May it be so…

Great video from one of my favorite bands, mewithoutYou.  Their latest album, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright. is a gem.

Unfortunately, embedding is disabled, but please take the extra second & check this out:

The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie

People I really believe in…

Hey friends…

I want to take a moment of your time to really, strongly urge you to take a look at the info below & consider responding.  I know many folks are strapped for cash currently, but this is run by a couple of my friends and I whole-heartedly believe in the Kingdom work they are doing.  Thanks for your time.

First Glance is attempting the impossible. Their goal is to raise $66,988.37 by June 30, 2009 at 11:59PM (in just 13 days)!

Why? You may ask…

First Glance is a Christian organization that provides a safe place for students to go where they can shed their burdens and enjoy themselves. This volunteer based organization has over 300 kids a week walk through their doors. In 2008 they ran out of room and needed to expand their facilities. The expansion project is now nearing completion, and they need only $66,988.37 to finish paying it off! This is where you come in!

Simply click here to see where we are in our goal, sign up to help spread the word, watch videos and more!

the church of the lowest common denominator

one month later, i have not stopped thinking…just lacked time to document my thoughts.

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at the beginning of April the CEO of Pixar, Robert Iger, was having to respond to questions about the commercial viability of Pixar’s latest film, Up.  industry insiders were concerned that it wouldn’t have mass appeal for a variety of reasons highlighted in a New York Times article.  Om Malik grabbed this gem of a quote for a blog piece based on the article:

We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.

as i’ve been studying church models recently (including reading Simple Church), evaluating the future of youth ministry (including the Seismos posts on this blog & reading Youth Minitry 3.0), and through a myriad of conversations & thought processes related to my vocational role in ministry, i think the Church has much to learn from Iger’s thought process.

Seismos pt. 6 – Inquiry #1 – keys to the future of Youth Ministry

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations. We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be. Mark Oestreicher’s “Youth Ministry 3.0” formed the leaping off point for our discussion (many of our thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read it). On this eighth post (intro, first, second, third, highlight video, fourth, fifth posts), we’re looking at the first of four questions we really dug into.

for the love of panic

I was out of town & offline this weekend when everything started breaking loose with swine flu.  I believe it’s tragic that people have lost their lives because of this disease & I hope that people wiser than i are able to quickly and effectively provide treatment and help for those suffering from it.

however, i’m deeply, deeply concerned by the media and general public’s response to this disease outbreak.

Seismos pt. 5 – the 6 inquiries we settled on

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations. We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be. Mark Oestreicher’s “Youth Ministry 3.0” formed the leaping off point for our discussion (many of our thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read it). On this seventh post (intro, first, second, third, highlight video, fourth posts), we’ve (finally) arrived at the point where we were ready to pick some topics to drill into more specifically.  

Seismos pt. 4 – YM 2.0 appreciative inquiry & related thoughts

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations. We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be. Mark Oestreicher’s “Youth Ministry 3.0” formed the leaping off point for our discussion (many of our thoughts will make more sense if you’ve read it).  For this sixth post (intro, first, second, third, highlight video posts), I’m going to outline our appreciative inquiry of Youth Ministry 2.0 & some of the questions that came up related to it.  By the way, sorry about the delay since the last post…I’ve been on spring retreat with my middle schoolers & am finally back & recovered & ready to keep rolling on here.  I’m interested to hear your feedback

seismos – video break

check out this great little video that Tom Roepke put together using animoto (by the way, if you don’t use animoto, you should!):

more notes from our conversations to come over the next few days (week)!

Seismos pt. 3 – initial conversations & YM 1.0 appreciative inquiry

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations.  We met for three days (April 20-22, 2009) to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be.  For this fourth post (intro, first, second posts), I’m going to mention a few of the thoughts that were brought up during our first conversation & reflect on them as well as outline our appreciative inquiry of Youth Ministry 1.0.  

seismos pt. 2 – a beginning list of questions

Seismos is a gathering of 17 youth leaders from 4 states & 15 churches representing over 9 different denominations.  We’re meeting for three days to dig into what the future of youth ministry might be.  For this third post (you can see the first two here & here), we’ll dive into our first real discussion, which we used to list questions that had been raised the last few weeks as we’d read the book and thought about it.  Some of these questions are very directly connected to material in the book and some are more general questions.  The next several posts after this will include appreciative inquiries of Youth Ministry 1.0 and Youth Ministry 2.0, and then discussions of what we decided our top 6 questions were.