FaithVillage Blog

Houses of the Not-So Holy

For the last month or so I have been drawn back into classic rock mode.

I blame Pandora.

I think it all started with wanting to listen to an old Blood, Sweat and Tears song that randomly ran through my head. “You made me so very happy, I’m so glad you came into my life.” And no, my sheltered friends, they weren’t singing about Jesus.

After finding that song, Pandora chain-linked me to Steve Miller Band, Kansas, Queen, AC/DC and finally to Led Zeppelin. Yes, these are your musical roots when your parents allow teenage friends to give their seven-year old son his first musical lessons with albums by Black Sabbath and Grand Funk Railroad.

This classic rock-fest began as a nostalgic musical journey, until the power of memory took over, and then the listening led to something far more significant.

While working out at the gym a few days later,  I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song,” off the Houses of the Holy album, the one with the provocative cover that got it banned in some regions of the Bible Belt. Suddenly, I was lying on the gold sculptured carpet of my boyhood bedroom. I could almost physically sense the furniture in the room; the twin beds of my brother and I separated by the Jetson-esque desk painted Hershey-chocolate brown, and the matching dresser I used to swan-dive from onto the bed pretending to be Captain America.

As Roger Plant’s haunting lyrics washed over me, I was there all over again, lying on the floor, mesmerized, escaping, on a vinyl magic carpet ride moving at 33 revolutions per minute. And for a moment, I also felt the old emotional ache again, the invisible “other brother” that I now realize was always there in my childhood for a host of reasons too complicated to explain here, but ones that are common to anyone with a dysfunctional upbringing in a house that was not holy in the way kids need.

But here is where God was suddenly present in my heart and mind. In the midst of the music and the remembering in such a visceral way, I felt deep gratitude for where my life is today. That childhood ache has long-been massaged by grace. The acute absence I felt as a child has been filled with an enduring Presence. “See,” God seemed to say inwardly, “I have taken care of you, haven’t I? That boy grew up to be a confidant, competent man. You have become the father you never had. I have kept my word to you.” I smiled to myself, right there in the gym.

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion – I seek the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient – Upon us all a little rain must fall…
It’s just a little rain…

This spiritual moment brought to you by Led Zeppelin … and the Holy Spirit.

On Remembering with God

But before I get too self-indulgent (as Simon Cowell would say), let me make some observations about remembering. Spiritual writers have long-observed that remembering is a potent spiritual practice. The ancient Israelites modeled remembering with their persistent storytelling of their deliverance from Egypt. The early church’s location of the Jesus movement within the epic story of God’s creation is powerful remembering. The recording of Scripture and the study of Scripture, the written record of God’s revelation, are acts of remembering what God has said and done.

Re-membering your own life is a means of probing the past parts of your life as you seek a deeper understanding and integration of the parts into a more coherent whole. This includes the painful stuff and the ordinary stuff, as well as all the stuff that made your creative memories scrapbook. Most importantly, by remembering along with God we can experience the redemption of our memories, perhaps not until years later, by identifying the lasting value of a heartache or hardship that God has used for our good.

My first experience with this “remembering with God” happened at the age of 25 when I was struggling with a call to leave my advertising agency job and pursue ministry. I took a long camping trip to the woods of eastern Kentucky. It rained a good deal of the time I was there so I spent large chunks of time reading and writing in my tent. I don’t really know what prompted me to do it, but I began to remember and literally journal the story of my life, but this time with God as the main actor in my story. Through this incredibly affirming experience I came to a much deeper clarity about the purpose of my life and the experiential power of God to redeem and transform me.

Of course we’re often reluctant to remember because we’re so bent on moving forward, or because we’re not very thoughtful people, or because we feel some parts of the past are just too excruciating to relive.  Yet in forgetting, or refusing to remember, we render our story disconnected, dis-integrated, and unredeemed in our understanding. People for whom forgetting is a common spiritual practice are often emotionally numb and suffer difficulty being fully present with others.

On the other hand, I have found that when we remember with God-awareness, we can go back through the memory and re-member it in new ways that positively feed our identity, self-understanding, peace, and direction for the future. Knowing the truth is indeed a path to freedom, that is, knowing the full truth that includes God’s redemptive work beneath the surface of our lives. I am not making light of what can sometimes be awkward and painful. I’m also not reducing remembering to a simple 1-2-3 process because it’s pretty much a “rinse and repeat” kind of thing.  However, I am deeply convinced that this kind of remembering is vital to personal happiness and well-being, and one of the wonderful gifts of God’s companionship with us.

A Few Exercises for Remembering

So, here’s a few exercises for remembering that might help you.

- Regardless of the prompt you might use (photos, music, objects), consider these significant topics for your remembering: family and friendships, loves and losses, achievements and disappointments, adjustments to life’s changes.

- Pull out your scrapbooks for your devotional time and have a conversation with God about the different stages of your life. What did you need? What did you want? How did you feel about yourself, your significant relationships? How did events shape you? How would God have you understand the significance of each stage?

- Do a visualization walk-through of important places in your life, such as your childhood homes, your schools, your churches, your neighborhoods, your college campus, your workplaces, vacations and nature experiences. As you remember the details of each place be attentive to what you think and feel and what happened in these places.

- If faith has long been important to you, pull out one of your old Bibles, maybe the one you used as a youth or college student, and walk through the pages, perhaps considering the verses you underlined or notes you made in the margin, reflecting on your spiritual journey and the progress you have made in understanding God and learning from Christ how to live.

- If you can, travel back to important places in your life and spend some time remembering them while in them, celebrating the good, naming the bad and confessing the secret.

- For each of the significant people in your life, attempt to remember them at the point they were most influential on you. Try to also remember what influences shaped who they were, what they needed, what they wanted. We become far more forgiving when we remember the needs of others, even those who failed us, and not just our own needs.

- And if it works for you, play a little Led Zeppelin, or something like it.

It is the summer of my smiles – flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain’t so hard to recognize – These things are clear to all from
time to time.

So how about you, what do you need to re-member?

Rob the Rock Star

I know this church (you know, like, “I have this friend who …”) that has a brilliant Bible study leader who has achieved something of Bono-like status around there. Everyone loves Rob because every Sunday he is well-prepared, delivers his content in a compelling way, genuinely cares about his group members, and is a model of servanthood. So, what’s the problem with that?

Well, most churches would be thrilled to have Rob on board, but he teaches a department of over 150 members. In a large group setting like that, you basically get a sermon. Every Sunday. The content is good but I have to wonder how much personal transformation is happening. Like Don Henley singing Hotel California, “you can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” (If you’re too young to get that reference, look it up on Guitar Hero World Tour.)

Don’t get me wrong, I am a preacher and believe passionately in the art of preaching. But I have also learned enough about educational principles over the years to know that passive listening to preaching is not the most effective teaching technique if the outcomes you seek are things like self-awareness, personal transformation, authentic relationships and practical engagement with the needs of others.

Of course, these are the goals for small groups in the church, so if we treat small groups like they are preaching settings, what’s the point of adding another sermon to the mix? And if the preaching of a Bible study lesson is also mediocre, well, haven’t we missed a huge opportunity and wasted a chunk of time our friends have generously given us?

You can’t handle the truth … alone.

Now while I’m tempted to throw around terms like Socratic method and discovery learning, let me just shoot straight like Jack Nicolson in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth . . . alone!” What I mean is, people learn better when they participate in their own learning, when they are actively engaged and emotionally invested. Before you get nervous, this doesn’t have to mean those tedious “group learning” exercises of yore or cutting out paper dolls of Bible characters. It does mean requiring your members to put some intellectual and emotional monkey grease into their learning.

Jesus understood this full well. This was his explanation for teaching in parables (Matthew 13). What Jesus appears to mean here is that callousness of heart and hardness of hearing are best treated with parables, symbolic stories that the learner has to struggle to comprehend. This is one theological explanation for why God cloaks himself in mystery, requiring faith and some asking/seeking/knocking behavior from us before he reveals himself. In the struggle to learn we are changed in vitally necessary ways.

Be a Sherpa, Dude

So what if, as small group leaders, we saw ourselves as sherpas guiding people into truth rather than experts merely downloading our superior knowledge? We keep people safe inside certain boundaries, we share our knowledge of the mountain but we don’t climb for people. We guide them to discover the truth we know is there.

The chief tool of the small group guide is the question. Not the leading question that Law & Order would object to, but the kind of provocative questions that get people to think about what is going on in a Bible passage, in their own lives, in their workplace or community.

Teachers who do this well, first master their content, but then they ask themselves, “How can I lead people toward this truth so that they can find it?” Along with asking good questions, the teacher uses techniques like inviting the group to make lists, solve problems posed, build models, share examples, compare and contrast, reflect on the who/what/where/when/why/how, explore hypothetical situations and connect ideas from related fields. Of course, we’re always inviting them to share personal connections, but you shouldn’t always ask for that straight up.

When the activity for a particular point is complete and there remains undiscovered truth, then the teacher unpacks what else is needed to complete their knowledge. This is how we balance dialogue and monologue, conversation and lecture. This is also why a sure-fire way to kill conversation is to lecture first as “the expert.” No wonder people won’t speak up and answer questions when we do that. When the teacher-as-guide operates from the basic value that learners can and need to get at the truth first, for themselves, people sense that and are much freer to express their own ideas.

When I teach this way, and I certainly don’t do it perfectly, I have been amazed at how the group sometimes will come up with much of the content I could have spoon-fed them, but there is a much greater affirmation when they have articulated an idea and I have written it on the board or put it in play with other ideas.

So, if you have a teaching opportunity this week, trying working a bit harder at being a guide and not an expert. Dare to loose a little control in the small group and pass the truth around a bit so everyone can touch it. Dare to let people learn something.

Jonathan Acuff is the author of the satirical blog Stuff Christians Like and a new book by the same title published by Zondervan this spring. In a little over two years, Acuff has taken a start-up blog from obscurity to over 1.5 million readers, many of whom interact loyally with his site every week.

We recently sat down with Jon to learn more about Stuff Christians Like and the guy behind the stuff. The entire interview is provided in the 12:00 video but if you’re one of our more literate followers or you don’t think “ambient noise” creates a cool, unrehearsed feel, then here’s the whole conversation below.

Jon, so tell us about Stuff Christians Like. Is this a blog about Bibles and where to find the best Lord’s Supper wafers, or what?

Hah, well it’s really an exploration of the entire culture of faith from a Christian perspective. So it’s everything from how to raise your hand in church when you worship to silly things we do on the road, like driving like we’re not Christians. I wish there was a bumper sticker that said, “I’m sorry I cut you off but I’m a Christian that drives like an Agnostic.” People have this idea that “I don’t have to have faith when I’m in the car.” We’ll have it when we get to church but on the way there we might need to run somebody off the road. My grandmother actually took her ichthus off her car because she didn’t want to make the Lord look bad by her driving.

That sounds like a conversation my family has in the car on lots of Sundays.

Sure. Sure.

Every time I post something about you on Facebook or Twitter, I get lots of “I love that guy” responses. How’d this crazy love fest for Jon Acuff get started?

We’ll, first I did a year of a blog that nobody read. Maybe fifteen people. So, part of it started with just trying to get better at the voice. I started Stuff Christians Like as a version of Stuff White People Like, which is another popular blog by a talented writer named Christian Lander, and then it took off. So, I can’t talk about how to grow a blog quickly, or how to be original, clearly, but it’s just been a slow process. And I think part of the reason it took off is that I’ve written 750,000 words. Stuff White People Like has maybe 200 posts and we’re at #823 on Stuff Christians Like. So, I think maybe one of the reasons people read it is because I’m faithful to it.  One of the rules of blogging is that “if you don’t faithfully write, why should I faithfully read?” So consistency has been key.

Well, your writing is awesome and so is the level of engagement on your site.

Yeah, I feel really blessed in that in two years we had over 120,000 comments, so it’s an act of community. And I don’t associate that with any degree of talent I have. It’s just God starting a conversation and we get to be a part.

You’ve coined observations like “the side hug” and the “metrosexual worship leader.” You find a lot of funny stuff in evangelical church life?

Sure, I think we’re just like any group. There are funny, quirky things we do. I try to never make fun of the church. I try to laugh with it. The only finger I point is the one at me. So, if I’ve done something silly I’ll be honest about it. It’s not like I’m not dressed like a metrosexual worship leader. I mean, I used gel today. I packed gel for my trip, that’s pretty “metro.”

How else do I know if I have a metrosexual worship leader?

Well, I mean, you can know by the depth of their V-neck t-shirt, if they’re wearing a scarf in the summer, the ironic winter hat in July, white shoes, white belt, a watch that looks like it’s a belt. Some guys are wearing eyeliner and tight-legged jeans on men. There are probably a hundred different things that are actually pretty funny.

Jon, one of the things I see in your work is this kind of ambivalence about pop-culture. You’ll talk a lot about Lil Wayne and Prince, and then you talk about the church being obsessed with being relevant and post-modern. What’s the challenge of the church to navigate that tension, to speak the language of the culture but not worship the culture?

I think it’s a fine line. I think there has been a time when we went from being irrelevant to being obsessed. There’s a pendulum. I think now maybe we are swinging back toward the middle. But somebody asked me, “Do you ever think we’ll be as cool as the world?” And I said, “I hope not.” We’re not held to that standard. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not a coolness contest. For me, I use pop-culture references because it’s a common language. When you, in the midst of a big “Jon and Kate” celebrity blow-up, mention them, everyone knows what you’re talking about so it gives you a chance to use a shared language to jump off of. For me, that’s why I use pop-culture. There’s stuff I don’t really care about and think it’s silly, but I know I’ll connect with a larger group of people if I can reflect that but not be obsessed with it, because ultimately, I don’t write a gossip column. I’m not writing TMZ for Christians.

I remember from your book that you grew up as the son of a church planter in the Boston area. How did that whole experience shape your humor and observations about the church?

It definitely did. Massachusetts at that time was very focused on Catholicism so with my dad being a Southern Baptist minister it was difficult getting a foothold. So, I watched him creatively approach people, creatively approach community, and that shaped how I looked at faith. It wasn’t cookie-cutter. He didn’t have an easy job, so I saw him apply creativity and honesty and these are things that are important to me now. So, I definitely think it shaped me.

So, is your dad down with your blog?

Yeah, he just keeps saying that if I ever go on The Daily Show he wants to sit in the crowd. I keep telling him that Christian bloggers don’t often get invited to The Daily Show, but parents have to think the best.

That’s great. So, if there were three values that you would say guide your work, what would that constellation of values look like? What’s underneath there?

Well, I guess, honesty is one. Kindness. Mockery just tries to wound. Satire is not mockery. I hate it when people confuse the two. Satire is just humor with a purpose. So, I guess kindness, honesty, and maybe accessibility. I don’t want ivory tower ideas and I don’t want complicated ideas.

That’s interesting because humor is such a dangerous thing sometimes. It can be filled with landmines. For you, where is the line between satire, sarcasm and maybe cynicism?

For me, the difference between satire and mockery is “is there a victim?” I ask, “If I write this, does somebody get hurt?” And the other distinction is that satire addresses issues where mockery addresses individuals. If I can stay away from making it personal, all the better. It’s so much better to me to get people to talk about an issue. Who cares about one particular celebrity? If I can talk about divorce, for instance, then people can relate to that and engage with it.

One of the things I have heard people praise about your work is that underneath the humor is a profound caring for people that comes through, a great deal of grace and compassion. Do you see the church missing the boat sometimes?

I think we do sometimes. I mean, I write about Christian hate mail. That doesn’t even make sense. We should be the most loving people. We should be the ones who have the most grace because we have been forgiven the most.  So, it’s weird that we’ll give grace to everyone that’s named ourselves, and then won’t give grace to other people, so yeah I think that’s just weird.

One of my favorite pieces is on “how to break up with your small group.”
How do you do that?

Well for me, there have been times when you have a small group and it just doesn’t fit, it’s just not right. It doesn’t mean they’re jerks or not good Christians. And so for me, I came up with some things to do, like you just make gross desserts so they’ll leave. You just tell horrible stories about bathroom issues you’re having.  Or you make a run for the border and just find another group and start going to that group as you start “small grouping around” and get a reputation. Or, you can just be honest, that’s always a possibility.

The nuclear option.

Right, right.

So there are all these awkward moments that you do such a good job of exposing. What else do you see?

Well, today, I wrote about how Christians don’t casually recommend books. They say, “Read this book, it changed my soul.” Or, “Read this book, it taught me how to be a man.” That’s? A one hundred and fifty page book by a thirty-four year old you never met taught you how to be a man? So, it’s awkward when you don’t have the same experience and you give it back to them and they ask, “Did it change your heart?” and you say, “uhhhh, it was okaay.” People take that personally. If you recommend Twilight and someone says, “You know, I don’t like Twilight,” you don’t say, “But that book changed my life!”

Any crises in the church that you think we need to urgently address?

I’m always concerned about “deep v-neck syndrome.” We’ve got plunging necklines for our men that are disturbing. And iPads. We have people reading sermon notes from iPads for a sermon about homelessness. That doesn’t make sense.

Tell us a little bit about your process. You appear to have this enormous work ethic with over 750,000 words written in two years. How do you do what you do?

The big part is collecting, capturing the ideas. Some many people have ideas but they don’t ever capture them and they disappear. I initially capture an idea and write it down on my iPhone. And then sometime later I’ll go back and look at whether it’s a good idea, does it fit the site, does it make sense, has it been done before? Then I’ll write a draft, and then wait a week because you need a week from your work to get objective about it. If I post it that day, I’m too close to it. I won’t see some of the errors in it. SO, I wait a week, and then I’ll edit it and post it. I usually try to stay about three weeks ahead of y site so I have three weeks written and posted at any given time. That gives me the chance to having a bigger look, so I can say, “Wow, I have two marriage posts in the same week, let me move that and split it up.” Because if you are a single reader, that’s kind of frustrating.

You write every day? Up at 5:00 a.m. ?

Usually.  It will fluctuate depending on what we did the night before. But, it’ll usually be anywhere between 5-6:00 a.m. I’m pretty much an early morning guy.

So you write in the morning before your day job.

Yeah, I usually try to do a quiet time and then do my writing. It’s a great way to force your job become something where you don’t have to get your need for creative writing done there. I’ve already done my writing. I’m good (for the day). I don’t need my job to be my creative outlet. It might be some days, but some days it won’t.

And you have a family.

Two little girls, six and four.

Do they know what you’re doing? Do they get into it?

They will say things when someone does something funny. They will say, “You should tweet that.” So that’s funny, but I told them that a movie company had called me about making a movie of Stuff Christians Like, and they said, “Okay, so can we go outside now?” Kids keep you humble. They don’t care, and rightfully so. It’s a blog. I’m not curing cancer. Perspective helps.

I should say my 13 year-old just started reading your book and he really likes it. I think it’s a great way for him to hear some things that maybe he couldn’t hear in a straight up way.

Sure, sure, that’s great.

So, cliché question time.  What’s the last book you read?

I’m reading right now, A Single Insight is Worth a Thousand Good Ideas. It’s about the creative process, the difference between your insight and your ideas. I like stuff like that.

If stranded on a desert island, who would you take with you?

My wife, of course. I mean you have to say that. “Yeah, I’d take my Bible and my wife.”

Very good. And if you could be any animal what would you be?

Ooo, some sort of bird of flight, I don’t know, maybe an eagle, something that can fly.

That’s pretty biblical.

That wouldn’t be bad.

So what’s next for Jon Acuff?

Figure out the next book. Working on that, spending more time on the site. Being a dad, being a husband, being an employee. We’ll see.

Great, well we really enjoy your work and wish you well.

This was fun, thanks for having me.

NOTE: Following this interview, Jon Acuff  announced on August 2 that he has moved from Atlanta to Nashville where he has joined the Dave Ramsey team. Jon will continue writing Stuff Christians Like and develop other social media projects. Special thanks to Daniel Burke for shooting video on-site at Echo 2010.

I saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie, Inception, last Monday night. Or at least I think I did.

I don’t want to give away more than the trailer already does, but I can tell you that the movie is built on the thesis that technology could allow other people to modify our dreams.  But there’s a catch: this works only so long as we don’t know we’re dreaming.  If we realize we are, the game’s up.

At the end of the movie we’re left to wonder, are we dreaming now?  If we think we are, we aren’t; if we think we aren’t, we might be.  If that sentence gives you a headache, my apologies.

Such ideas have always intrigued me.  The Matrix trilogy left us wondering if life is really what we think it is, or if we’re all hooked up to machines which project our apparent experiences into our otherwise bored brains.  Plato was one of the first to twist our view of reality, claiming that most of us are like people chained to a wall so that we cannot see the fire behind us, only the shadows it throws up in front of us.  It is the job of the philosopher, he thought, to unchain us so we can see the reality passing us by.

There’s a biblical sense in which Plato and DiCaprio are on to something.  The Scriptures make it clear that this world is not our home.  While it is very real, it’s a means to an end.  Jesus promised us, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2)–”mansions” translates a Greek word which meant “the destination at the end of a journey.”  Our bodies are cars for the trip; one day we’ll step out of them and go into the house.  Those who are still traveling will see our empty car sitting in the driveway.  They cannot see us in the house, but that fact makes us no less real.

In the meanwhile, I’ll try to remember that what I see is not all there is.  Nothing worth proving can be proven.  What matters most is what I cannot see.  I have long appreciated the story of the traveler in Israel who met a famous rabbi and was amazed by his very simple room with its desk, chair, and bed.  He commented on his lack of possessions, to which the rabbi smiled and said, “I don’t see much in your hands today.”  The traveler explained, “But I’m just passing through.”  The rabbi nodded and said, “So am I.”

Special to FaithVillage from
Dr. Jim Denison @GodIssues

GARLAND—At their concerts, the Christian rock band Hawk Nelson encourages teenagers to “live life loud.”  For this band, it means more than just making a bunch of noise.

“The phrase seems to encompass the overall theme for the band,” bass player Daniel Biro said.  “One of the messages that we share with teenagers is that they are never too young to start making a difference in this world. Treating others with kindness and being faithful in the little things are ways to impact people for Christ. We always want to encourage students to be different from the rest of the world and to live a life that makes a bold stand for Christ.”

In addition to Biro, the band is made up of lead singer Jason Dunn, guitarist Jonathan Steingard and drummer Justin Benner.

Wherever Hawk Nelson performs, their goal is to provide students and young adults a life-changing encounter with God.

“We like to write songs that relate to situations we’ve experienced,” Biro said.  “A couple of our songs are about difficult situations, such as my parents’ divorce when I was a teenager.  There was definitely a period of my life where I didn’t want to forgive my mom.  With maturity, God showed me that I had to forgive her.  By sharing difficult experiences through songs, we hope to minister to others who are also dealing with tough times.”

While touring, the band members also takes time out of their schedule to visit sick children and their families at Ronald McDonald Houses.

In an effort to encourage young people to reach out and make a difference in the lives of other people, band members often share information about a variety of missions organizations at their concerts.

Hawk Nelson is committed to raising awareness for the Hands and Feet Orphanage in Haiti, started by Mark Stuart of Audio Adrenaline. By partnering with TOMS Shoes, for every pair of shoes sold on the band’s website, a pair of shoes is donated to a child in Haiti.

They have also teamed with the Mocha Club, an online community of people who give up the cost of two mochas each month ($7) to help fund relief and development projects in Africa. The donations from their recent tour led to sponsorships for about 200 children and provided medical treatments for more than 100 children infected with HIV.

“We’ve really felt compelled to do more than just have an entertaining concert,” Biro said. “We want to use our platform to make a difference in this world. As Christians, we’re called to be the hands and feet of Jesus and to help widows and orphans in need.”

More than having a passion for music, the group has a calling to touch lives, Biro added.

“There is nothing more fulfilling than impacting lives for Christ,” Biro said. “We always encourage teenagers to find something they are passionate about, whether it’s drawing, writing, cooking or sports, and to use those talents for God’s glory. I think that God can take that little spark of willingness and a desire to be used for his glory and do amazing things.”

[By Leann Callaway, Special to FaithVillage]

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—As Jaime Jamgochian performs concerts and leads worship around the country, she communicates to teenage girls messages about modesty, purity and self-worth.

“I really want young girls to be who God created them to be and to believe that they are fearfully and wonderfully made,” Jamgochian said.

“That really comes out of being true to who Christ says we are and our identity in him. Modesty, purity and self-worth really come into the light when we really know who Jesus says we are, and we experience the hope and love that he has to offer through a relationship with him.”

During Jamgochian’s junior year at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass., her life completely changed after a classmate explained what it meant to have a relationship with Christ.

“At the beginning, I kind of thought she was crazy. But I got to see the life that she lived. She had this joy and peace without surrounding herself with the typical college party scene,” she said.

After she graduated, she felt a calling to ministry—to lead worship, write songs and minister to young girls.

“The Lord was restoring so many areas of my life and renewing hope, and I really wanted to share this with others,” she said.

As Jamgochian began leading worship and telling how God had transformed her life, she was asked to team with the Girls of Grace conferences, hosted by the musical group Point of Grace.

While leading worship for these conferences, Jamgochian was inspired to design a T-shirt with the slogan “Modest is Hottest” to help young girls remember the valuable lessons taught at the conferences.

Not long after, the overwhelming support and response from both students and parents prompted Jamgochian to establish her own conference, which would focus on instructing girls on how to dress in the latest styles while maintaining modesty.

“After I started selling those shirts, I realized that girls weren’t just buying it because they wanted a cute T-shirt or a souvenir,” Jamgochian said. “They really wanted to support that it’s possible to live a life of modesty that pleases God and still look cute and trendy.”

As Jamgochian leads worship and speaks at the Modest is Hottest conferences, she desires to share the gospel with teenage girls in a fun and relevant way.

The conference is offered as a one- or two-day event and includes praise and worship music, teaching sessions, a fashion show and a concert. During the teaching sessions, Jamgochian talks to teenage girls about how to have discernment in dating situations, family relationships, self-esteem and a personal relationship with God.

“As a teen girl, I was very insecure,” she said. “I was tall with red hair and freckles. I never felt beautiful. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized true beauty comes from our relationship with Christ.

“I think it’s so easy for young girls to get led astray by the lies of this world and to place their hope in all the wrong areas. I really want to help them realize that there is nothing in this world that will satisfy or compare to having a relationship with Christ. I strongly feel if that relationship is intact, then teen girls won’t be reaching out to the wrong areas to find acceptance and approval.”

At the conferences, Jamgochian and youth leaders spend a great deal of time off the platform, interacting with teenagers and hearing about how God is working in their lives.

“Girls open up and share all kinds of things at these events,” Jamgochian said.  “I’ve heard from girls who lost their virginity at the age of 13 and are asking if God can forgive them. Others have shared about eating disorders, and they are wanting to get to the root of the reasons they are starving themselves or binging.

“At one of the conferences, there was a girl who was struggling with cutting and had been sexually abused as a child. It was remarkable that this girl shared that despite all these terrible things she had been dealing with, she heard a message about the mercy, grace and forgiveness of God.

“She heard the words that she had been desperately searching for—that God loved her and was there for her in the midst of all that pain. It caused her to walk out of that conference so free and understanding who God created her to be. …

“I really stand in awe that God can use someone like me who didn’t grow up in church and didn’t make a lot of right decisions growing up. It shows how the Lord can restore and how he desires to use each and every one of us to bring hope to other people.”

[By Leann Callaway, Special to FaithVillage]

Religion News Service reports this week that Beliefnet, which consistently battles with BibleGateway.com to be the largest religious site online, has sold to Virginia-based BN Media after only being up for sale for a few months. The full RNS story by Alfredo Garcia may be found below.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Beliefnet in 2007 in an apparent effort to build a faith-oriented business unit, uniting its related properties in HarperCollin’s Zondervan unit and Fox Faith. What is interesting in this acquisition is that Beliefnet and BN Media appear to have very different missions and corporate cultures. Beliefnet has distinguished itself for interfaith content with a light inspirational tone where BN Media is characterized by CBN-styled evangelical video programming through its subsidiary CrossBridge and the sale of telecommunications services through its Affinity4 program that gives ten percent of proceeds to consumer-selected charities.

Will Beliefnet survive as it is, become something new, or simply have its traffic harvested for product sales as long as the current audience hangs on? It will be interesting to watch. Historically, religion and business interests can make strange bedfellows if ministry is left in the outer room.

Beliefnet sold to Virginia media company

by Alfredo Garcia (used with permission)

(RNS) A small Virginia-based media company that specializes in
channeling a small portion of consumer spending to charity has acquired
Beliefnet, a leading online website devoted to multi-faith news,
commentary and content.

BN Media LLC focuses on the “vast online market for spirituality and
inspiration” by “bringing audio-visual and written content to the masses
while helping people make a difference for their favorite nonprofit
organization,” according to a news release.

Over the past seven weeks, BN Media participated in what CEO Steve
Halliday called a “whirlwind romance” of purchasing Beliefnet from
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

With the acquisition of Beliefnet, BN Media builds on its existing
relationship between Beliefnet and its subsidiaries, Affinity4 and Cross
Bridge, which provides spirituality-based video and media.
“We are very pleased with how our online community is growing,”
Halliday said. “We recognized both the tangible assets of Beliefnet …
as well as the intangibles, in particular, its excellent reputation for
providing high quality, diverse inspirational content.”

Beliefnet is one of the largest online sources for multi-faith
spirituality and inspiration content. It has more than 14 million
newsletter subscribers and an average of 3 million unique visitors per
month to its blogs, articles, videos, devotionals, photo galleries,
social networking tools and interviews.

BN Media’s Affinity4 has raised more than $76 million in funding
through “affinity-based marketing” for nonprofit organizations,
charities and ministerial organizations. Affinity4 offers
telecommunications products to purchasers who have selected to support
charities and giving 10 percent of profits to the corresponding
nonprofit.

“We’re quite excited about the opportunity to go ahead with these
three associates,” Halliday said. “We’ll be all structured to work
together … to promote video and promote giving and all the wonderful
content that Beliefnet already has.”
Although Halliday could not divulge the exact number of Beliefnet
employees who lost jobs in the transition, he said BN Media is “very
sorry for those folks and certainly wish them the best.”
Beth-Ann Eason, GM and COO of Beliefnet, seemed positive about the
merger in spite of the staff cutbacks. She viewed it as “a fantastic way
for the three of us to accelerate each others’ business and for us to
… continue to fulfill our mission.”

Jesus walked on water, why can’t we? As the guy in the video says, “You have to believe that you can do these things. It’s not, like, impossible.”

Along with being a brilliantly produced viral video for Hi-Tec boots, it just may spark the next big student ministry rec craze, what do you think?

Learn more about how this video even duped mainstream media and made the evening news in D.C.

Businesses Create Own Social Networks

An article in today’s MediaPost News announces the recent decision by British Telephone to create it’s own proprietary social network to foster collaboration among its over 100,000 employees. Not only will the network enable employees to collaborate on projects wherever they are, it is also touted as an opportunity “to allow employees to figure out which personnel are best suited for each project.”

In other words, company leadership is learning to take advantage of the “wisdom of the crowd” and tap into what some call “the Facebook education” that has made social media a welcomed online environment.

Sounds like they are putting the work in social networks. This is something we have been hearing about for a year now–corporations building proprietary social networks for online work.

Many are realizing that social networks can be a far superior online environment as compared to email or some clunky intranets that organizations struggle to get their employees to use. Provide an easy-to-use interface, some functionality designed to help people work together, and security features necessary for confidentiality, and you’ve got a workspace that is accessible anytime, anywhere. Social networks can keep the conversation and the documents organized all in one convenient place and provide workspace for the growing army of remote workers and cubical-challenged. Best of all, Facebook-modeled environments are just more intuitive and, well, social.

Collaborative Social Media Groups for Non-Profits

So, will non-profits such as global cause organizations, Christian colleges and ministry organizations build their own in-house social networks for online collaboration? I can imagine that some of the big boys like World Vision or the Salvation Army will dedicate the resources to it, but many others will need an innovator and technology partner to provide this online community for them. Certainly, organizations of all sizes could benefit from moving more work online, especially those whose constituencies are spread out geographically. Churches, of course, are already creating in-house social networks but most of the currently available tools focus on simple communication and not collaboration.

That’s an area where FaithVillage is excited to help. One feature of the coming FaithVillage.com site is the ability for a non-profit to use the social media platform as its organization’s own social network. This means that an organization like Compassion International, Fuller Seminary, Campus Crusade or Buckner International can move into FaithVillage and create personal pages, collaborative groups and forums for use among their employees, volunteers, or members. Every time we talk about this in a presentation, people’s eyes light up. Leaders are beginning to understand how social media is changing the way we get our work done, how we form and sustain relationships, and how we discover new resources.

From the very beginning of our vision, the FaithVillage team has held fostering collaboration among Christian causes as a core commitment. We believe that when faith-based organizations have the opportunity to work together online, surround their teams with an array of quality resources, and gain access to a like-minded community with whom they can form new relationships, the organization, and more importantly the Kingdom, wins in a big way.

What features would you want?

So, what features and functions would you like to see in a social network for working online? What concerns do you have for online collaboration? Can you see your favorite organizations coming online to work together?

BY ERIC DAVIS, SPECIAL TO FAITHVILLAGE

John Wills serves as executive pastor of The Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, and for the first time in his ministerial career, he works regular hours.

As the church’s chief operating officer, mentor to staff and pastoral confidant, he could work through the night and never get all his work done. But Wills goes home at the end of business so he not only can spend the evening with his wife, but also with his neighbors.

“The office work can wait until tomorrow,” he said. He sees his neighborhood as a mission field needing his attention. “It’s calling my name.”

Wills notes his attitude toward sharing his faith changed five years ago after he read Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll.

“I’ve always felt like evangelism was our responsibility,” Wills said, but he never saw himself as the type who would share his faith every day. For years, he stayed so busy at church, ministry in the community had no place in his life.

But Wills became stirred—even “haunted,” in his words—by a statement by the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:14: “The love of Christ compels us.”

Wills knew he needed to take action. For two years, Wills implemented relationship-style evangelism.

“I already have a strike against me because I’m a preacher,” he noted. Neighbors still wondered how they should behave around him. And Wills recognized relational evangelism demands long-term investments of time and effort. But he also knew Jesus hung out with all kinds of people from all different faiths and personal backgrounds (some churched, but many un-churched) and he wanted to follow Christ’s example.

“If you mean to serve the Lord, you will be a friend of people for whom God is still not a big part of their lives or thoughts,” he said, adding association with people who sin does not mean joining in their sin. “There’s still got to be a real distinctive difference about your life.”

Wills began to view ministry in his neighborhood with intentionality. Neighbors learned that when his door was open, anyone was welcome to stop by unannounced. He and his wife, Kelly, host a “party on the patio’ each Friday. Families bring their children to play, while adults visit.

Wills interacts with neighbors from varied backgrounds. Some believe they have to work their way to heaven. Others are reluctant to give up going the way they are going, even if it is apart from God. He’s sat in on interventions for people struggling with unhealthy dependencies.

“We love our neighbors genuinely and we know that God loves them too,” he said.

As Wills builds relationships, he looks for the appropriate time to present the gospel. By showing love and spending time, he earns the right to talk about Jesus.

“I’m going to live the story, then I’m going to tell my story, then I’m going to tell his story,” he said.

Usually, he noted, the time comes when neighbors face either a crisis or an opportunity.

“You have to be sensitive to the things of God and walk through doors when he opens them,” he said.

Although Wills talks about relationship evangelism, he considers other styles relevant and useful. Regardless of style, Wills emphasizes, the gospel cannot be cheap. While talking about God’s love, Christians must talk about God’s justice.

“You have a choice. Either you die for your sins or Jesus does,” he said.

As Wills worked on his personal neighborhood ministry, he started to challenge members of The Heights to do the same. The church’s Engage ministry challenges members to do ministry within their circle of influence. Engage started by challenging families at The Heights to become involved in some kind of relationship-based ministry. The next phase asks people to move one of those relationships into conversations about Jesus, opening doors to share the gospel.

“Pockets of people have really embraced it. Other people are going ‘It’s nice for you but not for me,’” Wills acknowledged. While some remain under the impression that the staff gets paid to do the evangelism, some put forth effort but struggle for results, he added. Even so, church members have launched more than 20 neighborhood ministries in recent months.

Pastor Gary Singleton often challenges The Heights Baptist Church with a question: “If this church left, would anyone know we’re gone?”

Wills accepted the challenge to make sure in his neighborhood, his absence would be noted in the lives of people who need to draw closer to Christ.

“We believe we are right where Jesus would be – hanging out with his neighbors,” he said

Eric Davis is a member of The Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas. He will graduate in December from Dallas Theological Seminary with masters’ degrees in Christian education and media/communication.