Countdown to Tübingen

Gas is expensive. Why not crowd surf to work?

With the economy still in the doldrums, one should look to save money where possible. One easy way to save some cash is changing your routine for the commute to work. One possibility (totally hypothetical, here) is to ditch your Corolla for a bike – a tuneup at Bikeways of Tucker will run you less than a tank of gas – but perhaps a better solution is to not have a commute at all.

The modern miracle of the internet allows you to virtually be virtually anywhere from the comfort of your butt at home. You can be working at the office – from home! Vis-a-vis, I can be working in Germany from Mighty Joe Espresso in Tucker, GA.

Even though I may be Stateside, I am currently keeping contact via email, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, et. al. with many of the Unterwegs students in Tübingen. We continue to exchange music, we check in on how exams are going and how work is, how personal lives are progressing (or degressing… or digressing), and we get to know each other even while half a world apart.

As one student wrote: It’s a pity that we met only a few weeks before you had to go back. I really liked talking to you. Maybe we can stay in contact via email and get to know each other a little bit better.

I know I’m less than impartial on the subject, but if you ask me, a campus minister in Germany who can continue to work in Germany while in the United States is one heck of a deal, and is definitely someone worth supporting.

Globalscope Germany supports local business.

There are some things I missed about America during my first year in Germany: peanut butter; free refills on fountain drinks; Pandora (who is supposed to tell me what music I like in Europe?); my fiance, of course… I might even say I missed many things.

But one thing I did not miss was raising support in a down economy.

Well, here we are back in Mighty Joe Espresso (and in what may be the final weeks of business for the local establishment) with a daunting challenge ahead of us. The goal: to fully fund a couple and get back to Tübingen by January.

Here’s what’s different this time:

• The economy has been down for some time now, and things seem less hopeful than when last I was here. Things are definitely not helped by headlines like Still, times are dreary — in the economy, in the national mood, overseas. Isn’t anything positive happening?
• Contacts at many of the churches I had developed have left or gone to other churches.

But all is not lost:

• This time I am armed with stories and experiences from the field – not just a hypothetical plan.
• I’ll be married. I’m told this communicates stability.
• The recession has had time to reach Europe. Things are down here, but they’re down there, too. Accordingly, the Dollar-Euro exchange rate has improved significantly.

Plus, January is a must. With only three teammates in the field – and no extra staff, exchange students, interns, or volunteers – if we’re not there, well… It won’t be a problem, because we’ll be there in January.

Now it’s time to write an email newsletter.

The Unterwegs band rocks out.

Two months ago, the thought of having live music at a Thursday Night at Unterwegs was just wishful thinking. Eight weeks later, live music is a front-and-center piece of our growing flagship event.

Yesterday, at the last Thursday Night of the semester, the Unterwegs band – comprised of two students (electric guitar and voice, bass), myself (acoustic guitar and voice), and Kalyn, a Globalscope volunteer (voice) – led the Thursday Night crowd in song. The set list: All the Beautiful Things by The Eels, Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie, and I’m Yours by Jason Mraz. Short but sweet.

What a rush – certainly nothing Guitar Hero ever prepared me for. People sang along, people pulled out cell phones and recorded the performance, and best of all, we hit home the message of Unterwegs courtesy of the lyrics from Mr. Mraz…

Listen to the music of the moment people, dance and sing / We’re just one big family / And it’s our God-forsaken right to be loved, loved, loved.

“Occasional lead singer” really rounds out my resume.

This is the trophy you take home from the tournament when your team takes six straight losses.

Love hurts, or so the saying goes.

One of my favorite activities here is Ultimate Frisbee. It’s a sport that I enjoyed very much back in the States (and plan on enjoying there once more as I come into my extended stay Stateside), it’s a sport that is popular among a hard-core group here in Germany, and it’s a social sport in ways that other sports cannot provide. You are not required to play every point – so you spend a lot of time talking to people on the sideline. You are not required to drag around a lot of equipment – a simple Discraft frisbee will do, and it fits anywhere for convenient carrying. And Frisbee players do not generally consider themselves athletes, so nobody has any reservations about going out to the pub together after practice and undoing all the hard work and sweat they just suffered.

The Tübingen team has been especially good place for starting our community at Unterwegs… namely in that, while some teams focus on competition, our team prefers to focus on the going out to the pub part of the game. The Maultaschen (whose website was made by yours truly) have been a fantastic source of community for Unterwegs – the only rather major downfall being a serious scheduling conflict between practices and our Thursday night program.

Anyway, I have suffered my share for the team in my efforts to bridge the two communities. First, there was the open eyebrow which, long story, I pulled the stitches out of myself. Now, after a long weekend tournament in Nuremberg, I have a nice scab extending down most of my calf from sliding on the sun-baked grass.

So here’s my question: how many discs would Jesus dive for to show his Ultimate Frisbee team that he loves them? Because that hurts. And that’s what love is.

Tyler talks.

One month ago I stood in front of the Thursday Night crowd at Unterwegs to talk about the Good Samaritan and the practical side of all that. Something that I do love about Jesus as a religious figure is that he spent his time as a teacher of how to live life to it’s fullest within the context of faith. If God is the creator of life, Jesus is the user’s guide. Kind of like Nintendo Power.

This month I’m talking about work, your job, and how that figures into your identity. Jesus offers a lot of advice, but career advice isn’t really among the wise words he offered. Let’s see…

• Jesus did an internship under his step father as a carpenter, then picked up and left home to become a teacher of religion. When he came back to his home town to ply his trade, his own people tried to kill him.
• Jesus picked for his disciples some of the worst fishermen in the Bible. Those guys didn’t catch a single fish unless he helped them out with a miracle. That’s right – it took a miracle for those career so-called “fishermen” to actually catch a fish.

Thousands of people came to Jesus with life problems and crises – surely what do to with oneself career-wise was among those. It had to have come up at least once. Would it really have been too much for Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John to write in an extra verse or two to that effect? My guess: “And Jesus said to the young man: ‘I don’t recommend carpentry.‘”

Globalscope England

I owe a sincere apology to our friends in England. I have been unfair to the country as of late – making light of, among other things, the dreary weather (how much does it rain in England? According to Yahoo Answers UK, “not as much as in Scotland”).

I by no means dislike the country – I have, in fact, written many warm, glowing things about England in the past – and I don’t want to strain relations between England and Germany, which at times in the last century have been tenuous.

I love England. England has given the world such great things as the English language, Guy Ritchie, and America. Can you imagine James Bond with a Schwaebisch accent? I can’t. If we didn’t have Wales, we wouldn’t have actor Christian Bale to ironically star in movies like American Psycho. And on top of all that, England is the chief developer of some of the world’s most portable foods.

But I don’t just love England: I love Globalscope England. Globalscope England has given the world (and Globalscope Germany as a part of the world) such great ideas as celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculous number of students. Globalscope England’s creative power is a source of inspiration to me and to our team – in art, music, use of technology, ideas for ministry… the list goes on and on. The team in Birmingham has not only supported our team here in times of difficulty (and times of not-so-difficulty) but has also played host to us on several occasions, even when it was terribly inconvenient for them to do so. Globalscope Germany (and me as a part of Globalscope Germany) would not be where we are today without our older-sibling ministry in Birmingham.

So, to be clear: if I ever gave the impression that the two ministries were ever in competition, I apologize – we’re not. Unless, of course, Germany ends up playing England in the World Cup Finals this summer, in which case, yes, we’re totally in competition. But only for two 45-minute halves.

An example of me and a weird thing.

It is the job of the campus minister to build relationships with students, and relationships are built most easily with those who have common interests and experiences. Looking back over the last year (and a week) – which is how long I have been in Germany now – it is amazing to see the common connections I have built with students through the most random, extraneous activities and weird hobbies of my life. Here, below, is a list of some of the more obscure topics on which I have connected with students.

• Magic: The Gathering – a collectible card game that I played 4th-7th grade.
• Britcoms – especially those really obscure ones that came on after midnight on public television (like Red Dwarf and Black Adder).
• Anime – Japanese cartoons that provide no end of ridicule for me from my girlfriend.
• Rudi Völler – the one-time coach of the German national soccer team and the song written about him to the tune of Guantanemera.
• My two days in Canada – a country just north of the United States.
• Chicago – the city, not the play.
• The average age of people getting married in Germany – and how much younger than that age I am.
• Prague – and my experience with drunken Brits there.
• Freiburg – and how I’ve never been there, but I hear a lot of good things.
• My ex-girlfriend – and how interesting all of that is.

ACTING!

I’m tempted to file this entry under “Reasons to Support Globalscope Germany”… After all, good skits are no longer considered isolated incidents at Unterwegs’s flagship event, Thursday Night. Rather, they consistently evoke laughter and surprise from a population with a well-deserved reputation for earnestness and seriousness. But, hey, I can brag on my own time when I’m not on the clock.

Last night was our first Thursday Night of the semester. There were a lot of elements working against us: the worst Spring weather you can imagine (if you can imagine sub-40 and 48 hours of rain), a higher risk topic (relationships, romantic and otherwise), and no momentum going in from previous Thursday Nights. Despite all that, last night was a huge success for our team.

For my part, one of my main responsibilities for the night was introducing the topic with a skit. Along with a couple student volunteers, I presented a skit in which a father gave “the talk” to his three sons. I brought a clip (and translated it to English):

Wife: It has been about a year since the last time we talked to them about girls. What will you tell them this year?
Husband: I’ll lie to them, of course. Just like we do with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the existence of Canada. They are children, and it is our duty as parents to protect them from the truth by constantly deceiving them at every turn.

Okay, so maybe I’ll brag a little… That’s pretty funny.

Jerry Holkins, left, and Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade

An interesting post about the growing-up-Christian experience from the master wordsmiths at Penny Arcade. A quote from the brief article:

They don’t start you on the hard stuff until later, where you find out that God can ask a father to kill his son, or sometimes he’ll let the devil kill your children for no good reason. That’s always struck me as a tremendous messaging challenge: as an immortal being, how do you manage that kind of PR long term? Do you start offering extra miles?

I want to go where everybody knows my name. And where everyone can pronounce it.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s the girl I’m engaged to.

If there’s two things I love, it’s my fiancee and peanut butter (JIF, please send to Wilhelmstrasse 100 c/o Unterwegs, jumbo jars preferred but all sizes accepted).

But if there’s three things I love, it’s Shalynn, JIF, and Mighty Joe Espresso. Yes, almost one year out of the country now (May 6 of last year was my first day on the job), and I have still found no equal to Tucker’s finest caffeine-based community. Here I am on a Sunday afternoon drinking a cup of imported MJE at the Unterwegs house.

Our team of four has been putting forth a super-human effort, burning every end of the candle we can find to build our own community here at the Unterwegs house. That’s why I’m here, sipping liquid electric at 6 in the afternoon. While Beth has spent the last 10 days in the States touring supporting churches and organizations, drumming up support, the Colemans and I have been playing host to a host of activities and events here to get students engaged. I have seen my bed before midnight once in the last week.

This week we host our first official Thursday Night – our flagship event – and we’ll be talking about relationships between girls and guys… or at least opening up the dialogue. As with our Thursday Nights up until now, there will be no scripture, no worship songs, and, at least in the public speaking, no mention of Jesus or God. As the ultra-athletes who run 100-mile races say, when you can’t see the top, walk. Thus, our goal is to reflect Christ in every way that we can without making it an outright Bible Study – and relationships are a great place to do just that.

Pray for us. Wish us luck. Send us peanut butter.