Category: Stanford/Ministry News

Students Drive Me Crazy

Today I met with a frosh who is trying to choose between Chi Alpha and another ministry–we’ll call them Ministry X. A summary ensues:

“What I like best about Chi Alpha is the messages. Ministry X’s messages aren’t very good. And it isn’t clear what they believe. And I really don’t like their Bible study. Chi Alpha’s Bible study is much better. And I’ve found a place to serve at Chi Alpha–it would be much harder for me to find something to do at Ministry X because they’re so large. But I think I should choose Ministry X.”

That sound you hear is me slamming the door shut on my head repeatedly.

Visiting Prof Condemns Porn

A fascinating tidbit from today’s Stanford Daily: Texas prof condemns porn.

Invited speaker Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, presented a fairly biting criticism of the medium, warning that the content of pornography is “increasingly cruel, degrading and hostile to women.”

What I found most interesting at the end of the article is that no one wanted to go on record as defending pornography. Every pro-porn quote is anonymous. Given that there’s no real persecution of pornography lovers, I can only assume the desire for anonymity is from shame. That says something pretty profound about the extent to which they have doubts about the cause they advocate for.

Chi Alpha’s Advisory Leadership Team

I just spent 16 hours traveling in order to spend 18 hours in Springfield, MO.

First, an apology to all my Springfield friends, but I literally had zero free minutes the entire time that I was there (I am now at an age where I view sleep as non-optional). I’ll try to carve out a more flexible schedule on future trips.

Which leads me to the point of this post: I’m on Chi Alpha’s newly formed Advisory Leadership Team (ALT). I would have preferred to be in the CTRL or DEL group, but ALT is where they stuck me. 😉

This group is comprised of three local Chi Alpha leaders (presently me, Dick Herman and Mark Briley) along with the resident national Chi Alpha staff and meets every two months to advise the national director on strategic decisions and policy issues.

This is my own quirky and highly subjective take on things.

Things I Learned:

  • Scott Martin had to fight to keep the World Missions Summit from opening with a human video (and one involving swords, at that). We all owe him a tremendous debt.
  • The biggest Chi Alpha ministries are:
    • 600 students at San Diego State University with Sue Hegle.
    • 430 at Western Washington University with Brady Bobbink.
    • 275 at the University of Central Arkansas with Matt Carpenter.
    • ??? at University of Louisiana-Lafayette with Eric Treuil (his numbers aren’t on file, but I estimate his ministry probably fits here on the list).
    • 190 at Florida State University with Mario Solari.
    • 175 at the University of Minnesota-Duluth with Chuck Haavik.
    • 175 at Tennessee Tech University with Jonathan Scales.
    • 160 at Murray State with Mark Randoll.
    • 150 at Missouri State University with Noble Bowman.
  • Most Chi Alpha groups meet on Thursday or Tuesday at 7pm.
  • Only 19% of Chi Alpha students have an Assemblies of God background.
  • Chi Alpha at Yale University saw 40 students get saved last year. Big props to Andy Cunningham.

Things We Discussed There Which I Am Also Free To Discuss Here:

  • Filling out the annual Chi Alpha census needs to be part of the annual affiliation process. Not filling it out (and not affiliating) will be grounds for having your paycheck withheld, just as with our monthly financial reports. Also, this needs to be doable online.
  • We spent a lot of time talking about Chi Alpha’s decision-making process and organizational structure. There’s a lot of that I can’t comment on yet because our National Director is going to be talking to many people one on one to explain things to them. Here are things I think I can safely say:
    • Chi Alpha doesn’t exist in a vacuum: we’re embedded in the Assemblies of God and are absolutely governed by its constitution, bylaws, and policy manuals. The most important takeaway from that is that the National Director is pretty much the pope of Chi Alpha when it comes to national decisions (as opposed to district and local decisions).
    • In addition it is helpful to realize that there are four tiers (for lack of a better word) of leadership within Chi Alpha.
      • The National Director
      • National Staff
      • Translocal Influencers (Area Directors, CMIT Directors, DXARs, national Resource Personnel, etc). This is the most confusing, because most of the groups at this level are entangled (almost everyone who serves in one of these roles also serves in at least one other translocal capacity) and there’s not really a hierarcy among them (for example, CMIT directors are subordinate to DXARs in certain respects but not others and CMIT directors are more influential within Chi Alpha than DXARs). Realizing that they are all in roughly the same tier of leadership (which they express in very different domains) is helpful when trying to figure out how this beast called Chi Alpha actually works.
      • Local Staff
    • Functionally, each level has autonomy within their assigned level of responsibility (for example, no one can tell a local staffer what to preach on any given week). Micromanaging is the root of all kinds of evil.
    • We really need to define for each group exactly what decisions they are empowered to make without fear of their decisions being meddled with. We also need to clarify who reports to whom. This has to be in a public written document that everyone can look at.
    • The real challenge that we face is trust. My own take on it: many of the tier 3 leadership lack confidence in tiers 1 and 2. Some lack trust in the competence of the top tier leadership and others lack trust in the character of the top tier leadership (update: I do not mean that they lack trust completely; rather, I mean that they lack complete trust–a nontrivial difference). Most Tier 4 leaders seem unaware of this dynamic–they tend to hold the Tier 3, 2, and 1 leadership in a certain amount of awe and imagine that they’re all best friends. Many of them are good friends, and almost all like one another and are committed to working together effectively. But there’s still a breakdown in trust between the national leaders and the rest. (update: I wrote an article explaining that this is a tendency intrinsic to federal governance)
  • We need a national representative to serve our student-led groups. We’ve invited Dave Short to fill this position (contingent on his district’s approval).
  • The probable (but by no means certain) evolution of the ALT will inlcude all the Area Directors along with a non-DXAR non-CMIT Director rep from their region. Sort of like the General Presbytery of the Assemblies of God.

Anyway, I put all this online for two reasons:

  1. As a local campus representative I feel an obligation to let the people I’m representing know what’s going on. As long as it’s not confidential I’ll talk about it freely. If it is confidential I’ll tell you as much as I can.
  2. To ask for feedback. You can either comment on this post or email me directly. I’ll be sure to post the agenda for the next meeting once I get it so you can give me input on that heading into it.

Nothing Like Objective Reporting

There’s just nothing like an even-handed presentation of perspectives to get your day started, is there?

Too bad I just couldn’t find an even-handed presentation of perspectives at the start of my day.

See if you can guess who the author of this article in the Stanford Daily is sympathetic to. This is the opening paragraph:

Rows of crosses lined White Plaza yesterday, as the Stanford Students for Life sponsored a memorial for the supposed “victims” of Roe vs. Wade. Marking the anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case that provided women the right to abort pregnancies under certain conditions, the memorial was erected to remember the approximately 45 million fetuses that have been legally aborted since 1973.

Guilty As Charged

From a phone conversation yesterday: “[Our mutual friend] told me about your conversation. Glen, only you would think to mock someone who had just tried to kill themselves.” In my defense, I was quite funny (and the humor was well-received: the psych wards of hospitals are such dreary places).

More Holiday Happenings

After I posted last night’s entry I was filled with even more memories of the holidays.

  • Home cooking. Home Cajun cooking.
  • Eating at the Steamboat for our anniversary. Tasty beyond belief.
  • Teaching my nephew Rick why you should never lose at Tic-Tac-Toe. Also, reducing niece Rebecca to whining because I wouldn’t “go easy on her” while demonstrating my mad Tic-Tac-Toe skillz to a suitably impressed Rick.
  • Reading Soldier, Ask Not as an adult and realizing the hero is someone other than I thought it was when I first read it as a kid.
  • Being a missionary table host for the students from FSU Chi Alpha when the assigned discussion topic was sexual purity. There was so much boisterous laughter at our table that we got a dirty look from one table and a snide comment from another, “Do you see how that table is laughing over there? They don’t take sex seriously.” To which my reply was, “I find humor in everything I value greatly–laughter is one way of delighting in something precious. Besides, if you can’t laugh at something as ridiculous as sex you are seriously humor-challenged.” In the other table’s defense, however, we were having a disruptively good time.
  • Finding out that many of my former RUi students really enjoyed my sessions and remembered them in surprising detail.
  • Seeing how many Chi Alphas are spreading into the elite schools. One couple I helped disciple is heading to establish a ministry at Cornell and I met another chap heading to Brown (his brilliant support-raising motto: “What can you do for Brown?”). Of America’s extremely prestigious schools, that makes staff-supported chapters at Stanford, Georgetown, MIT, Brown, Yale and Cornell. We’re making major progress on that front.
  • Chatting with Gene Breitenbach about the recent intelligent design court case (he’s a huge fan of the way the case was decided).
  • Realizing how stark the imbalance is between Chi Alpha Xanga users and the more enlightened Chi Alpha WordPress crowd. I may have to post an article on that someday (but only if I want to endure a good-natured web fight, especially since my wife is a Xangan).
  • Dana screaming “Home!” with delight when we stepped back through the door of our apartment.

Holiday Highlights

As always, we spent Christmas in Lousiana. In addition, I got to spend around 14 hours in a car driving from Lafayette, LA to Louisville, KY for The World Missions Summit. Nearly 4,000 college students from Chi Alpha groups across America gathered to consider their role in God’s global plan. And then I got to spend 14 hours driving back again.
Some highlights from the trip:

  • Getting loot for Christmas, including Munchkin.
  • Having Dana decide that daddy was her favorite for a little while.
  • Watching my parents finally get broadband internet service. Also, fixing computers for both my parents and my in-laws.
  • Discovering that Steve Barke has a snore that would cause a dead person to search for ear plugs. Also, purchasing ear plugs.
  • Listening to J. Rufus Fears talk about Winston Churchill for 12 hours. I’ve long admired Churchill based on what little I knew about him–now that I know more I’m astounded. He was among the greatest of all time.
  • Hanging out with Greg for 14 hours in a car.
  • Discovering that there are whole stretches of road in the South which only receive country and/or rap stations.
  • Chatting with Lindsey and Nicholette about their upcoming moves to join us. They’re both such great people–Paula and I can’t wait for them to be here!
  • Meeting Will Phillips. He was every bit as entertaining in person as I had hoped he would be. For some reason he thinks he out-geeks me. Someday I may have to disabuse him of that notion (I contribute to Wikipedia, for crying out loud).
  • Seeing my old bud Randy Jumper again. We were classmates at AGTS and have kept in touch digitally since. Nice to have a face-to-face again.
  • Discovering that Stanford frosh John Sillcox can focus out of each eye separately. Freaky.
  • Way cool worship in the morning. In an odd turn of events, the morning services were consistently 5 to 7 times better than the evening services.
  • Seeing over 650 students make a one-year committment to missions with the option for a lifetime extension. Woohoo! And they weren’t just signing up for the easy places, either. A lot of closed countries are in for a big surprise.
  • Watching the amazing level of panache with which the Ascent (a Chi Alpha staff event) was pulled off. Knowing that Belkas Lehmann and I had planned the whole thing made it extra-special.
  • Getting a free copy of Full Gospel, Fractured Minds. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. Big thanks to Jerry Gibson for hooking me up.
  • Randomly walking around Louisville at dark looking for food (which I finally discovered at a gas station).
  • Finally watching The Magnificent Seven.
  • Watching The Fantastic Four and finally realizing that they’re the four elements.
  • Having Dana behave on both flights.

Hello, Dalai!

I got to hear the Dalai Lama speak at Stanford on Friday. I was actually a few minutes late because I was walking up from a non-standard direction and so I was trapped on the other end of his motorcade and the accompanying security detail. At one point I was about 15 feet from him.

A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • A student asked me why in world I would want to hear the Dalai Lama speak since he’s a leader of a rival religion. And then I read an article describing how some scientists are having the same reaction to the Dalai Lama’s scheduled appearance at a neuroscience convention: This merger of serious neuroscience with a particular religion is a practical joke because the very recognition of the Dalai Lama relies on the belief in reincarnation,” said Yi Rao, a neurology professor at Northwestern University. (source). I always find it funny when I see a scientist getting all fundamentalist. This is the flaw in that criticism: to say someone is wrong about one thing is not to say that they are wrong about all things. Of course I think the Dalai Lama teaches a lot of absurd ideas. That doesn’t mean none of his ideas are good ones. Plus, I figured I’d probably get a sermon illustration or two out of the mix. I was right, too–check out the next bullet point.
  • The talk was about nonviolence, and the Dalai Lama is a well-known pacifist and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, so I was fairly shocked when I heard him say that the jury was still out on whether or not the Iraq war was justified. I am not taking this out of context at all–this was in direct response to a question whether or not war was ever moral. I don’t think the audience knew what to do with that at all. I was laughing pretty loudly on the inside.
  • He has a wonderful lack of decorum. In the midst of one question he took off his shoes, rubbed his feet, and tucked his legs underneath him.
  • He contradicted himself quite a few times, but it could have been a byproduct of not being fluent in English. He was talking about some subtle things and he may have used a few words imprecisely.

update 11/7/2005: the Stanford Daily just released an article about his visit echoing many of my points above (including the Iraq war thing).