Impressed with NPH and House

While I'm at it (and since I'm suffering from jet lag), let me go on and say that I'm also impressed with Nazarene Publishing House and The House Studio.
Here's why.
1. NPH is kind of a traditional denominational publishing house. They tend to publish a lot of the kind of stuff you might expect from a denominational publishing house, mostly Bible studies, program materials, and tip books for how to do the same stuff a little better. I was impressed with their launch a few years back of Barefoot Ministries, a pretty cool in-house yet vogue youth ministries resource group.
However, NPH recently did something which strikes me as completely radical. They launched a new publishing house (in a house across the street) called The House Studio. The idea is simple yet shocking. People want some non-institutional resources. These can't be produced in a big institution (and even if they could be, the people who want them wouldn't buy them).
So NPH put up some cold hard cash and set up three quality young leaders in The House Studio and turned them loose. No oversight. No control. No rules. They just said, "The world needs you, and the world needs you to be free. Go forth and make good stuff."
This is incredibly unselfish, uninstitutional, and very-very-very Kingdom-like. I love it. This is a beautiful example of dying to live, of actually living out the truth that it's not all about us and our group and our success. In a time when NPH is working hard to keep their own house afloat, I can hardly believe that they put up the seed cash to start something new with no direct benefit to themselves. Way to go NPH. You just earned some trust in my book.
2. The House Studio's first offering is a beautiful little book for small groups called The Kingdom Experiment. Between yesterday and this morning, I have already read it cover to cover. It's a group study-experiment on the beatitudes. The basic idea is that each beatitude gets a 1 page explanation. Then, the group talks about two well-formed questions. Next, each person in the group chooses one of eight experiments to try sometime during the week to actually live out that beatitude. When the group meets the next week, they talk about their experiments and repeat the cycle.
I bought a copy, and I hope that some of the small groups at our church will give it a try. Maybe it will even make it into a church wide sermon series and book study next year.
I'm pretty impressed with The House Studio's staff and their plans for publishing the conversations about renovation in the Church. I look forward to seeing where God leads them.

Impressed by NTS

I am here in Orlando, Florida at the 27th General Assembly for the Church of the Nazarene. Yesterday, I attended two workshops hosted by Nazarene Theological Seminary. N.T.S. recently won a US$ 500,000 grant to completely revision the entire seminary to become more thoroughly missional.

This impresses me for two reasons.

1) It takes great courage to revision EVERYTHING. Doing some curriculum review is normal for academic institutions, but NTS is putting everything on the table. They are saying, "We need to do everything differently. We aren't holding anything back. We need to be open to complete change and revision." This kind of innovation takes courage and deep seeded confidence. Such risk-taking is not common in large institutions, much less among academic or theological institutions (some of the most conservative folks out there).

2. This is exactly what N.T.S. needs to do. My good friend, David Brush, repeatedly says to me that the university/seminary as we now know it is a dying species. Centralized, entrenched, isolated education is quickly fading. According to Dave, the education of the future will be embedded in ministry and professional contexts. The academic side of lectures, evaluations, and dialog with the traditional centers of education will happen via the internet, short-term classes, professional mentors (acting as adjunct profs), and/or mobile professors (with the traditional academic qualifications). If Dave is right, and I think he probably is, then N.T.S. is right on track with this revisioning process. Also, they have the guts to take action internally on what many Christian leaders are seeing is happening in a handful of cutting edge churches who are faithfully responding to our radically changing culture. It was just beautiful to hear the leaders of NTS talk about what they are doing to make themselves more accessible to students (a.k.a. ministers) and more accountable (to themselves and to others). They are doing all they can to decentralize themselves, to get out of the way so that we can all learn together how to follow Christ more faithfully together. Beautiful!

So my props go out in a big way to the folks of N.T.S. This makes me glad to be Nazarene.

Adoption Update

We are running into a brick wall with our plans to adopt.
We had planned to adopt from Russia. We had even been assigned to a particular region in Russia.
However, we took a few steps back to pay off our school loans. (We've got the money now. We're just waiting for the exchange rate to go down a bit more. Yeahhh!!!)
In the meantime, Russia has tightened up their adoption rules. In addition to adding several hoops which adopting parents must jump through, it seems like we no longer qualify to adopt from Russia because we don't live in the country of our citizenship (USA).
In fact, this is a big problem for us for other countries as well (including Korea). Sarah and our adoption agencies are currently considering our options in a few other countries. We have a friend who is researching some things in Kazakhstan.
So, unfortunately, we've come to a wall. We are looking for some ways around this wall. Maybe there will be a way around. Maybe not. We might just have to wait, and we might have to wait a long time.

POST #300!: Did You Know?

Circles of Leadership

Over the past few months, I have been getting many questions about my new role as a full-time pastor. How do you like? What do you do with all your new time? How is the church going now? What difference does it make?
I usually answer that I love being full-time because now I can give my full attention to my calling and passions. Sometimes, I say that I'm sure glad I'm full-time now because I don't want to imagine doing this semester while being bivocational. Lately, I've been saying that one of the best things is that being full-time gives me the opportunity to move beyond maintenance issues (keeping things running) toward thinking into the future about how to make things better and how to do new things.
I am beginning to think that my primary job is to focus on developing circles of leadership. There are three basic circles of leadership under my care (with satellite circles working off of them): the pastoral staff, the Advisory Council, and the Circle of Leadership.
This semester we have made two changes as a pastoral team. We have reworked our staff meetings to once a month coffee with reports, sharing, and prayers for each other. We have also added tri-annual reviews. Every four months, we all conduct answer questions about whether we met our goals for that period, our goals for the next period, and other topics. I am hoping that these two changes will be the core of strengthen our leadership as a pastoral staff.
I am currently reading a book called Transforming Church Boards. It is built on the premise that board meetings tend to be tedious, tiring, and divisive, but that boards can change into life-giving, inspiring, and leadership-building communities. I am excited to think about how we can improve our Advisory Council, a key structure of our church's leadership.
The Circle of Leadership is a budding group. Right now we have only had a meeting of a few key leaders who are setting the structure for how to involve others. We envision this as a community of people who are either called to ministry or studying ministry, and we hope it will empower them as leaders who are learning, growing, and practicing. I am hoping that we can start meeting with a pilot group this fall. We have high hopes that this group will not only help the participants but also increase the quantity and quality of leadership within our church.

So as I said, lately, I'm feeling like the best thing I can do as a pastor is to invest in these circles of leadership. If I can help these circles flourish in the life-giving power of the Spirit, then our church and our world will never be the same!

Prayer - Review

I borrowed this book from our church's prayer team leader, Anne, during our Lenten series on prayer, but I've just now finished it. Granted, I've done quite a lot of reading on the side, personal reading and work related, but still I often felt like I would never finish.
Sometimes I loved the book, particularly the moving stories of people's struggles and experiences with prayer. But other times, I just trudged on. As Yancey often returned to the same themes again and again, I felt like the book could have been shortened by a third without losing much.
On the other hand, I love Yancey's approach to prayer. He is humble and honest about the difficulties of consistent and meaningful prayer. When his own experience is limited, he pulls on the writings and advices of others, and explains how he has tried to apply those teachings in his own life with mixed success.
This is a very good book on prayer. It's just a bit too long. Rating: jjjj.

Searching for God Knows What - Review

I picked up this book out of the Owens Building mini-library (a collection of books deposited by KNU profs). It's a fun read, pretty much continuing and sometimes rehashing Donald Miller's earlier name-making book Blue Like Jazz.
This 233 page book summarizes easily: The gospel is not a formula. It's a relationship. What God wants from us and promises to us cannot be defined in neat categories or lists of truths. The truth inherent in the gospel is necessarily embedded in the stories of the people who understand and experience the gospel (especially the first ones to do so).
Donald Miller is king of off-the-wall-yet-strangely-appropriate extended metaphors, and this book is packed with them. The earth is an overfilled lifeboat with the inhabitants taking sides and waging wars of value assessment like people on Survivor trying not to get kicked off the island. Original sin is like the fallout from Chernobyl. Getting an outside perspective is like sitting down with an alien to watch an NBA game. We're all in a big circus act trying to do something to win cheers from the crowd to prove our worth. The moment when we we see that our religious system isn't enough anymore is like the moment when we see the department store Santa taking a leak in the men's restroom.
Great images. Great stories. Same basic thoughts as Blue Like Jazz. Rating: jjjj.

Emerging Nazarenes "White Paper" to General Superintendants

I just read this "White Paper" to the Church of the Nazarene General Superintendents. It is written by a group of Emerging Nazarenes with the purpose of helping Nazarene leaders understand and appreciate the emerging church and those within the Church of the Nazarene who are also "emerging."
I highly recommend it for anyone interested in theology and church stuff.

House and Neruda

Two quick reviews.

1) House M.D. Season 4: We have enjoyed watching House over the past year or two. It is smart and funny, and each episode is like a Sherlock Holmes story. But the dysfunctionality of the characters is getting painfully predictable. Near the end of season 4, just when one of the characters was starting to show some positive change out of dysfunction, they killed off the catalyst. Argghh. The show seems to revolve around House's mantra that people don't change. That's getting a little frustrating, but not so much as to ruin the whole show. We tried to start season 5 last night, but couldn't get it to load.
Also, the writers did a surprisingly good job of incorporating the new set of characters into the story line.
However, here's a big downer. The show seemed to get a little more soap-opera-like. In one scene - in which House really jumped the shark for us - all of House's team gets paged to find their patient passed out in a hallway. It's so melodramatic. If the nurses saw that the patient had fallen and took the time to page House's team, why didn't they attend to the patient instead of waiting for Houses team to come running from various ends of the hospital???
Over all rating: jjj.
(If anyone has recomendations for good TV shows, Sarah and I are in the market for a new series. Korean shows are also welcome.)

2) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. (Thanks to my friend Sarah Gu for this loaner.) This is a short little book of love poems packed with images from nature. I'm not sure if they are all about the same woman or not, but poor Pablo seems to have his heart broken again and again. They are alternatingly beautifully sensual and oddly confusing. Sometimes I couldn't quite tell what he was talking about - possibly because they are translated from Spanish. Neruda is Chilean and won a Nobel Prize for his writings in 1971. Even though some of the poetry soared and raced, the confusing parts take it back to a basic rating of: jjj.
(I enjoyed reading poetry for a change, so if anyone has a good book of poetry, I'd be happy to make your shelf lighter for a month or so.)

Two Great Speeches

Yesterday and today, I read two great speeches by Barack Obama.
The first was given at Notre Dame amid a great flurry of conflict and protest regarding abortion.
The second was given in Cairo amid great interest in what Obama would say to the Muslim world.
Both are interesting and inspiring calls to multicultural community and common commitment to improve our world together. Please take the time to read them.

God Is an Atheist

-- This sermon is part of the ONE PRAYER SERIES. --

(( Before the sermon, we will watch this video.))


I am an atheist. Don't look so shocked! You are an atheist, too. So is God. We are all atheists.
If you don't believe in God, you are an atheist. If you do believe in God, you are atheist.
Huh?

The early Christians were called atheists because they rejected the gods of Rome. They had the audacity to say that Rome's long-honored gods were false and that there was only one true God. So people called them atheists – people who don't believe in the gods.
Good Christians are still atheists in this sense today. Stan Martin was a professor here several years ago. He was fond of saying, “So you're an atheist … OK, tell me about the God you don't believe in. I probably don't believe in him either.” ...

To continue reading this sermon, CLICK HERE.


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Acts 2 - The Holy Spirit Is PINK (?)

As I thought about Pentecost this year, I couldn't help thinking of the song by Pink, “I'm coming up, so you better get this party started.” This might be a stretch, but I wonder if Pink is a metaphor of the Holy Spirit? Listen to some of the words:

I'm comin' up so you better get this party started
I'm comin' up so you better get this party started
Get this party started on a Saturday night
Everybody's waiting for me to arrive
Sendin' out the message to all of my friends ...

Last week, Yoni read Jesus' words: “Do not leave Jerusalem until the Father sends you the gift he promised … you will receive power when the the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere ...” (Acts 1:4, 8).

Making my connection as I enter the room
Everybody's chilling as I set up the groove
Pumpin' up the volume with this brand new beat
Everybody's dancing and they're dancing for me
I'm your operator, you can call anytime
I'll be your connection to the party line

I'm comin' up so you better get this party started
I'm comin' up so you better get this party started

“Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting. Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit …” and people from all around town “heard the loud noise” and “came running” (Acts 2:2-6).

Pentecost was God's coming out party. ...

To continue reading this post, click here.

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56 Foreigners Quarantined for Swine Flu

Amazing, but true.
50 some odd teachers were at a week long training session, on their first week in Korea. After the training, everyone dispersed to their hakwons and new apartments all around Korea.
Then, uh oh ... big uh oh ... one of the weigooks (foreigners) was diagnosed with swine flu, for real!
Every last person in the training session was rounded up in ambulances by masked medical personal, and they were returned to the same hotel that hosted the training session. It was something like the movie Blindness without the blindness and total anarchy.
Actually, it was a perfect brew for culture shock for everyone concerned, as the Korean leaders barked stringent orders and the foreigners more or less ignored them at will. Not staying in rooms, going out onto the balconies, smuggling in contraban like alcohol and cigarettes, defying direct orders, holding sit-ins for internet service, etc.
There is a guy who is blogging about the whole ordeal. Yes, as of today, it is still ongoing. He is actually a good writer and sometimes I found myself laughing out loud at the hilarious absurdities involved in this difficult situation. It's a good read. Check it out. And yes, this is an actual picture of the swine-flu-blogging quarantine-ee, though he doesn't actually have it ... so far.

Summer Goals

All of our pastoral team is setting goals 3 times a year. Here are my goals for this summer (May to August).

1. Make sure everything is ready while I am gone, and especially while Matt and I are both gone.

2. Help the Advisory Council teams accomplish their final goals for the church year.

3. Read the book, Transforming Church Boards, and make plans to improve our Advisory Council Meetings.

4. Guide the preparations for our Annual Meeting: budget finalization, choosing our long-term partnership, nominations, etc.

5. Help the Circle of Leadership create enough of a foundation to start a pilot program at the beginning of the fall semester.

(I am not going to finish my sermons a week in advance over the summer, but I hope to start this in the fall.)

I think the most important thing I can do this summer is to help all of our AC teams finish the year with a sense of accomplishment and value (#2). We need for every one of our teams to be able to look back on the year and say, “We did something important. We made a difference. I am glad I helped with this. We can do it again.”

Learning Pony Tails

This semester, it's my job to take Emma to school three or four days a week. In Korean culture, it is crucial for girls to have some kind of decoration in their hair. It is a sign of love and care from the parents. Without it the child seems neglected and uncared for. (This is very similar to African-American culture.)
In the past, I've just helped Emma put in a headband. This is the bare minimum in hair accessories, but it is also easier. A few times, I ventured into hair clips, but I often felt frustrated and gave up.
Something changed last week. Emma asked me to put her hair in a pony tail. I told her that she would have to do that on days when Mommy could fix her hair, but she persisted. I decided to give it a try.
Surprisingly it worked OK. With a few tutorials from Sarah (use a comb not a brush, etc.), I'm starting to get the hang of it. On the elevator today, though, I noticed that her pony tail was pointing a little to the left.
Adventures in being a father.

"Lawrence of Arabia" - Greatest Movie #7

Last weekend, we watched Lawrence of Arabia, the AFI #7 Greatest Movie of All Time. I remember watching parts of it as a child, but I couldn't remember the overall story. It was a little awkward to watch it on YouTube because it was in 26 parts, but we still enjoyed it.
The basic storyline (which is true) is that tribal Arabs were revolting against their Turkish rulers during World War 1, and the British Army decided to support their revolt as a strategy to weaken Turkey (a German ally). Lawrence enters the midst of this as a British officer and expert on Arab culture. His intent is to help the Arabs earn total independence as a unified state. To accomplish this end, he has to do some significant battle strategizing and help the disparate Arab tribes work together as a team. Both of these are huge challenges since the tribes are out-gunned and hostile against each other.
In the process, Lawrence accomplishes his most immediate goals - at least in the short term. But he does so at significant personal cost. He seems to sacrifice his soul to take on the role of a messiah figure.
Lawrence of Arabia is a poignant picture of the struggles of multiculturalism and visionary leadership. I can't give it the full 5J's because it's a little weird at times, and possibly because I read the whole story on Wikipedia's site. All in all, though, it's a good move: jjjj.

Acts 10 - Dangerous

I grew up in Texas, and Texans love Country Music. I grew up singing songs by Garth Brooks, songs like:

I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I'll be okay
I'm not big on social graces
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I've got friends in low places

One of Garth Brooks' less famous songs is, “Unanswered Prayers.” The song is in a story form. He meets an ex-girlfriend at a football game, and he remembers how he prayed – how he begged – God to give him this one girl. Then, he looks over at his wife and thanks God for NOT answering that prayer. “Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers,” he sings.

I've been thinking this week that some of our prayers are pretty dangerous.

God, make me patient. Be careful what you pray for, right?!

God, make me like Jesus. – Uh, dangerous? Hello! He died on a cross!

God, help me to trust you. Remember what happened when Peter trusted Jesus. He ended up walking on a stormy sea.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. - Everyone who sins against us? No matter what the sin?

God, lead us. Show us your will, and help us to follow. - Yeah, that will get you into trouble every time.

What about this one? We pray this one every week here. May God make us a loving community that changes our world. What if God really starts answering this prayer? ...

To continue reading this sermon, click here.

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Imposing a Curfew

As part of our effort to find a healthy rhythm, Sarah and I are imposing a curfew/lights out policy on ourselves. It sounds kind of silly, but we are tired of being tired. So our goal is now to have the lights out at 10:30 on week nights.
We are hoping that this will help us to get enough sleep so that we can do the other stuff in our day w/o feeling tired all the time. We have both found that it's really hard to find the motivation to exercise or to pray if we are tired. If I'm tired, I just fall asleep when I sit still for devotions.
This new lights out policy means that we often can't watch the TV show we planned to watch or don't read together as planned. We can pretty much just do one thing after we put Emma to bed, and then we have to go to bed ourselves.
I don't know if this means we are getting old or just facing reality - or both.

Finding my Rhythm

Well, as a white boy growing up in the suburbs, I never had any real rhythm, not musically anyway. I regularly step on Sarah's feet and/or lose the count when we dance.
But I did have some rhythm as a pastor. I had a schedule and a plan that worked for me.
Now, however, with more freedom and less office time (since I'm sharing with Sarah), I'm having a hard time finding a good rhythm. Also, I have to take Emma to school four mornings a week, so I can't go into work early.
I'm hoping to try something new - one night a week working late in the office, but we'll see how that materializes. For anyone out there who prays, occassionally even for me, I'd appreciate some prayers up to the Big One that he'll help me figure out a good working schedule that will help me take care of our church and my family (and myself along the way).

Review Bankruptcy

OK, so I've decided that I'm too far behind to catch up on all the reviews that I've missed. I'm declaring "review bankruptcy" and starting over. From this point forward, I'll try to write a short little review on all the books I read.
This week, I read John Grisham's The Partner. I can only handle a few Grisham books a year because I usually end up staying up half the night when I get to the middle of the book because I don't want to quit reading. I did that on Tuesday night of this week. I probably read 200 pages in one night.
The over-all outline of his stories are generally predictable, but he is a master of suspense along the way. His characters get into such difficult circumstances, and I get so attached to the protagonists, that I desperately want to see how the conflict resolves, so I keep reading and reading.
The Partner was a very fun read, but it wasn't particularly profound. It was a good, fun novel, but not especially great in terms of literature. I'll give it 4js: jjjj.