Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Glows world-wide welcome

    The New Colossus

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
    With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

    —Emma Lazarus, 1883

    With another NYWC kicking off this morning, this is exactly how it feels. Youth workers are the most misunderstood tribe of church workers. Maligned, misrepresented, dispatched to the corners of the building these resilient men and women endure a lot to be in youth ministry. They do it because they’ve answered a calling to minister to the tribe of people often cast aside as lepers in the church, teenagers.

    And they come to convention looking for rest, ideas, and encouragement. Convention is a place of shared known where we can laugh, cry, and celebrate what God is doing. As they come today, I hope to pour what I can into them.

    This is a homecoming for them and I intend to welcome them home!

  • Desert Questions

  • Get Out and Explore

  • A Word From Kermit

    Kermit is right. It’s not easy being green.

    Embrace your identity.

    Whatever God has called you to do, do it with reckless abandon. Fear is your enemy. Safety is never productive.

    Own your fears. But don’t let them own you.

    Kermit is right. Nothing worth being is easy.

  • What Good Works?

    church-ephesians-2-10

    I’m a rubber meets the road kind of guy. I want to know the big picture early on in a discussion. And I want to know what I’m being asked to do.

    Perhaps that is why I’ve always wrestled with Ephesians 2:8-10.

    For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith– and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

    In this passage Paul addresses the question, “Why are we saved?” More importantly, he points us to the biggest struggle of the church today: Do we exist, as believers, for the church’s good works or for the good works of the city we live in?

    I think church leaders morph the meaning of this verse and lift it out of context for their own purposes.

    Church leaders interpretation: “You were created in Christ Jesus to do good works, and we’re going to point you to good works right here in the church building. We have many programs of the church that could use your good works… especially in the nursery. Did you know we have a growing nursery and a shrinking pool of volunteers willing to hold babies so their parents can worship Sunday morning?”

    Let’s be honest. That’s a very seperatist view of the the world. Much of what we do as church leaders is kingdom building for our local church. We address our most current need as if it were the communities most current need. In America, our view of a  good church is one that is full of people, has a great pastor, and has a huge building. But what good are those things to the people of the community? Do they see the church as a place of good news for them? In most cases they don’t. American churches serve themselves more than they serve the community! Most churches in our country have little to no impact on the community they live in. They reach 2-3% of the populuation and all of their programs essentially benefit themselves or that 2-3% of the population who come to their building to worship.

    To the community– a lot of churches are bad news.

    Paul’s explanation in Ephesians 2:12-13: (The part pastors don’t read when asking you to volunteer for something) “Remember that at that time [before you were saved] you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ”

    Paul is reminding his people… you were once locked out of the being a part of God’s family because you weren’t born into it. But Jesus tore down that wall of separation. There is no “good works for Jesus” and “good works for the world” in God’s eyes. A good work is a good work. Verse 14 makes this even more explicit, “For he himself if our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”

    So… why are we saved? What is our purpose in the city we live in? To do good works both within the church and outside. There is no separation and one is not better than the other. They are both good works! The purpose of the church isn’t to create a holy huddle… it’s to create a sending place of good works and renewal into the places we live.

    Perhaps this is why the program-driven church is so repulsive to people exploring a walk with Jesus today. They read the New Testament for themselves and cannot reconcile what is described as a movement of God’s people to change the world with the church they are presented with… one that exists to feed its programs.

  • Stoney and Friends

    Stoney and Friends


    Stoney and Friends

    Originally uploaded by mclanea

    I woke up this morning to see Stoney, the family dog, laying on his blanket completely surrounded by the kids Webkinz.

  • The Man Who Punk’d the World



    It’s becoming increasingly clear that this family punk’d the world.     In fact, it looks as if the man who scripted the whole incident, less the involvement of the child, sold his story to Gawker.

    What isn’t clear is why they tried to play it this way. OK, so you pulled a fast one with the world’s media? Awesome! Why not use the spotlight to look into the camera and say to Wolf Blitzer, “You just got punked!”

    Sure, he’d be opening himself up to a big bill from the agencies who wasted taxpayer money playing pawn-like roles in his publicity stunt.     But, if he got the last laugh on CNN and then told Wolf that he had a place where people could chip-in to cover his impending legal problems– all of this would have been funny, he would have collected a million dollars, and the Heene family would have pulled something off which would have made Ashton Kutcher blush.

    In that moment Richard Heene’s held choice in his hands which would change his family forever. Would he tell the truth and become a legendary prankster? Or would he lie and become a legendary mook?

    Richard Heene chose to try to keep the hoax a secret. Even after 6 year old Falcon Heene spilled the beans on live TV. And now the family looks horrible. And now the parents may get arrested. And now the fame they so eagerly wanted will be replaced by visits by the Child Protective Services.

    The hoax had the potential to live out an example of Seth Godin’s blog post from the same day. Instead, we’re stuck with this sad story of 3 little kids who may now see their family encounter hard times.

    I just wish Richard Heene had chosen the other option.     Now that would have been captivating television. “Wolf, the truth is that you… and the whole world… just got punked!“

  • Use of Jargon in Church Marketing

    mailer-side-a

    mailer-side-b

    Today we received this mailer from a San Diego area church.* Since we live about 15 miles from their campus I’m going to make two assumptions:

    Assumption #1: They sent it to a lot of people!

    Assumption #2: They intend to reach a lot of people with this series!

    Both of those are world changing things. I know enough about the church to know that they have great intentions. The mailer makes it clear that they are trying to use something in our culture (tough economic times) for a Kingdom purpose. (reaching people with the Gospel.) I’m on board with their intentionality and boldness.

    In many ways it is a great mailer. It’s slightly larger than a normal postcard so it stuck out of my mailbox a little. It’s printed on high quality paper. I love the color scheme. Blue, orange, and white catches my attention. The fonts are fine and even the imagery they use is nice. Compared to a lot of church marketing they are way, way above average.

    One major problem with this mailer.

    Lots and lots of Christian jargon that their intended audience [unchurched people] wouldn’t know the meaning of or much less care about!

    – What the Bible says about your financial future.

    – The hidden cost of the new global economy.

    – The one world order

    – The new global economy

    – The coming cashless society

    – The world financial czar

    – The war between God and mammon

    – Babylon the fallen city

    – God’s final one world order

    – The millennium

    Conservative evangelicals will recognize this jargon right away… this isn’t really a series your financial future, it’s a series on the book of Revelation. (Words that never appear on the mailer.)

    Anyone outside of conservative evangelicalism… this jargon is meaningless. Babylon? Millennium? New world order? War between God and mammon?

    My fear is that this mailing may have had a negative impact on the community opinion about them they were trying to reach. This message is ill-timed as the economy is making a massive comeback the economic concerns seem far less interesting, the heavy use of jargon makes them come across as a doomsday cult.

    How to fix it? You simply cannot design marketing materials in a vacuum. If you are producing stuff like this in house make sure you field test it on your intended audience before you mail it to a few hundred thousand people. At the very least, send it to a copywriter. This was a preventable mistake.

    * Disclaimer: I’ve removed the church’s name on purpose. This post isn’t intented to be a slight at the staff or the church in any way. I like the church. I like the pastor. The people I know who go there say its a great church. This post is only using their marketing as an example. I removed their name because the church name is irrelevant to the discussion.

  • Schlepping through a data schmutz

    At work I’m doing a data smash. That is a tech geek way [I made up the term myself] of saying I’m taking all of our pipelines of customer web data and pouring it into one bucket to see if there’s anything interesting I can learn.

    It’s an experiment. There’s no guarantee it’ll tell me anything!

    Lately I’ve felt like I should put my lab coat on when I go into the office. And I find myself telling data jokes that people just stare at.

    It’s a very interesting experiment from 30,000 feet. But in the course of doing it, at ground level, it’s pretty flipping boring. As I trudge through spreadsheets, cleaning data, and merging terms like “church” and “organization” and “account” from various databases into one consistent term– I try not to let my mind wander. Consequently, at the end of the day I’m completely mentally exhausted. And you thought my job was just playing on YouTube, Facebook, and podcasts?

    My little experiment makes me think of real scientists in  real lab coats doing real experiments. These folks test a hypothesis with their hard work, ingenuity, intuition, experience… and money. Like my little experiment at work they don’t know if their hard work will ever pay off or if they’ll have to admit that their hypothesis failed despite all of the hard work, ingenuity, intuition, education, and money.

    And yet some of them work years and years, day-after-day, on the mundane unsexy experiments that change the world in big sexy ways. They invent new medical devices, develop vaccines, make sure the stuff we use is safe, on and on. Our society is dependent on nerds in lab coats.

    They are often the quiet heroes of our civalization. And yet we never learn their names.

    Better find my pretend lab coat and get back to work.

  • Unleash the Power of Observation

    observation

    Life is full of surprises. Unexpected things happen. People do funny stuff. But you’ll never notice the good stuff until you train your eye to look for it.

    Every week I see something that completely blows my mind. Sometimes its hilarity. Sometimes its tragedy. Sometimes its awkward. Sometimes its a persons moment of accomplishment. And when I share these things I always get the same response… how do you notice all that stuff?

    Observation is a skill. I don’t have special eyesight and I don’t think I live somewhere that especially strange things happen. OK, living near a university gives me the advantage that strange things probably happen more often than in other places. But I will make this promise, if you develop your observation skills you will see the art of life unfold before your eyes.

    Step one: Pop a squat. Define normal.

    The first thing you need to do is get to know your environment. If you’re new to this, go to a favorite coffee shop with a legal pad of paper or your laptop. Then, start writing everything you see down. Don’t talk to anyone. Just observe who is there, what they are doing, what they are talking about, what they are wearing, what they order, what they do after they order… write it all down. When it’s slow, map out the floor plan of the the coffee shop. Start noticing where people’s eyes go when they first walk into the shop. Start tracking foot traffic. Start noticing who stays how long. Start noticing how other people chose a seat. Once you’ve done this for a couple hours you will know what is normal about that shop.

    Step two: Contrast everything. Ignore the normal to notice the abnormal

    Once you get comfortable with the normal behavior of people in the coffee shop, you’ll start to notice the abnormal. (aka The Good Stuff) Notice that a guy sits in a certain place to check out female customers. Notice that people drop their change when the cute person is taking orders. Notice that the same person is meeting multiple people in a day. Notice the woman who cries quietly by herself. Notice the guy in the suit rolling his eyes while on the phone. On and on.

    Once you are used to a single environment and you get good about noticing what is abnormal at one place… it should start to come naturally with things in your every day routine.

    Most of the interesting things I observe happen when I’m in my routine. Riding my bike to the trolley I know what sprinklers are on, which direction cars typically come from at the intersections, which people are normally waiting for the bus, who are the regulars outside of Starbucks, that Tuesday’s are light traffic days at SDSU, who gets off at my stop, and which cars are parked on the side of the road as I work my way from the trolley to the office. Once I know that stuff– I only notice things that aren’t normal.

    The more you do this the better you get. I think I observe things a little better than most people because I do it in my routine all the time. Airports are easy “next steps” as typically most people behave about the same in all airports. But just know this.

    You can observe great things about the world simply by training your eyes to look out for it.

    The irony of this post? I notice obscure things but often miss the obvious.