Category: Stanford/Ministry News

Look, I’m On TV! Sort Of. Not Really.

Inspired by Mark Driscol­l’s exam­ple, I video­taped last week’s Chi Alpha meet­ing and put it online using Google Video. So now you can just go to google video and search for some­thing like “Jesus at Stan­ford” and the video will appear.

Or you can just go to the xastanford.org web­site and see it there. Google lets you embed the videos wher­ev­er you want. Pret­ty amaz­ing, huh?

Not bad for our first try. Now I need to brain­storm about mak­ing it more attractive–the black­board is pret­ty unap­peal­ing. For that mat­ter, I’m not all that appealing–I need a fash­ion makeover or some­thing. And I need to talk slow­er. Still, not too bad for our first try.

So why do we record these meet­ings? I can imag­ine some­one alleg­ing that it’s some sort of ego­ma­ni­a­cal thing. As a rebut­tal, I can only offer my poor groom­ing skills. Ego­ma­ni­acs exfo­li­ate.

So why do we record our meet­ings? 3 rea­sons:

1) We want to make it easy for our stu­dents to invite their friends to come.

Chi Alphan: “Come check out this meet­ing. It’s the best thing since sleep. And the wheel. And fire.”
Col­lege Pagan: “Wow. What’s it like?”
Chi Alphan: “Your com­put­er on?”
Col­lege Pagan: “Yeah.”
Chi Alphan: “Go to google video and search for ‘Jesus at Stan­ford’ — that’s one of our meet­ings.”

2) So our stu­dents still be part of our com­mu­ni­ty when they’re doing a study abroad. We’ve been lis­tened to on at least three con­ti­nents. I’m gun­ning for the whole globe!

3) I some­times refer back to pre­vi­ous mes­sages and it’s easy to say, “You know, I talked about that a few quar­ters ago. I don’t have time to explain all my thoughts on that right now–go get it off our web­site and ask me any fol­low-up ques­tions you have.”

Since we were already record­ing in MP3, video was a no-brain­er. We can do both eas­i­ly, so why not?

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.

Is Stanford Worth It?

Our team­mate Lind­sey found a great arti­cle about the return-on-invest­ment of elite schools like Stan­ford.

In The Dorms This Morning

I was on cam­pus this morn­ing strolling through Toy­on, and I noticed a lot of appar­ent­ly dorm-spon­sored fly­ers cel­e­brat­ing Hanukah and Kwan­zaa. I noticed some­thing was miss­ing, and so I asked a stu­dent if there were any dorm-spon­sored Christ­mas acknowl­edge­ments any­where in the dorm. She said no.