Embarking

Speaking of MegaChurches, the Hartford Institute came out with another study on Megachurches as a follow-up to the 2005 study.  You  can find a summary here and the full report here. 

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 9, Bill Hybels, Relentless

Mother Teresa: God’s radar located Mother Teresa’s carte blanche yieldedness, or willingness and openness to Him.  She was committed to…

• Little practices of love
• Little sacrifices
• Little fidelities to Scripture

Sobering Question:  If you were God, would you pick you for additional opportunities to make a difference in the world?
Sobering Question:  If in the next 15 minutes, God called you to serve the poor and destitute in Calcutta for the rest of your life, how would you respond?
Sobering Question:  What do you do when God taps you on the shoulder and asks you to step up?

Mother Teresa’s response was elation and carte blanche yieldedness.

There is a direct correlation between carte blanche yieldedness, white flag surrender and receiving a fresh assignment from God.

Some people take the assignment God’s given and put it on a scale and weight out what’s on the other side (comfort, security, money, fame, ego) and the scales tip… just not God’s way.  Don’t let that be your story.  Don’t every extinguish the new thing that God is trying to do in the world through you.  Refuse God nothing… you will never regret it.

When you are so enflamed with the excitement, there is usually a phase of time that is brutally difficult and in which there are many obstacles in the way.  This is a purifying time for the leader because it causes the person to deal with a bunch of questions:  How much am I willing to sacrifice?  Do I really believe that God has the power to do this?  This is the waiting period of dream-fulfillment, a time of frustration, but of important formation.

When a leader reaches the kind of clarity about the singularity of their heart for what God has called them to, God will often open up the doors.  Outlast the opposition. Be relentless.  God will release you into what he’s called you into.

How bad do you want it?  How serious is your calling?

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 8, Brad Anderson, Best Buy, An Uncompromising Focus on People

In each person is a seed of greatness waiting to be grow.

Employee Engagement:  how do we let the uniqueness of the employee connect with the uniqueness of the customer.  If our employees are highly engaged, our customers are likely to have greater satisfaction.  Employee engagement increases all the other factors (customer satisfaction, sales, etc.) 

“If I’m not serving my employees, I really shouldn’t be in this job.”

We have an image of leadership in which we think we are going to get a lot of good feelings about ourselves.  True leaders get a higher fulfillment out of empowering others than about accomplishing something themselves.  How do you inspire employees?

Marcus Buckingham talks about the “destruction of human capital.”  Those aren’t neutral words.

The biggest part of the job is treating people as full human beings.  You can take people out of the fabric of the work.  Performance, numbers, results, processes are all connected to people.

In response to the question about how to motivate employees, Brad said he would ask, “How is the employee coding what they’re doing?  What is the base out of which you lead from?  How healthy is it?  Do you see it as significant?  Do you believe in the core of the work?  This is key to ongoing satisfaction.”  Financial incentives are powerful, but thin, or incomplete.  Financial incentives are the scoundrel’s way out, leadershipwise.

ROWE – Results Oriented Work Environment (a new program Best Buy is testing)

1. Company Value – your family comes first
2. As long as you got your results done, no one is going to monitor where you are at 8am.  Tests show that this works.  The manager has to work harder because he has to keep a closer monitor on the work.

What are the narratives that are a part of the lives of great leaders?  What are the crucible events?  How are we narrating our lives and what story do we see ourselves living into?

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 7, Catherine Rohr, Founder & CEO Prison Entrepreneur Program, Risk Taking, Barrier Breaking, Bold Leadership

Catherine Rohr goes into the prison system, loves inmates, and trains them in business practices to be able to be functional in society when they get out.

“Yeah, my life is on the line, but it’s a calculated risk.”

1 out of 15 Americans go into prison in their lifetime.  Prisons have a 95% failure rate.  “It’s the organization with the greatest failure rate of any that I know.”

PEP is only 4 years old, but has 1000 CEO’s involved, and a 0% recidivism rate, which is generally 50%.  Employment rate is 98%, and 4 guys making over $100,000 in their first year out of the program.  47 men have started their own businesses.  70% of the graduates are donors back to the program.

“God doesn’t need me.  He just needs me to follow instructions.”

Her pastor says to her: “Just show up in the morning and get your orders for the day and then execute with obedience.”

Talking about her personal life:  “I sacrifice privacy for accountability.”

“I’m just a regular person with a skill set who gave it to God.”  “We sang, ‘I’m going to give you my everything, Jesus.’ But how come we don’t just do that?” 

“I dare you, pray, ‘bring it on God,’ and see what God will do.”

Comments:  Catherine has hutzpah!  Wow, I was impressed by her passion, excellence, diligence, commitment, risk-taking, and creativity.  She is a primary example of a next generation leader in the Kingdom.  It’s people like her who give me hope for the church.  She really challenged us to actually “be” and “live” what we “say” as Christians.  But, even more than that… this Christian woman could be a key to prison reform throughout America.  Think about.  What if, seriously, we implemented on a large scale across the country what she’s doing in prison ministry?  What if we got serious about prison reform that was committed to people transformation, grace, love, and renewal? 

James KA Smith writes that he’s just finished the initial draft of his forthcoming book Desiring the Kingdom: worship, worldview, and Cultural Formation.  As one who originally considered teaching at the university, but ended up in ministry on the campus for several years (no more), and as one who cares much about the concepts surrounding cultural formation and transformation, I really like what Smith has to say in this paragraph from his blog:

I’m pressing the limits, even distortions, that attend “worldview”-talk which tends to now dominate Christian higher education. Such worldviewism, I suggest, continues to reduce Christianity to an intellectual system that can be grapsed apart from the church and is then “taught” as information to be merely transferred from one head to another. In contrast, I argue that Christian discipleship is a matter of formation, not mereinformation–and that “Christian” education should be fundamentally a matter of shaping our love, our desire, to be oriented to the shape of the kingdom of God. And such formation happens not primarily via the heady, cognitive “lectures” (whether in our Protestant sermon factories or our Christian college classrooms) but through embodied practices that seep into our imagination and get hold of our gut, our heart, our kardia.

Thanks for hanging with us in this Blog Tour and through the questions.  Jim, thanks for your thoughtful answers, your wonderful book, and for the privilege of participating.  I want to encourage - especially parents, but others as well to get this book.  It’s a fun and insightful read.

Gum, Geckos, and God, is going on a book blog tour this summer!  The blog tour features 13 blogs and 15 bloggers on 12 posting dates. I’ve been asked to participate on August 4th, and am looking forward to it. Check out these other sites during the tour and then come back here on the 4th for - hopefully - some good interaction.  (Check out my other previous posts about this here: Walmart Bathroom Theology, Camp & Questions

Below is the schedule for this blog tour:

July 21 - Spunky Homeschool
July 22  - Beauty from the Heart
July 23 - At a Hen’s Pace
July 24 - A Holy Experience
July 25 - Family Voice
July 28 - Ted Wins
July 29 - In a Mirror Dimly
July 30 - Oversight of Souls
July 31 - Christians in Context
August 1 - The A-Team Blog
August 4 - Embarking
August 5 - Challies.com

For more details on the book, click here.

So I arrive at the church sometime after midnight.  I’m just going to run in, unplug the pump, and head home.

URC has these large doors as an entrance… probably 12 foot high.  I work my key in the lock, open the large doors, and lock the door behind me.  Why?  Because it’s after midnight, and truth be told, my wife’s words haunt me a little bit.  I step into the small foyer that at this time of night is a little eery.  The foyer was built to have the feel of an outdoor patio with a brick floower, a skylight in the ceiling, and thin vertical windows letting in the surreal night light from the moon.  I didn’t turn on the light, because I could see faintly enough and didn’t want to draw attenion that I was in the church this late at night.  I’m usually comfortable and not afraid of the dark, and I had actually been in the church many times at night. 

So, I step into the foyer.   The stairs to the basement are on my right.  For whatever reason, I glance to the left, which is the direction of the sanctuary, stairs up to the balcony, and an old couch.  As my eyes adjust to the faint darkness, I think I see something.  Or someone.  Yes, sure enough, there is something or someone on the couch!  Now, my heart begins to race and the words my wife had spoken 20 minutes before came rushing back into my head, “It’s after midnight.  What if someone is in there?” and my retort about how ridiculous that was.

I carefully walk over to the lump on the couch.  My words sound so loud in the quiet of the night church, “Hello?”  Nothing.  “Hello.”  The person is sleeping.  I reach down to wake him or her up with a slight touch and shake.  Of course, he jumps with a startle, and I jump because of the built up anxiety. 

So it’s after midnight and I’m standing in the dark in the church with a startled stranger.

Fall 2003… a Saturday in late November.  We had a work-project around the church that we would generally have two or three times a year to clean up leaves, plant new plants or dig up old ones, clean, paint, cut down branches, etc.   If you look at the picture on the last post, you’ll see what looks like a railing at the bottom of the building.  That was about 4 foot high (which gives you a scope of the size of the building). On the other side of that railing was a stairway leading down to the basement.  On of our members was down there that day and cleaned out a bunch of leaves that had collected and had been clogging a  drain.  Little did we know that in a huge down-pour a few weeks later those drains would - for the first time in awhile - send a large amount of water down under the church and into the sump hole where there were two sump-pumps to pump out the water.  The problem was, those sump pumps were both frozen up and not pumping at all.  So… the water began to rise and before we knew it, the basement was flooding with water. 

I happened to have a large water pump sitting in my garage at the time, so I called my friend Nate, and he and hooked it up to a hose and began draining the water up and outside.  We left for the day, letting the pump do it’s long labor of love. 

Bedtime - midnight that night.  I’m climbing into bed, and suddenly I realize that the pump is still pumping!  I figure that by now, the water will be drained down, the pump would be sucking air, and could potentially burn up, ruining my pump.  I share this with my wife, telling her I need to head back to church.  Not happy, of course, because this would mean her tossing and turning until I returned, she says, “It’s after midnight.  What if someone is in there?”  Of course I immediately responded about how ridiculous and paranoid that was and how no one could get in the church, etc. and that I would be fine.  I didn’t know then what a friend often says to me now, “I’ve heard the Holy Spirit speaking, and he sounds very much like my wife.”

I got dressed, jumped in my car, and drove off to church. 

To be continued…

As I’m mentioning some things about evangelicalism again, let me talk about another.  I recently read and finished James KA Smith’s book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church.  If you read my blog, you can see why I’m interested in this book.  Actually, I read it in a very busy week, but got it done.  I really liked it in a lot of ways because Smith was able to put to words many of the things I’ve talked about in this blog and thought about but haven’t been able to articulate in the way that he does.  Smith is kind of an alter ego for me.  He reminds me of what I might have been like had I chosen the philosophy route rather than the ministry route.  Smith is just a tad older than me, did some study at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, did his PHD under John Caputo, and understands a lot about the postmodern philosophy and Christianity.  He’s confessionally reformed and teaches philosophy as an Associate Professor at Calvin College.  He’s also the editor of The Church and Postmodern Culture series through Baker Academic, the same series that published John Caputos What Would Jesus Deconstruct.  He appears to have some sort of friendship with the likes of John Franke, Kevin VanHoozer, Brian McLaren, and of course, John Caputo.   (Smith’s blog can be found here.)

Quick overview and minor review:  This book basicly takes a look at the popular Christian (mis)understandings of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault.  I’m interested because these three have had a significant effect upon my own thinking since my study of them in the early 1990’s.  What Smith does mirrors my own journey of trying understand what these thinkers really are saying, and how it might actually be - not destructive - but constructive to our Christian faith, particularly in our culture shift away from modernity.  Many of Smith’s conclusions are also my own, and that was very affirming because he’s way smarter than I am.  Anyway, Smith basically does three things:  First he debunks the pop-understanding.  Second, he explicates a clear understanding of a core piece of their philosophy that could be helpful to Christian theology, faith, and practice.  Thirdly, he ends each section with prescriptive ideas for what a postmodern church would really look like if we took these thinkers seriously and often compares such ideas with the emerging or emergent church as well as the modern and or mega-church.  He elevates his own version which through him and others has been labeled “Radical Orthodoxy.”  I loved parts one and two of each section, and found myself disappointed and sometimes disagreeing with the third.  In any case, since he’s close by (in age, geography, and thought), I figured I probably need to invite him to lunch.  If it happens, I’ll let you know.

Anyway, he obviously gets at what potentially the evangelical postmodern church could and should look like in the future.  Good stuff to think about.  But there was one little phrase that I found particularly interesting in light of some of the “evangelical center” which I’ve spoken about.  Two things:

1. He was more critical of Stanley Grenz than I had anticipated.
2. He raises the issue of what he calls the “correlationalist apologetic,” which is the attempt to make Christianity no only intelligible, but also rational to the wider culture.  He criticizes this as a particularly modernistic approach.  (I once started a book on this idea, but haven’t finished it.)  I agree with his perceptions here, but this is what he says in the footnote:  “The same correlational method lies… behind the Wesleyan quadrilateral… which has been widely recovered as of late.” [p. 124]

I thought that I had mentioned the Wesleyan Quadrilateral in my previous post on the future of evangelicalism when I talked about Beggington’s 4 points of basic evangelicalism, Stackhouse’s 5 characteristics, and Kenneth Collins’ 4 enduring emphases.  The Wesleyan Quadrilateral isn’t as much a “center” of belief, but sources of theology or of knowledge.  They are:

Scripture

Tradition

Reason

Experience

John Franke interacts with these in his book The Character of Theology as well as in collaboration with Grenz in Beyond Foundationalism as they talk about how we come up with or even settle upon a “center” of belief.

In any case, this was a new insight to me… that the WQ would be a an example of an attempt to rationalize and justify evangelical beliefs to a modern world.  What do you think?  Do you think that’s necessary?  Is it necessary, for instance, to prove to the world outside of Christianity, for instance, the historical reliability of the Scripture, or justification for the decisions of a group of men who decided the canon was closed?  Do we need to justify those to an outside world, or is that falling into correlationism and becoming merely defensive to modernity in a way that isn’t necessary?  It’s got me thinking…