Month: February 2010

• pam and i are a couple of weeks behind in watching “lost.” right now i have mixed feelings about how it is going. i am thankful that this will be the last year. i would hate to see it continue going.
• i’ve been doing more cross country skiing over the past week and i am now intrigued with the idea of doing the birkie. the birkie is a 55k (34.1 miles) cross country skiing race. it happened yesterday. i’m not sure that i could be ready for it by next year but i could try for the kortelopet 23K (which happens with the birkie).
• i have loved the winter olympics but i am glad that it is almost over. i’ve hit the max of my winter sports watching limit.
• as one of the stevens point police chaplains i get to go to a seminar on death notification – how’s that for exciting?
• the q conference is two months away and i am pretty pumped about it.
• i started growing a goatee about 4 weeks ago and it is finally reaching a point that i like it. we’ll just have to see if i actually keep it or not.

scott brignac was one of the youth ministry interns at parkview baptist church in baton rouge when i led the youth ministry there. he produces great short films (but ironically rarely ever did such for the youth ministry – yeah, that’s right i’m calling you out scott). right now one of his shorts is among the top fop finalists for a canon competition. his video is great and therefore you should go watch it and then vote for it.

SIDE NOTE – elizabeth & alan thanks for the kind comment you sent pam. i’m not sure why the blog is not allowing you to leave comments but i will look into it. the issue you are having with the blog not allowing you to comment must explain why no one else has been commenting on my blog recently. surely it can’t be because no one is reading it. 😉

SIDE SIDE NOTE – thanks to the generosity of heath erickson (the senior high youth minister at woodlands church) i had the chance to go speak with a bunch of 9th graders about faith. stuff like this makes me miss youth ministry. if any of you paid ministerial type people ever want a speaker/communicator/preacher (or whatever the new term is) from wisconsin who can be had for travel expenses and a bbq sandwich i’m your man. 🙂

for the majority of the time that i have been a minister i have prided myself on focusing on not talking “church language.” what i mean by “church language” are all the internal terms and slang that CHRISTians use that communicate to those “in the know” but are often not understood by those that are not within the church culture. i wasn’t raised in the church world and when i came to faith in CHRIST and eventually started attending a local church i was always frustrated when pastors would refer to slang or stories that i was apparently assumed to already know. when someone would say “you all know the story of yada yada” i wanted to shout “NO I DON’T! TELL ME ABOUT IT!” since i usually didn’t shout that out i was just general confused and frustrated (a state that is pretty normal for my brain).

because of these experiences i have always tried to regularly focused on not using such internal language. before coming to point and starting tapestry i thought i did a pretty good job at this. now i know that at best i was just doing a good job for the bible belt and at worst i thoroughly sucked at it. i am very thankful for those who have helped me discover this.

this discovery has come over the past 5 weeks. during this period i have been leading tapestry through stories form the life of jacob during our sunday night worship gatherings. trying not to assume everyone was familiar with the story of jacob i started each week off with a summary of what we have talked thus far. i thought i was doing a pretty good job with my summaries until several people politely said i wasn’t (this is yet another reason i love the threads). after talking with several people what i discovered was that while i might have been doing an ok job of summarizing the story i wasn’t giving people unfamiliar with the story of jacob anything to attach to the summary to. the names jacob, esau, isaac rebekah, rachel, laban, and leah were unfamiliar to many and therefore i might have been repeating the same name over and over again during my summary.

the above stick people are an example of what came out of these conversations. the stick people serve as references for people to associate with the story and the weekly summary. i put the stick figures in my powerpoint and they come back up again and again. those far it looks like they are working. at least that is what i’ve been told and as stated above the people of tapestry don’t mind telling me when i am not connecting.

this is a brave new world for me. the old world allowed general assumptions concerning what people knew of scripture (or at least i lived like it did). this new world doesn’t fit that assumption. this new world is one that i thought i had already discovered but now i realize that i am much farther off the map than i thought i was. this is exactly where i want to be.

SIDE NOTE – none of this would have come about if it hadn’t of been for several threads telling me that i wasn’t doing a very good job of summarizing in the first place. i hope every pastor in the world is blessed with people who will tell him/her when things aren’t working. i know some pastors don’t view such people as “blessings” (a.k.a. reasons to be happy) and i know some are just mean people. thankfully i haven’t experienced many of the “mean ones.” instead. usually the people who point out when i’m not doing my best have been the people who help me the most.

i like presentations/sermons that use slides well and I HATE WHEN SLIDES ARE USED POORLY. most people can read faster than you can speak so it make no sense for us to sit there and listen to you say everything that is clearly written on your presentation slides while you add nothing else to the bullet points. presentations slides are for passages that you want people to be able to read with you, quotes, and most importantly images that convey what you are speaking about. they are not for an endless list of bullet points.

i feel better now.