Globalscope Germany's peanut gallery.

Team Leader Beth asked every team member to fill out a little blurb about ourselves for an upcoming newsletter to all supporters of Globalscope Germany. We want to share more about the team that works alongside the individual team members that each person, family, and church supports.

Here’s my info:

Hometown: Tucker, GA
Favorite German Word: “in der Nähe” – “in the nearness”. It’s hard to appreciate in English.
Mac or PC: PC. Now use all that extra money I just saved you to get me to the field.

Why campus ministry? I love Jesus, but I also love the work of campus ministry: it’s different every day, it’s always a challenge, and it requires every ability you have. I counsel, I preach, I talk about the Bible – but I also play Frisbee, I play in a band, I dance, I write sketch comedy, I design, I drink *lots* of coffee, I lift weights, I code… I do everything I have in me to share my love for Jesus with students.

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.

That was delicious. AND you're hired.

One of the tools of the effective support raiser is the lunch meeting. It’s great because you’re meeting a potential supporter when they have a low-gravity break in their day, and it’s lunch. Truly, there are very few things in this world whose value is lessened by the presence of food.

I’m still learning the in’s and out’s (thx, Microsoft) of the official business lunch. My team members have made it into an art form. Beth would schedule two lunches a day with supporters when she came Stateside for a week.

It’s a chance to connect with people about the ministry, but lunch can go longer than the time required to catch someone up on the events of the past year. Other pressing life topics might be broached. For example, this is a conversation I had at a lunch meeting yesterday…

“So, my wife wants to get a puppy.”
“Dogs are good. I’m pro-dog.”
“My fear is that this dog is practice for having a baby.”
“A baby? Are you guys ready?”
“We promised ourselves that we would wait three years before having one, and, wow, it’s already been three. It went so fast.”
“I’m way too selfish to give up my twenties for some baby.”
“Yeah…”
“You know what my reaction would be? ‘A baby? Why? Aren’t we having a good time? Why ruin that with a baby?’”

Not sure if that falls within Microsoft’s guidelines for a business lunch, but, then again, their specialty is software. Not what topics are appropriate at the dinner table.

Speaking of software, you can check off one item on my support-raising dream list. I wrote a WordPress plugin for the new imkeller.net, and WordPress accepted it for publishing. You can see the page here, and you can donate here.

Not trying to brag, but it was rated five stars. Out of five. Now I just wait for the donations to start rolling in.

Mighty Joe Espresso - or just a picture of Mighty Joe Espresso?

I have avoided the new version of Microsoft Office for as long as I can. Today I uninstall Office 2003 in order that I might enjoy the newer Office 2010 and all the progress that seven years of word processing R&D brings with it. Maybe now my support letters will write themselves.

While I work on putting a packet together that sums up the progress of Globalscope Germany, I have written a letter to be mass-mailed to my personal mailing list. The letter explains how my stay in the U.S.(of)A. is just temporary. It’s not the end of the work or, as I have been joking, “a chance to brush up on my English”; rather, it is finance trip and a recruiting trip (in that I am getting married and taking her back with me).

Did you know that my mailing list is comprised of 50 financial supporters and 60 others? It may interest you to know that it interests me.

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.

Holy crap: that's more than twice as much as I currently have.

This is the word from on high at CMF. Shalynn and I will need to raise $5,000 per month in monthly support to get back to Germany in January.

Just to give you an idea of how big that is, I spent a year and a half raising $2,000 and change in monthly support.

So, we have an incredibly daunting number in front of us. But if I’ve learned anything from my years in campus ministry under people who have overcome similarly ridiculous odds, it’s that nearly-impossible challenges are overcome with impossibly over-the-top dreaming. So let’s get creative about raising support.

This is brainstorming. There are no bad ideas.

So that’s a start. Whatever happens in the next six months, the key is going to be unrelenting effort.

Hike up those sleeves. Let’s get to work.

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.