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How to Have an Amazing Team!

I have been privileged over the last 22 years to work with some amazing people and on some amazing teams. For years I had interns, summer interns, volunteers and full-time staff that worked for me and with me. One of the things I have always used is a Staff Covenant that we all as staff agree to and keep with each other. This covenant can help your team thrive and stay together through trying times and success. People will notice if you care about each other and love each other like this and the environment it creates is contagious.

Feel free to use the covenant for your team or ministry.

1. We will believe the best about each other

      -Speaking and believing highly of each other @ all times

 2. We will shoot for excellence in all we do

      -Doing the best with the resources we have is excellence

 3. We will create, sustain and practice a positive environment

       -This doesn’t happen by accident but takes intentionality

 4. We will always be unified in public and disagree in private

      -Unified in actions, words and gestures

 5. We will pray for each other and encourage each other

       -Encouragement can help keep a heart soft and prayer can move anything

 6. We will always be the first here and the last to leave

       -This displays commitment and follow through to those we serve

 7.  We will submit to each other’s leadership when appropriate

        -This is how we honor each others gifts and callings

 8.  We will not cover up our failures or inflate our successes

         -Just be authentic and truthful

 9.  We will play together and have fun together

      -If we do not know how to play together we will struggle to work together

 10. We will above all seek to be known as lovers of God and His people

         -Love wins and covers a multitude of sins

 11.  We will value cooperation and collaboration

        -No one on this team is an island

 12. We will hold each other accountable to the preceding values

         -None of this matters unless we hold each other to these

 

 

 

Addiction as Worship

In his book Addiction and Virtue, Kent Dunnington likens addiction to counterfeit worship:

"Several years ago, a friend who had worked his way through graduate school as a paramedic told me about one of his more grisly experiences on the job. He received an anonymous call reporting a heroin addict who was on the verge of death in an abandoned apartment building. When [my friend] got to the apartment, the man was huddled in a corner, shivering and unresponsive, surrounded by piles of rotten trash, used syringes, lighters, spoons—all the paraphernalia of heroin addiction. When I asked what that was like, my friend related that it was terrifying, but that he also thought it was probably the first time he fully understood what worship looks like …. For all sin, as idolatry, is essentially counterfeit worship."

Powerful imagery, and a profound observation. It reminds me of the people who are in Hell in C.S.Lewis' haunting book, The Great Divorce. In the book the people in Hell could leave Hell and go to Heaven if they would only let go of the addiction, habit or whatever put them in Hell in the first place, yet none of them are willing to simply release what has come to define them. Abandon their little gods to gain the Eternal God.

Happens a lot. I'm guilty of it at times and so are you. So we all cry together COME LORD JESUS AND RESCUE US.

Jesus and Spandex (Christian Stuff of the 80's) Chapter #5

AUDIO ADRENALINE

Audio Adrenaline is a Christian rock band that formed in the late 1980s at Kentucky Christian University in Grayson,Kentucky. The band has received two Grammy Awards and multiple Dove Awards. They were regular performers at the annual Creation Festival, Spirit West Coast festival, Agape Music Festival, and Alive Festival. 

The band was formed as A-180 in 1986 by Mark Stuart, Barry Blair, Will McGinniss, David Stuart, and Phil Vaughan, who all attended Kentucky Christian University. The band went on hiatus the following year when Mark traveled to Haiti for a semester. Upon Mark's return to Kentucky, the band reformed with Ron Gibson on drums. They became a popular local band, booked by the school nearly every weekend and traveling as far west as Texas, north to Chicago, and south to Florida. The band did over 100 shows during this time and recorded two independent releases under the name A-180. The first was You Turn in 1989 and Reaper's Train in 1990. Reaper's Train featured the original version of the song "DC-10", which is also found on the first Audio Adrenaline release.

The band's big break would come in the form of Bob Herdman. Herdman approached A-180 with two songs he had written, one of them called "My God", and asked A-180 to record it. After "My God" was recorded at Landmark Recording Studio, in Ohio, A-180 asked Herdman to join them as their songwriter. The demo tape was sent to radio stations and quickly scaled the charts. Following this, the song caught the attention of Toby McKeehan (from dc Talk), who brought it to the executives at ForeFront Records. The label decided to offer a record deal to A-180 but had them change their name to Audio Adrenaline a name that Herdman had come up with previously.

After signing their deal with Forefront, the band started writing and recording demo songs with some similar to "My God" for the first album. Meanwhile, Stuart left the band to focus more on his family and Gibson left at about the same time. However, the edgy demo songs were not what Forefront was looking for. What resulted was a debut album of drum machine driven hip-hop. Their first album under Forefront, the self-titled Audio Adrenaline, was released in 1992. It included "DC-10", the only track from the original A-180 recordings and was well received selling 75,000 copies.^[2] The follow-up album, Don't Censor Me, came the next year and featured what is considered the biggest hit of the band, "Big House". The album sold 250,000 copies and launched the band into stardom. The album also includes the song "We're a Band", which remained one of their live staples.

In 2006, the group disbanded due to lead singer Mark Stuart's "ongoing vocal challenges." After a six year hiatus, the band reformed in 2012 with Kevin Max, formerly of DC Talk, as the new lead vocalist.

 

Retro Post #3: A Tendency to Glamorize

*This post originally appeared on October 20, 2008

I think we often tend to glamorize the past and think America was a Christian nation, where everyone loved God, was very upright and moral and that our society didn't have the major problems that it does today. We believe that America is worse off, but is that really true? 

When you really look into it you find that is not the case. Take for example this little tidbit from a book I picked up from Garry Wills called Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America. Check this out.

"In 1909 there was one saloon for every 500 hundred people. There were more saloons in the United States than there were schools, libraries, hospitals, theaters, or parks, and more certainly than churches."

Go Figure! You have any thoughts on this?

*Just to clarify I don't think drinking alcohol is bad but this little stat does say something about the priorities when America was supposedly  "CHRISTIAN". Saloons back then also often had dancing girls and prostitutes. Of course you could also mention racism, womens rights and a host of other things as signs of a culture that was rotten even back then.

Car Wash Suffering

The other day myself and the three kids were out driving and as we approached a car wash the kids erupted in the back "Wash Car Dad! Wash Car!" Just so you know the kids have always called it "Wash Car" and we just never really corrected them, so it is still "Wash Car". So I pulled in and they were very excited. Windows up, doors shut for the Supreme $9 wash. All was well, except with Jacob my nearly 2 year old. He was tentative as we entered the wash car...I mean car wash, and as soon as the soap covered all the windows, the cautious look on his face, was replaced by a sad face, which then went to a crying face filled with sheer terror. We are only 20 seconds into the car wash!

No matter what I did to try and calm him or distract him, he wasn't buying it. Tears were streaming down his face as his brother and sister tried to consol him. He then started to say with his very limited vocabulary  "All done, All done" over and over again, trying to will this evil from continuing, to end his personal apocalypse. It was heartbreaking but there was nothing I could do. It was also the first time I had ever heard him say those two words together, so I knew he was serious. If I would have captured this with my phone I could have gone viral.

He only stopped when the windshield cleared and he could see outside, then he just said one word, "Go!". He wanted out of there more than Andy Dufrane wanted out of Shawshank!

As we drove away I began to reflect on the last ten months of my life and all of the suffering and pain that has invaded it. I am still not sure what it has taught me except that I knew nothing about real pain and suffering until this time. I had been around it for so many years as a pastor but somehow felt shielded or seperated from it like I had miraculously managed to walk between those raindrops.

Suffering really makes no sense to me, and has at times left my faith as dry as a piece of bread left in the sun. Yet I keep crawling back to that same faith, that same God looking for answers. Many people have done this in history, searching for an answer to what I believe is a question that nobody has really ever truly answered and probably never will. Talk to Job, see if he was satisfied with what he got or many of the people I have walked with thru tradgedies and heartbreak.

C.S Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed:

"Meanwhile, where is God? . . . When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him . . . if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become . . ."

I could throw scripture out at this moment, because I'm a pastor and isn't that what we are supposed to do? End this post with some piece of Biblical wisdom that will wrap a nice bow around the pile of garbage. I could try to turn this season of suffering into something that fits into a nice flowery Hallmark card  or an annoying refrigerator magnet or give you some theology of this broken world that makes it all logical.

But I won't, I will just say "All Done, All Done."