Search results for: “good news”

  • The Hopeful Lean

    He leaned across the table and told me a secret in a hushed tone. “This neighbor loving neighbors thing. It really works. It’s incredible!”

    He then went on and talked about all the things that are going on in his neighborhood.

    Over the past months I’ve had several conversations that essentially went the same way. I hang out with a former youth worker, a person like me, who left full-time ministry on some sort of a quest to find their first love, ministry. And that position they take when they lean across the table? I call that position HOPE. 

    With excited hushed tones they start talking about what happened when they gave up the podium.

    • They stopped talking and started listening.
    • They stopped looking for their next illustration and started noticing what was going on.
    • And they got involved. And it lead to more cool things. And now Good News is on fire on their block.

    This life reorientation is disorienting at first. It causes them to lose their balance and go through a period of questioning, often times slipping into a period of depression.

    And what they find in that dark place of self-reflection is that they live in a neighborhood. There are people, often just like them, living next door. And this newfound disequilibrium causes them to be open to something they never were before… listening to what God wants them to do… regardless of if their church is behind it or not.

    That was funny to write. That people who have spent decades working at churches started to listen to what God wanted of them only after leaving their church work. And I’m sure that some may take offense at that. All I mean is that these folks feel free to listen to God’s voice in a different way, not through the filter of leadership, but with a more simple posture, “Lord, what will you have for me to do?”

    And almost universally the answer to that question involves simply reorienting their life around serving the needs of their block. It’s not a program and it’s not a paycheck. But it’s the ministry they always wanted.

    It Was There All Along

    It’s kind of funny having these conversations. Each of them is unique. With each person finding a new kind of ministry that fits their neighborhood differently. Big smiles emerge as they share this secret they’ve discovered: It was there all along. 

    Hope has a flavor to it. It’s having tasted the bitter root of despair, rejected popular fast-food cynicism, and popped out the other side with a big smile on your face. Hope is like taking an overcooked steak and decided to chop it up and put it on a salad. What was once not-quite-right is now the star of the meal.

    Hope has derivatives. It’s contagious. As one neighbor ventures out of the front-door and meets others, others do likewise. Suddenly, hope spreads down the street. A person shares a garden. A guy cut a neighbors grass when they are sick. A block party pops up. And neighbors begin to slow down and enjoy where they live as opposed to just seeing it as a place to store their stuff and relax between activities. Kids start to play outside again. Kids start to be kids again. Crime goes down. On and on and on.

    All because a family on the block decided to reorient their lives.

    The Bible doesn’t lie. Each of us were created in Christ Jesus to do good works. (Ephesians 2:10) And when we lean into that the rewards are everywhere.

  • Overcome by Evil

    There’s a whole lot of saber rattling going on these days. Why? Because fear sells better than sex right now. 

    • The stock market is up 80%+ since March 2009.There’s a whole lot of money being made while the media scares you with news of recession.
    • Crime is at historic lows. But there’s a whole lot of money made selling you things you don’t need like home alarm systems and guns. Gun sales are through the roof because the NRA scares people into thinking Obama is going to make handguns illegal.
    • An entire segment of our economy is built around the 401k. A primary method people get you to invest in your 401k? Fear. Fear that you won’t have the lifestyle “you deserve” and fear that Social Security will go bankrupt. Tell me what would happen to a president who ended social security. Yeah, it’s not going to happen. Ever.

    On and on. Much of our society and huge parts of our economy exist because their marketing keeps you fearful so you spend. It’s a distinctly American thing.

    Economic theory says that once you start paying into something, even if it is a factual lie, you believe it because your money is there. (Want to see this in action? Listen to an IT professional try to tell you why a PC laptop is better than a MacBook. They really believe it and it’s completely ludicrous.)

    The church isn’t far behind. We have learned that if we can scare parents that they will stick around. (And the church is infatuated with marketing right now. How many times has Seth Godin spoken at Catalyst now?)

    • Want to raise money? Scare parents by telling them that without ____ their children won’t follow Jesus.
    • Want to plant a church? Cite a bunch of stats about the churches decline. They’ll never ask about your strategy, just give you money.

    You get the idea. We are trying to grow our churches with marketing schemes… and it’s not working, in case you haven’t noticed. 

    Here’s the thing: Creating a culture of fear in your ministry is not good news. It’s fools gold. It might draw some people but you’re drawing the wrong people. This is a major reason you can’t do anything in your church– you’ve drawn a crowd of scared people.

    Last time I checked we weren’t asked to lead people into a life of making decisions based on fear. That’s the opposite of what Paul teaches…

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

    – Romans 12:21

  • Speaking of camp!

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    Speaking of camp week, I’ve been speaking at a camp for a group of Lutheran youth workers near Edmonton this week.

    I’ve never been this far north! So that is cool.

    And it’s always great to hang with passionate people who want to wrestle through issues of extended adolescence, social media, and their implications on becoming Good News to the teenagers in their lives.

  • An Ode to the Unqualified

    Here’s to you,

    The unqualified.

    The untrained.

    The unordained

    The unordainable.

    The seminary reject.

    The mom with no time for seminary.

    The dude with a job.

    The family in the pew.

    The widow in the nursery.

    The seasoned rookie.

    The mint veteran.

    The faithful.

    What you do goes unrecognized. There’s no sign in the church parking lot with your name on it but there should be. There’s no recognition from the platform because the people on the platform don’t know what you do. There’s no accolades or raises or sabbaticals or training conferences. There’s no books or magazines or hashtags describing your task.

    You just do it. You represent Christ every day in the small things. You come into contact with the people the pastors only read about. You take the words of Jesus seriously and love your neighbors as yourself. You pick up their mail. You check on them. You listen with the ears of Christ. You pay attention to the nuances in their voice. And you take action when the Spirit leads.

    There will be no pension checks for you. There will be no housing allowance. There will be no leased car. You will pay your own cell phone bill. You will mow your own grass.

    You are the unqualified. You are the heros of the faith. You are the workers reaping the harvest. You are the ones from whom Good News flows. 

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  • Speaking & Writing update

    Forgive the pause in my normal posts to share some life updates.

    Speaking & Training

    My 2012 speaking/training schedule is now has it’s own page. As far as I know, everything listed there is available for you to register to attend. There are two primary things which seem to be taking off for me in this area.

    1. A Parents Guide to Social Media – This seminar teaches social media principles, goes over relevant laws, and tries to replace fear with fact, principle, and strategy.
    2. Growing Your Business with MailChimp – This is a 2-hour class, more like an interactive training session on all that MailChimp can do for you. (I also do a ministry version, much the same content just geared for ministry communications.)

    Obviously, I do a lot more than just these two things. But that’s what is bringing the most interest right now. I’d love to come and speak for you. Just send me an email and we can talk about it. Being a small business owner/entrepreneur– I’m pretty creative when it comes to the payment side of things so darn near anyone can afford me.

    Writing

    Short-form writing has really become my specialty. (500-2000 words) Over the past several years I’ve written lots of blog posts, guest posts, and magazine articles. But I’ve stayed away from books because the idea of 40,000 – 60,000 words scared the crap out of me.

    That said, I have two book projects underway in the >15,000 words category.

    1. I’m co-authoring a small book for parents with Marko on social media. (Hence, the seminar above.)
    2. I’m revisiting some of my favorite, most shared blog content and “digitally remastering” it into a beautiful little book on how you and I can become Good News in our neighborhoods.
    I’ll let you know when those have official titles, release dates, etc.

    Curriculum

    I’ve got 2 very creative, very fun, 6-week curriculums in development for high school and college students. (They’d work for middle school too, probably) I’ve got a bit of a manifesto on curriculum and why I’m doing it a certain way, but that’s for another post!

    Both of those are coming out this Spring.

    I’m hunting for collaborators

    There’s no other way to say it. If you have ideas and you want to work with me on something, let’s chat. If you’ve got a great idea for a mobile app, event, book, curriculum, or something else and think working together might be awesome, drop me a line.

  • The Unemployable Problem

    Big news out of Washington D.C. recently. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest mark since February 2009, 8.5%. That’s good news if your a president in an election year.

    But others would be quick to point out that 8.5% unemployment is still too high. Yet, I have to wonder. What percentage of Americans are unemployed because they are unemployable?

    The other day, I took our kids to the local park for a picnic and to soak in some free vitamin D from the flaming ball which hangs in the January San Diego sky. It was a sunny, breezeless, quiet day at the park. With most kids back at school and parents back to work the park was fairly empty of the dozens of screaming toddlers on the slides and mom’s chatting on the sidelines experienced during the week before.

    It was our family and a pile of random stragglers each there for their own reasons.

    One man and his friend watched a little boy as they smoked weed and talked about how weed hasn’t hurt them a bit. In the same conversation they talked about their inability to find a job but apparently lacked the cognitive ability to recognize that smoking weed at a public park at 1 o’clock in the afternoon while a toddler plays under your care is as good a reason to not hire a person for a job as any other.

    A young woman sat on a bench near me and talked on the phone while her daughter tumbled up and down the ladder of the slide alone. She cried, literally, to a friend about how her mom wouldn’t give her $100 to pay her cable bill. In the same conversation she lamented to her friend about not being able to find a job anywhere.

    Moments later a nanny arrived with 3 toddlers. In San Diego it’s fairly normal to see a middle-aged Hispanic woman caring for 3 little white kids. I could be wrong in making that assumption, because they could have been her children I suppose, but they looked to be children she watched. She oversaw an orderly march to and from the park, the distribution of snacks and jackets, and she maintained order as they played in the sand and later helped them take turns on the swings.

    So there I sat, basking in the sunlight of this irony. 4 adults at the park with very different American experiences. 3 unemployed and relatively unemployable young adults wasting every legal opportunity they have for the advancement of their life. And 1 employed, legally unemployable middle-aged woman, exhibiting professionalism and investing in the advancement of her life.

    Mike Rowe is right, you know?

    We have an educational system that has created a massive hole in the job market. It’s not just in my industry that there is a gap in qualified people. It’s in the trades, as well. (Read more: College isn’t for everyone)

  • High-trust, low-control

    A movement cannot grow in a low-trust, high-control environment. 

    But a dictatorship can. (Cuba)

    A corporation can. (McDonald’s)

    A gang can. (Al Capone)

    In a low-trust, high-control environment leadership is supreme. Decisions flow from top to bottom. A high value is placed on replication and copying and perfecting. Efficiency is more important than individualism. And the everyday worker has virtually no voice. In fact, the less voice the worker has the better.

    China

    You want to see what church growth looks like? Remove the money. Learn about the Boxer Revolution and how that changed the church in China. All the western missionaries and their hierarchical structures went away. (Or were killed) And the church went underground.

    Thus, a low-control and high-trust structure was forced to emerge. When the church went from an Augustinian mindset with paid staff and buildings and budgets and fake-butts-in-seats to an underground movement of unpaid pastors on the run, meeting in house churches, and people risking their life to be a part of it… the church became a movement again. The Gospel spread neighbor to neighbor because it is Good News. People risked their lives to be called a Christian.

    And it became an unstoppable force. (I’ve heard estimates in the hundreds of millions of converts during the 20th century in China.)

    Jesus designed the church as an insurgency. Looking at church history, the times when the church has been most effective have been in a high-trust, low-control environment. The Roman Empire conquered every people group in its path but was conquered from the inside-out by an insurgency of the heart.

    A core problem in America is the rapid embrace of a low-trust, high-control leadership structure. “Church growth experts” (and their books and conferences) encourage church leaders to remove the voice of the people and go to staff-lead models. To generalize, the staff become the local experts on everything from discipleship to sex and the people become relatively voiceless, idea-less, worker bees in support of the vision of the leadership. These high-control, low-trust leaders proudly say things like, “This is the type of church we are. If you don’t like it, you can leave. There are plenty of churches out there.”

    I’ve heard leaders say that at leadership events. And people in leadership write that down. And underline it. As if asking people to leave who disagree with you is a sign of a powerful leader. (Hint: Surrounding yourself with people who agree with you makes you a wimp of a leader.)

    So many people have left the church. Sure, there are examples of big churches you can look to and hope for growth in that model. But I can schedule a tour of a 25,000 square foot church for sale 500 yards from my house that says there is no hope in that model.

    You can’t create an insurgency of the heart with a low-trust, high-control model. People will die for Jesus but they won’t die for you. 

    La Raza

    The church will grow when we give power back to the people. Not just the power to serve leaders vision, but real— actual power over their day-to-day church life. We give lip service to the Priesthood of all Believers but we don’t live it out. In 1520, Martin Luther wrote On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church:

    How then if they are forced to admit that we are all equally priests, as many of us as are baptized, and by this way we truly are; while to them is committed only the Ministry (ministerium Predigtamt) and consented to by us (nostro consensu)? If they recognize this they would know that they have no right to exercise power over us (ius imperii, in what has not been committed to them) except insofar as we may have granted it to them, for thus it says in 1 Peter 2, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom.” In this way we are all priests, as many of us as are Christians. There are indeed priests whom we call ministers. They are chosen from among us, and who do everything in our name. That is a priesthood which is nothing else than the Ministry. Thus 1 Corinthians 4:1: “No one should regard us as anything else than ministers of Christ and dispensers of the mysteries of God.” Source

    Friends, our lips say we believe in the Protestant doctrine of the Priesthood of all Believers but we fund a priesthood among us.

    Are you saying we have to fire people?

    Listen. I’m not saying that we need to eliminate church staff. I’m saying that if we want to see the church grow again, in a post-Christian America, we need leaders to lead towards decentralization of power. We need paid staff to see their job as expert equippers and not expert speakers. We need to measure leaders on their ability to replicate Jesus and not themselves. We need leaders to unleash an insurgency and not continue an occupation.

    So indeed, we probably need to fire some people who won’t embrace the present reality we live in. But new leaders will emerge. The Holy Spirit has always provided. Indeed, there are leaders in your pews today who could do this if only you allowed it.

    And which people should we pay? Probably the ones who don’t want to be paid. 

  • Top posts for 2011

    Top 10 posts

    1. Do you need a resume`? It depends.
    2.Repairing a wet iPod Touch
    3. Tim Hortons Arrives in Romeo
    4. Christians and Gun Control
    5. St. Patrick’s Day Prayer for Missionaries
    6. 14 Must Have Gifts for the Geek in Your Life
    7. TSA Resistance
    8. SDSU: I Believe That We Will Win
    9. American Airlines CEO Quits on Moral Grounds
    10. 5 Ways to Be Good News in the Neighborhood on Halloween

    No surprises there. Google brings the traffic to some of my backlog entries. But I was surprised to see some of the late November and December articles take off and make it into the top 10.

    Top 10 Referrers

    1. Facebook
    2. Google (Search, Image search, and Google Reader)
    3. Twitter
    4. StumbleUpon
    5. Youth Specialties
    6. The Youth Cartel
    7. Google+
    8. Raginpagin
    9. DougFields.com
    10. Whyismarko.com

    I had to giggle at #8. That’s a forum for the SDSU bowl game opponent. Facebook out-referred Google by 3:1 in 2011. Crazy!

    Top 10 search terms bringing people to my blog

    1. resume
    2. how to do a resume
    3. Tim Hortons
    4. wet ipod touch
    5. wii bowling
    6. sexting
    7. tiger woods new estate
    8. letter l
    9. st patrick
    10. ipod touch wet

    Again, the power of Google. Looks like I need to spend some time on my SEO of church/youth ministry stuff, eh?

    Top 10 outbound links

    1. thepoddrop.com
    2. facebook.com/adammclane
    3. twitter.com/adammclane
    4. theyouthcartel.com
    5. feeds.feedburner.com/adammclane
    6. mclanecreative.com
    7. thetechherald.com/article.php/200850/2611/Study-reveals-20-percent-of-teens-have-sent-naked-images-via-phone
    8. usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2008-12-09-high-tech-flirting_N.htm
    9. markuskrauss.com/Produktdesign/SWAY.html
    10. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival

    One of the surprising things that happened to my blog in 2011 was that I didn’t see a dip when I left working at Youth Specialties. As I transitioned from YS to The Youth Cartel I actually saw an increase in traffic, comments, shares, etc. I don’t know what that means but I was happy to see everything go up. (Visitors, Facebook shares, Twitter mentions, RSS subscribers, comments, contacts… everything.)

  • Dear 2012

    Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.

    Philippians 3:13-14

    Dear 2012,

    We, the undersigned, are ready for you. 2012 will be better than 2011. Not that we’re ashamed of 2011… we just want 2012 to be different.

    Rejecting apathy – For too long we’ve been defined by our apathy. We come to church to listen and not change. We engage Scripture to learn and not make a difference. We apply biblical truth to our hearts but not our blocks. We wait for the church to do something so we can feel good about funding it. We hire experts to teach our kids because we’re too busy doing nothing important.

    Apathy will not define us in 2012. We’re done talking about what we are going to do. We are done dreaming. We are done crying about what hasn’t been done. And we won’t wait for a program to do what we can do on our block. We don’t need a tax break. We don’t need a sermon.

    2012 will be known as the year of being Good News in our Neighborhood.

    Foregoing aestheticism – Sure, we didn’t live 2011 in the desert eating locusts. But we were way more reclusive than we wanted to be. When we were home we hung out in the house or in the backyard. We spent time with our family and deepened friendships with people who aren’t on our block. We were reclusive. We were loners. We defined ourselves by how we lived and not how we impacted our community.

    This year will be different. We will be social. We will be a front porch type of neighbor. We will not just have our little circle of friends chosen by a shared hobby or faith. Instead we will choose to be different. Our relationships will be defined by proximity, not affinity. We recognize that Jesus told us to love our neighbor and we will stop trying to redefine the word neighbor to fit our comfort level. And we recognize that Jesus has us living where we live for His purpose and not our own.

    2012 will be known as the year of being Good News in our Neighborhood.

    Living as the best neighbor ever- Yeah, we saw opportunities in 2011. And we blew it. The elderly neighbor who lost her husband. The person who hired a gardner to weed because they were too busy. The latch-key-kid who sat at home all afternoon waiting for her mom to come home from work. We saw it. We heard about it. But we didn’t do a darn thing about it and we’re sick of feeling guilty.

    This year we’ll go from observer and shoulder shrugger to opportunist. Our neighbors will know that they can depend on us. We will rearrange our schedule to serve. We will stop being busy at the church so we can be the church on our block. We will know their names and they will know ours.

    2012 will be the year of our neighbors knowing we are Good News in their lives.

    And finally- We will rally others because Good News spreads fast! We will lay aside petty differences for the sake of our neighbors. We will let forgiveness and grace reign. We will become block uniters instead of block dividers.

    This year will be marked by it’s impact!

    Making 2012 count,

    [signed]

    Leave a comment to join me. Feel free to add to the letter, too. 

  • Jesus loves Ron Jeremy

    Ladies and genteman of the jury I submit to you…

    People are hard-wired for Good News. It’s like crack to their soul.

    Yes, Good News can change lives. Anyone’s life.

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