Countdown to Tübingen

I may be in the support raising doldrums, but at least the scenery is nice.

In the past I may have mentioned the element of design involved in raising support. It’s freaking everywhere.

I did it as I interned at GTCCF. I did it to raise support. I did it as a part of ministry in Germany. And now I am doing it again as I raise support a second time. The only place I didn’t do any design was in any part of my formal education.

In fact, as I consider how to lay out the next pages of the support-raising packet I’m working on (example page above), I look back and see how many skills my job as campus minister requires of me that are not products of formal education… music, public speaking, sports, Biblical literacy, even carpentry. These are all things I picked up on the side of whatever more important thing I was doing at the time. Like calculus.

Well, now the tables have been inverted (to use a calculus term). Nothing makes a person rely on God like woeful underqualification, and here we are. If this packet looks good, it almost certainly wasn’t my doing.

Let the miracles occur.

Wordle from today's devotional @ Devo Lunch.

Another Monday, another Devo Lunch, another week of raising support. This week at Devo Lunch, I talked from the heart about frustration with God’s timing (my favorite line: “If your pizza was delivered ten months late, would you pay for it? If your baby was delivered ten months late… would you pay for it?”). It’s easy for me to speak from the heart on this issue as it’s almost always on my mind. Our goal is to get to Germany by January – and many things depend on us getting back in January – but the progress we’re not making in raising support makes it look like we’ll be once again waiting on the sideline for God to put us back in the game.

It’s great to get a little boost of encouragement every once in a while when you’re on the bench. Beth emailed us about the recent Unterwegs summer retreat to Taize:

Except for three of the students, this was the first overtly Christian worship service that any of them had been in since Confirmation, when they were 12. Talk about throwing someone in the deep end! But they loved it. And I learned again that empowering the students is what it is all about. Two students wanted to go to Taize and they helped put this group together. And the result was we all had an encounter with God through each other and the prayer services. I hope and pray that this will all take root in all of us and you will see the result this year at Unterwegs.

Man. I wish I was there.

There was a time where *hand-written* was done without the use of a keyboard.

When raising support, why not copy the experts?

Dad’s Garage, of whom I am a supporting member (oh yeah, I support things, too), sent me a support raising packet yesterday. Included in the packet: a calendar featuring the improv theater’s regular cast of actors in hilariously provocative and suggestive poses with important theater dates in red; a few sheets of paper describing the various cleverly-named levels of membership; and a simple bright pink order/giving form with a self-addressed envelope. Could I use any of this for my upcoming packet?

And now, the news.

In Tübingen, Unterwegs just returned from our first “retreat” of sorts to the monastery in Taize, France. Daniel Silliman was kind enough to take pictures of the trip and post them on flickr.

In Tucker, now that the mass-mailing has been sent out and received, I’ve turned my attention to hand-written letters asking (A) supporters who have given gifts in the past to match those gifts again and (B) supporters who have been supporting monthly to increase their giving. The packet still pends.

In Atlanta, I am continuing to do Devo Lunch at GTCCF. Some possible verses: Luke 4:22, Exodus 33:12-22.

It's funny 'cause it's true. We in Germany love a little light humor.

So, I’m doing some Devo Lunches at CCF while I’m at home.

Devo Lunch is a little Monday ritual where a few hundred students come to the CCF house to get a free meal and, as per tradition, a devotion as delivered by a member of the CCF extended network. This Monday it is my privilege to deliver the devotional.

As for the quality and consistency of whatever talk I give, my aim is to make it light. This is lunch, after all. We’ll let the heavier topics fall on Thursday Night Bible Study – which coincidentally, comes with dinner. My job is to be pretty good – not life-altering – and I only have to do it for 10-12 minutes.

And as for the topic: I think discussing overwhelming challenges may be in order. It’s the beginning of the school year at Georgia Tech. I don’t remember my freshmen year with much too much clarity (the crushing mix of depression, academic pressure, and a miserable freshman dorm has a way of blurring a lot of whatever it is that happened), but I do believe that a high degree of difficulty is still a staple of the GT academic plan.

So, what does the Bible say about that? Here’s what I’m using:

• The Widow’s Mite
• The Rich Young Man
• Paul’s promise to the Corinthians

See what you come up with using those three, and let’s compare.

Every great organization deserves a great website.

Marcus Aurelius once said that “the secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” And he did pretty well for himself.

I may not have much in common with Marcus Aurelius, but we have both done well in Europe, and we are both of the same mind when it comes to planning. My approach in the first week of support raising has been to prepare the tools that will see me through the $5,000 mark, the first of which is the new and improved support-raising website for Globalscope Germany, imkeller.net.

Allow me a minute to brag: flexible and robust, built on WordPress to make content management a snap for multiple users, the new website will allow a greater level of communication with our supporters. We can keep the new website up to date much more easily – automatically in the case of the blog feed aggregator and flickr widget in the sidebar – and contact forms and links to Facebook make communication with the team members in the field a cinch.

And it just looks cool.

It’s just a baby right now – barely eight (awesome) pages to the whole thing – but whatever non-obvious problems and needs arise over the coming months, perhaps some of them will be solved/met by my latest creation.

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.