Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our dis­trict spon­sors an event called The Lay Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. It’s a big con­fer­ence designed to help church vol­un­teers do their jobs bet­ter. There are about 50 learn­ing tracks (each with four work­shops) rang­ing from chil­dren’s min­istry to using the inter­net effec­tive­ly to using light­ing and sound sys­tems. We, of course, spon­sor a col­lege min­istry track.

I men­tion all this by way of intro­duc­tion to men­tion two peo­ple I inter­act­ed with this week­end: Dan Bet­zer and John Abela.

Dan Bet­zer is a leg­end in the Assem­blies of God–he’s an incred­i­ble speak­er, a mis­sions fanat­ic, and an extreme­ly suc­cess­ful pas­tor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, inci­den­tal­ly, blogs).

Any­way, I learned two things about him this week­end:
1) he once lost his min­is­te­r­i­al cre­den­tials for sev­en years for flout­ing the hier­ar­chy’s rules
2) he’s such an intro­vert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that peo­ple feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have nev­er had a con­ver­sa­tion. I gleaned one tid­bit from his ser­mon and anoth­er from a friend of his.

The sec­ond per­son I met was John Abela. John is a for­mer core mem­ber of the phpBB2 team and runs the most pop­u­lar con­glom­er­a­tion of Assem­blies of God web­sites in the world. I am told that his total band­width exceeds that of all the nation­al Assem­bly of God web­sites in every nation com­bined.

That tick­les me. Many of our lead­ers attempt to lead by lim­it­ing infor­ma­tion and don’t seem to real­ize that’s no longer pos­si­ble. John has effec­tive­ly done an end run on a ton of stu­pid rules in the Assem­blies of God and because he’s a layper­son no one can stop him–he’s got no cre­den­tials for them to revoke. I love it.

He men­tioned that he gets a phone call from some AG offi­cial or anoth­er about once a week ask­ing him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allow­ing for con­ver­sa­tion­al hyper­bole, that sounds about right. He’s mak­ing peo­ple ner­vous enough that we’ve even had res­o­lu­tions at Gen­er­al Coun­cil prompt­ed by one of his sites.

Any­way, I just want­ed to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s mak­ing our move­ment bet­ter by using the web to help peo­ple. Kudos to him.

Completely Random Dream

I nev­er remem­ber my dreams, and so I was very sur­prised this morn­ing when I woke up and remem­bered an extreme­ly bizarre dream sequence.

In my dream I was read­ing an op-ed piece by someone–I’m pret­ty sure it was Vic­tor Davis Han­son. As I read a sen­tence stuck in my mind, “If you sneak around on pri­vate prop­er­ty long enough, you will con­vince your­self you have a right to be there.”

How bizarre.

Tonight I’ll prob­a­bly have a dream about hear­ing Hugh Hewitt say some­thing like, “If you trash-talk a nom­i­nee long enough, you will con­vince your­self she is unqual­i­fied to be a jan­i­tor.”

Great T‑Shirt On Campus

Hats off to this guy–what an awe­some slo­gan. I’m tempt­ed to make them our offi­cial Chi Alpha shirts.

By the way–clicking on the pic­ture reveals the gen­tle­man so garbed. He suits the shirt.

Induced Combustion

Lind­sey Haw­ley (who will soon escape the frozen tun­dra of Alak­sa and move in with Paula and I) burst into flame the oth­er day, prompt­ing reflec­tion (and no small amount of laugh­ter) on our part.

Our thoughts:

  • We’re for­tu­nate not to have a gas stove.
  • We’re for­tu­nate not to favor flam­ma­ble sleep­wear.
  • We’re for­tu­nate not to have large win­dows in our kitchen.
  • We’re for­tu­nate to have learned of Lind­sey’s pro­cliv­i­ties so ear­ly. New rule: Lind­sey can’t cook coed. And we’ll start stor­ing a spare robe next to the fire extin­guish­er.

What All Religions Have In Common

At a three-hour Stan­ford Asso­ci­at­ed Reli­gions meet­ing last Fri­day I final­ly dis­cov­ered what all reli­gions have in com­mon: an aver­sion to meet­ings, par­tic­u­lary the long and bureau­crat­ic sort. Espe­cial­ly meet­ings in which the rules fall like man­na from heav­en. For instance, the Office For Reli­gious Life (an office I gen­er­al­ly and gen­uine­ly enjoy work­ing with), decid­ed that last year’s “Uni­fied Chris­t­ian Gath­er­ing” was decep­tive­ly titled because the Mor­mons (and a few oth­er groups) were not invit­ed to help plan the event and so now we have new rules gov­ern­ing event titles. And for a few min­utes there I thought we were about to be required to clear all guest speak­ers with the stu­dent activ­i­ti­ties staff. Yeesh!

Serenity

I went to go see Seren­i­ty with two stu­dents tonight.

It was real­ly, real­ly, real­ly good. The audi­ence burst into applause when it was over.

It was fun­ny. The humor was MUCH more amus­ing than most come­dies man­age.

It was sus­pense­ful. One girl in the audi­ence screamed at one par­tic­u­lar tense moment.

It was well-writ­ten. Very well-writ­ten. Every char­ac­ter was unique, made sense, and need­ed to be there.

I loved this movie.

A Dartmouth Double Standard?

Noah Riner, the stu­dent body pres­i­dent of Dart­mouth, told incom­ing stu­dents that they should focus on devel­op­ing moral­ly as much as aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly and that Jesus can bring moral trans­for­ma­tion. A ruckus ensued, with the appar­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tion being that stu­dent pres­i­dents should­n’t use such occa­sions to pro­mote their own idio­syn­crat­ic views of the world.

Odd­ly enough, a sim­i­lar ruckus does not seem to have fol­lowed the then stu­dent body pres­i­den­t’s call for the legal­iza­tion of pot two years ear­li­er.

Per­haps the issue isn’t that Mr. Riner prop­a­gat­ed his own views, but that the mes­sage of Jesus still makes peo­ple uncom­fort­able after two mil­lenia.

Just a the­o­ry, mind you.

Sound the Kazoo–Salvation is Nigh!

Yes­ter­day was our last day of tabling on cam­pus for the fall kick­off, and it was worth every minute for one real­ly unique expe­ri­ence: I actu­al­ly saw a Jew­ish open-air preach­er on White Plaza. Unex­pect­ed, giv­en that Jew­ish adher­ents are rarely not­ed for their evan­ge­lis­tic fer­vor. He had a bull­horn and every­thing.

It was a bit hard to make out what he was say­ing, giv­en that con­cur­rent­ly:

  • about 160 stu­dents and work­ers were hold­ing a rather loud protest ral­ly. “What do we want? Jus­tice! When do we want it? Now!”
  • a hip-hop group was blar­ing tunes from their turntable set up about 15 feet behind the afore­men­tioned preach­er.
  • two acapel­la groups were also pro­ject­ing music (although less thumpi­ly than the hip-hop­pers).

Still, it was inter­est­ing to spec­u­late about the con­tent of his mes­sage. I do know that at one point a dozen Jew­ish stu­dents were blow­ing kazoos while Rab­bi Mychal Copeland blew a full-on sho­far. I also was able to hear the occas­sion­al Hebrew phrase and a few Eng­lish words like “inner bro­ken­ness.”

All in all, a most sur­pris­ing devel­op­ment.

Steffa

Only a few read­ers will under­stand the ref­er­ence, but for today Stef­fa is offi­cial­ly a turkey. One of her alum­ni works in the Stan­ford reg­is­trar’s office and she nev­er told me! Con­sid­er your­self turk­i­fied, my friend.

T‑Shirts On Campus Today

While tabling on cam­pus today I saw two t‑shirts that tick­led me. The first was a Che Rea­gan t‑shirt. The shirt is delight­ful­ly ambigu­ous. Side note: the Che Jesus t‑shirts just don’t have that same vibe–the beret is just too much. The oth­er was a Kerry/Gore t‑shirt. Kerry/Gore? What? They were nev­er even run­ning mates. It was Gore/Lieberman in 2000 and then Kerry/Edwards in 2004. I’m sure the shirt was sup­posed to be some sort of state­ment, but I can’t for the life of me fig­ure it out.