On being grown

A buddy left a ministry event early because "she wasn't feeling well."

It wasn't like her, so upon reflection, I realized I had paired her working with someone she had "some issues with". There had been a misunderstanding. Some words might have been spoken carelessly. There may have been an email written and then send hit when some time and delete would have been better.

So I caught up with her and apologized.

Hey, I'm really sorry. When I asked you to help her, I was totally not thinking about your guys's troubles. It must of been awkward, huh? I'm really sorry.

Oh no. No. It wasn't that. I mean yeah we have had our thing, and at times I have tried to steer clear of her. But that wasn't it. "We grown." She was her same old happy self again. We're good. I really just wasn't feeling well.

I've heard this voice of community in other ways. "Being grown."

We are kind of like the brothers you never had. You can fight. I can disagree. But at the end of the day we love each other and nothing you can do or say can make us not brothers.

I want to be able to really talk about how I feel and think and not be afraid I'll say something to upset the Sunday school class.

"Being grown."

Sometimes when you are honest with me, I just can't look you in the eye.

It seems to "blow my cover".

I feel a need not to just steer clear of you but to pretend you don't even exist.

Sometimes when you speak a painful truth to me (and I always appreciate it when you take some time and consideration and even talk to others before you speak this painful truth to me), you become "dead to me."

I want to vote you off the island.

But, I find myself longing to "be grown."

And if you do, too:

Maybe we could even grow together.

bad dudes and good guys

I have been engaged in ministry with a young man from a local community in the hopes that our ministry there together might be incarnational in that he lives in the community our church seeks to grow with in God's Mission.

I had met a couple of young men from the neighborhood that I thought we might want to get involved in our community of community builders and engage them in some ministry opportunities.

No, he said, that wouldn't work. Those are bad dudes. They're into some bad stuff. They don't want to change or become better people.

I didn't understand. Weren't they precisely the kind of people we wanted to reach out to in ministry?

No. He said.

I didn't press the issue, but for a long time didn't really understand how he couldn't be excited about reaching out to "the bad dudes" to help them become "good guys" (quotes provided to emphasis we are all "bad dudes" and "good guys" at one time or another, but we are talking generalities here).

I got a little better insight into the concept by watching the movie Gran Torino.

Clint Eastwood's character is an aging, lonely widower who finds friendship and companionship with a couple of the good kids in his community. The community itself is also aging and "changing" in ethnic diversity and finding itself at the mercy of crime and gang activity.

The task is not to save the "bad dudes", but to protect the "good guys".

It's important to leave behind the 99 to find the one. But we have to protect the flock.

We have to have a certain amount of outreach to the "bad dudes". How do we best accomplish that?

Do we spend enough time and energy with the "good guys"?

Ultimately, as outsiders- 80 year old white guys- living among 20 year old "mongs", the "good guys" will ultimately have to "save" the "bad dudes". All we can really do is figure out what we are prepared to give up in order to fulfill God's mission.

At least that's what Clint did.

Baby Sitting Adults

A friend explained what he does for a living in succinct fashion: "I baby sit adults." The way he said it indicated that he didn't really like babysitting or felt that he shouldn't have to.

He was talking about, I think how he often had to take people step by step through tasks and jobs that didn't really seem that complicated: like you would a child.

I got the feeling that sometimes his colleagues didn't take the time to think through things and had to be walked through scenarios and lots of silly questions had to be answered.

I suppose there is a fair amount of that in any profession. But I also wonder if that is not a component of leadership that we have to embrace.

And if it is: maybe we need to rethink our perspective of baby sitter.

Maria in the Sound of Music was a pretty cool baby sitter. She had to earn some credibility with the children. She rose to the challenge and found how to connect. And she earned her way to a better position of leadership.

Ditto Mary Poppins. Except when her gig was done and she had achieved what she thought were appropriate results, she moved on.

Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, on the other hand (stretching the concept of baby sitter) provides a different take. Nurse is Ratched is a former army nurse. Her nickname is "Big Nurse", taken from the term Big Brother in George Orwell's novel 1984. This term refers to an all knowing authority. She wields control in every interaction she undertakes.

Over the years you have heard some baby sitter nightmares (they locked my kids out of the house because they were misbehaving) and some good things (they always clean up the kitchen even though I don't ask them to).

Maybe you have some babysitting experience and see similarities in how you engage others in ministry.

Maybe babysitting adults, really, is leadership. So when someone asks you what you do, you can sigh, shake your head and say: "I baby sit adults" or you can say: "I lead a mission".

At the end of the day, the two might not be too different. How successful you are might depend on if you take care of those in your leadership like Maria would or like Nurse Ratched would.

The next time someone at the ministry team meeting gets under your skin with a question that they and everyone else around the table knows the answer to (it's the same one they have been asking for the last two years and you have been giving the same answer to), just ask them what a few of their favorite things are.

And then maybe break out in spontaneous song.

Or: there is always electroshock therapy.

Keeping busy?

A blog post by Brian Ward reminded me of how cool the missional concept is.

It is kind of intuitive and it's kind of overlooked because of it's... simplicity--maybe?

I was also reminded of it when a friend described a mission project, with a wistful look in his eye, as being "really good".

Not like other things, he described, we do which seem like "busy work" sometimes.

I could vibe with what my friend was talking about.

Some stuff you do because you have to do it. And sometimes in the obligation you lose sight of the opportunity. Check out Keitharsis for more on this idea.

This is busy work. The wood to chop and the water to tote. And there is alot of it out there. We have to produce it. Or perish. And we can produce it by the ton.

What I like about the missional church is that there is very little busy work.

It's all "really good". Because it is all done for the sake of relationships and for the experience and for how it empowers others and yourself to want to do and be more.

We'll always have wood to chop and water to tote. It helps to consider who we are chopping with and what we are toting for. And then "busy work" can become "really good". And missions can become missional.

Thanks Brian. And good luck.

More yeses

In Managing the Non-Profit: Principles and Practices, Peter Drucker defines a customer as a person who can say "no". (p.55). Do you have customers? Are they just the people who come to your events? They can either come or not come. Do you spend most of your time trying to get all those people out there to say yes and come to an event?

What about the lay leaders you serve? They can come to ministry team meetings or not. They can offer their best efforts for your event or they can offer that effort at work or at home or at the ball park. How much time do you spend cultivating and giving good customer service to this group of customers?

How about the person you answer to as a staff member or as a volunteer? How much time should we spend giving them good value for their investment? Are they an annoyance that you put up with? A hurdle to overcome? It'll be tough for them to have very much customer satisfaction if you do.

And what about those you are responsible for leading as a professional?

Can they say "no"? Or do they have to say "yes"?

If they can't say no, you are not a leader, you are a manager and perhaps not a very good one.

If they can: how often do you get them to yes?

That might be an indicator of how good a leader you are.

Funny

You were feeling pretty good about the mission trip you organized to Sri Lanka. It brought together the "old-guard": missions is all about making converts with the "new generation": mission is all about living our lives together and learning more than you try to teach and earning the right to talk by listening. Lay leaders from the congregation were fully empowered to lead the trip. They put in lots of effort and made sacrifices, but you bet they felt it was worth it!

Their were some difficult moments, but the group came to trust each other and there was lots of social capital developed. People who were considered "outsiders" were empowered and there were 3 or 4 longer term relationships shaping up by the end of the trip. It was really incarnational, you know. I mean your team lived among the Sri-Lankans and made it a point not to eat at McDonalds and took part in Sri-Lankan festivals and even prayed a Sri-Lankan prayer even though you weren't completely sure you bought into the theology of it. And through it all, God's all encompassing love was at the center of discussions and projects, and devotions.

But when you got to the evaluation meeting, people were...sad.

They were let down. All their efforts and all the work seemed to go unnoticed by the church.

It was like pulling teeth to get people to sign up to be prayer partners. Someone from the facility staff had to drive the van to the airport because no one else had the time. Worst of all right in the middle of the drive to get people involved in the Sri Lankan outreach, the announcement time in Worship service was taken up by skits and promos for the upcoming wild game supper hosted by the co-ed softball team.

During the most critical time of sign ups for the Sri Lanka trip the children's sermon was about the Motorcycles for Jesus fundraiser which supported an outside group from South Dakota and didn't really involve anyone in your church congregation except for the one guy who rode the Harley Davidson down the center aisle that day during service to raise awareness for the fundraiser.

The Sri Lankan mission team was left thinking that their efforts to live out the incarnational, relational, experiential, and empowering nature of our Christian faith--that effort to engage this new paradigm of meeting Jesus, not just "taking" Jesus--was regarded by the church as less important than the wild game supper and the Motorcycles for Jesus fundraiser.

It's funny isn't it: how people determine what's important to the church?

Or is it?

--it happens

The bulletin articles, email announcements, posters, banners, inserts, fliers, handouts, brochures, pulpit announcements, closed circuit tv slides, postcards, webpages, and personal invitations we churn out everyday could as likely represent distractions as easily as they could represent valuable activities.

People are seeking investment opportunities. Which are hard to find when you are distracted.

People are looking for a return on investment.

James Coleman identified six forms of return on investment in this sense:

1. Obligations and expectations- If I do something nice or good for you or your cause, then you will reciprocate and do something nice or good for me or my cause.

2. Information potential- Relationships developed will increase knowledge and lead me to specialized information. I'll be in the know about stuff.

3. Norms and effective sanctions- I'll be rewarded somehow someway for selfless actions and I'll receive disapproval for selfish actions. This "My Name is Earl" approach sways me to work work for the collective good of the group and it's cause.

4. Authority relations- I submit to your leadership and you then have access to an extensive network of social capital that can be directed toward a specific goal.

5. Appropriable social organization- I committed to one thing and then the next thing I know, I'm involved in something else and I keep on through inertia.

6. Intentional organizations- I am brought together in an entity that benefits my group and it's cause as well as others indirectly.

According to this theory, most relationships are developed as by products of other intentioned actions.

So, does this discredit intentionality and pragmatism?

Or

Does this indicate that without intentionality, relationships don't happen?

Maybe the takeaway is that a clear cause, whether or not you advance it, leads to relationships.

And then you just have to see what happens.

Otherwise, you just spend lots of time seeing what happens.

And that's really just a bumper sticker.

Waiting to happen.