Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Mike Yaconelli’s 65th Birthday

    I’m sure at least half of the people who will read this won’t get why I’m posting this. I caught this over at Think Christian and I thought it was a tribute worth looking at again. Mike was the founder of Youth Specialties and a guy who made a lot of people think differently about youth ministry.

    I never met him personally but heard him speak a couple of times. Here is a tribute video that was put together shortly after his death in 2003. The last words of his last National Youth Worker Convention are a fitting closing to the video.

  • More interesting graphics about the church

    So yesterday, I used some cool graphics for my message. And as promised, tomorrow I will be putting the text from the message online. In the meantime, here are the graphics from yesterday as well as a couple new ones I came across today.

    God_and_americaBiblebeltMichigan_god_big1_2



    I used all of these for the message yesterday. I’m actually not certain where I got the God and America map originally. But I made the Michigan one on my own, it’s simply a blown up version of the original but I had to use a new county map and color it to map it big enough for the screen.

    Here are two I wish I had before the message though I’m not sure how it would have fit in to use. I found these over at Think Christian.
    Atlas_of_religions
    Map_of_christianity

  • Ever just feel tired?

    That’s how I feel right now. I came home from church yesterday and slept all afternoon. I went to bed at my normal time last night, slept in a little, and still feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

  • Mind Blowing Statistics

    I’ve about done with the message for tomorrow morning. I’m encouraging our congregation to embrace their life’s mission of reaching their community for Christ. But in the the process of preparation I’ve started comparing some studies, mixed with my own informal study here locally to discover some disturbing truths. I’m going to save both the good news and the bad news until the service. But I can’t help but think as I look at these facts, "Why aren’t people sending missionaries to Romeo?"

    The immediate good news is two-fold. (Not sharing any secrets of the message in the morning.)

    1. God has sent missionaries to Romeo.
    2. God’s desire is to reach Romeo through the local church.

    As I’m busy examining the evidence and fact-checking the data, this is one talk where I hope everyone takes the time to download the message notes and check the data themselves. Even with massive margins of error we’re talking one very powerful observation!

  • Managing a virtual community

    Designing_online_community
    Or congregation for that matter.

    I’m trying to sort out the meaning of three things I’ve read this week. All three have to do with the big question, "What is community?" and "How do you help people form balance in an online community?" From a 10,000 foot perspective the question doesn’t really become "What is it?" or "How do people find balance?" It becomes "How do I manage to maintain an community in a healthy, productive way to become something enduring and profitable?"

    Here are the three articles/posts I’ve read that have me trying to connect the dots.
    Virtual Reality = Virtual Community = Virtual Relationships by David Garrison
    Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer by Seth Godin
    Second Life and Multiverse by Bobby Grunewald

    On one side of the discussion Garrison, a youth pastor, is questioning the value of virtual relationships in comparison to online relationships.     He says that online communities are morally neutral, yet are often being used in unhealthy ways. That’s a good point but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all online relationships are somehow more or less dysfunctional that real world ones. My experience in more than 13 years of using online community is that it’s just as possible to form real relationships online as offline. You can be just as fake in real life, you can block people out of your life just as effectively, and dysfunctions in your personality will always evidence themselves in all areas of our lives.

    Lifechurch
    From the perspective of Lifechurch.tv, Grunewald lives out an attitude that online relationships are not only "real," but they can also be redemptive to reaching people for Christ.      That’s why Lifechurch.tv, one of the most innovative churches on the planet, operates a campus on Second Life. As the article mentions, a lot of "virtual people" who experience church at their internet campus, eventually reach out and make one-on-one connections with a local church or even one of their locations. In my experience with online communities this is a natural outgrowth. A sign of a healthy online communities is the "meet-up." Converting online friends into offline friendship has been an amazing experience for me. Online communication has some limitations as it fails to capture many of the nuances of language. After all, how much of our communication is non-verbal? How much depends on you knowing me personally so that when you read my words your brain says, "I can see Adam saying that, I know what he means despite his ability to articulate it clearly in writing." And in my role with Youth Ministry Exchange I can verify that nearly 100% of disagreements that occur in that online community have to do with misunderstood context and things that wouldn’t have caused conflict when combined with non-verbal communication.

    Sethgodin
    I had all of this swirling around the grey matter (Is it good? Is it moral? Can it last? Is it enduring and helping the trade?) between my ears when I read Seth’s Godin’s post.     In Seth’s opinion, forming, managing, and growing trade-based online communities is one of the big jobs of the future. See, it’s one thing when you feel like the only guy on the block who thinks your idea is worthwhile. It’s another thing when one of the premier business minds out there says the same thing. (Hey, when is this guy going to appear at the Leadership Summit?) See, I think places like YMX are valuable to people in Youth Ministry… but I am just one person and a nobody. When other people start saying that trade-based online communities are important now and will be super important in the future, I start to believe it!

    Ymx_nofullname
    I know online communities are important.     (Why else would I operate one?) And I know they can be redemptive. (Why else would we have joined the Gospelcom Alliance?) The hard part of managing an online community is this: Creating an online place where everyone feels valued, feels like they can contribute, and is still narrowly focused enough to effect growth and change in a specific sub-culture or trade. Put that in a bottle and you will make millions.

    Questions: When it comes to online communities from YMX, to Facebook, to the now dead and dying MySpace, what is the community value? How does an online community keep out of the grave? How does it keep going and become something enduring for an entire tribe of people?And how do I manage a community for long-term and not short term profit in the way MySpace did?

  • Wonder why we want a new sign?

    Here’s why.
    Romeosign
    At first I thought… "Should I post this?" Then I realized… somewhere between 9 PM and 9 AM a few thousand cars already saw it. I’m posting it to make a couple of points.

    Interestingly, both Jason and I noticed it immediately. It’s funny because you don’t often notice the text of a sign as you drive. That is, until the text is different.

    You see, our eyes take in billions of pixels of information an hour. Our brains automatically ignore most of the images we see because we’ve already seen and processed that. We can ignore what we already know. But our mind draws our attention to things that are different.

    This is why marketing is such a fascinating science. How do we develop a message that both lasts and is different all the time?

    And the new sign we want. It won’t have moveable letters for this reason. Only problem with that is that it won’t have moveable letters to draw your attention to it. Which mean, we need to design the new sign in a way that is memorable for other reasons.

  • Sex!

    College students talk about sex. Some interesting thoughts here. Some that are thought provoking, stupid, and…

    What do you think?

    HT to Jeremy DelRio

  • Walls… building or tearing down?

    I’ve been watching Bill Bowles trip around the world on his blog almost every day. I am continually impressed that he can produce and release a video a day from all over the planet. Some are fun and some are serious, but most are just fascinating. OK, so the Beer Run one from today is both fascinating and fun.

    But every once in a while Bill does something truly remarkable. This post from the Great Wall is brilliant. The question he poses is something that I hope this generation addresses. Gang, Jesus is all about justice… but are his people?

  • Fighting the Elongation of Adolescence

    As long as I’ve studied adolescents and been doing youth ministry I’ve heard talk of "the elongation of adolescence."

    That’s a fancy sociology term for saying, Kids grow up slow these days. Not all kids, but most, are being more dependent on their parents longer.

    A Quick Disclaimer: This has more to do with books and articles I am reading than individuals I know.

    Some causes

    • Parents don’t want their kids to grow up. They don’t enter adolescence with Bill Cosby’s goal of kicking them out… so they never raise adolescents to move out.
    • Kids are happy to accept luxuries without paying for it. It sickens me that parents just foot the bill for adult children. (By adult, I mean those who are old enough to live on their own and pay their own way.) They pay for their college, they give them spending money, they give them a cell phone, pay for their car, feed them, clothe them, and basically treat them like royalty. Honestly… why would you move out if you are waited on hand and foot? Think of all the free stuff you would lose if you moved out!
    • Parents are too nice. Just so we are clear… parents are not under obligation (Legally, morally, or spiritually) to provide for their children indefinitely! It’s not doing your children a favor to tell them "just concentrate on school and I’ll take care of the rest." The result is an unemployable and lazy, overeducated child who will live in your house and sponge off of you until you die. Imagine the interview of your adult child when they are a fresh graduate from college! "I‘ve never worked, I can’t do my own laundry, and I don’t really need this job because everything will be OK. My parents will make sure I don’t starve, they’ll buy me clothes, pay my bills, pay my car insurance, let me live rent free, and even give me money to go on vacation." Would you hire this person? I wouldn’t. I want to hire people who are hungry to work hard and have demonstrated hard work.
    • There is no allure of marriage. Think about it. Why get married? Take away the sex and companionship… and there is no reason for a young adult to get married anytime soon.
    • No urgency to grow up. No one expects an 18-19 year old to be an adult. We become shocked when 18-19 year olds want to act like adults! We even freak out a bit about it, don’t we? It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.

    Some possible solutions

    (more…)

  • Draught

    How come no one wants to use this term? The Romeo area has to be more than 6 inches behind on rain. People who haven’t watered their lawn are now experiencing dormancy and people who do water are having to do so nearly daily.

    How come no one wants to use the word drought? I’ve not heard it on the news or anywhere. How come Al Gore isn’t marching around telling everyone it’s the result of global warming? How come some idiot isn’t on the God channel telling everyone it’s the result of too many gays in Michigan?

    Obviously, this isn’t NorCal and we’re used to getting regular rain showers in the summertime.

    Growing up in Indiana I remember the farmers and all locals talking every year about too much rain or too little rain. They were quick to use terms to label the season. But around here, I talked to one farmer who is excited there isn’t much rain. "Less grass to cut" he told me.

    Huh.