• The weird side of Christians and politics

    Preamble: Understand in reading this post that I’m a swing voter and my #1 criteria for voting is, “Can this person lead in the role they are running for?” Side issues mean almost nothing to me in light of that one framing question.

    I cringe when I hear evangelical Christians being grouped together as a block of voters for two reasons.

    First, it’s a self-indicting judgement in how we view ourselves that we would only identify people with a certain political ideology when Jesus has commanded that we reach all people, all neighbors, with the Good News of Jesus Christ. Second, many of the solutions to issues Christian seem to care about from established political parties have been proven to both not work in society; the people who are elected because of their viewpoints on single issues often come with baggage that is distinctly against Christian values.

    Some examples: 

    • Gay marriage is no more an attack on my marriage than the billboard for no fault divorce I pass on my way to work. Actually, the guy with the handgun next door is far more dangerous to my marriage than the gay couple across the street. Violent crimes in America are way, way down versus 2 decades ago. But handgun sales are way, way up.
    • There are millions of children in this country brought here as children who went to school with our kids, who have said the pledge of allegiance every morning next to our kids, and who have dreams just like our kids. But because there is no pathway to becoming a legal resident they are stuck. I can think of no fathomable reason Christians don’t advocate for them. Those kids aren’t dangerous– their homeland, the United States of America, doesn’t love them back. It’s heart-breaking. We are all immigrants to this country. We should be advocates for the Dream Act.
    • Health care costs are killing people. Literally. People are dying because they can’t afford basic health care. And yet, doctors are reimbursed less now than 20 years ago. Privatized, for-profit health care coverage and agressive pharmaceutical companies built on 19th century patent laws are bankrupting our society while getting tax breaks on their profits from the government and distributing tiny dividends into your 401k. You can’t argue for both a balanced budget and decreases in corporate taxation. The same companies that caused this current economic crisis are continuing to profit from it while trying to shirk their most basic responsibilities as corporate citizens. That’s what happens when you let the wolves run the chicken coup. They think about eating meat tomorrow with no source for tomorrow’s eggs.

    What’s the point? 
    The point is this, you can’t be a single issue voter and think you’re part of the political process. These are complex problems and deserve our attention. We can’t walk into a voting booth, in good conscious, and cast a vote over abortion or gun control or tax reform or the economy and think that we’ve done our part.

    Doing our part means getting involved at the local level. It means advocating for the sick and oppressed on your block. It means standing up for the powerless in your life.

    When you get to know the people these things effect your perspective will change. When you get to know the gay couple across the street you’ll see that they love each other just like you love your spouse. When you get to know the crazy guy with the guns you’ll see that he has guns because he has deep-seeded fears that a gun can’t fix, a counselor can. When your kids best friend can’t get into college because he has no way to get a green card, it won’t be an issue it will be Joseph’s story. When your next door neighbor dies because she couldn’t afford the medicine anymore it won’t be a matter of corporate rights, it’ll be an injustice.

    Doing our part and doing the right thing might mean not getting what we want or doing what we’re comfortable with all the time. When we take things out of the rhetoric of issues and get to know the people they effect, we’ll see our perspectives shaped by a deep desire to help.

    Friends, we weren’t called into ministry just to love the people who show up at our church or whose kids show up to youth group.

    We were called to a messy ministry of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

  • Five ridiculously hard steps to a better you


    Tim is right. There is a whole lot of lying for the sake of SEO in blogs these days. While there might be five easy steps to creating a Facebook page for your business, there aren’t five easy steps for everything.

    Becoming a better you is ridiculously hard. I know it not from issuing advice but from walking through a few difficult seasons in my own life and finding success, happiness, and satisfaction on the other side.

    Here are five ridiculous hard lessons I’ve learned towards become a better me:

    1. You often have to say no to the wrong opportunity when you have no idea when the right one might come along. For me this has meant, several times, shoving off into the great Lake of the Unknown with no idea if I’d end up where I needed to or have the financial resources to keep going.
    2. Sometimes you have to do things you are dispassionate about in order to get to things you are passionate about. Sure, I probably look like I’ve lived a storied life. But I’ve had jobs I hated. And I’ve done countless things I hate in order to finance what I love. Walk around any art museum and you’ll see that most of those people didn’t become famous until they were dead. All of their life they did work they hated to pay for the work we adore after they are gone.
    3. Being the smartest person in the room is not nearly as important as being the hardest worker in the room. Some of my friends joke with me that I never sleep. That’s not true. But success has never come easy for me. Any success I’ve achieved has been the result of ridiculously hard work. And today’s success only got me here. To get somewhere else I’ll need more and more hard work.
    4. You can’t figure it out on your own. When I make big decisions on my own I usually make a mistake. But when I take the time to add plurality to my decision making process I make wiser , better informed choices. That’s a frustrating, personal, slow, arduous, and humiliating experience. It’s not that I don’t know what’s best for me. It’s that I’m so “in it” emotionally that I have a hard time seeing the bigger picture or asking the really obvious questions of myself. Left to my own, I make a decision and then generate a full-proof construction to justify my decision.
    5. Failure is not the enemy. Failing to see the opportunity in everything is. Albert Einstein said, “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” We consider them both genius’ but maybe they mixed their natural born intelligence with a unique ability to fail well better than their peers?
    What are some ridiculously hard lessons you’ve learned on your way towards success? Let’s learn from the wisdom of the crowd by sharing a comment. 

  • Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

    August beckons new life in ministry. 

    School starts. Our programs relaunch. We recruit and train (hopefully) a batch of volunteers. And we find ourselves, emotionally, in this weird place of hopeful dread.

    We’re hopeful because fall is our spring. Fall is full of new life, new energy, new commitment, and new dreams for the school year to come. Dread because we’ve felt this way before. We’ve printed the agenda, met with parents, trained volunteers… and it’s not gone as expected. 

    We need this year to be different. We are tired. We are weary. We need some success to come easily. We need our strategy to work. Because we don’t know if we can take another year like last year. Which was like the year before. And the year before that.

    In order for this year to be different we need to be a different type of leader.

    Stop.

    I remember in my first semester of classes in youth ministry being told that as the youth pastor it was my job to be the leader. And being the leader meant that I was in charge and ultimately responsible for everything that happened. The reality is that people don’t trust this type of leadership anymore. It might feel familiar or comfortable to them, it might make you look good to the board, but this type of leadership is only going to deliver the results you’ve already seen.

    To grow you’ll need to change.

    To clarify, an autocratic leadership style work great if you’re an ultra dynamic leader. I’m not. And most of the people I know in ministry are not. I’ve found it to be a growth limiter.

    Collaborate.

    I suck at telling people what to do and inspiring them to be all that they can be. But I’m pretty good at working as a leader in a flat, collaborative environment.

    I think that the old style of leadership, especially in the church, feels like a collaborative style is weak leadership. We make the mistake of believing that giving up the headship or giving up the microphone is giving up what we’re paid to do.

    Instead, I see it as forcing new leaders to emerge. It takes no leadership ability at all for me to say… “This is what we need to do, this is where we are going, and this is how it will work.” And if I do all of the teaching and speaking I’m communicating a style of leadership that Jesus didn’t foster with his own disciples.

    Conversely, it takes all of my leadership skills to say, “We all need to work together, we need the best ideas to come out of the group, and we all need to share responsibility.” While the first feels better because I’m taking all of the responsibility, collaborating with a team allows the team to dream a whole lot bigger.

    Listen.

    Nothing makes me tune out faster than being asked to come to a meeting to listen to the leader talk. (Or read from his notes which he dutifully sent to us all in advance.)

    I am willing to be lead. But to be lead I need to be listened to. And I need to see that the leader doesn’t just listen to me, he listens to everyone. The primary task of the leader of a movement is to listen. Ask open ended questions. Sit in a circle on the same level. Provide an open-ended agenda. And make listening your primary task. Listening isn’t passive leadership, it’s where leadership begins.

    It’s fall. Our spring. Are you ready to…. Stop. Collaborate. And Listen?

  • We need non-digital adventure

    Photo by Christine K via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    A couple weekends ago I told Megan and Paul to get in the car, we were going on a secret adventure.

    Anticipation in the car was high. Were we going for ice cream? Was dad taking us to a movie? Were we going to buy new video games?

    All were possibilities. But none were realities.

    Dad’s plan– Spend an hour at Barnes & Noble picking out books.

    “I thought you were taking us on an adventure, dad. This sucks.” Those were the words of my 8 year old son as we entered the store.

    I explained, “You need to take your brain on a non-digital adventure. And books can take you there.” Every time they picked up a book it was tied to a video game or cartoon. “Non-digital adventure. Longer, older, think about the classics.” They complained, “I don’t want to read an old book. I want to read something new. New stuff is good, old stuff is boring.” 

    In the end we made a compromise. They could each pick out whatever book they wanted. And dad picked out two books for them. (The first two books in the Narnia series.)

    Megan took the compromise. Paul didn’t pick out a book and went home empty handed on principle.

    I went home and planned our camping trip– A non-digital adventure of the mind, body, and soul.

    Besides restricting use, what are ways you help your kids take their brain on non-digital adventures? 

  • Grace is a form accidental to the soul

    Any substance is either the nature of that of which it is the substance, or a part of its nature. In this sense, matter and form are both called “substance.” But grace is higher than human nature. It cannot then be its substance, nor yet the form of its substance. Grace is a form accidental to the soul. What exists as substance in God occurs as accident in the soul which shares in divine good, as is obvious in the case of knowledge. But since the soul shares in divine good imperfectly, this participation itself, which is grace, exists in the soul in a less perfect mode than that in which the soul exists in itself. Such grace is nevertheless nobler than the soul’s nature, in so far as it is an expression or sharing of the divine goodness, even though it is not nobler than the soul in respect of its mode of being.

    Nature and Grace, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 110 Article 2

    Photo by Lawrence Lew via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Four questions:

    • Is grace a quality of the soul?
    • Was it in us at birth?
    • Is every action of grace learned behavior?
    • Or is it given to us as an exhibition of the Holy Spirit’s work through us?

    Last night, I was driving home from Costco and Ikea with Megan, and we listened to an interview with Jessica Chastain about her role in Tree of LIfe. She made a few interesting points which I’ve been chewing on.

    • The film is spiritual, not religious as it’s not calling someone to conversion. I don’t know if she was just trying to be politically correct or not. But Jesus made an important distinction between those who know about God and those who have a relationship with God in Matthew 7:21-23. In Jesus’ eyes, knowing about God without looking to conversion is pointless.
    • Grace is at war with human nature. I really like this distinction. It’s not Ms. Chastain’s– she doesn’t take credit for it, it comes from Aquinas. Her example had to do with getting slapped. When you are slapped by someone your nature’s response to to fight back. But graces response is to return a slap with love and compassion. What’s revealing to me about that is how little of that I see in Christian culture. Oh, that we may be a people who respond to one another with love and compassion.
    • Grace is not owned by Christianity. While Ms. Chastain made an attempt to argue that grace is a universal religious expression she couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a uniquely Christian response. While I’m certain other religions have a form of grace… the response she described  is uniquely Christian grace.

    Here’s what I know: When God’s grace shows up it takes your breath away.

    You experience it or you witness it and– in your humanity– you try to replicate it in how you live your life.

    But when grace arrives and it’s from God it comes out of no where and leaves you in awe.

  • 5 Minute Strategy Session: Define Your Ministry Goal

    Discussion questions:

    • Do you agree with the assumption that ministry programs have relational capacities?
    • Do you agree with the assumption that you need to grow or risk losing your job?
    • What are other strategies you could employ in the next 30 days which would impact adolescents in other spheres?

    Here’s the link to download my slides:  [download id=”19″]

  • Boogity boogity boogity AMEN

    ht to Danny via Facebook

  • Coyote Fear

    Click to view full-size

    Yesterday, I opened my front door to this letter. Everyone in my neighborhood did. Take a second to read it.

    There are so many things wrong in this letter. At its core it teaches us a lot about the power of fear in our lives.

    • The letter is completely anonymous. It’s a letter about fear from a person too afraid to reveal who they are.
    • A concerned neighbor expressed a legitimate concern. Coyote are dangerous to pets. Let’s agree that this note came from a very good place, right?
    • The solution offered is counter-intuitive. Hiding your animals and yourself in your house will not scare away predators.
    • The neighbor doesn’t talk about the one obvious solution: Calling animal control.
    • There’s a cynical side of me that wonders if this isn’t really about coyote, it’s a passive-aggressive note about keeping your pets indoors at night. Maybe this neighbor was awakened by a dog barking or two cats fighting? And there are plenty of neighbors feeding lots of stray cats.
    • The note talks about facts, says there is evidence to back up these facts, but provides no specifics as to where you could see the facts.
    • The notes use of hyperbole is impressive, poetic even, like a chapter of Inferno.
    • “Every cat left outside will be attacked, killed and eaten.” That’s my favorite line. It reminds me of the nightly news.

    Fear is big, bold, all caps… and delivered on your doorstep while you sleep.

    Remember: Jesus is not the author of fear.

    The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. ~ John 10:10

  • Kid’s Attention Valued at $1.12 Trillion Annually

    My kids can tell me about all the latest Disney movies. And they can rattle off the specs of just about every toy that they want. Worse yet? They are armed with lines that tell me all about why buying that toy is good for them and the deal they will get if they buy it online by a specific date.

    The culprit? Savvy marketers are hitting them where I’m not looking. Sites that I’ve deemed safe for them to play on are now rewarding them for watching well-placed ads. My own kids are earning Webkinz bucks by watching trailers for movies. It’s not just Webkinz, it’s all of them.

    On the table? Getting kids to influence their parents spending habits.

    $1.12 trillion. That’s the amount that kids influenced last year in overall family spending, says James McNeal, a kid marketing consultant and author of Kids as Consumers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children. “Up to age 16, kids are determining most expenditures in the household,” he says. “This is very attractive to marketers.” 

    Marketing to Kids Gets More Savvy with Technology, USA Today, August 15th 2011. – Read the rest

    What does this have to do with youth ministry? Absolutely everything. I’m not saying you need to market your ministry to your students. But I am saying that you need to know that there are others out there marketing to your students in ways that are more savvy and more influential than your flyer and stage announcement.

    Your retreat, your camp, your mission trip… things like that are competing for the same $1.12 trillion. Sad. But true.

    Tip for Webkinz parents: Go into your kids account and turn off third-party ads.

    Question: Should the government regulate advertising to children? 

  • My Own Casey Anthony

    click to view full-size

    You’re familiar with the command to the ancients, ‘Do not murder.’ I’m telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.

    Matthew 5:21-22 The Message

    I don’t live in Florida. And I barely keep up with the news. In fact, the first thing I heard about the Casey Anthony trial was that people were upset that she had been acquitted on charges of murder.

    There’s no way I can put myself in her shoes, having stood trial, and been declared not guilty on accusations that I’d killed my own child. As the foreperson read the verdict you could see her breath taken away. How her knees didn’t buckle I’ll never know.

    In that moment, either a burden had been lifted or one had been applied. Either way– she wasn’t going to go to jail.

    Tears were natural. I don’t know if I could have stood up to that moment with my future literally written on a piece of paper for a woman to read like she did. She stood there and took the verdict. And in the moments afterward I am sure her mind raced… “Now what?”

    There hadn’t been a next step in her life. But suddenly, in a breath, there was.

    I’m not Casey Anthony.

    While I’m not Ms. Anthony– I am Mr. McLane. And I can put myself in my own shoes. My shoes aren’t much cleaner than hers.

    According to Matthew 5 I am a murderer. And one day I will stand trial and be found guilty on hundreds of counts of murder according to Jesus’ standard. I’m a hopeless case. As I think about my trial, there may be some counts in which I’d plead guilty. And there might be others in which I plead innocent. And, who knows, there might be some in which I’m guilty of both the charge against myself and providing a false report to try to get myself out of trouble for committing the crime which I’d been charged.

    I’m my own Casey Anthony

    I have no idea what really happened with the real Casey Anthony. But my life is full of excuses and lies and manipulations of fact, too.

    Just like her I need a second chance on life. Who am I kidding? I need a 4,635,128th chance on life.

    That’s what is so amazing about second chances in Jesus’ eyes. I might be a hopeless case. But, hanging on the cross, Jesus bore my punishment so I could continue on. In a breath and suddenly, tetelaste, my second chance on life was given.

    Just like Ms. Anthony’s life– from this day forward– her life will be defined by what she does with her second chance.

    So will mine.  So will mine.

    Check out more stories in this series at People of the Second Chance