Patti's shared items

I chose to be just crazy enough. More importantly, I want to encourage others to be crazy enough to recognize that they can change the world. — Adam McLane, August 28th 2009

In moments like this I feel like there is little I can do. While I would love to hop on a plane and “go help” the truth is I don’t have any skills that are actually useful. (I doubt they need a blogger) I will do the next best thing. I will give what I can and commit to joining the people of Haiti who stretch out their arms and call out Jesus’ name. — Adam McLane, January 13th 2010

It’s now been a couple weeks that I’ve known I was headed to Haiti to help in relief efforts. In the course of that time I’ve been all over the place emotionally. I’m scared, I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m worried, I want to just jump on the plane, I pretend like it’s 10 years away, I shop for stuff I think I may need, I change the subject when people bring it up, I watch more CNN than humanly necessary.

Back on January 13th I had no idea I would be heading to Haiti less than one month later.

But it is true. On February 11th I will land in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and begin an overland journey to earthquake stricken areas of Haiti. In my mind I keep hearing reporters say, “Haiti is a dangerous place on a good day, and certainly this is no good day for Haiti.” (While I am not an expert in rapid response relief, I’m happy to be traveling with a team who is!)

And yet I hear the voice of Jesus over that. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

On top of the obvious, there are a couple other elements that have me excited for this trip.

1. The team assembled by Adventures in Missions for this trip is crazy diverse! The first time I talked to Marko about the trip he joked that when talking to a couple other bloggers one of them said, “We’d all just have to get together and hug it out.” We come from different denominations, liberal/conservative stripes, theological heritages, ministry-types, and even ministry companies who compete against one another. And yet, the need in Haiti is way more important than anything that should/could potentially divide us.
2. The team is calling you to Haiti. As soon as I told others that I was going they asked me, “How can I go too?” This is one of the secondary purposes of the Advance Team. We are going first, we are exploring what you can do, we are answering your questions, and we are imploring (begging?) you to come to Haiti with a team soon. That resonates strongly to how I encounter the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I long to see Jesus not just regenerate the hearts of the people we encounter but also the places we go and even the institutions which seem beyond renewal.

Soon the world’s cameras will leave Haiti. We will not have daily updates from Port-au-Prince. What will remain when the spotlight leaves is the hard work of rebuilding a country brought to its knees. This will be done by the Haitian people, NGOs, and the church.

I am going to Haiti because God’s people in Haiti cried out in Jesus’ name for help. I am one little tiny part of that very big response from Jesus to those cries in the darkness on January 12th, 2010.

And it is my hope that this little diverse team of people who is laying aside their differences for the sake of the churches response to the crisis will begin an amazing opportunity for Jesus’ people to change the world’s mind about believers.

What would happen if tens of thousands of God’s people laid aside their differences and came together in one response to change on country forever?

What would happen? I don’t really know. But I do know that it’s going to start with you.

• Why can some leaders effectively serve rural, urban, and suburban youth all within the same ministry?
• What gives ministries the greatest edge in effectively reaching out to youth and families from a variety of ethnic backgrounds?
• Why do some leaders consistently organize short-term missions projects that empower the local communities served and others struggle?
• Why do some leaders seem to work just as effectively with adults and parents as they do with adolescents?
• Why do some youth leaders thrive in the face of a multicultural, globalized world while others flounder?

The answer lies partially in their cultural intelligence, or CQ. Cultural intelligence is defined as the capability to function effectively across national, ethnic, and organizational cultures. ¹  And research demonstrates a leader’s CQ may easily be the single greatest difference between thriving in today’s shrinking world or becoming ineffective and obsolete.

The continually shifting landscape of youth ministry can be disorienting. Experience and common sense alone are not enough. When working in our own cultures, we intuitively use a set of social cues to lead effectively. We have a wealth of information, most of which is subconscious, which helps us do our work (e.g. managing and motivating volunteers, casting vision, teaching, addressing conflict, etc.). But those rules change once we start leading in a different cultural setting.

Cultural intelligence is a set of capabilities and skills that enables leaders from outside a culture to interpret unfamiliar behaviors and situations as if they were insiders to that culture. It can be learned by most anyone. In testing leaders’ CQ across the world, there’s a consistent set of strategies and practices proven to enhance anyone’s CQ. The findings consistently demonstrate a strong connection between leaders’ CQ and their effectiveness in reaching their goals. Our model stems from rigorous academic research on intelligence and cross-cultural interaction across 30 countries and includes four steps toward becoming more effective cross-culturally. The four steps can easily be applied to any cross-cultural situation (ethnic cultures, organizational, and generational subcultures).

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the first two steps in the process.

1. Soon Ang and Linn Van Dyne, “Conceptualization of Cultural Intelligence” in Handbook of Cultural Intelligence: Theory, Measurement, and Applications (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 3.

Related posts:

1. CQ Strategy and Action
2. Drive and Knowledge
3. Cultural Intelligence (CQ)

(Youth ministry is not an easy ministry. And in this series, Every Youth Worker Needs:..., I want to highlight a variety of things that might make your ministry a little easier. This ongoing series will include ministry tips, book suggestions, technology helps, and many other nuggets of advice.)

Every Youth Worker Needs: a receipt scanner
Unless you work in a very unique congregation, you have to turn in receipts in order to get reimbursed. This administrative task is always time consuming and boring. Not the reason you became a youth minister at all. But we all know that if we do not do this on a regular basis, monthly at least, then it becomes too overwhelming and then it does not get done. At the end of this train of thought is no reimbursements for items purchased (or what we ministers like to call "donations to the ministry").

I have recently come across a great little gadget that makes the process of organizing and totaling receipts much simpler. At least that is what the internet and "gift buying" news segment says. As I have watched this product in action and have seen the software to organize the items on the receipts, I have to say I am impressed.

All you have to do is slide the receipt through the scanner, if you have the travel version - which is cheaper and probably all a youth worker needs. Then after all of the receipts are scanned, you go into the program and determine which items go under which categories and which items do not need to be added to the report. Once this is done, you just print off the report and turn it in to the finance committee. (Who will probably be in amazement that a youth worker is so organized and uses spreadsheets.)

Go to this website to see the receipt scanner by neat

(I do not own one of these time saving devices, so consider it on the list of things you can get me if ever you want to get me something.)

i had the very cool experience, the other day, of getting to see an early screening of the book of eli, the new film starring denzel washington, gary oldman, and mila kunis, and directed by the hughes brothers. and, to make the whole thing even more surreal, i had a chance to sit in with a small group of “religious press” (about 8 of us — how i qualified is still a bit beyond me) who met one-at-a-time with each of those three stars, and alan hughes.

short movie summary (you can read more on the website): denzel plays eli, a man living in a post-apocalyptic america, carrying a bible on a “mission from god” (ht: blues brothers) to a destination and result he doesn’t know. gary oldman plays carnagie, a despot with complexity (aren’t the best despots always 3-dimensional?) who lords over a small town and a compulsion to find a bible. mila kunis plays solara, carnagie’s innocent step-daughter, who has never known another world, but finds hope for something more. eli has learned, through his 30 year trek, to defend himself and survive an almost-impossible life alone in this world that does not have room for loners. he’s a one-man machine when it comes to defending his precious cargo, and refuses anything (including companionship, at first) that even offers a hint of distraction or failure in his pilgrimage.

it’s an r-rated, bleak world, with some pretty stunning fight scenes.

but the themes the movie teases out are rich. both eli and carnagie are passionate about the bible, but for very different reasons. carnagie sees it as a weapon, a tool with which to control others, while eli sees it as the only option for redemption in his brutal world. there are a handful of surprises and turns that make the story rich, including one that found me choked up with tears.

when we asked denzel about the change in his character, as he wrestled with whether or not to let solara play a role in his life and quest, he responded, “sometimes we get so focused, in god’s name, and” (i’m paraphrasing here) we need an innocent to stop us in our tracks and re-evaluate. man, that had a ring of youth ministry to me, or christian ministry in general. i know there have been many times in my life when a teenager has been used by god to bring me re-focus on my own pilgrimage.

i loved alan hughes’ response when he was asked why he chose the bible, and not just a non-descript sacred book. he simply said, “it had to be the bible! it’s the bible, man!” he went on to say, “the bible is in the movie, but it’s not a movie about the bible. it’s about one man’s faith, and one could use the bible to enslave, and another to set free.” gah. that’s some rich stuff for hollywood.

the thought i was left with the most, as jeannie and i talked about the movie for hours, was how all of us have the potential to “use” the bible to our own ends. we find what we want in scripture, to support our own desires — good and evil, conscious and subconscious. we all do this, even the best-intentioned. eli makes a comment, late in the film, about his own shift. i don’t have the exact wording; but it was something along the lines of how he’d been protecting the bible for so long that he’d lost sight of allowing it’s message to guide him. man, that’s a sermon worth preaching, and worth hearing.

Windows/Mac: If you've ever wondered what a photo would sound like converted to music, free application RGB MusicLab aims to help you find out—sans the LSD.

RGB MusicLab is a portable application, available for Windows or Mac, that takes the RGB color values of an image and converts them, based on intensity, into sound. You have a high degree of control over the output of RGB MusicLab. You can adjust the size of the mosaic it creates for pieces of greater or lesser complexity, select from over a hundred instruments and sound effects that the Red, Green, and Blue color values will be represented by, and whether or not the individual color channels will play independently or harmonize, among other options.

The results won't be a carefully orchestrated concerto, but we certainly had fun loading different types of photos into RGB MusicLab and seeing what the outcome was—Christina Hendrick's photo, seen above, created a dynamic Broadway-musical-esque number and a photo of a tropical beach yielded a piece that started off fast and furious and then slowed to soothing melody. RGB MusicLab is freeware and available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Have a novel tool for turning one media into another? Created a particularly interesting piece with RGB MusicLab? Let's hear about it in the comments.

When a student dies, even the most bustling school can feel like a mausoleum.

Grief professionals come in, information assemblies are held and young people are encouraged to discuss their emotions in groups or one-on-one meetings with counselors.

But asking students to relive or recollect a tragedy could hurt more than help, according to a new commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Psychological debriefing could actually contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder rather than stave it off, researchers from Dalhousie University write.

Read it all.

Those of us who work with teens seem to be sliding into an adolescent approach to our mission.

Getting Fired for the Glory of God is a collection of writings from Mike Yaconelli. Beyond his writing, it contains audio and video of Yaconelli speaking. This is some of his best material collected together in one little book. What makes this collection so good, beyond it being from Yaconelli, is that his children compiled it all. This book is a tribute to the legacy he left on the youth ministry world.

If you have never read Yaconelli's work before, you need to pick up a copy and dive right in. You will be challenged, encouraged, and pushed. You might find yourself wanting to read "just one more chapter." For those who know Yaconelli's work, this book will be a reminder of his passion and love for youth workers. Plus, as a bonus, you will get to hear and see some of his most passionate messages.

The truth and honesty within the pages of Getting Fired need to be read by anyone in youth ministry. Take every opportunity to get a copy of this book into the hands of youth workers. If you can't get a copy for every youth worker, you need to at least show them the videos and let them listen to the audio.

My advice (rating) – buy more than one and give out copies (5 out of 5)