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Think before you hit enter

September 7, 2011 in Leadership, Technology with 0 Comments

I blew it.

I forgot to think before hitting enter. I needed to take a breath and think and pray.

Recently I wrote a status update on Facebook after I had just hung up the phone from a hard conversation.  I shouldn’t have. I was the most frustrated I’ve been in a long time. I should have talked to the Lord about it instead of seeking affirmation from the world…seeking affirmation that I was right.

I’m sorry.

Please hear me, I’m incredibly thankful for this person and their investment in Jody and I and the ministry. I’ve been so blessed by their generosity and the handful of times I’ve spent face to face with them. They have incredibly hearts to serve the Lord and their community. I also believe they are making what they think is the best decision, so for that I applaud them for sticking to their convictions. I wish them all the best as they continue to follow Christ wherever it might take them.

All that to say, the conversation was hard and I felt like I was on the defensive. But I have no rights. I have no rights to be heard or to seek affirmation. I’m a slave to Jesus Christ. I follow him wherever he might lead me. I don’t deserve anything. He stood in my place and took the pain I deserve. For that, I’m grateful.

I tell people this all the time….think before you hit enter. Lessoned re-learned.

Do you need a Fed Ex day?

September 2, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership with 3 Comments

Do you need innovation? Do you need to make some space for your team to dream? Try a Fed-Ex day!

The only rule of Fed-Ex day is that you have to deliver over night on a new ministry tool, idea, solved problem or anything else remotely tied to our organization. We just wrapped up the presentations of the Portland Metro staff team Fed Ex day. Here are the idea that were presented!

  • A new evangelistic tool that starts with the common Portland belief about man being inherently good.
  • A realistic look at the possibility of a Portlandia Summer Project.
  • A better way of managing our volunteers.
  • New ways to integrate International students into our day to day ministry
  • Tweaking our Regional Stint/Intern kickoff weekend to launch them into support raising better.
  • Launching a Portland spring break trip in conjuction with GAiN. (This will probably happen as a result of this time!)

The brain power and creativity on display amongst our staff team was awesome. It was fun to dream and allow for those dreams to be worked on. Plus the presentations were fun (think crazy fire transitions between Keynote slides) and developmental for our staff.

Do you do anything like this on your team?

How we do ministry – 1 page

August 25, 2011 in Leadership with 2 Comments

Want to know how we do ministry in Portland…here’ you go.

A while back Tim Casteel inspired me to do a one page document (albeit a long one page)  on how we do ministry with his version in Arkansas. I stayed up late one night and got busy on ours. Many thanks to Tim for allowing me to plagiarize some parts. :)

Portland Metro – How We Do Ministry Fall 2011 – One Page

Our Audience

  • 100 thousand students of Portland Metro area.
  • City savvy, socially liberal and independent activists
  • Post-Christian free thinkers
  • Majority are local to Portland

 Everything we teach should be gospel infused and Christ-centered – (discipleship, Cru Talks, Life Groups)

  •  Religion has baggage in Portland, thus a need display Christ and the grace that is found in him in all that we communicate.
  • The Gospel is that “I am far worse off than I ever imagined, but far more loved than I ever dreamed.”
  • Our desire is not to create moralistic doers, but lifetime lovers of Him.

Our vision is “That everyone would know someone who passionately follows Christ”

  •  Everyone – This is our Scope – Every student (and faculty) on the campuses of Portland
  •  Would Know – The gospel travels along the road of relationships (when we say “evangelism” we want students to think “share Christ with my friend, neighbor, etc.” not “share with random dude on the Park Blocks”. We talk about Jesus every chance we get while building trust through relationships.
  • Someone – This is our means of reaching scope. Spiritual multiplication. Mobilizing college students to reach college students within their spheres of influence. Students empowering other students to the same.
  • Who passionately follows Jesus – This is what we desire of students involved in our ministry. Staff and students infused and motivated to do ministry because of the work of the Christ in their lives. People who are compelled to share the love of Christ because the Spirit is at work in them.

Our mission – To help students know Christ, grow in their understanding of how to walk with him, go into their sphere of influence now and for a lifetime proclaiming the message of Christ.

Staff’s Job

  •  Walk with Jesus – Spirit filled life is key
  • Talk about Jesus wherever you go (this includes a campus target area for staff)
  • Teach the right people how to do the first two. (develop spiritual multipliers)

We reach Freshmen

  • Reaching freshmen is a critical ingredient to seeing movements built over time
  •  We target specific areas of freshmen strategically (personal evangelism, outreaches)

Life groups are the backbone of spiritual movements

  • Significant life change happens in small groups as students live life with the roof off and the walls down.
  • Life groups will be the backbone of developing spiritual multipliers

Holding ministry focus and scope in tension

  •  We value the health of our team – we are careful about commitments
  • We long to bring Jesus to the edges of our scope – we are full of faith and open to the Spirits leading
  • Staff focus downtown while mobilizing leaders/partnerships on various catalytic campuses one day a week.

We partner with others

  • The fulfillment of the great commission in Portland will not be the result of one organization
  • We value relationships with kingdom builders before opportunity
  • We desire to partner with volunteers, churches, other organizations to see the campus reached and to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the city.

We have the world in view – we are a sending pipeline to the world

  • We cultivate a heart for the world in our staff and students.
  • We passionately send staff and students to minister around the globe
  • Everything we do should be sustainable in producing life-long laborers

 

8 ways to tell you’re entitled

August 12, 2011 in Leadership, Uncategorized with 3 Comments

Entitlement is a team, ministry and faith killer. Have any of these thought reared their ugly head in your life?

  • I deserve a day off
  • I deserve a better job/ministry/summer assignment
  • I’ve worked to hard to do THAT job
  • I need (i.e. deserve) to have a day of television watching/alone time/golf/whatever
  • I deserve the American dream house
  • I’m not getting enough recognition for all my effort
  • I’m entitled to peace and quiet
  • I deserve a good night sleep every night

How do you battle entitlement creeping into your life?

 

Failure and other links

August 9, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership, Technology with 0 Comments

Here’s what I’ve been paying attention to and thinking about this week.

9 Reason why Failure is not Fatal – From the 99% blog that I love! I haven’t watched all the videos yet but they look great.

The Five Ministry Fronts of the City by Tim Keller – Applies to a church but definitely should influence our urban campus ministry.

The Five Posture Toward Ethnic Minority Ministry - Really good article for people that aren’t experienced in ethnic ministry like me. Super helpful for me.

Tim Casteel on how he does ministry at U. of Arkansas – Great idea of creating a document to succently explain your ministry to a new staff or student leader. Makes me want to make one for Portland Metro.

With our tech savvy and urban students I want to put a QR code on our promotional materials that has a link to information and a video from one of our staff welcoming them. How cool would that be? Anybody have any information on this?

Checking out the social media icon wordpress plugin. I might add this to our city website.

I added a landing page to our PDX Cru Facebook page. It welcomes people who are checking out the page for the first time, gives a link to fill out a “Connect with Cru” form as well as some other info. This will be helpful as we advertise on Facebook to connect people early in the term.  (I copied a UCF Cru image on this …I’ll eventually make my own)

Have a great week!

Are you a copycat?

August 8, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership with 0 Comments

I like things to be easy. I see a good idea and I immediately want to to install it into my ministry here in Portland. I like to cut and paste. It’s easy.  It’s also reassuring, because somewhere out there someone else is doing the same thing I’m doing. If the idea fails I can blame someone else.

Sure there are Biblical principles that translate across time and locations, but straight up copying another ministry….that’s way to safe.

What’s our prayer you say? Simply this,  ”Lord, what is it you have for THIS ministry THIS year? Show us your heart for the students of Portland.”

I don’t want to just copy another ministry, too easy and to safe.

Living off of reputation?

July 19, 2011 in Leadership, Uncategorized with 0 Comments

Am I living off of reputation or character?

I’m at our National Staff Conference right now in Fort Collins. We heard from Francis Chan this morning and he hit it out of the park. I’ve never read any of his books, but I’ve seen a few online clips that were good. Having no expectations paid off as my heart was challenged in a good way.

He taught from this verse in Revelation 3.

These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God.

Because I’m in formal ministry how often do I live on my reputation of being out there amongst the cutting edge, hardcore Christians,  while at the same time there are parts of my life that are dead or calloused to the Lord?

May I never become entitled, cynical or hard-hearted. I don’t want my life to make sense to the world. I want to be more in love with Jesus.

Spring Break – Urban Immersion

March 27, 2011 in Innovation, Leadership with 0 Comments

Last week we hosted almost 30 staff and students from around the Northwest for a spring break urban immersion, Portland style. Many thanks to Chicago Cru for the inspiration. It was a blast.

Here’s why we did it:

  • To get students and staff in the city to experience the power, diversity and brokenness of the city.
  • To give them a taste of what it could look like to serve in ministry here. Surface potential future interns or staff.
  • To boost our movement at PSU and surface leaders at various other schools.

Here’s a brief summary of what we did:

  • Sunday night: Devotional on why we need the city and our vision for the week.
  • Monday: Evangelism training, scavenger hunt via public tranport and evangelism at PSU and downtown.
  • Tuesday: Launching day at four large community colleges in the area, seeking to surface leaders.
  • Wednesday: Acts 17 prayer walk experience in Hawthorne district and day of service at Portland Rescue mission.
  • Thursday: More evangelism training and evangelism at PSU and downtown.

Overall the feedback has been really good and I think we might do it again next year. It was a huge win for us and the students who joined us. God moved in their hearts. Feel free to join us next year :) .

How are we allocating our staff in Portland?

March 1, 2011 in Leadership with 1 Comment

I get asked all the time, “how is your staff team investing on the 20+ campuses in Portland?” Honestly, this is the question we have to deal with and I’m not sure we’ve figured it out but here’s what we’re doing right now.

We’re treating Portland State (largest university in Oregon) almost like a staffed campus. This is where our staff spend the most time. We share our faith, we disciple students, and we invest heavily with our physical presence. This allows our team to have an environment that is great for new staff development and have fun just doing ministry together.

We’re treating the rest of the campuses way more hands off. Probably more like what Campus Crusade staff know as catalytic. We want each of our staff to have their hands in launching and/or coaching a ministry eventually because there is incredible value in that experience,  but at this point we will not ask them to invest more than 1 day a week anywhere else. Whatever they do on the other campuses must be done on our launching/coaching day of the week (tuesday). This makes it easy for us to say no to opportunities that are beyond our teams capacity.

So as you can see we’re doing our best to accomplish forming a great staff environment (motivating, accountable, developmental) AND reaching our scope. We have a lot to learn about launching and coaching movements and we’re constantly reevaluated our schedule but so far it’s been a great step in reestablishing our presence in the city. Also, obviously the Spirit is at work opening doors that we never would have imagined so we hold this schedule and strategy with an open hand.

What do you think? Any metro/catalytic staff out there want to weigh in on how they allocate their staff resources?

The City So Far – People Matter

February 26, 2011 in Leadership with 0 Comments

I wish you all could experience ministry in the city. It’s incredibly refreshing, raw, complex and challenging. I’m about 8 months in now and I could not be more thankful for my experience.

The biggest lesson learned so far is that I often lack genuine compassion and care for the people. Students, who are the very people I’m ministering to can feel like the biggest barriers to seeing minister growth!  And then there are my my neighbors, my fellow public transportation users and especially people that are different than me. I’ve always struggled with compassion and the city has reminded me of need for it, because I’m confronted with humanity every day. God is softening my heart toward people.

There’s no getting away from people…and I like it that way. I love being confronted with the rawness of humanity. It challenges me. It reminds me of my brokenness without Christ. It teaches me to love and sacrifice in fresh ways.

What if the bottomline about ministry is less about effectiveness and efficiency and more about people…broken, messy people? Yes we learn, strategize and get better at our jobs, but if we do it without genuine love and compassion we’ve missed the point.

I’m thankful for the city. Not everyone is called to live, work or minister in a city, but everyone should consider it. Guaranteed it’ll expand your view of God.
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