My favorite song on youtube

I can't get enough of this song. The album comes out March 3rd.

Have a great year!

The future of pastoral leadership

discernment for top down leaders means being wise when someone needs your expert advice and giving them good answers.

discernment for the rest of us means being wise when it comes to if we answer at all.

giving an answer, making a call, setting a course, giving advice are often (mostly?) the role of the expert. Pastors, Youth Pastors, and church leaders want to be experts. In a culture that is infatuated with experts, not being an expert is hard. because it means we stop playing the expert. It means we stop giving answers. It means we stop giving advice. It means we stop receiving the responsibility that God has given others. The responsibility that they are often trying to hand us. To find an answer, to spiritually form a child, to give then "the answer" to their problem.

Most pastors feel it's their role to hold their hands out and take these burdens off of the shoulders of others. However, by doing so, we create and enable a barrier between who they are and who they are to be.

Instead of reaching out. The best leadership is discerning when to put your hands in your pockets and refuse to take the responsibilities that belong to others. Of course this can be done beautifully, it's something of an art.

The best leaders in the future will not be known by their will, advice, or problem solving. They will be known by the quality of their questions.

Have you talked to you kids about this yet?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

You have my attention

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Now I've seen everything

My Beloved's Garden is a Christian sex toy store.

At My Beloved's Garden, we provide a safe non-pornographic place to shop for all your Christian sex toys and romance needs, while keeping Christ at the center of your marriage.

(thanks to Len Sweet for passing this on to me via twitter)

Refuse to Lead

What Pete is saying here, I believe is the way in which we will move to more healthy churches in the Western world. This is what my next book proposal will deal significantly with. This is the nature of Church B. This is the nature of leadership, refusing to enable citizens of the kingdom to give away their responsibility as citizens by leading.
There's way more to this, but this is a good snippet I came across today.

Here's the video.. what do you think?

For my Fisherman Friends!

Citizens of the Kingdom

A couple thoughts from Peter Block in his book Community that I think will be helpful. (Peter's a consult for businesses and as far as I know is not a believer. I say this because I'm fascinated by a business guy who writes a book named "community".)

He's language is citizen. and the goal or him is citizenship. (If you'd prefer you can exchange it for disciple)

A citizen is one who is willing to do the following:
+ Hold oneself accountable for the well-being of the larger collective of which we are a part.
+Choose to own and excercise power rather than defer or delegate it to others.
+Enter into a collective possibility that gives hospitable and restorative community its sense of being.
+Acknowledge that community grows out of the possibility of citizens. Community is build not by specialized expertise, or great leadership, or improved services; it is built by citizens.
+Attend to the gifts and capacities of all others, and act to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center.
(Peter Block, Community page 65)

This is going to take some time to process frankly, but our goal would be to function as pastor who enables an environment in which citizens (disciples) can happen.

What do you think?

Inside the Mind of Youth Pastors - NOW AVAILABLE!

Hey friends,
I just wanted you to know that my first book, "Inside the Mind of Youth Pastors" is now available online at Amazon.com!

My hope is that this will be a book that helps church leaders develop healthy, sustainable youth ministries within their communities.

If you want, join the facebook discussion group, or find out more into at MarkRiddle.net.

I look forward to hearing what you think of it!
My prayer is that it will make a difference for the kingdom of God.
We'll see.

Penn (of Penn and Teller) on evangelism

Penn seems like a smart guy. I'm fairly certain he is based on the seeing him speak on tv or interact with people. I can't tell you how great this video is. You really need to watch it. Things that stood out to me was his description of the man who gave him a bible and his line "How much do you have to hate someone not to proselytize?"
What do you think?

Penn reminds me of several friends I have. I'd love to hear more of his story (from him, please don't email any links) and hear more about where he's coming from.




(thanks to Ed)

What I think about when I think of Christmas

This kid is terrified of puppets

(thanks to Michael)

Not Sure what to do with this

Mankind is no island

(thanks to Jim)

Following the Bible or Following Jesus

My friend Wade has some thoughts:

Link

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Jesus means in Matthew 5:17-20. He calls his disciples to a righteousness that surpasses that of the Pharisees.

How is this possible?

I think it’s possible by following Jesus and his interpretation of Scripture as articulated through is words and embodied by his deeds.

What is the difference between a disciple of Christ and a Pharisee? A disciple follows Jesus as He embodies the ultimate intent of scripture. A Pharisee follows scripture without following Jesus. The difference between the two is massive.

We can take scripture so seriously that we miss Jesus. That’s what the Pharisees did. But if we take Jesus seriously, we will also take scripture seriously in the way that God intends for it to be taken seriously.

I was talking to a church leader recently about what kind of church he leads, how they operate, their philosophy of ministry, etc. He said, “We keep it simple, we follow the Bible.”

I understand what he means by that, but I wonder if it ultimately points us in the wrong direction?

Are we called to follow the Bible or are we called to follow Jesus? If we follow Jesus, he will teach us how to read the Bible the way God wants the Bible to be read. If we take the bible more seriously than Jesus, our desire to follow the Bible will land us in the same pit with the Pharisees.

Genetically test children for sports aptitudes

Unbelievable.

When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 ½-year-old son, Noah, she instantly said, Where can I get it and how much does it cost?

"I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it's good to match them with the right activity," Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor Soccer in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between juice and potty breaks.

"I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration," she said.

In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child's natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child's cheek and along the gums to collect DNA and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome.

Link here

(Thanks to Bevan)

Prediction

There are a lot of churches (I'll call them church 3.0) who developed a significant portion of their understanding for ministry based on youth ministry 18-15 years ago. These leaders may not have personally been involved in youth ministry, but they are smart folks, who planted church (mostly in the last 10 years). They are the people on the stages of most church conferences we see today. They are great leaders. My impression is that they are incredibly intuitive and adaptive. (a characteristic youth ministry of the 80-90's taught us) and are top down leaders. Like youth ministry of ol' was (see youth ministry 2.0).

Did you ever walk into one of these Church 3.0 churches and think, wow, this is like a big youth ministry, only done better with more money invested.

But my prediction is, that these churches built on old youth ministry models wills struggle with modern youth ministry almost exclusively because of the leadership style of the church.

Churches who have a high "command and control" systems will struggle the next 10 years because their command and control system will only have limited results. It will be interesting to see if they notice, because it may be that numbers are the last thing to go for them.

Of course these churches will say, that they are young and need to grow into youth ministry. This is why I imagine there's not a lot of talk about youth ministry at conferences like catalyst etc. (tell me if I'm wrong).

These churches over the next 3 years will have a come to jesus experience because they are smart folks. They plan ahead. Their children's ministries are the talk of the country. They sell their children's stuff. They have children's conferences. or new children's buildings "theme" by professionals.

But this will not work for youth ministry. You can't do youth ministry for the future in this way.

What do you think?
I'm totally shooting from the hip.
I'm open to being wrong.

Advent and Suburban life - For Eikon

This is for my friends within eikon and who I hope we will be and remember. The rest of you all are welcome to comment and provide your thoughts as well.

The suburban life I live is not normal. Most people don't live like this. But as a suburban person I see myself needing to resist the constant gravitational pull of believing that the way i live everyday is the only and best way to live.

It is not, on both counts.

I must also fight against the constant pull to look down on others in some capacity because they are unlike me. They don't live in a house, in the burbs. They don't dress like me, or share my preferences about grooming, how to spend their money, or their time.

I assume this kind of thinking happens in other neighborhoods as well. they talk about me, or my neighborhood.

This is flawed thinking from us all. The self-proclaimed redneck, the suburban soccer mom, and the hip urban dweller have more in common than we;d like to think.

Arrogance is at the core and an inability to be compassionate toward others is the issue. If we are unable to see the world through the eyes of another, we are doomed to isolation in our little ackwardly and perhaps sinfully separated neighborhood.

Until myself, and my friends in the suburbs are able to understand the details of the pain and humiliation of others, we will fail to live out the kingdom of God in the world in the ways we are called to.

Surely the homeless man feels differently than I do. He somehow deserves it, the thinking goes. He or she suffering on the street from mental illness, or a bad break, or bad choices is somehow acceptable to us.

Did I just write that? Tell me it's not true. That it's acceptable that people suffer. that we simply write off people as being different than we are.

My friends we will understand the heart of God when we engage the pain and suffering of others. Until then, we are holding tightly to something else. Something other than the gospel. Until then we will always be able to write them off as homeless, prostitutes, exotic dancers, trailer trash, alcoholics, druggies, unbelievers, homos, cut-throat corporate executives, or senior pastors.

Advent is about Jesus coming and engaging in our pain, humiliation and suffering. It is the way of Jesus to live this way.

May we be a people who become sensitive to the reality of others.

Update: Just for clarification. I believe that Eikon does this better than any other community than I've ever been a part of, but it's something I need to remind myself of and hope we can keep before us.

Ice Cream and other things

Growing up I liked vanilla ice cream. I absolutely did NOT like chocolate. At some point in my child-size brain, I devoted a deep resistance to chocolate ice cream. At a birthday party with other kids, only chocolate ice cream? No thanks, I'll go without.

It wasn't until after college, that I tried chocolate ice cream again. 20 years of not eating chocolate ice cream. Still I rarely eat it.

Today I scooped myself a dip of vanilla / chocolate ice cream.

And I felt resistance. I kid you not. Something in my mind told me not to eat it. That I don't like chocolate ice cream.

It makes me wonder...

What other things did I decided as a child do I still believe today?

I will call you Twitchy

Artist Daito Manabe uses electric stimulus to move his face to the beat of a song:


(thanks to Andrew)

Dear Mr. Obama (part 2)

I get emails from you and your people. I signed up for them. I appreciate your willingness to embrace technology to communicate with the country in which you will be leading. It will be interesting to see over the coming four years how well you are able to use technology etc to connect the american people to engage as citizens. That's not why I'm writing this though.

Today I got two emails. The subject lines stood out to me.

First "National Security announcement from Barack" in which you detail your new team.
Second "Your Obama Holiday Mug" in which you pimp your swag.

It's a little creepy to get both of those back to back within hours of each other.

Just thought you might want to know it comes across odd that you are telling the team of people who are going to protect us all and be our representatives for a key relationship with other countries, friends and enemies. then asking me to send you $15 bucks for a coffee mug.

I guess this proves you believe in capitalism after all, regardless of what your critics say.

An unbelievable proposal

My buddy Brandon put this on his blog. His buddy proposed to his girlfriend. Pretty much how I proposed to Pam 16 years ago. (not quite)

Quote for the day

I know it has been discussed frequently these days, so it's not new information, but I continue to be captured by the idea that YHWH is identified with designations such as "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" and "the God who brought you up out of Egypt." YHWH reveals himself by relation to people and creative/redemptive events, both of which imply that an understanding and knowledge of the story of those persons and events are necessary for grasping the revelation, message, and identity--the story--of God. Even when the Scriptures contain law or teaching, the foundation is always based on the context of a surrounding narrative, even when that narrative is not explicitly described (such as in the letters of Paul). When we choose to approach the revelation of God removed from this "story context"--such as simply focusing on "what Paul said", for example--we also choose to ignore the "how, what, and why" of God's message and its resultant contemporary implications for faithfully living out God's revelation today.
-Jimmy Doyle

Link