Brian Slezak

Well, I’ve been back from my mission trip for four days now, and I haven’t had a moment to post about it yet. I last posted that I would live blog if I could, and I failed! There was cellular service, and I picked up the wrong cable before I left! I left behind all of the connectivity tools I needed to get online! I was so mad …. Anyway, I hope to write up my posts about the experience this week. I have something else to say first though, in my next post.

Tags: mission

Well, tomorrow morning I head to New Mexico, specifically Dzilth-na-o-dith-hle, for a week of mission. I hope to update my blog while I am there, but I have no idea if I’ll have Sprint service. We don’t know exactly what we’ll be doing there, other than serving the Native American community in any way we can. We are the last mission group destined there for the summer, and will probably batting clean up.

I’ve been looking forward to going on another mission trip, and I feel it is about time once again. I’ll be travelling there in connection with Living Water Christian Church, led by the senior Pastor Laura Guy, my bosses wife.

With luck, I’ll be able to quazi-live-blog the event, but I may have to do everything offline and post when I get back.

Tags: mission, new mexico

My wife got up early this morning to take her citizenship exam. She passed with flying colors and didn’t miss a question.

She has been a green card holder since we first met, being of Indonesian decent. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia until the age of 18, when she traveled to the US for college. We have been married since May 22, 2004. USCIS provides study materials, which we studied together for days before this morning, so she was uber-prepared. One only has to answer 6 questions correctly. If you haven’t seen the study materials, you should check them out. I was born and grown in the US, and when I first saw the questions I could only answer the first 10-15! It is true that most native born Americans could not pass the test out of the gate.

She was excited when she called and told me she passed, and I’m proud of her. She has been putting off citizenship for many years, and finally decided to do it this year. Go wife!

Tags: citizenship, naturalization

Catching up some reading, I came across Jim’s post about God leading him in his life right now. I decided to give my own advice on scoring the Church IT job:

1. Know what you’re getting into
2. Just be yourself through the entire process
3. Hand it over to God

Nearly 7 years ago from now, I was chosen for an entry level IT position at Church of the Resurrection. I was at the end of my rope. I was 2 weeks away from packing my vehicle and driving home to live in the parents basement because the .com bubble popped, the IT industry crashed, no one was hiring, and I had no money left.

I honestly walked into the interviews at Resurrection not caring what happened, or what they thought. I wasn’t going to try to wow them or try too hard, I had decided I was just going to be me and nothing else. That was either good enough, or it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong though; I was in good spirits, and laughed and enjoyed the process. I did not sit there yawning and scratching my backside. I simply wasn’t concerned about whether I was the one or not, because I had already handed everything in my life over to God.

I was later told, after being hired, that I was by far the best interviewee of that position. …. I remember thinking, “That’s funny, because at that point I could not have cared less about that!” Simply stated, I attribute this to my second and third point above.

So FWIW, that’s my advice, good and bad. Point number one from above is important, and I listed it first because nearly 7 years ago … I wish I had been better informed. Hahah! I still would have taken the job, but it would have saved me from the great mental anguish of learning the hard way!

Tags: church it, hiring, job

For some time now, my wife and I have been attending Living Water Christian Church, in Parkville, MO. (About a 40 min. drive for us. Ouch!) This week’s e-mail from pastor Laura held my attention pretty well. In it, she relayed a conversation with her son:

My son Rob had a conversation with me recently, in which he was bemoaning the state of “organized religion.” He said, “People in churches can’t be real, they have to pretend to be someone they’re not.” I stopped him before he could go any further and said, “Living Water may not be a perfect church, but we have lots of people who have been honest about who they are and what they struggle with. We have made it clear that we accept and welcome everyone because all of us have baggage.”

That spurred this post, which is somewhat my own response to the Robs of this world. I wholly agree with Laura about Living Water, though I know where Rob is coming from, even though my “old guy” years give me a different perspective. For what I would guess is the majority, there is the life we live outside of church, imperfect, flawed, sinful, and via the human condition we simply accept this, and just drudge forward. Rarely we change our ways, or even acknowledge our failures. Then there is the life we live at church, where we are baptized in Christ, eat the bread and drink the juice, act as a better Christian for an hour or two, and try to befriend people we don’t know and build a community.

So what’s with the double-agent lifestyle? Where is the accountability? Why can’t we be like Rob and others envision, where if we say we buy into it … we actually BUY into it? To err is human.

This made me recall a conversation I had with Chuck Russell regarding accountability groups. Essentially these are small groups where individuals hold each other accountable to a very high degree for living a good Christian life. Why are these groups not wildly popular in every church? I think it is because people don’t want that. It’s to effective! “I seriously have to give up my sinful ways behind closed doors and live *that* life? For the love of God that sounds boring!”

For the love of God, we turn away, and are loved regardless by His grace.

Our flaw may be small, only a seed, or it may be a full grown tree with deeply set roots. Christianity is a walk – not a switch that is turned on and off. We accept Christ as our savior, strive to overcome our weaknesses, but we do not change overnight.

How does today’s church affect our lives in practicality? It may start with that person in the mirror.

Tags: accountability, gospel, sin, small groups

Well, I have to say I saw it coming. The Appian Way was slowly running its course, and I kept dreaming of one day setting up a blog of my own where I’m more apt, yet not guaranteed, to post my thoughts and musings on a more personal level. (We’ve yet to see if that’s really what this world needs.)

So here is the release of my very own blog! I have to say it was fun setting it up, and helping Clif get his set up in the process. I feel a sense of ownership with it now, which will hopefully make me a more prolific blogger.

Thanks to all those who have encouraged me to continue blogging.

In my previous post, I described my experience and opinions on day one of the Everything Must Change Tour that took place on Friday evening. Saturday morning, the conference began again at 7:29 am. I have to say that is really early to get postmoderns out of bed, but plenty were awake enough for good conversation. The morning started with break-outs, and we attended McLaren’s session on church plants. It was essentially just a gathering of people involved in church plants, young churches, or those trying to do something new in established churches. We sat in a circle of chairs and people commiserated about the difficulty of those tasks.

My wife and I connected with trying to do something new in established churches. Most people talked about how the old guard would work against them, and in some extreme cases just kick them out of the church. McLaren led the discussion and would interject his experience where appropriate. The conversation followed natural peaks and ebbs, and everyone seemed comfortable to participate. My wife and I agreed later that this was by far the best part of the event.

We talked about what “church” meant and how that differed from traditional ideas and the difficulty in reaching the unchurched. Brian used a phrase that stuck in my mind, “Leadership By Anxiety,” to describe using the natural energy around an idea to push through making a change. It reminded me of Adam Hamiton’s “Decision by Nausea” concept, which he uses to discern which of many paths he should to choose. The path that God leads you down is often the most challenging, and frightening.

Over all it was good, but here is my constructive criticism: The buzzword “narrative” was used quite a bit through the discussion. I don’t understand why we as people take simple things and make them complex in order to feel more enlightened. Other than that minor criticism, the only unsettling thing about the discussion was a strange quietness about what to call what they were doing. People used phrases like, “where we are”, “what we are doing here,” “how we were led to this.” To be honest, it made me feel like I didn’t really know what was going on, like I was sitting in some sort of cult-ish or secretive meeting. Kind of weird.

Other than the morning discussion we had a morning of worship. The songs were chanted, and very meditative. So much so we almost fell asleep. After we finished, we had to leave early to attend our nieces birthday party.

Overall, still just ok. Swag was good. :-/

Tags: brian mclaren, liberal

This evening I attended the Everything Must Change Tour, presented (I supposed), by Deep Shift. I live-tweeted the event, if that’s what you call it, which was my first attempt at using Twitter. It was very one-directional, as I did it through my cell phone and didn’t have device updates on. New guy – my bad.

I registered for the event late last year after hearing of it somehow. My wife and I had heard Brian McLaren speak at one other occasion, knew he was associated with this, so we signed up. It wasn’t cheap – $75+ per person at early bird price, but if you got in on the early bird deal you got a copy of Everything Must Change, one of McLaren’s books. Oh, and it ended up you got a compact fluorescent after showing up. “Yeah. Check out my totally enviro-friendly bling, yo. 1200 lumens for only 20 watts dawg.” So you got swag for $75. Not all bad.

I had a creepy feeling about the event from the time I registered though because of some of the language surround the event. To be perfectly blunt, it felt very bleeding-heart, tree-hugger, all we need is love … ish. Oh well, at the very least it’ll be a good experience for my wife and I. This feeling was intensified after getting to our seats and thumbing through the handouts. Let me extend this feeling to you by way of quoting some of the material:

…. Therefore we will practice ‘listening one another into free speech,’ ‘building bridges of empathy,’ ‘creating safe spaces,’ and other strategies of revolutionary communication.

When I see or hear ___ I feel ___, because my need for ___ is/is not being met. Would you be willing to ___.

When you said ___, I felt ___. Can you understand why I would feel that way?

A short commentary: Umm – Wow. 1. Revolutionary? Really? Seriously? 2. I’m building my bridge of empathy to solitude, and I don’t care where your bridge goes. 3. If I “felt” that much all the time, I’d be in therapy, or I’d be a woman. (I do not mean any offense to women, I am just a guy that’s all. But if that made you feel ___ because it was ___, I would suggest ___. No ___ intended.)

During one of the discussion times, I met Al. Al asked me what I thought of this so far. (Thus far we had experienced good music, a Sierra Club video, and some speaking by Linnea Nilsen Capshaw.) I admitted I had little expectation, not doing any research about it beforehand, but felt “like it was a bunch of liberal stuff.” Al gave me a concerned look, a nod, and agreed.

Brian McLaren spoke. He’s a good presenter, and a good speaker, so you can’t go too wrong. One thing I like about Brian is that he loves circles. Two dimensional circles. The man can explain anything he needs using circles, usually three or four … and maybe a box. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but that was ok because I wasn’t supposed to. He told us that before he started, and I happened to agree with him about that, and some other things too.

We broke into another discussion time to talk about our thoughts and feelings, and Al turns around to me and states, “Yeah, I’m afraid you were right. He is off base, and just wrong about ….” Unfortunately, Al and I were on the same page. This wasn’t the McLaren we knew, and to my initial concern; McLaren was veering hard left toward the target audience.

Overall, the evening was OK. The music was great, McLaren wasn’t at his best, and the evening was much like a sub-standard worship service. If I didn’t get books and swag, I would have been very disappointed. My wife tolerated it. That is to say she didn’t go postal on me, but sternly said I owe her something in return that is better than ice cream. She and I agreed that the time progressed much like a mainline worship service. Singing, greeting, prayer, shake some hands, singing, listen to preaching, prayer, singing, benediction. There was more discussion thrown in than usual. Oh – we did miss communion, but it wasn’t the first weekend of the month.

It may sound like I’m vehemently against the left, but I am really not. I have some liberal views that get me chastised, and I’m fine with that. I just take the extreme left less seriously. You kind of have to, because when they state in the materials that Brian will intentionally avoiding using male pronouns when referring to God because the bible reflects God in feminine images as well as masculine; you have to call that out. At what point were all those “He” references misleading? Did I miss it when Jesus pulled out, “whoops, I meant Mother, not Father. My bad.”

Regardless, we’re attending tomorrow’s morning session as well, and Pania (that’s my wife) is even going with me when I expected her to bail. If tomorrow is blog-worthy, I’ll post about my experience.

Tags: brian mclaren, everything must change tour, liberal

Ok, I had to do it. Our fearless leader Clif is at MinistryTECH in Oklahoma City as I type this blog post. My cohort in this was Ian, who is there with Clif. Ian was able to set up a webcam in short order and stream Clif to U-Stream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ministrytech

To the upper right is a shot from my camera phone. This is a projected image on a wall in our training room back in Leawood, KS. Clif is larger than life!

So to sum up – yeah I posted on Clif’s presentation in Oklahoma City before he was even finished, watching from Leawood, KS.

Given even simple technology – you can’t stop nerds from getting creative and participating, even if we don’t get to be there in person.

Tags: creativity, nerds, technology

Ok, a quick follow-up to my last post. Not only was it ridiculous to find the previous one, but I came back and refreshed the search and there are even more companies that found the genius in this strategy. (See image below.)

Great! Now, the first sponsored link looks quite reasonable. There technically is a Mitsubishi Eclipse vehicle. But the link provided takes you to a 2008 Lancer, and “eclipse” is found nowhere on the page. Bad, bad, bad.