Tuesday is for movement coaching

January 24, 2012 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

Some days the task list can wait. Some days I just need to be around the energy of students who are trusting the Lord for something beyond themselves.

Since Tuesday is our movement coaching/launching day, I had the chance to make the trek up to Washington State University – Vancouver to visit with a few of our student leaders today. I hadn’t been up there since last term and I had no idea what to expect.  WSU-V is on the edge of our scope and I’ve been coaching them via email/phone and occasional visit. It’s all student run with limited interaction with us. We resource and do our best to put fuel on the fire.

I could have said no to this trip. I have a ton of other tasks, phone calls and emails I could have worked on…but I drove the 40 minutes in the pouring rain in I-5 traffic to get some face-time with these students.

I met up with some “Coug Cru” students at a promotional table and I immediately began to get a taste of the flavor of things by asking a new girl who was helping out how she got involved. She responded by saying, “I met Phil and they seemed to talk about outreach a lot and that’s something I care about so I got involved. Also, I love that they pray a lot!”

I think that’s a good sign.

After we’re done with the promo table I sit down with two student leaders and begin to ask questions. The responses are about as ideal as you can imagine in campus ministry. They want to see believers connected in community…a community that is involved in the mission of seeing their campus reached for Christ. They want their friends to know Jesus. They want to courageous with the gospel.

Woah, woah, woah…settle down people. We’re just starting another Christian club here. :)

I walked away from our brief time in the bone chilling rain reflecting on the fact that a year ago there was no one on campus with the intention of making Christ known and now the environment of the campus is changing because some students started praying. Praise the Lord.

 

 

 

3 Mac keyboard shortcuts for newbies

January 19, 2012 in Technology with 4 Comments

Here’s 3 keyboard shortcuts (for a Mac) that I get asked about consistently. Learn to love the command key! Hit these combination of keys to make your life easier.

  • Hit Command +, or Command – to increase or decrease font size.
  • Hold Shift, command, 4 to bring up the cross-hairs for you to highlight (click and drag) an area to take a screenshot. It automatically saves to your desktop.
  • Hit Command, spacebar to bring up the Spotlight feature to search for an app, document or whatever

I know you experts out there have these all dialed in, but what other shortcuts do you get asked about on a weekly basis? (I just used command-i to italicize)

 

 

Evangelism – its both a process and an event

January 17, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

I’ve been wrestling with the messiness of relational (some call it friendship) evangelism combined with verbal proclamation and how to teach it to others. We’re seeing lots of spiritual conversations, but not a ton of those are resulting in bringing people to a point of decision. Some of that is the environment we’re in, but some of that is our lack of effectiveness. Each spiritual conversation we have is so varied that there’s no cut and dry method.  I landed on this phrase I picked up from Cru Press Green that might help us get traction…

Evangelism is both a process and an event.

I stole this paragraph from a CPG article that summarizes this statement well. Launching from a place of understanding that everyone is somewhere on the spiritual journey pictured below…

it is key to realize that moving people along that line is both a process and an event, we can continue to reach out to a person in many different ways and forms of witness – e.g., our testimony, a book or podcast, serving them in some way, hanging out, playing sports together, inviting them to be around other Christians at a Cru meeting or social event, or coming along to church. But since sharing the Gospel is also the event of them hearing the Gospel, there will need to be a time, or perhaps many times, when someone verbally shares the Gospel with that person. For some non-believers, we will be involved in both the process and the event, while for others we may only be in on the event, and others will be in on the longer process. Whatever our role is, we walk in the Spirit and let God use us in His overall plan in other people’s lives.

What I really like is that the article points out that sharing the Gospel includes people hearing the Gospel…with words, but doesn’t discount the effort we make to serve, invite and spend time with people. Maybe I’ll put it like this – verbal proclamation of Jesus is the backbone of evangelism that is surrounded by the mission to care for, love and serve those in our sphere of influence.

How do you train students in the reality that evangelism is both a process and an event?

My evangelism convictions (a work in progress)

January 15, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

I’ve been on this journey of rethinking evangelism over the last year. Moving to Portland will do that to you I guess. I’ve done my best trying to integrate biblical principles in these too. These are the convictions that I’ve arrived at so far…

  1. I believe everyone is on some sort of spiritual journey.
  2.  I believe that God is able to transform lives.
  3.  I believe I’m called to take the initiative to bring Jesus to those that don’t know him (leaving the 99 to go to after the 1).
  4.  I’m called to have a posture of incarnation – being present with those around me, listening with respect, engaging, serving, loving.
  5. There will be opposition – those that are angry, those that don’t respond, those that are neutral.
  6.  I get to be an ambassador for Christ and help people come to a point of decision. “Do you want to respond to Jesus right now?”
  7.  I want to be known for talking about Jesus – a natural outflow

Am I missing anything? Are any of these challenging to you?

Cru Conference – Gospel in Action

January 13, 2012 in Innovation with 3 Comments

Train a bunch of students in evangelism principles that will last a lifetime? Mobalize hundreds of students to have quality evangelism experience in a crazy city like Portland? That’s not daunting at all.

Our team was tasked with creating the evangelism training and outreach (Gospel in Action) for the annual Cru Conference this year. All logistics aside it was a dream come true to mobilize 600 people to go share their faith in Portland. That doesn’t happen everyday here. Kicking a dent in the kingdom of darkness. Here’s where we landed…

Pre-conference we asked students and staff to bring socks and stocking caps to benefit the Portland Rescue Mission (who we love) as a way to bless the city. The response to this was really good.

Day 1 training included a good look at the reality of our context (city, portland, individualistic people) that hopefully helped students have compassion that provoked action. It also included a general overview of the explorer role from Cojourners with the tools of asking questions and listening being the key take aways. Students then spent some time in the city, riding our amazing public transportation, exploring peoples stories and trying to identify where people were at in their spiritual journey.

Day 2 training was the guide role of Cojourners.  We walked them through how God calls us to be competant in proclaiming the message of Christ, dependent on him and and not-weird. :) Sidenote* I’m starting to believe whole heartedly that this is Cru’s niche in the evangelical world. We then walked them through how to use a tool we call the Knowing God Personally booklet that helps guide people to Christ. The outreach that day was also in various parts of the city where students were tasked with exploring where people were at spiritually and seeing if God opened doors to use them as a guide.

Day 3 was a workshop on how to practically connect major themes in life (guilt, shame, joy, hurt, forgiveness, etc.) to the gospel. Hopefully students realized that just about anything can be used to launch into deeper conversation about Jesus. At the end of the time we also trained them to use a “sometime” question. There are lot’s of variations, but they all sound something like this…”Sometime would you like to talk more about this?” We had students pull out there phones and take 10 minutes to text or facebook their friends back home to set up appointments for the first week back on campus. One kid texted 20 guys and got 18 positive responses…he’s gonna be busy this week.

There are a few things we’d probably change, but in the end the Lord showed up, students were bold and real in our city and people lives were changed.

Should we have done anything different?

 

Links of the week!

January 11, 2012 in Leadership with 0 Comments

Thanks for stopping by. These are a few articles that caught my attention and challenged my thinking last week. So thankful for a chance to be influenced by great men via the interwebs.

Enjoy some reading this week!

Portland Nights

December 2, 2011 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

I was working on prepping for mobilizing 600 college students to minister to the city of Portland over Christmas break and found this video of Portland. It sets the stage well I think. For your enjoyment…

Welcome to the 2011 Missional Team Leaders Conference

November 14, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership with 1 Comment

I made this a few days ago for the Missional Team Leaders Conference I was just at. I hope you appreciate it.  :)

 

Stop suffering at the mercy of urgent tasks.

November 7, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership with 0 Comments

My last post reminded me of the chapter in Scott Belsky’s book Making Ideas Happen on Prioritization. Scott answers the question, “How can you maintain long-term objectives rather than suffer at the mercy of urgent tasks? It is call prioritization.”

Here’s some tips to consider that are incredibly applicable to college ministry…especially in the operations context that I live in.

Keep two lists: I wrote about this a while back here. Two lists, one for urgent items and another for important ones. Do not let the urgent items compete against the important ones on the same list….the urgent will always win.

Make a daily “focus area.” Somehow designate up to five tasks in your to-do list that correspond to a priority project. Regardless of whatever crops up that day, the focus area must be cleared before bed.

Don’t dwell. Scott says that wen urgent matter arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. Do not dwell on possible negative outcomes. Break urgent items down into action steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy to the important as soon as the action steps are completes.

Don’t hoard urgent items. Even if you delegate well you may find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. The project your working on is important to you and you want to solve things yourself. “When you are in a position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items.” Scott says. The cost of not doing this is that our energy gets shifted away from the long term goals.

Create windows of nonstimulation. Window of time dedicated to uninterrupted project focus. Preserve blocks of time during your days as precious opportunities to make progress on important items with little risk of urgent matters popping up.

All of this requires discipline. Which I’m still working on.

3 things to help me focus when everything seems important.

November 5, 2011 in Leadership with 4 Comments

I wrestle with the fact that in my line of work there is always more to do. So many things I could do combined with a desire to do them well is a weight that never seems to be lifted. As I complete 1 task, 2 more tasks are added to the list.

If I’m going to thrive in the job of campus ministry and help my team move toward our vision of seeing the campuses of Portland transformed I have to figure out how to focus on the right things. The question I keep coming back to is how do I focus, when it seems like everything is important? Unfortunately a big audacious vision doesn’t help this problem either.

Here’s a couple things that I think could help free me up to focus on the things that only I can do. I just  need some discipline to put them into practice.

  • Make a stop doing list. Identify the things that I’m doing that do not fuel the vision of our team long term and stop doing them. Identify the things that won’t matter in a week or month and stop doing them.
  • Block out 2 hour “think times” at least once a week. This allows me to lift my head above the urgent, focus on the big picture and plan according without distraction. I must put these in the calendar and not fill them with meetings.
  • Be ok with not completing every little task. Completing tasks is great but I often find more satisfaction in accomplishing the wrong tasks than I should.

What strategies do you employ to hep bring focus to your job?

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