Category: hmm… thoughts

I don’t visit tons of college campuses, but I do visit several per year. And every since I was a college student at a Christian college I’ve been bothered by this.

What is that? It’s something I call "pseudo-homosexualality." I know that isn’t a word, but once I describe it you’ll recognize it straight away. I’ve seen it on every Christian college campus I’ve been on in the last few years. Wheaton, Trinity, Cornerstone, Cedarville, Grace, Huntington, and of course my alma mater, Moody.

What? It looks like this. You are sitting there in a college coffee shop, minding your own business. And two completely straight guys are taking turns rubbing one another’s feet at the table next to you. If you weren’t on a Christian campus, say if you were at the local Starbucks, you would immediately say to yourself, "Whatever, they’re gay. Not for me but whatever." But on a Christian campus you see stuff like that all the time. Other examples: Girls holding hands for long periods of time. Girls cuddling on couches. Guys giving one another extended backrubs in public. Two girls rubbing lotion on one another’s hands in chapel. Both genders being far too flirtatious with the same sex in public.

I am not saying that what they are doing makes them gay. All I am observing is that if this behavior were happening outside of the "safety of a Christian college bubble" it would automatically be labeled as homosexual. Instead… it’s not really homosexual behavior since the people are straight, it just looks homosexual.

I don’t want this to be misread as gay hate speach. (Though, I believe any sex of any kind outside of the marriage of a man/woman is against God’s law. Gay or straight.) This is just an observation from something I see at all Christian campuses I visit. There is a ton of overly feminine behavior out of the guys!

Not to pick on Grace simply because I’m here now. But, the decor in most of the buildings is very feminine. To the point where I wondered if they were interested in attracting guys at all? Maybe it’s the same at all the colleges we visit. But I’m noticing it here. I’ll have to be on the look out for that at other colleges.

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:

(more…)

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.