Should churches follow formulas to insure success?

Joy may be a side effect of a formula, but I don't think that it is usually the product.

The Master's Design

So if you were going to plan the seminar portion of an educational convention in Awka, Nigeria where the seminars were to be presented by four American teachers who speak English with a rather strange accent, how would you do it?

Would you give them one hour to present the 8 sessions they had prepared in a crowded school room with around 100 elementary students seated at their desks with their heads down while their teachers sat on the stage and their parents sat to the side listening?
Would you prompt the cute little red-headed lizards to run across the top of the wall at strategic times in the presentation? That's probably not how I would have planned it. In fact, I'm sure it's not. However, it ended up being a great plan.

During our weeks of preparation for our trip to Nigeria, we tried to imagine what the educational convention might be like. We had been told that there would be 3 days set aside for the seminars so using our previous experience with conferences here as our guide, we prepared eight different 45-minute sessions. After arriving in Nigeria, we discovered that the time set for the seminars would actually be one hour. We travelled to two schools each day and shared with the teachers at that school for an hour while the students sat at their desks and waited. Then we spent some time in the classes, observing, teaching a short lesson and handing out small gift packets to the students. At first it seemed like a rather inefficient design, but as the week went on, we realized that it was a great design for the situation.

Although the teachers we were working with spoke English, we soon realized that English can function as a foreign language. Even simple communication was a challenge at times due to differences in pronuciation and use and so I'm sure that had we delivered our seminars as we had intended, there would have been very little that was understood. However, since we had to condense our ideas into 15-20 minutes, we were forced to pull out the most important nuggets. Also, the principal and several of the headmistresses of the schools followed us around to the various schools. That meant that they were able to hear our presentation 5 times. On the last day Kristiana, the principal of all the schools, stood up after we had finished our presentation (during which the microphone had stopped working) and summarized each part in Igbo for the parents and teachers there. It was obvious that she had captured the essence of what we were striving to communicate and was excited to share it with her staff. God had used the nugget sized ideas and the repetition to overcome the language barrier.

The other part of the seminar presentation that I found exciting was the unity that emerged as we began to share. Although we had not spent much time coordinating our topics, by the time we had gone through the whole process of condensing our original thoughts into one hour, there were several common themes that emerged. I presented my part last, and it seemed that I was just restating what the others had already shared. We also sensed an openess to receive the message from the teachers and school leaders that we were working with and an affirmation that the message fit their situation. What a privilege it was to be part of God's design and to see him accomplish his purpose for the seminars in spite of our weaknesses.

Middle School Musings

It all started with a quote from a fifth grader...

"Life is a quiz." -M.H.
"If life is a quiz, ask yourself, 'Am I failing?'" -Z.M
"If you indeed are failing, ask yourself, 'Why?'" -S.B.
"If your answer is, 'I stink at quizzes', ask God for a study guide. If he doesn't give you a study guide, you are hopeless." -Z.M
"But you need to believe that 'Yes, you can.'" -J.B.
"Barack attack." -Z.M.
"A good life is one with alpacas in it." -S.C.
"That was random." -L.P.

Planting Joy

My desire for my sons is that they grow up to seek joy rather than to pursue happiness. How does joy seeking come about? Is there a way that I can plant seeds in the lives of my children that will influence them to turn from the crowded pool of temporary pleasure to venture up the narrow, rough road that will bring eternal life? What was it about my growing up years that motivated me to walk the path I am walking?


Well, one thing my parents did not do was to push the seeds as forcefully as possible, deep down into the rich soil of our lives. As my brothers discovered, deep down forceful planting doesn't produce many peas.
Rather, we were gently nurtured, creatively celebrated and taught responsibility.

More importantly, my parents modeled faith for us in their daily decisions, through the books they read to us, and in an unwavering commitment to attending church and loving those around them. Today I look at the lives of my siblings and see much joy seeking. May all of our gardens be as fruitful!