Category: Stanford/Ministry News

Stanford Grads In Unexpected Places

As someone raised Episcopalian I tend to feel sorrow whenever I read about the Episcopal church in the news. The global Anglican communion is doing okay, but the American denomination has really jumped the tracks since I was born. 

In case you haven’t heard, the Episcopal Church in America just elected its first female primate ever — Katharine Jefferts Schori. That’s not the source of my sorrow — I firmly believe in the ministry of women (as does my denomination).

Here’s where the sorrow comes in: she’s apparently an advocate of ordaining openly gay priests and bishops. So her election was sort of a slap in the face to the worldwide Anglican communion, a significant portion of which seems prepared to write Ichabod over the door of the Episcopalian church.

After the usual sigh that escapes my lips when seeing the Episcopal church in the headlines, one detail leapt out at me: Bishop Schori graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford in 1974. Thanks to purgatorio for putting that information where it caught my eye.

Those darn Stanford alumni–they just keep showing up in the news. Sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, but always making a difference.

Some Gal Walking Through One Of Our Videos

I’m always amazed at how putting videos online has exposed Chi Alpha to people who would never otherwise darken the door of our gatherings. For example, this gal was walking through the background of an interview I did with Dr. William Lane Craig and noticed herself when later watching the video. She then blogged about it and it got back to me. What a small and crazy construct the internet is…

Anyway, I should mention that she curses in this post. If you prefer not to read profanity then just skip reading the link and trust me that she mentions the video and links to the Chi Alpha @ Stanford website.

Alas, she seems to have been unpersuaded by Dr. Craig’s arguments.

Counsel To A Student

I recently responded to a student who was trying to muddle through an awkward relationship without becoming bitter. She asked for some counsel, and here is an anonymized version of what I told her. The pain she is experiencing is common enough, and so I post it here in the hopes that it will prove helpful to someone else as well.

You have already said that you are praying and so I will move on to other considerations. There are several practical things you can do. 

The first is to realize that you cannot avoid being hurt. You have no more choice in that than you have when falling off a cliff. Physically, if you get in a fight then your jaw will probably be sore regardless of who wins. Emotionally, it is unlikely that you’ll come out of a relational meltdown without at least the equivalent of a sore jaw. Just as in boxing, however, you can choose whether you’ll get hit in the face or the stomach. Where you are struck is based upon your guard, so block the blows that matter and absorb the ones you must. 

Practically, this is a matter of where you pin your hopes. If you pin your hopes upon romantic recommitment, then that is where you are most vulnerable to being hurt. If you pin your hopes to renormalization of friendship, then that is where you are most vulnerable to being hurt. The pain of dashed romance is generally considered to be far more intense than the pain of an awkward friendship, but you must choose your own course in this.

As an aside, I’m not so sure that “guarding your heart” in the Bible is about preventing painful emotions (which seems to be the way that it is most often preached–if you can just guard your heart sufficiently then you can avoid being hurt). Jesus and Paul both experienced much pain caused by other people. Jesus was betrayed by Judas and wept when Mary and Martha blamed him for the death of Lazarus, Paul was abandoned by virtually all of his friends when in prison and wept when he left the Ephesian elders to head towards his fate in Jerusalem. Guarding their heart didn’t prevent them from experiencing pain. I think we can fairly say that it reduced the amount of the pain that they felt, and it certainly helped them to surmount pain. But it did not prevent pain. That’s a very Buddhist notion which just doesn’t fit into the Christian faith. Buddhists detach, Christians love. And love always seems to involve a certain measure of pain.

The second is to listen to your mind more than your heart. Pretend this was happening to one of your friends and then pretend to give them some advice. I’m sure you would have wise counsel for them–so be sure to take your own medicine. Your emotions are going to be very poor guides up this particular mountain. At the same time you cannot afford to ignore them completely–your emotions are the source of your pain. Ignoring them completely is as foolish as a doctor ignoring your symptoms when diagnosing you.

The third is to believe that your friend is not intentionally trying to hurt you. This is a crucial defense against bitterness. He is making a lot of choices that are causing you pain, but he is not making them because they cause you pain. He wants you to be happy and is just as confused as you are about how to achieve that goal. 

And so if that’s helpful to you, take it and be blessed.ghost dog the way of the samurai divx

Agenda for next Advisory Leadership Team meeting

As promised, here’s the agenda for Chi Alpha’s upcoming Advisory Leadership Team meeting. 

Agenda:

1. Review XA 2010 Implementation Team Work

  • Organizational chart and definitions
  • Executive Leadership Team, membership and duration, frequency of meetings
  • Area Director position and area maps
  • Task group goals summarized 
    • Added Non traditional, church led and student led task group
    • Identified International Student Ministry Work Group and District Resource Team as similar to task groups to report activity and goals.

2. Calendar

  • The World Mission Summit
  • DXAR Conference
  • Campus Ministers Conference

3. Community of mission statement

4. Missionary furlough survey

5. Campus Ministers Conference

  • Larry Crabb
  • Patrick Lencioni

6. Suggestions for Department Directors

  • Student Ministries/ or Student Missions- E. Scott Martin
  • International Student Ministry – Jerry Gibson
  • Student Mobilization –
  • Campus evangelism –
  • Personnel – Bob Marks
  • Training and Resource
  • Communications

At this point I don’t have much info beyond that. I assume the names for CMC are potential speakers. 

As you will note, we’ve created several new departments and so we need to recruit people to those roles. Suggestions are welcome. You can email me, call me, or leave a comment on the blog (just remember that comments can be read by everyone). I’m there to represent folks on the field, and I can do that more effectively if some folks on the field let me know their perspective on things. 🙂

Encouraging Email From A Student

I just got a wonderfully encouraging email:

I haven’t been to a chi alpha meeting since that one time at the ‘obey your parents’ sermon, but I check out the mp3s every now and then and I think your sermons are great. I’d like to be more descriptive than that, but I’m fairly brain-dead tonight (can you say sleepdep?). Anyways, a big thanks to whoever does the recording and website work…I’m LOVING the google videos!

The potential hairstyle pictures were…great. More than great…really great. Maybe I should go to bed. I’ll try (harder) to actually come to a meeting before the quarter runs out!

Occasionally I wonder whether any students ever really listen to the stuff we put online. I guess they do.

It’s amazing how a little thing like that can totally make my day. 

Staff Reading Cohort

Our staff team is going to begin a reading program together. We’re picking our books now, and I thought some of you might be interested in the guidelines we’re using. I sort of made these up and modified them based on the feedback I received.

Frequency
Let’s start off with a book every two months. This will give us plenty of time to pursue our own reading without shortchanging our staff reads. We can always adjust the time later if we need to.

Selection
We make our list up two full cycles in advance (one whole year). We each get to propose 4 books, and then we each rank the resulting list of 12. We tally the votes using an internet script (Condorcet method for any voting geeks out there). The top six books win. We’ll decide the order in which the winners will be read informally, trying to alternate older books with newer books.

Guidelines

  1. We have to propose books that we have not read yet. Don’t pick something you loved and think it will be good for everyone else. The point of this exercise is personal growth.
  2. Having said that, it’s okay if someone else proposes a book that you have already read and the team selects it. In that case, you don’t have to reread it–skimming will do.
  3. Don’t try to impress anyone. No need to pick academic philosophy or anything like that–unless you really want to read it.
  4. Let’s try to alternate between new books and books older than we are. This isn’t a rigid rule, but an aspiration.
  5. Freshness is good when we’re talking about something based on research, and age is good when we’re talking about something based on reflection. If you want us to think about science or culture get a new book. If you want us to think about God or life get an older book. Unless you really don’t want to–these are guidelines and not rules. 😉
  6. The books can be about anything, but let’s keep fiction to a minimum.
  7. Nothing over 500 pages without first clearing it with everyone else.
  8. Nothing over $30 without clearing it first with everyone else.
  9. If you want, you can propose multiple short books as a single recommendation (less than 200 pages total).

After Reading
Following the reading of the book, by a specified deadline, the chooser will compose a few (3–5) questions for group discussion either in person, over the phone or online. 

Anyway, it’s not too elegant but it looks as though it will serve us well. We’ve each made our suggestions and here’s the list we’re going to be voting on:

  • The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle 
  • Prayer by George Buttrick
  • Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It by Richard D. Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Creative Ministry by Henri Nouwen
  • In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen
  • Pensees by Blaise Pascal
  • Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson
  • Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students by Charles Spurgeon
  • The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective by R. Paul Stevens
  • Margin by Richard Swenson

Once we have the results I’ll let you know what we wind up reading.

Ringing The Church Bells Via SMS

We’re putting together a text-messaging reminder service for our meetings. Every Wednesday night at 7pm our website will send out a SMS message to the cell phones of everyone who signs up reminding them to get ready for Chi Alpha’s weekly worship meeting. It’s a simple message to help out those students who always mean to come but get busy doing something else and forget until the meeting is partway over:

Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300–300.

I’ve just tested the system and it works pretty smoothly. It’s the modern-day equivalent of ringing the church bells!

The script was really simple to write. If you use a unix-based system with PHP & PEAR installed you could easily adapt it for your ministry:

#!/usr/bin/php
 ?php
//sends SMS announcments to each person in Chi Alpha who wants them

require_once('Mail.php');
$parameters['sendmail_args']='';
$mailer=&Mail::factory('sendmail',$parameters);

$cells['Ferdinand Frosh']='5555555555';
$cells['Suzie Sophomore']='5555555555';
$cells['Jing Junior']='5555555555';
$cells['Sheila Senior']='5555555555';

$headers['From']='you@example.com';
$headers['Reply-To']='you@example.com';
$headers['Subject']='XA @ 8pm';
$body='Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300-300';

foreach ($cells as $cell) {
        if (empty($cell)) continue;
        $email=$cell.'@teleflip.com';
        //echo $email;
        $mailer->send($email,$headers,$body);
}
?>

All you have to do is customize the script (add cell phone numbers and the right “From” and “Reply-To” emails) and then add it to your crontab file with an entry like so:

0 19 * * 4 /path/to/announce.php

(Hint: type crontab ‑e to edit your crontab file).

By the way, it should go without saying that you never add someone to an SMS announcement system without their express permission! If you think email spam hacks people off, then just wait until someone has to pay a text-messaging fee for something they’re not interested in. The depths of their rage would astonish the Hulk.

Geekspeak: the reason I used the PEAR::Mail library was to make sure that the reply-to address was the one I wanted. I just couldn’t make it happen using the PHP mail() function alone. Everything was from “root@my webserver.” Very annoying.

Hymnody

I sent this email to our worship leaders and I thought others might be interested in it. 

Why do we try to incorporate a hymn each week into worship?

The shortest answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook–even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. None of us can escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” (from his introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation).

The same thing is true of songs. There are some great worship songs out today and I want the majority of our worship to feature them. But I don’t want us to just feature them. They have notable weaknesses (pdf link) and so I want the “sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through our worship and keep us rooted.

Having said that, traditional hymn music doesn’t really connect with today’s students. That’s why I urge you to seek out or make up (yes, you are allowed to do that) contemporary arrangements for the hymns that we do sing.

I’ve found a few that illustrate what I’m talking about. Check out http://igracemusic.com/igracemusic/hymnbook/hymns.html

Each one has a sample mp3, lead sheets, tab sheets, and other resources available for worship teams.

Another excellent example is the Dave Crowder band’s recording of “All Creatures Of Our God And King.”

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to explain myself on that for a while but I’ve never actually gotten around to it. 

So there.