This is what my life feels like right now. My staff team is officially launching the ministry in Portland right now and I’m in Boise waiting for our son to be born. Not the way I planned it.

Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control. Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.

Rework – Fried and Hansonn

Things just don’t go as planned do they? Don’t get me wrong, there is great value in planning and thinking about the future. But we must build into our plans enough margin to seize opportunities and improvise if needed. And sometime we need to stop having meetings and start working on today.

Do you have tendency to overplan? I do. How do you balance necessary planning with being nimble enough to take advantage of God opportunities?

Part of my job as Operations Director of the ministry in Portland, Oregon is building the necessary manpower and team to move us toward our vision of every student having a chance to hear about Christ. Below is simple tool that I just revamped that I like to talk through with graduating students and potential volunteers.

I wanted something that was simple, clear, visionary and yet gave specific enough details that a potential staff member could see themselves working here.

If they don’t live here I also show them this video…dispelling the myth that it’s miserable to live here.

We’re a little different cause we’re starting from scratch, but do you have any go to recruiting methods or tools?

Pictures are courtesy of Portlandground

Just a few items of note from the interwebs last week.

• Social Networking icon Chris Brogan writes about his interactions with Lifechurch.tv. Authentic insight from a new perspective on internet church.
• Campus Crusade staff member Tim Casteel wrote a great post about being able to communicate better including a short and powerful clip from Seth Godin on why blogging helps. Can’t tell you how much this post resonates with me, especially as we launch partnerships and mobalize volunteers. The ability to communicate what I do is so critical.

I was looking back at a couple of video’s while brainstorming for the future of the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry in Portland and this one jumped out. Feel free to use it for ideas. I helped make it a few years back while I was on staff at Montana State University. I am so blessed to see lives changed and more than ever I’m committed to reaching students for Christ.

I’ve been ranting on sharing the wealth of our ministry expertise with each other for a while now. Having the technical ability plus the belief that sharing what we’re doing with other campus ministers could be incredibly helpful to seeing the Great Commission fulfilled is a key growth step for Campus Crusade for Christ. I think we’re headed that direction. Here is what Ken Cochrum, one of our national leaders, had to say about it.

In life there are important things and there are urgent things.

I’ve heard that some people struggle with letting the urgent take over their lives.  I can’t believe you weak people struggle with that! If you were like me…a rock of intentionality and eye-of-the-tiger discipline, you would never deal with that.

One of the tips in Scott Belsky’s book Making Ideas Happen is to create two to-do lists. One for the urgent items and another for important ones.

Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete agains the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve different periods of time to focus on each.

For me it’s a matter of stewardship of my time.  I’m gonna try this tip and rearrange my process of planning and see how it goes. Let me know if it works for you.

Photo courtesy of Noca

100 x 0 = 0

50 x 2 = 100

If the impact of our ideas is, in fact largely determined by our ability to stay organized, then we would observe that those with tons of creativity but little to no organization yield, on average, nothing.

- Scott Belsky – Making Ideas Happen

I have an idea.

If you are on staff with CCC, you might remember the 250 book from a while ago. It was a book that compiled 250 of the best outreach ideas from CCC campus ministries around the nation

I actually used it for inspiration a bunch of times….back in the day.

So here’s my idea. What if we had an online version? What if we had a way for staff in the campus ministry to upload their best evangelism outreach ideas on to one specific site. And let’s get crazy, what if we had the ability to leave comments and rate the ideas like we do on Amazon.com? Think about the engagement you could have. Think about the filtering of bad ideas you could have. You could have categories like 1-1 evangelism or large group outreach. I think it might just work.

As far as I know there is nothing like this. But how cool would it be if I could see what the Boston Metro team is doing, borrow an idea and and tweak it to fit my context. It could spur on new ideas in your context and move us forward quicker.

Sharing is good right?

Does this idea have value? Any problems with it? How could I make this happen?

Photo courtesy of Simon Gurr

Do we use our non-profit status to settle for less than excellence in what we do?

Last weekend I was sitting through ten hours of adoption class.  Saturday the instructor, bless her heart, was filling in for someone on vacation and winging it through a powerpoint presentation. It was rough. It was really rough. At one point while fiddling with the computer she made a joke under her breath about being a not-for-profit organization.

Everyone laughed. Including me.

But that got me thinking. The organization I work for is a non-profit organization. I don’t have all the resources I want. Like an old foundation on a house the disease of settling creeps in.

Business as usual creeps in. Settling for mediocre creeps in because we have an excuse.

I don’t want to lead or follow Christ with that perspective. I don’t want to settle.  I don’t want to use my position as full-time self-funded missionary as an excuse to settle for mediocre. I hope you don’t either.

What keeps you for settling for the status-quo?

Photo courtesy of Voxphoto

If you missed it, the CCC Blogference is off an running. It runs from today till thursday, but I have a feeling the conversations will continue long after. The collaboration across borders, ministries and ministry experience is amazing and it’s only been a few hours. Even Judy Douglass (wife of CCC president) has commented.

Highlight for me so far. Opportunity for people to highlight new evangelistic tools. Discussion on using social media socially and tithing your online time.

It’s so good! My mind is spinning with ideas.