I have been very helped by thinking of life in terms of rhythms and seasons. We go through periods of time where things seem to stay the same, and then something comes along to change things.

This happens in many scales. Short term rhythms can be as simple as weekdays and weekends, busy weeks and light weeks, or stressful stretches followed by easier stretches. Longer terms seasons can be literally seasons- for example, the summer season marked by Memorial Day and Labor day. Or they might stretch for years- for example, college, or entry level job, or early child raising.

These rhythms and seasons give variety to life. They also give hope that if there are things in our life that seem impossible or painful, they are usually certain to pass. It’s also worth noting that there might be seasons that we really enjoy, and it’s worth being aware that they will come to an end, and letting them end is probably important (for example, a single guy might really like playing hours of video games a day, but if he enters the early marriage and child-rearing stage, this might need to change).

It can be tempting to try to fight the seasons. Early in our ministry in Minnesota, we kept trying to do ministry full steam ahead in the summer- and found ourselves in a perpetually uphill battle. Now we scale things back, enjoy some rest, and still manage to get some good things done. Turns out summer in Minnesota is great for building relationships with neighbors since, unlike the other nine months of the year, they might actually be outside!

What rhythms and seasons make up your life? Which ones do you most enjoy? Which are you eager to have pass? Which do you miss?

Most people don’t like to think or talk about money. It is either uncomfortable, or embarrassing, or discouraging. In the church or organizational setting, talking about money can be equally strange. No pastor wants to feel like she is in a retail relationships with people that pay her salary, but sometimes it can seem that way.

I find that the willingness to engage the issue of money is a crucial one for many young leaders. Are you willing to get money for the ventures you feel called to? Are you willing to manage it well, take real responsibility for accounting, and assess how well that process has gone?

This is a crucible for many people. I think there are some who will be forever hampered from moving to the next step of leadership because they don’t want to think about or take responsibility for financial health. Beneath this are ofte a raft of emotional and spiritual difficulties. There might be fear or shame based in the past, insecurity or anger or a sense of not being able to handle one’s self.

Here’s the thing- if you can get through the emotional and spiritual stresses, handling money isn’t quite as difficult as it seems. Really, handling priorities is harder. Once you figure out the priorities and the vision, getting and managing the money is hard- but not that hard.

How has this worked for you?

I’ve been thinking a lot about gender differences lately. I find that in the post-feminist era, it is difficult to try to describe the differences between men and women without coming off as sexist. And to some degree, this is probably salutary. After centuries of misogyny, there is a natural reaction away from stereotypes and prejudices.

All that said, there is a difference, and it is significant. There has been quite a bit of ink spilled recently over the crisis of boys- some studies show that 60% of American undergraduates are women, and that boys are lagging behind in many key developmental areas. At the same time, women continue to be underrepresented in upper level corporate management.

As women have moved forward in society, the mommy wars have escalated, and many people struggle with how to balance motherhood, fatherhood, leadership, and work. For an honest, thoughtful take on one woman’s struggle read Suzy Welch’s book on priorities and decision making.

What strikes me is that we are going to have to find ways of talking about these issues without resorting to name-calling and finger-pointing. It is very hard, because gender is so central to our identity. Nobody can pretend a neutral, objective viewpoint on this. It is by its very nature an emotional conversation. And it cannot possibly be simple. I think in these sorts of conversations, simplistic solutions are often the most damaging.

All that said, I have so many questions I’d love your take on. What are the primary differences between men and women? How does that play out in society? How does it play out in marriage? How should we structure schools, churches, families to honor these difference?

Wow, those are big questions. Maybe some of the replies could turn themselves into continued posts or guest posts and some ongoing conversation.

(Note- if you are wondering where all the comments have gone, these posts also go up as Facebook notes and some people comment there instead. If you’d like to read this blog there, add me as a Facebook friend, and if I don’t know you, just make a note that you are a YLB reader. Thanks!)

Base-assumptions-for-this-post-part-one:

For various reasons, American culture has become extremely polarized between “red” and “blue”. At least part of the reason for this is that people tend to consume media and talk with people of their political/cultural persuasion, which tends to simply perpetuate the divide.

Base-assumptions-for-this-post-part-two:

This is mostly bad.

Base-assumption-for-this-post-part-three:

I swear by all that’s holy that if the comments to this become a shouting match I will do something horrible like post a video in a format that doesn’t work on anyone’s browser.

Ok, now to the-post-itself:

The weird part of this divide is how arbitrary terms like “conservative” and “liberal” end up getting used. Depending on who I’m with, I often get labeled either for very strange reasons. I’ve been called “liberal” for defending Joel Osteen and “conservative” for asserting that Christians ought to believe the Apostle’s creed. And similarly strange labeling along political lines.

Seemingly arbitrary positions or ideas get lumped together, so that somehow a lot of people have same opinions about the trustworthiness of the Bible, foreign policy, tax cuts, megachurches, and gay marriage. And these opinions skew remarkably (though of course not completely) along lines of age, race, region, and size of city.

In general, it seems like the best solution on most of these subjects is simply never to discuss them publicly. Someone is likely to get really angry, and it ends up in a debate. And generally, it’s even more important not to discuss them on the internet. Have you ever read the comments at CNN.com? I’m pretty sure most of them originate in mental institutions.

But where I get stuck in this is that the trustworthiness of the Bible, foreign policy, tax cuts, megachurches, and gay marriage matter. It could be fair to say that oftentimes our opinions about them don’t matter as much as we think they do, but at the end of the day, we have to do things in regards to them. We have to choose a church, cast a vote, and decide how to respond to the invitation to Bob and Sam’s nuptials. And as leaders, people will often look to us to help them respond to these situations.

Do I have a overly simplistic solution? Of course not. What do I look like, a self-help book? But I have a little slogan that helps a bit. “Love beats truth.” Love people first, figure out the truth second. If you go for truth first, you sometimes have a hard time getting to love, which is more important.

I’ve enjoyed our little foray into more abstract questions, but if I let it go too long, I think this blog loses its purpose. So here’s something uber-practical: always do an icebreaker.

Almost all leading at some point involves leading small discussion groups of some kind (church small group, discipleship group, team at work, staff meeting). Here’s a trick I’ve learned- when there are any newer people in the group, always do an icebreaker.

Sometimes, this just involves going around the circle and introducing ourselves. Sometimes it involves a name game, or answering some silly question (My favorite: tell me what your favorite late night road trip gas station food is. Everyone has one.) Sometimes it might involve praying together, or answering a more in-depth question (what is a significant experience you had with God lately?)

This may seem small, but it isn’t. It communicates that the people in the meeting matter, that we aren’t here just to do a job or have a discussion, we are here, as human beings together, to actually connect with each other over shared experiences. Furthermore, if there are introverts or shy people (note: there is a difference, I am a shy extrovert) they may be more likely to share something later on if they’ve already had to take the scary step of talking in the group for the first time.

A few mistakes are common:

1. Asking a question that not everyone has an answer to, which can make some people feel like outsiders (IE, what is your favorite Bible verse, or what is the best movie you’ve seen this year)
2. Asking absolute instead of relative questions. For certain personality types, absolute question cause great anxiety. “What is your favorite song?” is a terrifying query for someone like my wife (my favorite song? I don’t know. I can’t remember! Is it this one? What if I’m wrong? What if it isn’t? Will I be lying?). But if you say “What’s a song you’ve been enjoying lately?” then they can relax.
3. Going too deep too fast OR staying too shallow too long. “What is one of your deepest fears?” is too deep for the first group meeting, “What is your favorite candy?” could seem silly at a certain point in a group’s development.

This is a detail of leading groups that I used to think was just a throwaway, but the longer I do this, the more I believe that how we set up the environment of a group makes a big difference.

I am currently in a small group where I enjoy being one of the youngest members. Many of the other members are wonderful, wise, well-seasoned Christians who have lived in our city for a long time. They’ve seen churches and movements come and go, but they are committed to Jesus and have decided to be in our church for a season. I treasure their presence in my life.

We had a fascinating pre-small group conversation a few weeks ago. We were talking about the very young and small movement of churches to which our church belongs. I move a bit in leadership circles of the movement, and I was saying that from my point of view, the movement needs to develop more organizational infrastructure to continue to prosper in the future.

I was very interested in the fairly vehement disagreement that came from my older friends. They had seen so many organizations institutionalize and lose the lively sense of the Spirit within them. I countered that without some institutionalization, no movement can truly survive beyond the first generation. They begrudgingly admitted I had a point, but they were still very skeptical.

This feels like a central tension to me. Are institutions good, bad, or neutral? Is it better to change them from the inside, or to protest them from the outside? What causes institutions to go bad? Is he right, or is he right? Personally, I lean toward Heclo but respect Mark at the same time. Your thoughts?

I recently listened to the “This American Life” podcast called “Bait and Switch“, (and yes, it was from November, how terribly “with it” I am).  The stories he covered centered around, obviously, bait and switch scenarios and they were quite entertaining.  Then they came to the story on an evangelical christian who as a young man had been involved with a certain college organization known for their relentless pursuit of making converts for Christ.  At first, being a 20 something punk of a young leader, I stuck my nose up, rolled my eyes, and laughed along with Ira Glass as they exposed the tricks of evangelical christians, inviting people to parties and events that passively make the possible promise of girls, fun, drinks and music.  Basically they’ll put stuff on invites that make it sound like fun, normal, “worldly” activities will happen there.  But of course, when people do come they find that it is all a ploy to get people in the door and pitch them why they should accept Jesus into their lives.

After hearing some of these stories, it finally dawned on me:  I DO THIS STUFF!  Or at least HAVE done this stuff, in the not too distant past!  I give out water bottles, inviting people to events with a cool card with our church logo on it, calmly mentioning that we are a church and maybe they should stop by, but it’s no big deal.  Is that the same thing?

As it goes, I have shied away from this method, and have moved on to the next subject Ira Glass covered, which was basically relational evangelism.  He had Jim Henderson on as a guest, who is the founder of Doableevangelism.com, and author of Evangelism without additives, which sounds a lot like some of the things we talk about here, like how people are very interested in Jesus, but not so much in his people, or at least his church.  What his story all basically came down to was making friends with non believers for the sake of becoming friends with them, not with the hope of simply converting them to your faith.  Ira so cleverly said “so this isn’t so much bait and switch, but basically bait and bait!”, echoing the cries of other christians that there is no sense of urgency in this tactic and that there needs to be a next step.  This got me thinking.

I am in a place in my life where I am both an intern at a cool, young, growing church in a great city, learning how to plant a church someday.  I am also a cook at a cool, hip, up and coming restaurant in the hip part of said city.  I work with a lot of non christians with all kinds of lifestyles and background’s and am building some legitimate friendships with them and it’s nothing but a blast for me.  The thought does come to mind though, when am I going to pull the trigger with this Jesus thing? Outright asking them if they know Jesus doesn’t seem like a natural move on my part, I’ve invited some to church a few times and they haven’t come, do I just keep doing that?  I certainly don’t shy away from conversations about my other job at the church.  So what’s the next step?  Is there a next step?

This is why this podcast really was interesting to me, especially the “Bait and bait”, or “all bait and no switch” remark, because I think you make the case that Jesus did model that in the gospels.  But there is a gaping hole in this “method” and that is God’s power.  I am building relational equity and trust with my friends at the restaurant, so much so that maybe someday I will see an opportunity where God’s power and love would be great to break into their lives and I will take that opportunity and pray for them, serve them, fight for them, or whatever for them.  This could happen behind closed doors, like making them apart of my six (list of six people you commit to praying for), or maybe it will mean praying for them in person right on the spot, maybe at work (gasp). At the end of the day, I have believe that God loves these people more than I do, and has infinite resources and power to pursue them, and maybe I just keep being myself and building these relationships to be apart of what he’s doing in their lives.

What are your thoughts on this style of “evangelism”?  Is it even evangelism?  And finally, to go back to the first part of this blog, is “servant evangelism” a bait and switch?  Is it still useful?