• Watering the Garden from the Perspective of the Hose

    Melinda’s Ohio garden is banging! What a fun perspective on caring for the harvest.

    Who knew the GoPro could be used in the garden?

    ht to Tom on editing & Melinda on watering.

  • Abuelos

    This week we have Kristen’s mom in town. While our kids are playing it cool– they were over-the-moon excited that grandma could come spend a few days with us.

    There’s a lot of talk about the impact of family in the development of Sticky Faith. Obviously, mom and dad are the most influential figures in a child’s life. But watching this video and hanging out with Kristen’s mom is a strong reminder of the power of grandparents in the lives of children.

    I wonder how strong the correlation is between decreased religious affiliation of American youth (something we could call religious elasticity) and the decline in strong, central extended nuclear families? 

    Anyone seen a study on that?

  • Sir, why are you irate? (My Google Saga)

    Google Do No Evil Policy
    Here's the source of the Do No Evil policy: http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

    “Sir, why are you irate?”

    This was what Jonathan, a customer service agent in Google Montreal’s Google Apps call center, said to me this morning.

    Well Jonathan– allow me to tell you why I am irate with your company right now. One of your corporate values is Do No Evil. In fact, your founder has repeatedly gotten applause for this corporate value. He loves to say it in speeches. No doubt, that motto is probably somewhere in the building you work in.

    And yet, in the course of the past 5 weeks I have been repeatedly lied to, deceived, and lead to believe my case had been resolved. I can’t tell you how many times some specialist like you has tried to convince me they would call me back in full knowledge they were just using it as a tactic to get me off the phone. I am irate right now because your company’s system has erroneously billed me $1127. In fact, by your own admission, I owe you $8.33 which I will gladly give to you right now in any form of payment you will accept. But your system won’t allow me to give you the $8.33 I actually owe you because your engineers have built a system which does not allow you to either delete or modify billing… even when your engineers have already admitted that it was a mistake within Google Drive that caused my account to be billed for two 8 terabyte accounts of Drive storage when I asked for 8 GB. Moreover, you have admitted that neither an 8 terabyte nor 8 gigabyte Drive will work on my Apps account…but that’s not really the point. 

    A week ago, a very lovely man in your Dublin office assured me that an account billing specialist would be calling me within an hour to fix this. He unsuspended our account, apologized in full knowledge that this was your engineers fault and not mine.

    7 days passed and no one called me. 

    And now, for the 2nd time, my account has been suspended because I can’t pay you. Now you are telling me that some person on the other end of your chat window will not authorize unsuspending my account because they didn’t call me back. 

    So there is something you can do. You can tell that person to authorize the lifting of the suspension. 

    I am irate right now because you are suspending my account for no reason. I can’t give you the $8.33 I owe you because your system won’t take my money while this dispute is in process. I’m irate because people on 3 continents have lied to me. I’m irate because you just told me there’s nothing that can be done while at the same time saying that the reason my account wasn’t just unsuspended was because a person you are chatting with won’t authorize it.

    That’s why I’m irate, Jonathan. Your company is doing evil. While you are simply a cog in a very big corporate wheel you are unwilling to do more than pass me off as some irate customer before you go to get lunch. I’m irate because you won’t do anything. You won’t stand up and say… “Hey, we’re screwing this guy. Isn’t there something I can do right now?”

    Do you understand why I am irate right now?  

    If you know someone at Google who can resolve this case, who will take my $8.33, or who has guts enough to break through the silos and do the right thing, please contact me.

    If you would like to help me but don’t know anyone at Google, please share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and especially Google+.

    This is not a meme. This is not a joke. This is happening to my small business right now. If you need my case number or my phone number or any of the names/departments/employee numbers of the people I’ve spoken with and referred to in this post, please contact me.

    I’m not anti-Google. In fact, we love our Google Apps account. We just need this mess resolved so we can get back to business. 

    UPDATE: Thanks to all of your tweets, Facebook posts, and Google plussing… it seems we are moving towards a resolution. I’ll let you know for sure.

  • 5 Common Misreads on Teenagers in Youth Group

    One of the things you learn as you go in youth ministry is that teenagers are experts at sending off false signals that can be difficult to pick-up on.

    Here are five common ones I see newbies miss all the time.

    • “I’m just hanging out” or “I just thought I’d drop by because I was bored.” If you have a student that stays late or is just hanging around or lingers longer than usual or drops by the office for no real reason– it isn’t an accident. There is always a reason. They want to talk and are waiting for you to take the initiative. And sometimes when they do this you’re going to have to build a little repoire before they share what’s really going on.
    • That student in the back isn’t paying attention. This is a frustration that comes out of youth workers all the time. Stop it. It doesn’t mean what you think it means at all! It’s easy to think that a student who is sitting in the back, looking at the wall, or just looks like they aren’t paying attention isn’t paying attention or is being disrespectful. My experience is that they are usually paying attention and soaking in more than the kids who being compliant, smiling, responsive teenagers in the front row. If they weren’t there for an encounter with God they wouldn’t be there. Period.
    • The student who wants to be a up front is a leader. Nope. Up front skills and spiritual leadership are two different things. When I was in youth group I was up front, leading games, and even leading a small group before I even gave my life to Jesus. Some people are born leaders and lead wherever they go. Students who like to be part of your leadership teams might be just as lost and trying to figure it out as the dude in the back who stares at his iPod the whole time.
    • Spiritual maturity and physical maturity are two different things. This is really hard for adults to grasp. But if you do youth ministry for any length of time you will meet students who are just as spiritually mature, or who are MORE mature, than most of the adults in your church. You don’t have to be 50 and have kids in college to be mature in Christ. How do you judge spiritual maturity? Fruit. Stop looking down on students because they are young. Bottom line on that one.
    • They aren’t ready for theology. Ugh. Any time a youth worker says this I want to punch them in the face. I actually had a methodist youth worker say this recently via a Facebook message. My response: “How old were the founders of Methodism when they got started? Look it up.” Yeah, don’t underestimate what the teenage brain can handle. You can’t tell me that an 11th grader who just wrote a 5 page paper on Whitman’s use of symbolism isn’t ready for some theology. Just because you’d rather play video games than study doesn’t mean that every student is like you. A big reason they eventually bail is because they are bored and the faith that you are exhibiting is boring compared to what they read in the Bible.

    These are the misreads I see all of the time. What am I missing? 

  • GIVEAWAY: As for Me and My [Crazy] House

    What is it…

    It’s a book by my friend Brian Berry. Brian has been in youth ministry for 20 years. Literally, his kids know no other life than being the youth pastor’s kids. Speaking of kids– Brian has 5 of them! My kids LOVE going over to their house and seeing them at church. Somehow they managed to have 3 kids between Megan and Paul’s age. (OK, so 2 of them are adopted!) Somehow– not accidentally– Shannon and Brian have figured out how to keep their sanity while serving in ministry. I’m not saying the Berry family is perfect or problem free. But they have figured some things out and are worth learning from.

    Who is Brian…

    Brian is my compatriot, high school guys co-small group leader, and generations pastor at my church. He’s got a great big job, a great big family, and the biggest pick-up truck you’ve ever seen. Seriously, I drove it and it was as big as a short bus. More important than all that stuff– Brian and Shannon have great big hearts. They’re the kind of people you meet and want to hang out with more. If you’ve been to NYWC, SYMC, YS Palooza… or read a youth ministry magazine in the past 3-4 years than you’ve probably met Brian. (Read between the lines: I think Brian is legit. Does it show?)

    Why I like it…

    It’s a shame that this book has mostly been marketed to youth ministry people. Sure, Brian is a youth ministry dude. BUT this book is important for any Christian family trying to figure out how to balance life. Brian is an excellent communicator. I call his style “staccato.” When he’s got something to say it comes quick, in bite size, highly comprehendible bursts.

    There’s a ton of books in the “Christian family” category at any Christian bookstore. There is a lot of crap on the market in this category, we all know it. Everything Brian does is “anti-crap.” This book is no exception.

    You get the idea, I like this book because I like Brian.

    How to get it…

    BUY IT… Head over to Simply Youth Ministry and buy a copy. You can either download it in your favorite eReader format or pay $2 more to get a printed version.

    WIN IT… Leave a comment on this post by midnight tonight and you’ll be entered to win a free copy. Check back on this post tomorrow, I’ll edit the post to announce the winner.

    WINNER... James Hauptman – hey James, email me your address and we’ll ship it out!

  • Why big churches get bigger

    It’s been about a year since our family started attending Journey Community Church in La Mesa.

    For the past decade or so we had been small church people. Most of the congregations we’ve been a part of (and worked at) were a couple hundred people. But, for a number of reasons, we started attending at Journey last Spring.

    There are some obvious reasons people come to a bigger church… things like:

    • They do worship services really, really well. I can’t think of a time a technical issue has truly disrupted the flow of a service at Journey.
    • The preaching is always for the masses. I’m not sure why, but in smaller contexts the preaching has a tendency to respond to issues within the church a lot more than in a small context.
    • Programs. Programs. Programs. Dear Lord! There are programs for anything and everything at a big church. I’m waiting for Journey to start a class for how to start a class at Journey.
    • The disappearance factor is high. When you attend a church with a couple thousand people you can be as anonymous as you want. Plus, if you ever need anything— anything at all— it’s all right there at your disposal.
    • Big things are possible! When you have a big church with lots of hands available, you can pull off big huge thing after big huge thing. The crazy thing is that since there are so many people… pulling off something huge doesn’t exhaust the congregation in the way it would in a small church.

    I’m sure there are more, big obvious reasons why big churches grow. I don’t buy into the idea that God has blessed them more or that their staffs are better or anything like that. I know too many people to think that the case.

    But let me clue you in to the big one. One that actually drew us to Journey in the first place.

    Triangulation.

    People who study marketing and specifically those who study the art of sales, know that in order to make an impression on you about they need to triangulate. You need to see a message about that product in 3 different modes. You need to hear about Geico on the radio. Then you need to see a Facebook ad. Then you need to see their gecko on the side of a blimp at a sporting event. When you are looking for car insurance… everywhere you look you see Geico. So you call.

    The same factor is super high at a big church. 

    One reason people end up at big churches is the triangulation of connection. It’s easy to find other people or have a social connection to people in a bigger church even if you never meet them at the church. You just start bumping into them all over. Even when you meet a person whose sister goes to Journey, that makes an impression.

    Think about the social connection you make with any stranger… When you meet someone out in the community we each have an innate desire to seek social connection with them. There is always a little dance that happens when two people are getting to know one another. They shake hands or start chit chatting in line at the store, and they start dancing for a social connection. Sometimes its as simple as watching the same TV show. But you’d be surprised how often a church person will find another church person or a person through their church network will be connected to someone they meet in the community.

    Part of what is happening that makes a place like Journey grow is that it’s very easy to find little points of social connections.For us, it felt like all of the people in our lives had a connection at Journey. We joked about it feeling like a gravitational pull was dragging us there because everyone we knew went there.

    That’s triangulation in action. When you start to use the church as a place of social connection– that’s a powerful draw and it can overcome almost anything. 

    Photo credit: Dave Gray via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • June Bloom!

    San Diego is known for it’s June Gloom season. The combination of a cool coastal current and northerly winds this time of year result in a strong morning fog that often lasts until late in the day. While most of the country soars into summertime temps, June is traditionally a chilly month here. It’s actually more consistently in the 70s in January than in June!

    But with all the gloom I was surprised to see lots of blooms in the garden!

    What’s blossoming in your garden? 

  • Authorship

    My favorite podcast, The Moth, has a closing tagline that I love. “Live a story-worthy life.”

    Each of our lives are story-worthy. Most just choose not to tell it.

    Inner discourse interests me. Each of us tells ourselves a first-person story about ourselves all day, every day. (Though sometimes a persons inner-dialog is really in the 3rd person, which is equally interesting.) Each human can look back,  start at the beginning, and articulating memories and impressions in varying degrees of detail. Facts are painted and repainted to fit our story. And as time goes on we struggle to distinguish between what really happened and what we told ourselves has happened. Many of us have completely re-written the inner discourse so that they are the hero or they are the victim or somewhere in between.

    Facts are just part of our memories mashed potatoes of recollection and story. But the tone and emphasis on positive and negative implications of those facts are the gravy which covers our memory.

    I’m not a psychologist– but I understand that a task for a therapist is to help shape & help repair the inner dialog.

    Helping a person recognize that moment-by-moment they are telling themselves a story– And retraining those super secret, almost supernaturally uncontrollable thoughts in your mind can truly transform you from the inside out.

    What I find truly fascinating is that each of us tells our story with our very lives. While we simultaneously tell ourselves a story about ourselves we are writing a real-life story about ourselves by our actions.

    Here’s the point: We don’t get to control what happens to us. In our lives the amazing comes as often as the tragedy. We don’t always get to choose the circumstances. Sometimes evil happens. Sometimes the circumstances are all against you. And many time no one would blame you if you listened to the advice of Job’s wife… “Why don’t you just curse God and die.”

    You see, we always get to choose our physical, emotional, and spiritual response.

    You always get to write your response. You are the author of your story.

    The Apostle Paul speaks to this so well:

    Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

    Amen.

  • A truly open Kingdom

    “Adam won’t amount to much. He didn’t grow up in church leadership so he’ll never really fit on.” ~ A former friend said this to a search committee member once.

    You’ve probably heard similar things said about you. Hurtful, hateful, religiously big but theologically infantile words said to you or about you.

    These are the words of a gatekeeper. They think it’s their job to stand there and help others figure out who is in and who is out. All-too-often I hear people describe their experience with church by comparing it to a country club.

    May it never be.

    This is not what Jesus wanted.

    With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Mark 15:37-38

    With his last breath, Jesus lifted the power from religious gatekeepers and opened the Kingdom to all– Jews, Gentiles, saints, sinners, royals, and slaves. Every human was given the power to stand as an equal before their God.

    Jesus longed for a truly open Kingdom of God. He gave his life making it possible. His resurrection and ascension guaranteed he was for real.

    Never allow a religious gatekeeper to hold you back.

    Their power is from another source.

    Photo credit: Circuit Breaker by Yusmar Yahaya via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Are your dreams worth pursuing?

    Yesterday, I got a graduation announcement for a friend’s daughter and it sparked a memory. This is a sign I’m getting old, right? 

    • My own high school graduation was unremarkable. I don’t remember much about it. I remember it happened very quickly and my parents and brother were there. I think my friend Navid spoke about Star Wars or something like that.
    • By the time graduation arrived I’d already moved out of my dad’s house and was in a dorm at Moody working a full-time job to help me pay for my first year of school. I didn’t attend the last couple weeks of school. (I only had to pass gym to graduate my senior year. Interestingly, my teachers all gave me A’s the last semester. I did better when I didn’t bother to show up!)
    • Starting in May, it was all just a blur of prom and graduation parties.

    But I do have a specific memory from my senior year of high school that literally still has impact today. 

    During the Spring of my senior year all of the graduating seniors got a form from the school newspaper asking us about our future plans. Specifically, they wanted to know what university we were going to, what our major would be, and what we hoped to do.

    Most of my friends only had a vague idea of what they might do. But I had a very specific goal in mind. It took me about 45 seconds to fill out the form. Many of my friends had two out of three figured out… but the future? They had no idea. I guess I was fortunate in my clarity.

    As a 17 year old I wrote that I would be attending Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois to major in Youth Ministry. My future plans included becoming a youth pastor and ministering to teenagers.

    That was my dream. I was going to pursue it with everything I had. My parents wanted to help me through school, but their lives were falling apart with matching divorces, and they could make no promises. (They were behind me, supportive, and proud of me. That’s really all that mattered to me.) My friends kind of got it but kind of wished I’d be with them at Purdue or Indiana.

    It was my dream. And I was going to make it happen. My dream was only going to come true if I worked really, really hard to earn enough money to make it happen.

    18 years later I’m sitting here reflecting back on that. I’m still pursuing the same dream. I graduated from that school. I’m still in youth ministry. I wonder how many of my fellow Class of 1994 graduates can say the same thing?

    I’m still pursuing that dream because it’s my dream and it’s worth pursuing.

    That’s the thing about dreams. No one can tell you that your dream is worth pursuing but you. It has to come from inside of you.