like a fire

Age of Transparency Apparently we have entered a new age. If you didn’t realize it, then it will come as now surprise tha it is the age of transparency. This isn’t the movement from the 80’s worship scene where the in things to do was use transparencies. This is an age of rejecting the opaque views of management and its less than humble background. The new management model, according to this web site, is to humble confess your management sins and seek forgiveness. I don’t know if this is the church manifesting in business a la James Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, but they may be ahead of the church in many areas. They are using counselors to help them process their own shortcomings. At least the ones they will own up to. Admittedly this is an idea that hinges on honesty and divulgence.

How does this affect youth ministry? Not much, but it is an interesting idea that leaders should be able to talk about their shortcomings to the people they lead. People have a history of unkindness to failed leaders. How is/should we be different. Are you hooked on this idea? Ready to try it out. Let me point to a great area to start. Most tenures of youth leaders are one year. I would suggest that most of thos early moves in ministry are to to youth leaders’ tension with Sr. Pastors. When the two don’t line up and they can’t work it out, then one has to go and you know who that is.

Try this on for size (I will). Accept and forgive your Sr. Guy when he messes up. Show him the grace you would want to be shown when a parent complains to him about you. Just a thought.

Every once in a while I just get stumped. Well, actually I get stumped a lot, but what I’m talking about is actually understanding other people, especially spiritually. I seen probably as much as anyone else when it comes to skewed perspectives and mainline religion. Yesterday, I was just stumped. Here’s the back ground.

I recently had three articles published on another site. I felt really great about it and thought that I was able to help other people with some things I have spent considerable time developing. On the site there is a message board for people to discuss. Here is where it gets interesting/frustrating. Someone posted some pretty critical stuff. Now I can handle criticism, especially if it is constructive, but this was just weird. First it was obvious that the poster had been burned and hurt by a previous experience, so I was somewhat compassionate. But the more they posted the more I realized I just didn’t understand. This was a full on rant about how there was no place in the New Testament church for worship bands, worship leaders, preachers, preaching, buildings, formal leadership, etc. All of this peppered with the most abrasive equivocation I have seen since theooze. Finally I, and a few others, just had to give up and scratch our heads and wonder where all of this is coming from.

Funny that this happened right after the previous post on irritating Christians. I am somewhat irritating and these are some good points brought out the article, but this was just insane. No wonder Christians get such a bad reputation. Is our understanding that skewed? After this session of the forums, I certainly feel so.

The 5 Most Irritating Things About Christians

* Christians who think everyone else should be just like them.
* Christians who are lousy tippers.
* Christians who don’t move their faith one measly foot.
* Christians who major on the minors.
* Christians who think everything can be explained with a trite phrase or
a simple slogan.
* Christians who use “God told me” as a silver bullet.
* Christians who explain God by saying of God what God never said of Himself.

There is a lot I don’t like about myself and other Christians. Some of these are me. If your reading this, some of these things are probably you, too. This reminds of an article I read a while back called “Ten Reasons Your Church Sucks.” While it is true and very in need of being said to me, it just doesn’t really motivate me. Either I get somewhat self condemning or I just agree and think about how much better I am than all those stupid Christians. Is it just me?

Edgecraft This is my new word for the minute. Never heard of it? Well that probably puts you in the 99 percentile of the world. Edgecraft is:

Edgecraft is a methodical, measurable process that allows individuals and teams to inexorably identify the soft innovations that live on the edges of what already exists.

Still confused? Well, don’t be ashamed. Creativity doesn’t come from understanding. Edgecraft is an idea of creativity that uses a team method to target new approaches to solve old problems through identifying “edgy” benefits that can build influence and make a base of loyalty. Think about Apple. Until recently, they were the artists computer company. They weren’t very practical for the average business user. They did only a couple of things well, and the rest just had to wait. They looked cooler than other brands and they branched out into other edge experiments like the Ipod. What they did was build a very loyal following that enabled them to build a product that is at least as capable as their monster competition. I would even say that now they are a bit ahead of Microsoft/Windows, not in user share, but in usability. Will they capture marketshare? I’m scratching my head.

Even better than this example are the many youth ministries throughout the world that are trying to do this. We have monster competition, just like Apple. We compete with multi-million dollar organizations that spend crazy amounts of money to attract the attention of teens. We compete with time from school, sports, music, the arts, relationships, IM, fashion, online and paper gaming, and most importantly, other ministries. We definitely use edgecraft. I wonder how effectively we use it and to what impact on the kingdom? What would an affinity network look like, where we use all the things we compete with to build soft incentives and values? Could we engage all of these competitives to build realtionships through doing them together? Certainly everyone wants a cheerleader. Everyone wants recognition, even if it’s just that they reached a new level in World of Warcraft. To what purpose some might ask. Is it just to develop “brand loyalty” to our own ministries? YES! We need to build that kind of thinking, not so people won’t go looking to other ministries, but so that they know the value of the gospel lived in their lives.

GoWorshipOne.COM I found this site after scouring the web for worship and teens. They are doing very much the same thing I am trying to do but are much further down the road. Basically, they do clinics for churches and especially youth bands. There is so much to be done, but as more churches are actually letting teens be involved in worship, even at an early age, this will become a lot more useful of a resource. There are a lot of resources and even some free downloads to try some of their stuff to see if it is useful for you. Best wishes guys.