• At the Starbucks

    StarbucksI spent most of last night at the Starbucks on Hall Rd since there were a gaggle of high school females at my house. I ended up staying there for about 5 hours. During which time I watched a movie, Omagh, and mostly just chatted online with friends, worked on some stuff for YMX and people watched.

    Omagh On Omagh. This was a town fairly close to where I spent my summer in Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland. We went there on our day off, and I knew that it had a severe bombing. I had no idea that this is a lot like visiting the WTC area of New York. On October 15th, 1998 a bomb went off in the central shopping area of Omagh while children were going to and from school, people shopping, on and on. It was eery to see places and realize that I was there. I don’t know if the film was shot in the exact location, but it if was I stood right there, and went in that shop where the bomb went off.

    On people watching. This was a big eye opener for me. When we were in Fivemiletown we marveled at the way students congregated in key areas. As we tried to draw a parallel to this in the States the only thing we could come up with was football and basketball games. Now I know another place… Starbucks. For hours and hours tons of high school students filtered in, hung out, and filtered out. I have to look into that more. Wow. But more than that, there were all sorts of characters to watch. People like me on laptops. Ladies reading books about mystery. Young workers collecting checks. First dates. Business meetings. Old friends spotting each other over mochas. The occasional panhandler. And swarms of people either just going to or just finishing a movie. It is weird that I can concentrate so well among the noise of those places, but I can get more done in a few hours there than I can in an entire day in my office.

  • 3Story Life

    3storybannerI’m in the process of reworking 3Story for Students into a 6 session small group curriculum for adults. This isn’t a major re-write or anything, I would call it more appropriately "re-arranging" the curriculum to suit our needs.

    3Story has been slowly rolling out here at Romeo. I did the adult leader training last fall with what has become our core group of small group leaders. Also, a group of high school girls is working through it in their bible study. My goal is to see 100 Romeo people go through the training in 2006. Re-arranging the curriculum for adults is obviously a massive part of that.

  • Open Source Youth Ministry

    Ymx_transparantPaul Martin, in his blog called Like a Fire, described YMX as "source for people “in the trenches.” I like that a lot. That’s true. Take what you find at YMX and run with it. Make it better, tear it apart, put humpty dumptie back together again and share like mad. If all of us "in the trenches" do that then youth ministry will, as a whole group, be a lot more effective.

    Wikipedia defines Open Source as "Open source describes general practices in production and development which promote access to the end product’s sources. " Yeah, let’s do that in youth ministry today… how cool is that?

  • good times for LF and YMX

    Lf_bug It was a good day for both things that I am a part of and care about. Tonight’s LF was pretty solid. A bit weird since there were some middle schoolers missing with a meeting at the schools, and there was a smell of "winter duldroms" since students were well, down. Weird, but OK and part of the school year cycle.

    Ymx_alt_nostroke It’s also been a good week for YMX. We’re up to 172 members… pretty good for a newbie site. We’ve had a lot of hits and a lot of activity. I can’t get over nearly 26,000 posts in the forums. 26,000? Holy crap that is a lot of action. We also settled on a new logo and I am excited about a full run of meet-ups coming along.

  • Tuesday was a long day

    The day began at 6:00 AM and ended at about 10:00 PM. Tuesday’s are cool because I spend a lot of the day with students. Of course, interspersed with that is a lot of the "other stuff" that I do for the church. Tech stuff, pastoral stuff, yada yada yada. All in all, this made for a fast Tuesday.

    Missions minded church or mission minded church? This is a thought I was left with after last nights mission committee meeting. I hope that it will strive to be a church that first owns the mission in Romeo and as an extention this mission goes to "Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the utter most parts of the world." Still got some thinking to do on that thought.

  • Inner City Impact: One of the best

    IciWay back before Inner City work was hip, Bill Dillon started ministering to kids in the Inner city of Chicago. Now, 25+ years later, Bill’s vision of real ministry doing real discipleship is still plugging away one life at a time.

    I have grown to love this simple yet profound ministry. Their methods have never been cutting edge, but they just get the job done. For the past two years I’ve enjoyed getting to know this ministry as we’ve taken our group there for short term trips over Spring Break… and I just can’t get enough. (We don’t know for sure if it is going to work out in 06, more on that later.)

    But my point is that longitudinal simple ministry will always get the job done better and more effectively than a flash in the pan. Also, some people want to know "Are short term trips valuable to host ministries?" Absolutely. If a company is wise, they will integrate these short-termers into their long term goals. Mission agencies that make a business out of short term trips are well, short-sided.

    So… check out Inner City Impact.

  • Student Leaders… How do you “make them?”

    Studentleader I’ve published an article on YMX. I can’t take any pride in getting published since I am the publisher of the site and all… but I thought it was good enough to deserve the billing. [Read the article here] I originally did this as a project for a grad school class… but I always hoped that it would lead to both a larger reading and begin, in me at least, a broader examination to the question.

    Here’s an excerpt: For student ministry, the question is not, “should we create an environment like Jesus did for training and mentoring student leaders?” But rather, “In our context how do we go about this and when do we know the groups we lead have arrived at a place where student leaders can be fostered?”

  • the blog merger

    It’s been about 2 months now since I stopped the madness and started keeping one single lone blog. When I thought about doing this I was really concerned that changing my audience… combining them really, would ruin my blog and my sense of blogging. It hasn’t. In fact, it has made it better.

    Along those same lines. There is a troubling thing going around the "student world" of blogs. There is this thing that basically goes like this… "Write notes to 10 people of things you want to say that you would never say. Turn off comments and just say it." This is stupid on so many levels it almost isn’t worth commenting on, but I will anyway.

    Why is it dumb? First of all, it is dumb to say something rude that you know the person is going to read. Yes, get over it… there is no anonymity on blogs! (So if you are blogging something and you don’t want your mom to read it, don’t blog it!) Secondly, just because you turn off comments for a post doesn’t mean people’s feelings are not hurt. To see stuff that reads, "I hate your guts and I wish you weren’t so annoying" isn’t going to help. Why not just tell the person for real?

    This stupidity (great thing about blogs is that I don’t have to sugarcoat, right?) isn’t limited to students. I see something very similar on some of the pastoral blogs I read. Then they wonder why their words get them in trouble? Genius!

    As for me, I am happy to have everything nice and simple. One blog, and I am careful to not say things that I wouldn’t want my mom to read. (Heck I even gave my mom the URL… as if "adammclane.com" isn’t public enough.)

    Here’s my recommendation: If you are blogging, realize it’s public and the things you say there are real.

  • “Am I Cursed?”

    Dr_philEarlier this week in Light Force we looked at Luke 8 and discussed demon possession.

    The very next day, Dr. Phil talked about the same topic on his show. [See show] I tuned in during the early part of the show and actually agreed with a a lot of what he said. Primarily, I agree with him that there really is an evil force in the world and that it is possible that people can be possessed by demons. I ever respected his keeping the integrity of the shows purpose and attempting to keep a fairly religious topic as simple as possible. Even though I don’t like Dr. Phil overall and wouldn’t recommend watching him all the time, I didn’t mind this episode.

  • Another add to the portfolio

    Well, I have had some nail biting to do as this young investor had to make some choices! I’ve got100% of my stock portfolio in tech stocks. So obviously, I wanted to get out of some tech and get into something else. But what?

    Calgon My answer ended up being Calgon Carbon. This is a company that helps communities clean up their water sources. This companies exhibits two qualities I like in an investment, something I can tell people I own and not flinch, and a company which is profitable.

    My "dilemma" was that I am stock on Sirius right now and I may even end up selling my position Monday depending on how it reacts on Stern’s first show. My thoughts were… "Double down on Sirius or get out altogether." I chose option 3 and split my position. Nothing too shocking, but it is a minor deviation in my strategy.