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As we neared the church, however, our joyful anticipation quickly turned to horror as our eyes began to focus on a pick-up truck, parked sideways, off the road but purposefully obvious, so passerby either direction could view the homemade built up sides of the truck, emblazoned, in all-caps: “NO GAYS!” “GOD HATES HOMOSEXUALITY!” “GAYS WILL […]

I just finished a marathon weekend of work. It was absolutely ridiculous. Our software release that was scheduled for roughly 8 hours of work turned into about 28. I was literally at work from 10pm Saturday night to almost midnight Sunday night. And we are still dealing with the fallout from […]

Those of you that know about my trip this summer to Brasil know that my team and I went to a city called Londrina, in the state of Parana. Tonight I somehow I ended up at a site called Brasil 2010.
Project Brazil 2010 is the saturation church planting effort originally associated with […]

‘Youth pastors stay at their job for an average of 18 months.’ Not true, read more here.

Friday night I got to be a ‘fly on the wall’ and listen in on the discussion at the Chain Reaction summit. It was a really cool time, just being able to listen in and hear the team process experiences and emotions from last summer.
Basically, it was an intense debriefing time, helping the leaders […]

“Rosa Parks has met that standard of extraordinary service to her country. She didn’t have a weapon on her. She didn’t have an organization behind her. All she had was her conviction.” - Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.)
WaPo article here detailing the tribute.

Found someone’s rough notes from an Erwin McManus talk or something….Lots and lots of stuff here….
Invest in people who are willing to invest in others.Don’t have everything down… if you do, then no one will join your team.The quality of leaders that you call will be proportionate to the level of influence that you let […]

From Out of the Comfort Zone by George Verwer1. Vision2. Sensitivity and understanding3. People of prayer4. Encouragers of others5. Committed to high standards in communication6. A reader

A long work weekend ahead of me this coming weekend. My team will be on from 10pm Sat night to probably 4 or 5pm Sunday afternoon. I’m getting too old for these all night work marathons. Nobody at my company can remember the simple fact, “People are finite.”
Friday evening I will be […]

Forbes has a series of short interviews with great thinkers on the nature of communications. Here is a snippet from “Noam Chomsky On Why Kids Learn Languages Easily.”
The primary assumption goes back to Eric Lenneberg, who pretty much founded the contemporary field of biology of language. His thesis–which was pretty much everyone’s–was that language […]

“This kind of independent thinking applies to our management philosophy as well. In fact, our employees are so independent, we’ve been told by psychologists, that they would be considered unemployable in a typical company. We don’t want drones who will simply follow directions. We want the kind of employees who will question the wisdom of […]

Getting geared up a bit for our November launch. This is becoming an annual deal, which is kind of funny. The first year we did, it was totally an experiment, and I had no idea that it would generate such momentum. And… it was never my idea, I picked it up from […]

Today’s Washington Post Magazine is devoted to the results of a survey they did with involving teenagers and a variety of subjects. The survey was conducted with 800 high school age students and sponsored by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Survey pdf file here.
It’s a must […]

A few days ago, Em got a postcard in the mail from a church down the street. Here is the card (edited without personal info, click for larger size) “…Remember to attend Sunday school and church and have your mommy or daddy call us to let us know how you are doing.”
Now I’m […]

I’ve been playing around (just a bit) with Flock, a new browser. What is cool - a built in blogger component integrating Flickr pictures. Pretty slick. However, very buggy right now. Crashes a lot. Thanks to Jason Clark for the tip.

I was checking my stats tonight and noticed someone came from the Washington Post. So I clicked the referring link and saw that it was an article that I had linked to in this post, talking about safety while taking students into DC post 9-11. Notice that there is a section that lists […]

Mark Oestreicher, president of Youth Specialties, writes about his experience and principles for middle school mission trips here.
No airplanesTons of prepCareful leader:student ratioStepped approachPartnership with local, indigenous church
Nice. Good post with some great principles.

I’m reposting this, because it’s so good and because I don’t have much to say right now. Originally posted in May, 2004.
7 world changes relevant for missionsThe full article here.1. 24×7 global communications2. Largest population migration in history. More than 50% of the world now lives in urban areas.3. Global economy.4. The center of […]

Fuller Seminary’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry just released a study titled “The College Transition Project.” See the pdf here.
It is the results from “a survey to 234 students who had graduated from the youth ministry of a Presbyterian church within the last four years. This particular youth group was comprised largely of middle-class […]

Our leaders must be able to speak with engagement. And I don’t mean that they just talk. But they speak. They:- Speak life into their students. They know their students well enough to encourage, challenge, coach and correct. They are making disciples - a big part of that is conversation.- […]

People who cut often have feelings of inadequacy from growing up, difficulty with problem-solving and communicating pain, and also suffer from depression, impulsivity and aggression. It’s also common among people who grew up with abuse, neglect or invalid feelings for one reason or another. A cutter typically has poor interpersonal relationships and a shaky sense […]

D and I saw the movie Flightplan tonight. Even though some of the reviews weren’t that great, I enjoyed it. One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed (well, enjoyed might not be the right word) was the level of panic that the main character had looking for her child.
This summer during the LC missions […]

My friend MM got himself in on a Baptist annual meeting tonight to hear Alex McManus speak for the first time. After Skyping with MM for an hour, I’m happy to report that he had a great time. When MM posts some notes, I will link to them.
Alex is doing a round table […]

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them - Work - Family - Health - Friends - Spirit, and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will […]

New Tribes Mission is being expelled from Venezuela, because of Pat Robertson’s comments back in August. Sad. I posted a little bit about NTM’s very deliberate and hardy missionary training strategy here. Read more here. Lets hope there is some way that NTM and the government can come to an agreement.HT […]

K riding a bike for the first time. Thanks to the expert teaching ability of her father, moi.

Walt Disney’s widow was being interviewed after the completion of Disney World in Florida. The reporter remarked, “Isn’t it a shame that your husband never got to see this?” Mrs. Disney quickly corrected him. “He did see it. That is why it is here!”
“Design is treated like a religion at BMW.”
“Design is the fundamental […]

From Leadership That Lasts: Journeys to Significance - An Examination of Paul’s Improving Missionary Advancement, By Neil Cole
Leadership is influence. Not all leaders are good ones. There are some leaders that God doesn’t want to multiply. The best leaders are not those who win the most followers, but those who create other leaders.
Most studies of […]

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich […]

“A focus on the church service as connecting point perpetuates the idea that following Jesus is about going to church.” Read more from Ryan. HT Jordon
DCist maps - Google maps of DC with overlays of the Metro lines.
People particularly want to know if Aslan comes off as a Christ-figure, or just some warm […]

I haven’t written about this yet because she didn’t want the publicity. Too late now. My wife, D, now has a blog. If for nothing else, it should give you readers some very balanced and interesting insight into life in our household.
Here are two of my favorites posts so far:- my fixation […]

is to do the gospel.The title of this post is taken from PM’s post. Check out his 2006 summer mission plan. I notice I am always about 6 months behind him in planning. Ha.
And - he is right. The best way to learn is to do.

I’ve spent a bit of time in the past two weeks doing some setup for the future. I’m tired and I’ve spent too many evenings away from my kids. I sort of hinted at something for next summer in this post here. Can’t talk about that quite yet.
But here is something I can talk about. […]

One cool, dynamic element to bloggers is this almost immediate feedback loop. You can read up on details and details almost real time. A good example has been people posting their notes about the Catalyst conference.
Here are a few posts from people that I met from UMCP Tues night and some fun commentary […]

These should astound you, like they did me. From Shane, who got them from the book Megashift. Sounds like a good read.
- Between 1990 and 2004, Christians in Cambodia grew from 200 to 400,000.- Kazakhstan went from 100 evangelicals in 1990 to 6,000 in 2004.- Guatamala is now 44% born -again Christians.- El […]

Here are my speaking notes from tonight. I thought it went a little bit better than average. There were a few things that I wanted to say, but totally forgot. It was definitely fun though, and fun to meet and see everything that is going on there. It was also fun […]

I speak at IV - UMCP tonight. I hope FZ still has some credibility when I’m done. Ha.

I don’t know too much first hand about Andy Stanley and Northpoint Church. But what I do know, I like. Here are four videos from their Drive Conference, their conference for Senior pastors and staff. I watched #2, “Creating Irresistible Environments.” It was really, really good.

Well we spent a lot of time at the DC Festival this weekend. Our original plans were to take a small group of SPACE kids down to help serve at the Festival. We had a team that had pre-registered to help with some of the sports clinics and stuff like that. Instead, […]

Lots of rain today - modified DC Festival schedule. Should be somewhat fun but very wet. Whoever said SPACE runs according to plan?

I think this article about 30 Emerging voices under 40 was published last summer, but just got online recently. Anyway, its a ton of fun to read. I got stoked just hearing about all of these different people, the passion they have for engaging the world, and the many different ways ‘ministry’ looks […]

IV’s Entry Posture Diagrams for cross-cultural mission training:Openness, Acceptance, Trust, Adaptability -> Understanding, Deepening RelationshipSuspicion, Fear, Superiority, Prejudice -> Alienation, Withdrawal, Broken RelationshipPDF here.
Steve Addison’s Indigenous Christian Movements post.
Some blogging from the Catalyst Conference:- Out of Ur Blog - new blogfrom the editors of Leadership Journal- David Trotter- Tony Morgan- Joe Dworak- Here is Technorati […]

This weekend we take a small team of students to the DC Festival. It should be a lot of fun, and will be interesting to see the students perspective on a large Christian festival specifically designed for outreach. I think it’s going to be neat to see how its done and how people […]

What was the hardest lesson you have had to learn?Eldredge: Wow, what a question. What’s the hardest lesson I had to learn? How to handle power. I heard Dallas Willard say once that he believes that the story of the Bible is the story of God wanting to entrust men with His power and […]

Well, it’s been exactly two months since the Brasil trip, just one of the great experiences this summer. Like everybody, it’s getting more and more difficult to remember specifics about those experiences - the subtle memories that we often forget. So I thought, just for me, that I would try to list the […]

GCC invited all the ministry leaders tonight to hear more about the move. For those of you that might not know, we are building a building. In two months. It is large. It will have a lot of seats. It’s on a good sized property. You can think mega-church, […]

Sorry to all of you readers with IE… I didn’t realize for a long time that my sidebar was all the way at the bottom of the blog page. Weird. Since I use Firefox, I never noticed.
Anyway, I’m in the middle of fixing it, which might take a few days. This includes […]

I’m really thinking about entering this.

Leaders do not transform people - instead they:(1) provide a context which is marked by(2) access to a luxuriant portfolio of meaningful opportunities (projects) which(3) allow people to fully express their innate curiosity and(4) engage in a vigorous discovery voyage (alone and in small teams, assisted by an extensive self-constructed network) by which those people(5) […]

Dan Kimball is working on a book titled "They Like Jesus, but Not the Church."  In his post, he has listed seven main reasons why people stay away from church.  The list is generated from his interviews with people for his research and would be an important list for us to keep in mind.  […]

"GRILAGEM" - Brazilian Portuguese - The practice of putting a live cricket into a box of newly faked documents, until the insect’s excrement makes the paper look convincingly old.  More from the article here.

I have a pretty active next two weeks. This coming week, there is a leadership gathering at GCC talking about the building move, which happens in 9 weeks or so. Pretty crazy. It is the last time the ministry leaders will talk and pray before we move.
(I actually wish I […]