: great intentions ... lousy implementation :

... came home today to the usual mail, except for two thick envelopes, unusually thick.

One, in a plain vanilla envelope, was addressed, in fountain pen blue ink, to The Householder(s) at 969 Lucas Avenue ... in it was a JW tract, and a copy of their more, uh, user-friendly magazine ... Awake, and ... get this ... a hand written, in lovely scripted penmanship, note to "Dear Householder" ... wait, it gets better. It goes on ... 'my husband and I live in your neighborhood ( sic ). We've not been able to speak with you personally, but we have some important information ... ' yada, yada, yada ... ending up with 'it is our hope that someday soon we will be able to talk with you personally. Please feel free to get in touch with us through the above address. Sincerely ... "

OK, two things. I can't read her signature, so fancy is her handwriting, but worse, or better maybe? is the return address ... Bowness Rd NW Calgary AB T3B 0H6 ... !?!?

What do you think happened here? My guess is that these letters are mass produced, then sent somewhere to be stuffed in envelopes, with the propa, sorry, literature, hand addressed, and finally dropped off, in person, door-to-door. Somewhere in some sorting/stuffing department her little friendly Calgary neighbour letter got put in our little hand addressed Victoria envelope. Or do they really think neighbourly crosses the Rockies? If you are going to go to these lengths to get the word out, it might make sense to invest in a little quality control. Certainly is, to use an economics term, labour intensive ... all that writing, all that stuffing, all that walking.

dlc

ps. oh! the other fat envelope? our financial planner ( under-employed by us ) sending a Happy Thanksgiving card ... with two chocolates in it? through the mail? Well, it was semi-opposite ... a computer label, signed by her staff, whom we know, but really? chocolate? 2 weeks before Thanksgiving ( too efficient ) ... and coincidentally, THEE week of the financial markets' meltdown? Are we peons really that easy to appease?

: alive 'n kicking ... though you wouldn't know it :

... this is me, this week. All good, but less margin and/or creative time for reading, regurgitating, or posting.

dlc

ps. regurgitating as in ... re-hashing and 'blogging on stuff I'm chewing on, mulling over, grinding the mental gears to ...

: tim bailey : v. 3.0 : new and improved :

... our man Tim has re-surfaced, having re-committed hisself to daily 'blogging, and we're good with that. Make some changes to your RSSubscription for "And Another Thing" as he's morphed over to TypePad.

dlc

ps. all manner of stuff there btw ... photos, rants, movies, theology, attempts @ humour.

: hey people : new friend/colleague in victoria :

... folks, just want to introduce you to Mark Crocker, relatively newly relocated to Victoria, BC. A self-described "Migrant Worker - Foreign Correspondent" he has done a lot, and I mean a lot a lot, of mission trip and team pre-orientation, orientation and de-briefing.

Mark gets around a lot as well, across Canada, and then some, so if you need a good outside trainer type of investment in your next missions team, or want to (re)educate your elders, or whatever ... a dialogue with Mark might be a really good thing.

I'm adding him to the 'blogroll to your right ... and you can find him 'blogging over at www.stopover.ca ... some good stuff there.

over 'n out ...

dlc

ps. not that your really care, but I am attempting an occasional 'blog at 'sbf observation deck' for the folks at Saanichton Bible Fellowship. Just a little window, albeit slighty skewed, of my time here in the admin/exec role week-by-week as their transition winds down. They are pre-interviewing 3 potential candidates the weekend of October 3-4.

: three weeks under my belt :

... well, time for a little update on my world. I've been hanging out at/with Saanichton Bible Fellowship ( aka SBF ) for 3 weeks now ... and I am enjoying it. The people, the potential, the perseverance, the peninsula ... all conspire, in a good kind of way, to make this 'gig' a unique challenge and worthwhile investment of time and energy and ???

As could be expected, I am valiantly turning my workspace/office into something akin to Al Gore's creative cubicle ... sans large flat screen monitors, but close enough! Easels, whiteboards, flipcharts, piling system. You name it? Al and I have got it.

While I doubt I'd ever want to, or enjoy speaking on a weekly basis, once in a while is okay, and I enjoyed myself yesterday, following up an elder ( Sept 7 on Titus ch 1 ), and Dennis, the other interim pastor ( Sept 14 on Titus ch 2 ) with Titus chapter 3. The prep consumes too much for it to be a weekly thing for me ... time, energy, focus and the discipline of drilling down to a handful of key points and take home lessons for the people. My brain just works the other way ... up and out to macro ... makes preparing for 30 minutes of speaking/teaching/sharing really hard. Not the talking time, the goal being to have people go home with something of value, not just generalities and ideas, or worse, opinion. Anyhow, it seemed to work yesterday ...

On October 3-4 the search committee and elders team will be pre-interviewing 3 pastoral candidates. I've gone through their resumes and application packages pretty carefully, and today will be listening to a couple of sermons from each guy. Quite an interesting process. The short listing process has, I think, brought them to covering the 3-4 essentials that the leadership is looking for in a co-elder/pastor-teacher/partner in ministry. The next stage will be looking for fit, alignment, click and ... well, whatever else it is that needs to be there for the above to happen around here. SBF is ready for a permanent pastor now, and it may well be one of these three. Or not. Anyhow ... having covered the essential bases, all 3 are different, a span of more than a decade in age, a range of backgrounds, a variety of life experience(s), and a diversity in 'status" ... empty nester, kids at home, no kids. I'll be quite fascinated to see the co-chairs of the "SC" navigate and facilitate this 'winnowing' and discernment process. Of course, the references are glowing, but with one guy I know two of his references, and well, yah ... I wouldn't mind having them say those kind of things about me! Point made ... this process is loaded ... first impressions, personalities, styles ( of leadership or non-leadership ), security, self-esteem, etc.

Weird, but good. Necessary, but odd. Hopeful, but scary.

dlc

: life is full of choices ... choose with care :

... whether it is a 'posture' at work, your 'default' mode in relationships, the way you think your creator 'wired' you, or just as Popeye used to say ... "I yam what I yam" we really do have a choice in life, many in fact.

DDash 'blogged over the weekend about not letting your suffering define you. Bing posted about patience, or lack thereof, and Hugh over at Gaping Void had this cartoon up last week ( the actual post is worth reading as well ... 'Good Ideas Have Lonely Childhoods' ).

Maybe it all got me thinking about what Dennis was teaching yesterday at SBF from Titus 2 when he suggested that a Popeye mentality is not what scripture teaches ... we are to change, we are to grow ( up ), we are to mature. But those things require choices ... which, like last post, require a level of intentionality, perspective, guts, honesty and willingness to solicit ( and hear, listen to, respond to ) feedback.

I love this cartoon ... how many bored people do you know who end up complaining about being in the sheep camp? Fewer end up lonely as a wolf, with 'lone wolf' syndrome, but are bitter or edgy or just-not-fun-to-be-around? Wonder what a healthy middle ground is?

Food for thought ...

dlc

: a week in my life : a perspective on perspective :

... perspective is a funny thing. This time a decade ago, I had left the staff of a US megachurch for a large, by Canadian standards ( bad word, btw, when talking about church ) multi-staffed church in the GTA, which while good on paper ended up being the worst year of my life ( I did make some lifelong friends during my 10 months there, people who walked through the crucible experience it was with me ). However, not staying there for the 10 years I expected to allowed us to spend 9 years in Victoria, growing LPC/Place from 1200-1300 to around 900-1000 semi-intentionally. When will people get it that ... a) numbers aren't everything, b) real change will mean real consequences, and c) it may be possible for a ministry to be in the centre of God's will but on the margins of popularity, low on "success" rankings, questionable re: attendance figures and charts, 'iffy' on financial stability, and struggling w/ CCRA compliance, never mind ignorant of the latest fad in governance? Yes, yes, yes ... I know all of the above are important, critically so ... but they're not priority #1 ... not our focus, not our passion ( care to know anyone whose passion is all of the above? nyet ), not our raison d'etre. Why is it so tempting to default to a reliance on the quantifiable?

The picture here, taken by Fraser on his iPhone at Vancouver's iMax last Spring, is a reminder that the lenses in your glasses can be perspective bending ... so be careful which prescription you choose. At least twice while watching U2:3D in three dimensions I literally ducked ... expecting Adam Clayton's bass guitar to crack my skull open, or Bono's leap from centre stage to land in my lap. Can our lens of choice actually, or even temporarily, define reality for us? As GK Chesterton famously quoted St Augustine on an 'unexamined life' ... what if our lenses, our perspectives, our worldviews, our whatevers ... are unexamined, even for a season? That could really screw up your life, relationships, family, organization, team, whatever ...

This last week I've had a beautifully downward mobility perspective altering experience. I've temporarily joined the leadership team of a small, technically rural, family church in Central Saanich, the village of 'metropolitan' Saanichton to be exact, on the outskirts, across from the Saanich Peninsula Regional Hospital. I wondered, driving up here Sunday morning, what I would feel ... seeing as the first September Sunday of 1996 I was employed at a place with half a dozen worship staff! and the first September Sunday of 1997 at an influential Toronto church with a megalomaniac leader. And the first September Sunday of 1998 was, uh, between churches, unemployed. And the first September Sundays of 1999-2007 at Lambrick, planning and preparing and hosting big open house extravaganzas?

It was different, refreshing, simple and honest. Not better necessarily, or worse, just authentic. Did I enjoy working/worshiping in a congregation of 3,500? Yes ... at the time. Have I learned and grown in settings of 1,000, give or take a few hundred? Absolutely. Is there something special about a close-knit family community of faith? Certainly. I wish there was a 'perspective lens' available that encouraged people to embrace the fact that different isn't bad, big isn't necessarily better, and small can be just right. Whether church, or IBM, or politics or franchises, we tend to assume our way, our status, our rung on the ladder, our stage in life is the way it should be for others, even everyone. How self-centred and myopic is that? Let's be careful ...

dlc

? r.e.t. or r.i.p ?

... renewable energy technologies — “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology.

The countries that spawn the most E.T. will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not America.

Thomas Friedman

***************

... I'd rather call them RETs, as it gets the renewable up front and in there consistently, but then again, I am not an NYTimes columnist. Either way, it is interesting to hear the US presidential candidates ( and their vices ) rattle off half a dozen "new" energy (re)sources like North American's commitment is actually there, and not in oil. I guess I sat there last night listening to Mitt Romney, Rudi Guliani and Sarah Palin thinking ... this is all about protection ... of a life style, a sense of entitlement, a role in the global order. What about questions that might some day provide real answers, solutions, instead of entrenched positions that cost more and more and more ( oil dependency, war, whatever ).

dlc

: missing in action : sorry 'bout that :

... lots and lots going on the last couple of weeks, so I will try to get back to this soon by way of updates, insights ( or lack of ), developments, and life 'n times stuff, okay?

dlc

ps. wanna good read on sending a kid off to "U" or college? our adventurous friends Mike & Kim did so this weekend, and Kim blogged about it here. Might want to get the kleenex out tho'