Category: Practices

David Platt’s RADICAL … a call to radical obedience to God and a rejection of the American Dream. You’ve been warned!

Sometimes you just want to sit in your rocking chair and sometimes God put someone in your path to rock your world. Recently, some young adults talked with me about a study that was rocking their world based on David Platt’s book RADICAL: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. I acquired a copy to check out their excitement and nearly fell out of my Kennedy rocker.

Each of the opening chapters of RADICAL begin with a powerful story out of Platt’s experiences among populations under severe persecution. He reflects on the contrast between their hunger for God’s word and the typical person sitting and soaking in the pews of American churches. Platt lays it on the line as he described a weekend visit with a church that spent more time celebrating their American patriotism and promising “we will continue to send you a check so that we don’t have to go there ourselves” (63). A page later Platt sums up his frustration with this bold claim: “God has created each of us to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, and I propose that anything less than radical devotion to this purpose in unbiblical Christianity” (65).

This unbiblical Christianity, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is characterized by “assigning the obligations of Christianity to a few while keeping the privileges of Christianity of us all” with a dismissive “I’m not called” from the pews (73, emphasis in original). The privilege of “enjoying God’s grace” must be coupled with the obligation to “extend God’s glory” and anything less is what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. The balance of RADICAL reminds us of our grounding as Christians and posits an urgency for fulfilling the great commandment to carry the message of God’s love made known in Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.

Platt closes RADICAL with a challenging experiment.  For one year would we commit ourselves to: praying for the entire world, read through the entire Word, sacrifice our money for a specific purpose, spend a week in another context, and commit ourselves to being part of a multiplying community of faith. Platt labels this radical obedience and the claim made on our lives by Jesus demands singular devotion to this mission.

I admit to approaching the book with some skepticism. Over the last two decades I purchased numerous books that promised to change my thinking about the church, grow my spiritual leadership, or show how my theology was out of sync. Most of the time those books made it to the used book store within weeks. By the time my copy of RADICAL makes it to the used book store I hope it will have passed through numerous hands … buy this book, settle into your rocker, and be prepared to bolt out of it into a RADICAL life devoted to God’s soon-coming kingdom.

I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.

One more time I have to unlearn a three decade old habit! Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. (via Slate Magazine)

Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he’d become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails “creepy,” “lovesick,” and “stalkery”; I’d add overwrought, self-important, and dorky. (“Our intimacy seems like the memory of a strange dream to me,” went a typical line.) Still, given all we’ve heard about Assange’s puffed-up personality, the substance of his e-mail was pretty unsurprising. What really surprised me was his typography.

p>Here’s a fellow who’s been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that’s revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

via slate.com

Thanks for the reminder of “Six Things That Will Take You Out of Ministry” (via Case Bankord).

I was reminded recently of a 6 item checklist that Mike Breaux (@mikebreaux) walked our staff at Heartland Community Church through to determine whether or not we are in danger of some pitfalls that come with being in ministry.

Here are 6 things that will take you out of ministry (via Mike Breaux):

1. Life without boundaries
2. Calendars without Sabbath
3. Words without practice
4. Giftedness without humility
5. Relationships without discernment
6. Letting your identity get tied up in our title

This list is posted in my office. It should be in yours too!

via caseybankord.blogspot.com

Seth Godin offers 20 often surprising thoughts about “Where ideas come from?” Which did he miss (via Seth’s blog).

Where do ideas come from?

  1. Ideas don’t come from watching television
  2. Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture
  3. Ideas often come while reading a book
  4. Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
  5. Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
  6. Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
  7. Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
  8. Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner’s mind. A little awareness is a good thing
  9. Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
  10. Ideas come from trouble
  11. Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they’re generous and selfless
  12. Ideas come from nature
  13. Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
  14. Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
  15. Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we’re asleep and too numb to be afraid
  16. Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we’re not trying
  17. Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
  18. Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
  19. Ideas don’t need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
  20. An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn’t join us here, it’s hidden. And hidden ideas don’t ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.
via sethgodin.typepad.com

A leader looks for the hard stuff and does not hide from it. Check out “Sure, but what’s the hard part?” (via Seth Godin)

Hard is not about sweat or time, hard is about finishing the rare, valuable, risky task that few complete.

Don’t tell me you want to launch a line of spices but don’t want to make sales calls to supermarket buyers. That’s the hard part.

Don’t tell me you are a great chef but can’t deal with cranky customers. That’s the hard part.

Don’t tell me you have a good heart but don’t want to raise money. That’s the hard part.

Identifying which part of your project is hard is, paradoxically, not so easy, because we work to hide the hard parts. They frighten us.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

If unreasonable stuff is succeeding, then is being unreasonable the new reasonable? (via Seth Godin)

The paradox of an instant, worldwide, connected marketplace for all goods and services:

All that succeeds is the unreasonable.

You can get my attention if your product is unreasonably well designed, if your preparation is unreasonably over the top, if your customer service is unreasonably attentive and generous and honest. You can earn my business or my recommendation if the build quality is unreasonable for the intended use, if the pricing is unreasonably low or if the experience is unreasonably over-the-top irresistible given the competition.

Want to get into a famous college? You’ll need to have unreasonably high grades, impossibly positive recommendations and yes, a life that’s balanced. That’s totally unreasonable.

The market now expects and demands an unreasonable effort and investment on your part. You don’t have to like it for it to be true.

In fact, unreasonable is the new reasonable.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

You can do more, you can go faster. How about do it better? (via Seth Godin)

The easiest form of management is to encourage or demand that people do more. The other translation of this phrase is to go faster.

The most important and difficult form of management (verging on leadership) is to encourage people to do better.

Better is trickier than more because people have trouble visualizing themselves doing better. It requires education and coaching and patience to create a team of people who are better.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

You have to risk alienating the 2% in order to please the 98%, btw they will be alienated anyway (via Seth Godin)

When a popular rock group comes to town, some of their fans won’t get great tickets. Not enough room in the front row. Now they’re annoyed. 2% of them are angry enough to speak up or badmouth or write an angry letter.

When Disney changes a policy and offers a great new feature or benefit to the most dedicated fans, 2% of them won’t be able to use it… timing or transport or resources or whatever. They’re angry and they let the brand know it.

Do the math. Every time Apple delights 10,000 people, they hear from 200 angry customers, people who don’t like the change or the opportunity or the risk it represents.

If you have fans or followers or customers, no matter what you do, you’ll annoy or disappoint two percent of them. And you’ll probably hear a lot more from the unhappy 2% than from the delighted 98.

It seems as though there are only two ways to deal with this: Stop innovating, just stagnate. Or go ahead and delight the vast majority.

Sure, you can try to minimize the cost of change, and you might even get the number to 1%. But if you try to delight everyone, all the time, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Or become boring.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Learn 4 ways to be positive in the midst of a world gone mad from Tony Swartz (via Fast Company)

If there is anything this nasty, fear-driven, dispiriting political season has demonstrated, it’s that no politician–Democrat, Republican, or otherwise–has any compelling solutions to what ails us. Even as partisan a figure as Jeb Bush is suggesting voters are feeling “disgust with the political class.”

We live in a world that has grown increasingly complex and contradictory, angry and fearful, polarized but utterly interdependent.

How, then, to feel more control over our destiny amid so many daunting challenges and so few clear answers?

Here are four very personal behaviors to consider, offered in a spirit of hopefulness and humility:

1. Practice Realistic Optimism.

There is a powerful principle in psychology called “bad is stronger than good.” We’re quicker to notice threats to our well-being than we are to focus on what’s working well. …

2. Build More Bridges

In an era marked by fractiousness and extremes, what connects us rather than divides us? Where can we find common ground? Certainly, there are universal desires we all share: a safe and secure world, people we can love and who love us, a hopeful future for our children. …

3. Add Value Every Day

After three years of a recession that shows all too few signs of abating, it’s no surprise that people are feeling the full range of negative emotions from terror to rage. But to what end? …

4. Give Yourself a Break

The greater the performance demand, the greater the need for recovery. As the world speeds up, we need to keep a balance between doing and not doing. By building in a true renewal break at least every 90 minutes, you’ll feel better, think more clearly, be less reactive and ultimately you’ll get better, more considered results. …