Hey, 98 out of 100 ain't bad...

I mentioned in an earlier blog that when I blog on Wednesdays, I will be placing a special emphasis on topics that relate more or less directly to ministry. I feel like I might be able to share some insights after the last 6 years or so working in youth ministry full time. Can't say I am the best, smartest, most experienced, or most successful youth minister I know, but I suppose I have a fairly unique perspective and voice. Hopefully these blogs are of some help. If they are not, I imagine they will at least be entertaining on some level.

Now allow me to break my own law of blogging by copy and pasting material:

 Alienating the 2%

    When a popular rock group comes to town, some of their fans won't get great tickets. Not enough room in the front row. Now they're annoyed. 2% of them are angry enough to speak up or badmouth or write an angry letter.

   When Disney changes a policy and offers a great new feature or benefit to the most dedicated fans, 2% of them won't be able to use it... timing or transport or resources or whatever. They're angry and they let the brand know it.

   Do the math. Every time Apple delights 10,000 people, they hear from 200 angry customers, people who don't like the change or the opportunity or the risk it represents.

   If you have fans or followers or customers, no matter what you do, you'll annoy or disappoint two percent of them. And you'll probably hear a lot more from the unhappy 2% than from the delighted 98.

   It seems as though there are only two ways to deal with this: Stop innovating, just stagnate. Or go ahead and delight the vast majority.

   Sure, you can try to minimize the cost of change, and you might even get the number to 1%. But if you try to delight everyone, all the time, you'll just make yourself crazy. Or become boring.

That perspective is provided by a guy named Seth Godin (linked below) who, by all accounts, has no ministry experience. All the same, I was struck by how directly this information related to church work on a near daily basis. 

I find that a big part of what I do is based on evaluating programming and performance and purpose and just everything I am involved in here. It isn't because I am hyper-critical and don't believe myself or those around me capable of doing a job well. It is because I know that we can steadily improve  ourselves and everything we do. I know that with every new idea and effort come some weak points and failures. If we merely accept that we are doing a decent job that everyone is content with and move on, we are missing a never ending abundance of potential. 

For me, the example is Vacation Bible School. I will readily admit that I am no fan of VBS, but it gives me some comfort to sharply critique and painstakingly mold the program into something that bears some semblance of productivity and purpose. 

Over that last few years almost everything about how we do VBS has changed. It wasn't bad in the past, and people were doing great stuff, but it also wasn't evolving. We have changed the scheduling, the time of day, the way we do music, snacks, decorations, registration, name tags, recruiting, minister involvement, facility utilization, and on and on. Not all of the things I have tweaked have worked, but each year the program gets better and more functional. Each year it gets closer to something that has the special Seth stamp of approval. When I am no longer in charge, it may finally receive it.

If you know me well, you know that I don't have much fear of making people unhappy. I like to say that I seek to please God rather than those around me, and to a large extent that rings true. The other half of it is this - doing the right thing doesn't mean that everyone will be happy with you and those who are unhappy are often the only ones who speak up. 

I hear criticisms and often take them to heart, adjusting accordingly. I also basically ignore many criticisms when I know where it is coming from. A person cannot function effectively if they are trying to please the two percent who refuse to be happy! If you do things the exact way they ask, it is unlikely they will be happy and it is quite likely that the other 98% will become disgruntled. 

Innumerable  meetings that I have been involved with have spent massive amounts of time straining to find a way to accommodate everyone. It is a well-meaning and good-hearted intention, but it is destined for failure. It is hard for a lot of people to accept that some people, often their friends and family, will simply not be happy with their decisions and actions. One must take heart in the realization that they are seeking God's will and acting accordingly, that they are doing the right thing, not just the appeasing the cries from a senseless mob. 

Anyone who has attended a high school basketball game should recognize this principle. Cheers and jeers rain down constantly on the players, coaches, refs, scoreboard personnel, and occasionally the cheerleaders. If the refs blew the whistle every time someone expressed displeasure they game would never end. If they reneged on call challenged by the crowd they would never make it to the scorers table. The coach would be fired after every game whether he won or lost. There would be a dozen players on the floor for each time at all times. It would be an absolute mess of chaos and contradiction.

In ministry the goal should never merely be to please congregants. When that becomes your goal, you will quickly find yourself at the wrong end of one of many rebukes Paul offers to church leaders like yourself in his epistles!

When you seek to please God you will generally please congregants, but you will always disturb the 2%. 

 

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/alienating-the-2.html

Stuff Christians DON'T Like

There is a good reason that my blog is titled Misadventures and that most of my blogs are directly related to the stupid things I do - because that topic offers an amazing wealth of material.

I have never been a big Twitter fan, but eventually became convinced to join up and I am sort of getting into it. Some comedians say funny things, some Christian leaders say meaningful things, and Husker updates are coming my way with great frequency... so it's not all bad.

I have found the downside to Twitter though.

First, let me explain some things to anyone not in the know. On Twitter, you write updates or "Tweets" that are no more than 140 characters long - it started via text message and those have a 160 character limit. You can follow pretty much anyone you want and anyone can follow you. Your name is preceded by at @. If you put in a person's Twitter id with the @, they can see what you write on a tab with their @mentions. If you put a # before a word or group of words with no spaces it is called a hashtag. This allows you to tag topics you are mentioning so that people can see the "trending topics" - basically what is popular.

I hope that is enough, it is more than I knew about until a few days ago.

So here is my latest act of buffoonery.

On Twitter, I follow a guy named John Acuff who wrote a book titled "Stuff Christians Like." I have read only a bit of it while standing in a bookstore, but I have read quite a few of his blog entries (http://stuffchristianslike.net/) and I can tell you it is pretty funny stuff. Based on what I knew about the guy, I quickly clicked the "Follow" button when I saw who he was. I was pumped.

I got less pumped pretty quickly. Several of the first tweets of his that I read consisted of him talking about being friends with other people that are pretty famous in the circles I run in. They weren't funny. As isolated tweets, they sounded like he was just dropping names.

Here is where we need another couple of  Twitter side notes. First of all, it turns out that dropping the names of the people you are with is pretty much just what you do with Twitter. It is you describing who you are with and what you are doing. It is why you can do the whole @ thing. It turns out that I felt like he was name dropping in part because he was talking about those famous-y people I referenced and in part because I was new to the whole scene.

As I grew accustomed to how things were on Twitter, I grew less hostile about it. I had added some friends to my mobile notifications because it is cool to get their tweets throughout the day, but just as quickly I removed some of those friends from mobile updates because I didn't want updates every half hour about what restaurant they were at.

There are different types of tweeters. Some tell you where they are and what is happening no matter what. Some just like to retweet what other people say, incessantly. Some tweet their thoughts, or if something they deem significant is happening. Some tweet all of that. Some people never tweet.

This John guy tweets about anything. Looking back, a lot of it is pretty funny. A lot of it isn't. It is just a lot. About every time I check my account, I see his tweets. I miss a lot of his tweets because of the volume.

Now, the plot thickens.

That means it starts to get relevant. Sort of.

I had been sort of annoyed by his tweets. Several of them that I had seen in recent days weren't funny - most of them weren't intended to be. While I was going back reading some tweets, I was bothered by finding that he had dropped like 3 names in three tweets. It was too much for my taste. I reacted hastily.

I had been thinking of ceasing my following of @prodigaljohn. This was the tipping point. Seeing as I wasn't his follower anymore and I figured he wouldn't see it, I shot off 140 snarky characters about how he dropped names too much and how unfunny his twitter was, that I would just have to stick to his blogs. Turns out he reads his @mentions. Whoops.

He retweeted me.

That means he basically copy and pasted my comment and tweeted it himself - with some added commentary. He claimed he had dropped 3 names in his last 100 tweets. I didn't know about his tweet because I was no longer following him. When his followers caught wind of my affront they responded with their own tweets about my lack of math skills and courtesy. One guy said something about how it makes sense considering my Illinois heritage. A friend of mine tweeted about how funny it was that I had been called out.

Only then did I realize what was going on.

In my defense, while he may have only dropped 3 names in the last 100 tweets, he had dropped those 3 names in his last 3 tweets.

Of course I stink at math, I went to Bible College.

I am not from Illinois, and I haven't even lived here 4 years yet, I can't imagine that is part of my problem.

They guy had every right to do what he did. He was mostly right and I was kind of a jerk. Not totally a jerk because I didn't actually intend for him to read it.

Here is what I mostly feel bad about. He seems like a cool guy and if we knew each other we might be friends. His reply is probably about what any of my better friends would have done to me. He is supposed to be funny, saying something like that is to be expected. Unfortunately in this instance, he not only known as a comedic author, but a Christian author.

Before I even knew about anything happening, it seems he had already been thoroughly chastised and had deleted the tweet, replacing it with another retweet. This one wasn't funny. It was something about how we should pray for people who don't like us, not  retweet them.

I don't dislike the guy. In fact, I really like what he writes and I felt bad enough about the whole deal to REfollow him. To me, it seems like he got steamrolled by someone who apparently took things a little more seriously than anyone intended. He is somewhat of a public figure and apparently as a result, isn't allowed the freedom to be human. As he said - Twitter is insta-accountability, but to what?

You know you have a problem when you can't read what a comedic author writes and recognize a joke.

The problem, I suppose, lies in the fact that he has thousands of followers and several of those followers followed suit. They piled on. They weren't even funny. I think they tried to be, but missed the real nuances of what had come to pass.

Maybe if I had 240 or 440 characters my tweet wouldn't have come off quite so bad. If he had 240, his retweet may not have gotten him scolded. Those 140 characters simply don't allow for anything to be placed into context.

I experience similar things. As a minister, there are certain expectations of how I act, talk, and live. I fail to live up to those expectations a good portion of the time. That is in part because I recognize when expectations are unrealistic or unreasonable and in part because I am human.

I would love to blow off the expectations that don't have a reasonable basis. I would love to place the responsibility all on those people to change their expectations to something that makes sense. Unfortunately I recognize something in myself that I saw in this whole Twitter fiasco. If you hope to have followers, the responsibility to incite change starts with yourself.

Scripture Sundays Unveiled.

In the last month or two I have really been getting back into writing. For the most part, this has meant random blog entries without much focus. That has been fun, but I am not sure how relevant a lot of it has been.

I really first got into writing when I was a senior in high school. I joined Journalism as a class I thought would be an easy A for my senior year. I had a lot of friends in the class and they told me how fun it was, so I figured it was a win-win proposition: fun and easy both. It was those things, but I ended up getting way into it and probably spending more time on that class than I had any other single class in my high school career. I also found my favorite all time teacher. We ended up winning all sorts of awards and I found something that I really enjoyed and was even pretty good at - though most of my writing was juvenile smart alec stuff I got to write as the Opinions Editor.

I am starting to feel like I am writing quite a bit now, but going nowhere with it - so I wanted to add a bit of purpose, or focus. From now on I will be doing by best to write about something to be learned from scripture on Sundays and something I have learned about ministry when I write on mid-week on Wednesdays. If you prefer hearing me expose my own idiocy, tune in on the other days.

Since today is Sunday, I figured it is the perfect (and only rationale) day to unleash my Scripture Sundays on you.

I have a Bible in my bathroom. In my house, that is the best and maybe only place it is possible to get any quiet time - so I take advantage. Yesterday morning, I came across a cool little pericope that I thought was worth taking note of.

The passage in question is Ephesians 4:1-6 and is title "Unity and Maturity in the Body of Christ." Pretty appropriate for a Sunday I'd say. The coolest part for me is taking this section and reading it backwards. Not all the way backwards, then it doesn't make sense - just start with the last verse and go back to the first. The emphasis here is, as you will soon see - oneness. Here we go. 

"one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all"

In looking at this backwards, we get to first see the reasons for the actions promoted, and among those actions we now first get to see the primary; the God and Father of all. He is the first and foremost, the everything. His ultimate oneness is the reason for ours.

The previous verse highlights how that transfers to us:


"one Lord, one faith, one baptism"

This is what defines a "Christian" at it's most basic. Taking Jesus as your Lord, sharing faith in His gospel, participating in His death and resurrection. Pretty tidy. Oftentimes unity in the Body gets disturbed due to secondary issues. Actually, it almost never gets disturbed due to the challenging of the primary issues.

If you disagree with the primary issues, ones that affect salvation, there comes a point fairly quickly where you are simply not a Christian -  at that point the disturbance of the peace is warranted, as the two cannot coexist in one "body." It then becomes division from the body, not within the body. Serious, but different.

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called"

Sitting in a church service often makes it hard to imagine that you are part of one body with all believers, in one spirit with one Spirit, celebrating the same hope. When you are doing things the way you do them, it is hard to imagine being in communion at that moment with people who are doing it differenty; the charismatics down the road or the Catholics around the corner.


I love going to big youth events and seeing a large group of young Christians come together and experience that unity on a large scale. It is cool to imagine the Spiritual unity we experience when we worship each week - it is even cooler to actually see that physical unity. It really a shame that sort of thing doesn't happen more often.

Little things split churches and leave them with deep schisms that often won't heal even after those generations have passed on. Smaller breaks of unity happen all the time when individuals, families, or even small groups leave one church for another in anger. The relationship breaks based on trivial matters that often end up being forgotten within a matter of months are heart-breaking.

Now comes the responsibility born by all members of the faith to avoid such tragedy:

"Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace."

It turns out that much of the time, when people leave a church, they had been wanting to do so for a while, but the issue brought before them finally gave them a reason to do so. In that case, all your efforts at keeping unity are probably in vain - and the person doing the leaving is failing to make that effort themselves. That being said, we don't have license to simply write someone off as hopeless and give up our responsibility to continue in the effort:

"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love."

Humble? Put others first, even (especially) when you don't think they deserve it. Yeah, if everyone spent less time trying to get everything working the way they thought was best, 97%+ of the conflict in the local church would be eliminated. Get over your preferences in music style, song selection, service set up, building design, and room decor. Matters of opinion are not matters for division. One of the biggest reasons for conflict is church leaders trying to please everyone and failing to please anyone.

Gentle? That's the opposite of harsh. Using the right words and tone can make the difference in striving for unity.

Patient? Yeah, people are pretty stupid a lot of the time. That includes me. That include you. That's why we are supposed to bear with one another in love - if we weren't all bumbling idiots a significant amount of the time that wouldn't be necessary. In all reality, the times when your patience is most being tested, you are most likely to be causing the same stress on your current adversary.

We have all been called to something more than the a life of divisiveness, of making small matters into big deals. I will conclude with the words Paul used to open this passage:

"As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received."