A Day Without Volunteers

Great video from Warsaw Community Church: A Day Without Volunteers

more about "A Day Without Volunteers", posted with vodpod

The Gorilla Parable

Yesterday in a breakout session titled “Music Learning = Life Learning” Tim Lautzenheiser told this great story about our learned aversion to change:

A scientist did an experiment involving 5 gorillas in a cage.  The cage had a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling and a ladder sitting right under the bananas so the gorillas could get them.  Simple enough, but here’s the catch:  every time one of the gorillas approached the ladder, the scientist would spray all of the gorillas with cold water.

Gorillas hate being wet, and cold water is particularly uncomfortable for them.  So it didn’t take long before no gorilla would approach the ladder under any circumstance for fear of being sprayed.

Once the gorillas had given up on the bananas, the scientist exchanged one of the “trained” gorillas with one who had never been sprayed.  Predictably, when the new gorilla approached the ladder to get the bananas he was attacked by the other 4.  No water was used this time, but it didn’t take long for the newbie to learn that approaching the ladder would result in a beating.

The scientist then replaced another “trained” gorilla with another newbie, who took a similiar pounding when he approached the ladder.  The kicker this time was this:  the first newbie happily took part in the beating of the second newbie, even though he personally had never been sprayed with water.

The scientist continued to replace “trained” gorillas with newbies until the cage contained none of the original 5.  None of the current gorillas had ever been sprayed with water, and none of them ever approached the ladder for the bananas.  

And none of them knew why.

On Conferences and Jubilees

I’m in Nashville for the rest of the week, attending the Tennessee Music Educator’s Association annual conference in conjunction with the All-State band and chorus clinics.  Ostensibly I’m “chaperoning” 3 of my kids who made All-State choir this year, but that’s akin to holding my yard accountable for growing grass.  They get a cursory check-in from me just so I can confirm they’re still alive and the lawn’s not on fire.

Last year this conference saved my sanity–I was in the throes of my first semester teaching high school chorus and not certain I’d survive the experience.  Getting away from the choir room and hanging out with fellow chorus teachers (many of whom were my classmates at UT back in the day) was so helpful and so refreshing.  It refilled my hope-bucket!

It reminds me of many, many Arts Conferences at Willow Creek that kept me in the game during my worship pastor days, so much so that I have to wonder if the main value of these conferences isn’t the content so much as the environment.  Being away from what’s “normal,” whether it’s schedule- or duty-wise or simply being in a different city, may be all it takes to reset the system back to hopeful joy in the “normal” flow of life.  

It’s a sabbath, a jubilee for people who don’t normally do sabbaths or jubilees.

I miss my normal, but am still so glad to be here.  Let some other people do the teaching for two days.  Let someone else lead the worship at Powell Church on Sunday.

I will simply rest and receive.

Until Monday….

Interesting milestone for Vaguely Familiar

It’s been one of those irritating little stats that I haven’t been able to do anything about:  for as long as I’ve been keeping stats on this blog, the most popular entry is the one titled “How to Insult People.”   And it wasn’t even good.  Seth Godin had written something about how stupid Dunkin Donuts is (apparently a recurring theme for him), and I picked up the story and did a little blurb on top of his.  Nothing profound or even funny, and it shouldn’t really have done anything or gone anywhere.  Geez, it wasn’t even my idea!

Enter google.

It turned out that the trackback to Seth’s page generated enough traffic for this particular post to start scoring pretty high on google searches about “how to insult people,” and that phrase is unfourtunately searched a lot.  So this blog which I intended to be about church and leadership and incarnation and other profound things has as it’s number one post a knockoff dud with a catchy title.

Until yesterday.

The news:  yesterday the “How to Insult People” post had to bow to the new number 1:  The Smartboard.  Still not exactly what I want to be remembered for, but if the comments are any indication of value, it’s been one of the more useful online things I’ve ever done.  

Long live the king.

Asheville Meeting Recap

So this past Friday, (Aug 24) I load up the car with April and Lisa (two of my NAA downlines) and we all drive over to Asheville for a quarterly sales meeting.  There’s a reason these things come around every 3 months or so–that’s about how long it takes to start to forget what you once knew.  Things like:

• you have to change your actions in order to get different results,
• the biggest battle you face in the fight to succeed is against yourself,
• change is not comfortable or convenient, etc.

The meeting was wonderful, and I’m re-energized and re-focused again.  Here’s a smattering of powerful quotes:

Stephen Davies:  “Everybody has to do something.  If you’re going to do something, you might as well make a killing at it.”

Lou Holtz:  “The man who complains about how the ball bounces is usually the one who dropped it.”

Brandon Ellison:  “Once you start recruiting people into your team, you give up the right to be average.”

Danny Young:  “A job is something you do once and get paid for once.  Recruiting is something you do once and get paid for the rest of your life.”

Glenn Davies:  “Focus and controlling your schedule makes the difference between being a professional and being a salesman.”

Can’t wait ’til the next one!

NAA Box Score

Ok, ok, ok!  I’m going to explain the whole NAA thing soon enough, but first I wanted to point you to my newest blog:  Byron’s Box Score.  I’ll keep a running tally of how I’m doing with my new career there.  It’s not very good prose, but the numbers don’t lie!

Another good reason to not try your church

Here’s the text of a billboard we saw last Friday on I75 heading south to Bowdon, GA:

"If you love me, you will obey what I command."

Biblically, the Sabbath day is Saturday.

It’s shorthand for a longer theological proof that goes like this:

Truth #1:  Jesus said, "If you love me, you will obey what I command."

Truth #2:  Jesus is God.

Truth #3:  God commanded his people to rest on the 7th day of the week.

Conclusion:  People who don’t go to church on Saturday don’t love Jesus.

There is so much to say about this and so many fun directions to go from here, but I’ll restrict this post to this scenario:  suppose you have, say, a thousand dollars and can rent a billboard on I-75 for 3 months to do some promo for your church or denomination.  You’ll have at most 20 seconds of attention from anyone who happens to glance at the billboard in order to tell them what they need to know about you. 

What’s your message?  And who’s your audience?

If you’re confused about the answer to the second question, you’re going to screw up the answer to the first question in a major way.  If you are really trying to invite people outside your group to join you, the opening line in your invitation cannot be "First off, we’re more biblical than you."

What a waste of time and real estate.

TTATB4: Baptism

Ok–see the disclaimer in my “About” section before you get too far into this post…

I had a long talk with one of my favorite _______ college students at church yesterday.  She had reneged on her plan to be baptized last week and wanted to explain herself to a staff member.  Figuring I would be the least disappointed of the staff members, she talked to me.

I am more honored by her than I can say, but that’s for another post.

Here’s her story:  my friend was baptized as an infant in the Presbyterian church, raised in the knowledge of the Lord, and has been a vital part of ______’s College Ministry since coming to Knoxville to attend UT.  She was part of my team during last year’s Trinidad trip (see my post about the trip here) and is a tireless laborer who has been caught up with “missions fever.”

She agreed to be baptized in the first place because she wanted to participate in the Southern Baptist Journeyman program (a two-year overseas missions commitment).  To participate in any SBC missions program, she has to be a member of an SBC church, and to be a member on an SBC church, she has to be “properly” baptized.

But here’s the kicker:  in order to be “properly” baptized she has to break her parents’ hearts by embracing a conceptualization of baptism that sometimes implicitly and often explicitly denigrates other forms and practices as unbiblical and illegitimate.  You see, it’s never been enough for Baptists to simply say, “We’re going to practice the ritual this way because this reflects our best (albiet flawed) current understanding of the intent of scripture.”  Baptists compulsively extend their opinions to positions of exclusivity:  “We’re going to practice the ritual this way because we’re being ‘biblical.’  If you don’t do it like we do, you must not be as ‘biblical’ as we are.  Your experience is deficient, and must be corrected.”

Resistance is futile.  Prepare to be assimilated.

She’s almost willing to jump through the hoop just so that she can do the Journeyman thing, but she’s not willing to reject and spit upon an event in her spiritual journey that has loads of legitimate meaning for her and for her family.  She’s catching it from authority figures at ________ and from her peers imploring her to obey the “clear command of Christ to be baptized.”  But when it came down to it, she said “no, thank you.”

And she’s right.  I’m very proud of her.  I’m not a little angry at the position into which she’s been put.

It’s happened a couple of times now, where a baptismal candidate at _______ will be filming his or her testimony video and will answer the “Why do you want to be baptized?” question with some form of “I’m being baptized because the bible says that’s what Christians are supposed to do.”  I always have to resist the urge to stop the taping at that point and ask the candidate to either come up with a better reason or come back later when they’ve figured it out and really want to do it.  “I’m doing this because I’m supposed to” is not exactly inspirational or motivational.  Or even biblical, for that matter.

So here’s my Baptism Manifesto:

1. Churches are free to define their membership however they want to.  If a church wants her inductees to sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in Pig Latin in front of the membership and charge them a monthly service fee, then they have that right.  Asking someone to be baptized in order to be a church member is not out of order.  Insisting that someone be baptized in order to be considered an obedient follower of Jesus is out of order in the most obnoxious way.
2. Jesus’ commands for his disciples are two:  Love God and love your neighbor.  Nowhere does Jesus command converts to be baptized.  Read the Great Commission again slowly a couple of times, and you’ll see that if anything, his instruction is directed at his current followers, not the newbies they would convert (“go and baptize” is different from “be baptized”).  Even then, it’s debatable whether or not Jesus even had a water purification ceremony in mind when he said, “make disciples, immersing them into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
3. Water purification ceremonies have different meanings at different times and contexts.  John the Baptiser used the ceremony for people repenting of sin.  The Jews used the ceremony to signify the ending of a woman’s menstration period.  Some Christians use the ceremony to signify the parent’s intent to raise their child in the knowledge of the Lord.  Other Christians use the ceremony to mark a convert’s decision to follow Christ.
4. Infant baptism is a different ritual than is believer’s baptism.  The two rituals are intended to accomplish two different things.  Both rituals are legitimate ways to express different legitimate realities.  No one should have to reject one in order to embrace the other.  Why can’t we have both expressions in the same church?  Why not embrace and incorporate the best of our traditions?
5. Arguments about what “counts” in baptism are stupid, because God isn’t counting.

[Update]  Some have asked about the “TTATB” acronym–it stands for “The Thing About The Baptists.”  It’s a series of posts about things that drive me crazy about Baptists.  My therapist friend would probably call the series a passive-aggressive attempt at getting myself fired, but he likes to say provocative things like that to get me going.  Here are the links to the posts:  TTATB1, TTATB2, TTATB2 redux, and TTATB3. 

Consensus and Those Who Matter

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.  If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.  Margaret Thatcher

Our new programming process and team has done an excellent job of raising the bar for what happens during our worship times, and especially so when it comes to how we kick off the service.  Two Sundays ago we opened the service with a candlelight choral processional on “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” to set up the Hope Advent candle lighting, and last Sunday we opened with a sketch of a couple in conflict paired with the spiritual “Give Me Jesus” to set up the Peace Advent candle lighting.  Our teams have worked hard producing these moments, and have done well.

The kicker is that a significant number of worship attendees at _______ are happy to enter the auditorium on their schedule and wrap up their conversation similiarly.  It’s not unusual for people to continue their conversation in the aisle throughout the first congregational song, and the noise from the lobby is distracting at best and disruptive at worst.

The solution I’ve landed on is to have the ushers close the doors at the agreed-upon start time and bar admittance until the congregation is standing and well into the first song.  It works wonderfully, as the absence of lobby noise functions as yet another sensory cue (along with a house lighting change, the big “zero” on the countdown video, and the guy on the stage praying out loud in the microphone) to congregants that “we’re starting now.”  We don’t do it all the time, just when we have an element like a processional or a drama or a solo that requires it.

And so this past Sunday we got some significant pushback and advice from people whose laudable goal is to not cause distress to anyone.  Loud, animated pushback and advice as if we disagreed with them because we couldn’t hear or understand what they were saying.

It’s easy to build consensus around the idea that anyone should be able to enter a worship service whenever they want to, because the value behind that practice is “we want to see more people in worship.”  Who would oppose that?

It’s not easy to sell the idea that

• sometimes better worship is more important than more worshipers.
• congregational worship is to be a transformational experience that costs the worshiper instead of a product to be consumed by the worshiper for the worshiper’s pleasure and gratification.
• boundaries make us better people, that a “no” is an opportunity for personal growth.
• congregational worship is not the prelude to the sermon, to be missed at whim.  It is itself a mode of discipleship that does not require a sermon for legitimacy.
• how one comes to worship is more important than whether one comes to worship.

The person who is caught on the wrong side of a closed auditorium door can react in one of two ways:

1. “Well, dang it.  I was late and missed it.  My bad.  I’ll make some adjustments and get here early next time,” or
2. “Well, dang them.  Who do they think they are, shutting me out?”

A disciple is a learner, open not only to change but to being changed.  A consumer is a critic, willing to withhold participation if the product doesn’t suit.  If our mission is to make disciples, we will program for the disciple, not the consumer.

Or as Dr. Seuss said, “…those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”