2012 Top 5 Lists

Music

The Most and Simple Life by Tyrone Wells. We have a 1a and 1b situation…The Most describes the first half of our year and finding healing in the midst of deeply personal tragedy, and Simple Life is where you land on the other side of that healing. Great songs by our new friend! Killer lyric: how do you start again, when the whole world ends, there’s nothing that makes this right, but I’m on my way tonight, I’ll be here, when you need me the most (The Most)
Handwritten by The Gaslight Anthem. My favorite band of the past couple of years. This whole album is about how we connect through music and this song is the best example of that in my mind. Killer Lyric: Pull it out, turn it up, what’s your favorite song? That’s mine, I’ve been crying to it since I was young, I know there’s someone out there feeling just like I feel, I know they’re waiting up, I know they’re waiting to heal.
Below My Feet by Mumford & Sons. The new album was everything one could hope for in a follow-up to “Sigh No More.” Big, anthemic, and slightly darker, Mumford proves they are not a passing fad. Killer lyric: Keep the earth below my feet, From my sweat my blood runs weak, Let me learn from where I have been, keep my eyes to serve, my hands to learn.
Born and Raised by John Mayer. Mayer had almost completely fallen from the graces of the music cognoscenti…to the point where he was essentially a punch line. Many may still feel this way (especially now that he is dating Katy Perry), but I dare you to listen to this album and not feel the pain of someone who has screwed up royally and who is looking for redemption. Here’s the secret music snobs: it’s really good. Killer Lyric: So line on up, and take your place, And show your face to the morning, Cause one of these days you’ll be born and raised, And it all comes on without warning
Give Us Rest (the whole album) by the David Crowder Band. This was it…the swan song, the finale for my favorite “christian” artist, and they didn’t hold anything back. Too many great moments to name here, but I think my favorite tune is “Our Communion.” Killer lyric: all of them.

Books (required)

Simply Christian by NT Wright. Wright continues to prove that he is the most helpful scholar for the layman around right now. Simply outstanding.
The Road Trip That Changed The World by Mark Sayers. The first half of this book was so good, such great cultural exegesis, that I said out loud, to anyone listening: “this is the most interesting book I’ve read in years.” The second half (more conclusions than descriptions of the problem) were good, but not great and certainly not up to par with the first half. A fascinating read nonetheless.
Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel. I picked this book up because I thought it might be helpful for another guy on staff. I think it was, but it definitely made me think too. A lot of this book was a repeat of what you can find in many other “emergent” reads, but his emphasis on listening to your life and trusting your gut as a leader was challenging and affirming.
The Anxious Christian by Rhett Smith. This is more than a “hey you struggle with this, here are some tips” book. Rhett tells us his story, which is pretty powerful, and then weaves several biblical texts into the mix to show how anxiety (really tensions of all sorts) can lead us to new places in life and faith.
Emergence Christianity by Phyllis Tickle. This works builds on a previous book, The Great Emergence (which I would recommend over this title), and helps shed some light on the various expressions of Christian faith popping up around the world. If you care about where the church might be headed in the next 20-30 years you should read this book.

Book (non-required):

Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry. This is the hardest top 5 list I’ve made in a while. Most of the compelling reads for me this year fall into this category. Barry wins for making an extremely boring, and unimportant, baseball game absolutely fascinating and thrilling. Joe Morgan (not that Joe Morgan) became one of my all-time favorite leaders because of this book.
Life by Keith Richards. Richards is crazy. We knew that already. But what surprised me about his story (much in the same way Ozzy Osbourne’s autobio surprised me) is just how grounded he became once he found himself in a stable marriage. Like Ozzy, Keith’s marriage literally saved his life. I find that endlessly interesting.
Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Another book with leadership lessons in abundance. And another book that demonstrates the importance of a strong and stable marriage. Riveting, you won’t be able to put this one down.
Quiet by Susan Cain. Quiet made a lot of “best of” lists this year, and for good reason. Her argument is lucid and well-researched. I, personally, found the book to be very affirming and illuminating of some of my frustrations with our extravert-tilted world. I continue to search for the restorative niche.
My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe. Funny and touching with great insights into race and class dynamics, this book is another in the same theme: leadership principles from unlikely sources.

If you’d like to see my previous lists check them out here: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.

Why You Should Care About Collegiate Ministry

Final reflection piece for the year. Will have another marina pic and some top 5 lists, but regular blogging won’t happen again until 2013.

This post reflects a little bit of my journey over the past year…I wholeheartedly believe in the work we are doing here in Boston: here’s why…

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Confession: a pet peeve of mine is the minimizing of the importance of collegiate ministry. Our field has not always done a great job advertising our awesomeness (probably because campus ministers are too busy to do marketing). But, in my lower moments, I find the misunderstandings of our work to be aggravating.

Some look at college ministry as intellectual youth ministry. Others dismiss it as a mere “life-stage” ministry. Some deride it as an unhelpful “parachurch” organism/parasite. I get asked about once a month: “so when are you going to become a ‘real’ pastor.”

There are many people who get it and who invest in it and who think what we are doing is important. And that is beautiful. But the misunderstandings still drive me crazy.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to hang with people from other ministries all over the world. When I asked them to tell me the story about how they got interested and inspired to do their work they all started with this:

“When I was in college…”

That phrase has been difficult to get out of mind over the last several weeks.

Collegiate ministry may not be directly addressing poverty, or dirty water, or whatever other issue or cause you might care about, BUT it will have an impact on all of those things.

If you care about the fact that church attendance is declining rapidly in the remerging generation you should care deeply about collegiate ministry.

If you care about issues of class and race and poverty that affect our cities and the education of our young people you should care deeply about collegiate ministry.

If you care about global missions you should care about collegiate ministry (for two reasons: US students will be called at this point in their lives to go abroad and international students studying in the US will take the good news of Jesus back with them).

If you care about sex-trafficking, human slavery, and other rights-based issues you should care about collegiate ministry.

If you care about the direction of technological advancement, research, medical and scientific developments, and the progression of philosophical thought and practice you should care about collegiate ministry.

If you care about politics you should care about collegiate ministry.

And, at the risk of exploiting current events, if you care about the deep, deep brokenness in our country you should care deeply about collegiate ministry.

I had the opportunity to meet with some Boston University officials at the end of the Spring semester and they revealed a startling development:

During that semester the school, for the first time that anyone could remember, made more hospital calls for students struggling with mental health issues than for alcohol related incidents.

Among emerging adults there is a profound crisis centering around questions of meaning and being.

The shootings in Newtown and other communities are the extreme expressions of a culture that is failing miserably to answer these questions in any kind of meaningful way.

We don’t know how to talk about truly significant things like evil, life, and ultimate meaning.

Most of the people (men? boys?) committing these unthinkable shootings are between the ages of 18 and 25.

Over the next couple of weeks and months we will hear about gun control and mental health reform, and both are important and needed conversations.

But, neither get to the heart of the issue. President Obama got us there for a moment in his speech on Sunday when he asked: “Why are we here?”

This question and other questions of meaning and being (what is a human? what does it mean to be human? is there purpose and meaning and importance to life and the universe? etc, etc) are at the center of our national crisis, a crisis that impacts our young people (specifically college aged students) more than anyone.

And if you care about this, if you care about how we answer and will answer these questions as a nation and a culture, then you should care deeply and passionately about collegiate ministry.

The Gospel According To Brady Quinn

Before reading this post, click here and watch the video on the page (also read the quote by William Deresiewicz, it is excellent).

It is rare to see a professional athlete (or any public figure) quite this candid. And I think what Brady Quinn has to say is important as well as profound.

I ride public transportation every day and there are times, more often than not, where every single person in my train car is flipping their way through a phone or an iPad.

I am not anti-tech, I am not anti-iphones, I’m not anti-facebook. I think these are mainly presenting issues of a deeper problem.

More and more I realize how profoundly messed up most people’s experience of family has been, and how poor we are as a culture at understanding community.

We live in a me-first, achievement driven, I-get-the-last-word-on-my-life world. Families, healthy ones anyway, don’t work like that. Healthy families work on a group first, team focused, someone-else-gets-the-last-word ethos.

Which brings me back to Quinn’s thoughts. We need to be better at actually caring for people…at asking hard questions of each other…at expecting hard questions to be asked of us (and looking for someone to do so if we don’t have that in place)…at submitting…at being a part of a group (at the expense of our own personal gain or comfort)…at considering others more important than ourselves.

I will never forget a conversation I once had with a student. They told me they needed me to give them 1,000,000 bits of positive feedback for every 1 bit of “criticism.” There’s a truth there: we need more positive affirmation than negative.

But there is an underlying current of avoidance of hard stuff in our culture: hard conversations, hard truth, hard work. I know this makes me sound like an old man, but I think it is true, and I think this lies at the heart of Quinn’s post-game thoughts.

Which leads me to a final thought: the best things in life always come through working through something hard. Grace is a free gift, and that is beautiful, but the working out of our salvation is not an easy job. It is a worthwhile fight…a difficult effort, a long obedience, that is truly good in every sense of the word.

I’ll end with this from Norman MacLean (author of “A River Runs Through It”): “All good things come by grace and grace comes through art and art does not come easy.”

Pray to Stay Awake

Over the years I have had times where it has been difficult to fall asleep. Not full on insomnia, but definitely long nights laying in bed wishing I was sleeping.

I prayed to help me fall asleep. Not because I am super spiritual and wanted to redeem the time. No, praying actually lulled me to sleep. Which has always made feel sort of bad.

But now I get up in the middle of night, every night, and sometimes I’m up for a while. My daughter seems to fall asleep best when she is walked. I walk around the house with her for 20-30 minutes until she is succumbs to deep slumber.

And I pray during those walks. Ironically, because it helps me stay awake now.

But also I sense the need to pray more regardless of sleep or no sleep. There are some big things to process through and some big dreams I/we have about the future. As a staff we reflected on this this week, and so I will continue to work on prayer even when it is not helping me stay awake or fall asleep.

Gratitude

I am tired. I don’t sleep enough these days. My left eyelid twitches uncontrollably most of the time (a sure sign of fatigue for me). I complain about a lot of things: traveling on the T, people who don’t get it, the frustrations of working for/in two organizations, mice, car trouble. I could go on, I’m sure.

But, life is good. I am so blessed. I am married to an amazing woman and we have a beautiful daughter. We live in a great apartment in a neighborhood we love. We have good friends. We are a part of a church on mission. We serve some amazing college students. We are extremely well taken care of by generous partners. We have a lot of great stories. We have an amazing extended family that cheers us on in so many ways. I could go on, I’m sure.

Grateful.

Shoveling Snow And Thoughts on Leadership Development

I’m not a huge college football fan. It’s probably 5th or 6th on the list of sports I care about. But my wife went to a big football school (USC) and so I’ve grown more interested over the years.

When it comes to the college game I lean towards the West Coast. I’d love to see Oregon win it all this year just because I am sick of hearing about the SEC.

But I’m fascinated by the Kansas State Jayhawks for two reasons:

I like old guys. Their coach is an old guy. It sure seems like the K-State kids would run through a wall for old Bill. I hope to be half as relevant to college students when I’m 73.
I love their senior quarterback. Collin Klein fascinates me.

He’s on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week and I was struck by several of the stories shared about him in the article.

Like this:

“When Klein was a boy, his mother and father expected him to shovel the driveway on mornings after it snowed. So he did. Neighbors driveway, too. Many years later, when he was a junior at K-State, he shared an off-campus house with four other students. In the midst of an excruciating 317-carry season, his faithful center, B.J. Finney, once had to carry him down to his bedroom in the basement after an especially violent game. But none of that had a thing to do with falling snow. Klein didn’t talk about it much, didn’t try to gain credit or leverage or anything. He just got up first and started shoveling.“

The best leaders are servants first. They are the ones shoveling the metaphorical snow…stacking chairs, etc. Again and again, as you read about Klein, the thing that stands out is that he cares more about his teammates and his team than himself (even to the detriment of his health).

I believe that one of the primary roles campus ministry plays in the development of leaders, especially future church leaders. Some people can spend their whole lives in leadership positions and never “get” the servant aspect down.

Students who figure this out between the ages of 18 and 24 will become incredible assets to any organization, especially the churches they get involved with.

We need to pray for and work to develop more Collin Kleins.

Architecture and Spirituality

I haven’t had time to fully process the conversation I had recently with my brilliant friend Nate who is a graduate student in the realm of architecture (at this school). We spent a good long while discussing buildings and design and connections to spirituality. Here are some ideas that will require further thought (and perhaps further posting):

Adaptive Reuse: the truth that old things can be made new again…the incorporation of new design elements into an old building make a whole new creation.
Multiple Modes of Presentation: architecture (done well) engages multiple senses and calls forth a response from each of those senses.
Clear Narratives: architecture (done well) has a defined story that is followed all the way through the structure.
Questions: As an undergrad architecture students simply learn how to answer questions, graduate students learn how to ask the right questions, and more importantly learn the process of getting at the right questions.
Quote of the day (From a Wentworth Prof): “The person [the architect] who makes the most mistakes wins.”

Humbling

If there is one thing I’ve learned in ministry so far it is this: don’t go into ministry expecting your ego to get pumped up.

Ministry is incredibly humbling.

Sure there are those few who write some books and influence thousands and who make some money who might have an inflated sense of self. But if you want strokes than be a movie star, or a politician, or a lawyer or just about anything besides a pastor.

I am humbled in about a hundred different ways each week, but one of the most humbling aspects of being a pastor/campus minister/teacher/preacher is this:

I can teach someone a truth in a thousand ways (through teaching, modeling, conversations, etc), and then they go to some conference, or listen to a podcast, or go to a different church and all of a sudden the heavens open and everything makes sense.

Humbling.

I get really frustrated by those moments. My frustration probably has something to do with a need to be in control or liked or thought of a certain way.

But, whatever my issues are, it doesn’t change the fact that they got it. Something finally clicked and they are growing, evolving, changing, living differently. It just wasn’t because of me.

Humbling.

Not Worth It

I wrote two weeks ago about a “faithfulness deficit” in our culture. I continue to think about this.

I had a conversation the other day when a new thought struck. I don’t have a well articulated theology of spiritual warfare, but I do think a way the enemy attacks the church in the west is through undermining faithfulness.

We question whether the hard work and the rejection and the nastiness and the disappointment is really actually worth it. Someone stabs us in the back and steals our job. Someone we trusted turns out to be completely untrustworthy. We ignore a gut instinct and it comes back to bite us so we question our ability.

I have experienced all of those things and I’ve talked to other leaders who have experienced those things in just this last week.

I think about the conversations I’ve had in Acts this semester with students. I think about the blogging our staff has been doing through the Psalms. I realized this is a tension everyone feels, and has been feeling for thousands of years. David was hated and people tried to kill him. Paul was run out-of-town. So was Peter.

When injustice wins, when we get screwed, when it all blows up in our face, it rocks our world. It rocks our theology. It rocks our logic.

I keep coming back to this reality: not even Jesus could control the outcomes. He was rejected and despised in a big way, but also in a lot of other small, more subtle ways. Like this and this and this.

All you can do is throw yourself into the work and then let go of the outcomes. We can’t control what people will say about us, or what people will think of our work. But we can do the work and we can give it everything we have.

Again, we can’t control the outcomes, but we can choose to stay faithful. And that is a difficult but courageous choice.

Some Thoughts on Being Inconvenienced

There are things about living in the city that just complicate life. Parking is difficult. Even when you find it, it can end up costing you. Transportation is difficult. Today I got stuck on a train and was 10 minutes late to a meeting. Navigating crowds and busyness and bustle is difficult.

There are also things about living in the city that are wonderful and amazing, but I find again and again that there are so many variable I cannot control.

Last week our neighbors painted their apartment. They moved stuff around and unplugged cords and ended up disconnecting our cable. No TV and no internet. It still isn’t fixed five days later.

The TV is not normally that big of a deal, but it just so happens that a baseball team I love is making an incredible, unprecedented run through the post-season. I’d love to watch that.

The internet is actually kind of a big deal. I am doing more admin work from home these days. Amy uses it all the time for recipes and questions about babies and communication with me and many others, not to mention staying in the loop with her company while she is on maternity leave.

As much as I hate to say it, we need the internet to work in our home.

When things don’t work, when things go wrong, when unexpected annoyances derail my plans, I find out all kinds of things about myself and my character that I would rather not know.

And that’s maybe the most interesting thing of being inconvenienced. It’s not that my impatience (or frustration or anger or whatever) is exposed, it is that I am so mad at it being exposed.

I’d much rather live with the illusion that I am patient, and I’m ticked that the illusion was brought o my attention. Because now I have to do something about it.

Illusions are easier than hard work.

So, those are some thoughts…