Weekend fun: Variations on Murphy's Law

Paul Burleson recently posted this list of humorous one-liners that I enjoyed, and thought you might too!

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Everyone knows Murphy's law... "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Well here are some similar laws...variations on the same theme:

Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you'll have to pee.

Law of Gravity - Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

Law of Probability -The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act

Law of Random Numbers - If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal and someone always answers.

Law of variation - If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now (works every time).

Law of the Bath - When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

Law of Close Encounters - The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

Law of the evidence - When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will..

Law of Biomechanics - The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

Law of the Theater or stadium - The people whose seats are furthest from the aisle, always arrive last. They are the ones who will leave their seats several times to go for food, beer, or the toilet and who leave early before the end of the performance or before the game is over. The folks in the aisle seats come early, never move once, have long gangly legs or big bellies, and stay to the bitter end of the performance. [The aisle people also are very surly folk too.]

Law of gym Lockers - If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

Law of Logical Argument - Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.

Law of Physical Appearance - If the clothes fit, they're ugly.

Law of Public Speaking - A closed mouth gathers no feet.

Law of seeing a Doctor - If you don't feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you'll feel better. But don't make an appointment, and you'll stay sick.

Law of Interior decor - The likelihood of a slice of buttered toast landing butter-side-down is directly proportional to the square of the price of the carpet. [added by Bob Cleveland to the original list]

Which brought a smile to your face?

Message from God to his people today

I can't stand your religious meetings.
I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,
your public relations and image making.
I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.
When was the last time you sang to me?
Do you know what I want?
I want justice--oceans of it.
I want fairness--rivers of it.
That's what I want.
That's all I want.

--God
(Amos 5:21-24 The Message)

Apostolic challenges

Bob Roberts recently shared some thoughts related to apostolic challenges which I found helpful. What do you think about what Bob shares? Agree? Disagree? I have stated a couple of differences in italics, but overall, this is a good piece in my opinion.


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Apostolic is not:

• The original 12
• A Spiritual gift [I would disagree with him about this one not being apostolic]
  
• A position in the church
• Not necessarily a large church pastor
• Not necessarily a high profile pastor or church leader
  

Apostolic is:

• Big Picture Perspective
• Future Oriented
• Entrepreneurial leadership
• Pioneering
• Multiplying
• Connecting
• Releasing
  
• Leadership that calls to action and inspires
• Modeling
• A Leadership model & role in the church, recognized or not
• [I would add to this list "empowering others" to go out and do]
  

Apostolic Challenges:
Communicating what you sense and where you see God leading. Because it’s fresh and intuitive and you’re not even sure where all it will take you, getting words and vocabulary around it can be hard, BUT, you must communicate immediately the stories. Stories communicate and drive more than processes and systems. To keep your people with you and moving forward - tell the story again and again and again. You can move forward without a system - albeit slowly - you cannot move forward without the story of God calling and working. The Old Testament is living proof of that.
Keeping people up to speed with you. You’re not an engineer, a programmer, a systems person - which is really easy for people to follow, but not necessarily as impactful. Apostolic leaders tend to submerge themselves in what they begin to see and learn so books, relationships, ideas all start flowing really fast. There will always be tension at moving forward and keeping people up to speed with you. Visionary leadership at its core is calling people to a future.
Building a staff and partners that see the direction, are excited about it, then can build the systems and processes to help you move forward. I’m convinced, for an apostolic pastor - not only is that pastor uniquely gifted - but the staff surrounding them must also be uniquely gifted. If not, they’ll grind things to a halt because they have to have all the answers - and that’s simply not the way an apostolic leader operates and sees, neither is it the way movements happen. Apostolic leaders are not driven by a book, concept, or process - but a vision, an idea, an impression with a sense this is going somewhere.
Keeping the big idea in front of and not traveling down all the different streams of a big undiscovered area. Stay in the main stream of this uncharted river you’ve found. There’s time to come back later and hit some of the tributaries, or send others back to discover. Some of the best stuff is down those tributaries, but if you don’t map the main thing first, along with where the tributaries are, you’ll never get to the core of the idea.

Stuff spinning around in my head these days

The "M Blog" is described as one missionary's thoughts, experiences and lessons learned. What goes on in the head of a missionary-church planting strategist? I can't speak for fellow M's, but can share the kinds of disjointed work-related thoughts that are bouncing around in my head these days...

• wanting to restart in our home a house church to test some of the new concepts we are currently using in our training...problem is, we don't have a free night during the week
• Neil Cole's new book, "Church 3.0" and how some of his thoughts might be integrated into what we are currently doing
• how to personally contact the 100+ people we are currently training to encourage them and show interest in the details of their new church starts
• identify key people who we can pour ourselves into to help us train a second wave of 100 church planters who are already in the wings waiting
  
• how to raise badly needed money to finance the multiple missions/church planting projects going on, and yet doing so without creating dependency
• ideas for fine-tuning our current nightly training sessions
  
• the need to make time for more quiet, uninterrupted prayer and listening to God
  
• planning a weekend retreat with the team to do a crash course in using the new training materials; who needs to be there, where to go, what dates, how to pay for it all
  
• desperately needing to sit down with several key leaders to talk doctrinal issues and concerns and clear some of the piling up debris and misconceptions
• setting up March, April, and May meetings with key leaders out in the coastal provinces
  
• keeping the ten2b prayer virus alive and spreading
• the kind of leaders we need, and the kind of leader I need to be to others
  
• urgent "To Do" list: multiple print jobs needing done yesterday, burning 1500 music CDs for trainees, finding someone who can fix the broken copier and video projector
• finding time to make all the pending phone calls and visits
  
• all the stuff pending around the house, emails needing responses
  
• planning this week's CP training out in the Galapagos Islands
  
• sitting down with the host of the Alcance Ecuador TV show to plan a series of upcoming TV interviews, and suggesting we use an assortment of the people currently being trained in starting simple churches as those we interview

So, who cares about the kinds of things circulating within this particular M's head? Where is all of this leading? What is the point?

Proverbs 27:3 "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” We are what we think about. Kind of scary, huh?

I share all of this to say, for me, blogging helps order my thoughts. Writing is a valuable tool helping me connect random ideas into more meaningful and effective ministry. Loose ends--like those described above--often have a way of eventually coming together as blog posts. Clarity comes as I struggle to put something down in writing.

What kinds of things are spinning around in your head? Maybe I'll add them to my own list above!

How to train fleas

You don't have to know Spanish to get the message of this one-minute video we use in training to start simple churches.


The questions we ask after showing are:

1) who are the fleas?
2) what does the jar represent?
3) who are the jar lids?

We then discuss how all of this greatly affects the way we carry out the Great Commission.

Needless to say, some people get pretty upset after viewing and talking through these three questions. What do you think? Is this a realistic way to portray what has happened to the church today?

The Team

In over 530 blog posts to date, I have never blogged on "the team" we work with! Of course their stories have been shared and referred to many times over the years, but never have I actually blogged about the entire group of men and women that make up our church planting team.

In the above photo, taken yesterday, six of our team are missing. Marcos was outside working on his car when the picture was taken. Mercedes was at home recuperating from an eye surgery. I don't know where Juán was. Manuel and Esperanza are out doing evangelism in the southern part of the country trying to start a new church near the Peruvian border. Fabiola couldn't be there today (she is our prayer coordinator), and Linda (my wife) was at home teaching our daughter in home school.

Linda, Barbara, and myself are all from Texas. The rest of our team are Ecuadorians. Except for Julieta, all were either won to Christ through discipleship and church planting efforts, or were trained in one of our church planting training schools.

We have been meeting every Monday afternoon for many years now. Over time, some have moved on, and others have taken their place. Our meetings usually last three hours with most of the time listening to each other's exciting stories about what God is doing. We seldom get around to taking care of "business", so those matters are generally taken care of by Geovanny and myself on the way home in the car after the meeting.

Approximately 80 churches have been planted to date by the individuals pictured above. When taking into account all the people trained by those in the photo, the number of church plants swells into the hundreds.

Click on the linked names below for a related story about that person(s). All of these are great stories and worth clicking on to read (at least I think so!)

Our team leader is Geovanny. He is the tall young man standing to my right. I personally do not know of a more gifted church planter/trainer and sold-out believer to Jesus Christ than this dear brother and best friend.

Barbara is the other Texas missionary here in Guayaquil, third to the left, who has served for 23 years with the IMB. She has a ministry working with women engaged in prostitution.

On the far left is Julieta. She served ten years as a church planting missionary in Asia, but is currently working as our mobilizer to mobilize Ecuadorians into missions, and in charge of our Guayas Para Cristo project.

José met Zarai (standing to the left of Barbara) in Peru last year. In Nov/09 they got married, and are now preparing to go back to the jungles of Peru to work as a newlywed couple with the Ashenika, an unreached, indigenous People Group.

Marlene is one of the most gifted evangelists I know. She has been used to disciple many people to the Lord and start new churches. Two of her disciples are Medardo and his wife Mónica. I have written many stories in the past couple of years about these two. Currently, they are working with five different house churches started in their neighborhood, and on weekends travel to the neighboring province of Manabí for a new church plant they started near the town of Paján.

Felipe, Bladimir, Pedro, and Juán are all church planters and trainers. Three of the four have begun working out in the provinces on weekends starting simple churches in areas where there is little or no evangelical work.

Marcos, along with his wife Tania (she is the one holding the little girl) are very engaged in evangelism, discipleship, and church planting.

Mariana was part of the very first house church training school we did back in July 2000. She has been faithful all these years to travel every weekend out to a small village where she started a church. She continues to evangelize and disciple those in the village.

There are so many stories that could be told about each of these. All are my "heroes" and I have the greatest admiration and respect for each member of our team.

Which story linked to an individual did you like the best? I would love to share with our team some of your comments about their stories. It would thrill them more than you can imagine!

Would you take a moment to just pray over us all? Gracias!

Jesus follower

Under Religious Views on my Facebook profile, I state "Jesus follower." But, what does following Jesus actually entail? In reading the Gospels one finds a whole lot more detail and explanation than just going to church on Sunday, reading the Bible & praying, not cussing, smoking, drinking, or gambling.

One can land in just about any chapter of the Gospels and discover first hand what the twelve experienced with Jesus as they followed Him on a daily basis. It entails quite a different set of activities from what most of us modern disciples routinely experience.

Take a look at some of the things the disciples go through with Jesus in just a couple of pages (chapters 8 and 9) ...

• going through a storm and nearly losing their lives
• watching Jesus perform a miracle of calming the winds and sea
  
• coming out of the storm only to face demon-possessed men (fringe/marginal people)
• pigs running off a cliff and the locals traumatized
• people begging you to leave their region (being unwelcome)
• forgiving sins in Jesus Name (are we supposed to do this kind of thing?)
  
• healing paralytics (those unable to walk on their own)
• confronting religious opposition for doing what is good and right
• identifying with sinners and outcasts of society (the non-church folks)
• calling on sinners to leave what they are doing and follow Christ
  
• going to a party, eating/drinking with non-followers of Christ
• being given a lesson on mercy and what that means by seeing it first hand
• being questioned about religious practices and traditions and answering
• healing a sick woman
• raising a dead child
• healing the blind
• driving out more demons
• going from town to town teaching in synagogues
  
• preaching Good News of the Kingdom
• healing every disease and sickness
• having compassion for the crowds
• instructing disciples to pray for laborers
• pointing out the abundant harvest to disciples

Does this sound like a typical follower of Christ today? Can we identify with the way Jesus lived and taught his own disciples and the kinds of things He exposed them to?

I am struck that these first followers of Christ spent so much time healing the sick and demon possessed. Yes, there is also the preaching, teaching element of discipleship, but a lot of time was spent healing and ministering to the sick and oppressed.

How much of my time is spent in these kinds of activities? How much of the above list would characterize my own walk as a follower of Jesus?

How about your own?

Ecuador Photos

Beautiful photos of Ecuador and the people who live here. Taken from The Nelson Press the blog of fellow IMB M's Ken and Kirsten Nelson.