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The greatest small group night ever
I’ve done small groups in one form or another most of the last 15 years. I’ve been in high school, college, and adult small groups. I’ve lead middle school, high school, college, and adult small groups. I’ve always wanted a small group that gelled and did awesome things… and I could never make it happen as a leader. Just when I had nearly given up on small groups, along came Harbor and my stupid insane idea to say “yes” to hosting this group after visiting a church one time.It’s been about 8 months and I can’t imagine a better community group to be a part of. I’m growing. We’re growing. And I think we’re making an impact on the people around us. Moreover, I can’t think of a better church to be a part of in this season of my life. That may sound like hype… but you need to understand what happened tonight to see why I dig Harbor so much.
Last week we decided that it would be fun to meet at Ocean Beach for a bonfire. For those who read this outside of San Diego all you need to know if that OB is kind of a leftover surfer area full of artists, hippies, beach bums, and those who can afford to live down there who probably secretly wish they were one too. The beach has these fire pits that are open to the public, just bring wood and claim one and you’re good to go.
So our group met at 6:30. In typical form everyone brought something. Wood, hotdogs, a cooler full of water, etc. We got our fire going and started to enjoy an awesome sunset laughing and catching up. Then Keith showed up. Keith is a homeless guy who asked if he could sit by the fire. Soon enough another person from our group struck up a conversation like he’d known Keith since grade school. Hotdogs eaten, water drunk, more sunset enjoyed. Pretty soon Keith asked us why we were hanging out at the beach. He didn’t really wince too much when we told him we were a small group from a church. “So, what do you guys talk about?” That’s when Richard pretty much told Keith the entire sermon from the day before. He read all of the Scriptures and then retold him all of the illustrations and all of us agreed… we were pretty much hypocrites and we were construction zones… we all settled on Stephen’s description of “holy mess.” Yeah, that pretty much explains me too.Just when we were all settled into a nice quiet moment another person shows up. This sort of thing happens in OB all the time. (This kind of thing happens to our community group all the time as well.) 10 people having a good time on the beach naturally draws others looking for a good time. So a guy walks up with a couple of his friends. “Hey, would you guys mind if I practiced my fire twirling?” Um… no!
So here we are. A hodgepodge group, a holy mess, huddled around a fire enjoying s’mores, the perfect sunset, waves traveling thousands of miles across the open ocean and crashing on the shore 50 feet in front of us, and a guy with a boom box twirling fire. “This is the best night ever,” Amy says. She’s right. We all exchange high fives. He does his performance while we all look on. His friends are not sitting with us but are cheering him on. After a couple of routines our entertainer comes over to us and says, “You are in for a treat… a lot more people are coming.”
Within 15 minutes ten more fire twirlers show up. Each of them has a few of their friends. 20 or so of us huddle around the fire while people with flaming sticks, fireballs, and numbchucks wait their turn to show off their skills. More hotdogs eaten by anyone hungry. More s’mores by those who needed a sugar fix. And our hodgepodge small group, the holy mess, is completely surrounded by awesomeness. We’re all grinning ear to ear.Fire twirlers, hippies, girlfriends, and us. I post a couple of pictures and tweets onto Twitter… and my co-worker Mandy and her husband who live in OB come walking over. How could they resist, right? That’s when it hits me: This is the best small group night ever in the history of human existence!
You can’t put small group mojo in a bottle. You can’t buy community at a conference. All of the training in the world couldn’t put this magic in a bottle and sell it. We’ve got the real deal in our community group and all we can do is enjoy it.
As Kristen and I pulled out of the parking lot we roared with laughter. We knew full well that in most ministry contexts, including the ones we’ve served in, tonight would be viewed as an utter and complete failure. “What do you mean you had a bonfire? What do you mean you just talked to a homeless man all night? What do you mean you watched people twirl fire? I heard there were people their smoking drugs, is that true?” I’m glad to be a part of a church looks at tonight and screams SUCCESS instead of hides in shame, calling an elder meeting to discuss how to break those people up.
As I drove home it hit me. The magic of our small group isn’t about an agenda. Don’t get me wrong, our leaders try to keep us moving forward. It’s never been about pounding out curriculum. It’s not about the hottest small group resource or DVD series. All of those things are great and I’m happy to have them. But when a small group hits the stratophere like ours has lately… all of those things just seem irrelevant. We get together. Not as a holy huddle but as a holy mess. We invite others in. It’s infectious. We need each other and we all secretly live for Monday nights. For me, this group is a magnet. Who wouldn’t want to be in a group that dyes Easter eggs one week and hosts Burning Man the next?
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Digging out and shaking off
Digging through paperwork and trying to find missing reciepts for tax time exposed that there was one big area of my life that I had just ignored for 6-7 months: The move’s impact on our finances.
We did fine through the move. We’re doing fine now. And like I’ve mentioned before, we’re taking all the right steps to be in great shape into the future. That’s not the point of this post at all.
The point of this post is simple –– there are areas of your life that you simply have to take control. You can’t ignore stuff and hope that it’ll be alright. Nor can you just pretend that it will all go away if you just put it into a nice little pile. In our case, we were fortunate and when I finally did open the vault everything will be just fine when about 5 checks clear the bank. But it could have been a lot worse.
The same is true for a lot of things in life. I’ve had a longstanding weakness of avoiding things I didn’t want to deal with and foolishly hoping that they would just fix themselves. I’ve even tried to outsmart myself and those around me by over-doing some areas while completely ignore others.
I have a feeling I’m not the only one who does this.
– People ignore a project at work and try to distract their failure with success in another area at work.
– Men tend to focus on work to avoid family issues. (Sorry for the generalization there)
– We keep our schedules too full to avoid dealing with our walk with God.
– We focus our ministry around a big event or a mission trip to distract from a larger problem we don’t want to deal with.
– Kids will pay attention to the TV so they can pretend you didn’t tell them to clean their rooms.
– High school kids will join a club or even get a job to avoid going to a youth group they are bored with.
The thing is, Tax Day is coming. The things that we avoid will eventually need to be addressed. It doesn’t matter how much we ignore areas of our life which make us uncomfortable… eventually we’ll just have to deal with them. And it is way better to deal with those things today than it will be tommorow. That’s where accountability comes in. We all need people in our life who lovingly help us draw boundaries. When we were kids we had those people built in as parents, teachers, and church leaders helped keep us on track.Adults need to find people in their lives whom they are willing to allow to go there and ask the hard questions. “Adam, what is it that you’re avoiding?” What a tremendous question for self-reflection!
If you find yourself concentrating too much on one area of your life to avoid another… my only advice comes from my dog. Shake it off.
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Saturday Tunes
Since Spring has finally arrived in most of the country, I don’t mind bragging a little. We’re going to have a fantastic weekend! With tempuraturs in the mid to upper 70s, our family is drawn to the beach like a mosquito to a bug zapper. Right now, Kristen is meeting some of my co-workers for a hike up Cowles Mountain. Later this morning we’ll all take Stoney to the beach for his weekly ocean therepy. Tommorow we’re headed to the beach after church to resume our Sunday beach tradition after a long break for Winter. Then on Monday night our community group has decided to meet down in Ocean Beach for a bonfire on the beach.In the meantime, the kids are watching cartoons. Water is boiling for coffee and I am settling in to relax a bit. Here are the next 10 tunes I’m listening to. As always, no cheating and my ratings are included.
#1 Stardust by Nat King Cole ****
#2 Glorious by Chris Tomlin ***
#3 Maria Maria by Santana ****
#4 Seven Steps to Heaven by Miles Davis ****
#5 Take it to the Limit by The Eagles *****
#6 Magnificent by U2 *****
#7 You Give Me Something by James Morrison ****
#8 Doolin-Dalton by The Eagles ****
#9 Late Night, Early Town by Lloyd Cole *****
#10 Neverending by David Crowder Band *****
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The rise of the webinar
This morning I lead my first webinar. Like a lot of things right now I felt like I was breaking new ground and this first one felt pretty bumpy. I was pretty confident that the content I had was solid… but my use of the delivery system was awkward. Audio issues, PowerPoint issues, user feedback issues, stuff like that. These are all little things I want to get ironed out because it’s a platform I want to master. A co-worker asked me how it went and I said what I thought at the moment, horrible! He assured me it wasn’t as bad as I thought. But I’m not happy with a mediocre performance!Why are webinars so hot right now? Here are my thoughts.
#1 The software is getting better and cheaper. We use Gotowebinar (or Gotomeeting) and its very slick. If it allowed live video streaming I’d like it a lot more… but I’m sure that’s coming.
#2 People need specialized training despite limited travel budgets. It’s no secret… lots of companies used to spring for people to fly all over the place for specialized training. With technology better and more accessible, it’s really more cost effective to grab people out of their routines for a couple of hours as opposed to travelling.
#3 People are getting used to it. It’s not that this type of thing hasn’t been around for a long time. Conference calls, teleconferencing, stuff like that. But I’m noticing a big uptick in the amount of it people are jumping in on.
I also want to point out that you don’t have to spend a ton of money. You could just as easily host a webinar on UStream.tv or Justin.tv and share your presentation on Google docs. Likewise, I am confident that there will be a much better webinar interface soon. The two big options out there now are GoToMeeting and WebEx. Both are expensive… and I’m positive something in the free or nearly free category will come on the scene soon.
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Susan Boyle is a Dreamer
You know I am all about chasing dreams. Here’s an instant classic dream chaser from Britain’s Got Talent.
For all of us who have been told that our dreams are stupid. For all of us that have been told that our dreams aren’t worth fulfilling. Here’s to you. Here’s hoping that we all get our Susan Boyle moment. I love the look on Simon’s face. Says it all!
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Defining quotes
“I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” That’s a bunch of crap, isn’t it? The truth is that sometimes words said to you hurt way more than any of us would like to admit.There’s something in my personality that remembers these words, embeds them as self-talk, and run through my brain like a broken record… and they serve as a powerful motivator for me. The negative ones, I desire to shove them back into the face of the person— long since forgotten– who spoke them. The positive ones, I try to live up to in all that I do.
Here are some negative examples:
– “Adam is a spiritual orphan.” — my first “real pastor” in Indiana. This implied that my parents didn’t care about me and always made me mad.
– “You’ll never finish college. You’re destined to be a community college drop-out.” — my stepmother said this my senior year of high school.
– “You’re not cut out for pastoral ministry. You’re too much of a maverick.” — a co-worker at my first church said this… repeatedly.
– “You are a legacy hire, I wouldn’t have hired you.” — a former boss said this all the time.
Here are some positive examples:
– “Your work ethic makes up for a lack of talent and money.” — a high school golf coach
– “There’s something special about you. God is going to use you in big ways.” — a favorite camp counselor
– “Adam is one of the most organized/driven students I’ve ever had.” — an undergrad professor
– “You made a big impact on my kid. Thank you for letting him in to your family” — a parent
So what’s the point?
First, I’m convinced that the self-talk that we all have can be either a severe motivator or a severe motivator. If you’re finding that you beat yourself up endlessly, there’s no weakness in going to see someone to help you. I’m not going to claim that I’m the most healthy emotional person in the world. But I’m here to tell you that good self-talk has gotten me through some tough stuff.
Second, be really aware of the words you speak into people. Of the eight examples I gave above I’m convinced none of them felt like they were saying something prophetic. Some of them were even just little side comments that stuck. Words have weight… things we say to and about others can impact them for years!
