Month: May 2008

as i posted once before, i have no idea what a church planter is supposed to do.

what i’m trying to do (and i’m hoping it’s what i’m supposed to be doing) is hanging out with as many people as possible. today that took the form of fishing with a guy. he’s the intervasity campus minister for uwsp, he has a good handle on where people are, and he’s a great guy to hang out with. the side benefit of all this is that i caught my first muskie today. woohoo! i also caught my largest smallmouth bass today. woohoo! of course, niether one of them were huge, but being raised in the deep south these are two fish that i haven’t had much experience with.

anyhow, here are the photos.

first, i have a great mom and though i have wished her happy mother’s day personally i thought i would also do so on my blog. happy mother’s day mom.

secondly, i thought i would introduce y’all to “project mayhem.” due to finals and the beginning of summer the tapestry launch team will not meet for the next month. since, we’re going to be separate for the next month i thought it would be fun to have a project for all of us to work on. thus “project mayhem” was born.

it came out of the book i am presently reading, a whack on the side of the head. it’s a book on creativity and it is wonderful. one of the things it pushes is overcoming the practical. it tells a few stories of creative products that came out of completely impractical original ideas. here are a couple of them:

• in a brain storming session on how to improve the additives within dog food one person suggested placing indigestible items within the dog food that would produce certain desired effects. two suggested examples were grass seed and florescent dye. the grass seed would sprout from the poop and the florescent dye would glow in the dark enable people to avoid the spot when walking in the dark. not practical ideas for dog food but great ideas for livestock and wildlife. the ideas were put into action in some cattle food to encourage reseeding of the grazing land and into wildlife salt licks for help in tracking the animals. not bad for an unpractical idea.
• a town was dealing with a major trash problem. they brainstormed ideas for getting people to put their trash in a garbage can. they suggested increasing fines, hiring more police, and other ideas that punished people for not placing their waste in a trash can. finally, one person suggested creating garbage cans that would pay people to put trash into them. a completely impractical idea. the city would of course go broke if they gave people money for putting trash in a garbage can. yet they took the idea of a reward and created joke telling trash cans. every time you put trash in the garbage can it told a different joke and since the jokes were changed every two weeks people were encouraged to continue doing. not a bad idea for something that was originally completely impractical.

so “project mayhem” is about completely impractical ideas. for the next month the launch team is going to pray and think about the most amazing and impractical ideas that tapestry can do or be a part of. via the wonder of google docs we will also discuss the ideas. the only rule is that for the next month nobody is allowed to point out why an idea will not work. instead, we will discuss what positive about an idea and how it might “cross pollinate” into other more-practical ideas. hopefully it will be a means for pushing on the walls of the box a little bit.

may is a busy month for me both personally and ministerially. last night was the first thing that tapestry led within the community. we did our own interpretation of proost’s labyrinth experience. considering the fact that very few people within the point area have ever heard of tapestry i was quite please with the attendance. there were 18 people other than the launch team that came to the labyrinth (there are 5 of us thus making it 23 that participated). we might could have handled a little over double that amount and still been comfortable. the best part was that we didn’t draw very many people who attended other churches. the vast majority of the people that came to the labyrinth were not connected with another church. that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. i get more pumped about it the more i think about it. there was even discussion concerning doing this annually or doing a different experiential project each year.

it’s all not bad for a church that is starting out of hanging out in coffee shops.

even more important was that the labyrinth gave the launch team an example of what we can do that is not your typical church service. there are some amazing people on the launch team. most of them had not been through anything as experiential as the labyrinth. now that they have, their creativity can be released and great things can start happening. in the future we will be able to work more and more as a team, using everyone’s talents and input, because of what happened last night.

the rest of the busyness bounces around traveling and running. pam’s brother and sister-in-law are coming up to run the green bay marathon next week (i’m running too but they are beasts). we love hanging out with them so that make for a fun few days while they are here. after they leave i have a day or two before i fly down to baton rouge for john/haley’s wedding. it’s always fun to see former youth get hitched and it’s even more fun when it means i get to see people that i haven’t seen in a while. once i get back from that the family and i leave for minneapolis to see spamalot. we’re all very excited about this. the kids are going to love the play. pam and i have already seen it and seeing it again with our kids will make the experience all the better.

it’s a fun few weeks.

we did the labyrinth on campus tonight. consider the fact that we are an unknown church within the community and that i purposely didn’t advertise in CHRISTian places (so as to avoid people who are just looking for their next spiritual “fix) i think things went very well. the launch team was great. i’m worn out and going to bed after i finish unloading all the junk out of pam’s van.

thanks to everyone who helped and participated within the labyrinth.

one of my favorite sayings regarding parenting is that it’s like being pecked to death by ducks. it makes me laugh every time i think about it. owning two basset hounds is one step worse than this. owning basset hounds is like being pecked to death by ducks who try to make you feel guilty the entire time they are killing you.

genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Elbert Hubbard

we have our tickets to nicaragua so i can introduce my new friends to all that GOD is doing there. this is very important. our first steps as a church body will go a long in shaping who we will become. that’s one of the reasons that i am so excited about this year’s trip down there. the other main reason is that for quite some time pam and i have wanted to introduce out kids to al that is going on down there. that’s going to happen this year. woohoo!!!

my run for the day
distance – 4.0 miles
time – 42:42
pace – 10/40/mile
weather – 48º

as a former youth minister (boy is that hard to say) i know a ton of college students and young adults who are going off on mission trips. that’s great, of course it also means that i get contacted by many of them concerning support. sometimes that’s a good thing and some times its not. recently i received to such requests. one request from a kid that only contacts me when it comes time to ask for support. i don’t hear from this kid at all otherwise. the other request came from a kid that i don’t talk with all the time but i do hear form every now and then. this kid responds to my questions and makes contact every now and then.

i’m excited about helping one of these kids. you can probably guess which one.

the reminder here for me is i have to do some of the same things. i have to remember that people are going to respond to my requests the same way. maintaining contact is a majorly important thing. caring for somebody is much more important that caring for their pocket book.

every time i talk to one of my friends who is not in wisconsin i get asked the same question in various forms, “so how are things going with starting the church?” before i talk about my confusion on how to answer that question i want to point out that i’m very thankful that friends are asking it. every time i hear from a friend i am very grateful for it. this is especially true in regards to friends from baton rouge because it’s nice to know that i haven’t been completely forgotten down in the swamps. okay i’ll talk about my confusion now.

i don’t know how to answer my friends because i don’t have anything to compare this experience to and i’m not real sure how to define the success of tapestry. i think we’re doing well. when we started meeting as a leadership team in january we were composed of 5 people committed to the launch and one guest. this past week when we met there were 8 people committed to the launch and one guest. more people seem to be connecting with what we’re thinking about the church and that’s great. yet, like i said i don’t really have anything to compare it too.

the other problem in answering the question is that i don’t know how to define success for tapestry. ultimately tapestry is a success if we bring glory to GOD. that’s the goal but that’s a very hard goal to quantify (as it should be). it would be nice to have something that could be a semi-guiding goal that was quantifiable enough that i could see how we are doing based upon it. i can’t use the launch (september 14th) because it’s kind of lame to have as your goal just to start. launching the church worship services is not even close to the finish line so i can’t aim towards that. i can’t use having a certain number of people attend a worship service because that’s not even just kind of lame, it’s amazingly lame. that’s about as far away from who we are as you can get.

so i’m going to ask a question that i’m not sure is easily answerable. what quantifiable things do you think a young church can and should look at for judging how it’s doing? i would love to hear your thoughts.

right now these are the things that that i think we will be looking at:

• CHANGED LIVES – if we really believe that the gates of hell will not prevail over CHRIST’s church then we should see visible manifestations of evil being defeated within people’s lives.
• SACRIFICES THAT CAN ONLY BE EXPLAINED BY GOD – irrational sacrifice seems very much in line with the way of JESUS. why is it that the early church was know for its sacrifice and the modern church is know for political influence?
• REACHING OUT TO THE REJECTED – the church should be like JESUS and connect with those who are rejected by the powerful.
• SENT LIVES – when our people start feeling like they have been called to all the “corners” of the world to be a part of sharing and living the love of JESUS that will be most excellent.
• NEW DISTINCT CHURCHES – as a church we should be involved in planting new embassies of the kingdom of GOD (i.e. churches) that are their own representations of CHRISTian community rather than franchises of us. to some extent this will be the most visible sign for me. when we plant a “daughter” church i’m going to feel like we are doing what we are supposed to do.

any thoughts?

SIDE NOTE – my parents should be very happy. they always complain if i don’t post something regularly (they are the only ones who do). in the past two days i’ve 6 times. while will admit that some of them are quite short (the random quotes post) or administrative (the tapestry monthly prayer post) they’re still posts and therefore count. i’m giving my parents a reason to surf the net.
😉