Category: hmm… thoughts

Missionaries know it. Businesses know it. Documentarians film it. Marketers make money from it. But what is it? It is ethnography.

Ethnography ????? ethnos = people and ??????? graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitativefieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic
research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot
necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.

It doesn’t matter if you are a youth pastor in a community. An insurance salesman. A high school math teacher. Or a physician. If you want to succeed in a community,  you need to take the time to understand how the community works. Understanding ethnography helps you understand how the people think, how the politics of both elected and unelected people control things, and understand how cultural phenomenon dictate community behavior. (Holidays, local business practices, etc)

Here’s the thing. Most doctors, pastors, insurance salesmen, and high school math teachers that fail, do so for cultural reasons and not because they are bad doctors, pastors, salesmen, or teachers. They fail because they failed to grasp the culture they are working in. Yet they blame themselves, their training, or even the people they want to sell to, provide services for, or teach for their failure!

Success at Romeo depends not just on us teaching doctrine and working hard. It depends heavily on us adapting and developing methods to reach our community by first understanding how the community works. Stick with me.

Some examples:

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In our leadership group at the church and on YMX, we only launch things when we’re pretty sure it’s a homerun. First impressions are pretty much everything in my world. If someone walks into Romeo and their first impression is that we are disorganized or unfriendly, that’s how they will feel about Romeo until we prove them wrong. But chances are… a bad first impression will lead to them not coming back. The same thing applies with the website. If someone comes to YMX and the site is down or the site is hard to navigate or understand… chances are that person won’t come back.

Enter Wal*Mart’s new downloadable video store. The worlds largest retailer and the nations largest private employer launched their service that is supposed to compete with Apple’s iTunes. This launched today… obviously they weren’t ready. Not only are they entering into the download video world very late, now they’ve done this. 

This wasn’t the first impression they intended to make. It will take them some time to prove this one wrong.

There are all sorts of urban legends out there. There are local ones and international ones. Interestingly enough, they are very powerful.

An urban legend tells us a story that is what we want to believe, so it is often more powerful than the truth.

The former principal of Romeo High School never really chased a kid, caught him, and fought him. But students wanted to believe it so it was true… hence he earned the nickname "Action."

Al Gore never said he invented the internet. But people wanted to believe that the Washington DC liberal was out of touch with reality. People believed it and it may have cost him his chance at being president.

You don’t get sick because you go outside with wet hair or without a jacket. (They are called viruses, diseases, and bacteria!) But people want to believe it’s true… so it might as well be true.

The phrase "80% of all statistics are made up on the spot" is used to destroy people’s sound arguments using research. Of course, there’s never been a study on that and it’s impossible to measure. But people believe it, so it is true.

Urban legends make or break a lot of people. They are part of the reason why some people succeed and some people fail. What people want to believe about a person or a church or a sports team or a book or a website or an mp3 player is often far more powerful than anything else that can be said.

Here’s something I’m learning: People make decisions about things not based on anything factual at all… they make decisions about people, churches, sports teams, books, websites, and mp3 players based on how those things make them feel and how they feel associating themselves with that thing.

What are the urban legends about me? What are the urban legends about things that I care about? I have no control over that… but it is interesting!

Last night’s talk from Acts 16 was interesting. It’s an interesting concept to think about God being glorified when He upsets a local economy. To think that God actually take great pleasure in revealing Himself in the midst of messing up manmade economies.

I think the problem last night was that I was in such a rush to get people talking about it that I don’t think I did a good job of describing the types of economies that students experience that God could upset. Oops.

The Church Report just issued a list of "The Top 20 Youth Ministers" in America. Well, not on the list. Interestingly enough I am not familiar with most of those people. In fact, most of them aren’t published authors and seem to be pure practitioners. Youth Ministry speakers and authors seem to be completely missing.

Missing from the list? Interesting that Doug Fields isn’t on the list. He is clearly the most influential youth minister in America and at one of the most influential churches in America. If you ask people that I know "Who is the biggest name in youth ministry?" I would bet 7 out of 10 would say Doug Fields.

Honestly, it would seem that in order to be considered you would have to be on CR’s "Top 50 church" list as well.

This morning there was a segment on The Today Show called, "60 is the New 40." I’ve noticed that Baby Boomers will do just about anything to be labeled as "getting older." In their eyes, they are always going to be 18-21. Honestly, it’s just laughable. They can talk about sex after 60 and 60 year old models until the cows come home. But the generation that "didn’t trust anyone over 30" needs to look at their driver’s licenses! They are over 30, 40, and 50… and the younger people are wondering if they should bother trusting them.

You hear slogans like "you’re only as old as you feel" and things like that. I think the reality is that generationally, the baby boomers are the perpetual drama queens. Instead of allowing any other generation to have their due spotlight… maybe gracefully stepping to the side to allow others to emerge. Like any "drama queen" there is no such thing as grace. As a group, they’ll never step aside. In 10 years, Raquel Welch will be talking about how great it is to be 77.

What I see is a group of people in complete denial. 60 year olds getting plastic surgery to "feel 30." People in their 50s trying to dress like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. (Um, no one wants to see a 50 something year old woman in knee high boots and a micro-mini skirt. 60 year olds on TV talking about sex toys and modeling when 5 year olds are watching is absolutely ridiculous.)

On the other hand. I should shut up and say nothing about this phenomenon. After all, the only way to truly silence a drama queen is just to ignore them.

The contrast between "marketing" to Baby Boomers and today’s 20-30 somethings is night and day. Boomers only want to be convinced that everything they do is "the best" and "forever young." Any product that tells older people that they can feel young will sell like hotcakes. Even old folks homes are being set up to convince old people that they are really young. After all… you might be aging chronologically but you aren’t getting older. Um, denial?

By contrast, younger people are finding significance in acting responsibly and thinking about what’s best for others. If the Builders are known as "the greatest generation" as coined by Tom Brokaw, Baby Boomers will likely be known as "the most selfish generation." During their "reign" over American culture, American culture has tanked! It’ll take another "greatest generation" to repair the damage.

American evangelicals, who profess to be committed to Truth, are among
the worst abusers of simple descriptive statistics, which claim to
represent the truth about reality, of any group I have ever seen. At
stake in this misuse are evangelicals’ own integrity, credibility with
outsiders, and effectiveness in the world. It is an issue worth making
a fuss over. And so I write. Complete article

Let me be blunt… this article is talking primarily about Barna Group. Critiques of Barna have been going on in the academic world of Christian education for the last several years and it is finally boiling over into the public arena. Basically, the most quoted name in Christian research has been accused of methodology problems for years. (At least 50% of the time, hahahaha!) I first picked up on this while reading a church history book by Notre Dame history professor Mark Noll. (long time Wheaton College history professor) In his book, American Evangelical Christianity, Noll made the observation that Barna’s definition of an evangelical was shifting significantly. Essentially this "window" of what they were labeling "evangelical Christian" was changing drastically. They were labeling all sorts of people evangelicals… which skewed their other research about "evangelical Christian behaviors" including some often quoted"truth" we’ve all heard like, "Evangelicals divorce at the same rate as non-Christians." I’m certain that this wasn’t the first mention of it, but since the 2000 release of that book this point of view has been gaining steam.

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