• 10 Things I’m Excited About for The Summit

    The Summit: A chat with some of the presenters from The Youth Cartel on Vimeo.

    With just over 100 days until The Summit, I thought I’d share 10 things I’m excited about.

    1. The theme. After the insanity of the past 3-4 years, the idea of linking arms– taking a big, deep breath, and looking at where we are at and where we need to go. Gosh, that’s so needed.
    2. Awakening dreams. Each of us in youth ministry went into this thing with some dreams. To have 2 days to intentionally awaken them, spurring them into action? Bring it on.
    3. An incredible line-up of presenters.There’s depth in this line-up. We have a wide variety of leaders from a wide array of background… it’s broad in that aspect but really, really specific in its aim to elevate youth ministry.
    4. A fresh schedule and approach. Yes, the main sessions are very much TED-like. There will be 5-6 presenters, a couple surprises, and a theme. But I also love that we’re creating feedback space when you can go and connect with presenters. No one is zipping in and out. Our presenters are coming to help you become a better leader.
    5. It’s in a church! I think events like this belong in churches. Plus, Josh and the kind folks at Fellowship are a blast.
    6. It’s cheap. $129 for groups and $149 for 1-2 people… when you compare that to any other event… it’s a great value for what you’re getting. Plus, it’s just 2 days… so you can do 1 night in a hotel instead of 3-4.
    7. Really fun partners. Oh baby, our partners are making The Summit even more fun for everyone. We’ve got some great giveaways and surprises coming.
    8. Marko & Adam unleashed. Over the past year I’ve heard over and over again how cool our partnership looks. Well, come to The Summit and you’ll see it on full display.
    9. My favorite people. We’re a small business and Marko and I are very involved in every aspect of The Summit. Each time someone buys a tickets we’re like… “OH YES! ____ is coming!” I know that sounds cheesy, but the room is going to be full of really cool people.
    10. It’s new. I mean, I like new. Don’t you?

    How can you help? Here’s 2 things we really need at this stage in the game.

    1. Register now. I know the deadline for the early bird rate isn’t for another month… but if you are coming it helps us the most if you buy your ticket now.
    2. Help us promote it. Our biggest weakness is our size. We know this is a great event. But we just don’t have a big marketing budget. (This is directly related to our price, by the way!)

  • Too big to fail

    “Too big to fail” is a colloquial term in describing certain financial institutions which are so large and so interconnected that their failure will be disastrous to the economy, and which therefore must be supported by government when they face difficulty. ~ Wikipedia

    Since the mid-1980’s the federal government has mandated that some banks are so important to the operations of our country that they, literally, will not be allowed to go out of business.

    No matter how bad it gets. No matter much much money they lose. If you stick your ATM into the machine or swipe your card at checkout, it should work. Those companies can be bought and sold, they can be taken over by the government, and their business practices can morph over time.

    But these banks are too important to the livelihood of our country to be allowed to go away. 

    Youth ministry is too big to fail

    Youth ministry is too important to the Kingdom to be allowed to fail. (As I wrote in this article, we do need to address our actual failure though.)

    It’s too important to be folded in as an extension of children’s ministry or simplified into a church-facing, sterilized family ministry. (I love potent, community facing family ministry!)

    It’s too important to be tamed by lawyers and protected from actually doing ministry by safety policies. And all-too-often true youth ministry can’t be measured by business goals or contained to mission statements, it’s bigger and more important than those things created for Main Street.

    We need to remember what youth ministry has always been… A little bit wild, a little bit dangerous, and recklessly chasing all of God’s kids.

    Organizations like Youth for Christ and YoungLife were created, not as nice extensions of the church, but as a response rebellion to the churches failure to reach teenagers for Christ.

    Sometimes, youth ministry isn’t nice. I know too many friends who were nice about getting fired for reaching “the wrong kids.” I know too many people who are silent as a board embraces stupidity to the default of its most important ministry. I know too many people now tamed by jobs they hate to hold onto a sliver of hope that one day things will get better.

    We’re too nice. We need to embrace rebellion again. We need to drag this thing back to the drawing  board and innovate like we used to.

    We need to re-embrace our 1-eared Mickey-Mouseness when it means reaching “the wrong kids.” We need to be willing to get fired for the sake of bringing “the wrong kids” into the church. We need to yawn at staff meetings. We need to forsake office hours. We need to be more willing to please our Father than please the board.

    We need to adapt to a climate that is less likely to fund youth ministry endeavors, becoming empowered by unleashing our creativity instead of held back by a lack of resourcing.

    We need to get really engrossed in ethnography while restlessly becoming disinterested in chasing the latest craze.

    Precisely because youth ministry is too big to fail we need to step back, take a deep breath, and allow ourselves to dream again!

  • I see your faith in action

    A year ago I stood on the edge of a giant cliff. And jumped.

    No regrets. No turning back. Hit the play button on Tom Petty’s Free Falling.

    My jump involved leaving a life of the bi-weekly paychecks behind and launching McLane Creative & The Youth Cartel. It wasn’t a faith step in that resolution or self-correction kind of way. It was a big old leap of faith with no parachute and carrying along a wife & 3 kids.

    But I’m not alone. I actually have a front row seat to a few friends who are taking similar leaps. It’s exciting and important for the Kingdom that faithful people line-up in faith and jump.

    Here’s a few of them whom I want to affirm today.

    I see you:

    • Marnie Nair & City Heights Prep –  Our community has a significant problem that Marnie is setting out to address. City Heights, the San Diego community we live in, exports most of its teenagers every day for school. This communicates a powerful message that in order to be successful you need to leave City Heights. City Heights Prep is a brand new college prep middle/high school launching this Fall. I’m pretty pumped about it.
    • Jeremy Lee, Parentministry.net, Parentzilla.com, and UthMin.net – Jeremy is a life-long youth worker working on a big dream. He’s made a huge investment in developing unique and useful content for parents and youth workers. I’ve walked with Jeremy through the web development end of this project and gotten the chance to see all of the premium content. Gosh, it’s really good stuff. In a world of free he’s gambled that you’ll be willing to pay for the best stuff and the community that forms around it. I like it, this is actually where most internet stuff is headed.
    • Phil Cunningham & Steps of Justice – How many people do you know that put their family in an RV to go on tour for a year. I know one and his name is Phil. It’s one thing to say you care about social justice and praying for change. But to walk away from everything you’ve known, sell it all, and go on tour to raise awareness? That’s not a step of faith, it’s holding your breath and jumping.
    • Ryan McRae & Geek in Afghanistan – Earlier this year Ryan, approaching 40, decided he needed to take a step of faith. So he quit his job at a university and moved to Afghanistan to take a defense contractor job. We’re not talking about locked away in a cushy base in Dubai. We’re talking about going to places where things blow up and people are killed every day. He’s blogging his journey and using the experience to reboot into his next stage of life. Totally love it.
    • The Summit – OK, so this one is tied to me. But for Marko and I it’s a big huge leap for our little, bitty company. We couldn’t be more excited about how the program is developing, how partnerships are forming, and all that stuff. At the same time, we’ve got no guarantees that it’ll work. (The biggest thing you can do to support this effort is to buy a ticket. Heck, gift a ticket to a youth worker who needs to be there if you can’t come!)

    What about you? How can you affirm people in your life taking big leaps of faith? 

    photo credit: Simon Hooks via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Leading without Anger

    It’s hard to imagine what was going through Joseph’s mind. For 40 years he imagined this moment — He saw his brothers. (Reread Genesis 42, it’s fascinating.) When he was just a teenager these brothers staged his death, sold him to some travelers as a slave, and lied to their father about his disappearance.

    • For 40 years his brothers owned the secret.
    • For 40 years Joseph wondered what he might do if he saw them again.

    And here they were. Penniless and in desperate need of food. And here was Joseph. The man with the power to silently execute judgement on them. They didn’t recognize him and no one in the room knew they were his brothers.

    He held all of the power over their life and death.

    And here was his moment of confrontation! He had the power to do whatever he wanted to them!

    Leading Without Anger

    Inside Joseph screamed this truth: They wanted to destroy me. They wanted me dead. They lied to our father.

    But. BUT. BUT…

    They didn’t have the power to harm me. They didn’t have the power to destroy me.

    And I do…. so what am I going to do?

    He lead without anger. He made the radical choice to not empower the voice of revenge. He made the choice to not execute judgement. He made the choice, instead, to give power to leading his people forward and towards a new life.

    We Have to Make This Choice

    Leading with and without anger looks the same. There is only a silent difference between driven by a dream and driven by anger. Only you will truly know. Like Joseph, leading without anger is a daily, intentional choice to make.

    In my own life I am very competitive. I’m driven by dreams and aspirations, some of which are decades old while others are brand new. There’s a fine line between wanting to do my very best, wanting to “win” versus wanting others to lose. [Sidenote: I’m a golfer. We view competition differently than football players. Wanting to win is not truly wanting others to lose. Golfers cheer for one another, wanting everyone to do their very best, while at the same time trying to win. That’s why Ernie Els consoled Adam Scott in the scorers tent at the British Open, he was happy he won but sad his friend lost by not playing his very best.]

    I do have things that could allow me to be driven by anger. (We all do.) There’s temptation there. There’s energy to be found in relying on anger to drive your dreams.

    But doing that give your adversaries, those who have sought to harm or even destroy your work, all the power. It’s leaning into the sin of the Garden instead of the redemptive hope found in Jesus.

    True power is not in the execution of revenge, it’s in having the opportunity for revenge but choosing redemption.

    “Do not be overcome with evil. But overcome evil with good.” 

    Romans 12:21

    Photo credit: The Brick Testament

  • Back From the Brink

    I just turned on my computer for the first time in 7 days. 

    It still feels a bit funky. My fingers are stretching to familiar places but typing feels totally odd. Yesterday, I woke up to cuddle a freezing Jackson back to sleep. Today, he woke up in his crib to a warm bowl of oatmeal and a morning full of Curious George & Elmo.

    The McLane Family is 500 miles from our little June Lake camp site, 8,600 feet above sea level and a million miles from yesterday.

    I spent a week intentionally disconnected from my day-to-day life. I turned off my email, signed out of Facebook, never opened Wunderlist or even had the thought, “I should write that down.” For the first time I can remember I even let the blog go fallow for a week.

    It felt good to rest.

    When I wrote my last post I was on the brink. I was past tired. I was exhausted. I don’t know what comes after exhaustion but I was pretty much there. It’s not so much that the exhaustion was hurting my work as it was that it was hurting to work. Day-by-day the grind was like a bruise that kept getting punched. Even embracing a more regular Sabbath wasn’t helping. I needed real rest.

    After a week of hiking, exploring, playing, laughing, star-gazing, and fishing… I feel better and found rest for the first time in a long time.

    It had been a few years since I really shut it down for 6 consecutive days. I don’t know if it’s my insecurity, the desperate feeling we had to turn it around at my old gig, or what… but I do know shutting it down was the right thing and something I need to do more often. (I have 3 weeks of vacation planned for the remainder of 2012.)

    Rush-free Play

    As we drove home yesterday, Kristen and I kept joking about the fact that we all still liked one another. Camping brought us closer together. As we left June Lake we were all a bit sad it had ended. I think all of us had embraced a little fantasy that it didn’t have to end… that we could just head to the grocery store and restock for another week. (And hit the showers to clean up!)

    I think that’s a sign of a good vacation, that you leave wanting a little bit more and having fully entertained the option of never going home.

    Each day was filled with a slowventure where we made breakfast together, cleaned up camp, and went somewhere to explore. We had a simple lunch of PB&J or fruit, cheese, and crackers. Somehow we managed to make it home in time to make dinner and have a camp fire before bed. (Did you know marshmallows are a food group while camping? I think each of the kids ate their weight in marshmallow!)

    Together, we saw some of Earth’s greatest treasures. Yosemite denies description. Photos cannot capture awe. The giant sequoias, the Valley, the Tunnel View, the Merced River, Tuolumne Meadows, the Tioga Road, even The Mobile… all are happy places.

    We spent 2 days not catching a single fish but smiling the whole time. We went up and down mountains. And we played in lots and lots of streams.

    I loved watching Megan and Paul get lost in ancient forms of play. They made bow & arrows and pretended to hunt chipmunks. They wandered in the woods collecting stuff. They stared deeply into the starry abyss. They played with fire.

    And they were rarely bored.

    It’ll probably take me a few weeks to really unpack my vacation. But all I know is that I need more of that more often!

     

  • A breath mark

    A breath mark or luftpause or, for bowed instruments, a bow lift (also retake), is a symbol used in musical notation. It directs the performer of the music passage to take a breath (for wind instruments and vocalists) or to make a slight pause (for non-wind instruments). For bowed instruments, it means to lift the bow. This pause is normally intended to affect the duration of the preceding note and not the tempo. It is usually placed above the staff and at the ends of phrases. Its function is analogous to the comma in several written languages. Indeed, the two symbols look identical.

    ~ via Wikipedia

    Friends, we have come to a luftpause. 

    This morning, Kristen and I are putting the last few items in the car, packing the cooler full of ice, and driving up to Yosemite National Park.

    It’s not a vacation unless daddy unplugs, signs out, and leaves his laptop at home. No tweets, no Facebook, no Flickr, no YouTube… and I already don’t LinkedIn or Google+.

    I’m doing all of things. I need it. We need it. Heck, you need it.

    Until next week, adieu.

  • Photos from Comic Con

    Yep, the dude in the middle of the stream of people is him, Mr. Double Rainbow. Hilarious. I had no idea when I took this shot who it was.

  • Living in Sodom

    “I guess that’s my lot in life.” 

    We’ve all heard that conciliatory remark. It’s the kind of thing you say when you accept the fact that your circumstances are less than ideal. While scholars seem to disagree about the source of the idiom, “lot in life” the phrase definitely reminds you of the Lot in the book of Genesis.

    The story of Lot provides a very important lesson. Sometimes you make a choice that results in you living in the wrong place. 

    Parallel Abraham & Lot’s lives and you’ll see that after these two friends families broke up Lots family went from being highly successful to just barely surviving the judgement of God in Genesis 19. He went north into calamity and Abraham went south into an everlasting covenant with God. Dramatic right? 

    Sometimes you find yourself living in Sodom

    As I reflect on that story I can’t help but recall a time when I lead my family into Sodom, I mean Oroville, CA. I graduated from college with a strong desire to leave Chicago and find a place to invest a lifetime. We found that place in Oroville. A small northern California city in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada’s which had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates, lowest high school graduation rates, and highest meth usage rates in the state.

    We met good people to work with. We got started with a good church. And we even found a little house to live in that would be a solid place to start.

    But it was Sodom. It’s not that the place was bad. It’s not that the people at the church were evil. (Well, not especially evil!) And it’s not that our work was unimportant.

    But it was that we were in the wrong place. It was clear. It was obvious. The attacks came from all sides. It was like bathing in sulphur.

    No matter how hard we tried to convince ourselves that we could thrive, we couldn’t. It wasn’t going to be possible because this was Sodom for us. We tried to make the best of it but each day we were there got progressively worse. It’s hard to explain what’s it’s like to be in that space. But it was bad and you could feel it getting worse and worse.

    There’s only one thing to do when you live in Sodom

    It’s either get out or wait for destruction. Those are your choices.

    If you find yourself in Sodom right now, make a move. It’s not going to get better. Get out like your life depends on it.

    Now. NOW. NOW.

    How do you know you are living in Sodom? You’ll know. And if you are trying to convince yourself that you don’t… ask some friends who have known you a long time. A true friend will tell you the bold truth.

  • When “Our Dream” is Better Chased than “My Dream”

    A few weeks ago Kristen and I both woke up in the middle of the night. Apparently 2 AM is the only time parents of 3 young kids can have a long talk without interruptions to ask us if it’s OK to watch TV or a dirty diaper or someone getting hungry.

    We talked for about 2 hours. After 15 years of marriage we know that there are times when marriage kind of gets lonely. We were in  that space… doing everything together but never really being together. We recognized that most of our communication throughout the day was logistical. We talked a ton, but more about who was doing what or when we were going to do stuff than we were really talking and listening to one another. It wasn’t that anything was wrong it was just that we had fallen into a military mindset where we talked plans of attack more than we really talked.

    I don’t know why we each woke up in the middle of the night. (Um, equally small bladders I guess?) But I think God was in this conversation.

    We started talking about some of the dreams we are chasing. Big stuff like raising our kids a certain way. Smaller stuff like dreams of connecting deeper with our neighborhood and our vacation to Yosemite and Paul’s birthday party.

    Here’s the kicker. And this was the thing that has really shaped my actions in the past few weeks since this conversation happened:

    I don’t ever want to chase my own dreams so hard that Kristen pays the price. I don’t want “Adam chasing his dreams” to mean that Kristen loses the opportunity to chase her own dreams. It’s no fun to succeed at stuff if we aren’t both excited about it and both winning. And, more importantly, I want Kristen and I to chase our dreams together. I don’t ever want to give up our dreams that we shared as 19 year olds walking along Lake Michigan or when I worked so that she could finish her degree, on and on. I’m willing to give up some of my dreams for that…

    Dreaming with Kristen is what I want. Two people chasing their own dreams but kind of coexisting? I’ll leave that to the Clinton’s. 

    That perspective has changed things. I think it means I do less stuff on my own somehow. And I think it re-orientates how we dream about actually accomplishing stuff.

    There’s no denying it. Launching 2 businesses over the past year has taxed us all as a family. It is beautiful to see this dream become a reality and we are reaping the rewards and Lord willing we’ll reap the rewards of this past 12 months for many years to come. But there has been a very real cost for everyone to pay, as well. (This is a cost hundreds of thousands of small business owners pay. I’m not alone in this!)

    At the same time, Kristen and I need to consistently check-in with one another. (Even if it’s at 2 AM!) Are we chasing our own dreams alone? Or are we intentionally, self-sacrificingly, chasing a better dream together?

    Fellow dreamers: What about you? How do make sure that you dream together instead of chasing individual dreams in your marriage?

  • Scenes from the Revolution

    I’m working on 3 hours of sleep. Again. No eloquence this morning, it’s all pain!

    This is what the front line of a revolution looks like. Tired, exhilarating, fast moving, and sometimes scary.

    Oh baby, here’s stuff that is happening right now.

    • I’m pretty close to helping Parentzilla.com relaunch. Combined with Parentministry.net and another site slated for later this month, Jeremy Lee is making very impressive steps into online ministry this summer. And I’m happy to help him behind the scenes in both strategy and development.
    • Sunday night, I wrapped up a round of edits on a book I co-wrote with Marko, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media. It was the first time I read it from start to finish. (And first time I’ve written a book of this length!) As reluctant as I was to do the book thing, dang this is such a good resource for parents.
    • I’ve been working with the organizing team for Open Seattle to try to nail down speakers/line-up. When I launched Open I kind of had this wild dream that we could flip the script on youth ministry training events. Yup, verified that.
    • The early bird deadline for the Middle School Ministry Campference is this Sunday. There’s a lot of movement happening behind the scenes on that one. Gonna rock.
    • We’ve begun work on layout and design for a couple Cartel books. I’m enjoying both learning that process and having discussions about how we can revolutionize the publishing relationship. Of course, it helps that the books are really cool.
    • We hired a bookkeeping service yesterday. This is a weird sign of growth… but is reflective of the level of complications things have gotten to, in an absolutely beautiful way.
    • I had some amazing conversations yesterday with folks about everything from small events to big projects that will continue moving this revolution.

    8 hours of meetings and 10 hours of work… didn’t make for a great night of sleep but did make for a soul filling day.

    It’s spreading and gaining momentum. Join us in reimagining youth ministry in new ways.