• Best of 2007

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Why Ethnography is Important

    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. Read the rest

    Looking through blog posts in 2007, I can see my blog taking a big turn. For years I just blogged about what was going on in my daily life. Occasionally, I tossed in a thought or a principle. But in 2007, posts like this one started to creep up as I found a more comfortable voice.

    The biggest advice I have for anyone who wants to get started in blogging is… write, a lot!

  • Best of 2006

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    The (C)old House

    One thing I don’t like about an old house is that it is very hard to keep it warm. It’s a combination of a lack of insulation and inadequate duct work. If I had to do this house over again I would have installed radiated heat… but instead we have a blended system of forced air and electric heat. The result is that some areas are warmish while other areas are constantly drafty.

    It’s been a joke of visitors that our house is always cold. People say “We’re going to Adam’s house, we need to dress warm.” Or my personal favorite is a friend of mine who says “We McLane their house sometimes.” (Now we’re a verb?) Why? Um, pretty simple… we can’t afford to keep our old house at 72 degrees. Even at 65 during the day and 58 at night, we’re a little worried about energy costs this winter.

    Read the rest

    As much as we love San Diego, we still miss our house in Romeo. It’s a great place to live and I’m happy to hear that someone is finally living there again. I just hope they figure out a good way to heat it before winter!

  • Where to Rent vs. Buy

    HT to Mint

  • Best of 2005

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Check Out YMX!

    Hey, a buddy of mine and I launched a website lately for youth workers to connect up. This is filling the forum void left behind since YS closed their forums back in June.

    Anyway, check it out at ymexchange.com

    link

    This changed everything. As I look back on the last several years, no event changed my life more than creating Youth Ministry Exchange.

    For years the youth ministry world was pretty self-contained. There were a limited number of players and it seemed impossible to get your foot in the door anywhere.

    So we created a new door.

    Within a month we created massive traffic for our new business. We had some sense that what we were creating was important– but the truth is we had no idea what we were doing. We were even afraid to call it a business. We didn’t have any of the legal stuff done. We never had a business plan. We never spent $1 on marketing. And the two original owners have STILL never met. 3.5 years later I was sitting in an office at Zondervan signing paperwork and waiting for a bank transfer as we sold Youth Ministry Exchange, LLC to Youth Specialties. It’s mind boggling.

    How in the world does a guy go from being a no-name youth pastor at a church of 150 to shaking hands and receiving a check from the CEO of a major publishing company in 3.5 years? Simple: Looking at closed doors and building an open one to walk through.

    Investing $72 in an idea changed my life.

    Want my advice? If you have an idea that you are absolutely passionate about… do it. Do it now. The idea and the opportunity are never going to get better than they are today. But invest less than $100. If it’s a good idea it won’t make a difference if you invest $100 trying it out or $100,000. (Donald Trump may be good, but that guy has led his company into bankruptcy three times! Never finance an idea with debt. Pure and simple.)

  • Best of 2004

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Yes, I am Wasting My Life

    August 31st 2004

    Again this month we are short financially. Grad school came calling. Preschool came calling. Uncle Sam gets his cut in a few days. A combination of expected and unexpected expenses draws a little more money from savings to checking in a constant game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Life’s expenses are again expensive. Each time this happens to me I start to reminisce about what life could have been like for Kristen and Megan and Paul. Had we stayed on the path of corporate success in Chicago we wouldn’t have this to worry about. The bills always got paid in full. There was always a little extra at the end of the month. We could always surprise someone with a special gift. Vacation? No problem. New tires? How about the best? New clothes? Why not. Yet in the same moments I recall the emptiness I had as I laid in bed at night, longing for my life to be wasted for something more important than getting richer… or more precisely, helping rich people get richer.

    Read the rest

    It’s 2010. I am still here. I am still wasting my life. And I still love every minute of it.

  • Vacation Reading

    Yesterday officially kicked off my summer vacation. For the first time since I was 24 I’ll only have two weeks of vacation this year, one of which I’ll use for my July trip to Haiti, so I have to make the most of this one.

    My intention is to disconnect as much as possible. (More on that later)

    Last night, Kristen and I went to Barnes & Noble to load up on some books for our trip.

    Here’s my reading list:

    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

    I am not sure how it is that I lived to be 34 years old without reading the greatest pirate novel of all time. But I have and I am looking forward to diving into this one. If vacations are about mentally and physically escaping from your day-to-day life… I’m thinking this book can take me there.

    If not, then at least I can check it off my list of books I should have read in high school but didn’t because I was reading other stuff.

    Presence, Arthur Miller

    The only other things I’ve read by Arthur Miller were back in high school, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

    Something tells me that Miller is a master storyteller, and a collection of short stories seems like a winner. And the endorsements on the back used a lot of fancy words.

    Broke USA, Gary Rivlin

    My first and only experience with this game came when I was 23. Hard up for cash and too proud to ask a friend for a few hundred bucks to make it to the next paycheck, I went down to a payday loan place and wrote a check for $400 to borrow $300 for two weeks. Before I walked out of there I realized I’d stepped into a world I didn’t understand. 400% interest… yeah, not cool. It was a lesson learned.

    When the review copy of this book showed up last month, I snagged it and thought it would be a good opportunity to learn more about how people take advantage of the economically disadvantaged.

    Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

    When I think of Steve Martin I think of movies like Three Amigos and Father of the Bride. I’m not quite old enough to remember him from The Jerk or Saturday Night Live. Yet, I still have a fascination with his work. He manages to walk the tightrope between hilariously funny and believable drama.

    I first heard about this book when he made the late-night talk show circuit promoting it. I’ve wanted to read it since than but it never quite climbed into my wishlist. So when I saw it on the bargain rack for $5, I grabbed it.

  • WordPress 3.0

    https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21

    Any time any type of software goes from one version number to the next, it is significant. WordPress 3.0 brings a few interesting highlights.

  • Theme improvements. (You’ll get better themes as a result)
  • Menu improvements. (Made it easier to add dropdowns)
  • Multi-user, multi-blog administration built in
  • Some cool dashboard improvements, highlighted in the video. Now I can make WordPress act more like a CMS.
  • Even easier to update WordPress software and plug-ins

    • McLane Creative customers: You shouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade. All of the templates/sites I have out there are compliant and should upgrade just fine. To upgrade, open up your dashboard and click the “Upgrade to WordPress 3.0” link at the top of the screen.

    If there are any problems, let me know.

    If you have a WordPress stand-alone blog, I highly suggest upgrading immediately. With more than 1200 bug fixes, there is bound to be a security issue in there you’ll want cleaned up.

  • Possessed

    Clay High School, 1992 | Welcome to the wayback machine

    When someone pitches an idea my mind is running through a matrix of questions. Is this really a good idea? Is the idea even possible? Is this the right person to turn this idea into a reality? Will enough people buy into the idea that it’ll take off? Is this the right time for this idea?

    But the overarching question on my mind is simply, “Has this idea possessed this person to the point that they won’t rest– they will just be driven by this idea for as long as it takes?”

    90% of the time the answer to that question is no.

    “I can teach anyone enough about music to sing in the  choir.”

    This was the philosophy of my high school choir teacher. The woman was possessed. I’m living proof of this truism. I have no musical ability or talent at all and I was taught enough to perform at hundreds of shows, concerts, and competitions during high school.

    This woman was possessed in her belief that anyone could sing and sing well. She convinced more than 50 students per year to take a choir class at 6:30 AM. On top of that she convinced about 25 of us to take an additional music class in the afternoon. Get this, for three of my four years of high school I had two music classes every day. And after school in the Spring almost all of us were also part of a musical.

    It wasn’t unusual for me to leave for school before 6:00 AM and not return home from school until after 9:00 PM.

    How did she do it? She was possessed by her idea. “I can teach anyone to sing.”

    She had that one magical ingredient that most purveyors of ideas don’t have.

    Do you?

  • What is NYWC all about?

    I have the coolest job in youth ministry. I get to do what I love, connecting with youth workers around the world and I get paid for it!

    At the core of it this video demonstrates the 2 things I love most about working at YS.

    1. Tic lays out the heart of why we do the National Youth Workers Convention. This is really the heart of YS. We do all of this to minister to youth workers… that’s why it is worth it to us.
    2. I get to work with amazing people. Setting aside the amazing people I get to connect with outside of YS as part of my job, I have gotten to work day-by-day with some amazing heroes of youth ministry. These folks continue to be a daily inspiration to me.

    When we were shooting this video (ht to Ian) I just kept thinking about those two things.

    Dang, I am fortunate.

    And dang, I want to be a part of carrying on this legacy.

  • Churches don’t reach people…

    Time For Plan B Photo by Bjørn Giesenbauer via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Churches don’t reach people… People do.

    Maybe that’s a statement of the obvious for you. But if you read enough church blogs or look at enough books or listen to a bunch of pep talks you may begin to believe the lie that churches, their leaders, and their programs reach a lot of people.

    They don’t.

    Less than 5% of our culture is actively involved in church. That’s a lot of smoke and not much fire.

    Neighbors loving neighbors reaches people. Which involves talking and getting to know people who live next door to you. Which involves you being home and not hiding in your house.

    Here’s a little secret I learned from working on church staff.

    It feels good to keep people busy.

    It makes you think you’re being productive. It makes you think that they are keeping your ministry a priority. You look really good with lots of things going on and people running around like busy little bees.

    Having a lot of people involved in your programs is a powerful temptation as a church staff member. The bottom line is that you feel like its your job to grow a program. Heck, there’s a good chance it IS your job to grow a program.

    But if you step back for a minute and think about it– For every moment you are keeping a person at the church “doing ministry” you are actually preventing them from doing the one thing we know works. And the one thing every believer, including your pastor, is called to do universally.

    Love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:39

    A lot of church involvement is actually counter intuitive to your church actually reaching a community.

    It might feel good to keep people busy. But in the end it is killing your ability to grow the church.

    Reality Check

    For Kristen and I it took stepping out of a busy bee church and into a situation where we could simply say no to everything but church attendance to have this truth awakened in us.

    Believing in the “churches reach people” paradigm is really just an excuse for me to not reach out in love to those in my neighborhood. I might feel pretty good about keeping busy in the church. But my life ends up with a lot of smoke and not much fire.

    We try to do the bear minimum and I still feel like we are over involved. We have church on Sunday. Community group on Monday night. And youth group on Tuesday night. (I’d skip church and youth group over community group, by the way. Community group is our lifeline.)

    And it still feels like too much.

    Wondering

    What if community service became the program of the church? What if you had a simple service on Sunday morning and then sent the people of the church out to apply what they’ve learned in their life?

    What if the role of the staff is to go out with the people of your congregation and work alongside? Not as a program overlord, but as an encourager and equipper.

    Wouldn’t that be a biblical expression of church?

    Or have we bought so firmly into the current paradigm that we don’t think simple expressions of faith in action will work anymore?