Glen Davis

Reaching the Campus Tribes

Last year I had the chance to meet a guy named Benson Hines. He took a year to travel to nearly 200 college campuses to see what God was up to, and one of his stops was Stanford University. We met and talked shop for a while and have stayed in touch via Facebook since then.

Benson has just written a free book called Reaching The Campus Tribes

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about his observations. His central thesis: college ministry is a whole lot more like foreign missions than it is like youth ministry

It’s going to be fully available next Monday at http://reachingthecampustribes.com/

. For now, there’s a prerelease version you can download (pdf link, 4.2 MB).

Benson also has a blog: Exploring College Ministry. Check it out.

Worship for Believers and Unbelievers

One of my favorite MP3s is Tim Keller’s Preaching to Believers and Unbelievers. I desperately want to preach in such a way that I nourish believers while simultaneously engaging nonbelievers.

I don’t know of any comparable resource that talks about musical worship. Does anyone know of a good MP3, article or book along these lines?

I’m not just looking for something that says, “We should do this.” I’m looking for something that says, “We should do this, and here is how.”

You can leave a comment the hurt locker dvd or send me an email/Facebook message.

Why People Are Getting Married Later

The Freakonomics blog tipped me off to a fascinating interview with the author of a recent book on marriage in America. Two of the author’s responses stood out to me (emphasis added):

Fifty years ago you had to be married to be a respectable adult in the United States. Today, marriage is optional—you can get most of your emotional and economic needs by living with partner—and single parents can also get by. But oddly enough, marriage is, if anything, more important than ever to people as a symbol of having made it in life—of having a successful personal life. Most young Americans still want to get married, but they do it only when all the other steps to adulthood are in place—when they have completed their education, when they and their partners have jobs, when they have saved up enough for a down payment on a house, or even have had children together. Marriage used to be the first step into adulthood, but now it is the last. It’s the capstone of personal life—the final brick put in after all the others are in place.

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So marriage is still important, but in a different way than in the past. It’s a symbol of personal achievement—the ultimate merit badge, the marriage badge.

And

One statistic that stunned me: take two children, one growing up with married parents in the United States, and one growing up with unmarried parents in Sweden—which child has the higher likelihood of seeing his parents’ relationship break up? Answer: the American kid, because children living with married parents in the United States have a higher probability of experiencing a break-up than do children living with unmarried parents in Sweden. That’s how high our break-up rates are.

So… yeah. If it sounds interesting to you, check out The Marriage-Go-Round. Interestingly, the Google Books page is very sparse right now. How long does it take for new books to get a full listing?

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My Redeemer Lives Considered From The Standpoint Of Grammar

WARNING: grammar geekiness ahead.

I hate songs with nonsensical lyrics, especially those that purport to be worship songs. The lyrics of a song matter far more to me than their accompanying music: I would forbid a song from being played in my ministry for having bad lyrics but never for having chords which I did not like.

And so I was especially pleased to make sense of some puzzling lyrics in My Redeemer Lives

in church this morning.

The problematic stanza is

You lift my burdens
I’ll rise with You
I’m dancing on this mountain top
to see Your kingdom come

I was hung up on the word “to”, which I took to mean “I am dancing on this mountain top in order to bring about Your Kingdom’s arrival.” In another language this would be called a dative of purpose. This troubled me, because as Lindsey download the tragedy of macbeth online download drag me to hell dvd download the namesake online

said this morning, “There are few things less likely to bring about the kingdom than dancing on a mountain. How about feeding some homeless people or talking to someone about Jesus?”

But then I realized there were at least two other interpretations of the word “to”. It could be like a dative of instrument (“I am dancing on this mountain top because I get a good view from up here which enables me to behold Your kingdom as it spreads on earth”) or like an ablative of attendant circumstances (“To see your Kingdom come causes me to dance on this mountain top”).

I suspect it’s the latter.

So now I can sing that song.

For the 1% of you who have been similarly puzzled, you’re welcome.

For the 80% of you wondering if I made up the words dative and ablative, check out Wikipedia’s list of grammatical cases.

Create a Facebook Friend List for Chi Alpha

I just sent this email to the students in my ministry. If you find it helpful, feel free to adapt it for your own church/ministry.

Hope you’re doing well in the aftermath of finals.

Quick suggestion: take a bit of your free time over spring break to do a very simple task that will help strengthen our community.

If you use Facebook, make a friend list for Chi Alpha.

Go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn

Click the blue “Make A New List” button on the left side of the screen and call the new list “Chi Alpha”.

On the next screen, add everyone in Chi Alpha. Use the phone list as a guide (I’ve enclosed the list of names below — just cut and paste them one at a time into the “add to list” box).

Now every time you log in, you’ve got a simple way to quickly check in with our community. There will be a “Chi Alpha” link on the left sidebar of the main Facebook page that will show you the most recent status updates/shared links/whatever from the people in our group.

Now add two or three people you are sharing your faith with to the list. Whenever you see their status updates pop up on the XA list you just made, remember to pray for them and invite them to join us the next time you see them.

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It’s hardly going to revolutionize your life, but if all or even a lot of us do it then it will make our community that much tighter. Facebook is a great tool for enhancing real life friendships — maximize it for the Kingdom!

Hope it helps. We’re all in this together. car accident lawyers ny download basic instinct 2 free

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College Ministry and Global Transformation

One of my favorite subjects to talk about is the strategic nature of campus ministry. As I was reading the most recent issue of Books & Culture scar divx

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, one passage from a book review popped out at me:

I saw a striking pattern in these books [Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South: Africa /Latin America/Asia] that the editors and authors did not mention: a distinct source for much of the more principled evangelical social and political engagement across the regions. Repeatedly, the leaders of parachurch ministries and reform-minded NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable, who spoke up for human rights and electoral reform and against corruption and autocratic rule came from two sources: student Christian movements and the worldwide network of evangelical leaders affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship joined the People Power movement in the Philippines, while Campus Crusade played a central role in the formation of the Citizens Committee for Economic Justice in South Korea. Likewise in South Africa, it was the members of Youth Alive, the evangelical student fellowship started in Soweto by Caesar Molebatsi, who drove the Concerned Evangelicals movement to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin American Theological Fraternity, an evangelical network with strong ties to both the Lausanne Committee and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, figures prominently in pro-democratic evangelical work across Latin America.

INFEMIT [the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians] itself is a product of this network, which might help explain these authors’ interest in highlighting this strain of evangelical social thought and action. But it is indeed significant. Little could the Anglo-American founders of the Lausanne and campus ministry movements have imagined that their emphasis on thoughtful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help animate democratic movements around the globe.

source: “Now What? Revivalist Christianity and Global South Politics” by Joel Carpenter. Books & Culture March/April 2009, page 36.

If you want to change a culture, change its campuses. They are the steering wheels of society.

How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Listening to a bad sermon is like eating crab legs. It’s a lot more trouble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are diligent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I sometimes find helpful, in order of preference. I don’t want to make you too excited: nothing is going to make a bad sermon good. But these might help mitigate your suffering.

Be merciful. Preaching consistently good sermons is a lot harder than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your coworkers and customers to respond with compassion and understanding. Now extend that same compassion to the preacher.
Overlook the stupid stuff. Every once in a while even solid and reliable preachers will say something that’s completely ridiculous — usually when they venture outside their area of expertise. This is particularly true when preachers begin using stories to illustrate a point they are trying to make. It can really throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at family reunions. Even your favorite book has some boring passages, but you judge the book on its highlights. Judge sermons likewise.
Be randomly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a seminar: you should bring a notebook to sermons not because of how insightful and magnificent the preacher is going to be, but because the Holy Spirit will spark new and amazing insights in you which are only tangentially related to what is in the speaker’s notes. Few sermons are so bad that there is no goodness in them — even a three-year-old will say something profound and/or hilarious if you listen to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unexpected Bible reference, or a fact that you were hitherto unaware of and begin writing furiously. Doodle as well. Repeat as necessary.
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had a tradition in his Chi Alpha ministry. Once a year he would preach opposite: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrustworthy”, etc. He did it deadpan (well — as deadpan as Harlow ever gets). The first time he did it he was worried his students wouldn’t catch on that he was merely exaggerating and then repeating their own doubts back to them in order to demonstrate how ridiculous their doubts were, but it was a huge success. Even the guests got it. It became an institution. Ever since he told me that story, I gamely pretend that a really bad sermon is merely the results of “opposites day”.
Improve the sermon.
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This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be disruptive if people around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only possible psychological defense. There are two fundamental kinds of badness. There’s bad delivery. That’s the best kind. The preacher has good things to say, but the inability to say them well. The whole sermon can be spent fruitfully paraphrasing and improving the solid content of the sermon. For example, you might reorder and reword the outline for greater impact or logical flow. There’s bad content. The preacher is distorting the text or not thinking things through. That’s harder, but can be even more diverting. You can compose your own outline from scratch on the same passage or topic that the preacher is endeavoring to address. One or two of my best sermons has come about this way.

Finally, my apologies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has happened before and have no doubt it will happen again. It’s my job to be the best speaker I can be and it is your job to be the best listener that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work together this whole thing will go much more smoothly.

And a note to my pastor — relax, this was not inspired by your sermon this week. You didn’t even preach. We watched a movie, remember? 🙂

We&amp;amp;#039;re Number 10

Just noticed that the National Council of Church’s 2009 Yearbook was recently published (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest religious groups in America.

The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 members, down 0.59 percent.
The Southern Baptist Convention, 16,266,920 members, down 0.24 percent.
The United Methodist Church, 7,931,733 members, down 0.80 percent.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 5,873,408 members, up 1.63 percent.
The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 members, no change reported.
National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 members, no change reported.
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 4,709,956 members, down 1.35 percent.
National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., 3,500,000 members, no change reported.
Presbyterian Church (USA), 2,941,412 members, down 2.79 percent
Assemblies of God, 2,863,265 members, up 0.96 percent. dangerous beauty divx online

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So.… yeah. We’re number 10, we’re number 10, we’re number 10! Maybe we can chant that at General Council.

Sadly, we’re the only Christian group (in the top 10) that is growing. And even sadder, when you get into our internal numbers you realize that a few parts of our movement are growing rapidly but that there are huge swaths undergoing slow decline. For now, the explosive growth is offsetting the decay.

I’m grateful that I’m on a winning team and that our movement is growing when so many are stagnating, but I must confess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exactly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divinely-sparked revival to which we must respond with organizational renewal, or else we’ll soon be celebrating the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with people who say, “The Assemblies of God? Never heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Presbyterians. Nearly. We’re only off by like 80,000 people. That’s the size of a good South American church. We haven’t quite figured out how to do that in North America, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basically one missiological insight and then one good church plant away from being number 9. So there.”

Baptism on Campus

January 29th I had a great privilege. I was able to baptize my friend Kelly in the Claw Fountain in between the Bookstore and Old Union.

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The water was cold. In fact, I saw Kelly’s eyes shoot open when she went under the water and I could practically read the thoughts running through her brain, “I want to gasp. But if I gasp, I’ll drown. Drowning is bad at a baptism. But I want to gasp so badly.”

Fortunately, the warm California sun brought her back from the brink of hypothermia right after I pulled her up. I’m just glad I told her to bring a change of clothes and a towel!

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watch slaughter online If having a baptism out in public strikes you as a little odd I’d like to point out that it has ample Biblical and historical precedent. The most famous Biblical example is from Acts 8:36–38:

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why shouldn’t I be baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him.

Yeah. So we did that.

And I hope we get to do it again soon. 🙂

Digital Discipleship

In one of the first conversations I remember having with Scott Aughtmon, he tried to sell me on the advantages of using sequential autoresponders download evil under the sun

in ministry. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I smiled and nodded.

Turns out they’re awesome. I wish I had listened to him sooner.

Consider the case of Dick Schroeder. He speaks at retreats and frequently prays with people to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Over the years, he has put together a series of emails that he sends to people afterwards to coach them from a distance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to automate the process. My mind flashed back to Scott’s enthusiasm for these autoresponder things, so I downloaded a free PHP script called Infinite Responder

and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if someone signs up, they begin receiving coaching emails from Dick once a week. Since the messages appear to come from his email address, students can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about anything they found confusing or that they need special advice about. It’s very low-maintenance for him, and Chi Alpha students nationwide get a year’s worth of Dick’s expertise.

Since rolling this out at the World Missions Summit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 people subscribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momentum is building and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thoroughly publicized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

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It’s just email. No one has to install a special plugin, put headphones in their computer, or have some insanely fast connection.
Personal. The emails come from an actual human being to whom you can respond.
Low-maintenance. Once the email is in the database, it’s just there. Neither Dick nor I need to do anything special to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from people who have specific questions, which is only a fraction of the people who receive any given email.

Pretty cool, eh?

Lately I’ve been wondering what other opportunities are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

Emails for new believers
A “40 days” type campaign for Chi Alpha with daily emails where each campus that chooses to participate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
A first two weeks of school devotional to get students fired up when they return from summer break
Coaching emails for people who are called to ministry
Monthly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the transition out of college gracefully
A term’s worth of weekly emails for people pioneering new Chi Alpha ministries
etc,etc

It’s just a matter of finding a person with the right expertise and hooking them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d especially love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has content ready to go. I can just run it past Dennis and get that stuff online faster than you can imagine. 😉

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