Countdown to Tübingen

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

my dad's comment: "looks like you have a beer belly"

Long before garbled emails written in secret typo-code regarding special prices on sexual-performance-enhancing drugs filled spam boxes, there were newsletters. The email newsletter, a curious and oft-misunderstood beast, is nowadays quietly buried in the spam folder among an avalanche of offers for fabulous time pieces at incredible prices – where once it used to reign as king. Email newsletters once roamed the spam box as free and as numerous as buffalo, or at least like buffalo before the railroads and Ted Turner quite literally turned them all into burger.

Yes, for pennies, you can send a communique to and audience hundreds – even thousands – of people instantaneously, an audience that will most of the time quietly push it aside to be ignored until a more convenient time (this convenient time is, more often than not, never). As such, when crafting an email newsletter, effectiveness in communication is everything. A reader, should he (or she) choose to grant your email a brief glance – like a king (or queen) granting audience to the village’s raving lunatic – may only give you a few sentences before moving on. Or words may be a bit of a commitment – pictures will have to suffice for now.

Thus, we campus ministers spend a lot of energy crafting the email newsletters that we send out to our supporters. We have to simultaneously present the (amazing) work we are doing while continuing to ask for support, that that (amazing) work might continue. Nothing lights up our lives like a positive response to a newsletter… An email reply containing only the word “nice” makes me so excited I don’t sleep the next night.

What is the perfect layout? What is the best order for stories from the field, financial report, and links to the website? Is it okay to send out September’s newsletter on the first day of October? These questions haunt us like the Ghosts of Newsletters Past, Present, and Future.

If you want to see exactly what it is I’m going on about like a village raving lunatic – or you feel you could use some more padding in your spam box – click the “sign up for the monthly newsletter” link on the top right of this page, and be a part of this incredible Quest for the Perfect Newsletter.