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.

Einstein Endorsement

Cour­tesy of the cool Ein­stein dynam­ic chalk­board gen­er­a­tor.

Dialectic

One of my stu­dents (stage name Dialec­tic) just released a rap album. You can pre­view it at MySpace. Or as we hip-hop­pers like to call it, MySchiz­zle.

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.