What Rick Warren Said at Q and the Qs I ask Myself

At the Q conference, Rick Warren said that keys to engaging culture are humility, integrity, generosity, civility.

That being so, I ask myself, Am I embodying these qualities as I interact with people around me who are not yet following Jesus?

1. Am I being humble?
   • Do I listen non-judgmentally to the stories, ideas, and beliefs of people who are not following Jesus?
   • Do I try to see things from their point of view?
   • Do I recognize that I can learn things from them?
   • Do I act in a way that shows God loves them just as much as he loves me?
2. Am I showing integrity?
   • Do I act without ulterior motives?
   • Do I live out my faith?
3. Am I being generous?
   • Do I seek out people with whom to share friendship?
   • Do I give them the benefit of the doubt?
   • Do I show them love?
4. Am I being civil?
   • Do I show them respect?
   • Do I exhibit plain old good manners?
   • Do I try to find common ground?
   • Do I show them grace?

I trust in Jesus, and I need to share the Truth about him.

But sharing starts with sharing. And that includes sharing the pains and uncertainties I have just as part of being human.

I need to give up a good bit of my pride. I need to release my petty antagonisms. I need to start seeing things from the other person’s point of view, so that I can address his concerns sensitively and graciously.

I need to act in a way that shows the Kingdom of God is here.

(Hat tip: Church Relevance.)

Culture 101 (#1)

In which I share what I’m learning about the culture and what TTUMC is doing in it.

1. Cultivating the Garden. I’m excited. The upcoming Park Cleanup Day and picnic at Hillsborough River State Park shows TTUMC taking the initiative to do something good and green. Be sure to donate money ahead of time so the Young Adults don’t have to operate this event on a shoestring budget. Because it’s really hard to buy food with shoestrings.
2. Worshiping By Cartoon. LifeChurch.tv, America’s most innovative church (.pdf), has recently opened a campus in the virtual reality world of Second Life. In Second Life, you move an “avatar” (or cartoon representative) through 3-D representations of streets, shops, clubs, stores, and other buildings while you interact with the avatars of other people. The virtual church campus is staffed by the avatars of LifeChurch.tv volunteers.
3. Touching Manzanillo. Giving by TTUMC has helped our sister church in Cuba add a second floor and renovate classrooms. A group traveling to Cuba Jan. 16-23 has openings for two more people: 813-988-4141.
4. Handling Voice Messages Left on Your Cell Phone. SpinVox is a free service that will take voice messages and turn them into text messages and emails. Via Kem Meyer.
5. Blogging x 12. TTUMC is now engaging the culture with twelve blogs.
6. Appreciating $2,253. The amount the TTUMC Relay for Life team brought in to support cancer research.
7. Keeping on Top of Things. Using the web site calendar, you can get a week’s view or a month-by-month view of upcoming events at TTUMC.
8. Broadcasting Text Messages. Twitter is a free service that lets you broadcast text messages to your friends’ cell phones or instant messages to their computers.
9. Realizing that Jesus Didn’t Make Any Junk. To get a new perspective on how artistic Jesus is, read this blog post on Jesus as an artisan.
10. Pac-manning (n.). “To drive right on the dotted white lane divider, which gives the same effect as Pac-Man eating dots. ‘Dude, quit pac-manning, you’re gonna hit that car!’” UrbanDictionary.com.

Q Quickly

Q is over, and I wanted to take at least one shot at summarizing what Pastor Jerry and I heard there. The “fire hose” of information (as one speaker described it) could never be communicated in just one blog post. But I’ll give it a shot.

1. The Church has a problem, because it is now seen as judgmental rather than loving.
2. The Gospel itself will always be a stumbling block and an offense. But we Christians ourselves have now become a stumbling block.
3. The Church has adopted a posture of either Condemning and Critiquing the culture (which makes us seem judgmental) or Copying and Consuming it (which makes us seem no different than anyone else).
   • Condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming should be occasional gestures rather than habitual postures.
4. The best postures toward culture are to Create and Cultivate it.
5. Jesus called on Christians to be salt and light. Just as salt preserves food, Christians are called on to penetrate and preserve the culture we find ourselves in.
6. But what is to be our attitude when we penetrate culture? Should we be arrogant know-it-alls? No, our attitude should be humility, integrity, generosity, civility, and clarity.
7. We are to incarnate Christ by loving all people regardless of what they believe.
8. As we engage with culture, we must hang on to both Grace and Truth.
   • Truth without Grace makes us seem intolerant.
   • Grace without Truth makes us lose our value to the culture (we are no longer salt–the culture rots).
9. We need to shape the culture by creating culture.
10. Creating culture includes not just making art and music. It means creating “cultural goods” such as projects to care for the environment, promote justice, care for widows and orphans and prisoners, and so forth.
11. Once we have created these “cultural goods,” our culture has to deal with it. In other words, they see us as embodying Jesus and their attitudes toward us have to adapt.
12. We need to help folks in church build relationships with very different people. We need to befriend and talk to and work with folks of all different faiths.
13. By partnering with people of different beliefs on projects that our community needs, the church becomes a cultural leader.
14. There are many projects that we can work on with non-Christians, including the environment, sex trafficking, poverty, hunger, the homeless.
15. We need to organize service opportunities that we can invite our non-Christian friends to.
16. When Jesus comes to town, things ought to get better. Churches should make their communities a better place. If our church was removed from our community, who would protest?
17. There are no shortcuts.
    • We need to apply these ideas to our context. Our community, our situation is different than anywhere else. We cannot just grab what other people are doing and plug it in here.
    • We have to do the work of building relationships and bridges.
    • We have to find out what our particular community needs.
    • What does it mean for us to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out for our community, for our world?
18. As a church, TTUMC needs reflection and conversation, then integration of these ideas.
19. As we engage the culture, we cannot forget evangelism. Grace and Truth.
20. We need to produce transformed disciples. It’s not how many attendees we have, but how many transformed disciples we have. Jesus had 12. He didn’t say, “Folks, I need at least 20,000 people to get this thing rolling.”
21. If you have transformed disciples, you have a movement that can transform your city.
22. Every cultural good begins with a small number of people:
    • 3 at the core
    • 12 committed
    • 120 in the community

Q People

Most of the attendees at Q are young. Younger than 30. And most are men–over 90%, I’d say. Women are so rare that when a second woman came to sit at our table this morning, she exclaimed, “Another woman!” and smiled and shook the first woman’s hand.

I don’t know why I start that way–I mean, with the woman thing, because I know it will make the women reading this angry at Q, or angry at church leadership policies, or angry at sexism, or angry at me, or something. And that’s just a distraction. Because the real point is, think of how I and Pastor Jerry felt that the other attendees are so young. We stuck out like older people at a place where most of the people are younger. I hope that simile made things clearer for you.

A few of the young men wear their hair combed unevenly into the corners of their eyes. A few more have shaved heads. They wear short sleeved shirts untucked, shirts without tails, and jeans. Over one shoulder is a strap supporting, often, a leather bag, which may or may not contain a small white Apple laptop.

Their shoes, sometimes, are sandals. Or they may be brown shoes, or black sneakers. But I think the real point is that their shoes are never white sneakers, like mine, which are so 1980’s. To put it in terms you can understand, I feel like a person who is wearing slightly different shoes than other people are wearing. There. I’m getting good at that.

And they’re so polite. And eager. They show up early before the doors open as if they’re arriving for a big concert, and they stand around on the steps and the sidewalk. But they apologize if you bump into them, and they part meekly to let you through, and you feel that these are people who love Jesus, earnestly, eagerly. And you feel fortunate to be there with them, fortunate to find out that so many people like this even exist.

As we were listening to the incredible speakers they have here at Q tell us how to connect with the culture, I was looking around at these young guys, and thinking, “Isn’t it a waste that there aren’t more older people here? Isn’t it we older guys, who are already in leadership, who need to know how to connect with the culture?

No. In five years, in ten years, in fifteen years, when these young men and women are in charge, the Church will be more creative, more engaged, less judgmental, full of both truth and grace.

More like Jesus.

Maybe that’s the point. I’m pretty sure that ’s the point.

Q Day 1

It’s Day 2 at Q. Evening is coming.

Off and on, it has sprinkled all day. On the rain-damp street outside, the cars have their headlights on.

Pastor Jerry and I are about to walk from our Days Inn back to the historic-Baptist-church-now-turned-Atlanta-cultural-center where Q is being held.

Tonight we’re going to worship (including communion, I think) and listen to Rob Bell.

I realize I haven’t yet blogged about Day 1. Maybe tonight.

Yes, it’s been amazing. God has made it amazing. God through Jesus makes everything amazing.

I have to go now.

Q Anticipation

Tomorrow, Pastor Jerry and I will experience the first day of Q.

I wish I could tell you what Q is. Because then I would know.

All I know is that a few months ago I started to create a Google Calendar about church conferences. While researching conferences to add to the calendar I came across Q, described this way:

Q is a gathering for leaders in the church to become informed and exposed to future-culture. It is a space where select leaders can create, dialogue, collaborate, innovate, serve and ideate around the important topics shaping the church’s future role in culture. In an intense, fifty-hour experience designed to unveil the cultural context in which the Gospel must go forward, Q will expose participants to over twenty presenters on myriad topics. Church leaders will be inundated with information, perspective and expert thoughts that will drive conversation with their peers about the ramifications for the church.

Wow. Pastor Jerry had just completed his Visioneering message series. Everyone knows that his passion is to use EPIC methods to connect people in the 21st century with the love of Jesus. So I sent off an email to several people, including Jerry, saying, “Pastor Jerry should go to this.” And I provided the link.

Little did I know that Pastor Jerry would immediately apply to attend, get accepted, then issue an invitation to everyone on the TTUMC Lead Team to go with him. In the end, I was the only one who met the stringent requirements of being willing to pay (thanks, Debbie!) and being able to take a few days off (thanks, Boss!).

So now I am about to spend 50 “intense” hours in Atlanta, GA, doing things like collaborating and ideating.

If I’m able, I’ll blog what happens. That is, if I’m not too busy ideating. (First I have to find out what that is.)