What would Jesus say?

If Jesus hosted a conference for pastors, what would he say to them?

My guess is that it would go something like this:

Do not worry about your ministry: how many people you have in the seats or how big your budget is. Is not the Kingdom more important than statistics? Who of you by worrying can add a single name to the book of life? Why do you worry about buildings? Have you not seen the Grand Canyon which is more majestic than any cathedral? Why do you worry about budgets and offerings? The pagans run after these things. But your heavenly Father knows what you need. Instead, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Do not worry about results. The results will take care of themselves.

You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and success.

So what do you think?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Pastor as Expert

Cognitive load theory says that experts are distinguished by two things:

• Extensive schemas of knowledge stored in long-term memory


• High levels of automation in handling many of those schemas
  

Obviously, becoming an expert requires a significant investment of time, energy and attention.

It seems clear that no one can be an expert in everything (outside the movies).

At various times and in various places, pastors have been expected to be experts in one or more of these subjects and skills:

• Administration
  


• Biblical exegesis
  


• Biblical languages (Greek & Hebrew)
  


• Business management
  


• Change management
  


• Counseling
  


• Fundraising
  


• Marketing
  


• Personal networking
  


• Politics
  


• Public speaking
  


• Systematic theology
  

But what is the essential expertise that is required?

I would suggest that every pastor must be an expert in spiritual transformation. He (or she) must be growing more like Christ and be able to assist others in understanding that process and putting it into practice. It seems to me that this is first responsibility of the leader of any group of believers. Anyone who does not see this as the chief calling does not belong in leadership within the Church.

There is a secondary responsibility that follows the primary in much the same way that the second great commandment (to love the neighbor) follows the great commandment (to love God). I believe that every pastor must also be an expert in theology.

I don't mean systematic theology. Experts in systematic theology often have little expertise in spiritual transformation. They seem to be more concerned with organizing the truth about God than with living it out in real life. I'm referring to what Nouwen is talking about in this quotation:

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, p. 68

As pastors, we must know God and be able to articulate how he relates to all of life.

We need to develop a robust theology that addresses

• Work


• Play


• Relationships


• Money


• Evil


• Sex


• Time


• Nature


• Power


• Culture

So what do you think? Do you agree with my basic point? Would you add anything to the list?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional Transformation

Georges Boujakly at Missional Church Network lists these principles of Missional Transformation. (I've reworded them slightly.)

1. Spiritual transformation takes place on the inside.
   
2. Spiritual transformation requires deliberate effort.
   
3. Spiritual transformation has a specific goal.
   
4. The goal of spiritual transformation is conformity to Jesus Christ.
   
5. The progress of spiritual transformation is always slow.
   
6. Spiritual transformation is the "business" of the church.
   

Spiritual transformation (discipleship) is not a luxury for the spiritually elite. It is at the heart of the mission of the body of Christ.

It is so easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services…. The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 169–170

Some people try to reduce this mission to

• Getting people signed up for heaven
  
• Making the world a better place
  
• Attracting people to a weekly meeting
  

But when we focus on spiritual transformation, all the other things fall into their proper place.

When we try to do one of these other things in isolation (such as getting people signed up for heaven) we distort the gospel and the impact of the Church on society.

For example, what would happen in your community if 15 people "made a decision" to accept Christ?

Maybe nothing.

But what would happen if 5 people who were living "without God and without hope" submitted to the Good News and lived as serious disciples of Jesus Christ becoming transformed into his likeness?

Eventually the whole community would be transformed, or so I suspect.

What do you think? Can you identify any other substitutes for the Gospel beside the three I mentioned? Why do you think that the Church has lost its focus on spiritual transformation? How do we change that?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Making Sense

Many people see education as a process of transferring information, as if information were a commodity that can be moved from one place to another.

In this view, learning is simply about adding new information to memory. And the goal is to find the most efficient way to get the information from the brain of the teacher into the brain of the learner.

Richard Mayer argues (Multimedia Learning) that learning is about making sense. It is a process of constructing a network of knowledge.

Learning involves integrating new information into existing networks of information (schemas) stored in long-term memory. According to this theory, there are only two things that distinguish an expert from a non-expert.

• They have extensive schemas.
  
• Parts of those schemas are "automated."
  

When you first learned to drive, you had to focus on many different things. The first few attempts were overwhelming. But with experience, the details combine into schemas that can be managed all at once. And many of those details can be safely automated.

The same is true for learning to read. At first you needed to learn the letters. Then you needed to learn how to combine them into words. The first stage of reading required you to pay attention to every word. And some words had to be "sounded out," requiring you to focus on the letters. As your skill developed, so did your vocabulary and your reading schema. Now you can even read sentences words missing and undrstnd words with letters missing.

Your expertise with these two difficult tasks has developed to the point that you could even do both at the same time.

Here's a little more background if you're interested.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

They Just Don’t Get It

As I hung up the phone, I had an uneasy feeling that I'd just been taken.

The call had been from a vendor about a past-due bill. I was given the option to pay with a "phone check." I was busy when the call came, and I had done this a few times before, so I wasn't suspicious—until the call ended. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that this was phone fraud.

So I frantically tried to contact my bank.

I went to their Web page, but I couldn't find a phone number for emergencies. I called the customer service number and got a menu—without any options that fit the situation. I dug a little more online and found a more specific number. I still had to go through a long menu, but this time I was able to talk with a real person.

I explained the situation to the young lady.

She told me that I had three options, none of which would really solve my problem.

I asked if I could put a hold on the account. She said no.

We talked for some time with her repeating the three options several times (always in a condescending tone).

Eventually, she told me that I had zero liability if I was the victim of fraud.

I said, "I'm glad to hear that. It would have been good if you had told me that at the beginning of the conversation."

She said, "Sir, I'm offended that you say that I should have told you that at the beginning. I answered your questions."

I replied, "But it's your role as the expert to answer the questions that I'm not smart enough to ask."

She snapped, "Sir, I answered the questions that you asked. I was doing my job."

She wanted to argue with me about this. Finally, I just said, "Listen, you told me that I have no liability. That's all I need to know. Thank you."

This was a person who was hired to handle problems.

Most of her callers are upset. I was panicked. But, I suspect, many of her callers are angry. "Her job" is to defuse the situation and to make the caller feel good about her bank. Yet she was only concerned about fulfilling the requirements of the call. It's as if she sees the calls as an annoyance, a distraction.

If she really understood "her job," she would welcome emotional, even irate, customers. The more problems there are, the more valuable she could be to the bank. And calls like mine, would make her into an easy hero—if she understood what "her job" really is.

She could make my problem virtually go away, simply by telling me, "Don't worry, Sir. You have zero liability if you are the victim of fraud. You don't really need to do anything. But you do have these three options, if that will make you feel more secure."

But she was following the rules, answering my questions.

Now here's the kicker, when I couldn't get through to the bank right away, I called 911.

Just as I finished my conversation with the "customer service" expert, a police officer shows up.

I start to explain the whole situation to her. I apologize for even calling in the first place.

She suggests that I call the company that the bill was for. (Of course, that is the logical thing to do, but I was more concerned with preventing a big disaster at the time.)

So I called the company and got a person who did get it. She checked my account and was able to tell me eventually that it showed a payment for the amount I had authorized in the first call. Then she wanted to know why I was uncomfortable with the collection call. She asked if there was a problem with the "professionalism" of the caller. She wanted to make sure that there wasn't a problem on their end. And, if there was, she wanted to make certain that it didn't happen again.

I thanked her, hung up, and gave a sheepish grin to the police officer.

By now, I'd lost track of how many times I'd felt like a complete idiot.

And I really had no one to blame but myself.

But there were several things my bank could have done to minimize the damage. Instead, they gave me even more opportunities to feel stupid.

So here's the question: How does the church do the same thing to the "unchurched"?

• Do we have a similar confusion about what our "job" is?
  
• How do we make people feel stupid?
  
• Do we find ourselves answering people's questions instead of telling them what they really need to know?
  

Let me know what you think. I'd be especially interested in any "horror stories" you might have about encounters with churches.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Why is PowerPoint so bad?

You've seen hundreds of examples of horrendous PowerPoint slides. Edward Tufte even argues that PowerPoint is evil.

But the problem is not the software. The problem is how it is used.

Richard Mayer takes this argument one step further:

"Asking whether computers are a good instructional technology is like asking whether books are a good instructional technology. It all depends on how they are used, that is, on the instructional method" (June 2005 issue of Educational Psychology Review).

Seth Godin contends that PowerPoint presentations are used as crutches by presenters and audiences alike. The presenter uses it as a teleprompter. The audience uses the print out of slides as a verbatim record of the presentation.

Godin suggests five rules to rescue your next presentation:

1. No more than six words on a slide.
   
2. Use professional images.
   
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
   
4. Never use the sound effects that are built in to the program.
   
5. Don't hand out print-outs of your slides.
   

Garr Reynolds offers these suggestions:

• Use a remote.
  
• Blank the screen when appropriate.
  
• Limit the special effects.
  
• Use high-quality graphics.
  
• Choose your fonts well.
  
• Don't use built-in sound effects.
  

But Richard Mayer sees the problem as much deeper. A few tips will not solve the problem. What is needed is a good theory and some real-world research.

It is worthwhile to distinguish between two possible goals in making a PowerPoint presentation — information presentation, in which the goal is to present information to the audience, and cognitive guidance, in which the goal is to guide the audience in their processing of the presented information. When your goal is information presentation, PowerPoint slides can be full of information that may be extremely hard to process by the audience. However, since your goal is simply information presentation, you are not concerned with whether or not the audience can process the presented information. When your goal is cognitive guidance, you want to make sure that the audience members build appropriate knowledge in their memories. Your job is to communicate in a way that will have the desired impact on the audience, so you need to design your slides so they are consistent with how people learn. In my opinion, many of the examples of misuses of PowerPoint occur when the slides are designed to present information rather than to guide cognitive processing. In short, like any communication medium—including books — PowerPoint can be misused as a device for presenting information without regard for how the audience will process the presented information (bold added).

In his Multimedia Learning, Mayer explains the three assumptions that form the foundation for his work:

1. Visual and auditory information are processed through separate "channels."
   
2. Each channel is limited in its ability to process information.
   
3. Processing information is an active cognitive process designed to construct coherent mental representations.
   

Mayer explains that most presentations are focused on the technology:

It is worthwhile to distinguish between a technology-centered approach and a learner-centered approach to the use of educational technologies including PowerPoint. In a technology-centered approach, the focus is on the capabilities of cutting edge technology. Thus, we would be interested in the effects of each of the many features of PowerPoint. In a learner-centered approach, the focus is on the way that people learn and process information. Thus, we would be interested in finding ways to use the features of PowerPoint to support people's natural ways of learning, that is, as aids to human learning.

He explains that humans are not information processors. They are meaning makers. And this requires three distinct steps:

1. Selecting what is important.
   
2. Organizing what has been selected.
   
3. Integrating the new meaning with previous knowledge.
   

In my next post I'll list his "research-based principles for the design of multimedia instructional messages."

So what do you think? Does this theory fit with your own experience?

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

Wright-ing History

In his Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, N. T. Wright makes an important point that is often overlooked in the discussion of Gnostic Christianity.

The gnostic gospels are today being trumpeted as the radical alternatives to the oppressive and conservative canonical gospels, but the historical reality was just the opposite.

Elaine Pagels is one of those heralds of Gnostic superiority. In The Gnostic Gospels, she writes:

At a time when the orthodox Christians increasingly discriminated between clergy and laity, this group of Gnostic Christians demonstrated that, among themselves, they refused to acknowledge such distinction. Instead of ranking their members into superior and inferior "orders" within a hierarchy, they followed the principle of strict equality…

Such practices prompted Tertullian to attack "the behavior of the heretics."

(Quoted at The Gnostic Jesus.)

The popular view is that Gnostic Christianity is "a lost treasure of immeasurable value, long buried in the suffocating darkness of conventional orthodoxy on one side, and blind fundamentalist extremism on the other."

But Wright argues that the truth is very different:

The people who were burned at the stake, fried on hot irons, thrown to the wild beasts, pulled apart on the rack…, these people did not imagine themselves to be on the way to a great political victory of "orthodoxy" over "heresy." They were not, as is often suggested, settling down and making comfortable compromises with the status quo…. They were following their crucified Lord.

The proponents of Gnostic Christianity, like to bring in factors from the reign of Constantine and from the time we call the Middle Ages. But the second century was a very different world.

In a.d. 177 many Christians were martyred in Vienne and Lyons. Among them was Pothinus, the Bishop of Lyons. He was immediately replaced by Irenaeus who was living in Rome, but who had been a highly-respected presbyter in Lyons. "And it was exactly then that he wrote his Against the Heresies, the work which mentions the 'Gospel of Judas.'"

This runs counter to the popular narrative about the emergence of Christian orthodoxy:

Reading Ehrman, Meyer and others, it is easy to forget what was really going on at the time, and to imagine that Ignatius, Irenaeus and other like him were simply unpleasant and arrogant heresy-hunters, eager to simply prop up their own power and ecclesiastical systems.

The truth is that in the second century the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives. They were the ones who took the path of least resistance. There was nothing dangerous, radical or progressive in Gnostic "Christianity."

The Gnostics were quite content to capitulate to their surrounding culture, in which mystery-religions, self-discovery, Platonic spirituality of various sorts, and coded revelations of hidden truths were the stock in trade. In other words, the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives, sticking with the kind of religion that everyone already knew.

In fact, an honest reading of the Gnostic texts will give us the impression that these people were "fairly thoroughly sexist, anti-Semitic, and lacking the courage to stand out against the ideologies and authorities of their day."

In stark contrast:

It was the orthodox Christians who were breaking new ground, and risking their necks as they did so.

(All unattributed and unlinked quotations are from Judas and the Gospel of Jesus by N. T. Wright.)

As an aside: As it was in those days, so should it be today. The orthodox Christians should not be known for "heresy hunting," conservatism and caution. Rather we should be known as the ones breaking new ground and risking our necks as we do so.

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

Cultural Literacy

Many Christians are culturally out of touch. I don't mean that they aren't up to date on their pop culture. I mean that they have little understanding of what culture is.

To these Christians, culture is all the stuff in the world that is different than "what Christians do." Here is an example of this mindset:

Redesigning the church to suit one's own cultural or generational preferences (as opposed to seeking a biblical approach to church order) is the very thing that caused the evangelical movement to run aground in the first place.

This implies that there is a neutral culture or, even worse, a "biblical culture" in which Christians can and should live. It says in so many words that there is only one way, "the biblical way," to structure a church.

And there are many other voices calling for a return to "traditional values." One news commentator styles himself as a cultural warrior.

There is no doubt that contemporary culture is growing increasingly hostile to organized religion. And there are many values of today's culture that are in direct conflict with the gospel. But this has always been so.

There has never been a time when society did not present a threat to the gospel.

• This was true in first-century Israel.
  
• It was true in fourth-century Constantinople.
  
• It was true in twentieth-century America.
  

When modern missionaries first started evangelizing the peoples of the world, they often were more focused on instilling western culture than in instilling biblical values.

Much of this seems obvious to us now. Few Christians would confuse these western values with biblical Christianity:

• Capitalism
  
• Democracy
  
• Western ideas of modesty
  
• American hymnody
  

But there are many aspects of contemporary Christianity that have no biblical foundation. Even though they've become a common part of Christian practice and culture, they are relatively recent additions.

Here's a list of elements found in churches and Christian observance:

• Altar calls
  
• Baptism
  
• Cathedrals
  
• Christmas
  
• Church buildings
  
• Clergy
  
• Easter
  
• Evangelism program
  
• Individual Bible study
  
• Jesus as personal Savior
  
• Ordination
  
• Organ music
  
• Pews
  
• Priests
  
• Public reading of Scripture
  
• Revival meetings
  
• Sacred music
  
• Sanctuaries
  
• Sermon
  
• Sunday Sabbath observance
  
• Sunday worship
  
• Weekly offering
  

Tell me which ones you think are essential to Christianity and the gospel.

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

Religious Literacy

According to Stephen Prothero, "Americans are both deeply religious and deeply ignorant about religion."

In his book, Religious Literacy, Prothero traces the decline of religious knowledge, proposes a remedy and compiles a dictionary of religious literacy. He includes a quiz for readers to test their knowledge.

Here are a few of those questions along with some of my own:

1. Name a sacred text of Hinduism.
   
2. What are the five books of the Torah?
   
3. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Where is this found in the Bible?
   
4. What are the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism?
   
5. What is Ramadan?
   
6. What is the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites?
   
7. Ellen White founded what religious faith?
   
8. What religion celebrates Kwanzaa?
   
9. What are the teachings of Gnosticism?
   
10. What are the five pillars of Islam?
    
11. What is the Decalogue?
    
12. Vishnu is a deity of what religion?
    

If you don't know one of these, do a Google search and explain the answer in the comments.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Wright on Time

I just received my CDs of N. T. Wright's lectures at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake on March 23. At the end of the first lecture I asked this question:

The popular Christian view tends to see time as an illusion. If, as you argue, time is real and an enduring fact continuing into the new creation, it seems to me that this requires that God interacts with time in a way that involves genuine participation in the passing of time. I'm sure you've given this some thought. Could you comment on this please?

Here is his answer:

Yes, there is, of course, quite a debate at the moment I'm aware of, within North American not least, about God's interaction with and engagement with time, with the question being really whether things that happen in time can, in our cricketing image, put God on the back foot, whether God thinks, "Hmm, never thought you were going to get up to that."

There are, of course, places in the Bible which do seem to say that. You know, when Jeremiah inveighs against the practice of offering children to Molech, he says as the Word of God, "Not only did I never command that, it never entered my mind." That's an extraordinary idea for us, that humans can do something which God would never have dreamt of. And it kind of puts God in a different position. But God remains sovereign.

Jonathan Sachs, the chief rabbi of the UK, is one of the finest commentators on our present scene in Britain, wrote a piece no long ago likening the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness to what happens when you have a sat-nav or GPS system in your car. The voice says, "In half a mile turn right." And you say, "Actually, no. I don't like that road. I'm going to turn left in a quarter of a mile." And there's a pause, and the voice says in effect, "Well, this wasn't what we had in mind, but since we're now here, you're going to need to go this and this and this and this." And it seems to me that this is a perfectly proper way to think about how the sovereignty of God plays out through the responsibility of humans.

It's all to do with image-bearing-ness as humans and the sense that our job in worshipping God is to reflect him into the world. And because God has made the world like that, it is part of God's sovereign determination rooted in the triune nature of God himself that he will act through and with what humans think and do, and that actually you can collapse that back but you're actually moving away from the Trinity if you do so. Equally, you can move it too far forwards into a kind of totally indeterminate idea where really there is no sense of God as creator and judge, but merely of God as one player in a rather odd game. So for me, bring it back to the Trinity. Think through particularly creation and judgment, and you may be able to hold together what some people at the moment find is falling apart. Not a very adequate answer, but that's a starting point at least.

I'd be interested in your reaction to his answer.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Psychological Literacy

If scientific literacy calls into question the book of Genesis, then psychological literacy apparently rules out faith completely.

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, makes the case against faith in "The DNA of Religious Faith" published in the April 20, 2007, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He announces that "the era of deference to religious belief is ending."

Religious faith, which he defines as "belief without evidence," is dangerous to society. In fact, "the very teaching of religion to defenseless children is a form of child abuse."

Psychological literacy has excluded religious faith for quite some time. "Scholars have found it easy to explain religion: They've done it hundreds of times, in psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical, anthropological, and economic terms."

The problem, as he sees it, is that evolutionary theory hasn't been able to explain the survival of religious commitments in evolutionary terms. "It often appears that religious practice is fitness-reducing rather than enhancing." He writes, "Think of the frequent advocacy of sexual restraint, of tithing, of self-abnegating moral duty and other seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic denial of the 'evidence of our senses' in favor of faith in things asserted but not clearly demonstrated."

But riding to the rescue are "the four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse," Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Carl Sagan, "all passionate advocates of reason, committed to the proposition that religion is essentially unreasonable."

"Part of the attention-grabbing novelty of the Four Horsemen has been their refusal to abide by" the idea that science and religion are two independent domains, "insisting that when religion makes egregiously false 'truth claims' against science, it must be confronted, and that, moreover, religion itself can and should be 'naturalized'— that is, subjected to the same scrutiny that science brings to other phenomena."

Barash celebrates the iconoclastic work of the "Horsemen" in destroying the historic arguments for the existence of God. He takes particular glee in the attack on the argument from design, which he puts in quotes (presumably because it is not a legitimate argument or because only the scientifically illiterate would see design in biologically complex organisms). In spite of the "absurdity" of the argument from design: "This chestnut has had numerous stakes driven through its heart, but like a cinematic version of the undead, it keeps resurrecting itself, staggering, zombielike and covered with flies, back into public view."

He also addresses the "fine-tuning" argument. "Both Dawkins and Sagan examine this argument, which Dawkins caricatures as 'god-as-dial-twiddler.' Such twiddler-twaddle is oddly tautological, in that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to wonder about it." Then he shows his disdain for articles of faith, theories that are not falsifiable: "The anthropic principle can also be 'solved' by multiple universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist. This might apply not only to horizontally existing multiverses, but also to the same one occurring differently in time, if there have been (and will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the nature of matter and energy."

We wouldn't want our children to commit intellectual suicide by putting faith in "the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible." It is so much more intellectually rigorous to think that universes are multiplying at every quantum event happening all over the "current" universe, whatever that word means.

Not only is there a universe where I never made this post, but there would have to be an infinite number of universes where I made an infinite number of different posts. There would even be a universe where Richard Dawkins is a TV evangelist. But we can't have people believing in things that can't be proven. That is why Sam Harris feels a "need to take the United States in particular by the scruff of its neck and rub its nose in the dangers and absurdities of religious belief."

But the last stronghold of religion to be destroyed is the idea of transcendent moral law. Barash asserts that "God is no longer needed to explain 'Moral Law.'" Biologists have shown that "kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, third-party effects, and courtship possibilities, as well as simple susceptibility to social and cultural indoctrination" taken together or in various combinations provide sufficient foundation for a transcendent morality.

Professor Barash is well within his rights to refuse to believe in Christianity or any other traditional faith, but he doesn't seem to realize that his own plausibility structure is loaded with unprovable assumptions. If he chooses to place his faith in multiverses rather than a personal God, that is understandable since his assumptions exclude the existence of such a being. But surely he could spare us the patronizing lecture.

While I would agree with his view that scientific truth and religious truth are not two completely separate realms, I am not prepared to adopt materialism as my "scientifically-proven" religion whose "articles of faith" are not open to scrutiny. I prefer my religion to be transparent and honest about what it wants me to believe.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional Dip

Seth Godin has a new book, The Dip. I've ordered it, but it doesn't ship until May 10.

Here are some quotations about the topic of the book.

From the book description at the Amazon site:

"Maybe you're in a Dip-a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it's really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try."

"Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt-until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it."

"Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip—they get to the moment of truth and then give up—or they never even find the right Dip to conquer."

From an interview with Guy Kawasaki:

"What's the worst time to quit? When the pain is the greatest."

"The willingness to quit when you get off track pushes you on the path to mastery."

"When you copy something that's already on the other side of the Dip, you've already lost."

From an old essay at Fast Company:

"Fundamentalists decide whether they like a new piece of information based on how it will affect their prior belief system, not based on whether it is actually true."

Here's my summary of what Seth is trying to say:

• Any accomplishment that is really worthwhile gets difficult before there is a "pay off."
  
• But not all difficulties are created equal.
  
• Some difficulties are essentially dead ends.
  
• The "trick" is to be able to tell the difference.
  
• The bigger the dip, the greater the pay off.
  
• Each person, or organization, must discover what challenges should be faced and what obstacles are simply too big to overcome.
  

This requires a little translation to apply to missional Christianity. But here are some observations I would offer:

• Missional living is the ultimate "Dip."
  
• There is no quick pay off, no short cut.
  
• But the eventual reward is incalculable.
  
• There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ministry.
  
• One of the most important disciplines for a congregation is to learn to say, "No."
  
• It is a mistake to copy what another congregation did to get to the other side of the "Dip."
  
• The reward for getting to the other side of the "Dip" is not
  
  • Getting big
    
  • Becoming famous
    
  • Speaking at seminars
    
  • Telling other people how to do it
    
• The reward for getting to the other side is
  
  • Participating in the viral spread of God's kingdom
    
  • The opportunity to encourage others to survive the "Dip"
    
  • The opportunity to "risk it all" to cross another "Dip"
    

So what do you think? What would you add? What do you take issue with?

Here's an even more important question: Does this sound like something you'd be willing to spend your life for?

Pastor Rod

"Helping you become the person God created you to be"

No Accent

Since I moved to the Chicago area 25 years ago, people have wanted to know what my accent was. As it turns out, I don't have one.

What American accent does Rod have? His Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Try the quiz for yourself and post your results here. (Philosophy students: this does not count toward extra credit. I'm generous, but not that generous.)

Pastor Rod
"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"