ts

LeslieB, one of our long time SPACE students-morphed-into-leaders, has just been accepted for a Spring DTS at YWAM-SF. In case you aren’t up on the latest missions abbreviation lingo, that is Discipleship Training School at Youth With a Mission, San Francisco. A DTS is typically three months of classroom intensive training followed by a two month cross cultural experience.

Leslie has been with SPACE since the beginning, first as a student and then as a leader, she has been on the front lines of helping us move the slow boat as we engage students for the world. A first hand witness to the fun and insanity, she has been a part of raking 300 bags of leaves on a Saturday and teaching English classes to immigrants as well as getting kicked out of nursing homes and locking keys in running church vans. She has also adapted with us, realizing that mission trips aren’t solely for the experience, but are only good if they turn students into people that must, regardless of locality, personal cost or structure, while keeping in mind context, long term impact and partnership. She has seen it first hand in New York City; Grove City, PA; New Orleans; Brasil; Cameroon and Europe. And just as important, she has been a part of it at home.

Congratulations Leslie!!! SPACE is proud of you!

Photo: Leslie, summer 2006, Kirbi, Cameroon.

Or…

Tomorrow’s missionaries don’t exist today. Yet…

Even though a lot of people say it, we have learned first hand that everything rises and falls on your leaders. In terms of mission teams, people typically staff for when things go well. Instead, you need to staff for what might go wrong. If you’ve got great leaders that can handle possible trauma, can empathize with someone who is hurt or can react quickly and decisively in the light of danger, injury or ambiguity, they will thrive if things go according to plan [which they won’t.]

Some real world scenarios:
- You are in country at your hosts home and a normally friendly dog goes berserk and bites one of your team members. Call a doctor, take her to the hospital [but go to the one on the other side of town because it’s run by Chinese…] or stitch the wound yourself?

- One of your team has a bit of a stomach bug. He decides to self-medicate with immodium, pepto-bismol and cipro. Meantime, the whole camp you are serving is planning an all day excursion today. Bring him along, with his bucket and lots of hand sanitizer?

- You and your team have just landed in Paris and have twelve hours to take in the sights in the city of lights. But you are sick as a dog and have to run to the bathroom like clockwork every 15 minutes. Make the best of the sights and subject your team to the possible “tour of public bathrooms?”

Luckily for us, all of these scenarios stayed minor. But all of these represent the possibility of a minor accident evolving into something more serious quickly. One other slight detail - what happens when any of those scenarios happen to your point leader?

When staffing mission teams, start with leaders by asking:

:: Can they think quickly and rationally?
:: Who would you trust your children with?
:: Does this person have a lot of life experience that has molded maturity and wisdom in them?
:: Who has lots of experience around accident-prone little children?
:: How does this leader team complement each other in terms of maturity, decision making ability and life experience?

Photo: Me, contemplating the “tour of public bathrooms”, in a bathroom on AirFrance. Summer 2006, from Cameroon to France.

If you read D’s post about today, you know about the interesting day I had at the hospital today. What you should correctly gather is that my family isn’t exactly a real time feed of relevant information.

Everyone including you and I, every second, is getting older. As we take care of our families, do what we can for the strangers and contribute our part towards saving the world, we must remember that we don’t live forever. We don’t have all the time in the world.

The Orbiters and I hung out in Silver Spring this evening with a small gathering of people that collected with M and the International Mentoring Network. Included were Alex McManus, Dale Swinburne [Catonsville], Jumaine Jones [The Bridge, Silver Spring] and Rich Merritt [VA Beach and Pennsylvania].

Here are some snippets of the conversation:
- movement before structure
- everyone could be a leader, but leadership is based on circumstance and opportunity
- instead of leadership development, we should think about character development
- when someone is a leader, they need to continue to be human and they need to respond to the way the world really looks
- the future movers of the kingdom will not be impacting a world similar to today
- the future looks latin, asian, turkish [declining birth rates, etc.]
- instead of using elements of youth culture to connect youth to churches, we should continue to catalyze them for the world’s sake
- tricia is awesome [wait, how did that get on my paper?]

Two questions Alex had for the interns:
- describe how often you are connected with your close friends and the medium?
- how has traveling around the world informed your decision making for the future?

Photo: TriciaB, Alex and EllyK.

My notes and background for the GCC 2007 India team training session. If any of it will help you, feel free to use it.

India 2007
AMoser
travel dates - late December, before Christmas, for two weeks
orphanage and possibly leper colony
8 team members [one didn’t come]
all college/young adult age

::: Focus
Team unity.
Why - 50% of long term teams come home after the first year, most of them due to team and personality conflict. Get you to think about operating, thinking and functioning as a single team.

::: Myers Briggs [of course]
6 extroverts - 1 introvert
your single I is going to need a break from all the others Es. don’t think he hates you.
7 feelers - 0 thinkers
your team might not be able to make any rational decisions because everyone will want everyone else to feel good about everything.
6 perceiving - 1 judging
your J is going to need to know where we are eating lunch on thursday and how are we going to get there. challenge for the J is to go with the flow, challenge for others is to give the J enough details.

type preferences are like writing with your natural or opposite hand
knowing their personality allows you to be more gracious

::: Team Disintegration
Saving Private Ryan
Modern day paradigm for the Gospel
“In the Last Great Invasion of the Last Great War, The Greatest Danger for Eight Men was Saving… One.”
clip from 1:23:13 to 1:43:00
what did you notice about how this team disintegrated?

::: Feedback
Q: What is one thing that concerns you about our team?
My answer: Besides teamwork, which is why we spent so much time on it, culture. India is culturally very distant from Western culture. Go with a learner posture.

Staff of the Baltimore branch of the International Rescue Committee, an agency that helps resettle roughly 350 refugees each year, said they expect an increased number of Burmese immigrants as the unrest continues in Burma, which borders India on the west and China and Thailand on the east.

Recent immigrants, such as Mang, represent the second large wave of Burmese immigrants to the area, following an initial movement in 2000, said Kakoli Ray, the regional director of the rescue committee.

Dozens of Burmese families have settled in Howard County since January, according to the committee, which helps refugees find housing, employment, education and health care.

Roughly 50 immigrants, including Mang, attended an orientation and winter clothing giveaway Sept. 28 at Patuxent Valley Middle School and Bollman Bridge Elementary School, in Jessup. The event was organized by the rescue committee, Howard public school officials and Grace Community Church, in Fulton.

Link
Don’t let anyone tell you different - you can impact the world from your home in suburbia. [I had no idea anyone from GCC was involved in this. Cool.]

::: Counterfeit drugs in Africa, impact on malaria and fighting fake drugs with mobile phones.
Fascinating stuff.
Link via My Heart’s in Accra

::: China’s 39M Christians

Most believe there were approximately 700,000 Christians in 1949, when China closed to traditional missionary activities. So 53-54 million Protestants and Catholics today still demonstrates remarkable growth.

Link via Nigel

::: Is Your Mom on Facebook?

“older people being on Facebook is kind of weird.”

Unless it’s your church’s student missions coordinator. Then it’s not weird, it’s way cool…
USA Today article via YPulse

In over 17 years of student ministry, I have never personally led someone to follow Jesus who has turned into someone doing the same.

In 4 years of SPACE, we have never seen someone come from an irreligious background to devote their lives to Jesus, specifically due to SPACE, to continue on to reach others.

We track the numbers of kids who come out of our experiences to live lives of service. But this metric - those who we have reached and in turn reach others - is a big 0.

Is the standard definition of ‘mobilizer’ just for people that already know?

Not just plain RocketFuel today, but some links you should definitely click.

::: If you are interested in space exploration, the human condition, cultural implications of extraterrestrial life or risking it all to live differently, — video.
From TED, Carolyn Porco talks about two of Saturn’s 46 moons, lands unreached by humans and the possibility of life somewhere else besides Earth.

::: If you are around young people at all — Marc Andressen on career planning - what to study in college.

In my opinion, it’s now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself — expose yourself to risk — put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.

::: If you speak to people and implore them to a life bigger than themselves, — Barbara Nicolosi on heroes and story.

a) What does a kid (and by extension, a society) look like who has heroes? Idealistic, hopeful, imitative, open, eager to please, reverent, grateful

“A boy doesn’t have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn’t like pie when he sees there isn’t enough to go around.”
Edgar Watson Howe

b) What does a kid look like who has no heroes? Cynical, haughty, suspicious, jaded, irreverent, entitled, self-absorbed.

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.” Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

c) As a child, a hero provides a teaching example of a life worth living. In fact, the “no greater life” of one who gives his life for his friends.

Em and I dropped in on some of our high school boys doing some light landscaping and painting at one of our local elementary schools this past Saturday. The connection to this school actually arose via our children - long story but the principal at this school used to be at our kids’ elementary school. They needed some help so we threw it out to one of the grade level classes at CpR. Think connectedness and D. Funny thing, two years ago, ESunde and EmGberg did some community scouting at this very school.

When SPACE started, part of the vision was to broker [I like that word] community service opportunities for our students. It was to provide for opportunities that were there but not capitalized upon, because we knew our students could make a tremendous impact.

Random acts of kindness is a trendy youth group thingy now, and SPACE did a bit of that when we first started. Those kinds of service events push kids to the edge of what they think they can and cannot do, helps them with the tension of risk, and increases their relational dependence on each other and God. But as much as those are good - local, indigenous partnerships are that much better, like in the case of this school. This particular class did some other landscaping over the summer and this weekend they were back, having kind of adopted this school as theirs. The principal knows and appreciates them.

By the way, these are sophomores in high school, and they invited freshmen to join them. The sophs were at Chain Reaction this summer. Next weekend, they are reconnecting with a church in Baltimore that they served with this past summer. Yes, that young. And yes, they have started their high school careers with service as part of their dna.

This morning, I met with some other mission team leaders [in SPACE and out of SPACE] in a meeting facilitated by the GCC Missions Task Force for the purpose of debriefing the summer teams leaders. Here are some random and scattered notes that may help you if you are a mission team leader, serve on a mission board or have involvement in sending, supporting or being on teams.

PH - adult short term coordinator
PW - elder, overseeing missions
SW - chair of MTF
J and J - team leaders, adult - Uganda, AOET
S and B - team leaders, adult - Mexico, WorldServants
TS - moi, SPACE in general, SPACE 2007 Hungary
DS - my better half, SPACE 2007 Hungary
TM - SPACE 2007 England
JB - SPACE 2007 NYC

Team prep time:
Mexico - 9 weeks from start to finish - not enough time
Uganda - 12 weeks

What kind of preparation:
logistical
language training
Might help to have single day workshop to cover fund raising, culture and logistics - like Mission Advance
Uganda did personality testing
can and should begin to resource a lot of other people within the Body - language training, cultural engagement, team building

Team application process:
how do we choose who goes - need some level of baseline for participants
interviews
this year for adult teams, short term coord did most of the interviewing and then placed people on specific teams
need spousal buy in and agreement

While the team is on the field:
support for spouses/families - who is left behind
including expectations for communication protocol

Debriefing:
need to meet with teams once they come home again - specific to process not for social
have people who are fully devoted to the experience but gain a heart for missions after they return home
long term view - how is God calling you to this in the future?
bring in a guest facilitator for debriefing teams

You probably noticed that most of these issues are common to mission team leaders. You could also infer that there was a lot more to talk about and these were just the talking points that rose to the top in our limited time. Consistently, the missions piece has gotten tons of empowerment, gratefulness and delegation of authority and leadership from the higher-ups at GCC.

Within SPACE, we have also been thinking about process improvement and I’ll be detailing some of our plans along those lines in a later post.

Related MTF debriefing sessions - 2005 and 2006

But this was not quite what I had in mind…. Creativity and artistry via TriciaB.

And this is exactly how Jesus does discipleship: he organizes it around mission. As soon as they are called he takes the disciples on an adventurous journey of mission, ministry and learning. Straightaway they are involved in proclaiming the kingdom of God, serving the poor, healing and casting out demons…. Even the newest convert is engaged in the mission from the start; even he or she can become a spiritual hero… if disciple making lies at the heart of our commission, then we must organize it around mission, because mission is the catalyzing principle of discipleship. - The Forgotten Ways

Even though I’ve done a fair share of what one would call missions trips, the quote reminds me that we must be about mission.

[Related: Alan Hirsch’s blog]

I’m doing a team coaching session for one of the GCC young adult teams later next week. It’s a team that is going to India with AMoser and they need a little bit of help. Not a lot, but a little. I was a little hesitant to get too involved, but I really want them to succeed. And if you can avoid a train wreck… not saying they would be a train wreck. Anyway, I digress.

I’ve got a series of posts dealing with team preparation [also in the sidebar on the right.] It’s a good set of resources. But if you are getting started with a team, you

…. must ….. get…… started….

You must initiate, drive, compel, begin, move, gather, invite. You must take the first step. You must start.

We deal with this every single summer. School schedules, after school sports, kids with jobs, leaders away at college, final exams. It’s difficult logistically. But departure dates are static entities - they don’t move, whether you are ready or not.

The principle is ’start with who you can.’ The rest will follow. Have your gathering when most are available. Make your gathering awesome. If it is truly valuable - mold them together as a team with good interaction, give them a vision for more than just the trip, grow a tangible skill they achieve at - the rest will be really sorry they missed it. And they won’t miss the next one.

::: Church in Starbucks with Lifechurch.tv’s internet campus

Right when he says this, the little “hand raised counter” gets to 7. Everything in me wanted to click “Raise Hand”, but I didn’t. Because I’m a good boy. Didn’t want to misbehave in church.
I wish I had my camera for what happened next. There is this older woman on her laptop across the Starbucks. I swear when internet pastor dude asked one last time to raise your hand…her hand went up. Then the little counter thing went from 7 to 8.

via Los
Story worth reading because it’s funny and it highlights a new expression of church

::: The world in 7 cheeky photos
Link via Kottke.org

::: 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a “good impression” of Christianity.
*ouch*
Link via YPulse

In the summer of 2007, I helped lead a team of students to serve with Christian Associates International, helping to put on a kids program during their annual staff conference called Connect. Connect is a meeting point for their worldwide staff and is a homecoming of sorts where staff reconnect, introspect and get invested in. Connect serves to vitally recharge and re-energize church planting families that have served in their respective environments and contexts. Let’s visit the 3 essential questions in light of this experience.

1. Am I planning to have an impact that lasts for 500 years?
Aside from the given of impacting the missionary kids, our interaction with the missionary families had a huge impact as well. I know all of our team was affected by hanging around the crazies - the ones that are brave and daring enough to leave everything behind to live in a foreign culture so that Jesus would be proclaimed. Like most missionary families I meet, in some ways they are normal and just like us. In other ways, they aren’t normal at all. Living a life of intentionality is not commonplace. The members of this team saw Europe’s need, spent quality time with families interacting about God’s mission in the world and continue to envision a different future for themselves - and for mankind.

2. Can both host and teams trust each other because we are partners?
Our initial contact with CAI was through a GCC family that eventually ended up on the mission field serving with CAI. So based on that context, we already had somewhat of a partnership from an organizational [church:mission agency] level but not personal. Of course, that partnership deepened to the personal level as we prepared. The culmination of that partnership was a week of kids program that ran extremely well in both the logistics and overall ethos of the week. One other thing worth noting - SPACE and CAI share a lot of the same values - experimentation, personal leadership development and risky innovation.

3. How will I engage the culture?
The difference between American and European culture is not great. In addition to the similarities, staying in a hotel that was very American with a lot of other Americans made engaging with the culture more difficult. Out team made the most of non conference times, such as time before and after the conference in Vienna and Munich and a morning touring the city of Sopron [where our hotel was located], which provided some observations in culture. This experience required a bit more ingenuity when it came to making sure our team engaged context and culture.

Photos: Team reflection, Vienna, by RobynB; the fire tower, Sopron, Hungary, by ErinOB.

I picked up the book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why on a whim a few weeks ago at my local Borders. Intrigued by the wilderness survival topic, it sounded like an interesting read. To put it mildly, this book is intense. Below are a few excerpts.

:: Speaking about mental maps - like when a person gets lost and having to reassess where they are. [Stretch to expand this idea to cultural engagement. The ones that thrive in other cultures are the ones that adapt the best and quickest, in essence reshaping their mental models.]

Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor “does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best … mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body.”

:: He writes a lot about keeping your cool and how there is a fine balance between emotion and cognition - the ones who survive are the ones who have kept their emotions in check while making the right decisions and acting on them. A bit about the physiology in the brain:

Since the organism’s survival depends on a reasonable match between mental map and environment, as the two diverge, the hippocampus spins its wheels and the amygdala sends out alarm signals even as the motivations circuits urge you on and on. The result is vertigo, claustrophobia, panic and wasted motion. Since most people aren’t conscious of the process, there’s no way to reflect on what’s happening.

:: The idea that serving others transforms you into a survivor:

Kerns learned many lessons that night. His mastery and confidence turned the pilots around even more than the fire. It showed them the way, and it made Kerns more able to save himself. That lesson was driven home and home again: Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim. And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else back home.

Two other ideas surfaced for me while reading this book. First, although our SPACE teams aren’t necessarily in wilderness survival environments, there could be incidents where our leaders are in crisis mode and trying to balance emotion versus cognition in order to make the right decision. Realistic scenarios include being in a foreign city and losing a student, a team member getting into a major car accident, or being the target of a violent crime. Perhaps this book has allowed my mind to wander, thinking that any of those are remotely possible [they are, aren’t they?] The ability to hold emotion in check while cognitively making the right decisions is a leadership behavior that is important. Perhaps we need to visit this topic as a part of our team preparation. [Along the same lines but the topic of another post - staffing your leadership for worst case.]

The second thought that came to mind was the difference between surviving as a victim versus surviving as a rescuer. The bigger paradigm relates to all of us that follow Christ - instead of merely just surviving, are we rescuing? Because it sounds like that makes a big difference.

My personal notes from this morning’s message.

I Kings 16-18
prophets are not comfortable people to be around.
Ahab - 7th king - married to Jezebel
Jezebel from Sidon - incredibly pagan
drought, no dew or rain
Baal - male god - god of agriculture and natural elements and fertility
Asher - female counterpart
Elijah - God tells him to give the message and then turn and go hide.
Go to Sidon - where J is from - huh?
Find specific village where a widow lives.
A widow - a person in the bottom of the social strata who is going to ‘provide’ for him during a drought and famine in the land.
[not only faith of Elijah but faith of the widow]
widows son grew ill - Elijah healed him
drought lasted 3 years
cultivation of Elijah’s faith happened in private
gathered 850 of Baals and Asher’s prophets on Mt. Carmel
“prophetic trash talk” - Ortberg
pour water on the alter - 4 jars, 3 times - all in the middle of getting over a drought
contrast the way the pagan prophets dance, cut, sacrifice as prayers to Elijah’s calm, confident prayer
Elijah is one of the original fire kings

One of my feedback evaluation forms from the GCC LDP session I led last week.

Exhibit A in the red. No, I didn’t plant an admirer in the crowd.

Exhibit B in the blue. Yup, someone understood the ramifications of their mission against the backdrop of humanity. That is exactly why.

Everyone and their mother seems to be writing about churches and Facebook. So here is a perspective from a globally-connected, out-to-change-the-world component of a youth ministry.

SPACE has seen the following uses of Facebook:
- Connecting
Of course, the first and foremost use of FB is connecting with friends. Writing on walls, messaging [although I would rather use normal email] , checking on their status, reading their profiles and seeing who has new friends all are various ways to connect. Most recently, we’ve seen a lot of our students connect and stay in touch with the new friends they have made while serving around the world.

- Community
FB is also an environment for community. The amount of FB groups are evidence of that. The groups represent affinity and can be closed or allow anyone to join. We’ve started a general SPACE group as well as specific groups for SPACE summer teams, book clubs and groups just for fun [like the “SHENGS have more fun” group.] My latest favorite is the “IDK my BFF Jill” group [from LB’s FB profile.]

- Photos, Video and Tagging
Part of the fun of FB is being able to upload media [photos/video] and then tag your friends in them as well as leave comments. Through this, you can see all the pictures/videos/etc FB-wide of your friends. All of our summer teams uploaded huge quantities of pictures from their experiences this summer, then tagged their teammates and commented on those pictures as well. On the left, one of my favorites, detailing an experiment I was conducting with cellophane - note the funny comments.

Other Resources:
- Churches on Facebook, from digital.leadnet.org
- The Lifechurch.tv swerve blog’s informal social network survey results

One thing to note about security and privacy - only add the people you know and you should be fine. Feel free to add me as a friend by clicking my profile badge at the upper right of this post.

::: Is “See You At The Pole” Unbiblical?
Link via Mark Riddle

::: What Myers-Briggs type is Jason Bourne?
Link

::: The most amazing temples in the world
Link

::: I Don’t Look Like This Demographic

For Americans ages 35 to 54 - 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975… 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24… Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Link from Marc Andreessen

Among other memories… some of my favorite from the past year..

As part of GCC’s leadership development program, notes from a session I did yesterday.

====

::: Intro
tony sheng
Leading in the Global Matrix
culture and context - the faster and deeper a leader engages, the greater the impact
look at paul - 3 on the ground, tangible behaviors he uses to engage context
expand your perspective about our current context - where Grace is on the way to marking human history

tony’s context - about me - SPACE - catalyzing students

Ex: TS in Brasil - moose on his shirt signified homosexuality - they laughed and he had no idea what about

your context – you are to lead - lets get it clear - you are here for a reason and if you have doubts about your leadership - put them on the shelf - the most exciting strategic time to be a jesus follower in human history - you have a vital role to play - the world is depending on you

::: Acts 17 in another language

::: Pauls behaviors
- 1.sees his context clearly
how the world really looks
most amazing time in history ever

: world and history - Six of the ten billion who have ever lived are alive today, and half of them are under the age of 25 – if you need compelling proof for youth ministry…
More has happened in fulfillment of the Great Commission in the last 100 years than in the previous 1,000 years.
China—fastest Christian expansion ever with 10,000 new converts every day
15 million converted Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims have opted to remain within those religions in order to witness for Christ as active believers in Jesus as Lord.
In 1900 81% of all Christians were White - By 2005 this will drop to 43%
Unreached peoples: 13,000 cultures

: cities - global urban migration
yaounde
vienna

: howard county - GCC - strategic right in the middle of DC and Baltimore
1/6 in Howard County are foreign born
:poll - how many life next to someone of a different ethnicity

community:church:leaders – sets and subsets
not a lesson on corporate diversity
but a lesson on clarity – we must care about what our community looks like
why this is called Leading In the Global Matrix - wake up and see

2006 best places to live - Money Magazine
1000 families $3M budget - $300K to local and global projects
over 200 middle and high school students in the past four years, $150K
Building Bridges – a week long community impact project
This church is not like any other church you will find

clearly GCC is situated for something grand
unique pivotal spot in human history
Paul saw this clearly

Learner vs. teacher
Trader vs. seller

:: Discuss – “In the different contexts or environments I am in [work, school, hobbies, church, etc.] do I see this global melting pot? Is there a place I should and do not see it? Why so”

- 2. focused on long term impact
**’the latest ideas’**
Paul was in this specific mix for a reason and this group of people were probably not like his own
he was there for a specific reason - he was trying to reach the group that were focused on the ‘latest ideas’
diffusion of innovation scale - draw this on the board [not my idea] - flip chart - The Tipping Point
how fast people gravitate towards change

front edge of the curve - the innovaters, risk takers, entreprenrial, catalytic
they are the leaders
people of influence
these people would go on to affect change in others
wave of difference and action

Paul knew that he had to draw from leaders - whether they were Christ followers or not
not a flash in the pan
mentor - if you are focusing on less than 500 years, it’s too short [not my idea]
who are the leaders - not followers - you are trying to reach?

Bobby Clinton, Fuller, studied 1200 leaders from history and the Scriptures - ‘leadership selection and identification is a major function of leadership.”

Neil Cole author of Organic Church says, “The best leaders are the ones who are creating leaders, not just followers”
Everyone has the potential to influence at least one other person. The best leaders aren’t necessarily the ones up front of a lot of people – they are the ones catalyzing those others to affect the multitudes

How do you identify those in your ministry who are leaders? There are surely signs…
TJ - in student ministry, see which adults kids gravitate towards
two SPACE interns – these kids read everything that I give them

- person of peace idea from Lk 10 - someone who has good reputation in the community, well connected, lots of influence, people follow them

F in Brasil – great relationship with the other parents of school kids, great reputation in the neighborhood, serves in community board. Not a believer, yet. When she comes to Jesus, there will be an very fast expansion – in the form of multiplication not addition.

- think about multiplication versus addition

UMCP is one of the best places to reach Chinese – reach more there than going to China – because they will return to China

More than just a great kids ministry or a dynamic moving small group
A movement of Christ followers
SPACE started as mission trips and community service - now it has become so much more than that - creating a movement among students to catalyze and empower them to change the world

not creating a ministry for the ministry sake
it’s about affecting humanity
making a difference for all of mankind

::: Discuss “what is the impact of my ministry in 5, 50 and 500 years.”

- 3. language
looks into the culture to frame a passion for God
Don Richardson, Peace Child
redemptive analogy - finding a story or legend in the culture that is analogous to the Gospel
music, movie, legends, etc.
movies:
ET - alien comes to life, dies and born again to give life to Elliot
Children of Men - no one has any more babies except one
the Bridge movie in cheq
can come from literature, music, etc.
keep in mind that pop “culture” now has very deep, philosophical meanings
The Matrix, etc

Discuss: examples of redemptive analogy

::: Close
responsibility, impact and influence

=====
Link to the handout, which includes an outline, other resources and questions for coach-leader interaction.
Photo: SSunde reading for our session.

::: Sending Your Kids Out

It’s so tough sending our children out, and you’d think that Karen and I would be better at it. But it still strikes us to the core. We do it out of obedience. We do it because God did it for us and the world needs to know.

Link from Seth Barnes

::: 20 countries, 12 weeks, overland - London to Sydney
The OzBusvia MetaFilter

::: Voice is still the killer app in many developing countries.

As part of a UN programme to tackle poverty in rural Africa, 79 villages across 10 African countries will be hooked up to cellular networks.

Link. Note that Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute.

::: Statetris
Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location. This will kill your productivity - you have been warned. Link via Kotkke.

The theme for the past two Sundays at Grace have been called “Taste of Grace,” the annual series designed to engage people to be involved in serving in different capacities. Part of this Sunday’s message was about what kind of community we are - how many of our community are already serving. PastorMark outlined two elements of serving - the summer mission adult and student teams. Here are the metrics from both:

Students — 81 people || $61,000 || $753
Adults — 38 people || $76,000 || $2000

[I wrote about specific student historical financial metrics previously in this post.] From a purely monetary perspective, we are getting a better deal on the student side. Of course, the finances are not the only thing we measure.

It’s important to keep in mind finances from the perspective of students. Students don’t have the financial viability that adults have - most of their friends don’t have full time salaried careers, the majority of support come from their parents’ friends and “taxable donation” is a nonsensical term to a sixteen year old. So when we look at trip destinations and partnerships, we have to keep overall costing in mind. If it is very ambitious financially, that is somewhat of a flag. Adult teams may not have the same kind of considerations for if a trip goes or not.

Of course, I’m super proud to see that our students are, in some ways, leading the greater body in this way. When SPACE first started, adult mission trips were here or there and this summer, there have been seven. It’s what teenagers are good at - innovate, risk and pave the way a little bit.

Public School Lunch
3 hard beef tacos
2 mini bowls of salad
1 big spoon of corn
water or juice too
$2.60

oh and ice cream for $.60

Goodwin’s expectation principle: “A potential leader tends to rise to the level of genuine expectancy of a leader he or she respects.” via Bobby Clinton.

Whether interns respect me or not, I have the highest expectations for them. Knowing what they know and having experienced what they have experienced, their responsibility, impact and influence on the nations is limitless.

EllyK was the perfect person to spend one-on-one time with Nast, a three year old adopted girl who only spoke Russian. Any time there was the threat of having to be around only English speakers, she freaked and went into meltdown mode. EllyK - empathy - spent hours rebuilding and reshaping, creating safety and connection - ideation - distractions via swings, bubbles and walks in the woods.

In it’s most desperate hour, the world needs you.

Photos: 2007-2008 Orbiters TriciaB and EllyK.

In the tradition of trying something new and different, SPACE is launching a book club. First gathering - Sept 27th at 8pm at the Food Court in Columbia Mall with gatherings about once a month. The book we are going to read is Soul Cravings. Feel free to bring friends - even ones that aren’t interested in church. RSVP via email or comment.

I wrote a little bit about the Leadership Vision dudes at the CAI conference. More on them later. What was very intriguing to me was that CAI had these guys engage all their field teams as “Missional Consultants”, both at the conference and throughout the year. Most of their time spent with teams was spent interpreting StrengthsFinder and Myers Briggs in the context of the working teams.

I think we did a great job putting our leader teams together this past summer due to focusing on first finding strong point leaders and then surrounding them with other very capable people - ultimately resulting in the strongest most capable leader teams we have ever had.

An area of improvement for next summer will continue to center around leaders, including something like:
- a team leader guide.
- all team leaders take StrengthsFinder.
- someone interprets the results as a team, not just as individuals.

Photo: SF results of some of our team. Note the circles.

::: Short Term Missions and the Future
Seth writes:

Over and over again I watch the very missionaries I’ve mobilized through a short-term experience tell me, “It’s too much work. I don’t want to host any more teams.” Hosting a short-term-mission (STM) team is a lot of work for missionaries.

And…

It’s true that many of our short-termers don’t belong on the field. Far too many churches don’t adequately screen or prepare their teams. And their presence on the mission field is a net negative. They spend $1000 a participant to do VBS and a bit of construction with a bunch of spoiled Americans with attitudes.

The answer to that problem is better screening and preparation, not a moratorium on STMs. I want to ask all missionaries reading this, what are you doing to replace yourself? How are you raising up future missionaries?

Link from Seth Barnes

::: http://digital.leadnet.org

We are aiming to unpack the technical jargon and gobblygook so that non-techies and church leaders can better understand how various digital technologies can be used in the church to connect its members and attenders as well as reach its surrounding communities and even the world.

Friends DJ Chuang and Stephen Shields are part of the team.

::: How Cultures Think
via RG Lewis

Just a reminder, fun is a core SPACE value. In four years, 200 students and leaders and over fifteen teams, fun and laughter have been key components of our experiences.

In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. This immediate, involuntary reaction, as one researcher puts it, involves “the most direct communication possible between people - brain to brain - with our intellect just going along for the ride, in what might be called a “limbic lock.” No surprise, then, that people who relish each other’s company laugh easily and often; those who distrust or dislike each other, or who are otherwise at odds, laugh little together, if at all.
In any work setting, therefore, the sound of laughter signals the group’s emotional temperature, offering one sure sign that people’s hearts as well as their minds are engaged. In a study of 1,200 episodes of laughter during social interactions, the laugh almost always came as a friendly response to some ordinary remark like “nice meeting you,” not to a punchline. A good laugh sends a reassuring message: We’re on the same wavelength, we get along. It signals trust, comfort and a shared sense of the world; as a rhythm in a conversation, laughing signals that all is well for the moment.- Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

Photo: D and I. Otherwise, I have no idea.

One of the forums recently started on M opened with the question, “Think 18th century through today…who are your heroes?” One of mine was Amelia Earhart, who had some amazing accomplishments in the field of aviation, especially being a woman in that age. Talk about daring, risk and adventure. Kind of along the same lines as Steve Fossett, who has been missing for a few days now.

I spent just a few minutes contributing to the Amazon Mechanical Turk “HIT” for finding Steve Fossett. The basic idea is that images from the overall search area are loaded in to the Turk and the power of the Web is harnessed for people who have the time to scan those images using Google Earth, identify whether they see something suspect or not, and the results cataloged. Hopefully the more people involved, the more images can get scanned and maybe some hits on possibilities for where Steve is. D just told me that they have found 5 or 6 plane crashes that no one could find before.

Here is a fascinating article about Jim Gray, a Silicon Valley technologist who disappeared sailing earlier this year, and the high tech search used to try and find him as well. To date, no one has found him or evidence of his boat.

There is risk for it’s own sake and there is risk for a greater cause.

Here is the official link for the job opening at GCC:

If you are a vision caster, who loves leading leaders and teaching high school students we would like to hear from you.

Grace Community Church is a dynamic, growing, seeker sensitive church with an average weekly attendance of over 1900 adults that is strategically located in Howard County MD in the Baltimore Washington corridor. Our church mission is to build followers of Jesus Christ among those distanced from him.

Our current high school pastor of 10 years is stepping down and we are looking for his replacement to lead a high school ministry of over 200 students and 70 volunteers. Our high school ministry exists to:
• To provide a safe place for High School students to think about life, love, and faith,
• To explore their relationship with God, and
• To express their hearts to each other and God.

You must also really appreciate a Chinese-middle-aged-young-at-heart student mission coordinator and let him continue to run his crazy experiments that intersect students, culture and humanity.[No no, it’s not in the official write up… but it should be don’t you think? Kidding…]
Link to the official job posting.

::: 168 hours
Nigel spent a year as George Verwer’s [President of Operation Mobilization] gopher, meaning:

6 continents; 18 countries; 100 flights; 100 blog entries; met 5,000+ people; 250 meetings with George

Here is a snippet of what he learned:

Six of the ten billion who have ever lived are alive today, and half of them are under the age of 25. The spiritual war rages stronger than ever – with more response and more opposition to the Gospel than ever before. More has happened in fulfillment of the Great Commission in the last 100 years than in the previous 1,000 years. This is where you and I find ourselves. God is at work, and His plan will happen. The question is, “Am I part of it?”

::: Ethnographic research, cultural context and emerging technology

- Texting in Pinyan [Chinese] isn’t an easy thing to do - it requires two to seven button presses for each character.
- Why do Koreans pay to go to cybercafes when they’ve got great connectivity at home? Because it’s customary in Korea not to host guests in ones house, so playing games in a PC-Bang is the only way to socialize with friends.
- The ilkone phone signals a call to prayer, then silences itself for 20 minutes to allow you not to disturb anyone in mosque.

Link with much, much more about Genevieve Bell, a legendary anthropologist who works with Intel, from My Heart’s in Accra

::: Apple addresses early adopters
Link via Seth Godin

We are almost done closing out the financial part of the summer. When we close out summers, I invariably cannot believe the amount of people that support our students and teams. It really is amazing, all the ones that give and pray and give, because they know these students and love to see them risking, moving and serving. Here are some rough summer budget metrics.

If anyone else has any costing per student for their summer mission budgets, I would love to see them. The other interesting dialog might be about whether we are getting our money’s worth. Of course, I’ve got an opinion…

Photo: Belvedere Palace in Vienna [via ErinOB]

The Nens were in town a few weekends ago. It was so good to see them and after spending 10 days in Hungary with the same kind of families, it was familar, refreshing and really fun.

Hard to believe it has been one year.

[Related - Cameroon 2006]

::: Europe’s Coolest Cities
Including Copenhagen, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dublin and Vienna
Link via The Creative Class

::: Dean Kamen and a new prosthetic arm
Watch a video from TED.com with Dean Kamen and the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the US Department of Defense. Link

::: The Essence of Movements
1. Structure
2. Recruitment
3. Commitment
4. Ideology
5. Opposition
Link via Sam Metcalf

Administrative announcement:
The “Potpourri” series [random tidbits from the web that I think you would enjoy] is now being renamed to “RocketFuel.” Mostly, because RocketFuel is a lot easier for me to spell.

Goals, goals, goals. Remember, it’s good to have goals that are measurable, realistic and timely. Here is a recap of SPACE goals from last year [and scores] and the goals I submitted for this coming school year.

2006-2007 goals
2006-2007: goal: help to shape a student ethos of impact and mission - use momentum from SPACE summer teams and TNT to collide into CpR Fridays
5 [out of 10]

2006-2007 goal: intentionally use SPACE as a medium to develop leaders that are creating leaders not just followers
KC, JB, summer team leaders
8

2006-2007 goal: give LC a presence from a SPACE resource
KC connecting with Spotlight teams
5

2006-2007 goal: continue to invest in SPACE kids - kids that have shown interest in global cultures, the future and cross cultural ministry
8

2006-2007 goal: continue to build missional/mission team leaders
8

2006-2007 goal: continue to send summer teams to GCC missionaries when we can and cultivate those relationships for long term perspective
10

2006-2007 goal: rearchitect the LC summer missions experience
10

2006-2007 goal: replace the MERGE missions experience with something more aligned with service and evangelism - targetting incoming 10th graders
10

2006-2007 goal: help facilitate an environment for KC to engage urban realities
2

2007-2008 goals

:: Intentionally use SPACE as a medium to develop leaders that are creating leaders not just followers
- JB, TB, EK

:: Continue to invest in SPACE kids - kids that have shown interest in global cultures and cross cultural ministry
- once a month ESL class
- Fall SPACE event
- SPACE Winter expedition
- Spring SPACE event

:: Continue to send overseas summer teams to GCC missionaries when we can and cultivate those relationships for long term perspective

:: Add more energy and momentum to LC summer missions experience

:: Use the progression of summer experiences similar to summer 2007 - Baltimore, NYC, overseas

:: Continue to build missional/mission team leaders
- Continue to shape round1 of SPACE leaders via innovative behind the scenes projects [LB, ES, EG, NL]
- Catalyze round2 of SPACE leaders via students turning into leaders via summer team leadership [TH, SS, MK, RB]
- Presummer Leader Gathering and Training - including providing Mission Team Leader Packet
- Engage each summer leader in StrengthsFinder
- Mission Advance

:: Explore the expansion of SPACE
- [2 cannot-disclose-right-now goals]
- Continue to use the blog [http://tonytsheng.blogspot.com] as a means of leadership strategy and publicity for SPACE

:: Compel GCC ministry leaders into understanding culture and context
- Lead workshop entitled “Leading Thru the Global Matrix” for GCC Leadership Development Program

:: Assist in hiring a senior high pastor that is unconventional
[not really a goal since I’m not involved in the process… but I threw that in there for grins…]

[Related: 2006-2007 goals and 2005-2006 goals ]

This is K playing with two random brothers she met on the beach the other day in CT. After a few minutes of playing, I heard her say, “Let’s play a game - it’s called Digging for Your Treasure!”

I know our family is going to remember our Pirate Sven experience for a long time.

Last weekend was our annual youth leader retreat. It’s a time when all the youth leaders go away for some refreshment and planning. Even though it’s intended for small group and program leaders, I go too and bring some of my people. This year, I brought JoyceB, TriciaB and EllyK. Along with planning some stuff about the fall for SPACE, we also watched a talk by Erwin McManus from Origins 2006 [how churches attract or repel catalytic, entrepreneurial leaders based on the diffusion of innovation scale], and spent some time praying for leaders of leaders.

This year, at the last formal session, our high school pastor SM announced that he was stepping down at the end of this school year. What I’ve appreciated most about SM is that he isn’t status quo at all. He isn’t the least bit interested in being a holding tank with pizza.

That would be a huge change in any youth ministry. It also means that the future of SPACE is a little uncertain. SPACE could continue to exist in it’s current form and function. Or potentially, there could be a high school pastor brought on who has definite views and plans for the integration of missions in his philosophy of ministry. In either case, it will be fun to see how it all plays out.

I don’t think SPACE was meant to last forever. However, there is still a fine line between the balance of letting everyone do what they want with student missions, while having enough oversight to make sure they are doing the right things, with the most prepared teams.

via Dean

That was the theme of my talk in LC last weekend [amidst our youth ministry leader retreat and Mission Sunday in big church…] - as in repeat after me, “I am a missiologist.”

The overall idea was that it’s important for all of us to understand God’s sense of mission throughout all the Bible [Gen 12, Mt 28, Rev 7] and to be in touch with how God is moving through all the world. The morning included 3 minute interviews from a lot of our summer teams including Baltimore, New York, England, Hungary and two other young adult teams, Uganda and Jamaica. All the Light Company kids that did something mission-trip-wise were also on the stage to share real quick. [Related topic - how young is too young for kids to go on overseas mission trips?]

I touched on some concepts such as global urban migration and a redemptive analogy. Granted, some big ideas and big words. But I don’t think they were too out of the realm of what middle school kids can understand.

And once they understand, we have to move them to act.

Photo: K and OR, after swimming in the Danube, outside of Vienna, Austria, summer 2007. via Megan

From a recent article in Good Magazine, profiling the Mormon Missionary Training Camp (MTC):

It’s like a proselytizing version of the Peace Corps—except the Mormons have seven times as many volunteers in the field as the Peace Corps, and they’re in 145 countries—as opposed to the Peace Corps’ 75. In many parts of the world, a Mormon missionary is the only American the locals will ever meet; the clean-cut, idealistic young face of our nation.

And…

Lane Steinagel, a middle-aged linguistics scholar, is in charge of language instruction. In the late 1970s, Steinagel served as a missionary in the Cook Islands and discovered his gift for languages. He remains an expert on Cook Island Maori, a language most people haven’t even heard of, let alone studied. Steinagel has also taken classes in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, and Tongan. Under his guidance, the MTC teaches tongues you can study virtually nowhere else. “For some languages we have produced our own printed materials,” Steinagel explained. “It’s hard to find a good text for learning Icelandic or Albanian.”

And…

Through their willingness to learn languages no one else studies, the Mormons make themselves available to as many of the world’s peoples as they can. And their willingness to study obscure tongues helps them corner the market on conversions in certain parts of the world.

Photo: Our 2007 NYC team teaching a free ESL class in Brooklyn.

Welcome back readers and thanks for being patient while I took a little break. It actually wasn’t too much of a rest, but that’s probably a good thing. Much more to tell you in a bit.

In the meantime, September is my favorite month. Autumn around DC is awesome and with school starting, I always get a renewed sense of energy because things are new.

Before I tell you more, I would love to have both old and new readers jot a quick comment. Who are you, where are you from, how can I and this blog serve you in your context. Love to hear from you guys and gals.

I’m taking a little blog break until sometime in September. Even though the blog will be quiet, here is a list of things below that are still cooking around the international office:

:: Youth Leader Retreat - This is an annual thing and it continues to impress me that we have a ministry that invests in leaders of students. I’m only going up for the day on Saturday with some of our SPACE peeps - my goal is to plan a bit of the fall as well as do some development with them [aka Erwin McManus videos]
- I’m speaking at Light Company [our middle school gathering] on Sunday, doing the post Missions thing. Big church is also doing it. If I can snag the video and audio, I will upload it later. [Video and audio from last summer’s post mission Sunday.]
- Cameroon team reunion with the Nens on Sunday afternoon. They are in the States for furlough and are living in MD for a few weeks.
- School starts on Monday for the girlies.
- I’m running a workshop for GCC’s leadership development program - one evening in September and one evening in February. The LDP is Grace’s attempt at growing and training leaders. My session is entitled, “Leading In The Global Matrix.” Catchy, eh?
- And of course, the most important project is jotting down quotes you could use on mission trips from the film Ice Age 2.

See you in a few weeks.

Placeholder post for images.

Like the past summer SPACE teams I have led, this experience was majorly impactful as well. I feel like I’m continuing to learn about myself, leadership and the world that God has called us to help serve. This summer was no different - I’m a different person because I went. And like every summer, what a privilege.

Here are some personal highlights:
:: The Fam
Having my family on the team was definitely a different dynamic. Most apparent was just needing to give some attention and time to D and the girls - not a bad thing at all. We did a stellar job in the selection and identification phase for this leader team and they were awesome, especially when I needed to bail a little bit - like the evening in Munich. And each one of the team members really just loved my family so much during the week, which was awesome for me to see. My fam was truly a part of the team, not just along for the ride.

There were certainly times I did feel the pressure between leading the team and being a husband and father, but that pressure was worth it. We all fell in love with Europe [what’s not to love?], K continued to exercise her heart for others, and Em’s first missional experience was in the context of serving those who serve. And of course, D was a glue that held both our family and the team together in so many ways. I believe, like we hoped when we planned this, that this experience was a milestone in our girls’ lives.

:: Europe and CAI
I continue to be astounded at Europe’s need and continue to have the highest admiration for families that leave everything behind to see humanity rescued. Like previous years, connecting with these kinds of families has been a great experience. CAI seems like a great community and many of their values resonate with me, most specifically - empowerment, experimentation and the development of leadership. If Europe is on your mind, you should check CAI out. And all the families made a huge impact on us. We know we were there to serve them, but their hospitality, openness, honesty and willingness to share their experiences with us was a profound blessing.

:: Sending
I think this team of students may do it. It’s always hard to compare teams and trips, but I see a glimmer in the eyes of these students that I have not seen in others. A glimmer and shine that reflects both the world in need and the light inside. Only time and their resolve will tell, but when they depart - in order to restore, renew and rescue humanity - I will be sad in the moment and ecstatic in the future.

And that is why we - you and I - do this.

Related: - D’s post about the team and my photos

I think I mentioned before we left that our whole piece of the children’s program was created by our students. Theme, craft rotations, teachings via the short dramas, all of it was their creation. Some of the actual craft assemblies were the adults but overall, it was really our students. I’ve never seen a team put it all together like this one.

THE BEST SONG EVER
By Tricia and Elly
To the tune of Do-Re-Mi

We are here to watch your kids
And we are really excited
We have come from Baltimore Maryland
A long long way to fly
So sit back and relax
And enjoy your time here
We are here to serve you
All fifteen of us

Deanna, the mother of Katie and Emily
Kt, she’s young but mature
Em, she’s bubbly and outgoing
Sven, he’s lived in lots of places
Emilie, she goes to college on the west coast
Michelle, she likes to play field hockey
Lindsey, she likes to rock climb
And Trevin’s really good at soccer

Tricia, at home she is a lifeguard
Elly, it’s her summer job as well
Greg, he is a high school math teacher
Robyn, she takes really good pictures
Erin, she works at our church
Leslie, she’s training for a marathon
Tony, the leader of us all
And we are the Hungary team!

A snippet from one of the skits, all written by RobynB.

Sven: *looks around* Okay….now that I’ve forgiven Lindsey… how do I find this treasure. *looks at kids* Do you know where the treasure is? *improvise here, going off of their reactions, just don’t find it right away. Eventually, you find the cross first, not the treasure* Hey, a cross! This is to remind me about forgiveness! *looks back at kids* What? The treasure’s over here? *finds it..* X marks the spot….*ponders* Hey! Cross marks the spot! *opens the chest….and just stares at it for a few moments* It’s not gold at all! *looks at kids* Look! *pulls things from chest, the key heart, the patch, the compass, the cross* Love…Kindness…Patience! A new compass! …And forgiveness! *holds them up, shows them to the kids, finds something else in the chest, a paper and he reads it: * Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… *realizing* For where your treasure is…*looks up* there your heart will be also! I…I think I get it! Love, kindness, patience, forgiveness…these treasures are way better than gold!

*Everyone comes out that he’s met on his journey.*

Tricia: Hey, Pirate Sven. Did you find your treasure?

Sven: *turns excitedly* Yeah, Tricia, I did! Look! *shows her* Love!

Tricia: *laughs*

Sven: *to Elly* And, Elly, look! Kindness! Like the Good Samaritan!!

Elly: That’s great, Pirate Sven!

Sven: *to Michelle* Michelle! Patience! And Lindsey, I got a new compass! And, *holds up cross* Forgiveness! These are the real treasures, not gold!

*All four girls smile excitedly and congratulate him…*

Parrot: RAWK! Well done, Pirate Sven! You realized the treasures God wants you to have!

Sven: Polly Parrot! Thank you for all your help! This is awesome! *turns to kids* Look, mateys! I found me treasure!! Now you should search for yours! Love, kindness, patience, forgiveness! God will give you all these things! And you can give them to others! Arrrrrr, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also! *looks back at everyone else* Come on, guys! Let’s share the treasures! *they…all…go off stage happily?*

absolutely no rhyme or reason to this deluge of information - except to motivate you…

:: For a global missions org like CAI, even the kids ministry team needs to be at the top of their game.
identification/selection and preparation in both ministry skills and the big picture of affecting humanity

:: Debriefing in Munich
should have listened to D
ended up at a hotel too far in the suburbs
too much travel time to get into the city and landed too late in the day
team [minus Shengri-Las] still went into downtown Munich but it was a long day
and I left my wallet on an unattended cafe table for 20 minutes in the Munich airport.

:: CAI
organic, experimental, low-hierarchy, almost solely church planting, lots of tattoos
cool, young, hip missionaries, emerging culture

:: CAI internships - Brussels
either for post high school or post college
post high school - spend 3 months in Bible college in Europe - good time to acclimate to European culture
focused on action, experimental, etc. very well thought out
team leaders were youth pastors in the US and then in Europe before CAI
about Brussels - mix of French and Flemish
150,000 people, a third are immigrants
hq of the EU

:: Worship
in the sessions brought tears to my eyes every time - i have no idea why

:: CAI process
If you are not already living intentionally, being on staff won’t make a difference.
Process

:: Europe
.05% in France are evangelical
Most people that come from Perspectives are very focused on the 10/40 window and Europe gets lost.
You have made it through your first year on the field, describe it. “Brutal.” - Megan

:: Leadership
Everyone can be a leader - everyone can have influence over at least one more person.
Fuller’s MA in Global Leadership sounds great if you are in your twenties or thirties

:: Say What?
There was a missions org in the conference center ending their conference as ours was beginning. They were your parents missionaries… and their conference [nor any of their conferences] did not accommodate any children. Not everything that falls under the label of “Missions” is inherently good or right.

Photos: Pirate Sven and EllyK, some of the girls and TriciaB and RobynB’s VBS group.

Vienna Day was a pretty cool experience. Kudos to the leadership team of CAI for dreaming huge. The overall idea was to send the whole conference - kids and all - into Vienna to work with on-the-ground, local outreach and service projects.

Some of the projects included:
- taking the elderly on a stroll around the zoo [this one is my favorite]
- ad hoc soccer and basketball games in the city
- street outreach with drama and music
- cleaning up a youth center
- refurbishing an old home for the elderly
[I’m sure there are more projects, I couldn’t find my list.]

From a logistics point of view, think Mission Advance*400. [MPM, you would haved loved this.] 300 people, kids care at a local church [families had the option of taking their kids on projects or leaving them at a church], team leaders all with detailed directions, public transit tickets, bag lunches for everyone, 6 coach buses, BBQ dinner at a park when it’s all done, and then getting everyone back home.

Our team’s original plan was for all of us to hang at the church. About a month before the conference, one of our contacts had the brilliant idea of sending us out with specific families on their projects to help with their kids - a sort of babysitter for the day. Of course, we thought it was a fantastic idea. As Vienna Day got closer, the idea got nixed. But then at the last minute, our contact pulled some strings and each one of our students go to go out.

If you gathered a group of your most intentional and missional friends for a week long party, most of them wouldn’t be content to just sit around the whole time, would they? That is the essence of Vienna Day.

Photostream from the day here.

TS: I’m a really good team player when I am in charge.
ES: I’m a really good team player too when you are in charge.

Our biggest issue from the Hungary experience was difficulty working with another team. Two issues were very different styles of leadership from the point leaders and differing expectations of capacity and skill between teams. Both of these aspects could only have been worked out when the teams were brought together.

The quoted exchange above is a true one, I actually said that. Realizing that teams take on the persona of their leader [no matter what kind of team], I know that some of the difficulty in working with another team could have been something that I projected. And I know that if I’m a good team player only when I’m in charge, working with me could be like working with a 3 year old. It’s something I need to be keenly aware of.

In the end though, once everyone got into their groove and over their jet lag, a lot of grace was given on both sides. We also experienced the ’cause creates community’ idea, since our team had a bit more to concentrate on than just trying to get along with each other and this team was one of the most cohesive that I’ve helped lead, probably for that very reason. All of us together - the CalifTeam, us and the two fabulous ladies from Boston - shaped and molded a fantastic environment for the kids of CAI.

Photo: A photo of some StrengthsFinder scribble. [More on this later, but CAI has a team of missional consultants from LeadershipVision that come to every conference as well as visiting specific projects to work with their teams.]

Thursday am - land in Vienna, check into Hotel Delta, meet CalifTeam, walk the promenade down the street from our hotel - need to remember to buy the girls flat water.
Thursday aft and eve - bus tour of Vienna - amazing - dinner in First District, around the corner from the opera house - girls go to opera with CalifTeam.
Friday am - our team minus the Sheng women go to Belvedere Palace before it is open, take shuttle from Vienna into Sopron, new passport stamp.
Friday pm - first kids club - spur of the moment, no real program
Sat am - kids club - same ad hoc make it up as you go
Sat aft - kids club - I snuck into one of the sessions
Sat eve - dinner with LeadershipVision guy - what the heck. If I could have a dinner like this once a year, I would be set.
Sun am - worship with preconference, and then kids club
Sun pm - first kids club with whole conference
Mon - Vienna day - amazing
Tues - Sopron with our team in the morning, kids club aft and first pirate sven in the evening.
Wed - kids all day morning aft night
Thurs - breakfast with missions pastor from CT, kids morning and after, dinner with team leaders from Brussels to talk about internship process and strucutre with CAI
Fri - kids morning, clean in aft, last sven in evening
Sat - departure in the am - land in Munich mid afternoon, team dinner in Erding and rest of the team goes into downtown Munich
Sun - home

Church Planting and Movement Making
Martin Robinson
[Notes from the one session I snuck in to]

::::
- Tear Fund research in the UK
important not to talk ourselves into insignificance
53% of UK claim to be Christians - all is not lost in Europe
- unusual situation in London [or all capital cities in Europe] - immigration
more than 50% of population is ethnic
minorities are not going away
- Christian vs. secular - not very much overlap
- Spirituality yes, church no
- consumer challenge
- challenge of youth
- churches are not connected with local communities
although ethnic churches seem to do a better job at this
- reinvention of the workplace
industrialization is coming to an end
- church plant
renewal of the church
redefinition of mainstream
experiment
ancient-future

Problems
- reproducing old models of church
- rearranging the kingdom - transfer growth is not going to do it
- movement creation - plant churches vs. plant a movement
- creation of intentional missionary movement
cultural exegesis
coaching/mentoring
spiritual direction
most church planters are isolated and lonely

Concerns
- Fresh expressions of church or mission
- mission is very hard work
- act quickly in relation to youth
- initiatives are no substitute for long term
- we’ve lost the skills to create viable communities of disciples [vs. members]

Key Issues
- cultural exegesis
- thought tribes [Driscoll]
- value tribes
- experience tribes
- high and popular culture - philosophy/thought and pop cultural are now deeply connected - think The Matrix and deep philosophy

- Listening
- Interpret
- Doing missional theology
- Reshaping
- Receptivity is a function of God conversations
Based on prayer and the miraculous
- Europe - there is an absence of a God-consciousness
- people of peace - Luke 10

Org Capacities
- constant relationship building - we keep people too busy
- evangelistic structures - build open communities
- discipleship capacity
- rapid mobilization
- sit light to buildings but remember sacred spaces - important to Europeans
- leadership development of the non-professional
::::

I asked the speaker the following questions [with the answers following them.]
- What is the most successful movement off the top of your head, religious or not?
The underground church in China.
- You spoke about the short window for youth in the UK. What would you do about that?
Partner with existing churches that have influence in the local, public schools. Public schools are asking for people to come in to the schools for service projects, etc.

Here is a glimpse into our travel logistics for the Hungary team. Thankfully, not all of this was something I had to plan and confirm.

private cars : Columbia to Dulles airport
air : Dulles to Vienna Austria
shuttle bus : Vienna Austria airport to Vienna Austria hotel
shuttle bus : Vienna Austria airport to Sopron Hungary
shuttle bus : Sopron Hungary to Vienna church for Vienna day
public tram, subway, bus : teams travel in Vienna Austria during Vienna day
shuttle bus : Vienna Austria to Sopron Hungary
shuttle bus : Sopron Hungary to Vienna Austria airport
air : Vienna Austria to Munich Germany
shuttle bus : Munich Germany airport to Erdin Germany hotel
public bus : Erdin Germany hotel to train station
public train : train station to downtown Munich
taxi : train station to hotel
shuttle bus : hotel to Munich airport
air : Munich Germany to Dulles
private cars : Dulles to Columbia

The Gospel moves…

Photo: Our team either arriving or leaving…Hotel Delta, Vienna, Austria.

Fantastic trip. Will tell you more about it this week. Thanks to those of you that were following along and praying via the blog.

The conference officially ended tonight. Like any last night on a mission trip, emotions are high and the team is proud of the work they did here. They and you, certainly have a right to be proud - they went out of their way to serve and bless.

Tomorrow is a quick hop to Munich, debriefing there and spending the night. Sunday we fly home to the US. All in all, it’s been a very positive experience. Probably no updates until we get home and then I have a lot of processing to do.

One full day left. We depart for Vienna Saturday morning at 9. Kids VBS this morning, clean up pack this afternoon, and one more Pirate Sven this evening. The team is still doing amazingly well. Michelle is totally back in the groove.

TriciaB is looking over my shoulder and says hi.

First Pirate Sven.
Making legends that will last for the next 500 years.

Ministry is still going well. Our students are falling in love with these kids, its pretty cool. We are encouraging them to get as much time as they can with some real live missionaries. Last night, curfew was 11.00pm unless you were talking to someone that lived in another country - then you get an extra 45 minutes. The room scattered.

Michelle is doing much better. Got her a doctor and some antibiotics. The doctor cost 10,000 forints - about $52 - for him to drive from town and make a house call. Thanks for praying.

Had breakfast with a missions pastor funded via CA at The Well in Groton, CT.

One of our students is a tad under the weather. The onsite nurse has checked on them and we are in the midst of setting up a doctor to check on them as well. She could use your prayers.

Our involvement here at this conference is taking SPACE to a new level of mobilization.

Our team went into Sopron this morning for a little break. It was nice just to be out of the conference for a little bit. Very cool village.

Big day of kids programs today - Waterworks VBS in the afternoon and our first run at Pirates and Treasures this evening. Our evening piece was great, mostly went well except for some momentum lost during the music piece, but not a big deal.

We have a team debrief every night where we collate ideas for adjustment. It’s usually a fun time and provides a constant feedback loop [like this blog…]

Like I also expected, our students are getting a lot out of hearing some of the stories from CA staffers, as am I.

Pray for MichelleK and K. Michelle has a bit of a cold and chills. K threw up earlier this night but seems better. D gave her Pepto and you know what those pink pills do to people on SPACE experiences.

Today was pretty wild. The whole conference went from Sopron into Vienna for a “serve the city” day, multiple, local, service projects set up for the conference attendees. Think Mission Advance * 400. Our students got to go out with families were serving as kind of a kid helper for a day. In other words, they got to pick the brain of a missionary family.

Huge logistical ambition.

Yesterday was all pre-conference - kids stuff with a small mass of kids. I heard one of the sessions with Martin Robinson, really good stuff, will upload notes later. Had dinner with a guy from Leadership Vision Consulting. That was crazy. As you can tell, not much time for posting. The team is doing great, doing a lot of really creative, on the fly, experiment-and-see-how-it-goes stuff. They would make you proud.

Official conference starts tonight.

We are here in Sopron, Hungary. Pre conference started last night with 25 or so kids. The team is doing great. Thursday was an all day run in Vienna, doing the sights, including a bus tour and the big huge palace. [I will find the name.] We didn’t remember much due to jet lag. Friday was coming here from Vienna. The team is doing well.

Ok.. one more post right before we leave. Team should be arriving in twenty minutes. I got word last night from mpm of our new total support raised. $58,847 and some odd change. Based on estimated spending, we are now in the black. Of course, once NYC and Hungary return, the balance gets adjusted. But still….

81 students this summer. Almost $60K. I recognize, and you should to if you are connected with SPACE, that we are doing something that isn’t very normal.

So this is probably the last post at least until we get to Sopron, Hungary on Friday. Thanks for praying for our travels. For all the stress of traveling with fourteen other people [2 of them being my own little kids], I’m looking forward to:

- flying with our team and feeling that buzz when you send kids onward to serve a world in need
- watching their faces at the first sight of Vienna
- seeing them engage some kids that we have thought and prayed about for months

See you over the pond.

The team is doing great, I just got off the phone with JBourq. Yesterday was a day in a West African neighborhood and last evening was them helping out with a free English class there. Of course, I knew it was going to go great… Take an average suburban high school kid, have them teach a free English class for an evening and their view of the world - in impact, influence and responsibility - becomes very different.

“Too many youth groups are holding tanks with pizza…” - Ed Stetzer. The Church Dropout Study full report and USA Today article.

In 2006, building on the streak we started with 2005, I helped lead a team of 12 students and leaders to Cameroon. Cameroon was also the home of one of GCC’s families and they jumped at the idea to host a team of American students. Months of their preparation culminated in our arrival and a short youth camp three hours outside of the capital city. Two days after camp, our team was witness to the first ever student small groups in the capital city started by this missions agency. On to the 3 essential questions:

1. Am I planning to have an impact that lasts for 500 years?
Local, Cameroonian youth workers that are being trained. A host mission family that already has a well thought out exit strategy. Cameroonian students that will be the foundation of politics, science, industry, and the Christ movement when they get older. Three elements that meant our trip was more than a short term mission trip - it was the beginning of centuries of impact.

2. Can both host and teams trust each other because we are partners?
Once again, having a host that was part of GCC’s network of families around the world was vital. The experience was built from both sides, balancing need, talent, context and impact.
The crux of this trust was displayed via our trip to the Pygmy village, during our camp. G had decided to stay home since one of our students was down with a stomach bug. Instead, one of his indigenous youth ministry leaders would be the point person. It all worked according to plan, except when she asked me to explain the Gospel to our Pygmy Indian friends. Well, someone’s plan anyway.

3. How will I engage the culture?
Host homes. Pygmy indians. Living with Cameroonians in a beach camp. Our students experienced Cameroonian culture first hand. They still remember and they still know - both in their hearts and in their heads - that the Gospel moves relevantly from culture to culture.

Photo: me and ND and Wlson, two local, Cameroonian youth workers in it for the long haul.
Related: 2006 - Cameroon

Our fourth out of five teams departed this morning - a team of 19 serving in NYC with Urban Impact. For those of you keeping score at home, we are up to 81.48% of our summer teams having departed. The final 21 odd percent is my team and we depart on Wednesday.

In other weekend news, we got Em’s passport. Out of the four times calling the passport office, we consistently got inconsistent updates. We are just happy that we have it, finally.

Our team packing went well. Here is a picture of the chaos during the packing party. Like last year, each person on the team [except the little kids] are checking in an extra bag filled with team stuff or stuff to give away to the families we meet - little fun things from the States that they maybe can’t get in Europe.

Jeremy tagged me with this meme, about living out Scripture, so here it goes.

:: John 10:10

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

The summer after I decided to follow Jesus, I met a guy who embodied life. To him, and then to me, Christianity wasn’t an affair for those who didn’t want to have any fun. In fact, he became my first real example of someone who lived a full, no regret and fun life. Since then, I can tell you that my life has been much richer because I have decided to follow Jesus, and not just on the fun scale.

:: Genesis 12:2-3

I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Somehow, God is reliant upon us make the world a better place. And the charge for us is to bless because we have been blessed. And no doubt, I have been richly blessed and because of that, I have a responsibility.

:: Joel 2:28

And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

I want to be an old man that dreams God sized dreams.

The other day, I drove into my driveway after work and saw something like this. Someone had come by and decorated our whole driveway and it was really funny. And fun. And on my porch, it said “Cool people live here.” I have no idea who it was but I suspect they were cool.

Hi Dear friends of SPACE,

Thanks so very much for your investment in SPACE [Students Prepared to Act for Christ’s Empire] - Grace Church’s student ministry’s mission and service facet. We are thankful for you and your support for us. Already we find ourselves in early August and we’ve had a very busy but exhilarating summer.

We are thankful for three trips have gone out and come home safely with stunning feedback. Even more exciting, we know that students have been marked by these experiences:
- A team to England working with YWAM Marine Reach in and out of Liverpool, where they had a chance to give boat tours, serve the crew with energy and encouragement and bless our extended network of Grace families around the world. [Right before the bomb scares too…]
- A team to downtown Baltimore serving with Chain Reaction, blessing and serving downtown neighborhoods via a partnership with a local church. Best story - our team helped clean up the grounds of a local police station and no one had ever done that for them before.
- A small group of middle schoolers who assisted locally with the Howard County food bank and prayer walked through a downtown Baltimore city block, the sight of an inner city Adopt A Block movement someone from GCC is assisting with.
- All three teams have come back with awesome feedback from their hosts. We seek to send the best prepared, most engaged student teams.

As you remember, please pray for the two remaining teams this summer:
- A team serving in NYC with Urban Impact [8/5 - 8/10] - ministry focused on immigrants from the 10/40 window living in the city. They will be helping teach free English classes and also visiting an Islamic mosque. The world is indeed coming to our doors.
- A team traveling to Austria and Hungary, [8/8 - 8/19] serving with at the Christian Associates staff conference, running pieces of children’s ministry for the conference. And actually… the whole Sheng family is taking part in this trip, so pray for D and I - for leadership, discernment and sending these students and our own
kids in the right trajectory for the nations.

As always to you friends near and far, blessings to you as you live out the Kingdom.
- tony
:::
some links you might enjoy
The Blog - http://tonytsheng.blogspot.com
Join M, a missional online social network - http://myimn.com

In the summer of 2005, 12 years after the last time I led a student team out of the country, I traveled with a team of 10 students and leaders to serve and assist one of GCC’s mission families. The McMs were living in Londrina, Brasil building relationships with university students. Our team came to town to help them catalyze relationships in the medium of a culture exchange between American and Brasilian high school students. The 10 days centered around average teenage life together including meals, music, movies, and bowling with the periodic deep life discussion talks thrown in there for good measure. On to the 3 essential questions.

1. Am I planning to have an impact that lasts for 500 years?
Absolutely, even without knowing it. We had invested in two local connections, two investments that could go on to make significant strides in leadership, relationship and movement. The first, J, was a high school student at the top of his class in academics and athletics, who the McM’s had nurtured and catalyzed. J epitomized a local, indigenous leader: a high school student who could reach more high school students than any adult, and a Brasilian who could reach more Brasilians than any American. J was committed to impacting his peers for the Kingdom, and has continued to go on to university, still involved in investing in others. The second was F, a lovely mother and housewife who wasn’t a believer at the time but was certainly a connector. F and her family had a deep reach into the community via her husband’s job relationships, her friendships with other moms and the group of kids their two sons hung out with. Although F, person of peace and connector, still isn’t a believer to my knowledge, she is still deeply connected to the McMs and is still impacting others for Jesus whether she knows it or not.

2. Can both host and teams trust each other because we are partners?
Absolutely. I could [and would, and did…] trust our hosts with our students. Our team was well prepared and lived up to expectations and reputations. Based on the McM’s recommendation, we had students live with host families that were not connected to a church. When one of our students there got a stomach bug, I knew he was in the right place when the host mom [F from above] made him soup.

3. How will I engage the culture?
Like mentioned above, we utilized host families and had no regrets. Engagement of the culture via a culture exchange was one of our primary ministry tasks and almost all of our team got to see Brasilian culture up close. This ranged from seemingly innocuous contexts like the mall to Brasilian barbeque [oh my word] to the extreme of Brasilian culture watching - seeing a local soccer game.

Photo: Some of our team at local soccer game.
Related:2005 - Brasil.

We are down to less than a week. Here is some ramblings…

- Em’s passport is the last one. The passport agency said I should call back on Saturday if we haven’t gotten it then. Hmm…
- Our original return flights had us going through Frankfurt. After some team discussion, we realized we all could delay coming home by one day so we arranged for a one night layover in Munich, which is supposed to be a lot nicer than Frankfurt. It was a pretty minimal cost and the overarching idea is that a layover in an neutral location is going to help our team regroup, recover and come home different [related - Debriefing Resources.]
- I bought a Canon CP720 printer to take with us and the thing is pretty awesome. The surface idea behind this was being able to print pictures of the kids for their parents to see during conference. The deep idea was to shape and mold the environment where their families could take home some memories.
- We are doing a big craft/team pack on Saturday, at least those that are in town. Like every year, and anytime you have a big group of people, the team is going in a million directions right before we leave. We’ve said to most of them, “See you at the airport.” [Not really though, we are meeting at my house to depart.]
- Budget wise for the whole summer, we are at about 91% give or take, meaning that we are down about $5K of about $58K. Goodness that is a lot of money.
- I mentioned before that our theme for the evening stuff is “Pirates and Treasures.” What I didn’t tell you is that this was wholly put together by our students and us adults had nothing with it.
- RobynB has put together some awesome skits to go along with our theme and EllyK and TriciaB wrote the “BEST SONG EVER” for the way we will introduce ourselves at the conference. I didn’t make that quote up either.
- These are the kinds of students I have the privilege of traveling with.

Todd Johnson - uber mission geek. You would probably love him too. From World Christian Trends, Update 2007, in the August 2007 issue of Lausanne World Pulse:
[some of you should put the rss feed into your reader too]

- We estimate that over the entire history of Christianity, seventy million Christians have been killed for their faith. Over half of these were in the twentieth century alone…
- There is already enough evangelism in the world today for every person to hear a one-hour presentation of the gospel every other day all year long.
- Ninety percent of all Christian evangelism is aimed at other Christians and does not reach non-Christians.
- Our analysis in the World Christian Database reveals that of the top one hundred most responsive people groups over one million in size, twenty-two are Tribal (nine percent of the total by population), thirty-one are Hindu (forty-eight percent), thirty-one are Muslim (twenty-five percent) and four are Buddhist (nine percent). The five most responsive of these are the Jinyu of China (Buddhist), the Khandeshi of India (Tribal), the Southern Pathan of Afghanistan (Muslim), the Magadhi Bihari of India (Hindu) and the Maitili of India (Hindu). What this means is that God himself is inviting the world’s peoples into his family. Christians must be more alert to his initiative.
- In 2007, we find ourselves in an unprecedented position for the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.

In the summer of 1993, I led, along with a female co-leader, a team of 6 students and leaders to spend three and a half weeks working with an orphanage in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic. The context for the trip was working with a missionary and his family supported via our local church. This trip was also ‘phase 3′ in an intentional progression of mission experiences much like SPACE. [In fact, this is where SPACE got the idea of progression from.] Every person on this team had traveled with me the summer before, on a 6 week buffet of mission experiences such as inner city summer camp, beach outreach and local vacation Bible schools in the coal mine communities in Kentucky. In light of the three questions:

1. Am I planning to have an impact that lasts for 500 years?
We were very short sighted and didn’t think past that summer. Much of our time was spent working with orphans and local children - certainly an admirable task. We didn’t, however, spend any time developing, catalyzing or equipping any local people to do any leading on their own. What we accomplished only lasted for that summer, if even that long. Yes, we certainly helped build energy and momentum for the teams that were there long term. But no, we didn’t provide anything that was reproducible or replicable.

2. Can both host and teams trust each other because we are partners?
Both host and team had a high level of trust. The experience itself was built upon each other’s needs and strengths - our team having lots of experience with kids ministry while the host team definitely needing a team to come in and do that ministry.
The crux of this trust was our team having to travel across the country to meet our host who had gone ahead of us by a day. Think haggling with taxis in broken Spanish over a three hour car ride.

3. How will I engage the culture?
Not very well. The majority of our time was spent in a compound on the host property. We lived with mostly Americans and while we had a few Dominicans staying with us, when they went dancing, we sat at home and played cards. Although that isn’t meant to sound pious, it reflects our working paradigm - we hardly engaged the culture. Short of staying in a Dominican home, going dancing would have given us a huge exposure to Dominican culture, such as food, music, practicing Spanish and building relationships.

Although this was a fascinating experience, asking the 3 essential questions before we left would have given the experience a much different tone and level of effectiveness.

Photo: Some of our team at Christopher Columbus’ grave site. [Yeah right…]

The metrics surrounding cross cultural mission are dire. 60% of all short term mission experiences due detriment to the witness and reputation of their hosts. 50% of all long term mission teams leave the field within the first year, never to return. Setting individuals and teams up for success requires forethought, creativity and a willingness to do mission differently. In light of the two very sobering statistics from above, here are 3 essential questions you should ask yourself and your team before you commit to a missions trip:

1. Am I planning to have an impact that lasts for 500 years? [original idea via Alex McManus from Origins 2004]
If you are predicting a summer, a year or a decade of impact, you are thinking too small. How do you have an impact for 500 years?
You:
- Impact local, indigenous, nationals - people that live in that culture and can impart their lives in that dna and context.
- Lead leaders and not just followers - movements start by creating leaders that are persons of peace, mavens, and connectors.
- Empower them to impact with a simple, reproducible strategy.
Like that “Teach a man to fish” proverb, making an impact requires being intentional about dependency and ownership, empowering instead of limiting. Cross cultural teams that are proactive about these issues will impact people for centuries.

2. Can both host and teams trust each other because we are partners?
What I know about my hosts - not only about their logistics and planning but their values, personality and style of influence - should embolden my trust of them with my team. Have I done everything I can to ensure that my team is culturally ready, has the appropriate ministry skill training and understands their job is to serve others with an attitude of flexibility? Mutual trust is built on partnership between the two parties - host and visiting team. One is not there to serve the other but rather, the shared experience is built keeping in mind the strengths and talents of both teams in the specific context.

3. How will I engage the culture?
Extremes of engagement go from living with your friends in an isolated compound to total immersion in a host culture. Although certainly daunting, you should error in the latter.
Other questions to ask:
- Will you live with a host family?
- Have you been given some cultural understanding of your new locale?
- Does this include basic language skills, trying the food and hearing about some of the major stories in this culture?
At best, failing to engage the culture will leave your team bored and remembering the experience as lacking. At worst, your team might not understand how the Gospel is relevant in every culture, you might propagate all the worst American stereotypes, and you may do more harm than good.

Some real world examples:
Dominican Republic - 1993
Brasil - 2005
Cameroon - 2006
Hungary - 2007

D and I celebrate 13 years of marriage today. We had a great weekend away attending a wedding, staying in a hotel and spoiling ourselves.

My wife is a creator-artist, guardian of belief, and family launcher. This fall, she starts a part time job at a local pottery studio. Her cover is cashier and ceramic assistant while the real mission is to continue to show elements of the Creator via her artistic creations. Off the scale in the Belief strength, she shows and tells the Shengri-Las that you do what you believe. Last year, I was in Cameroon on our 12th anniversary. D wrote me a card that said, “For our anniversary, do something fun that you have never done before.” The next day, I went to visit a pygmy village. She is determined to launch me, even when I’m terrified. I know it’s a pattern that will continue with our kids too, even when they are terrified.

Because of her, our marriage has been filled with opportunities I could have never imagined.

LOVE

Congratulations to our good friends K and K, who got married yesterday. Long time readers will remember that I helped lead a high school small group from 1999-2003 and K was one of my students. It’s one thing to watch students grow, develop and change while they are under your watch. It’s a totally different dynamic to see them become adults and friends for the cause of Jesus in the world.

::: Mark Beeson from Granger Community Church, on sprinting

Sprint, rest. Sprint, rest. Sprint, rest. Ministry is not a marathon. It is a series of sprints. Get a strangle-hold on the experiences, people and locations that renew you. Maximize your restoration opportunities. Stay fresh or you will rust out, flame out or drop out…and if you are out, you are out, no matter how you went out.

More from Tim Stevens. [Did you know Granger is a Methodist church? Check the links to see what Mark says about denominations as well.]
And… we are in sprint mode right now. Late August until mid September will be rest mode.

::: Character #6 of Leaders That Finish Well
They walk with a growing awareness of a sense of destiny and see some or all of it fulfilled. Bobby Clinton link via Steve Addison

::: Countries - Future Orientation and Competitiveness

Below is a media player loaded with the talk from Fusion earlier in July that I mentioned here. The talk is an interview style format, with our Fusion pastor TJ interviewing a church liaison officer from World Relief and…. uh… me. You should listen to her interview, it’s got lots of good stuff. Mine is okay too. Topics that you might be interested include Africa, church partnerships, sustainability, leaders creating leaders, engaging culture and The End of Poverty.

My interview starts at around 35:00. If you listen to it, I would love to get your feedback.

Here is the full link in case you want to play it on your own player.
http://www.archive.org/download/20070715.Fusion-AfricaHands/20070715.Fusion.mp3
[feed readers - there is embedded audio in this post]

I used to have meetings at church. Instead, I now have meetings where actual humans congregate [not to say that church people aren’t humans…]. This past year, I met the Orbiters a lot at the gym where the girls take gymnastics. Yes, that was a little weird. No, no one asked me why there were all these high school girls that were meeting me there. Where you meet says a lot about what you are trying to do.

Photo: Our LC leaders meeting outside of a Baskin-Robbins.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Alan Kay

Photo: Some of our middle schoolers on a prayer walk in Baltimore.

::: Urgency, Compulsion and Passion

The problem with movements that have settled down is they have all the money and all the time in the world. No sense of urgency. No desperate compulsion. No passionate cause.

More from Steve Addison

::: PM is thinking about a new Bible college
See why I love this guy…

::: NCC’s next location is in Georgetown.

Fantastic time on the LC mini missions experience [LC stands for Light Company, the name of our middle school ministry] this weekend. NLind put together two days of light service projects with an overnight between them. The first day was an afternoon serving at our county’s local food bank. This included sorting and packing food and general tidying up. The evening included showing them some of the Caleb Project’s Infobytes - great material on global missions. [Not quite my Global Missions Primer, but you know…] We also threw in there cooking smores, a game combining linguistics and Capture the Flag [yeah it kind of flopped], and a time of encouraging and praying for each other.

Saturday was spent in downtown Baltimore, again with the same folks that our other summer teams served with during Mission Advance. Colleen S set this up for us again and walked our team through the vision, strategy and lessons in culture about the inner city. This day included prayer walking and clean up around two blocks adjacent to Charm City Church.

A few observations:
- These middle schoolers - wow.
- Pastor Mike - a life of radical faith - which is what we originally intended to find in a host for our middle school experience. Hmm…
- Local, indigenous, contact and connection based on partnership - in both Colleen and the Howard County food bank. Our team saw the need in our own communities as well as in the inner city - two distinct cultures and the combination of here and there.
- Perhaps the LC experience is a entry point for summer leaders. Maybe it can be a significant part of the leadership pipeline and progression similar to the student progression.
- NLind [who has led on each middle school team, this being the 4th year, and also helped lead Cameroon 2006] did a fantastic job pulling it all together. I’ve tried to give her plenty of freedom as she has sought to intersect middle schoolers with the world. It’s fun to see the end product of one of our leaders that are creating leaders.

Some of our pictures from the day are below.

sat am
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng

my morning view we are having fun with these middle schoolers

I’m leaving in a few hours for our middle school mini missions experience. To be honest, I wish I was a lot less ambivalent about it. Part of that comes from knowing that I really haven’t done the very best at putting this thing together for this year. Sure, I can use the standard excuses - we had plans for an event that got filled, no good leads came for serving opportunities, middle schoolers are always late at signing up [which is not true], etc.

But wait…. when we decided to do this, we decided it would be different. That it would be creative and innovative. It would not just be about serving as the end goal. That we would inspire, catalyze, and transform because we see the intersection of missions and middle schoolers through a different, very unique set of lenses. We would call students to something much, much larger than themselves, because they need it and the world needs them.

Standard excuses are good if you are doing standard things. I need to give a whole different set of excuses. Instead, I will end the pep-talk to myself.

We have about 3 weeks to go. Here are some of the big items that we still have to plan:
- details on crafts for both VBS and evenings.
- build out activities in the evenings based on our theme.
- passports for RobynB, and the Shengri-Las.
- I need to get a hold of our world travelers ESunde and her brother for some final airline logistics. Apparently, they are in Iceland right now… We’ve had an itinerary for a few months but some last minute changes might make the return leg a lot more fun.
- Oh, and support. We are at about 80% give or take.
- I’m sure there is more. But we had a great team meeting last Tuesday and the momentum will continue to build.

Our theme is [if you are at the conference, help us keep this a secret until we get there please] Pirates and Treasure, which I think is amazingly creative. It will allow for a lot of fun elements as well as some good Bible teaching [Treasure like fruits of the Spirit].

I should have scored higher - Solaris is a variant of UNIX…

For the team… check out some of these:

http://kerriinfrance.blogspot.com/
http://www.unplowedground.com/
http://www.jonesfam.us/
http://www.christianassociates.org
http://fourwildgeese.blogspot.com/
http://glasgow.wordpress.com/
http://www.aixtremelife.blogspot.com/

this is the California team blog:
http://web.mac.com/jayrob2/iWeb/Connect%20Hungary%202007

Leaders create leaders, not just followers. In that sense, it is vital that we help team leaders process their experiences, similar to the way good team leaders help their teams process.

MPM and I sat down with TMurray, one of our England team leaders over lunch. Here are some of the questions we asked and a list of actions we took from our conversation, all in an effort to be better in our role of sending but also to help her process her leadership experience.

Questions
- how did you engage the local culture
- what were the ministry tasks?
- who of your team got the most out of the experience?
- what is the long term impact of your team serving?
- partnership/what unique thing did your team bring?
- what was difficult?
- did you have individual team time and what did that look like?
- how did you and the other leaders sync up?
- how prepared did you feel?
- what was your favorite event?
- if the future of humanity were dependent on one person from your team, who would it be and why? [this was my favorite one, if you couldn’t tell…]

Actions
template to each team for team preparation
mpm or i come to at least one team meeting to do a prep session or two and
provide cultural/missiological info to teams
schedule for team meetings so that finance info can be in sync
need to continue to build improvisation as a leadership skill

Photo: The 2007 England team leaders - TMurray second from the left.

A TED video: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong.

- the numbers, although still staggering, are a bit inflated
- there is a correlation between economic development and the rise of AIDS cases - when economies grow, there are more AIDS cases
- the higher the life expectancy, the more people opted to change their behavior related to AIDS [remind you of the Broken Windows theory?]

whoa.

If you are interested in the African AIDS crisis, you need to watch this video. It’s only 15 minutes and even if you disagree, it’s compelling.

The term “sweat equity” is not my original term, rather it is a term that one of our Mission Task Force members use to define the concept of a team coming together to put on a fundraiser and having the primary goal be a greater team identity, not necessarily making any money.

This weekend, our Hungary team washed people’s windows at a local gas station as a fundraiser. I was pleasantly surprised by how much money we raised and how generous and gracious people were. We raised a serious amount of money in just a few hours.

Gen Y students we have in our ministries are very inventive and experimental in their efforts to raise support - much more than we adults could ever be. Our challenge is to ensure that they get the freedom to experiment, risk and run with their ideas. And when they are given ownership to do so, guaranteed that they will apply 110% of themselves to the task.

Michelle, Lindsey and Robyn - you guys are awesome.

Shackleton was a great recruiter. Nearly 5,000 people applied for 30 spots on the ill-fated Endurance (although no historian has produced a verifiable copy of the renowned help wanted ad). Shackleton used all kinds of inventive techniques to probe for what made the applicants tick, such as asking hard-boiled sailors to sing (a test of whether they would boost or sap morale on a long voyage).

- from Mavericks at Work

Fusion155, GCC’s young adult ministry, is finishing a series on Africa this Sunday. I’ll be helping with a quick interview sometime during the service. I think it will mostly be on what people can do and the tangibles of serving even when you feel like it is so far away. And of course, big overtones of optimism - we can really make a difference.
If you are around Fusion on Sunday, stop in and say hi.

::: Want to mix with other cultures?
Regions with the highest percentage of movers (from last year) who spent the previous year abroad.
1. New York - 150,913 movers from Abroad (7.8% of all total movers to the region)
2. Washington, DC - 58,900 (7.1%)
3. Miami, FL - 62,813 (7.0%)
[Large metros only]
More from the CreativeExchange

::: DDT and Malaria
The U.S. banned DDT in 1972, spurred on by environmentalist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring.” Many countries in Europe and around the world followed suit. But after decades of exhaustive scientific review, DDT has been shown to not only be safe for humans and the environment, but also the single most effective anti-malarial agent ever invented. [emphasis mine]
From the WSJ article, “Give Us DDT” via DefeatPoverty

::: Northern Africa and the Middle East
Check out the interactive country map including populations, people groups and worldview breakdown. Did you know Morrocoo has 33M people and is about the size of California. [California has 36M people.]
via Lu

Two of our teams have gone and now come back, both of them returning this past weekend. Like any anxious parent with kids overseas, I’m relieved that they are back home with no major issues. This past week, I’ve gotten some awesome feedback about both teams. They have said things like “a joy to work with,” “so well prepared, “and “to be commended for their maturity, their servants hearts and teachable spirits.” When 60% of all short term mission trips do detriment to their host missionaries, feedback like that means we have a lot to be proud of. Not that it is all about SPACE, since if you know some of our students, you know that they were quality people long before SPACE got a hold of them for this summer.

We all know - in just about every venue of life - the better prepared you are, the more effective you will be. Student missions fits with that principle just like playing basketball, singing an opera or building a redundant web farm. We stress some pretty unconventional things with regards to our summer teams, Mission Advance being one of them. The primary reason is so that our teams are effective in the field. The rest is icing on the cake.

Photo: TriciaB working at building a team - Mission Advance 2007.

The concept of progression is important as we build students to understand cultures and impact the world. Starting with middle school, we try to progress students in both culture and physical proximity as they get older. The year between 9th and 10th grade has historically been a bit of a challenge for us.

It is an important year because we want to focus teams on something close and something that gives students experience in serving and sharing in their own culture. The best preparation for going to serve in another culture is experience serving in your own culture first. And this helps us build students that care for both their own communities as well as lands far away.

In 2005, we had the bright idea of building a once-a-week-for-six-weeks serving day. The idea was that every Friday for 6 weeks, teams would go in and serve with various ministries in and around Washington DC. [DC remains one of our strategic centers even though we didn’t send a team this year because …uh, it is just plain strategic.] The idea was good and a bit audacious but we couldn’t implement it - we didn’t have the leadership infrastructure to support it. We did end up doing one single day that summer and I still think it could work in the future with the right leadership involved.

In 2006, we sent this same year of students to the Merge conference, which had been morphed from SEMP, put on by Sonlife. SEMP really had most of the elements we were looking for - local, a lot of training and experiences based on sharing in your own culture, and an ethos focused on the outsider. Unfortunately, Merge was a bit different. Probably still a good experience for students, just not fitting exactly what we needed.

This year, we finally scored. Chain Reaction helped our team serve locally, blessing strangers, and unashamedly stretch students. Props to Matt and Jeremy for shaping the future via our team.

Photo: Jeremy with some of our team, Baltimore Inner Harbor

Related:
DC Eclipse 2005
Jeremy’s photoset

Our England team landed this evening. The only thing that I know about how the trip went was, “It was beyond awesome you have no idea it was absolutely incredible and a text message doesn’t do it justice,” from TriciaB. Of course, I knew all along it was going to be beyond awesome [sort of.]

Two teams have gone and come back as of now [Baltimore returned last Friday], about 40.96% of our summer teams. Three more teams this summer - middle school on 7/20, NYC on 8/5 and Hungary on 8/8.

Every few months, a high school or college student wants to sit down and talk to me about their interest in going on a missions trip. Usually, I try to sit down with them in person to help them think through it a bit. This usually entails two things: First, talking with them about their desires, experiences, and talents. It’s an effort to play to their strengths from the very beginning. Secondly, I try to give them the “Global Missions 101″ talk. Drawing the world on a napkin [but not much bigger] always helps too.

So this post is about the essentials of global missions in 11 minutes. If I could distill it down to the essential concepts, here they are. These are concepts that should shape action as students contemplate contributing to global missions. In my experience, the average suburban, Christian high school student has no idea about most of these concepts. So, this is an attempt to give them some important information, so that they know the world is really big and that the world really needs them. Here we go.

::: Concept #1 - The Unreached
Quite simply, this concept refers to people who have a 0% chance for hearing about Jesus. Zero. No missionary, no evangelical church, no Bible radio. Most likely, they will have not even heard the name of Jesus. The rough approximation right now is that around 40% of the world is currently unreached.

Related concept - peoplegroup - breaking the population of the world into affinity groups by culture, language, worldview, etc. [versus geopolitical countries]

For more info:
http://www.joshuaproject.org
http://www.peoplegroups.org

::: Concept #2 - The 10/40 window
A geographic window of the world referencing those regions of the eastern hemisphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator. The reason that this window is important is because it contains both huge populations of those that are ‘unreached’ [see #1] and huge populations of the world’s impoverished. This area of the world is also home to an overwhelming proportion of children and some of very harshest and most remote living conditions.

For more info:
http://home.snu.edu/~HCULBERT/1040.htm
References to the “10/40 window” on this blog

::: Concept #3 - The Current Missions Disparity
A tiny fraction of the global Church’s resources are going to the unreached. The going estimate is .5% - right, half of one percent. So for every $100, fifty cents is going to support the unreached. Not just budget and spending, but human capital as well. The current disparity of both staff and spending is an important thing to keep in mind, even if you aren’t necessarily going but just sending.

For more info:
Where Workers Serve

::: Concept #4 - Europe
From the European Spiritual Estimate:
- only 4.2% of Europeans follow Jesus and are actively concerned about the people around them following Jesus.
- this study estimates that there is only one Gospel Oriented church for every 27,749 people in Europe.
Although the 10/40 window is huge, Europe is quite strategic as well. People there are still interested in spirituality, just not the church, as evidenced by the recent fact that the name Muhammed is number 2 in baby boy names.

For more info:
European Christian Demographics
European Spiritual Estimate
YWAM Europe’s statistics

::: Concepts #5 - Other Important Concepts
- Global, urban migration
More of the world lives in urban areas than in rural areas now, meaning that cities are more strategic than ever.

- International youth ministry
Ninety-seven percent of the world’s trained youth workers live and work in the United States, ministering to less than 3% of the world’s youth population.

- The African AIDS crisis.

- Don’t underestimate your skill of knowing the English language.

In conclusion, we are living in unprecedented times. The problems facing humanity are large, complex and important. Hopefully, these concepts have given you a little dose of the world’s realities. The first step is to understand the world. Then, gather all the creativity, resolve, innovation, risk and faith you can in order to create a future that is Jesus-centered. Humanity is counting on you.

I went and visited our Baltimore team tonight. They are working and serving with Chain Reaction in the northwest part of the city and seemed to be having a great time. Today, part of their time was spent helping mow, clean and weed the grounds of the local police station. Now that is pretty cool.

I just knew the Chain Reaction team was going to take care of our team and the CR folks have executed within the context of local, long term, community presence - two really huge principles that we stick with.

I spent this morning hanging out at a …yes…. vacation Bible school. If you’ve hung around me long enough, you know I’m not a huge fan of pre archictected curriculum. Granted, I know not everyone [nor me] can write their own material… but I say, if you can come close, you should.

In any case, there is a cool church down the street from us that is running a VBS this week. And it just happens that the curriculum they are using is the same one we are helping out with in Hungary later this summer. So we signed our girls up to go to it, so they could have some fun and so we could spy. Well, not really on the ‘they could have fun’ part. [I’m kidding]

Our girls are having an absolute blast and the people I met at the church this morning we so kind and welcoming. The church also seemed to really have a heart for the world, integrating one of their own visiting [long term, involved in Bible translation in Burkina Faso - where there are over 60 some languages] missionary families into the VBS program.

Second funniest thing this morning - a kid’s shirt that read, “At the time, it seemed like a good idea.” Could be a SPACE motto.

First funniest thing this morning - someone was talking to K and pointed at me and asked her, “Is that your older brother?”

Happy 4th!

Three summers ago, I took my oldest daughter K, to spend a few days among mosquitoes, living in a tent, with no air conditioning in a Florida swamp. That’s right, we took part of a Teen Missions Boot Camp. I’m proud to say that the experience so impacted her, that the mere mention of the phrase “Boot Camp”, brings fright and terror to her.

That experience coincided with the first summer of SPACE and was a good precursor for my foray into replicating some kind of missions progression with GCC. It set a good stage for me in both the physical and directional movement for SPACE. Physically, the time was very difficult and challenging - fitting it’s exact purpose. They make it pretty miserable on purpose - because the mission field isn’t like suburban America. Florida heat, no running water, sleeping in a tent on a concrete floor, pool time for one hour a day… When traveling now, I am still relieved any time I sleep on a bed. I also appreciate bug repellent a lot more after the 160 mosquito bites between the two of us [we counted them after Boot Camp was over]. Directionally, Teen Missions certainly has a huge progression and a path to give students the practical experience for growth and the medium to get them to other cultures.

All of the above is just extra though. The most significant impact of that trip was the effect it had on K. She put her face underwater in the pool for the first time, she learned of the enormous problem of the African AIDS pandemic [back in 2004 mind you], and the experience set her up knowing that the world is a much bigger place, with much bigger problems.

This summer, Em is the same age that her sister was during Boot Camp and we had toyed with the idea of me taking both of them back and K doing the next program step up. Thankfully, it “didn’t work out.” Instead, following the Wind takes all of us to Hungary. 2004 was a milestone summer for K. I’m excited to see how 2007 will be another milestone summer for both K and Em, as well as us as parents.

2 out of 5 teams in the field now. This team is serving in Baltimore with Chain Reaction and returns on Friday. England returns on Sunday.
#3 - LC team departs on 7/20.
#4 - NYC departs on 8/5.
#5 - Hungary departs on 8/8.

They landed at Manchester safely with all of their bags. In other ‘whoa the world is connected’ news, JBourq’s nephew, who is leading a startup church, lives around the corner from the Manchester airport and is going to try to meet them to make sure they get on the train okay.

Most of you have probably heard about the London bomb that was found and diffused early Friday morning. Interestingly enough, this afternoon is when we send off our England team. I was there to pray with them before they left as a team for the airport. They are not traveling through London but are flying in to Manchester and then taking the train to Liverpool, where they will be assisting and serving YWAM Marine Reach during Liverpool’s 800th year celebration.

During the summer of 2004, SPACE’s first summer, there was a terrorist scare in NYC the night before one of our teams was leaving to go serve there. I remember thinking back then, like today, “Hmm…. how interesting…”

We live in a dangerous world - serving people in it requires discernment, resolve, bravery and faith.

On the eve of the iPhone release, read about the Nokia 1100, which has a built-in flashlight. The phone, designed for developing countries, is one of the best selling consumer electronics devices in the world, beating the iPod, Motorola RAZR, LG Chocolate, and Sony Playstation 2. via My heart’s in Accra

This is ELB [Lynn], one of our NYC team leaders, on the left. She and her friend SS are telling a bit of their story at the block party that all of Mission Advance went to this past weekend. I interviewed Lynn last night during an NYC team fundraiser at a local restaurant. Take a listen as she talks more about Mission Advance 2007. [Caution - the audio is really loud for some reason…]

[feed readers - there is embedded audio in this post]

::: African Windmill

William had to drop out of secondary school in 2002 because his family lacked funds to pay his school fees. Determined to continue his education, he started reading books from the primary school library, which had been contributed by USAID in a teacher training scheme. He discovered a pair of books on energy, one of which included the design for a windmill, and he began work on a five meter tall windmill near his family’s home, built from scrap timber, an old bicycle frame, and blades made from PVC pipe heated and pounded into flat blades. The windmill powers a bicycle dynamo, designed to power a bicycle’s headlamp. William ran the bicycle dynammo through a transformer, which provided enough power to charge a 12 volt battery. That battery in turn powers four lights, two radios and a mobile phone charger in William’s home.

via My heart’s in Accra. Also see William’s blog

::: Ghost Cities of 2010
Detroit, Michigan, USA; Alexandria, Egypt; Tianjin, China; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Bangkok, Thailand; Banjul, Gambia among others. Link.

::: Viewing youth class divisions in MySpace and Facebook

MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth.

Link via Waxy.org/links

Quite a weekend with our summer teams. Once again, our goals were to train, inspire, and tightly gel teams. Thanks to those of you that were praying for our weekend and thanks to all of those that made it happen, from help with the food prep, all the acts for The Axis, and the workshop leaders. A lot of people were instrumental to pulling it all off - and that is the way it should be.

Here are the tactical elements in case some of you were interested:

- The Axis - SPACE’s first talent and variety stage - designed to encourage, inspire and build support. We made a little bit of support from that, but it was more about that.

- Camping in tents on the church property. My favorite part about camping was being able to stuff my air mattress into my seventeen year old still-in-great-shape North Face VE-23 tent. My second favorite part were the sprinklers going off at 8am on the girls that kept me up all night. But hey, no hard feelings now… As you can imagine, this was the element that contributed most to the out-of-routine, get just a tad uncomfortable. I think it worked for most, me included.

- Team building initiatives with Amy M. One principle I asked her to stress was the idea of sacrificing for the team. During that initiative, I was the most guilty of trying to win instead of sacrificing for the team. Hmm…

- Serving and hanging out at an Adopt A Block party in downtown Baltimore. Our teams were also rotated through doing some minor clean up in the host church there and some of them got to share their story as well as do a short drama for the party. And yes, there was a dance party. Taking all of our teams there contributed a huge element to the weekend - we act on what we believe. Thanks to Colleen for hosting us to serve. [Her story is going matter more and more to Baltimore.]

- Mission workshops including principles about team unity; cultural aspects versus Biblical principles; sharing the Gospel without speaking and relational initiative. All of them from people that, once again, act, were great.

- Two separate blocks of team time.

- Heartbleeding worship with friends that are working to make a difference.

The album [from my M page] is below. [Feed readers will have to open the source post.]

Related: Mission Advance 2006

Thanks for taking a look at our prayer calendar and know that we appreciate you thinking about our summer teams. Each date that has a significant SPACE event is filled in with something that could be prayed about [pay no attention to the times.] Click on “Agenda” tab for details, events, names, etc.

Thanks again for praying for our teams and feel free to type in your prayer as a comment.

[Feed readers, go to the source post to see the calendar.]

This is a busy week around the international SPACE office. We are preparing for the second annual Mission Advance weekend - the weekend where all teams come together for some missions prep. We still believe it’s a great idea and this weekend is a great venue for making sure that we send teams that are well prepared, from tactical ministry skills, to knowing their teams well and being ready to engage new and different cultures.

Even though we did it last year, this year will still be a much different challenge. There is the standard challenges of masses of people - food and lodging. In this case, we’ve got some people helping behind the scenes for food and lodging will be a mini tent city on the church property [taken down before the wedding starts…]

Two other interesting challenges - The Axis, our talent and variety stage on Friday evening. And all of Mission Advance will be traveling to downtown Baltimore to help serve an ‘Adopt a Block’ event that one of our good SPACE friends from GCC is trying to catalyze. There are going to be quite a few of our kids sharing their story this weekend - either in a suburban youth church or on the street.

We have also invited some special guests to be with us this weekend just like last year:
N and B Rmsing - who used to live in Tanzania;
AMoser who calls India a second home and her session entitled, “Alyssa’s Tour of the World” [I wrote about her here] ;
D and J Helger who run Nav Youth here in Howard County;
MPM, our logistics coordinator - these four will be running some special mission/culture workshops,
and Amy M, wife of MPM who will be running some team building activities.

I’m excited about this weekend. I have a feeling there are going to be some significant moments this weekend - groups of people that transform from individuals into teams, kids blessing strangers from vastly different cultures and some students deciding to go whenever and wherever God calls.

Photo: Mission Advance 2006

We just put the final touches on trip number 5 - a mini missions experience for middle school students. Long time readers will remember that for the past three summers, we have taken teams of students to serve at CMTS, which gives participants a very unique view of the world, an out-of-the-box perspective on missions and a weekend full of manual labor. All of the elements are strategic, especially the manual labor - we want those kids to be pretty tired at the end of the day so they don’t give us any trouble. [I’m kidding, sort of…]

This year, in an attempt to rearchitect the experience, we came up with plans very late for a middle school experience. Instead of traveling anywhere, we are using GCC as a hub and will be serving two locally connected ministries. Also, because of the lateness, we aren’t requiring this team to be at Mission Advance, happening this weekend.

Part of me is a little disappointed we aren’t taking them further away and doing something more daring and dramatic. But overall, I’m glad we are at least doing something. You know middle school - hormones, awkwardness, energy, fluctuations between being a kid and being an adult - when better to plant and grow a mission to rescue humanity?

[Info sheet is available in the upper right hand sidebar, “Light Company Mini Missions”.]

These are my parents Frank and Pauline with our two little characters… My dad finished seven rounds of chemo a few weeks ago and he looks good, relatively speaking. Thanks to you all for praying for him since he had surgery for colon cancer in November.

Happy Fathers Day to you all.

OK - I’ve done this before, but I’ll just do it again… hehe.

Happy Father’s Day, ts!

(and if you want to wish him the same, just do it here!)

~deanna

We had another Hungary team meeting late last week and as the plans for the staff conference and our team continues to gel, there is a real sense of destiny and purpose for what we are going to do there. This is one of the phases of trips I love - an undercurrent of nervousness, excitement and energy, intersected by the unknown and mystery all the while knowing that we are doing something important.

One of the tasks our team has been charted to do is this element of evening fun with the kids, centered around the Wordless book. It’s a great concept since some of these kids don’t speak English and some of the kids will be able to go back home to non English speakers and communicate what they believe without having to use language words.

Our team is comprised of Christian kids - the wordless book can easily become an all to familiar cliche to all of us. So I challenged the team to really expand their imagination about how to communicate this. We need to make an experience that is powerfully centered around these ideas - and I know this team can pull it off.

Here is what we brainstormed - remember the brainstorm phase means not saying no to any idea, no matter how unrealistic.
- paint 5 different hotel rooms the colors and walk the kids through
each one
- skits based on each color where all the participants are dressed/face
painted in the color
- pick out film clips from popular kid movies that illustrate or
symbolize each colors principle

Creativity, innovation, experimentation. How would you break the cliche of the wordless book?

M… subversive…network…those who MUST…to help humanity…
Join us.

I didn’t think Mommy was *that* surprised…. Click for larger. From Em’s Paw Print Press [self publishing for elementary school kids] book.

::: “cults are the unpaid bills of the church…”
and Burning Man - link

::: Portable Youth Ministry

- go to where students are, a school campus, rather than asking them to come to us
- people serving in different capacities
- forces you to be efficient

link
By the way, D has been trying to sell a mini version of this idea for a number of years. Ask her about it.

::: Tailing sixty affluent teenage girls [and one boy] through the mall
link

::: Andy Stanley on leadership

“‘Follow me.’ Follow we never works. Ever. It’s ‘follow me.’ God gives a man or a woman the gift of leadership. And any organization that has a point leader with accountability and freedom to use their gift will do well…“

link via The Leading Blog

Q: Do we need new churches planted in the suburbs?

A: Absolutely. These are places that need to hear the Gospel. There is a lot of room for planters who can think creatively, who see the world of suburbia as a missionary would. Very few people try that in the suburbs because they just default to what they know. Worship band, PowerPoint preaching, a four-step system for discipleship. I think that missionary training needs to be as rigorous for the suburbs as it is for the foreign mission field.

Excerpt from an interview with David Goetz, author of Death by Suburb, from the Summer 2007 issue of Cutting Edge. The subtitle of the book is “How to Keep the Suburbs From Killing Your Soul.”

The blog has been fairly quiet for a few days now and I’ve probably tried to write this post 20 some times. We’ve had to deal with a few very difficult situations last week - some of them would have been quite frustrating on their own. Instead, they have been coupled with one of the most difficult decisions that I have been involved with since SPACE started. It has not been easy and I know the leaders that were involved have begged for discretion and wisdom, as have I.

It is vitally important that we protect the reputation and ministries of our host missionaries. This means that we send the best teams, teams that are well prepared, teams that go above and beyond when it comes to serving and relating and individuals on teams that do their very best to do right. Just as important, we protect our leaders, not putting them in situations where their leadership can be easily compromised. We absolutely trust them and we will set them up for success in every way that we can.

Because both of these values came into jeopardy, we as a leadership team were forced to make some changes to one of our summer teams, which departs in less than a month.

Our leaders are to be commended - they were prayerful, discerning, inviting feedback. When the time came to act upon a decision, no matter how painful, they did the right thing. Sometimes, doing right will haunt you for years.

movies
what we could bring
[those top two links are some new friends that have connected with us
- they have two girls the same age as the Sheng girls - insight into life in another culture]

The 2nd most popular boys name in the UK
Passive indifference to faith has left Europe’s churches mostly empty

A simple case of dependency is where missionaries start a church, a school or a hospital without figuring out how those things can be run by the local people. These projects may run just fine as long as a missionary (they don’t have to pay) is there to help, or as long as monthly infusions of subsidy keep coming from abroad.
By contrast, all over the world are broken-down school buildings and even smoldering church buildings that have been left behind by fast-growing church movements that have learned how to grow without depending on outside help.
Self-reliance is the opposite of dependency. Self-reliance emerges when people discover ways to do things with self-respect and in ways that employ what is within the range of their control. Growth becomes spontaneous. They do not “depend” on help that is beyond their control… - Ralph Winter, Mission Frontiers, May-June 2007

[Related: The Greatest Missiologist]

The session culminated with a healthy dose of controversy. Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda gave a fiery talk, articulating his well-honed arguments against foreign aid, which he views in no uncertain terms as Africa’s problem, not its solution. Eloquent, funny and forceful, Mwemba sent a jolt through the divided audience. Many stood and cheered; others muttering audibly in disagreement. “Do any of you know someone who grew wealthy from receiving aid?” he asked, midway through his talk. The silence was broken by … Bono. Who argued that yes, actually, government aid helped Ireland through the potato famine, for starters. (Bono would take the stage himself in Session 2).

From the TEDGlobal 2007 - “Africa: The Next Chapter” conference. Um… yes, that Bono…

Middle School
Two days of local service opportunities near Howard County, MD
[more details soon - post will be updated then]

::: Baltimore
Incoming 10th graders
Team of 7 leader and 12 students
Serving in Baltimore with Chain Reaction
July 1 - 7, 2007
$5400

::: New York City
Incoming 11th graders
Team of 6 leaders and 13 students
Serving in New York City with Urban Impact New York
August 5 - 11, 2007
$11,000

::: Liverpool, England
Incoming 12th graders
Team of 4 leaders and 12 students
Serving with Marine Reach
June 29 - July 9, 2007
$22,000

::: Hungary
Mixed age group
Team of 6 leaders, 7 students and 2 kids
Serving with Christian Associates International
August 8 - 18, 2007
$28,000

::: Middle School Mini Missions Experience
Team of 15 students and 6 leaders
Serving two local ministries connected with GCC - FISH of Laurel and Charm City Church
July 20 - 21, 2007

“On the one hand, it means small groups can make very bad decisions, because influence is more direct and immediate and small-group judgments tend to be more volatile and extreme. On the other hand, it also means that small groups have the opportunity to be more than just the sum of their parts. A successful face to face group is more than just collectively intelligent. It makes everyone work harder, think smarter and reach better conclusions than they would have on their own. In his 1985 book about Olympic rowing, _The Amateurs_, David Halberstam writes: ‘When mot oarsmen talked about their perfect moments in a boat, they referred not so much to winning a race but to the feel of the boat, all eight oars in the water together, the synchronization almost perfect. In moments like that, the boat seemed to life right out of the water. Oarsmen called that the moment of swing.’ When a boat has swing, its motion seems almost effortless. Although there are eight oarsmen in the boat, it’s as if there’s only one person - with perfect timing and perfect strength - rowing. So you might say that a small group which works well has intellectual swing.” - James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

Recruiting the right team leaders, cultural preparation, the task of raising support together, bonding the team - all of it is so that our teams land and serve with this idea of swing. I would take it a step further though - not just intellectual and not just limited to a single moment. Rather an experience of swing with multiple layers.

When was the last time you were part of a team with swing? And why was the team so effective?

The Axis - a talent and variety stage - is an opportunity for you to show your support for the summer SPACE mission teams. Come out and experience the artistry, creativity and fun that our summer teams embody and support them via being at the show, performing an act [music, skit, short film, dance, etc.] or making a donation to a SPACE team. Friday June 22 at the Warehouse - 8200 Old Columbia Road, Fulton, MD. The first act opens at 7.15, light refreshments will be served and guests of all ages are more than welcome.

I, nor SPACE, have never been involved in anything even closely resembling this. So you can imagine what kind of fun we are going to have with it. AND, it is a neat way to gather community [with a cause] around our summer teams and gather momentum and support [both moral and financial]. AND, it’s doing something missions-wise that I think is pretty creative and innovative. If you are anywhere near Columbia, MD, we would love to see you. Contact me via email or comments if you need more details.

“Regardless, what’s really important about the work of Smith [studies of experimental economics] and his peers is that it demonstrates that people who can be, as he calls them, ‘naive, unsophisticated agents,’ can coordinate themselves to achieve complex, mutually beneficial ends even if they’re not really sure, at the start, what those ends are or what it will take to accomplish them. As individuals, they don’t know where they’re going. But as part of a market, they’re suddenly able to get there, and fast.” - James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

If this is true, we aren’t giving enough credit to our teams, small groups and communities.

“Stretch goals” were a term used in job 1.2 of certain things we would stretch for but not necessarily achieve. On the contrary, our dreams and visions should inherently be ones that stretch us and be consistent with the ideas of risk, adventure and taking whatever we are doing to the next level.

Here is how SPACE has stretched me and us, in the past four years:

2004 - combining all summer student mission teams under one idea
2005 - combining movements of students with GCC’s intentionally placed families around the world
2006 - Mission Advance as a weekend context for preparing students, sending a high school team to deep, dark Africa
2007 - The Axis [tell you more about this one soon], two overseas teams, a 10% increase in operating budget.

Am I queasy? Yes.
Is that any different from June of the last three years? No.

What leader from a feature film most reminds you of you?

[Stolen from the M page because I like this question so much…]

We had team meeting #3 this past weekend, where most of the team went to eat at Old Europe - a German restaurant in DC. For this team, meeting #3 is the one where the team started to gel, to mold, mesh and become collectively one. You can see people stop being formal and start being friends, to ask probing, deeper questions and start thinking about others instead of just themselves.

Two other elements that were important for this meeting. First, about an hour car ride each way. Best use of time which also is the second element - the Myers Briggs test. One of the best ways to gel a team together. And, of course, we chart it out together.

Not to mention, the riveting and engaging older woman who played all kinds of fun songs on the piano, including all the songs from “The Sound of Music.” And she sang the words. And she was blind. [No, I’m not kidding.]

Photo: Where our team fits on the MBTI scale.

Related:
Getting Started with Mission Team Preps
Cameroon 2006 Meeting #3
Brasil 2005 Meeting #3 [I think it was #3]

I had a difficult conversation this past weekend when someone quit on one of my teams - and not just one of the SPACE teams but my personal Hungary team. Now, let me just say for the record - I have had *tons* of people quit on me over the years. Seriously. Five or six people quit under my leadership on job 1.2. My Dteam certainly had guys decide not to come back because we were studying the Bible or because they didn’t like the way it was run or because we as a group were too high on the compassion scale [haha kidding…] I think there have been instances where people have quit on a SPACE team before. And if not, well, here is a first but certainly not a last.

Get this - if you are in charge or leading something, eventually, people will quit under your direction. Campus team, job supervisor, Bible study leader, whatever. Team members, customers, clients, partners, bosses.

Let’s be realistic about it. Not everyone will get along with everyone else. Not everyone understands or cares to understand. Some might be in it just for the ride - the sooner they wake up, the better for everyone involved. If their heart isn’t in it, they are going to be fluff weight anyway and will eventually bog you down.

You and I are doing this for those who stay. For the ones that are sold out. The committed to the core. The ones that know we will prevail. The ones that stay awake at night knowing the world is going to be marked because of us.

M. Join us.

SPACE started in the Fall of 2003 as a pilot idea. Most of us were actually okay if the whole thing didn’t last past one school year. This summer marks our fourth summer in resourcing, catalyzing and mobilizing students and below is a sample of some of the sketchy ideas we have toyed with. I’m pretty sure a lot of people are glad we didn’t execute on some of these ideas:

1. Sending a team somewhere overseas that didn’t have the full approval/blessing of the director of youth ministries.
Relevant point in the dialog: “You know, they kidnap people in that country…”
[Instead, we found another option that had people on the ground that we knew well.]

2. Driving empty strollers around the Mall to celebrate Sanctity of Life Sunday.
[Instead, we took a team of students to volunteer at a pregnancy crisis center.]

3. Kicking off two team members from an overseas team who decided to start dating after they had both been accepted on the team but before the team got to the field.
[Instead, we sat them down and gave them very clear guidelines, which they followed until a dog bit one of them - extenuating circumstance but hey it was a missions trip…]

4. Saying no - to risk, to people we had never met face to face, to taking students literally and figuratively to a place where they had never been before.
[Instead, we said yes with good reason to opportunities that were strategically with friends of like mind.]

Photo: The first SPACE team ever - middle school team serving at CMTS, Bernville, PA. [A DC team and a NYC team were later that summer.]

::: Two principles of leadership from the Lifechurch.tv dudes
The 20% discomfort factor [link]
Refusing to delegate period or refusing to delegate not only tasks but authority [link]

::: Robert Webber planned his own funeral
Webber wrote The Younger Evangelicals among other things. [Related: some good quotes from the book]

::: Species explosion

Already this year researchers have announced the discovery of a bunch of new species: 6 types of bats, 15 soft corals, thousands of mollusks and 20 sharks and rays, to name a few.

Link via kottke.org. Does this reflect something about innovation?

::: Newspring Church gave a house away on Mother’s Day.

“Unfortunately, the word trust is used - and misused - so often that it has lost some of its impact and begins to sound like motherhood and apple pie. That is why it is important to be specific about what is meant by trust. In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable with one another.” - Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, quoted in The Big Idea.

Proximity builds trust - which is why Community Christian Church’s office is designed like it is.

From The End of Poverty, Dr. Sachs outlines the Big 5 technologies that are transferable and could be invested in to get parts of Africa on to the first rung of the economic ladder.

:: Agricultural inputs
fertilizers, water harvesting, small-scale irrigations, improved seeds, storage facilities
[My friend Dean is helping purchase and run - with the eventual turn over - a banana plantation in Malawi.]
Think about studying landscape architecture, civil engineering, agriculture/plant science, biology…

:: Investments in basic health
antimalarial tools [like bednets,] treatment of HIV/AIDS, skilled birth, sexual and reproductive health services

:: Investments in education
vocational training in farming, computer literacy
training in infrastructure maintenance such as electrical, diesel generator, water harvesting, carpentry
[The goal is to know these well enough to be able to train others.]

:: Power, transport and communications services
Power services - electricity - off grid generator - provided for water well pumps, milling grain or other food processing, refrigeration, carpentry, charges for household batteries
Transportation services - getting harvest to market, emergency medical care, shuttling resources back and forth
Communication services - shared village mobile phones connect with the outside world, web connectivity for education, connection and information

:: Safe drinking water and sanitation
protected springs, bore wells, rainwater harvesting storage tank pumping station

If you are in high school or college and you really want to impact the world, then, here is my advice:
Learn one of these technologies. And I mean really learn it - everything about it, how to apply it practically, in a variety of settings, and in the most remote environments you can think of.
Practice your skills repeatedly.
Go to Africa to really practice.
And come back and tell us all about it.

[Related: Notes from Chapters 1, 2, 3, Malaria, 10, and Reith Lecture 1.]

Every year our momentum gets bigger and bigger. I don’t think it’s just about quantity - rather it is about direction and weight. Here is a sample:

:: ELB, who has served with SPACE as a middle school trip leader as well as a student participant, went to the Dominican Republic during Spring Break. And… not on a missions trip, but with a group of students that just wanted to serve an orphanage - not related to a church at all. I would call that mission on multiple levels. She is on the leader team for the NYC team this coming summer.

:: LAC and her mum are going to Uganda this summer. She got in touch asking if I knew anything about the org they were going with. They have definitely done their legwork in terms of finding a reputable place to go with. She wasn’t part of SPACE as a student but got connected as the Ghost started to spur her to think and act about Africa.

:: JAB, one of my leader team from Brasil, is going to Costa Rica for an internship this summer. Very much like a missions trip, he will be traveling around the country, going to language school, working on urban planning and community revitalization projects, living with a Costa Rican host family and showing people why Americans are likable after all.

:: His better half [and they are getting married in March], FZ, also one of my leader team from Brasil, is graduating from UofMD and then going to Cairo with IV Urban Trek. Some details about her trip:
- Your cell phone and wallet get locked up in a church where your team preps and debriefs in LA.
- You are allowed to bring $30.
- All your clothing for six weeks must fit into carry on luggage. Your luggage that gets checked in holds clothing that you give away.

Weighty momentum won’t be able to be stopped given enough time, even if we wanted to stop it.

Below are the percentages of leaders serving this summer that have been a part of a SPACE experience in the past. We consider this measurement an important one to track - one we consider a “core” score.

Baltimore [9th grade] - 3/7 42%
NYC [10th grade] - 5/6 - 83%
England [11th grade] - 2/4 - 50%
Hungary [various] - 5/6 - 83%
total - 15/23 - 65%

This ratio is important to measure because it gives us a feel for how experienced our leaders are, how well we know our leadership team in general, and the-oh-so-subjective criteria of ‘Do they get it?’ If they have done something with SPACE in the past, that criteria is probably yes.

[Related: Fall 2006 core score]

This week, D and I have been doing some thinking and planning for Mission Advance. Yes, that same project that last year seemed to invite total chaos and constant rain, yes that one there. But we feel good about it this year. Well, better about it this year. It is the right thing to do and we’ve made it an element of all summer teams for this year, starting from the time the trips have been made public.

We’ve also been talking a lot about reinvention, innovation and change for SPACE, not because we want to change it, but because it almost has to. And to that end, Mission Advance is going to be quite different this year. Changing something is difficult but we have to get to the point where we are willing to risk what we have already achieved. It was new last year and good. It might be better this year. Or not. But we will give it a go. I’m excited to tell you more soon.

Mission Advance is a weekend where we take all of our collective summer teams away for the weekend together. The weekend’s primary goals are to focus teams on working together, getting to know one another, and going through some informal missions and cultural training. Of course, the bigger picture is that we are architecting an experience based on movement [because the Gospel moves], teams [we do it together] and risk [because we don’t always know for sure].

[Related: September thoughts after last summer and Mission Advance 2006]

::: A mini van with 400 HP
Link via Metacool

::: How messy is your desk?

People who keep messy desks actually spend less time looking for things than people with neat desks. And you know what? Common sense backs this up. If you’re a busy person, and a lot of stuff is coming across your desk—how can you possibly keep a pristine, neat desk if you’re not spending a significant amount of time processing paper that could otherwise have been safely ignored if you had a messy desk. You can’t be extremely neat and organized unless you put a lot of resources into it. And you know what, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy increases. Whatever you do, the more productive you are, the more mess you create. And the only way to deal with that is to spend a lot of energy to get rid of the mess. — An interview with Dave Freedman, author of A Perfect Mess.

I think this is good news for the International SPACE office.

::: Eliminating email overload and tripling productivity in 24 hours.
PDF from ChangeThis. At Job 1.2, I averaged 50 emails a day, most of it noise. It was on the verge of unscalable.

::: Bill Gates - America’s Greatest Missionary?
Link via Bob Roberts

“Culture fit is more of a key determinate of success or failure in a company than actual experience or ability. It’s one thing to tune into the superficial tenets of a culture, but it’s another to really understand the culture.” — When You Don’t Fit In at a New Firm from CareerJournal

We had an offsite team party today at work to celebrate my two months with the company. No I’m kidding. But I’m ecstatic to report that the new job is still going great, at least from my point of view. I hope that my new supervisors feel the same way haha… I’m still learning something new pretty much every day, which is a really good thing for a career in technology, not to mention being fun. I also feel like I have connected well with my new colleagues and believe that my skills at doing this can be wholly credited to some of my extracurricular activities *ahem* SPACE.

Sure, I learned tons and gained great skills from my other professional experiences. But when it came to actually engaging the specific culture in my new job [and you do know that every environment has a culture], lessons we have tried to impart to students were very practical for me as well. Lessons like being a learner instead of thinking you know it all; identifying key elements, stories and legends of a culture; and how important it is to at least try key elements of a culture like music, food and language [well, maybe not so much that last one…]

A few short examples:
::: My new friend R spent 30 years working for the government. His personal email hints of Oakland and Pittsburgh and he takes the sports pages of the paper to McDonalds every day. His car has a bumper sticker that says “My other car is a Nimbus 2000.” In other words, he loves baseball and Harry Potter and can tell you long, varied and rich stories about a career working for the federal government.

::: Every person has a mini-whiteboard outside their cube. It is used for information - when are you going to be out or late, emergency contact info, etc. When I first arrived, my cube didn’t have a whiteboard and I had to wait a few weeks while mine was on order. The most innocuous object can be significant in a specific context.

::: My new friend B, who sits next to me and is training me is really involved at Covenant Life church, Josh Harris‘ church. It’s too bad - not that he goes to that church - but that I’m working so closely with someone who has the same belief system. I mean, that is a good thing. Er, sort of…

::: It’s amazing what you can learn about people when you ride in a car with them for a few minutes.

Our [secret/covert] couples group watched the first part of this tonight. It’s pretty good if you had a group of people that needed to be introduced to Africa and the AIDS crisis. It’s produced by Willow Creek and features Bill and Lynn Hybels. It comes with a little discussion guide which has some good questions.

For those interested in more, of course, The End of Poverty.

Our Hungary team had a great time hanging with K and B McN and their kids tonight - real live missionaries! Since they are one of the families that will be at the CAI conference we are serving at this summer, we invited them to our team meeting to meet some of the team and tell us what the conference is like from their perspective - one part vacation, one part great worship and teaching experiences, one part reconnecting with good friends who share the same mindset and experiences that you haven’t seen for a year. It was a very fun time of hanging with them. The McNs are also the original way we imagined this trip in the first place since they are a GCC supported family, having been a part of Grace before the mission field.

Two my favorite stories from tonight: From K - how an In and Out Burger t-shirt reaches across the globe. From B - looking out over the city they just moved to and thinking, “God, my only purpose for moving here is to see the Kingdom advanced.”

If in 500 years, we have one person from SPACE live like that, it will all have been worth it.

And the Sheng children were great little babysitters tonight.

“The singular one-volume source of information on North American missions today.” Of course, you should also be asking, “What is the future of North American missions?” That answer isn’t in this post.

But according to this book:

Austria
Number of Missions Organizations: 37
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 190

Brazil
Number of Missions Organizations: 137
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 1509

Cameroon
Number of Missions Organizations: 34
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 328

Hungary
Number of Missions Organizations: 59
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 286

Micronesia
Number of Missions Organizations: 11
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 32

Dubai
Number of Missions Organizations: 1
Number of Missionaries in the Country: 0

Try it here yourself:
[RSS readers - click to post to see]

Matt, our logistics coordinator, threw this idea out to our leader teams and they have totally run with it - me included. Host a mission support letter stuffing party. It ensures your letters get out while you have some fun with your team.

Photo: TH, EllyK and GM at a recent Hungary team letter stuffing par-tay.

::: Cities Where People Walk the Fastest

1. Singapore; 10.55s
2. Copenhagen (Denmark); 10.82s
3. Madrid (Spain); 10.89s
4. Guangzhou (China): 10.94s
5. Dublin (Ireland); 11.03s
6. Curitiba (Brazil); 11.13s
7. Berlin (Germany); 11.16s
8. New York (USA); 12.00s
9. Utrecht (Holland); 12.04s
10. Vienna (Austria); 12.06s
Time in seconds to cover 60ft (0.02km)

link via kottke.org

::: Rick Warren on giving back

PDL money scared him to death, so in 2002 he and his wife made 5 decisions: 1) Don’t change lifestyle at all. 2) Stopped taking salary from church. 3) Gave the church everything back that it ever paid in salary. 4) Set up three foundations. Acts of Mercy (funds AIDS ministry because AIDS is leprosy of 21st century); Equipping Leaders; Global PEACE Fund. 5) Became reverse tithers: give 90% and live off 10%. Why? Every time we give it breaks the back of materialism over our lives. God made PDL a success because God knew what Rick would do with the money.

link via Jeremy Del Rio

::: The new new careers

It’s a new twist on a very old concept. When cholera and yellow fever spread during the 18th century, “medical geographers” drew maps to show infected areas but had no way of knowing where an epidemic would strike next. Tatem [the mapper] pulls data from NASA satellites to plot a picture of rainfall, temperature, vegetation, and other variables in regions where malaria has struck. He correlates it with infection rates and hospital reports to create a map of the disease and its projected spread.

Description of a disease mapper. Link via Dan Pink.

Kt’s class was doing a unit on Africa a few weeks ago and so I dragged NLind in with me to talk to them a little bit about Cameroon and Uganda. We had a great time telling some fun stories and showing pictures and passing around some of our souvenirs [the drums, Cameroonian and Ugandian money, jewlery box, necklaces] I even had D snag the :: oh so cool wood carving of the country of Cameroon that I cannot get hung at GCC but I’m not bitter :: from the GCC conference room so I could bring that in to show the kids.

The main point the teacher wanted was the idea of how geography has shaped the culture, which is really a fascinating subject when it comes to Africa. I think she also specified something so that the talk wouldn’t turn religious. And we totally kept religion out of it, except for the one time NLind said the “M” word….

Telling the stories are important. And the stories, if we really think about them, are much more than about a missions trip, a destination or some project. Our stories are about humanity.

One day, I’m going to take a whole mess of people to Origins… In the meantime, Eric Bryant has write ups 1, 2 and 3 and Josh Griffin has some good notes on one of the sessions on character.

I’ve already been pretty fortunate this year in terms of being invested in - having been at Humana 2.0 in January and then virtually at Shift in March. In fact, in late March, between some time off of work and processing both conferences, I felt like the balance between listening and doing was not enough on the doing side. [Does it feel like there are conferences going on all year long these days?] If I could pick only one, it would be Origins. There is just something about that LA vibe.

[Related: My Origins 2004 processing, right before the first summer of SPACE.]

from the Center for Missional Research

Missions Sunday [or as I am going to start calling it now - Pre Missions Sunday] was this past Sunday. It is the Sunday sometime in the spring or summer where the adult body gets to hear about all the summer teams. This time around, we were fairly ready with 3 out of 5 times, meaning that we had teams chosen, team pictures available and prayer cards printed. A fourth team was almost ready and a fifth team… well, we are seeking on that one…

This year, like every other detail every other year, has been a little different in that there are a whole other set of adult trips that GCC is doing this summer and fall - so the whole lobby was filled with mission stuff. All in all, there were ten or eleven teams represented. People stood up as teams were outlined on slides and then Pastor Mark spoke on Isaiah 58 and the idea of justice. He also outlined the overall direction for the Africa initiative and the first part of that is a partnership with AIDS Orphans Educational Trust, based in Uganda. [GCC has sent 3 or 4 teams to AOET in recent years.] And this Sunday was kind of a follow up to last Sunday, where the interview with Bono and Bill Hybels was shown.

I was surprised last year that my brain didn’t implode sometime during the morning [it was Father’s Day, I had worked all night, etc.] This year was just the opposite, nice and relaxing. It was also a lot of fun to see Em so excited about being able to stand up with the team. [K was sick with strep.]

The beauty of this Sunday is that the students feel like the whole church is behind them - which she is. And the adults feel like our students are doing really significant things in the world - which they are.

Photos: Some of the students standing during their slide; B and K McN in the lobby. B and K are from GCC and with CAI and are in MD for about a month before returning to the field. We will be hanging with them and their kids in August.

[Related: Pre Missions Sunday 2005 and 2006.]

how em rolls
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

seat belt - nah

crash helmet - absolutely

[Pre-Missions Sunday is this Sunday. If you are at Grace, we would love to meet you.]

Our summer support levels for this year are about 20% more than last year. That is a little daunting because I thought last year was a huge stretch goal. Honestly, I am a bit anxious about the whole support thing. And I’m not the only one…

We as a family have quite a bit to raise.
We have some students that are going on multiple overseas trips and have a big goal.
Some individuals on our teams are looking at other projects post-summer and looking at the combined large goal.

A conversation I have had a few times now revolves around the idea that the intimidating amount of support should not deter us. Yes they are large goals but if God has called us to these tasks, then we should simply go and act on faith that He will provide the means.

And if the goal was small, if it was something we could simply do ourselves, if we could do it with our own strengths, smarts, and abilities - it wouldn’t be worth it would it?

[Related - Mission Support Metrics, 2005]

Photo: Post Mission Sunday, August 2006. [Those are my feet on the screen!]

::: Papua New Guinea has the most number of languages of any geopolitical country.

::: Kevin Kelly - founder of Wired magazine speaks at the Q conference:

1000 years in the future is only 13 generations.. what was it like back 1000 years ago: gospel, church, culture, future.. noted the invention - technology of printing.. it changed culture.. “science” was also a new technology that emerged..

and

[first time ever] Humans have only ever experienced a rise in prosperity in parallel with a rise in population.

via DJ

::: Alex McManus asks:

93. What insights will we gain about the scriptures the first day they are read on Earth Colony Mars?

If you think Alex is crazy, you do know that scientists just found a planet that might be hospitable, don’t you?

::: A city of 2 million without street names or addresses via Jordon

::: “She said in one sentence what 1000 missionaries in 1000 years could never do.” The real story of the 3 Christians killed in Turkey last week. via Floyd McClung [Floyd wrote one of the articles for Perspectives]

UPDATE: 2007-05-04
Andrew Jones posts that the media exaggerated the details of the murders.

::: The founder of YWAM from Bob Roberts –

It became real quiet for a few minutes while Loren answered in typical humble Loren fashion, “Oh, I don’t know, I just said yes. All I did was obey. God spoke and I said yes. Maybe He asked 1,000 people before me, I was just the one who said yes–maybe I didn’t know any better.”

::: Rodney goes to jail [for a good cause]

What a life
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

ah the innocence huh…

Another post in a series of posts based on the book The End of Poverty.

Chapter 10 - The Voiceless Dying

:: Deeper cause of Africa’s poverty than corruption. Ghana, Malawi, Mali, and Senegal failed to prosper whereas societies prone to more corruption such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia enjoyed rapid economic growth.
:: Isolation and lack of basic infrastructure are the prevailing conditions of most of rural Africa, and that rural Africa is where most Africans live.
:: Malaria and AIDS
:: The WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH)
1. Causation runs in both directions regarding poverty and disease.
2. Eight areas for longer life expectancy - AIDS, malaria, TB, diarrheal disease, acute respitratory infection, vaccine-preventable disease, nutritional deficiencies, and unsafe childbirth.
3. Donor aid from the rich world to the poor world ought to rise to $27B by 2007 - about an annual investment of one thousandth of rich-world income. $27B to avert 8 million deaths per year.
:: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria
Key point was that drug treatment for the poor would cost the donor world much less. Antiretroviral medicines can be priced very low in poor countries due to high pricing in monopoly and high-income markets.
:: Geography has conspired with economics in Africa - lacks navigable rivers with access to the ocean for easy transport and trade, highland populations having more reliable rainfall and soils but more isolation have higher densities of people, more than 90 percent of crops are rain fed.

[Related: Notes from Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Malaria in Africa, Sachs the Optimist]

[clockwise sort of]
D, Robyn, Elly, Erin, Michelle, Lindsey, Sven, moi, Tyler, K, Em, Greg, Trevin, Tricia [not shown Leslie and Emilie]

We would LOVE for you to be praying for us.

And…

I was pretty convinced… but now I’m really convinced…

From talk 1 of this series:

::: malaria nets
300M sleeping sites in Africa that need protection from malaria
anti-malaria bed net costs $5 and last five years - $1 a year
multiple kids sleep under one
total investment - $1.5B for 5 years
the most amazing bargain of our time

::: the solution to overpopulation is child survival
it is a myth that saving children contributes to the overpopulation problem
in fact, child survival is correlated and causally related to reducing fertility rates among poor households
you want them to have fewer children? assure them that the fewer children that they have will survive
you cannot leave children to die to solve the overpopulation problem

::: optimist

I spend my time with people who are dying. Twenty-two years ago I started to say that we needed debt cancellation for the poorest countries. (APPLAUSE) It came late, but it came. I can’t give up, that we are doomed. (APPLAUSE) That’s why I started this lecture as I did, that too many of us think it is impossible, too many think it is unreal, but that is a dangerous defeatist belief. That’s exactly where I started. We have to believe that we can make choices if we can understand them. We have to believe that the more we analyse together and reason together, especially in this house of all places on the planet, that it’s possible to sort out some of these things. No part of the whole planet has done more than this institution to change the course of history in fact. Life expectancy was twenty-five years, and it’s because of what this house and what it represents has accomplished, that in the rich world we’re at eighty years, and in the middle income world we’re at seventy years. And when I think about how Condorcet, months before he was killed in the French Revolution, talked about how we could harness reason to grow more crops and to extend life expectancy - what right did he have to be optimistic, but he got it exactly right. So what right do we have to be so pessimistic, and blind, and not moving, when people are dying on our watch?

The full transcript is here.

[Related - my posts from The End of Poverty - Chapter 1, 2, 3, and Malaria.]

::: England
07.England Parental Release Form

07.England Support Response Cards

::: Hungary
07.Hungary Parental Release Form

07.Hungary Support Response Cards

::: Baltimore
07.Baltimore Support Response Cards

::: NYC
07.NYC Support Response Cards

Thank You Inserts

Mission Support Letter Examples

Return Envelope Labels
[Please note - These have been formatted for Avery 5160/8160 labels]

“No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.”

- Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, via Alan Hirsch

Dear Friends, Family, Co-laborers,

Each year, right around this time, Tony sits down and carefully constructs a support letter for one (or two) of his many missionary adventures. For years, I have been the whisper in the background, voice of reason (hehe – OK, maybe not ALL the time!), prayer support, and the organizer of funds, hotel reservations, an administrator of sorts and the point person the homefront. It has honestly been a fun journey, while a little sketchy at times (like the two weeks while he was in Brazil and we had no shower to speak of in our house!), and I would never trade those years for anything else.

This year, things have come together for a different sort of adventure, one that we have been dreaming of in our hearts for several years. God has opened the door for us to go this year as a family on a trip that seems, in many ways, designed just for us! We have the opportunity to embark on a family adventure with a team of leaders and students from our church to Vienna, Austria and Sopron, Hungary to serve the European missionary families working through Christian Associates International. These families will be meeting together for a week long conference and retreat and we have been chosen to serve these families by providing childcare while they are involved in learning and planning together.

I would like to invite each of you along on this one in whatever capacity you feel comfortable. We will need lots of preparation and prayer, patience and wisdom as we attempt to be Godly leaders/parents/servants, and a huge amount of faith as we tackle the daunting task of raising support for our family of four. We are excited and scared all at the same time, so please join us in any or all of these areas in the first Sheng missionary adventure! ~Deanna

CAI’s existence is based around impacting Europe via the multiplication of high-impact leaders and churches, and a family from Grace has been working with CAI for the past few years. Our team’s main goal will be to assist with different facets of the children’s ministry for the kids of CAI workers. This trip has great elements including: blessing Grace’s network of families who have invested everything for humanity’s sake in Europe; having students spend some time with these innovative and unconventional people; and the opportunity to do ministry in a spiritually hungry post-Christian culture that is Europe. Being that this trip is focused on children, our own kids will also have lots of great opportunities to serve beyond themselves. The 16 of us fly out on August 8 and return on August 18, and our travels include flying in and out of Vienna, Austria; children’s ministry during the conference; and a service project day trip with the whole conference back into Vienna. There may also be possible opportunities for our students to travel with CAI middle and high school students to do some service projects with local ministries in Vienna for a longer duration.

We would love for you to be a part of our support team. To start, you can pray for:
- all of our summer teams [Baltimore, NYC, Liverpool and this one] - for their leaders, their students and the logistics.
- for our Hungary team - for unity, for our leadership and for the vision to know that we will prevail.
- passports, airline tickets and logistical details.
- for our Mission Advance weekend, a missions prep weekend for all our summer student teams, June 22-24.
- for Tony and I as both leaders and parents, and the discernment about both roles.
- for K [9] and E [6] and for the contributions they will bring to the CAI kids and our team in general.

We also have to raise a significant amount of money - the total for our family being $7100. If you feel led to support financially, that would also be a huge blessing. There are two ways you can financially support our team. First, you may send a check in the enclosed envelope with the response card. Please make checks payable to Grace Community Church and in the note section please specify, “SPACE Hungary - Shengs”. You may also contribute via the Internet, by clicking the “Online Giving!” link at the top of the Grace Church webpage - http://www.gcconline.org. Click the “eGive” link and after entering the appropriate donor and bank information, fill in the amount for “Short Term Missions” and specify for “SPACE Hungary - Shengs”.

We dream of how this summer will catalyze the lives of our students, our church, and our children - giving them a direction for shaping human history because of the passion that Jesus has placed in their hearts. Thanks for your support and prayers, for supporting SPACE [Students Prepared to Act For Christ’s Empire] and being an integral part of mobilizing students for mission. ~Tony

Images: Austria and Hungary, Em’s castle, Kt’s thoughts, the fam at Easter.

In light of the VT shootings…

- A youth worker guide to helping your students via Marko

- The Copycateffect blog [if you hang with students or on campus, you should skim this.]

- Our schools are dangerous places, just like the world we live in. They require bravery.

::: Update 2007-04-23
Our friends on staff with CCC and alumni of VT wrote that Crusade at VT sent flowers to Seung-Hui Cho’s family.

::: Campus Ministry Primer for Cities - via Jeremy

::: Global Subways to Scale - link

::: Cities not like ecosystems after all

mostly so i can remember these details…

::: Travel Agent
Sybille - bcdtravel.com
Manchester is closer to Liverpool than London

::: Passports
Catonsville, MD post office is still doing them while you wait

::: The Shot Lady
M Carrington - Columbia MD
[no shots for any of our teams this summer]

::: Visa Service
http://www.americanvisadc.com/
[no visas for any of our teams this summer]

- scan passports and visas and email the images to yourself
- each minor’s parents have signed a notarized, signed letter of consent and responsibility
- each leader carries copies of all paperwork for each team member on their person at all times

[very cryptic I know, but if you need more info, get in touch and I will get you specifics]

If you are on the SPACE07 Baltimore team, you might be interested in this post from my friend Jeremy Del Rio. Jeremy is a good friend of SPACE and Matt Stevens, who runs Chain Reaction, is his partner in crime.

In The Tipping Point, in the chapter about ‘the power of context’, Gladwell writes about the relationship between character, context and behavior. He writes:

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.

He then continues:

Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As a result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I’m fun. But if I couldn’t have lots of dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations of which I had little or no control - like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken-down subway - they probably wouldn’t think of me as fun anymore.

Gladwell also sites this study about a test of seminary students studying the story of the Good Samaritan and which ones will stop to help someone. [You guys and gals at Grace have heard this story before.]

“What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contexts of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior…. we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.”

I read this chapter over and over for about a week, trying to wrap my head around the idea that character doesn’t matter. Is that really what Gladwell is saying, and if so, the leadership paradigm I have used for my whole life has been wrong.

Instead, I think his point is *not* that character or belief systems or convictions don’t matter. Rather, his point is that context, culture and environment matter *a lot more* than we give them credit for. And one of the mantras of SPACE has been that context and culture are significant.

If Gladwell is right, it should make us think about:
- Teaching students about engaging culture on a deep level, both their own and ones they travel to, is important.
- How much of the way we currently *do* spiritual formation relies on teaching and molding character versus understanding context?
- Since the Gospel was meant to be moving from culture to culture, how are environments more significant for us [and that would be you too by the way] who have been blessed with it in order to bless others? [And the idea that contextualization is a Biblical principle.]

But at it’s essence for SPACE, *everything* about the environment, context and opportunities we create for students communicates that the precious students we have been privileged to share time with - we must communicate that *they* CAN and MUST can change the world.

[Related - most of you have probably heard about the Washington Post article, “Pearls Before Breakfast.” Also brings up the idea of context.]

D and the Madre are in Savannah visiting her sister and their family. They stayed in a hotel last night near Dulles and flew out early this morning, so I have the little angels until Tuesday night. My parents will be coming to help out a bit Monday and Tuesday so I can get in full days at work. Every time she leaves me I tease her about her leaving me with our children, how much work it is, etc etc. My dramatic side comes out nicely.

Seriously though, the past few summers, as I have gallivanted to other parts of the world - really fun parts by the way - she’s taken on quite a bit while I’ve been gone. In 2005, I was away for 28 nights, all for this supposed thing I like to call a ‘hobby.’ So, a few days away for her together with the Madre to see her sister and her fam will be fun for D. It will be nice this summer to all go away together and to have my kids see first hand what this ‘hobby’ really is about.

And… where is the line where it isn’t a hobby anymore…

::: End of Poverty Podcasts
Link via Jordon

::: China, the Olympics and Sudan
Link via Rudy

::: Your Future?

* If I were an engineer I would get a job with a company that works overseas.
* If I were in college today I would study international business.
* If I was graduating from college this spring I would take a civil service test, apply for a State Department job and try to get an overseas assignment with the U.S. embassy.
* If I were a history, english or math teacher I would apply to teach at international school in the Middle East.

More from Dr. RG Lewis

This evening, our second summer team was finalized. The England team is now final and this leader team has already put together a schedule for their meetings, put deadlines on the team getting support letters done and distributed key contact information for the whole team. Wow, they are making me look lazy…

To give you some insight into our recent processes for all of our teams:
- choose overall direction and destination based on some of our student mission values and goals
- leader team recruited
- info sheets distributed
- applications submitted
- Tony and MPM meet with leader teams to review next set of milestones
- team chosen
- support letters written

Fun, huh?

::: Sam posts from Buckingham and StrengthsFinder on the myths that holds us back.

MYTH 3: A good team member does whatever it takes to help the team.
TRUTH 3: A good team member deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time.

::: An interview with Rodney Stark [via Reinhold]

- One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?
- What Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity.
- People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing. You’ve got a choice: you can be a church or a country club. If you’re going to be a church, you’d better offer religion on Sunday.

::: The World’s Most Livable Cities
- Yaounde - 182
- Paris - 33
- Washington, DC - 41
- Los Angeles - 55
- Vienna - 3

We’ve just put together some mission support letter examples via a public Google doc. Feel free to use it or pass it on to someone who could benefit from it. Link located in the upper right sidebar as well. [Note that our examples have some specific funding details you will want to change.]

[Related: my personal 2005 and 2006 support letters.]

The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
[I know I’m late to reading this, but this was a fascinating read. Gladwell is a great story teller and there are some pretty significant principles in this book about leadership, movements and change.]

::: Law of the Few
Connector - they know lots and lots of people, different kinds of people that they know, manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches, social glue.

Maven - information broker, not just passive collectors of information, but they are delighted to pass that information on to others as well, wanting to help for no other reason than they like to help, data bank.

Salesmen - skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced.

Also, idea of emotional contagion - how emotions are transferred person to person.

Mimicry is also by one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me smile and smile in response - even a micro smile that takes no more than several milliseconds - it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious.

::: Stickiness
Fear experiments - free tetanus shots - included a map and appointment times that made the difference

Sesame Street

Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested - and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history - it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologist who don’t believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of those who watched the show regularly… They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and make that they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

Blues Clues
- active involvement
- repetition -

“So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability.”

Tinkering for Stickiness

We all want to believe that they key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas… The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.

::: Power of Context - I
Bernie Goetz and the Broken Windows theory [there is something foundationally important we should explore on this one - more later]

::: Power of Context - II
John Wesley and community
The Rule of 150 -

[British anthropologist Robin] Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4.

WL Gore factories and work teams, Hutterite colonies

::: Case Studies
Airwalk sneakers and the diffusion model

Suicide in Micronesia -

… a group of researches in England in the 1960s analyzed 135 people who had been admitted to a cetrnal psychiatric hospital after attemping suicide. They found that the group was swwrongly linked socially - that many of them belonged to the same social circles. This, they concluded, was not coincidence. It testified to the very essence of what suicide is, a private language between members of a common subculture… If suicide in the West is a kind of crude language in Micronesia, it has become an incredibly expressive form of communication, rich with meaning and nuance, and expressed by the most persuasive of permission-givers.

Teenage smoking -

Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22.3 percent to 28.5 percent. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32 percent. Since 1998, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73 percent. There are few public health programs in recent years that have fallen as short of their mission as the war on smoking.

::: Principles

1. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas - Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.
2. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuition. What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus… We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us… Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics….In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

::: How About It?
- Keep on the lookout for Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople.
- The Law of the Few reminds me of StrengthsFinder Connectedness, Relator, Woo and Includer, but seems to go even deeper than that. Not everyone is one of these but when social change is concentrated on these three types, that is when things tip. Could it be that these are the 2% required to change a whole population? Also reminds me of the principle of reaching leaders and not just followers - these three wield a lot of influence.
- Emotions are contagious.
- Experiment with our SPACE experiences not only in content but in environment and architecture to make them sticky.
- Context and culture are significant.
- Was the apostle Paul a Connector, Maven or Salesperson? I think at least one.
- What makes Christianity sticky to a suburban, American teenager ?

easter saturday disney craft
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

Easter crafts yes of course disney related. happy easter everyone!

0405071819.jpg
Originally uploaded by tonytsheng.

Sometimes when you are trying to ignite, you accidentally burn.

For some reason, I’ve been listening to selected tracks from Rattle and Hum over and over for the past few weeks. It probably has something to do with the CD mix I made entitled, “Fun with D’s Subwoofer.” [I almost like the title more than the mix.]

Specifically, tracks 3, 8, 9, 13, 14 and 16. Man.

Bono has of course been getting a lot of press for the past few years with Africa, The One Campaign and Product RED. But I remember Live Aid, the Amnesty International tour, and lyrics about apartheid. You remember apartheid right? Which is now history… It’s interesting to talk to K about the race issues around the world in the past - she gets pretty incredulous that the world could ever operate like that. That same idea is what has me so stoked about the ideas in The End of Poverty - my kids would be able to say “Well people used to live like that but my friends and I helped end it.” And… you do think that your kids and my kids are going to be a part of it, don’t you??

And about Bono, passion that endures.

Yesterday, the development across the street from GCC had an Easter party. Right, an Easter party which is interesting enough. In our postChristian society, who does Easter parties anymore? Anyway, we took some one SPACE kids to help out. Kind of a missed opportunity in that I should have done a better job of inviting and promoting

There is a fine line between an ‘event’ and a group of friends serving a small piece of humanity. I like the latter but not sure we got it this time.

Photo: EllyK with MaggieMoo [a local ice cream place] and the Easter Bunny. Speaking of MaggieMoo, how do Hindus feel about eating ice cream from a store with a cow as a mascot?

From The End of Poverty [yes, I’m trying to get back to posting more notes from the book]:

Malaria
- claims 3M lives a year - 90% of whom live in Africa
- Four types of human malaria
- Malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum is by far the most lethal variant and is responsible for the vast proportion of malaria cases in Africa.
- central ecological point - the warmer the temperature, the faster the life-cycle change for the parasite to go from the stomach back to the saliva of the mosquito - to be put into the next person
- Some types of mosquitoes prefer to bite people whereas others feed off cattle. Transmitting malaria requires two consecutive human bites: the first for the mosquito to ingest the parasite and the second for the mosquito to infect another person, roughly two weeks later. Africa has a predominating mosquito type which prefers human biting nearly 100 percent of the time.
- Africa is really unlucky when it comes to malaria: high temperatures, plenty of breeding sites and mosquitoes that prefer humans to cattle. Africa’s crisis is unique, with only a few other scattered parts of Asia sharing the same high ecological burden.

If you are like me, you had no idea that Africa was such a unique, isolated, perfect storm for malaria.

[Related posts from the book: Chapter 1, 2, and 3.]

Jason Mandryk from Operation World [yup, that book] and his talk about the State of the Gospel at YLG2006.

[Related - the post about the ppt from the talk that you can download.]

[These stats won’t be new to long time readers…]
- about 27% of the the world is still unreached
- we are sending about 2.5% of our current foreign missionaries to the unreached - 1/40
- some areas of the unreached world have less than 3 missionaries per 1 M people
A lot of people out there need a better world.

via Dennis

In a 1992 survey of English teachers to determine the top-10 required “book-length works “in high school English classes, plays by Shakespeare occupied three spots and the Bible none. And yet, let’s compare the two: Beauty of language: Shakespeare, by a nose. Depth of subject matter: toss-up. Breadth of subject matter: the Bible. Numbers published, translated etc: Bible. Number of people martyred for: Bible. Number of wars attributed to: Bible. Solace and hope provided to billions: you guessed it. And Shakespeare would almost surely have agreed. According to one estimate, he alludes to Scripture some 1,300 times. As for the rest of literature, when your seventh-grader reads The Old Man and the Sea, a teacher could tick off the references to Christ’s Passion–the bleeding of the old man’s palms, his stumbles while carrying his mast over his shoulder, his hat cutting his head–but wouldn’t the thrill of recognition have been more satisfying on their/own?

The full article here. Via Marko.

Watch the video for why Francis Chan and Cornerstone Church Simi Valley California decided to build an outdoor amphitheater instead of a new building. via Ben Arment. [One of the messages I watched by Francis had him throwing dollar bills at the congregation to illustrate how affluent they were. Ouch.]

It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.

Buechner via Seth

The great preacher D. L. Moody is said to have carried a list of the names of 100 non-Christians for whom he prayed all his life. Over the years, his prayers for many of these people were answered and, whenever one of them became a Christian, Moody would cross their name off the list. It is a tribute to the power of perseverance in prayer that, by the time of his death, no fewer than 96 of those 100 people on Moody’s list had become followers of Jesus. What’s more, the remaining 4 gave their lives to Jesus at Moody’s funeral.

- Pete Greig, God on Mute

Our summer team info sheets are up. I think finally most of our details are solid enough to publish. But you long time readers know how that goes…

:: incoming 10th grade - Baltimore with Chain Reaction [Jeremy helps run this party.]

:: incoming 11th grade - NYC with Urban Impact

:: incoming 12th grade - Liverpool, England with YWAM Marine Reach

We are still working on middle school… I’m very excited about all of these teams. They embody our principles of long term partnership, progression and GCC family connections.

PS - I used Google docs for all info sheets and it seems to be working out well.

I got a copy of Off-Road Disciplines by Dr. Earl Creps in return for a review, so here it goes. Overall, it was a pretty good book. I especially liked the subtitle, “Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders.” Two other things struck me. Dr. Creeps writes to leaders and potential leaders keeping the context of mission at the forefront. He knows that leaders must be catalysts for the future, not leading to keep the status quo. The other thing that struck me was that these ‘disciplines’ are indeed off-road. They are not the staples of traditional disciplines, such as prayer, Bible study, etc. Even though they don’t follow the standard model of habits, these off-road disciplines require concentration, intention and modeling. And they are habits that are worthy of developing.

Here are some of my scattered notes:

Intro:
This book argues that missional leadership derives not from methods or strategies but from the work of the Holy Spirit to rearrange one’s interior life.

…the off-road disciplines serve the function of making space in our lives so that Jesus assumes the central position within us and the Spirit conforms us to the mission.

Chapter 1 - Death - The Discipline of Personal Transformation
How can I be changed so that others will find me worth following in mission.
The way to develop a missional ministry, then, is to be transformed into a missional person, “so that everyone may see your progress.” In the end, my best practice must be me.
concept of culture of origin - COO

Chapter 2 - Truth - The Discipline of Sacred Realism
Sacred realism fearlessly embraces the truth about the Church, and about our lives, because of confidence in a God bigger than those facts.
Post-Christianity is waiting for missionaries who practice sacred realism: the discipline of holding the truth in one hand and faith in the other.

Chapter 3 - Perspective - The Discipline of POV
Christian mission tends to prefer a blueprint point of view that insists on replicating designs developed in a relative vacuum, or cloning methods used somewhere else.
A reverse engineering POV applied to Christian mission starts with the off-road discipline of interpreting culture and arriving at a strategy for mission at its deliverable.

Chapter 7 - Assessment - The Discipline of Missional Efficiency
[From a sample scorecard]
7. If we worked for a mission agency, would we still have jobs?
9. What would we say to a poor person who asked us what we have done to help the marginalized since our last meeting?
10. Who is growing spiritually among us, and how do we know this?

Chapter 9 - Reflection - The Discipline of Discernment
Processing the event - The purpose of the exercise is to create white space in which God has a chance to speak to us about our best efforts - whether they succeeded or failed.

Chapter 10 - Opportunity - The Discipline of Making Room
Students of the Church estimate that approximately 250 plans to evangelize the world were proposed by 1900, with another 1,150 or so added during the twentieth century, many of them coalescing around the end of the last millennium, with none of them succeeding.
Like catalyzes love, and love grows the capacity for mission in every form.

Chapter 11 - Sacrifice - The Discipline of Surrendering Preferences
But every missional leader experiences shock, the only question being which kind.

Good read, definitely recommended.

Posting about your job on your blog is a terrible idea, unless its your job to write about your job on your blog about your job. But I can tell you that I’m having an absolute great time at the new job. It’s just about everything I was hoping for.

It’s a really great technical environment. I’m learning a lot about some very cool technology and getting some great experience in that regard - a nice change of pace away from the role of management and back into being an engineer. Every person that I have met so far has been extremely friendly, kind and helpful - and I don’t think that is just because I’m new. I think these people act like this all the time - and not just because someone is telling them how to act. Finally, there is huge element of dignity - the work matters and is important, but staff is not simply a means to an end. And it seems like there are always free meals or snacks.

I realize I’m only in my second week there and that, like life, it is probably not going to be so great all the time. But so far, I’m having a lot of fun and really enjoying my new job. And work is one way we create - like in the image of the Creator.

PS - Related to job and work, go listen to the message by Nancy Ortberg [husband of John, who has written a few books] entitled, “Jesus and Your Job.” It’s got some great concepts such as “watching breathtaking leadership” and “the nobility of service.” [via DJ]

I like to read through mission team applications - it’s okay, I know it might not rank high on most people’s list of hobbies. I read through one tonight that was intriguing. Let me give you the breakdown:
- 5 total pages
- 2 pages of Involvement Policy
- 1 page of Trip Covenant
- 1 page of Liability Waiver [notarized please]
- 1 page of Medical Consent

One point about this app - it states that an interview is part of the process. But.. you might be wondering, like I am, where is the part about where the applicant gets to talk about themselves? Stuff like how God is leading me lately, what my personality is like, my motivation for trying to join a team, what my dreams are about this opportunity…

We use our application to find out a lot of information about potential team members. We want to know about you - to know what you value, what gets you excited, what you think you are great at, and what you might need a bit of help with. How you envision being an integral part of securing humanity’s future. But absolutely for sure, I hope that our potential team members use the application to find out a lot about us too. Because we are surely dreaming about you, excited about you being involved, and know that the experience will stretch you, grow you, and get you more excited about God’s plan for the world. We aren’t really just dreaming about policy, consent and waivers.

From the left: ErinOB, moi, D, LB, GM and inserted with some mad Photoshopping skills, EGrab.

Some short introductions to tell you the caliber of these peeps:
ErinOB - over four years of staff experience with Young Life and serving now as GCC’s senior high youth administrator. Knows how to organize a movement and get students to a direction.
D - will keep me in line along with experience with children’s ministry and intuitive, one-to-one interaction. Connectedness, Belief and Responsibility strengths which will mean specific insight into serving the CA staff to depths others may not have insight into.
LB - third summer of SPACE leadership on a third continent. Third summer of seeing first hand what families are going through in the field and being able to bless them in those ends.
GM - second summer of SPACE leadership. Off the scale Realtor and special attachment to high school students. His somewhat ADD tendencies will be a major asset to speaking life into some third culture students. [I’m being serious here.]
EGrab - second summer of SPACE leadership. Been immersed in children’s ministry as long as he has been alive.

My personal challenge may in fact be to get out of the way. It’s going to be a lot of fun to lead with these folks.

Our church, Grace Community Church, in Fulton, MD, now has an rss feed for the messages. This page has the actual link. I think Pastor Mark is one of the best communicators around these days. Give it a listen.

[Sorry for the light posting. Adjusting to Job1.3 has been going well, but taking a lot more energy than expected. Normal posting to resume soon.]

On this St. Patrick’s Day, some posts about passion, innovation and risk. Because St. Patrick certainly embodied passion [for the Irish], innovation and hmm just a tad of risk… [The real story of St. Patrick]

::: “Managers obsessed with logic and left-brained thinking are dismissive of feelings—they say that emotions don’t belong in the workplace. They do not believe engagement has anything to do with organizational performance or that people can be passionate about their work. Managers need to understand that emotional intelligence and right-brain thinking are critical skills to become successful leaders in the new global economy.” more about engagement from LeadershipNow

::: “In 1998, Barry Stiefel took off from work on Friday at 5pm and was back at his desk a little more than a week later on Monday at 8am, having visited every US state in the interim” link via Kottke

::: Explorer Bill Stone: “The traditional approach to space exploration has been to carry all the fuel you need, and to carry everybody back in case of emergency. But to prime the pump that will take us beyond, boldness is required: the first expeditionary team must travel to the Moon without the fuel to come back, and produce it there. It can be done in 7 years, and I intend to lead that expedition. There was a time when people did bold things to open new frontiers. We have collectively forgotten that. Now we are at a time when boldness is required again.” via the TEDBlog. See also, a Wired article from 2004 on Bill Stone.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy with getting our teams up. Our initial plans are done and we are almost done with the recruiting-leader-stage. Recruiting is maybe not the right word. Begging perhaps?

No just kidding. I’m very happy with each one of these leader teams. They are all pretty much people I have a lot of respect for. But the two big tests - would I greet them if I saw them in a shopping center, and would I trust them with my children? And every leader passes those tests.

Hopefully the final details for the majority of teams line up later this week and then we publish info sheets for students this coming weekend. That would be grand. This year is a combination of experiences we have done before and new stuff, just like seemingly every year. I like it, I think it’s going to be a great summer.

When the info sheets are done, I will set up some links to them from one of the sidebars, in case any of you are interested. I also decided to use GoogleDocs for those info sheets, it’s quite handy.

PS - Job1.3 is going great. Along with the job transition, I’m trying to figure out the best balance for my extracurricular online time.

First day at Job 1.3. Very fun. It was landing in a new culture and I was asking all day, “What do they value without saying so outloud?”

Some people have been asking what are the right answers to some of the questions on the team leader app for this year. Here are my answers. Of course, they aren’t right either…

:: Describe all cross cultural ministry experience you have had. How did these experiences change you?
Summer 1992 – 6 weeks of student missions around the east coast including inner city summer camp, VBS in the coal mine community in KY, beach outreach
Summer 1993 – 4 weeks in the DR working with an orphanage
Summer 1995 – 2 weeks in the UK - vacation
Spring 2003 – Perspectives class
Summer 2004 – 1 week in NYC working with immigrant populations
Summer 2005 – 10 days in Brasil working with GCC family McMs
Summer 2006 – 10 days in Cameroon working with GCC family Nens

All of these experiences have continued to solidify my convictions about the following:
The need for two-way partnerships in the context of short term missions that capitalize on local and indigenous leadership and ownership on the host side and a utilization of talents and strengths on the visiting side; the need to catalyze and mobilize students to reach the nations; and how important culture and context are to living a life that others want to emulate.

:: You are 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 needs to continue or they will miss their connecting train and flights home. Your mobile phone is not working so you can’t call for assistance. What would you do and how do you meet all the group’s needs?
[question via Intrepid Travel]
The two smartest guys rig up a stretcher from whatever they can find in the woods – branches, leaves, vines, etc. The two biggest guys carry the wounded as far as they can. We go together as a group as far as we can and do the best we can. If we miss the connection, so be it. I implore to be as engaging as I can in light of plan B – who knows what else we might experience that we would have otherwise missed.

:: Predict 500 years from this summer – what will be the impact of your leadership?
We will have catalyzed a team of leaders to do change their day to day thinking to be based around culture and worldview. We will have launched a group of students to seriously pursue cross cultural contexts for life. My children will have impacted some other kids and gained life long friends that will rally around Jesus and His mission for humanity.

:: Describe the riskiest - but not necessarily successful - endeavor you have ever attempted.
Either:
1 - Taking a team of students to Cameroon in the summer of 2006. Risky because of the travel, locale, intimidation effect. It ended up being not too risky at all.
2 – Flying across the country in 2005 to work on a community outreach project with a youth pastor who I had never met face to face.

:: From any experience working with groups (eg. as part of your employment, school settings or student ministry), tell us about the role you played in the group, and how you dealt with any conflict.
I like to think that people are capable of resolving conflict when they need to. Most of the time, I will let it go until it reaches a boiling point at which point, it needs to be addressed because it hasn’t worked itself out. I also believe that conflict always needs to be moderated within the context of two points of view - one person is never all the blame.

:: Describe a time when you birthed something (i.e. a club, a business, a team, etc). Experiences from childhood count.
[question via the International Mentoring Network]
I helped birth SPACE – the service/missions component of a student ministry.

::: “If you’re an artist, as opposed to a careerist, and your movie is more important to you than a career in this town, they can never beat you.” - Quentin Tarantino on making movies via Kottke

::: SHIFT conference video clip - Donald Miller on Story
[Related - my SHIFT notes and reflections]

::: “Think about what you just said. You give gifts to Alzheimer patients and missionaries!” - more from Blue Passport

::: “We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence (while none of us, most of all me, did anything to help) can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive healthcare to its citizens.” - Bill Clinton at TED 2007 via TED Blog [TED - The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference]

“Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the mood in which it has been made has passed.” - Cavett Robert

For some odd reason, I had this quote on an index card at my desk to literally my whole time of being employed here at Corp1.2. If you know who wrote it, let me know.

I turn in my computer and badge this morning and thus ends a chapter. Wow.

I also gave my aerial map of the Arctic Circle to my friend and coworker, Axr. I know it will serve to give him some good perspective.

Well, time to get ready and finish it.

from yesterday

The next two days might be a tad weird…

Well, it’s back to work for me for my last three days in Cubicle Nation. Here is a little bit about my little career break:

::: Movies
- The Illusionist
- Amazing Grace
- Music and Lyrics [D and I went to a 1.15 show on a Tuesday - what a life]

::: Reading
- started The Alchemist
unfortunately, not much more reading than that

::: Cooking [yes believe it or not and yes, Rachael Ray is my friend]
Chicken Parm Pizza [easy and turned out really good]
Cognac-Sauced Pepper Steaks [the steaks I bought were too thick and D had to bring the sauce to a higher boil - really tasty, but make sure the steaks are thin]
Paprika Smoked Onion Rings [what a mess after this one - not bad either but a lot of work and cleanup]

::: Misc
- bought $150 of hard drives
- reinstalled WinXP on an older desktop
- wired a Yamaha subwoofer to a new receiver and listened to some good old school music
- rebleached my basement floor [leftover from our sewage issue a little while ago]
- had lunch with Em at school
- went away with D
- talked to people on a ship in Europe via Skype
- Blogged about Willow Creek student ministries conference

::: How The World Really Shapes Up via Waxy.org

::: Interesting story about Polycarp the Bishop of Smyrna

::: When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the ship captain tried to turn him back, saying, “You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages.” To that, Calvert replied, “We died before we came here.” via Nomad4God

::: Live beyond the limits of the imaginary lid
via Jonny Baker

Name as many as you can in 10 minutes.
I got 80 after my 4th try…
[Warning - huge timewaster - you mean I only have one more day to do this?] via Kottke

“We are so fragmented we can’t even make friends.” - Erwin McManus from Humana 2.0

[Preface - I know some readers of this blog have a very different view of the world, especially when it comes to religion and spirituality. So this post may be a bit - hmm how shall I put it - dorky. Even so, thanks for reading this processing in my head.]

One of the themes from Humana 2.0 was getting away from evangelicism, out of the Christian enclave, outside the bubble - and into the real world and engaging humanity. One of the sessions on “Idols and Avatars”, the idea that an avatar is divine embodiment and that we are all meant to embody the light within us to the world - not just to those in the Church already. In that respect, I consider myself lucky - I don’t spend all of time around people that believe the same things as I do and I have a job that gets me out with people from all kinds of different backgrounds, cultures and contexts.

I am as busy as everyone else with a job and a family. I also have a hobby that requires a certain amount of people development - empowering, leading, planning, etc, which is a good thing - allowing me to invest in other people’s lives - it really is a super opportunity. Your life - and mine - are meant to be invested.

But…
There is no progress in my life regarding being a friend to someone that doesn’t believe the same things that I do. For instance, I can’t remember the last time I:
- had a meal with
- saw a movie with
- had coffee with
someone that is outside of my sphere of influence related to SPACE. The point I got from Humana 2.0 is that it is really important to make room for people. Making room means maybe not doing all the church stuff all the time. Maybe deciding intentionally to give up the church activity sometimes in order to make room for someone that isn’t connected to Church at all. And this idea is not something I’ve been very good at in a long time.

One other related thought here. In light of my recent career move, I’m going to be losing touch with and gaining some new coworkers. I’m sure both of these will provide some interesting opportunities.

Ok, one more related thought. Cubicle nation has also reinforced the idea that community is formed out of mission. My work environment used to be a lot of fun mostly because the people that I worked with were bound with a common sense of mission. We worked together to achieve a common goal that was larger than any of us individually. We were a team that had a sense of community, that were responsible for one another, that had a sense of belonging and camaraderie. This sense of mission has left us for many reasons [too much to go into here] - but the byproduct is a group of people that work together, but are not bound together at all. Community is not formed randomly - deep friendships are forged out of a common mission and dedication to something much bigger than ourselves.

Here are three quick things that will help me at least be aware of being a good friend. Maybe they will help you too.
::: BLESS
::: Remembering birthdays
::: 10:02am

Photo: The UrbanPoets via Ted Law’s Flickr

[Related - my conference notes.]

Some very quick reflections from the Shift Conference:

::: Much of what Darren said in Session 1 was not new to me. Even so, I’m glad he said it to an audience of youth workers. Most everything about the talk was representative of what missionaries know about culture and what youth workers know but don’t realize. For instance:
- “User created content” - think indigenous.
- “Tour guide” - think contextualization.
I don’t mean this to be negative at all - his session was good and he is a top-notch communicator. The content just wasn’t new to me, which is certainly not a barometer of a good session or not.

::: Having Jeremy encourage Willow by having a worship band with diversity of musical style was good. Maybe it’s just me, but is Willow really that white and suburban?

::: Three big things stood out to me and these made the conference a good investment of time:
1 - The concept of cultural freeze [from session 1]
2 - That we have to engage students in a much bigger story [from session 2]
3 - Conferences like this should be about paradigm shifting, not necessarily about implementation - because context and culture are significant. I think that definitely happened in session 2 [Donald Miller] and session 5 [Jeremy Del Rio].

Thanks again to Willow Creek for inviting me to be a part of the virtual side of the gathering.

[Related: notes from Session 1 and 2 and Session 5]

[Click for full size]

Here are one of the overall directions we are moving towards for this summer. I am leading a team to Hungary and Austria this summer. Not to brag or anything, but I think this is one of the most innovative mission experiences around.

GCC supports a family that are ministering in Italy. Their mission organization does an annual staff conference where all of their staff come to a central location for some relaxation off the field, some investment and some downtime. This summer, my team is going to travel to this conference - happening in Hungary - to assist with all the activities centered around the missionary kids. There is also a possibility that some of our team will split off and assist with the activities for the high school missionary kids, which will be located in Vienna. The distance between Sopron, Hungary [where the staff conference is] and Vienna is only about an hour by car.

I say this is innovative because:
- A local *student* mission team connecting with some missionaries of a world wide missions organization.
- Our students are going to get to impact some families that are out in the field. I suspect some families are going to be fine and some other families are really going to need this break. For them, our students could fill a vital role of encouragement, blessing, a break from their kids, and speaking into their lives. Not only that, but having our students be able to spend time with missionary families is going to be so valuable.
- This missions organization is very cool. Tell you more about them later.
- It’s part of our strategy to be connected to our extended body all around the world.
- This is an invite only team. Students that are invited to this trip have significant missions experience, have heavily invested in SPACE and are serious about considering a lifetime in cross cultural ministry.

With regard to another aspect of the trip, D and I have decided to move in the direction of all of us going as a family. Yup, call us either deluded, crazy, all of the above. We think that this is going to be a great experience for our kids and this specific trip is a great environment for our kids to actually assist and play a vital role in the team. Of course, we both know it’s not going to be easy. Heck, we have a hard enough time getting them ready to go to the beach, much less Europe. But we believe that the difficult investment now is going to be worth it - the trajectory of their lives will see this summer as a major boundary event.

Leader invitations are en route as are the first round of student invites. Like all of the past teams, this team is slated to be a great one as well. Traveling across the world to hold up some people that are fighting to rescue humanity. I guess we shouldn’t expect this to be super easy.

D and I are off for a night - computer free. As always, CourtK, her black belt and our watch dogs are home. Have a great weekend!

Highlights:

- The Scriptures begin in a garden but end in a city - melding of different cultures - a flavor of what Heaven is going to be like - knitting people together because God has deposited a little bit of Himself in everyone.
- We’ve bought the cultural lie that young people are the future. David as a 13 year old was not the future. Mary was not the future as a virgin teenager. Esther was not the future winning a beauty pageant to save her people from genocide.
- When we were choosing birthing options, the Central Park petting zoo was not one of our options.
- Jesus ministry lasted for 3 years - hey middle school pastors, you have them for 3 years.
- Justice is about righting wrongs. You give your life to right the wrongs.

Full notes here. Good job Jeremy!
[Session 1 and 2 notes]

[Not blogging the Shift conference today but will be back blogging it tomorrow.]

::: From an interview with John Eldredge at Infuze Mag:

In John 10, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice. They follow me.” That’s the whole deal right there. But I recognize that we weren’t taught this. The Christianity in the West, for all kinds of reasons, has just become an exchange of information.

::: Two great reads on Europe

- At a growth of only 300,000 people per year, Northern Europe will likely increase from ninety-four million in AD 2000 to only 101 million in 2025. It is heavily urbanized and over eighty-three percent of the population lives in cities. Over 180 cities have a population of one million or more. Northern Europe has the third highest concentration of elderly in the world: twenty percent of the people are 65 or older.
- Western Europe is responsible for over half of Europe’s GNP, and sixteen percent of the global economy. It is not surprising that both France and Germany have been attracting tens of thousands of migrant workers.
- 234 least reached people groups still remain in Western Europe.

- An Overview of Western Europe
- Least Reached in Europe both via Lausanne World Pulse

::: Cafe 1040 - training for college students to work in the 10/40 window - also via Lausanne World Pulse

So I’ve been liveblogging the first two sessions of the Willow Creek student ministries Shift conference and they both have been pretty good. [I’m off of work for a while since resigning.] Here are some of the highlights and links.

Session 1 - Culture - Darren Whitehead
: cultural freeze - when immigrants leave their home country and settle in a new country and then they recreate their culture in another country. Even though they had never gone back, their host culture has changed. The culture they had recreated in the US was frozen - 30 years of nonrelevance. Could this be what unchurched people feel like when they come to our churches?
: less leader generated to more user generated content in your student ministries - let the students create it and own it. [I feel like we do this pretty well - student led, leader guided]
: less imitation to more imagination - totally

2 - Evangelism - Donald Miller
[I don’t even like putting that word on my blog.]
: when a culture becomes so insular that it only reacts with itself - it becomes goofy - it creates its own rules, goofy feeds on being insular
: After seeing a really good movie, many of us feel great and clear headed. I understand what life is now about, my positions, where I fit. We live in a culture where story is declining [Dan Pink’s book again and John Eldredge _Waking the Dead_ writes about this a lot too.] Erosion of values has brought the erosion of story.
: Big part of evangelism - inviting people to a better story.
: Acts 17 - Paul doesn’t care that they are making fun of him - he just stays - because he gets his real validation from God - I don’t care what they think about me, I care about *them* - freedom to serve and reach out and relate - God has validated us - not about being validated by other humans
: Every story needs a redeemer.

Be sure to read the comments on the posts too - some pretty good interaction from other youth workers that are involved in either the virtual or the live conference.

Here is that blogger thing I was talking about. Jeremy kindly recommended me to be a guest blogger for the Willow Creek Student Ministries Shift Now conference that is happening later this week. I’ll be blogging over on the ShiftNow blog for two of the sessions on Wednesday morning [Session 1: Culture and Session 2: Evangelism.] while I watch the sessions live over a private webcast. There will be other guest bloggers updating over there as well. Should be fun. Also, Jeremy will be speaking on Friday on Activism. I will update this post if public links for the conference become available. Also, here is the list of guest bloggers - looks like a group of cool guys.

Well, here is some more big news. Before I get into that, thanks to everyone who responded and prayed after the last big news update - the one about my dad and our puppy. I really should have updated before now, but anyway. With regards to my dad, he is doing great. He had colon surgery in late November and then has been on chemo since then. He’s almost done with that and has not been having many side effects at all. And our puppy Phoebe is doing great as well. You would never know she had a kidney issue. Maybe that healing ceremony worked…

On to the next news - I just resigned from my job - literally like 20 minutes ago [talk about breaking news over blogs huh?]. After 12 years of working within the Information Technology division of a large telecommunications company, I have recently accepted a position at a technical services company. I’ll be doing the same kind of work in information technology, specifically database administration and engineering. I’m really looking forward to the job and employer change although I know it’s going to certainly change some things. For starters, I’m looking forward to: having weekends again [I’ve worked an average of 24 weekends for each of the past three calendar years], returning to the hands-on database engineering I used to do instead of “managing” the work, and a change in scenery.

I do realize that there are going to be adjustments that have to be made. I’m going to have to get to know a whole group of new colleagues. I anticipate that technically I am going to have to dig deep, learn fast and provide value right from the start. Our daily schedule will change a bit. Things could potentially change with SPACE as well. It’s a bit nerve wracking - it’s been a *long* time since I’ve had to start a new job. But it is the right thing to do. You know, deep change or slow death.

In the meantime, I’m taking some of my vacation time between now and my last day here, D and I are getting away this weekend, working on SPACE stuff for this summer, got a neat blogger opportunity I will tell you about later this week and other stuff to keep me busy. Very excited - I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while now.

Now everybody at once, deep exhale.

I know I’ve said I’m going to write more… and I am… For now, here are two things that struck me during Humana 2.0.

::: 1 - I’m not such a good friend.

::: 2 - What we are trying to do via SPACE cannot get bogged down by SPACE. [Pretty meta-physical huh?]

I will expand on these a bit more soon. Have a great weekend!

::: 75% of short term mission trips are done poorly via Seth
I think SPACE is on the right page here regarding leadership [strong experienced cross cultural leadership], partnership [overseas teams with GCC families], and training [Mission Advance].

::: Germany’s World Cup baby boom
Related - worldwide birthrates
both links via Kottke

::: A Perspective on Missionary Furloughs [valuable comments too]

::: MosaicLA Youtube videos via Eric Bryant and Lon

fun

The girls giving their mom a card that plays the song “Girls Night Out”

Happy Birthday to D!

For those of you that might not know - D coined the name SPACE. In many ways, SPACE embodies her as well as me - Developer in students, Belief in what Jesus said, Responsibility in what we need to do because of it.

Anyway, go wish her a happy birthday.

Guess where we are in the photo? Disney World!

Happy birthday love!

Happy Chinese New Year readers! We are still in CT until tomorrow and getting some Chinese food sometime today. Enjoy the beginning of the year of the Pig!

Photo: Chinese new year in Beijing via Chris Verrill

::: A Church Door with No Handles via Jordon

::: Only two options - slow death or deep change from Ron Martoia

::: Living on $2 a day in the American suburbs from the Suburban Christian

[PS - I’ve still got more to write about Humana 2.0. We are doing some traveling this weekend to hang out with the Madre, perhaps then.]

While at Humana 2.0, I met a couple who had just returned from eastern Africa, having spent a little bit of time in one of the countries at the epicenter of some of humanities greatest crises. This couple were in their early 30s and had two children, both under 5 and intentionally moved to this unreached, closed country - for the rest of their lives. After selling virtually everything, all they owned was in eight suitcases. Through some health-related circumstances, they ended up coming home much earlier than intended.

While in the country, they:
- were one of ten Christian families in a city of almost 2M people.
- had electricity and water about 50% of the time.
- went to this locality because of a pull towards an unreached people group, a people group that have been untouched by the Gospel for literally thousands of years.
- had a member of the government’s secret police follow them around and randomly pop in.

You can find quite a bit of church planting among the unchurched [blogsearch] and it is vital and needed. But the unreached - that is an altogether different reality. Although both are important, we need to keep a clear distinction between unchurched and unreached.

After sharing about my role with students, they shared two things in the context of not forgetting that one of our biggest impacts could be serving our missionary friends:
- handwritten notes are gold: write big so they can hang it on their wall.
- the candy bar you bring from the States: it has not been in transit for two years and they will love it.

Did I ever mention someone in our family likes animals?

It was a pretty amazing time. Not just the speakers, but the friends that I went with, the old and new friends I met face to face and the whole atmosphere of the event.

::: Some Rough Notes
Alex McManus - Humanity in the 21st Century: Where and When Are We?

Characters in Scripture acted on - dreams, visions, impregnated, intuition - instead we are now overly dependent on rationality
Instead of what you are saying, what are you doing that requires explanation?
People don’t change simultaneously in sync - there are those that get it but are unwilling to go.
Innovation is always desynchronized with the perceived present

Gerardo Marti - Idols and Avatars: How Leaders Manifest Spiritual Movements

The future of evangelicalism is assured but do we want to base the future of Christianity on the megachurch - less than 1% of churches today?
bureaucratization of the sacred
weary of churches only concerned with Sundays
Idol - concrete expression of communal worship
Luke 10 - the 70 were dependent upon strangers inviting them into their houses - do strangers welcome you into their lives? Can you survive outside the Christian bubble?
Avatar - physical embodiment of the divine
The future of Christianity is dependent on each person moving out and being an avatar of social change

David Arcos - Creative Sweat

unchurched people don’t understand what we are saying
fierce imagination
creativity is the essence of our soul
3 points to unleashing more creativity
- clarity
Adam innovated to name all the animals from nothing
- space
reactive to reflective - savoring the moments of life - crockpot: need space for ideas to cook
- audacity
challenge convention - dig inside yourself

passion - you may not love it enough to create
love is the greatest motivator for creativity - it must be done
Most people live an imitative life - we are supposed to live an original life
Art is a matter of life and death for our friends

Alex McManus - Humanity in the 21st Century: Who and What Are We?

aged of connectedness - Acts - book about motion - not the book of Deeds but the book of Acts - book of Immigrants

the Gospel is moving - overcoming hurdles - culture to culture - expansion
The Gospel comes to us on the way to someone else - it is not about us and for us

Thorsten #5
[I was totally disconnected during this one - long story…
But it was something about house churches.]

Erwin Mcmanus - Leadership in the Mosaic Future

We’ve stopped speaking to humans. We’ve trained ourselves to speak to Christians.
The question is not what kind of church - the question is what kind of future are you creating.
Not about a successful church that has no effect on history. It’s about becoming that kind of transformation agent in culture.

The human imagination is the most powerful instrument God has given us.
We are so fragmented we can’t even make friends.

Not a Revolution [reference to Barna] - this is a disullsion. It isn’t a revolution until things change.
Intimacy - Meaning - Destiny - every great film or story has all three themes.

We have given so much credence to Bible knowledge, we give a pass on character.
[”Step Up” - message on the stage floor - Alex’s subversive message to ‘not tank.’]
The danger is that we reach a level of influence where we are afraid to risk everything.
We experience God most profoundly when taking risks that matter.
Creativity needs boundaries. Boundaries are the friends of creativity. People with limited resources are extraordinarily creative.
[Erwin refers to Mosaic as “She”. That is cool.]

Story of Dave Auda - will fight tooth and nail if he doesn’t agree but once Erwin decides, will work even harder to implement so that it will be successful and that you would never know he was against it - be your leader’s best implementor

The key to leadership is not that you know what you are doing. The key to leadership is knowing that you will prevail.

ps - read that last line again a few more times.

::: New and Old Friends
Old friends first time face to face:
Sam and Rachel - planting a Mosaic church in England
Stephen and Elizabeth - youth pastors in Chattanooga
Dale Swinburne - the Strengthsfinder Swami

I also met what seemed to be a different species of human - church planters, missionaries, etc. In our first round of ’speed dating’, I met:
- a lead pastor who planted a church in Iowa, after serving a ten year stint in Bangladesh
- a couple who had spent around four months in the heart of the 10/40 window, amazing story which I’m going to tell you more about
- a retired pastor/missionary who had been in Japan for a while before and after planting [just a few] churches
- some guys getting ready to plant a church in Seattle
- Ted Law, serving a community in Houston

And of course, going to the conference with my old friends BalancingKiwis and LeslitaB.

I’ll be posting more thoughts in the next few days.

Photo: Alex McManus, via Ted Law

I’m posting incognito from a hotel lobby in Orlando - one I sort of snuck in to… I’ve got lots to tell you about - both from Humana 2.0 and from a pretty amazing family vacation. Hope you guys in the north are enjoying the snow. It was 65 degrees here today - a little too nippy for our shorts and sandals.

From Humana2.0

We have stopped speaking to humans. We’ve trained ourselves to speak to Christians.

Gabcast! mobilizing students mission | mobilecast #7

Leaving for the airport in about two hours are very looking forward to all of it - the combination of a conference, spending time with some good friends who live in Orlando, the time at Disney with the girlies and watching LB’s life plans fall into perfect order…

Will be posting some notes from Humana 2.0 at some point although web access will be limited - and that is a good thing for me right now.

Read about my trip to Orlando last year [I told you we love it there.]

What is far from perfect is our situation with our Uncle Dave in LA. If you’ve been keeping up with D’s blog, his is very ill. I’m torn between having fun and feeling for our family on the West Coast. Life moves fast - sometimes too fast.

Gabcast! mobilizing students mission | mobilecast

[feed readers - there is embedded audio in this post]

Alan Hirsch writes about the M Scale - a scale developed by missiologist Ralph Winter to try and assess just how far a people group is from a meaningful engagement with the gospel:

* m0-m1 - Those with some concept of Christianity who speak the same language, have similar interests, probably the same nationality, and are from a similar class grouping as you or your church. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket.
* m1–m2 - Here we go to the average non-Christian in our context: A person who has little real awareness of, or interest in, Christianity but is suspicious about the church (they have heard bad things). These people might be politically correct, socially aware, and open to spirituality. This category might also include those previously offended by a bad experience of church or Christians…
* m2-m3 - People in this group who have absolutely no idea about Christianity. They might be part of some ethnic group with different religious impulses or some fringy sub-culture.
* m3-m4 - This group might be inhabited by ethnic and religious groupings like Muslims or Jews. The fact that they are in the West might ameliorate some of the distance, but just about everything else gets in the way of a meaningful dialogue. They are highly resistant to the gospel.

One of our major strategies for SPACE is the idea of progression. As a student gets older, they progress through mission experiences. The experiences progress in both culture and geography - and both aspects are key.

Two examples from last summer:
- Middle school - Working at CMTS helping with serving missionaries around the world : m0.
- 10th grade - Serving in DC with Food and Friends : m1
- SPACE team - Pygmy village in Cameroon - m2 or m3.

I first learned of this idea in Perspectives and believe that it’s a pretty foundational principle that students need to be exposed to.

Rumor on the street says that the Grace Missions Task Force is going to reveal some pretty cool summer mission opportunities for adults and families this coming Sunday. I’ve heard that its on the order of seven or eight possibilities. I would love to be able to reveal the SPACE trips this Sunday too, but we aren’t quite ready. Soon hopefully though.

I’m excited to see the level of response to these opportunities. We are now operating at a higher level regarding missions with students certainly. I think with this coming summer, the same will happen with adults. I can remember back to the summer of 2003 when there were no summer teams and the idea of some cohesive, progressive, strategic mission expansion was not on anyone’s mind. I can also remember Erwin McManus saying that within 13 months, Mosaic had sent 50% of their community out on mission experiences.

If the info for these trips is available on the web after Sunday, I will update this post with a link.

::: “How do we have church services that end with a giant ‘Go’!”
Some notes from the Isn’t She Beautiful conference that Rob Bell and Mars Hill put on. [By the way, I absolutely love that photo they have on the main page of their website.]

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