Coffeedrinkinfool's Xanga

The House

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:58:20 GMT

Last weekend Janet and I visited The House, the young adult ministry that my friend Randy Jumper leads for 1st Assembly of God, North Little Rock, Arkansas. The talk, entitled "Defenseless," I gave at their Saturday night meeting dealt with the ways God reduces our defenses so we can respond to His vision rather than follow our best ideas.

Code Pink

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:39:23 GMT

On a recent trip to Berkeley Jan and I had a chance to meet some members of an anti-war group called Code Pink as two of them protested outside the US Marine Corps office. We talked with them for a while and watched them protest by singing what I would call anti-military parody songs karaoke-style as one of them swung a large hoola hoop around her waist.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show recently featured this video report on the Code Pink initiative in Berkeley.

We found the Code Pink women to be sincere and personable, but alone. Their exercise of free speech was protected by two Berkeley police officers (one for each protester, I guess) but with no other participants or audience, except Janet and me. I'm sure there are more people there at other times, but not on that day.

In our dialogue with them, we felt an echo of the Berkeley of old, the bastion of alternative lifestyles, social ferment and radical politics.

While a lot of that DNA is still present in the community, it seems remarkably inconspicuous on an average day walking the streets. My sense is that the student population, while very diverse, seems more conservative in some ways than the older residents of the city who have roots in the 60s and 70s.

Of course, all of our conclusions about Berkeley are still very preliminary. The campus and community are complex entities with many faces. At least part of our learning process is the reversal of expectations. I suppose a lot of that is necessary before real understanding begins to grow.

Earl and Janet Go to Berkeley

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:33:44 GMT

This Joel Triska production chronicles our April 2008 visit to Berkeley, California which will be the home of our new university church plant.

Followership Styles and Mission

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:46:21 GMT

Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big personality” so often identified with leadership.

He described himself as “leading from the middle,” that is, bringing people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that produced results but not heroes.

Talking about this issue brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus.

We began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different approaches to leadership, at least in the northwest Anglo context in which the observations were made?

This hypothesis (and that’s all it is) draws a distinction between two primary followership styles. I am deliberately exaggerating the difference for the purposes of clarity and discussion:

1. The churchly followership style: Serving for many years as an audience for platform-driven ministry, lots of church folks seem to equate leadership with a dynamic individual standing at the front of a large room casting vision the way a major league pitcher hurls fastballs. The ability of this lone entrepreneur to sway a large group of people with the quality of his/her strategy and the force of his/her personality is considered the very definition of leadership. This kind of attender is not shy about pressuring less dominant leaders to fit into this mold. And the temptation for leaders is to spin the ministry’s ethos in a direction that will appeal to this follower type because they likely control most of the financial assets in the house.

This is not to say that the less forceful leader loses his/her integrity, but that important nuances of the group’s culture are gradually shaped to please the churchly. If you don’t think this is possible, ask yourself what your ministry would look like if the majority of your financial support came from people under 25, or an ethnic group other than your own? If you don’t feel these pressures, we speculated that the reason may be that this battle was lost so long ago that it’s no longer a fight. Followership for the churchly, then, is a response to greatness—the kind of leadership I deserve.

2. The unchurchly followership style: My friend has noticed that the people coming to faith in Jesus in his congregation have an unswerving distaste for “big personality” leaders. These new Christians are likely to regard the celebrity model as an exercise in narcissism that is more about control and ego than servanthood. Their resistance takes many forms, but mainly is expressed by their relative absence from churches directed by the leaders of a more heroic stature. That way of leading feels to them like working for “the man” in the corporate world. They reason that, if Sunday morning demonstrates essentially authoritarian values, then the rest of this religion is probably not worth checking out. However, this person is more likely to be receptive to the “small personality” leader who, like my friend, brings people together in a faith community that responds in love to the mission of Jesus for the world.

Imagine what would happen if this leader began to spin the ethos of the ministry in this direction so that more and more unchurchly folk began to show up? Perhaps this explains research by Barna and others finding that effective evangelistic churches, in all their diversity, have the common feature of a missional culture. Followership for the unchurchly, then, is a response to humility—the kind of leadership that could change me.

Our embryonic idea concludes with the suggestion that these followership dynamics become cyclical, moving the ministry in either a less or more missional direction over time.

That’s the hypothesis. So test it.

The Demise of Illusions

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:03:48 GMT

A famous historian once said the most dangerous form of ignorance is the illusion of knowledge. This maxim has become very real to us as we prepare for our campus church project in Berkeley. On our journey, Janet and I have stumbled over three kinds of "knowledge" (so far) that have all proven to be illusion in their own way.

1. The Google Illusion: During the very anxious season when we were considering becoming planters, we comforted ourselves by doing research about the campus and community at Berkeley. Along with millions of others, we turned to Google to discern the answers to life's questions. What we found was a huge quantity of information about our potential plant site. We learned, for example, that the median adult age is 31, that this adult is likely a single professional, and that Cal is one of the top- ranked universities in the world. Armed with more demographics than the Census Bureau, we headed to the Bay area for our first visit feeling that we understood some things.

2. The Sidewalk Illusion: About ten minutes after we arrived on campus, the statistics that had given us confidence in our own understanding suddenly seemed like pale abstractions. To be honest, we had expected to see a 21st century version of Woodstock reenacted on the campus. What we actually saw were extremely serious students walking by in silence on their way to the next class. Our Google illusions experienced something like a hard drive crash, only to be overwritten by the kind of shallow assumptions that are developed in a first visit. So, maybe the numbers didn't tell the whole story, but now we had actual field experience, meaning that we had walked around for a few hours, eaten Indian food, and sipped Peet's Coffee. Certainly experience couldn't mislead us?

3. The Relationship Illusion: Talking with people about the planting project after a couple of visits was a lot more fun than just reciting the statistics. Now we could tell stories about the "look and feel" of the campus and city, including the homeless guy smashing bottles against a wall and life on the street after dark on homecoming weekend. We also collected sound bites about Berkeley that helped us tell the story of our emerging mission. For example, I will quote William Gibson's comment that, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" to make the point that Cal is one of the recipients of that uneven dispersal. All of that was fine, until I realized that telling stories about coffee houses and repeating clever quotes was not the same as actually knowing anyone in the community.

There is no "Berkeley Barbara," a perfectly representative 31-year old single professional, or "Berkeley Ben," a prototypical 20 year old engineering student. Our new community is the home of cultural creatives (some in training and some at work) who highly value the atypical.

While numbers and experiences help, only relationship is going to crush the last of our illusions so we can actually discern what God is already up to our community. Berkeley is not the "site" for a "project," it is a community that is home to individuals whom God loves more than I ever will.

How have your illusions met their demise?

Free Fall

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:55:05 GMT

Leaving the conference room at the end of our last church plant screening interview, I felt like a parachutist taking that first big stride out the airplane door. Up until that moment, my resignation from our Seminary and the sale of our house had still seemed sort of hypothetical.

But this committee's affirmative vote completed a long approval process that finally made our transition into church planting concrete. In our system, we raise personal and project budgets for as long as it takes before the plant actually begins. In other words, we are self employed with a capital "S," a radical departure from the institutional cocoon of higher education.

It feels like free fall. One step and you're hurtling downward through empty space with nothing tangible to grasp for support. But there are some things that happen during the free fall of risk-taking that weren't as likely when we were just passengers on the plane:

1. When I look down, the view is great: Now I understand why skydivers do what they do. After that long first step it takes a moment to gain the courage to open your eyes. But once you do, the world looks completely new, taking on a perspective that is just not available from the plane. Could this be something like the God's eye view? For me, free fall has made it possible to see Berkeley (the location of our plant) as part of a network of smaller post-Christian cities dominated by "cultural creatives" who invent the future the rest of us will live. An effective ministry in Berkeley might help us learn how to reach these enclaves and even produce some of the people to do it.

2. When I look around, the company is grand: At first free fall felt very lonely, as if we were flying straight down by ourselves. However, looking downward eventually yields to looking around and the realization that we are actually doing something like formation skydiving. Our planting journey has connected us to some of the most amazing people, including other planters like Trinity Jordanin Layton, Utah, Curt and Kelly Harlow of West Coast Chi Alpha, and Craig and Dana Mathison, global missionaries with the AoG. We knew most of these folks before, but nothing bonds like skydiving together. They are our mentors, our friends, and our family.

3. When I look up, I see God's face in a new way: It's not like the movies; there are limits to what the other skydivers can do for you. In the silence, as the air rips past your face, you can hear things that were drowned out by background noise when riding as a passenger. Our Church Planting Director, Steve Pike, told me once that God may have sent him to plant just to teach him to pray. I thought I knew what he meant, but now I am learning it in a new way. The heart of Christian ministry is a person in love with God in a way others would notice and want to emulate.

With one big step transition becomes a lifestyle and a state of mind, rather than an event. There are seasons for riding in the plane (that's good for in its own way) and seasons for jumping out.

If we gave more attention to the benefits of free fall, would more of us would jump?

The New Bohemians

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:07:50 GMT

Not long ago, Janet and I had a long talk with a twentysomething man I'll call Zeke, who manages a local coffee house during the days.

At night he assumes another identity as a musician in an AltCountry band (a genre that he says fuses country music with an alternative rock vibe to create a new sound). I've heard his band in a show (and liked their music) so we started asking Zeke questions about culture, music, and spirituality.

The motivation to ask the first question is the difference between mind-blowing learning experiences and just another jolt of caffeine.

What we heard described "Bohemia," a distributed nation with representatives in most major US cities, but with concentrations in places like the Bay area, Madison Wisconsin, and Austin, Texas. Richard Florida describes bohemian traits in his brilliant book, Cities and the Creative Class.

While no human (especially an altcountry guy) can be reduced to a list, here are a few things that Zeke might want to say to all of us mainstreamers about his "nation," the tribe of the midtown brick loft dweller:

1. "I love media, but I trust my friends": A lot of our conversation had to do with music, a natural subject for Zeke. We compared notes on some bands, asking him what he liked (e.g., a group called Welco) and what he did not (anything mainstream). So I asked him how he found out about the latest developments on the music scene. He mentioned websites like Pandora and social networking on MySpace, but confessed that "I ask my friends." He finds the front edge by relationship more than by research. Zeke's opinion is consistent with a new survey that finds the younger people assume that if information is important it will reach them, so they are less inclined to pursue it in conventional ways.

2. "I am aware of broadcasting, but I trust narrowcasting": We joked with Zeke about the importance of what were called "transistor radios" in our adolescence. They made music portable and private preventing our parents from catching us worshiping the Rolling Stones. But Zeke disdains radio, regarding it as pitifully trailing edge, more of a monument to what used to be new than anything else. Moreover, he describes its music as corrupt, over-produced, and fake. Zeke prefers the homegrown music available live in local clubs and online at obscure MySpace sites. Best of all is the music you make yourself.

3. "I spend money, but I trust art": We learned that anything done just for the money is not to be trusted. In fact, the worst slur that can be applied to music is to call it "commercial." Authentic things are done for the joy of it, and if the money comes that's fine. In fact, Zeke went as far as to say that, while he would love his band to become prominent, if it does not, he is content knowing that he had a good time playing local gigs. The rest just has to take care of itself at some point. Art merits trust because it is performed for its own sake, offering a kind of purity that for bohemians has a meaning something like holiness.

4. "I respect excellence, but I trust authenticity": We discussed the trend among younger adults to have no one musical taste. In other words, the 1000 songs on an iPod play list may feature the two best tunes by 500 groups. Zeke laughed about this "highlight reel" approach and we reminisced about the days when teenagers liked rock or folk, but not both. Zeke pointed out that what holds together the best of the music is its honesty. He is much more concerned that a song be authentic to the artist's convictions and talent, than a computer-massaged mass market product. He feels that people care much more about this quality than about production values.

5. "I resist church, but I trust Jesus": To Zeke, the average worship service sounds just like radio: homogenized, over-produced, shallow, and obsolete. Raised in a conservative denomination, he has no desire to be part of this kind of experience. Moreover, he cited the fact that Christian leaders (including those in my fellowship) are his most demanding and complaining customers. "They walk around like they know something you don't know. But the way they are, I don't want to know what they know." Ouch. Zeke finds Jesus very compelling, but cannot imagine finding a spiritual home in the average congregation.

For Zeke, music is a metaphor for so much else in life. What we found refreshing about him was his self-awareness. He knows that millions of people listen to the radio, and that millions attend conventional congregations. But after our talk, I was pretty sure that this altcountry guy and his friends would only fit into an altchurch that meets them on their own terms.

I wonder what that would look like?

We receive US Missions approval!

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:47:12 GMT

On July 10th Janet and I officially received our national appointment as church planters with US Missions, the Assemblies of God national homeland missions agency. We have also received approval for the Berkeley Church Planting Project from the Northern California-Nevada District, which will be our new home once we move west. (We are counting the days.)

However, because our travel schedule is so crazy, we have been unable to attend any of the official commissioning events. So Steve Pike, the USM Church Planting Director, surprised us during a coaching session at Big Momma's coffee house on Commercial Street in Springfield.

He presented us there with a Certificate of Commissioning and with a small sculpture of Jesus washing Peter's feet. The inscription reads, "Commissioned to Serve." Amen to that.

In the photo below you'll see Janet, me, Steve, and Lyle, the owner of Big Mommas's. We have done enough officing at his place to feel that he deserved a piece of the action.

The advantages of USM appointment for us are several:

1. We want to plant a campus church (in partnership with Chi Alpha) that is heavily involved with students. Appointment means we raise a budget before we go, so we don't have to depend on the people we serve, or starve because they don't have jobs.

2. The appointment means we have been scrutinized in the form of interviews (several times), psychological screening (we took the MMPI + a bunch of other inventories), a credit check, and even a vetting by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Hopefully, this process puts some kind of floor under our credibility.

3. We can raise support across the country wherever we are welcome to do so. Berkeley is a location of national significance, so this really makes sense to us. It's also expensive on a Tokyo scale, so we will need all the help we can get. (BTW, the link for online contributions to the Project is on the left.)

4. At this point in our lives the AoG is our family. It's not a perfect family, so we fit right in. A USM appointment gives us the best opportunity to reach out to the network of people we already know (mostly AoG) and ask them to dream this dream with us.

5. USM has Steve Pike, and we really like Steve.

Not every planter will go this route, because there is no one approach that's right for everyone. Also, a country as diverse as ours needs a multitude of models launched in many ways. So the point here is not that this is the one, best path, only that it is the one we are on-- and we are glad for it.

For Janet and me, being commissioned at Big Momma's rather than in an auditorium or at a banquet was perfect. We want to do a church that feels more like a coffee house than a cathedral. Thanks, Steve.

13 things I like about the Southern Baptist Convention

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 01:53:13 GMT

Today I spoke at some workshops for the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention. Located at North Phoenix Baptist Church, the ACE conference is attended by about 1500 leaders from local churches who come together for a day of training.

But in this case, even though I did some teaching, I also did a lot of learning. The conference was my first exposure to the inside of SBC culture. So I asked a lot of questions, made some observations, and generally tried to find out everything I could about these new friends.

In light of all the critical things that appear in blogs these days, I want to concentrate this one on the things I like about the Southern Baptists. This is not to imply that I also have a long list of complaints that I will either keep to myself of publish later. I'll save that treatment for my own tribe.

Based on my conference experience, a lot of which I spent hanging out with Daryl and Kenneth (two other presenters) and Jay (one of the organizers) here's what I liked:

1. Southern Baptists are likable: we spent a lot of time just talking and laughing, especially at ourselves. Meeting people who do what I do, but not from an identical perspective made me feel affirmed, not threatened.

2. Southern Baptists like coffee: Jay took us to Starbucks several times just to make sure that our workshops did not devolve into the funk of after-lunch-carbohydrate-overdose that can put everyone to sleep, starting with the presenter.

3. Southern Baptists all want to be consultants: I overheard or participated in many conversations with Baptists who had been, were, or wanted to be church consultants. I regard this as extremely positive because it evinces concern for congregations as organizations, rather than just as groups of people who sing songs together on Sunday morning.

4. Southern Baptists like big stuff: the North Phoenix campus is a sprawling mult-building complex housing a large conference. So while I was lost I had the time to think about how these folks actually expect major things to happen in their midst.

5. Southern Baptists have Ed Stetzer: he keynoted the conference this morning with a killer message on the "Four Commissions of Jesus." I wanted to stand up and cheer except that I was laughing my head off too much. He hit it out of the park.

6. Southern Baptists really like Dockers and polo shirts: I saw thousands of yards of khaki tailored into pleats and cuffs and held up by braided belts, topped by 600 golf shirts. Hey, you may not like Dockers and polo shirts, but they do, and I think that's a positive. (Under-thirtysomethings were in jeans and untucked shirts--the new Dockers/polo combo.)

7. Southern Baptists have some first rate young writers: one example of this would be Sarah Cunningham, author of Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation. I met Sarah in the conference bookstore. Check out her book on Amazon.

8. Southern Baptists believe in personal witness: I heard so many stories about personal evangelism from people who were reaching out to their friends and neighbors with the gospel. This was profoundly encouraging and very impressive.

9. Southern Baptists believe in the Bible: they just never let up about this Bible thing. They teach it, preach it, put people in small groups to learn about it together, and put a huge effort into making the scriptures the center of life transformation.

10. Southern Baptists have a sense of urgency: I had several conversations about the difficulty of transitioning older churches, the "walk away" rate of young people (around 70% after high school graduation), and heard of a study reporting that 89% of SBC churches are not growing by evangelism. Baptists are worried about the future.

11. Southern Baptists love details: Daryl, Kenneth, and I actually had a facilitator for our elective track (Jay) as well as a handler assigned to make sure we received our favorite beverages and snack foods (that was after I found a nice bag of carbs in my room). But that's not all. My bag of peanuts even had a label on it identifying it as mine and wishing me great enjoyment. Needless to say, I felt welcome, especially when I received the conference logo shirt (all the presenters wore powder blue.)

12. Southern Baptists are accepting: being a denominational outsider (and I think I was the only one) seemed to make no difference to anyone. From the organizers to the workshop audiences, I was greeted, encouraged, and generally made to feel good about being there.

13. Southern Baptists are as confused as we are: comparing notes on our annual meetings, districts, and autonomous churches, I discovered that the AoG and the SBC have some things in common. We are both trying to sort out how to amplify the efforts of thousands of independent churches through concerted action. It's a jungle out there.

I'm writing this blog because those of us within denominations easily fall prey to the idea that our organization is just the worst thing out there. We have so many problems and so many critics that some days negative thinking can become almost an obsession. Talking honestly with anyone from another group is a wonderful antidote to organizational anxiety. We really do share the same challenges.

Another antidote is to talk some what the positives are. We all have negatives, but fixating on them is not a path forward. So every now and then we need to do the unthinkable in the blogoshpere, where audiences are built by critique and controversy, and reflect on some things we like.

Learning Communication from the Transformers

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:20:53 GMT

A few nights ago I attended a preview showing of the Transformers movie at the invitation of a group of students from our seminary.

Having grown up watching Superman in black and white I was almost totally ignorant of the robot-as-Swiss-Army-knife genre. But the mostly twenty and thirty-something crowd that packed the darkness around me did have this memory. So I started interviewing Ryan and Joel, the two students seated on either side of those clever, drink-holding armrests that locked me into a reclining seat.

My initial question was how eight of us had ended up attending a screening that was not advertised. In response, Ryan described how he discovered the preview on Yahoo Movies (which I have never used) and quickly spread the good news to his peers who purchased tickets online and then invited me to go. (I still owe Jordan $6.75.) So there it was, another set of lesson in culture from my young mentors...

1. Buzz marketing really works when the product is highly valued in advance

2. Film is the grammar, the default language, of younger adults

3. The internet is a cultural symbol; to find something exclusively there raises its value

4. The purpose of a preview is to get people to the premiere, further accelerating #1. The movie made one million dollars an hour on its first day.

And then the movie started. For two hours and twenty-four minutes I watched the emotions of the crowd rise and fall like waves. They laughed, gasped, shouted, applauded, went silent, and stood up and cheered at the end.

I get it—sort of. The film is big fun.

But there was something else going on. Several hundred people sitting in rows not unlike pews had crossed a line into another world for a while. Part of this effect doubtless stemmed from the way the film recalled their childhood devotion to Transformer comics, toys, television, etc. Now, with the help of mega-millions of dollars in CGI, alien robots on screen transformed them by inviting the audience to become temporary citizens of an alternative reality.

Driving home from the theater I reflected on how seldom preaching (including my own) has this effect on people. Announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God offers a new reality like no other, yet I find that a lot of the speaking I hear takes the form of lists of ideas about God, solutions for the problems in my life, or really long stories.

All of these are fine, and all have their place, but none of them makes me feel like the people in that theater felt.

I used to think that making my communication more visual (e.g., slides, clips) was the answer given the “postmodern” priority which young adults place on media. I was wrong. It’s that feeling of being gripped by something transcendent, something outside yourself that moves people. The visual is mainly present by coincidence.

Perhaps this explains why preachers using video clips are delivering messages all over the country with no more effect than their pre-video sermons.

I have to believe that hearing Jesus speak must have touched people in this transcendent way. He perplexed them by using parables that almost no one could understand. He baffled them by posing questions instead of answers. He amazed them with signs and wonders. Everything he did suggested the in-breaking of a reality beyond anything we have experienced. His crucifixion and resurrection were the ultimate statement of what was possible in this new world.

I watched the theater audience being caught up in something powerful, but temporary, during the preview. And I read in the New Testament about how Jesus moved people in inexplicable ways.

What would it take to preach the good news in this way today?