Congratulations, George O. Wood

While I was busy tour­ing Mon­terey Bay Aquar­i­um with my fam­i­ly and eat­ing duri­an, most of the rest of the Assem­blies of God was in Indi­anapo­lis for our bien­ni­al min­is­te­r­i­al gath­er­ing.

George Wood has been elect­ed Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent of the Assem­blies of God. I hon­est­ly did­n’t think he had a chance — our move­ment is still pret­ty anti-intel­lec­tu­al and he has two earned doc­tor­ates. In addi­tion, I thought he might be per­ceived as part of the “old guard” in a time of great change. I’m delight­ed that I was wrong — he’ll be a great leader. He’s a very flex­i­ble thinker and sees both the strengths and weak­ness­es of our move­ment pret­ty clear­ly.

Alton Gar­ri­son was elect­ed the new Assis­tant Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent (I expect­ed he would take one of the two top spots) — and he’s a very savvy leader. He’s much more well-read and inno­v­a­tive than most peo­ple expect an evan­ge­list from Arkansas to be. He’ll be a great voice to have at the table.

John Palmer is the new Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary — I had expect­ed him to become the exec­u­tive direc­tor of AG US Mis­sions instead. I’ve nev­er met him, but I’ve heard noth­ing but good things. Tim and Julie Smith in par­tic­u­lar have giv­en me very encour­ag­ing reports about him. He seems like a great addi­tion to the team.

Zol­lie Smith was the most sur­pris­ing elec­tion. He’s my new boss’s boss (direc­tor of US Mis­sions, tak­ing the posi­tion I expect­ed John Palmer to land), and I’ve been hear­ing good things about him for years. His elec­tion was a mile­stone for the Assem­blies of God — he’s our first non-Cau­casian exec­u­tive offi­cer.

I’m very excit­ed about the lead­er­ship team that came out of this Gen­er­al Coun­cil. It bodes well for our future as a move­ment. We picked some extreme­ly com­pe­tent peo­ple.

Oh — and the busi­ness ses­sions were feisty this year. If you’re into that sort of thing, you might want to check them out

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A Missionary As General Superintendent?

The way the Assem­blies of God works, our next Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent will almost cer­tain­ly be or have been the pas­tor of a megachurch (I add “have been” because dis­trict offi­cials come pri­mar­i­ly from these ranks).

In fact, some are clam­or­ing for chang­ing our lead­er­ship mod­el to require that our Gen­er­al Superinden­dent be required to serve as pas­tor while serv­ing as our nation­al leader. There’s mer­it to the idea, but I’ve always had a notion in the back of my head that I’ve want­ed to see tried instead: elect a mis­sion­ary as Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent.

The Assem­blies of God is explod­ing world­wide, part­ly due to the lead­er­ship of our mis­sion­ar­ies. Turn­ing to these proven and capa­ble lead­ers seems like com­mon sense to me, espe­cial­ly since we are increas­ing­ly real­iz­ing that Amer­i­ca is a mis­sion field just like any oth­er. We need some­one who is able to sep­a­rate the way they want to do things from the way things need to be done — the very essence of an effec­tive mis­sion­ary.

Why not some­one who has led a nation to revival? None of our state­side lead­ers has that kind of resume, but sev­er­al of our mis­sion­ar­ies have rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence.

Why not some­one who has proven that they can func­tion with lead­ers they did not select them­selves? This, after all, is a key aspect of the Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent posi­tion to which megachurch pas­tors are unac­cus­tomed.

Why not some­one who is accus­tomed to train­ing and coach­ing lead­ers on the ground instead of try­ing to run the whole show them­selves?

The only oth­er can­di­date I think is as well-suit­ed for the job is a dis­trict super­in­ten­dent who has led his dis­trict to health and growth. I expect that Leslie Welk (North­west) and Don Gif­ford (Indi­ana) will both receive nom­i­na­tions on this basis. Jim Brad­dy (Nor Cal / Nev) might also — but I’m a mem­ber of his dis­trict and so I don’t have a good sense of how he’s per­ceived out­side our nar­row lit­tle world.

How­ev­er, I’m bet­ting that Alton Gar­ri­son (for­mer Sup of Arkansas) is ulti­mate­ly going to get the nod. He’s led a megachurch, led a dis­trict, and is pro­vid­ing lead­er­ship on the nation­al lev­el as the direc­tor of AG US Mis­sions.

So there’s a good chance that we’ll get some­one from AGUSM into the top spot — but not because of his con­nec­tion with mis­sions.

As to the oth­er spots I have no idea. In addi­tion to the nom­i­nees I men­tioned above, I’m pret­ty sure John Lin­dell will get nom­i­nat­ed. He may even let his name stand (although I sus­pect this depends on whether or not he can con­tin­ue to pas­tor at James Riv­er). Dary Northrop will prob­a­bly be nom­i­nat­ed. Dan Bet­zer will be nom­i­nat­ed. Bret Allen might get nom­i­nat­ed but he will decline. I would not be sur­prised at all if John Palmer gets nom­i­nat­ed (espe­cial­ly for the AGUSM lead­er­ship role if Alton is elect­ed Gen Sup), but I have no idea if he will accept.

Beyond that, I real­ly don’t know. There are a lot of poten­tial can­di­dates out there, and our desire to avoid the appear­ance of pol­i­tics means that we nev­er know for sure who will be nom­i­nat­ed and who will allow their names to stand.

Speak­ing of avoid­ing the appear­ance of pol­i­tics — the only way to real­ly avoid pol­i­tics is to select our lead­ers ran­dom­ly. Any solu­tion involv­ing vot­ing is extreme­ly polit­i­cal and the only ques­tion is whether or not those pol­i­tics will be pub­lic. In our move­ment we’ve decid­ed that hid­den pol­i­tics are prefer­able to trans­par­ent ones, and more and more of us are unhap­py with the result.

How­ev­er it shakes out, the Assem­blies is in for a wild ride at Gen­er­al Coun­cil this year. Too bad I’m going to miss it…

Electing A New General Superintendent

A friend of mine (Jay New­land) just sent me a fas­ci­nat­ing site talk­ing about the future of the Assem­blies of God: Future AG.

Sites like these are con­tro­ver­sial in our move­ment because we wish to avoid the appear­ance of pol­i­tics — it seems too tawdry for us. But our goal is not to be non-polit­i­cal (as though that were pos­si­ble), but to be wise in our selec­tion process. Con­ver­sa­tions such as those at Future AG can help us make wis­er choic­es, and are there­fore a good thing.

One post was extreme­ly help­ful to me, and so I share it in the hope it will be help­ful to oth­ers as well.

Here is how it will work. When we arrive we will be asked to nom­i­nate some­one for the posi­tion of gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent fol­lowed by the assis­tant gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent, gen­er­al sec­re­tary, AG World Mis­sions exec­u­tive direc­tor and mem­bers of the Exec­u­tive Pres­bytery. Any ordained min­is­ter can be nom­i­nat­ed.

In the past this has been done by writ­ing someone’s name down on a piece of paper, how­ev­er, vot­ing this year will be con­duct­ed elec­tron­i­cal­ly. This should speed up busi­ness con­sid­er­ably. For exam­ple, fol­low­ing an elec­tion results should be avail­able in 10 min­utes rather than the hour or more it has tak­en in the past.

With these changes, it is impor­tant that you reg­is­ter ear­ly. Go to www.ag.org and you can reg­is­ter online before August 3rd. If you miss that date make sure to reg­is­ter imme­di­ate­ly upon arrival.

Vot­ing will require: Reg­is­tra­tion, Vot­er ID Badge, Vot­er Guide­book

Vot­ing del­e­gates will receive a vot­ing num­ber on the back of their reg­is­tra­tion cards, which will give them access to the vot­ing machine.

If one nom­i­nee receives two-thirds of the bal­lots cast by the del­e­gates at the gen­er­al coun­cil, a win­ner will be declared. That is what hap­pened in 2001 and 2005 when Trask was re-elect­ed.

If no one receives the two-thirds major­i­ty, the vot­ing is lim­it­ed to the top 15 vote-get­ters.

If that does­n’t pro­duce a win­ner, the field is cut to the top three.

You might also wish to check out http://www.agleadershipchange.blogspot.com/

Information Overload?

Every so often I’ll hear some­one men­tion in pass­ing that we are over­loaded with infor­ma­tion com­pared to our ances­tors. I’m sure that’s true if you mea­sure “infor­ma­tion” in a very spe­cif­ic way, but I’m not sure it’s as true as peo­ple think it is.

Augus­tine, the 4th cen­tu­ry bish­op, left behind over 5,000,000 words in writ­ing.

That’s 5 mil­lion words.

Many nov­els have 50,000 (the range varies depend­ing on the genre).

He left behind the equiv­a­lent of 100 nov­els. And he’s just one author.

For the edu­cat­ed elite, the ancient world was rife with infor­ma­tion. And, by and large, the stuff they read was more impor­tant than the “infor­ma­tion” we’re so proud of. Most of what we devote our brain­pow­er to pro­cess­ing is from news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and tele­vi­sion… the knowl­edge equiv­a­lent of emp­ty calo­ries.

For all the “infor­ma­tion” we each have at our beck and call, not many of us could muster up 5 mil­lion words.

And since our point in say­ing that we’re so over­loaded com­pared to the ancients is that we’ve got so much more stuff to process than they did, maybe we should­n’t be so smug. After all — we don’t real­ly process the “infor­ma­tion” that bom­bards us. We rush through it and prompt­ly for­get as much as pos­si­ble to get ready for the next del­uge.

The ancients were read­ing and reread­ing and rereread­ing sub­stan­tive works and actu­al­ly under­stand­ing them. And so Augus­tine was able to write 5,000,000 words that peo­ple still mull over today.

We have no idea what infor­ma­tion over­load feels like. If we can­celed our news­pa­per sub­scrip­tions, threw away all our mag­a­zines, and replaced all that read­ing time with reread­ing a hand­ful of sol­id books until we under­stood them thor­ough­ly, then we’d have some inkling of what true infor­ma­tion over­load is.

And since we’ve got so many years of insights beyond Augus­tine to avail our­selves of, and the mod­ern peer-reviewed sys­tem of jour­nals to draw from, we’d be very jus­ti­fied in say­ing that we wres­tle with infor­ma­tion in a way that the ancients nev­er did.

But not now.

The Bathrooms at the Barefoot Cafe

I’m meet­ing a friend at a sweet lit­tle cof­fee shop called the Bare­foot Cafe in San­ta Clara.

I sup­pose if I liked cof­fee I’d think this place was beyond words — but even with a dis­dain for the bev­er­age I admire the ambiance. For my Spring­field friends, it’s like the Mud­house of the Bay Area.

Any­way, I had to com­ment on their fab­u­lous bath­room dec­o­rat­ing idea. They paint­ed the whole bath­room with that black­board paint. There’s a big box of chalk next to the sink — doo­dling is encour­aged.

How awe­some is that?

I have to say that if I ever man­age a piece of prop­er­ty (a Chi Alpha house or a church or some­thing) that I’m going to give seri­ous thought to rip­ping off their idea.

8 Random Facts About Me

Will Phillips asked me to make 8 quirky com­ments about myself, so here goes:

  1. When I reheat foods, I like to set the microwave for a prime num­ber of sec­onds (i.e., 17, 23, 37, etc).
  2. I tend to dis­dain “lit­er­ary fic­tion” — I find that the typ­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion or fan­ta­sy nov­el is just as insight­ful and vast­ly more enter­tain­ing.
  3. I write PHP pro­grams to relax.
  4. I hard­ly ever watch TV any­more — I’m pret­ty much exclu­sive­ly devot­ed to watch­ing pro­grams on Net­flix. My wife and I are cur­rent­ly on a Veron­i­ca Mars kick.
  5. I used to hate talk radio, but now I love lis­ten­ing to Den­nis Prager. I find him very stim­u­lat­ing.
  6. I don’t like the New York Times most­ly because it does­n’t car­ry comics. Seri­ous­ly. I want my Get Fuzzy and my Pearls Before Swine!
  7. I don’t eat the meal before I preach. Maybe it’s psy­cho­log­i­cal, but I feel that the food in my bel­ly makes me slow-wit­ted.
  8. The main rea­son I haven’t writ­ten a book is that I feel that there are too many books out there already — the great stuff is get­ting lost in the flood.

So there. 8 things about me you prob­a­bly did­n’t know.

Advice From A Design Expert

Last night at Chi Alpha we inter­viewed George Kem­bel, co-founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Stan­ford d.school about his faith and how it inte­grates with his pro­fes­sion­al life.

It was lots of fun. Dur­ing the inter­view he shared a help­ful metaphor about his cri­sis of faith as a young adult. “It’s like my baby teeth. They had to go so my per­ma­nent teeth could come in. Some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened with my faith. I need­ed to move from a child’s faith to an adult faith, but what I got in the end was some­thing bet­ter and more endur­ing.”

Any­way, after­wards we were able to talk briefly and I asked him about apply­ing the prin­ci­ples of his pro­fes­sion­al life to min­istry. How would a d.school per­son approach improv­ing the expe­ri­ence of a reg­u­lar or a guest at a min­istry func­tion?

We only talked briefly, but one tid­bit he shared real­ly struck me. “When we’re doing feed­back we find it help­ful to have peo­ple restrict them­selves to three types of state­ments: ‘I like…’, ‘I wish…’, and ‘We should try…’. For exam­ple, ‘I liked it when you talked about x, I wish you had spent more time on that and less on this oth­er point.’ It forces feed­back to be more per­son­al and also push­es it in a con­struc­tive direc­tion.”

I think we’ll exper­i­ment with that and see how it works out for us. It sounds promis­ing.

Any­way, I hope you find his com­ments as inter­est­ing and help­ful as I did.

Kudos Where Kudos Are Due

My pas­tor just got an arti­cle pub­lished in Rick War­ren’s Min­istry Tool­box. Way to go, Scott!

An Apology For the Sign-Bearers

As a Chris­t­ian min­is­ter, I apol­o­gize to the cam­pus com­mu­ni­ty for for my well-mean­ing but mis­guid­ed broth­ers who bore the signs on White Plaza yes­ter­day.

You recall them, no doubt. They bore such charm­ing slo­gans as “The sin and the sin­ner go straight to hell togeth­er,” and “Warn­ing: For­ni­ca­tors, Drunk­ards, Thieves, Adul­ter­ers, God Haters, Liars, HOMOSEXUALS — JUDGMENT.”

I know you find it hard to believe, but they were under the impres­sion that they were act­ing with kind­ness and even love. They were try­ing to tell you some­thing impor­tant in the best way they could think of.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, their method under­mined their mes­sage.

To them, and to all the sign-bear­ers scat­tered across the cam­pus­es of Amer­i­ca, I direct the next few remarks.

I know you are doing your best to hon­or God, but when you bring such signs onto cam­pus and pro­voke stu­dents you are not accom­plish­ing your goal.

In fact, I sus­pect that a care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of the Bible will lead you to rethink your actions.

Observe:

Always be pre­pared to give an answer to every­one who asks you to give the rea­son for the hope that you have. But do this with gen­tle­ness and respect, keep­ing a clear con­science, so that those who speak mali­cious­ly against your good behav­ior in Christ may be ashamed of their slan­der. 1 Peter 3:15–16, NIV

Gen­tle­ness and respect may have been your aspi­ra­tion, but the mes­sages on the signs belied your intent. You may not under­stand why, but peo­ple found your mes­sages extreme­ly dis­repect­ful. Respect is mea­sured by the recip­i­ent, so if an entire com­mu­ni­ty tells you that you are act­ing in a way that they find offen­sive and insult­ing then you must take them at their word and rethink the way that you com­mu­ni­cate your mes­sage.

Con­duct your­selves wise­ly toward out­siders, mak­ing the most of the time. Let your speech always be gra­cious, sea­soned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer every­one. Colos­sians 4:5–6, NRSV

My broth­ers, I humbly sug­gest that you act­ed with a great lack of wis­dom, as any­one who has spent time min­is­ter­ing on the col­lege cam­pus could have told you. Indeed, we would have made the point with great fer­vor. Some­thing like this hap­pens once or twice every year and it always detracts from the work of God on cam­pus — I have nev­er once seen it help.

If you doubt the effects of your vis­it, I direct you to the unof­fi­cial Stan­ford blog’s per­spec­tive on your actions.

If any place will not wel­come you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a tes­ti­mo­ny against them. Mark 6:11, NRSV

And this, to me, is the clinch­er. Jesus told his dis­ci­ples to move on when peo­ple did­n’t want to lis­ten. And that’s the mod­el we see through­out the New Tes­ta­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Paul. Paul, con­trary to his rep­u­ta­tion, was very can­ny and was a mas­ter at non-intru­sive evan­ge­lism. He sought to preach in places where peo­ple expect­ed to hear preach­ing. He went to syn­a­gogues, philo­soph­i­cal venues, and lec­ture halls and talked to peo­ple who were ready to lis­ten.

And so while I applaud your inten­tions, I beg you to rethink your evan­ge­lis­tic strat­e­gy and see if there is not a wis­er way to engage stu­dents with the claims of Christ.

And to the cam­pus com­mu­ni­ty I reit­er­ate my apol­o­gy. They meant well, but they act­ed in a way that caused many of you to have a low­er opin­ion of Christ and His fol­low­ers than you did before.

Ear­li­er today I was read­ing an arti­cle about Ein­stein’s reli­gious views and I was struck by the fol­low­ing com­ment: “I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the lumi­nous fig­ure of the Nazarene.”

If your per­cep­tion of Christ is shaped large­ly by the sign-bear­ers and oth­ers like them, then I urge you to look at Jesus your­self. Read the gospels and ask around in your dorm. I promise that you will find some Christ-fol­low­ers who would love noth­ing more than to have a respect­ful con­ver­sa­tion with you and help you to see why Jesus is still wor­shiped after these many years and across these many miles.

Pi Day at Chi Alpha

John Sillcox, mathematician extraordinaireAs most of you were com­plete­ly unaware, yes­ter­day was Pi Day.

If the ref­er­ence is con­fus­ing to you, yes­ter­day was March 14. This date can be writ­ten 3/14, and 314 are the first three dig­its of the infi­nite­ly-long num­ber pi.

Any­way, I made a ref­er­ence to Pi Day at the begin­ning of my mes­sage last night and I asked offhand­ed­ly if any­one in the audi­ence had pi mem­o­rized out to any sig­nif­i­cant length — more than 10 dig­its.

At first I did­n’t see any hands, but then I noticed that every­one was point­ing at some­one just out of my field of vision. I turned and John Sill­cox (pic­tured here) had his hand raised.

“John, how many dig­its do you have pi mem­o­rized out to?”

“100.”

“For real? You know the first 100 dig­its of pi?”

“Yeah.”

I was pret­ty floored. I had thought MAYBE some­one would know the first 10 or 25 dig­its.

“You know that I have no choice but to call you up here and have you recite them.”

After some cajol­ing he agreed and began recit­ing the num­bers. One of the graph­ics I had for pi day hap­pened to dis­play the first sev­er­al hun­dred num­bers and so we pro­ject­ed the graph­ic behind him while he rat­tled them off. His recall was per­fect.

Here’s the bit that I found most inter­est­ing about the entire expe­ri­ence: the response of the audi­ence. This is the sort of geeky thing that nor­mal­ly only I would find cool. But at Stan­ford, such dis­plays get a dif­fer­ent response. Our Chi Alpha group went wild. One of our rug­by play­ers got up and began bow­ing to John, cry­ing “We’re not wor­thy!”

So yeah. That’s what Pi Day at Chi Alpha is like. At least at Stan­ford.

For the record, my texts were Exo­dus 3:14 and Philip­pi­ans 3:14. 🙂