Tag: harbor

  • Just Make it to Harbor

    Imagine how good this guy felt when he got the boat into harbor?

    What a metaphor for life!

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt like this.

    Life is ugly sometimes.

    And just pulling into safe harbor is exhilarating.

  • My 3 Caddy Rules for Ministry

    caddy
    CC 2.0 jenni40947 via Flickr

    I’m a golfer. I’ve played the game off and on most of my life. More importantly, I love being around golfers.

    There is a joke among golfers that there are just three rules to a caddy’s job. “Just show up, keep up, and shut up.”

    That’s really how I feel about our burgeoning youth ministry. I’m just trying to show up, keep up, and shut up.

    Show up

    Let’s be real. As a volunteer that is 85%. I want to get there on time, be ready to join in whatever needs to be done, and be present emotionally.

    Keep up

    I’m learning. Tonight I came home feeling good because I felt like I learned a bunch of the kids names. I feel like I have a ton more to learn so that I feel like I’m actually contributing. I’ve got to keep up.

    Shut up

    The kids in our ministry could care less what I do for a living, how long I’ve been in ministry, or anything else. I just need to shut up and be there for them.

  • Back in the Saddle Again

    This video expresses a lot of how it felt last night to get back in the youth ministry saddle again. Last night was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to figuring out a whole new way of doing ministry.

    My biggest observation from last night: These students have a particularly sexualized lexicon. I wasn’t ready for that!

  • Towards Holistic Youth Ministry

    degrees-360I’ve been blogging the Harbor Mid-City journey as we head towards a launch of student ministry. Up until now in the life cycle of the church plant youth ministry has always been around– part of the DNA– but never emerged as a priority. That’s changing rapidly as the church has formed to the point where ministering to adolescents is bubbling to the top of needs.

    Here is where we are:

    – We are doing a “soft launch” next Tuesday. 8-10 students are coming to one of the pastors house where we will eat dinner, get to know one another, we’ll crack open the Bible, and break off into discussion groups.

    – We’ve got a core team of 4 to start “youth group” with. (That doesn’t seem like the right term, but it’s what we have.)

    – We are creating a ministry aimed at ministering to the whole needs of our students. So Tuesday night youth group is really just one part of the greater sum of what we’re doing. We already offer mentorship, we’ll be adding to that academic help, regular community service projects, leadership development, and family assistance and probably more stuff as we go. The antithesis of what we’re after is entertainment.

    – For now, we’re focusing on high school and recent graduates. The church has a pretty solid kids ministry and for now, that’s where the middle schoolers will be ministered to.

    – For the first quarter, we are meeting in a house. But an early goal is to secure a meeting site somewhere more suitable.

    – Unlike anywhere else I’ve worked with students… getting rides is a big deal.

    – The concept of plural leadership seems to be in the DNA of what we’re creating. I’ve committed to leading up to 25%. For now that means I’m in charge of content. (Either teaching or lining up the teaching, but helping develop the content for the group.)

    – There’s a lot of excitement as we get started. I’d call it naive but the truth is that there’s a lot of experience in the leadership group. We know what we’re getting into and we’re pumped at what God is doing!

    – I think it’s a good idea that we don’t have all of the details, vision, and particulars nailed. Since we already have a solid group of students to launch with… it just seems better to launch with what we have and line-up the rest as we go.

    – We are looking to learn. I’m picking the brains of the urban youth workers I know, putting feelers out to meet more, and our team is all doing the same thing. We know we aren’t inventing something even though it feels like it.

    – Yes, we have a sexy acronymn for what we’re doing. I just can’t remember it.

  • Buy the Harbor Worship CD

    hchwHere on the blog I’ve talked early and often about our church, Harbor Mid-City. One of the things that we like most is the expression of arts in weekly services. In the last year I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a musical solo. But in that time we’ve had spoken word performed, rap performed, and an artists representation of the message. These are amazing wrinkles to worship. Very cool.

    The role of our worship leader is unique. (Based on my observation– not something anyone has ever told me.) It’s a role which I love in view of the rock star worship leader model we see so prevalent in the Evangelical church. First, Matt Cromwell’s job in leading worship is to elevate the rest of the group above himself. He simply won’t take the spotlight. No lead guitar. His mic isn’t louder than the rest. He’s rarely the visual leader of the service. Second, he facilitates the people of the church writing the lyrics for the songs we sing as a congregation.

    It’s that second thing that I want to point you to today. Matt and the worship team have put together a CD of the songs we sing at church… and I think you should check it out. Head over to CD Baby or iTunes, sample some tracks, and consider supporting Harbor’s worship team by purchasing a song or their entire album. If I could suggest one track, Trial By Fire. Yeah, I like that one a lot. You need that one.

  • Youth Group vs. Youth Ministry

    Youth Group vs. Youth Ministry

    Last night I sat around a table with some people to talk about youth ministry in our church. As I’ve mentioned a number of  times, our church is in a working class neighborhood of San Diego. We are a community of people with tangible needs. There is real poverty. Real educational problems. Real family trouble. Real gangs. Real violence. Not that life in the suburbs is all perfect, but the needs of students in City Heights are different from their peers just 6 miles to the East in La Mesa. It’s outside of my evangelical, middle class, white culture. And that’s what I like about it.

    Thankfully, there was a ton of agreement around the table. We all can see that we need a ministry and not just another program. And we know that our little ministry has no hope if it isn’t holistic. This is an opportunity to live out more of the Gospel practically than we’ll teach formally.

    I came home last night with one phrase: “We want to create a youth ministry, not a youth group.” As we defined that, we implied that youth group points inwardly and creates a cluster of kids around a common purpose. Not intrinsically bad, just not our target. Instead, we are trying to form a ministry that looks at the whole person and pushes those students out into the world, transformed to transform their world. While I have no doubt that we’ll do youth group-type things… retreats, events, Bible studies, and stuff like that. That won’t be our focus.

    As I shared last week. I’m not in this to waste my time or keep busy. Not being on the church’s staff changes my perspective completely. Oddly enough, not being on paid staff emboldens me even more!

    I’m interested in developing leaders for influence in their culture, I’m interested in upsetting Satan’s plans, I’m interested going where the kids are, and I’m interested in sharing leadership. I’m not interested in a group, to babysit and entertain the apathetic. It seems like those parameters are common with the others in the group of people trying to figure it out.

    Shared values are a good place to start. Going to the next step, I feel pretty good about beginning something that is focused first on ministering to students.

    Photo credit: Camaradas by Julián D Gaitán via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Pushing Back to Find Sanity in Christ

    this-way-to-sanityClosing in on a year as “just a family in the pews” I have learned a ton about myself, my walk with Jesus, and what it’s like to be on the other end of church life. Having spent my entire adult life on the church leadership end of things I would often say, “I don’t remember what its like to just go to church.” This last year has been an amazing vantage point.

    When we first came to Harbor we knew right away that we wanted to be a part of it. We went to a service on Sunday and shared coffee with the pastor and his wife later that week. They told us their story and their vision for Harbor… Kristen and I were sold and let them know right away we were committed to staying on board.

    As the months went by we felt like we were getting sucked in and were powerless against it. What I mean by that is that churches have a tendency to get their tentacles on you and slowly wrap their eight arms around you so that you find yourself fully enveloped by its grasp until you wake up drowning in holy activity. One moment you are helping in the nursery and then you wake up to realize that you are serving at the church 7 days per week and 3 times on Sunday.

    Since I was new in my job and had just come out of serving at a church, I was determined that Kristen and I would stay out of the vortex. It may sound weird but people in our lives were firmly encouraging us… in order to reconnect with Jesus you need to do less church work and work more on your relationships outside of church. While I felt like it was a counter-intuitive approach to spiritual growth, I trust the people God has put in my life to tell me the truth… to tell me the truth!

    And yet we started getting sucked in. A weakness I am working on is that I have no ability to say no to something I have the ability/skills/talent to do. Someone from the church would pitch me an idea and my “no thank you” must have come out like a “yes, no problem.” Next thing I knew I was sucked in. It turned out the people in my life were right… and the breath of fresh air I was enjoying so much was quickly snuffed out and replaced with bitterness, anger, and temporary depression. We were right back where we started. In fact, we were probably worse off then ever.

    lead-weightFlash-forward to January and early February. I was fully freaking out about our involvement with the church on Sunday mornings. In fact, for some reason I was literally freaking out at church. I would be fine right up until we left. Then we’d pile in the car and I could feel my blood pressure getting higher. I’d get to church and be ready to explode. A little dizzy, on edge, and feeling the strong desire to flee. All my mind would be saying is, “Leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.” And the more people were nice to me the more intense the feeling. It was really one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. Mr. “I’ve got it all under control” was completely not in control. I’d tell Kristen, “I think I’m losing my mind.” I was being completely honest. I was really scared that I was actually losing my mind.

    Each time someone at church asked Kristen or I to do something it got worse. I kept saying to myself, “The kids hate coming to church, I hate coming to church, and I can tell Kristen is upset that we’re all upset.” While the calm rational side of me knew that we needed to worship on Sunday mornings the irrational, emotionally-charged side of me started to think that the best way to make these symptoms go away was simply to stop going to church altogether.

    [Enter wise council from stage left] Perhaps the solution wasn’t either of those choices? “Stay and be miserable or leave and do nothing are both crappy solutions.” That is when it hit me. What I really needed to do was meet with the leadership and push back.

    Gracious. That’s all I can say about my meeting with the staff. My experience with church leadership and AS church leadership has always been to tie someone’s involvement with church stuff to their spiritual growth. When people met with me to bail on things I always took it personally. I would always be polite and thank them for their service… but they’d leave and I would be annoyed. To look across a table and say… “I can’t explain the why, but I know that I need to say no-to-all for a while to find freedom and connect with Jesus” was so freeing. And to have those words embraced was incredible. While I’m certain the two men I met with were discouraged by the outcome of that meeting as they drove away… I was amazed at their maturity. They gained 10,000 points with our family simply by agreeing that our family needed to do nothing. (Not less, nothing.)

    fresh-airSo here we are three months later. Other than our uber-active community group my family is a regular family who fills the pew on Sunday morning, hosts a few friends on Monday nights… and that is it. I don’t know how long we will practice this new displine of “no-to-all” but I have to tell you that it is working. The more we push back from being super-involved the better things get for our family. More family time, more family growth, less busyness, less tension… these are all good things.

    I don’t know how long this needs to last. My feeling is that I need to guard our family like this until the desire to serve comes back. It hasn’t happened yet. And for once in our lives we aren’t in a rush to make something happen. But for now, we are embracing this new period of our lives. We are embracing a lifestyle of a new normality. It’s a renessaince of the soul that I am enjoying. Maybe a little too much?

  • Rock that Quirky Church

    dsc_0211I think some of my harsh criticisms of the evangelical church come from a love of our church. The mission of Harbor Mid-City is one that is quirky by design.

    We have a hyper-qualified staff brought together despite significant theological difference who lean into that tension for the sake of the Gospel in the neighborhood. For my theologically savvy readers (aka Kristen) we have staff people from PCA, Salvation Army, Baptist, pentecostal, emergent-types, traditional evangelical and hard core liturgical backgrounds. In most communities these folks wouldn’t even get together to pray for one another… much less chose to work at the same church!

    Toss on top of that theological stuff the language issues we experierience every week and you will start to see the quirks pop out. We offer the same service in both English and Spanish, meaning there are painfully long times of translation. But this is San Diego and people are used to hearing both languages on the radio and TV… so that’s no big deal. We also have a population of people who speak Korean, Vietnamese, and Swahili. Sometimes our worship music is in those languages. In fact, there tend to be as many non-English songs as English ones.

    Ready for this? It gets more quirky as the design of the church allows minority cultures to have equal voice in our services. What that means is that we’re more worried about celebrating our worship service in a way that lifts up Latin American, Mexican, African American, Southeast Asian, and African cultures above the dominant white evangelical culture.

    OK, one more quirk. There is a huge hodgepodge of socio-economic situations in our church as well. You have working class poor next to college kids from San Diego State. And you have immigrants next to upper-middle class folks who live just north of the church.

    Is it perfect? No. Do I agree with every last bit of the theology? Absolutely not! Are there things about the church I really dislike? Yes! Am I comfortable in the service? Rarely. Are the messages challenging and encouraging to where I am at in my walk with Jesus? Not often. Do they offer all of the things I need for my family? No, children’s ministry is just getting organized. Youth ministry is in a pre-formational stage.

    So why do we go? We go because we believe at the core of our being that there is tremendous strength in that diversity. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my evangelical expression of theology and worship is superior. I love to worship in a place that agrees on the essentials while allows gray areas to be interpreted through the lens of culture.

    Don’t get me wrong. This place is solid theologically. In fact, I’m convinced that Harbor expresses in their worship many best practices of things believed across Christianity. This hodgepodge isn’t just the brain child of idealists. It is the brainchild of idealists who are stupid enough to think that it will work, have the training and experience to make it happen, and have a core of people at the church who are dreaming the same dream.

    In these quirks I see tremendous hope for the Gospel across our country. Lives are changed as they are surrendered to Jesus. And as I think about it, much of what I rebel against here on the blog about evangelicalism is because I see Harbor doing something right while most of evangelicalism is doing it wrong.

  • A Favorite Thing About Harbor

    Each Sunday, during the worship service, our church invites all the children to come up and play instruments during one of the songs.

    Too often we push the children of the church away from the adults and I think that’s a real mistake that accidentally sanitizes intergenerational worship. This small action each week is symbolic of a place that provides voice and value to all equally. I love it! The leaders are crazy enough to think that they can change City Heights.


    Pint-Size Jam Session from Kristen McLane on Vimeo.

    HT to Kristen

  • Stumbling buddies

    Last night we hosted our first community group with Harbor. I don’t have much else to say but this.

    #1 It’s fun to host a small group after going to a church 3 weeks.

    #2 I’m looking forward to having some people like me to stumble towards a deeper walk with Jesus with.