed-loop feed of the first speakers. Then they watched the second presentation. Then, the third. Many of them had Moleskine pads, and were furiously scribbling notes. No one was talking. No one was checking text messages.

One of the great memories I have of a Catalyst Conference is a panel discussion with Andy Stanley, John Maxwell, and Erwin McManus during the first ever conference in 2000. Erwin said something profound, and John immediately looked down at Linda, his longtime assistant in the front row, and made a motion as if he was writing, indicating he wanted his Moleskine notebook to capture what Erwin had just said. In front of two thousand young leaders, John demonstrated his desire to learn. Andy Stanley made a great comment later on, and satirically asked John, “Are you going to take notes on my answers as well?”

But as I learned while working at Catalyst, creativity is not completely inborn. It’s not just the musician sitting on the rooftop, dreaming up new lyrics about the color of the sky at noontime. It is the man in the third third of his life, taking a college course to learn more about his field. It is the CEO who schedules a lunch with a local graphic designer to talk about trends in logo design. It is the team of accountants who train themselves to use a revolutionary computer program before anyone else in their market does. The key to innovation is intentionality.

You are the chief, but not the only, vision caster. When you hire new team members, don’t hire only staff executers. Stack your roster with some dreamers too. They’ll take the vision you’re placing in front of them and will run with it. Make sure to ask questions designed to reveal how much time they spend dreaming each day.

MURDER, WHEN APPROPRIATE. This habit must be handled with care. Don’t complete a project for completion’s sake. You’ll often realize that an idea should be killed while you’re still attempting to execute. When this becomes clear, murder it and move on. However, if you find dead bodies lying all over the floor, you should evaluate your creative process to determine why so many of the ideas your team is generating are unsustainable.

Disclosure: Thomas Nelson provided me a copy of this book for review purposes.

The Peeps I Meet

Some of the peeps I have met this NovEmber. I'm inspired by them.

: S - trying to start some kind of missions nonprofit in the Middle East.
: N - landed in NYC and trying to get involved in some kind of outreach or fellowship there.
: S - works with his wife shepherding a group of young adults.
: M - spent time working with the Peace Corp in Peru, where she saw an attempt of the OLPC program that didn't work very well. It wasn't a total waste though because she said lots of those kids took the computers apart and learned a bit of engineering that way. I talk a bit about OLPC in my talk teaching Perspectives and owned one in the past.
: A - spent time in northern Uganda where she saw families sell their malaria bed nets so their kids could eat.
: H - moved with his family to Tunisia for a year.
: M - works a part time job so she can spend more time working and serving with college students who are here from other countries.
: H - has a background in industrial design and wants to serve the less fortunate with her husband who is an engineer hopefully using both of their sets of skills together.

Photo: Blackfriars Millenium Pier, London, July 2015.

Friday Burn

::: Paris Emergency Medical Crews had Practiced for a Mass Shooting Just Hours Before the Attacks

During Friday's exercise, trauma specialists used a centralized dispatch system to set priorities and direct victims to the ER best equipped to treat their injuries. Ambulance services made sure they were ready to roll, and hospitals verified that surgeons and staff could be quickly summoned to treat arriving victims. "We tested every link in the chain," Raux said. Because Paris emergency physicians work 24-hour shifts, virtually every ER doctor on duty in the city Friday night had already taken part in the exercise earlier that day.

Link

::: Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty

In a large, continuing study of upward mobility based at Harvard, commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.

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::: 4 Years Ago, Facebook didn't Exist in Burma. Now it's the Country's Most Important Source of Information.
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::: Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts. - Thomas Aquinas

Photo: Dinner before Perspectives earlier this week. Matt Maloy, left, Ember board of director. Trevin Hoekzema, right, local community outreach coordinator/Ember guide, Bay Area Comm Church. Lures, Crownsville, MD.

NovEmber #4

I had four speaking engagements all in the month of November and I never do that much public speaking. I'm glad they are over but each one of them was a lot of fun and I loved meeting people at each one of the talks. This is from the last one, earlier this week, a Perspectives class at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg. Loved meeting Greg CLC's missions pastor and they had nearly 70 people at their class, which is huge. Their global missions team just set up Go Grants, a way to help fund people who sense a need and want to do something about it.

NovEmber #3

Teaching at Perspectives last night at Bay Area Community Church outside of Annapolis, MD. Bay Area is a fantastic church and has a great missions pastor who grew up in the developing world - amazing paradigm of a suburban church with a global leader who grew up in Ghana.

Love the opportunity to show off some of our Ember tribe. Up front with me sharing for a few minutes is most of the 2015 Prague team and one of our illustrious board of directors. This is why we do what we do.