The Age of the Unthinkable

I just finished Joshua Cooper Ramo's book The Age of the Unthinakble. It's a book that probably confirms for people that I am a 'geek'. Ramo examines everything from the recent financial meltdown, military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the (initial) surprise success of the Wii, details interviews with both Israeli and Hizb'allah leaders, reveals how most Silicon Valley venture capitialits missed out on Google (and why one in particular didn't), and a host of other topics all meant to demonstrate how the world is fundamentally changing and what we can do with it.

For the purposes of the church, though, came this interesting thought. Ramo cites a discussion with Roberto Unger, a Brazilian politician, who believes that our current approach to the world has been reduced to the passing of checks through the mail- a danger that means our generosity is often wasted and always isolates us from a world that we need to feel and not simply see or touch at a distance (244). For the past couple of years at Hillcrest, we've discussed the danger of simply outsourcing our care for the world. We can write checks to places like The Community Outreach, the Furniture Mission, or even World Vision, but a check is simply a transaction that outsources the burden of care. While not everyone can work for these places, or even work in the places where these places operate, we all can take steps to do something so that our care isn't a simple outsourced transaction.

Biblical Inerrancy

Is a children's bible supposed to be without error?

We were reading a story from Riley's bible the other day about Jesus healing on the Sabbath. It opened the story by mentioning the fifth commandment of doing no work on the Sabbath. I read it and stopped and said "that's not right". Riley said, "what, we can do work on the sabbath?" (I'm kidding). I grabbed my bible- one without error, I presume- to make sure I was right. And yep, the sabbath commandment is #4- not #5. So Children's bibles are probably exempt from the inerrant argument, as Riley did remember another time he found a mistake in his bible that we had to look up as well.

Sloppy Joes

We had sloppy joes this past Wednesday at church for the meal before our Wednesday Night Service. It truly was a group effort to pull of what I thought would be a rather easy meal. I had gotten a recipe from Karen and started work on it Tuesday afternoon but was missing two ingredients. Wednesday morning I picked up the ingredients and turned the roaster on. As I thought about the sloppy joes, I had two thoughts: first, I know the kids like them extra sloppy, and second, since I'm not exactly a cook but more of a recipe follower, I had better have a couple people taste them to see if they are ok. So I enlisted

• my administrative assistant to tell me if they tasted ok. She tasted them, and said they were ok, but were missing something. She added some things and made them better
• my wife, who stopped by while running errands. She thought they were good to go, but only after my administrative assistant had added some other things.
• Pastor Ben, who took a sample, and said they were good, but wondered if I Had enough (I was beginning to question that myself).
• the kitchen crew came later in the afternoon, and decided we needed to add more meat, and they even added some onion!

Who knew so much went into sloppy joes? And in the end, my kids didn't eat them. Oh well, this week's chicken enchiladas ought to be better because I didn't have any hand in them . . .

Kids say . . .

Recent comments from my kids:

Convo #1
Riley: Dad, can I join the Cub Scouts?
Me: Probably not.
Riley: Why not?
Me: Why do you want to join the cub scouts?
Riley: Because you can get badges (is that all it takes? no wonder tats are so cool).
Me (later in the conversation): what was the best part about your day?
Riley: When they told us about cub scouts (of course it was, but you're still not joining scouts).

Convo #2
I came home this past Sunday afternoon from a meeting and found Chraley doing something he shouldn't. I asked him to stop. Charley looked at me and said, "you, go back to work".

Convo#3
Me: Kinsley, can you go downstairs and let Pepper out?
Kinsley: Sorry, dad, but I actually can't do that right now.
Me: When did you learn the word 'actually'?

I'm a failure as a parent . . . !

Seth Godin on Non-Profits

Godin has a tough post on non-profits here. I suppose you could put "church" every time he writes "non-profit" and finish reading with the same humbled feeling I had.

Backpacks

Wednesday Night 30+ Hillcresters kicked off the first night of packing 2000+ backpacks for the Food Bank's weekend food ministry to under-resourced elementary and middle school students. It was a fun night!

R.I.P Summer and Brett Favre

This past Labor Day we had a fire to roast smores and bid adieu to summer. R and W have fond memories of their campfires out at the lake with nana and papa, but this fire was my personal favorite as the kids shared their favorite things about summer and in addition to saying farewell to summer, we also laid to rest our fondness of Brett Favre as a Packer icon.

Tim Keller on Parenting

I've just finished Tim Keller's fine book The Reason for God. It's an excellent book that present reasons for the Christian faith in a new and smart ways. In the midst of his discussion on why Jesus had to die on the cross as our substiution, Keller presents a nugget on parenting:

"Children come into the world in a condition of complete dependence. They cannot operate as self-sufficient, independent agents unless their parents give up much of their own independence and freedom for years. If you don’t allow your children to hinder your freedom in work and play at all, and if you only get to your children when it doesn’t inconvenience you, your children will group up physically only. In all sorts of other ways they will remain emotionally needy, troubled, and overdependent. The choice is clear. You can either sacrifice your freedom or theirs. It’s them or you. To love your children well, you must decrease that they may increase. You must be willing to enter into the dependency they have so eventually they can experience the freedom and independence you have (194)."

Recommendation #2: Program Insights

Since there is a potential generation gap (see earlier post), there may be different imlications for future programs aimed at spiritual development. A couple of potential insights could include:

• Design development opportunities that meet real needs over a set period of time. This is one of the reasons why Finanical Peace University is so successful because it meets a real need and it takes place over after a certain number of weeks. For our groups, we communicate no end time, leaving some to wonder how they exit groups they don’t like or join groups that they do. For future spiritual programs, Hillcrest ought to consider programs that meet real needs (spiritual disciplines, parenting, marriage, finances, etc) and do so over a set number of weeks (i.e. 6 weeks).
• Connect learning to mission- we can probably do better in terms of connecting learning or development opportunities with our current missional focus. We perhaps would offer a seminar as part of Wednesday Night Service that would address how to be a mentor, what to expect during a home study, a book talk on The Shack, or how to handle conflict that would both provide content/skill training and connect with our mission.

Recommendation #1: Care for Leaders

Simply, it shouldn’t have taken an intern and a project to check in with our leaders in terms of spiritual development. Many of our leaders are doing good things and feel a general sense of support from Hillcrest, but many of these same leaders are operating on an island. There’s no cross connection or conversations between them and other leaders, whether other group leader, study leaders, or FPU leaders. There is also some tremendous potential to simply ask people how they are doing when it comes to matters of faith, what is God showing you, how can we praying for you, etc. Discussing these questions amongst each other could raise the temerpature of spiritual development throughout Hillcrest.

Finding #3: Generation Gap

Looking back on the survey, we wish we would have added a question about age. We then could have separated the data against ages and look for any possible patterns. Nonetheless, our conversations with several leaders indicated a potential generation gap. The gap mainly exists in the different expectations older and younger leaders have towards the Sunday morning worship services and spiritual development programs. Going forward, Hillcrest may need to allot for the idea that no program or opportunity will be ‘one size fits all’.

Finding #2: Mentoring

Perhaps the greatest insight that came from the survey is the lack of spiritual mentoring taking place within Hillcresters. The mentoring component is really the only data piece that holds up no matter how you analyze the data. In our conversations with leaders, several of them shared the needs people in their circles have for mentoring and also their desire to see mentoring have a great influence on Hillcresters. It's a balance because you can't just begin a mentoring program and arbitrarily pair people up, but let it be too 'organic' and it'll be a long time before something takes place.

Finding #1: Mixed data

As we sifted through the data we really though we'd find connections between the amount of time a person spends with God and other positive things- time spent in service, better relationships, better finances, etc. But the data was mixed at best. For instance, 1/3 of those who had spent 2 or more hours with God were experiencing difficulty in one of the other areas we surveyed- either relationships, serving, or finances. We later theorized that perhaps it was the difficulty of a relationship or finances that was driving that person to spend more time with God during the week, but nonetheless, we weren’t able to draw any connections here. While spending time with God certainly isn't a negative thing, there wasn't any conclusive data that made a direct correlation between the time one spends with God and success in other parts of life. You could spend less time with God and get just as good, if not better, results in these areas. It's an incomplete analysis, for sure, but interesting nonetheless.

Pastor Richie

KELO did a great story on Pastor Richie last night.

Spiritual Development Insights

This summer a seminary student interned with me and we did some work exploring what spiritual development looks like at Hillcrest. We conducted a survey (that several people responded to), held a focus group meeting as a follow up to the survey, and interviewed several of Hillcrest's small group and bible study leaders to get their input on what they see happening in terms of spiritual development at Hillcrest. We made a presentation to our Leadership Council last night that detailed some of our findings, and over the next couple of days, I'd like to share some of the results on the blog. While Hillcresters will be most interested in what we discovered, there might be crossover to those from other churches as well.

So for today, here's the raw data from the online survey:
• Time spent in spiritual practices
o 38% spend an hour or so per week
o 27% spend more than two hours per week
o 24% spend two hours per week
o 12% spend less than hour per week
• Hours spent serving others in the last month
o 47% spent more than 6 hours
o 21% spent 3-4 hours
o 15% spent 1-2 hours
o 15% spent 5-6 hours
o 3% spent none
• Quality of close personal relationships
o 35% have shown great strength and healing
o 35% have shown small amounts of progress
o 24% have the same amount of conflict and stress
o 3% have more conflict and stress
• Health of personal finances
o 35% made excellent progress
o 35% made some progress
o 18% made no progress
o 3% went backwards
• Involvement in mentoring relationships
o 62% are not in a mentoring relationship
o 35% are in a mentoring relationship

We'll attempt to explain what these numbers might mean tomorrow.

Murphy's Law

Murphy's Law hit Hillcrest this past Sunday. If it could have gone wrong, it did, including

• It was baptism Sunday and upon getting to church the tank was full but cold; apparently the heater wasn't on. The property guys got creative and drained the tank and then refilled it by attaching garden hoses to our water heater, insuring a warm tank for baptisms.
• There was confusion over who was to make coffee for this 5th Sunday and so we got a late start on making it. 5 minutes into making the coffee, the large coffee maker keeps tripping a breaker thus making it inable to make large batches of coffee. We resort to making one pot at a time.
• Halfway through our 9:00 service an older gentlemen begins to choke, very audibly. Several people jump up to attend to him, but he regains himself pretty quickly. It's one of those moments that feels like it took minutes, but was acutally only a few seconds. The paremedics were called but we were thankfully able to send them home.
• There was a biting in our preschool room during our 10:30 service.
• We ran out of coffee by 10:40 (see above). Wouldn't have been so bad if there wouldn't have been like 10 people trying to drain every last drop from our empty pots.

On the plus side, we baptized 6 people, took communion together, and enjoyed worshipping with one another. The stories from our baptism folks remind us what the point of ministry really is, even if Murphy decides to crash Hillcrest on a Sunday.