blogging + conference = blogference #cccbf

today marks the beginning of what i believe is the second annual blogference.  started last year by brian barela a staff member of campus crusade at chico state university in california.  brian started this as a means to develop conversation and discussion about ministry between people who desire to see the great commission seen through to the end. (hopefully all people who call themselves believers fall into this category)

similar to a regular conference the blogference consists of several “speakers” who each prepare basically a talk in the form of a blog post.  they range in size but they are all designed in order to help generate ideas, questions, and in general discussion within those who read the posts.  The posts go live at various times during the day and (at least this year) are broken down into 5 different topics.

• evangelistic engagement
• get better at college ministry by learning & sharing w/ others
• mom’s/wives/women in ministry
• self-directed leadership development
• social media and ministry

by clicking on the above you’ll be taken to posts dealing with that topic.  i would highly encourage you to check them out and please comment on them.  share your ideas, insight, encouragement, constructive criticism, and experience.  this isn’t by any means limited to those who chose vocational ministry as their career path but can be used by anyone.

anyway, today (april 13th) through thursday (april 15th) but i’m sure that discussion will continue much longer than that.  please check things out.  below is a video of brian explaining a bit about the heart of the blogference.

thought questions (part 2 of many)

so on friday (4/9) i asked two questions that were posed to me and asked your feedback on them… what you thought about the statements and how you would finish them.  the questions (statements) were:

• paul said to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” and when i think about asking someone to follow me as i follow Christ, i ….

• leadership is ….

thus far i haven’t received any comments yet (and i know at least 14 people read the post) so hopefully today is the day that some back and forth might be generated from this site.  so here goes…

Q: paul said to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” and when i think about asking someone to follow me as i follow Christ, i ….

A: … am terrified.  i think this almost goes without saying.  i one small group i’m in this is something that we actually talk about quite a bit.  i feel like when ever i ask myself this all i really end up dwelling on is how poorly i’m doing in the area of following Christ and i’m sure i’m not alone in this.  i feel like it’s really easy to get bogged down in failure and regret.  the bright side is that in Christ we’re set free from that.  before paul asks the corinthians to “be imitators of me, as i am of Christ” in 1 corinthians 11:1 in 1 corinthians 6 paul says:

“or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers… nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

i don’t know about you but that pretty much counts me out.  but thank God he doesn’t stop there.  paul continues:

“and such were some of you.  but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

great news if you ask me.  so when i think about calling guys to follow me as i follow Christ i know that i’m going to blow it along the way.  one of the coolest things i’ve seen though is that it’s in those moments of failure on my part that are probably some of the best teaching moments for them.  when they see someone they respect fail it’s going to effect them, and if they saw me fail and then self-destruct what are they going to walk away with?  but what if they see you fail and immediately turn to the God of the universe?  that’s going to speak greater volumes than any sort of hour long discipleship appointment you could ever have with them.  when they see you walking with God, when they see you stumble along the way, they’re going to get a vision for what this looks like going the distance.  because for me that’s what i’m calling my guys to do, to walk with God for a lifetime.

Q: leadership is…

A: …intimidating …hard …sometimes overwhelming …a big responsibility …fun  wait did i really put fun?  absolutely!  leadership to me always seemed like it was over my head.  i’ve really felt so unequiped that i would do anything i could to shirk leadership responsibility.  thorough college i saw leadership as another line on my resume, something that was one day going to land me that corner office, but always something that intimidated me.  someone’s going to look to me for guidance, for direction, or to make some sort of decision?  me?  really?  but the closer i read the gospels (matthew, mark, luke, and john) i really saw how Jesus took these untrained and uneducated men and turned them into basically the entire leadership of the church after he left.  the reason we have heard the name Jesus and have the Bible that we have in our possession today was left up to some fishermen, a tax collector, and a couple other guys.  someone who i respect alot rececently said to me in an e-mail that being a good leader really requires you to be a strong follower.  “to lead and lead well you must follow the Lord’s will and trust in the Holy Spirit to communicate in and through you to motivate and encourage others to follow and do the same.”  which is why i really think these two statements are really closely related.  so why did i say fun?  leadership is fun because it really puts you out there, you have to really be vulnerable in order to be a good leader.  so you’re probably still wondering where the fun comes in.  well for me this has meant getting personal with someone on a whole new level.  a level where as a borderline genius i know says it in a house illustration as “living with the walls down and the roof off.”  where you’re living with “the walls down” in that the people around you don’t see this face that you hide behind and can see the real you and living with “the roof off” in that there’s nothing you’re trying to hide from God.  it’s in these type of relationships that you really can get to know someone and viceversa.  that’s where the fun comes in, yeah it’s a risk but is anything worth having at least a little risky?

so there you have it, that’s how i’d finish those statements.  what about you?  how do you feel about paul’s call to us?  what is leadership to you?  you defiantly don’t have to write as much as i did. (as you can tell i ramble sometimes) but i’d love to hear your ideas as well as what you think about what i wrote.  thanks

thought questions (part 1 of alot)

so i’ve been putting this off a while but in order to keep things fresh around here and hopefully get a little dialog going, finish the following sentences in a comment below.  i’m doing the same thing and monday (4/12)  i’ll post what i come up with and i think it would be fun to talk through what we come up with.  plus this will keep me accountable in actually doing it.  let’s get to work.

• paul said to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” and when i think about asking someone to follow me as i follow Christ, i ….

• leadership is ….

guilty pleasure or complete waste of time…

alright so i’m a little ashamed to admit it but over the last couple days i’ve been nearly addicted to flickchart.com so i figured i’d share in my weakness or whatever.  flickchart is a website that pits two movies together and then from several (hundred) of these one on one showdowns it gives you a top 20 (50, 100, 200) of your favorite movies.  it takes some serious consideration because on one side who want’s to pit empire strikes back against raiders of the lost ark?  but on the other side sometimes it’s hard trying to figure out which was the crappier movie star wars episode 2 attack of the clones or men in black 2?  anyway just some mindless fun for you if you’ve got time to kill and are waiting for water to boil or something.  flickchart also keeps embarrassing info about you and the movies you rate.  for example based on the movies i’ve rated (426 movies) i’ve sat in front of a movie screen for a total of 31 days, 5 hours, 12 minutes.  so yeah that kinda sucks.  anyway enjoy flickchart and feel free to look me up on there.

the topaz’s final journey

a white easter

the leopard vs the leper

so in church saturday night we were singing “Jesus paid it all” and in the song is the lyric “Lord now indeed i find, thy power, and thine alone, can change the leper’s spots…” (1:28 in the video) and i realized that up to this point in my life i had always sang it “can change the leopard’s spots…” you know a leopard… bit cat covered in black spots, can run really fast, the print of which can make even the most manly of men look like a dork, or ‘panther padres’ to those who know scientific animal jargon. it just always made sense to me, you can’t change the spots on a leopard… they’re genetic. but at the same time, leprosy, in Bible times at least, was an incurable disease, an instant death sentence… much like getting bit by a zombie in almost any zombie movie. so i had to get to the bottom of things… who was right, me (being pro cat thing) or elvina hall (the person who wrote the lyrics to “Jesus paid it all”)

so my first, and last, stop was to go to the source of all knowledge, google. i had remembered something in the old testament about one or the other (the cat or the disease, i couldn’t really remember which) so i did a handy dandy google search, and being bias and whatnot of corse i search changing a leopard’s spots first. and i was right… in jeremiah 13:23 it says:

can the ethiopian change his skin
or the leopard his spots?
then also you can do good
who are accustomed to do evil.

there i had my proof. me 1, miss hall 0. the Bible wasn’t talking about a skin disease it was talking about the panther padres, the smallest of the “big cat” animal family. but to be fair i proceeded to google about changing leper’s spots and found this. in luke 4 Jesus is officially beginning his ministry and he starts by causing a stir at his local synagogue. Jesus read’s a section of scripture from isaiah which really turned some heads. he goes on to talk about things that occurred during the old testament including the mention that at the time there had been zero healing of leprosy save for one. naaman was the only person up to that point who had ever been healed of the disease and he wasn’t even a decedent of israel.

so as i pondered this and what the late miss hall had written about in her song it really hit me. we’re both right. jeremiah was speaking about our inherent desire to do evil. like it or not we are all morally corrupt people. we’ve all blown it at least once and deep down inside there’s something that just desires doing wrong. so is that it? are we all just doomed to do evil? thankfully no but jeremiah compared this inward desire for wrong doing to that of both an ethiopian being unable to change their skin color and a leopard being unable to change his spots, no matter how hard he scratches. all of the above are genetic. from our skin color (or spots in the big cat’s case) to our desire to do wrong, they all come from up the genetic gene pool, and for us that goes all the way to the top. our first parents sinned against God; they wrongly thought that they could live life on their own, in effect functioning as their own gods. because of this we’re separated from the living God, death entered paradise, and with it arrived such things as murder, war, oppression, and door to door vacuum salesmen. (it’s ok i can make fun of that, i did it for two weeks) and just like how the leopard can’t change his spots and the leper was unable to cleanse himself of his disease, we are unable to cleanse ourselves of the hold of this sin in our life… at least not by ourselves. this is where Jesus stepped in… Jesus has both the ability to heal people of leprosy and other diseases but he also has the power to forgive sins.

so as i was able to think through this it really made me grateful that JC’s working in me to stomp out the desire to do wrong… and also thankful that i don’t suffer from a skin eating virus… like this guy.

what do you think?

the things we take for granted…

so in working on a new post for tomorrow i figured i’d share something that matt shared with us during staff meeting.  i don’t know if i’ve ever laughter at a youtube video so hard or watched something so many times.  enjoy and thanks matt.

Stolen from some great blog

ok i saw this earlier this morning and then saw that jon acuff over at http://www.stuffchristianslike.net had beaten me to posting about it… so i just decided to just steal his post.  thanks jon

It is impossible to dislike Justin Timberlake.

Mar 24th by Jon

// ShareThis

This has very little to do with anything else except that it’s funny and this site is about funny things. Justin Timberlake had to cancel a hosting of Saturday Night Live. So, to make up for it, he showed up and did the entire show in 2 minutes. Brilliant stuff. There’s a quick NBC commercial at the beginning but what follows is one of the most creative things I’ve seen in a long time. Check out the video after the jump:

LINK (apparently i can’t get the video to embed so here’s the link.)

1 corinthians 9:24-27