Today was a historic day.

We got about the business of launching the ministry at Portland State University today. By the way, PSU is the largest university in Oregon and the third largest in all of our Campus Crusade region, behind U. of Washington and U. of Utah. Didn’t know that, did you?

We started with a short discussion on this powerful article by Tim Keller to give us a framework for our heart to see this urban campus transformed. Keller’s stuff is what pushed me toward making the decision to move to Portland. For Keller fan boys, here’s a link to all his stuff.

Then believing God to breakthrough on campus in powerful ways we braved 97 degree temperatures and pounded the streets for information. Joined by five of the regional office interns today that will be working with us 1 day a week this fall we gathered information that will shape our initiatives, outreaches and strategies.

Looking forward to the day when at PSU there is a community where the gospel captures hearts, transforms lives, and launches men and women into a lifelong adventure with Jesus Christ.

**I stole that last line from another Cru ministry somewhere. I’m pretty sure they don’t mind.

***I love my job

We’re in Prineville, Oregon this week connecting with some of the families that partner with our ministry. This means limited internet access, so I brought along all the books that I’m working through right now. Here you go…

• God Space – Doug Pollack This was a freebie at our national staff conference that I’m just getting around to. I think the evangelism principles could be helpful as we launch a ministry in post-Christian Portland. Brian Barela just happened to post an interview by Doug here.
• Making Ideas Happen – Scott Belsky This is the book of the summer for me. I can’t get enough of the principles in this book, but I’m also wired to eat this stuff up.  I think every operations minded person should read it…scratch that, every person who leads a team should read this.
• The Speed of Trust – Stephen Covey This is the son of Stephen Covey of 7 habits of highly effective people fame. Staff in our region are about to start discussing this book via a private facebook group, should be fun! So far in the first 30 pages I’ve had multiple aha moments.
• The Narrows – Michael Connelly Crime thriller fiction scariness.

There you have it! What are you reading this summer?

I live in the city…

I pass people that are homeless everyday. I overhear conversations about addiction. I pass people on the street that look a little scary to me and sometimes act a little scary. I hear about the sex slave industry that’s taking place at the mall up the road from my house. Humanity is definitely broken.

How do I respond to these things? How is being exposed to these things shaping me? Here’s what I’m learning after two months.

• I must guard against ever being hardened to the reality of how broken humanity is…because then I’ve forgotten how great my Savior is.
• Caring for people means I throw my Getting Things Done mentality out the window.
• I’m thankful to raise a kid in this environment. The conversations we’ve had already are gold.
• My conversation with my neighbor might not mean much to the city, but it might mean a lot to my neighbor.

After two months in the city, I can already see the Lord at work in my heart. There is adventure outside my door everyday. All I have to do is step into it.

Reminds me of this poem I heard at Catalyst this spring. Check it out.

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

In the midst of moving to a new city, expanding our financial support team and getting ready to launch a new metro ministry, my margins have been thin lately.

Five years ago I would have struggled with the stress of this season of life, but right now I’m doing pretty good because of a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. It’s only a season. Things will either calm down naturally or I’ll start weeding some things out soon.
2. Change and being uncomfortable has an incredible influence on my walk with God. Stepping into the unknown forces my dependence on the Lord. I’m so thankful for that.
3. I don’t need to control everything. My significance is not found how well I have life under control or how many of our pictures we’ve actually hung on the walls of our new house.

Just some thoughts for you. I hope they’re encouraging wherever you’re at. How have you dealt with thin margins in your life?

I’m writing a post for the CCC Blogference and I have a question for you. 

Help a brother out….

If you are on staff with Campus Crusade (or another organization) what has been the most influential ministry experience in your life? Think….most defining moment for your development and experience of God. There’s no right or wrong, I’m just doing an informal poll.

Don’t be shy.

So you’ve finally caught the social media bug…or at least want to test the value of it. There are so many social media applications available that the thought of learning them all will burst that bubble quickly. I believe that if you have limited time and capacity the best way you can invest your time is with a blog…if you work hard at it.

Why? Blogging gives a face to your position and ministry, it connects you to like minded staff people and helps you sharpen your thinking as you write and collaborate with people who comment. It doesn’t have to be perfect, I’ve stopped and restarted a blog at least 3 times. The crazy thing is that I have friends all over the U.S. and Canada that I’ve never met in person and only know through my blog. It’s given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise and has even helped recruit for our new staff team in Portland, Oregon.

How? There are plenty of applications out there to set up a blog with. I recommend if you’re brand new to try WordPress.com. It’s super easy, free to set up and has lot’s of templates to choose from. There’s a slight learning curve, but you can have the basic’s set up in a few minutes and a super tweaked template in a few hours. Other staff like blogspot.com (free), but I’ve gotten a little tired of it. By the way, you can always import posts into another blogging platform so don’t worry about the decision to much.

Best blogging tips:

• Content is king. If you have good content people will keep reading and engage with your blog.
• Make your post shorter than you think. This post is actually probably too long. The average length of visit on my blog is about 1.3 minutes. Shorten up those posts!
• Steady drip of content. Post regularly (whatever that means for you). This will help you gain regular readers.
• Write about what you know best! Find a niche and write. You’d be amazed at what people want to know about. People want to see behind the scenes of you and your ministry. Appropriate authenticity.
• Take you’re blog to the next level.

What’s keeping you from blogging? If you blog, what are you learning as you go?

Photo courtesy of Amypalko

To harness the full power of social media you must make it conversational right? It’s not about tooting your own horn and telling everyone how magnificent you are. It’s not about getting the most followers and blasting everyone with tweets about yourself. To make social media benefical you must build trust, be generous and have a conversation. Yes this means you, rental property company that blasted me with tweets when I said I was going to Big Sky, Montana for the weekend.

I get that lesson. I’m all in with that.

So what does this teach me about evangelism? In our culture if someone trusts me then they’ll engage with just about anything I’ll say. If I want to turn someone off instantly all I have to do is turn on the bullhorn of righteousness.

Trust, relationship and authenticity is everything. But keep in mind this trust and relationship can be built in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Keith Davy and Cojourners have highly influenced my thinking on this subject of evangelism. I haven’t got my hands on Keith’s new release Backstory yet, but I’m excited to see how it’s received on college campuses.

These are the most viewed pages on my blog over the past three weeks. In case you missed them.

1. Behold the Power of Twitter – A case study
2. Seek the Shalom – How should we view the city as followers of Christ?
3. Clear as Mud - The battle for clarity of vision in ministry
4. Weird, or just different – a short TED video on different perspectives

I took the liberty of taking a slide from John Chamber’s talk and tweaking it to fit the non-profit campus ministry organization I work for.  I think I changed it enough to be legal

I’ve begun to recognize that this collaboration and innovation wave of the future we keep talking about can be broken down into categories. This slide has given me structure for the discussion in a fresh way. Below are the three areas that we need to apply the principles of collaboration along with explanations of what that could look like. Study it, learn it, memorize it.

There’s a lot of info here to talk about, but what’s your first response?