Countdown to Tübingen

Two weeks between talks - just enough time, in my opinion.

Last Thursday was the high point of our existence as a ministry that puts on events with a featured program.

• The upstairs room - the program room - was transformed (thanks to the second-hand tables and cheap lamps I got my hands on) into a cafe atmosphere.
• In what timing can only be labeled as serendipitous, the sound equipment we ordered arrived on the day of the event, and a student showed up almost simultaneously to help set it all up.
• With a professional tech and comfortable seating setup, we put up decorations related to the night’s topic: the houses and a mural of the photos we had collected from all the students - and all the internet submissions.
• Students speaking comprised 50% of the night’s program - talking about our successful bake sale for Haiti relief (we raised 250 Euros) and what the idea of “home” means.
• After the program, the evening went into full swing as an impromptu dance party started downstairs and a singing circle - complete with instruments students brought from home - started upstairs.

It was comfortable but mind-opening; engaging and thoughtful without being insistent upon itself or trying to sell any message; creative but accessible to everybody; and personally meaningful to people who have never had a place to connect in such a way. We are somewhere in the void between art show and worship service, and it’s not such a bad place to be.

Jesus was never mentioned, nor was God, but “love” was the focus of everybody who shared on Thursday - students and staff, Christian and non.

And now that we’ve got momentum, it’s time to ironically celebrate the end of the semester.

It's so close to the Hope/Fear project, it's bound to be great.

This is the brainstorming for my piece on Thursday on “what makes a home a ‘home’”.

In a few months, my house at 4330 Tucker North Drive will cease to be my home. My parents, who have retired, will make the move from Tucker to their smaller, more practical retirement house in the mountains of North Georgia.

Ever since I left for college in the fall of 2002, 4330 Tucker North Drive was always a fallback. There was always a free meal there. My bed - the only bed I had ever owned until sleeping in the GT dorms - was always available for me. There’s wireless internet. The clothes that I don’t wear but don’t want to throw away (and the toys I never play with but don’t want to give away) are still in my closet. I still own every video game system I have ever bought with my own hard-earned money - 7 in all - and they are all in that house.

We moved into 4330 when I was five. I remember because I had chicken pox. It’s where I mowed the lawn for the first time. I learned how to change the oil in a car in the garage. I learned how to use a circular saw in the basement. I learned how to cook in the kitchen. I learned how to sew in the guest bedroom. I trained my dog in the back yard (although not very well). I fell asleep on top of my books doing calculus homework in the computer room. I got my first kiss from my first girlfriend in front of the house, and I got crushed when she dumped me in front of the house a year and half later.

But in a few weeks, 4330 Tucker North Drive will no longer be my house. It’s a weird feeling. I still feel at home in Tucker - the Atlanta suburb where you can find Tucker North Drive - despite the fact that I don’t - or, rather, won’t - have a house there. And I think the reason why I feel like that goes something like this…

There is my house in Tucker, and there is every other building in Tucker: my old school, my church, my favorite coffee shop, my gym. When you take my house away, there are still a lot of buildings that I have memories of. Where I graduated 3rd grade, where I learned to sing in a choir, where I drank a latte every day for a month, where I developed these incredible biceps. But take all those buildings away, and what’s left is this: the people.

Here is everyone I know in Tucker. This is my family, these are my friends from school, these are the people at church, these are the people who work at Mighty Joe Espresso, these are the people who I work out with. These people are the reason I’m at home in Tucker. Even with no bed to my name in Tucker - and no collection of aging video game systems - these are people that love me. Even without my parents, there are still hundreds of people in Tucker who care about me, and that’s what makes a place home for me. Home is where you are loved.

And because of that, I also feel like Tübingen is becoming a home to me. The fact that I have an apartment and a bike and a campus house here doesn’t even compare to the fact that while I was gone in December, people here in Tübingen missed me - and I missed people here in Tübingen. I’m at home here in Tübingen because I feel loved.

viva la suppe! surely germany loves nothing more than french.

One week back in Tübingen and already I’m running aground on the shoals of Lack of Inspiration. All the muses I had learned to do without in 2009 - Pandora, Mighty Joe Espresso, latte - I re-introduced to my body in my weeks back in the States for Christmas. Now I’m hurting for a fix. It’s like my four days and three nights spent getting bumped to later flights in airports across Europe was a subtle sign: “Don’t go back there.”

Well, in two days we’re having Suppe*r Donnerstag at Unterwegs. It’s the next in our twice-a-month-on-Thursday events. This Thursday we have a great night lined up: music, a short talk about Haiti, the introduction of the “Home Project” that I blogged about all those months ago, and a skit - that’s yet to be written by me.

There’s an art to writing good skits - and that is letting the skit write itself. In the case of Thanksgiving, we threw a giant cardboard pilgrim hat and a beard on Jochen, and - Bob’s your uncle - it was funny, even by the excruciating German standards. In the case of Christmas, we put Dolly in the role of the Disaffected Madonna whose five-year-plan was ruined on the night Gabriel delivered the Good News to her. Holidays truly are gifts.

January brings with it a spectacular lack of funny holidays. So that means I need a skit about the idea of “home”. If the title of this post is any sign, I’m currently short on ideas. Those good skits just need a good hook - so if you have any suggestions for what kind of hat to put on or what kind of awkward situation to put someone in, please write me.

My choice of English words to talk about Unterwegs.

What an interesting time to be given the sermon slot. Two days after Christmas after 7 months in Germany - the opportunity to talk about campus ministry with the condition that everyone get a message they can take home for themselves. So, my epiphany from this week: grace - the biggest theme in the story of Jesus - also happens to be the centerpiece of Unterwegs.

It was written on the wall in front of me. No, seriously, it was on the wall in front of me. I wrote it there. Here’s what the Unterwegs wall says (translated to English) (stop me if I’ve posted this before):

Unterwegs is a group for students and young people, bound together by Christ’s love. We’re open for everyone and everything.

We are here because of our love for God. God’s grace is like a party, and everyone is invited. Come exactly as you are.

Speaking of things, I just got word from the language school in Tübingen: I am TestDaF certified fluent in German at the university level. I will start the application process for university within the next week.

These are a few of my favorite things.

This Sunday I’ll be speaking at the Tuckerfirst Contemporary Service.

The Sunday after Christmas is tricky business. With the incredible American Christmas escalation finally having peaked just days before, dare one mention the Christmas story at the risk of being boring and repetitive? Or would a talk on December 27th without an element of Christmas come off as irrelevant and uninteresting?

The trick here is to find a binding, relevant connection between the Christmas story, the message I want to deliver, and the ministry I help build. So, what do the three have in common? I really like the idea that, as we say on the Unterwegs wall, “God’s grace is like a party - and everyone is invited.” Unterwegs, like Jesus, operates with an open guest list… Shepherds and kings are invited to celebrate his first birthday; The Wedding Feast in his parable (Luke 14) is filled with “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”

So, there’s our starting point. Let the writing begin.

Got a sweet, hot little something for a rainy day in Tucker. Also, I got a latte.

Well, after four days touring and three nights sleeping in Europe’s premiere airports, I am back in Atlanta. It was a hard journey - harder on my poor passport, which now shows me entering and leaving Switzerland twice without ever entering another country. Such is the danger of traveling standby, I suppose. But sitting in Mighty Joe Espresso, Shalynn by my side, is worth the trip.

The last month at Unterwegs was nothing short of fantastic - thus the lack of blog updates recently. We had Thanksgiving dinner with 70 of our closest friends, and then two weeks later we had our first official Unterwegs Thursday night - a Christmas program with a skit, a band, and a video - and we had a crowd of 60 show up to that. Thus we begin our arrival from the dark, seething, ill-defined, chaotic sea of outreach to one of our first ports of call: Structure.

As a part of our new “Structure” feature, last Thursday I presented a two-minute talk on what Unterwegs is at the end of our program. It went something like this (only in German):

A lot of people are still trying to figure out what Unterwegs is. On the one hand, we are a Christian group, but we’re not a church. On the other hand, the atmosphere here is genuine and exciting - we have parties, activities, and games, but we’re not a disco, we’re not a dorm or a flat, and we’re not a bar. So what are we?

But Unterwegs is more than the house - it’s the group of people here. You can read the words we have on the wall downstairs, but the sum of it is: we are a group of students and young people bound by the love of Jesus, which means that every person is welcome here, every person is accepted, and every person is loved. It’s that simple.

And thus began the next step on our exciting journey :)

proof that the postal system works, at least some of the time.

There is a list of increasingly encouraging things supporters can do to make me feel awesome: respond to an email newsletter, call me on Skype (username: brownlowdown), mention me on their website, send me peanut butter, and fly to Germany to spend a week with me at work. More on the last thing later. This is about the third.

I have always been an avid athlete. So while I was support-raising, I spent afternoons down at Crossfit North Atlanta, a garage gym that makes itself unique by putting a large emphasis on the community of members. With the exception of a couple days where the extremity of the workouts induced vomitting, it was a fantastic, vomit-free experience - I got in shape, and I made a lot of friends from all ’round Atlanta. And CFNA supports Globalscope Germany.

I’m pleased as punch that six months after leaving the gym, they gave me a shout-out on their website. Thanks a ton, Travis and gang - I still practice the Olympic lifts I learned from you guys. Except dead lifts. I hate dead lifts.

leonard bernstein - a composer famous for his travelling orchestra of grizzlies, kodiaks, and pandas. i'll let you guess what they were called.

TED talks seem to be a bottomless well of lessons and messages that apply to any number of aspects of business, everyday life, and, although most of the forum comments might try to dissuade you, ministry. Take, for instance, this great talk on conductors by Itay Talgam. The immediate application of his talk is leadership, as you might expect a talk on conducting styles would naturally lend itself to. Itay comments on how much control is exercised by each conductor, what messages they are sending to the audience and the orchestra they conduct through their body language and facial expressions.

But a significant part of his point is that the orchestra works best when the instrumentalists - somewhere between (1) being dictated by a drill instructor on the podium and (2) struggling to read the mind of an unexpressive and unhelpful conductor - are given cues by the conductor to express themselves through the music. As Itay puts it: “I’m opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation - that is, another story.”

It reminds me a lot of the Hope/Fear project from (almost, now) a year ago. We formed a question, asked people to respond, and allowed the stories that came from that weave the material of a sermon.

It worked wonderfully - the project engaged the community in- and outside the church; it provided a road to deeper discussion with non-Christians without the pressure or stigma that may normally come from a Christian project; and, because all the stories that compromised the project were incredibly real and incredibly personal, the sermon that came from it was just that.

And so we come to Christmas at Unterwegs. We have decided we want to do a community project like Hope/Fear to start transitioning into a Bible Study after the Winter break - and whatever that project is, we will present it at a huge party on December 10.

Excited? You bet. Nervous? I peed my pants just writing this blog entry. But, hey, it happens to all the great conductors.

yes, you heard right: *real* americans!

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten,” writes Hugh MacLeod. Feh.

When I was a child, I was not just creative - I was the five year-old da Vinci of my time. I drew, I painted, I glued macaroni in thought-provoking formations to contruction paper before having a qualified adult spray-paint the entire thing gold. My pipe cleaner sculptures put the shallow, pedantic pipe cleaner sculptures of my classmates to shame. I was the Matisse of finger paint. I was the Rembrandt of the Number 2 pencil with extra-thick grip for persons with small hands.

I’m not saying other children weren’t born creative - I’m just saying that I was imbued with the kind of creativity that put all the other children with similar crayon boxes to shame. The kind of creativity that got awards for the comic strips in the high school newspaper. The kind of creativity that survived four and a half years of cybernetic hybernation while I was at Georgia Tech.

And now, that incredible, undying, and unyielding creativity that started with a box of crayons is at work for you in the field.

Only now instead of crayons, I use Photoshop. Instead of producing macaroni art, I produce vector-based Web 2.0 graphics. And instead of home-made, VHS-taped sock puppet shows with stuffed animal cameos, I now put out network-quality multimedia of our time and events at Unterwegs.

In 1989, as a smaller, cuter version of me sat in my kindergarten classroom, painting a blue horse in front of a red house with a green rocket ship flying overhead, I had no clue that in twenty years I would be living in Germany working as a missionary, using those same skills to help share a life-changing Christian experience with university students. But here we are. That’s a creative effort worth supporting.

my handy: it's been there since day one, and it works every day - even weekends.

Here are the last few days of SMS messages sent (outgoing) from my phone (translated from German)…

If it’s not raining in 30 minutes, I’ll be there.
6.10.2009
17:10:00

Hey, are you back in Tübingen tomorrow? If yes, do you want to get coffee with me?
6.10.2009
23:15:00

That works. Tell me where I should be at one and I will see you tomorrow.
6.10.2009
23:20:00

Okay :) Til then!
7.10.2009
10:45:00

Just talked for a half hour about corrugated cardboard. Hope you’re having more fun.
7.10.2009
16:08:00

Don’t do that :) You are worth more than a bad night at the club. I think Beth wants to do something with you and Kathi. If you need anything, call me :)
7.10.2009
18:41:00

Sleep as much as you can. We’ll see each other tomorrow, okay? Don’t forget how wonderful you are :) We love you so much!
8.10.2009
04:11:00