I loved this Superbowl ad. Great marketing. Great branding. Way to go Google.
“How do you come up with all the stuff that you blog about?”
This was the question proposed to Seth Godin on a recent Catalyst podcast. If you read his blog you know the insight and innovation in his posts are far reaching and challenging. His answer was this; write 10 ideas down every day. Get good at deleting the bad ones…but don’t delete them to soon. You will have 1 idea each day that will be a world changer.
What if we did that everyday in the context of Gospel ministry and Campus Crusade for Christ? We’d get a lot of bad ideas but maybe we’d get some world changing ideas that would help fulfill the great commission.
Photo courtesy of James Nash
Google maps is changing a lot of things. Including looking for a house to rent or buy. By allowing developers to mash up information with Google maps, sites like Hotpads.com have been developed. Hotpads.com is my new best friend as we look for a house to rent in Portland, Oregon. I can see all the Craigslist rental properties and their geographic location. I haven’t even talked about how helpful Google street view is, i.e, the house may be nice, but it’s right next door to Walmart! Geography is our friend right?
You can see a recent post I did on the google map I’m creating for the new Portland Metro Campus Crusade for Christ team too. Could Google maps be helpful for you? How?
Another interesting TED talk. This one is only 2 minutes. It challenges me to think critically and be open to new ideas.
Recently I’ve started using twitter search to listen in on what the twittersphere is saying about Campus Crusade (I know…I’m a nerd). A while back I saw this post from a guy working at the hotel in Denver that served one of our regional winter conferences…
I was about to engage in a twitter conversation with @stephenwebb when I happened to notice that one of my regional directors already had! @mattmikalatos responded to @stephenwebb and wrote this…
I watched their conversation unfold online as Matt offered his help to right the situation…even going so far as to offer his phone number. I don’t know exactly what took place beyond the twitter conversation, but I do know that this was @stephenwebb’s post a day later…
I discovered Picnik about a month ago and thought I’d pass along the info. It’s simple and quick online photo editing software. I use it primarily to re-size pictures for uploading purposes, but you can do other simple stuff too. It can grab your photos from your computer just about any online storage location (flicr, facebook, picasa, etc.) Bonus: there is no registration required!
Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.
This is the third post from the ‘Cowtown to Urban Hipster’ series chronicling our transition from small college town campus ministry to large metro area with multiple campuses and 100k students.
Jeremiah 29:4- 7 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
Our ministry on the campuses in Portland is just part of what God is doing in the city. But beyond our occupation, the question remains of how are we going to live our lives. How are we going to seek the “peace of the city” (shalom)? How do we enact Jeremiah 29 as followers of Christ in full-time ministry in a urban setting? What does this mean for where we live, where we send our kids to school, and how we interact with people and how we seek to bless the city? Will we put ourselves in position to reflect Christ to a lost and broken world?
All these questions are running through my mind at warp speed as we’re in Portland this month trying to figure out where we’d like to live in the area. Part of me longs for safety and comfort. Which, in my mind, somehow translates to suburbs, although I don’t believe this is necessarily true. Part of me wants to live in a vibrant, challenging, artistic, pulsating part of the city, which sounds a little risky and has it’s challenges to our family life (cost of living, parking, crime, finding a decent school, etc.). Sidenote: Please don’t take this as a bash against you if you live in the suburbs. It’s more about principles than specific location.
Bottomline, wherever I live, I don’t want to use the city and count it’s hassles as a necessary evil. I want to live in a way that serves the city. I want to bless the city and make it better. This means knowing my neighbors and serving the school my daughter is at. It means not ignoring those less fortunate than me and it means learning from those that I share space with.
It means seeing the beauty of God’s creation in the souls around me.
If you were in my shoes, how would you decide where to live in the city as you seek to make Christ known to the 100K students in the area?
Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Don’t miss the comments.
Photo courtesy of rxb
If RSS still doesn’t make sense here’s a quick tutorial that might help. I highly recommend partaking in some RSS. It’ll save you some time with all the blogs that you want to read.
We’re experimenting with using a Wordpress blog-style website for the Portland Metro Campus Crusade for Christ ministry. Here’s me giving you a behind the scene’s look at it why it might work for you to. I don’t claim to be a website tech guy by any means, but this will give the lowdown on why we’re using it.
This is the second post from the ‘Cowtown to Urban Hipster’ series chronicling our transition from small college town campus ministry to large metro area with multiple campuses and 100k students. You can read #1 here. (Don’t miss the great discussion in the comments).
Evangelical Christians used to run from cities, or at least be midly disgusted at what takes place in them. That’s why all the states with big cities were blue states right? Well, except for Texas. Times are changing. The body of Christ is catching on…finally. As of right now more than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban centers and we’re catching on that cities are vital to seeing Christ made known on this planet.
Thus began my discovery of the world’s cities, the incredible brokenness within them and the multitude of college students needing Christ that make their home in the city. Here a few snippets of my life that have given me a heart for the city, perhaps they’ll challenge your thinking.
A couple of years ago I helped lead some students on a spring break trip to Mexico City. At the time it was the 2nd largest city in the world with over 1 million college students! I ate a lot of tacos and began to experience the vast multitudes of those that didn’t know Christ and might not ever hear. I followed that up with a trip to New York City for Jody’s 30th birthday where we visited Tim Keller’s church and got a glimpse of what the body of Christ was doing in the most hip, trendy city on the planet. I discovered that Jesus Christ was relevant there too.
I began to listen to people talk about cities. I would catch myself looking at photo’s of cities. I heard other staff members talk about the great cities of the world, Chicago, L.A., New York, Istanbul, Moscow (Russia..not Idaho 
).
Reading the last chapter in Jonah pushed me over the edge. You might remember it. Jonah has been sent to Nineveh (”that great city”) to tell the people to turn back to God. In the last chapter he’s sitting outside the city waiting for God’s judgment to rain down on the city. (We’ve never had thoughts like that right?) Problem was, nothing happened. God chose to demonstrate his lavish grace. At that point Jonah get’s mad at God because he caused the plant to die that was providing shade for him. God get’s the last word and Jonah get’s a sharp rebuke for caring more about a plant than the souls of the people of Nineveh.
At that time in my life the needs, creativity, brokenness, diversity and beauty of the city had captured my heart. God had/has led us to be a part of a city and to work to make him known in the city.
We’re still figuring all this out and learning to love the city, but if I could summarize my perspective now it would be something like these words I heard a while back. “God loves people more than plants. There are more people than plants in the city. God loves the city more than the wilderness.”
Is Christ relevant in the city? Is the city a place Campus Crusade (and other ministries) should be? What captures your heart and what makes you cringe about the city?
Photo courtesy of airicsson