facebook & teAMerica

i cannot stand myspace. i think it’s okay for organizations and media but bugs me for individuals. besides there always seem to be reports of creepy people lurking around on myspace. i’m not as familiar with facebook but some of the college students swear by it and i have seen many reports recently concerning the wonders of communicating through facebook. so i figure i’ll give it a try and see if it is something that will be useful in stevens point.

speaking of stevens point pam and i are back from our teAMerica church planting assessment week. the point of the assessment is to see if i should be able to hack it when it comes to the nature of planting a church. apparently about 85% of new churches fail within 5 years. that’s not a good percentage. yet with the right assessment and training that figure flips over on itself. the teAMerica week takes a person and sees whether he/she would be a good fit for planting a church. the way they do this is through a series of personality inventories, written interviews of your friends, surprise group projects, planned presentations, a series of interviews, and basic teaching time. truthfully the whole thing was kind of similar to a church planting version of “the apprentice” without the “you’re fired” part. everything you do is watched and analyzed to see how you work with people, how you lead, how you follow, how you think, etc. it was very tiring but cool.

at the end of the week there are 4 options of what they will say to the candidate.

• recommend
• recommend – with conditions (usually this is to attend a couple of conferences and do some more homework – this usually slows things down by a few months or so)
• recommend – with strong conditions (intern with someone and do allot more homework – this usually slows things down by 12 to 18 months)
• not recommend – (which means that in the assessors’ opinions it would be best for you to do something else)

we left the week with a “full recommend” and therefore we have crossed another hurdle on the path. now we continue working with namb to see if there is any possibility of getting some funding through them. if we get some funding from them that will mean that i can focus all my efforts on planting the church rather than being somewhat distracted by the need to hold down a part time job for financial reasons.

[tags]church planting, teAMerica, facebook, myspace[/tags]