• Well, January is just about over. Seems like yesterday we were just setting our goals and making resolutions for the New Year. How are you doing on your goals?
• Coaching begins! This week kicks off the start of my church communication coaching group. I’m so excited for what these next six months have ahead and am praying they make an impact. I’ll keep you posted on how things go!
• This weekend I was in Charlotte and absolutely loved it. I hung out with the team at Lake Forest Church for their leadership conference with Donald Miller and as they opened a new worship space AND kicked off a new series “Hope in a House of Blues” [it was quite a weekend!]. The team at Lake Forest is doing some outstanding work and it was an honor to be there with them. Donald Miller did three sessions talking about evangelism, pain, and the blues. Check out my notes!
• It just so happens that Ben Arment was in Charlotte this weekend for a Dream Year Weekend, so I had the chance to sneak in and catch some sessions. I was so inspired by the dreams that were inside of the people around the room and was so impressed with Ben’s heart to help them come to life.
• I’m still processing what went down in The Elephant Room last week. I’ll be doing a blog post on my thoughts tomorrow. In the meantime, be sure to download my Elephant Room Conference Notebook to catch up on what you missed.
• Communication can change the world. Check out this great post from Jeff Goins on the power of communication.
• Stuff Chicagoans Say. I know the “Stuff … say…” videos are a bit overplayed right now, but this one, as a proud Chicagoan, is pretty awesome.
• While I was in Charlotte this weekend I also had the chance to check out a Saturday night service at Elevation Church. They are kicking off a new series, inspired by Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, on the power of our stories. They built a website, MyBetterStory.com, for people to share a one-sentence synopsis of the story they believe God wants to write through their life. It connects with Twitter and Facebook, which is pretty awesome. Love it. What a great and creative way to get people engaged around a message series.
• I’m about to start drawing circles and being praying in them. If you haven’t checked out Mark Batterson’s The Circle Maker yet, you need to. It’s a powerfully convicting book on prayer. Review coming shortly.
• Does your church need a private online community? Kem Meyer shares how Granger Community Church addressed growing connection and communication gaps as a church by coming around The Table. Check it out.
• In church communications? In or near SoCal? Don’t miss your chance to spend the day with me, Dawn Nicole Baldwin, Drew Goodmanson, Josh Burns, and Curtis Templeton as we talk church communication at the 77 Events Gathering for Communication/Media on March 14 at First Christian Church in Huntington Beach. Details here.
• Challenge for the week… Think about what you know God wants to you do. Now look at your to do list. Now, focus on the things that will move you closer to what you know what God wants you to do.

• If you think about the tradition of blues, it’s honest music.
• It is the root of our spirituality.
• It’s an incredibly honest, soulful dialogue.
• We’ve lost that.
• Christianity is glossy today.
• The history of our faith is incredibly soulful, angry, and cries out to God.
• The Psalms were incredibly honest dialogue with God.
• David was painfully honest in the Psalms.
• We are flawed, lonely, and have coping mechanisms so we don’t have to feel our pain… that’s a human experience.
• With God, we don’t have to pretend.
• God is familiar with our pain.
• There are so many blues songs about unrequited love.
• God’s Story is about unrequited love.
• God is crazy about humanity and He’s crying out to us.
• God came to us through Christ.
• He loves perfectly.
• There are times when God has the blues.
• You can see His longing for humanity.
• Jesus got the blues… going off on His own to be with His Father.
• Jesus has been where we have been.
• He’s felt the pain of unrequited love.
• Jesus knew we were worth it.
• There’s hope.
• There’s longing.
• When you feel that, know God is with you.
• He feels your pain.
• He has empathy.
• Be honest in your dialogue with him.

• How does God use our pain?
• I believe that God intended for us to experience pain.
• It’s the anthesis of what we understand in our culture.
• We are taughtthere is not supposed to be pain in our lives by our culture.
• That’s not consistent with a Christian worldview.
• Don talked about Toy Story 3 and how he was impacted by it.
• I think Toy Story 3 is the greatest screenplay ever on film.
• It’s not my favorite movie but it’s a flawless screenplay if you study story.
• The story is about a group of characters who are separated with their owner.
• They were created for relationship with their owner.
• They are trying to find their way back to their own.
• Pixar spends 3 years cultivating their stories before the start animating.
• The human epic we are in is reflected in Toy Story 3.
• The most traditional story structure obeys a 3 act structure.
• Act 1 is about 10 minutes.
• At the end, something happens that launches the character into the story.
• That’s an inciting incident.
• Act 2 is the bulk of the story.
• The last 5 minutes are Act 3.
• Act 2 is trying to resolve the conflict that happened because of the inciting incident.
• Something usually happens to go back to Act 1 but then is resolved and runs into Act 3.
• Something happened in our lives that disrupted our emotional stability.
• The Christian worldview says that’s the fall of man.
• When we understand the structure of story, we can understand where we are at in our lives as humans.
• There is a point in a story where all of the conflict is resolved through one single action.
• Why is there an Act 3 climax in stories when there is no Act 3 in real life?
• Conflict and Characters exist in life. The climax doesn’t
• Everything in a story is represented in a story except for the climax.
• If you can convince people that there is an Act 3 climax in life, you can manipulate and control them.
• Advertising does that. It says, “Something is wrong with you, BUT if you do this, you’ll get better…”
• The cultural scripts that run through our commercials are interesting.
• They all say the same thing: if you buy this, this will happen.
• We as humans, especially as Christians, need to accept the reality that life is hard.
• As Christians, we need to teach people that life is hard.
• The most happy country in the world is Denmark. [America is 32nd]
• The common characteristic of people in Denmark is that they have low expectations in life.
• If you have low expectations you’ll be surprised when things go right.
• When we look at Scripture we see people facing difficult, painful realities.
• Romans 8, Paul talks about the Act 3 climax that will take place in your life, when you go to Heaven.
• Most of the verses on hope are focused on hope later, not hope now.
• If you believe that you are supposed to be experiencing the climax now, your focus is off.
• You will go through life very disappointed.
• Where we are is in Act 2. Not Act 3.
• We are in the struggle.
• We are post, mid-act climax.
• That’s the cross and resurrection.
• That was the event that will engage the Act 3 climax.
• We are betrothed.
• We are engaged to Christ.
• Your troubles will never end.
• What you do have in this life is hope.
• We can climb through the mountains of life and struggle together.
• The sufferings of this present time cannot compare to the glory that’s going to be revealed … – Paul
• Christ’s glory is to be revealed. Not has been revealed.
• In the midst of our pain, we are to wait with patience and have faith it will happen.
• What should our posture be?
• How does someone act when they are engaged?
• They are excited about the what’s to come.
• They are hopeful.
• If you are 30 years old, you’ve had 12-15 significant positive and negative experiences.
• God redeems the hard things in life.
• Sometimes God embeds things in our lives.
• We are born into conflict.

• Joseph has a dream  [positive]
• Joseph tells his brothers [negative]
• Joseph is thrown in the well [negative] – “I blew this…”
• There are mistakes you can make in this life that will cause churches to exempt you from helping them fulfill their mission. But God can still use you.
• Joseph is rescued [positive]
• Sold into slavery [negative]
• Run’s Potiphar’s house [positive]
• Thrown in prison [negative]
• Meets baker and cup bearer [positive]
• Cup bearer forgets [negative]
• Joseph meets Pharaoh [positive]

Bringing it Home

• Write down the positive and negative turns in your life.
• Spend time doing this.
• Your positive experiences are points to celebrate God’s faithfulness.
• When we look at our negative experiences, we need to let God redeem them.
• What the enemy intended for evil, God can use for good.
• Mine those experiences in your life.
• Do something with them.
• Through writing the book about growing up fatherless, Don has created a non profit to mentor fatherless boys.
• The things God can do through the hard things in your life can be the things that bring hope to others.
• Create a storyline of your life.
• Ask yourself, “With these negative things, what can happen?”
• Each negative turn in your life can create a seed that can grow into something great that can bless and feed others.

Q&A Session with Mitch White

• There are different kinds of conflict. There’s conflict that God embeds in our stories.
• This idea that we can be completed in God is untrue on this side of eternity.
• Some of our needs are there because God wants them to be there.
• God took Adam’s conflict and made it worse by asking him to name to the Animals.
• God uses conflict to make us appreciate what He is going to provide.
• It gives us respect for what He gives us.
• It causes us to fear and honor Him.
• There’s conflict that comes from the fall of man.
• It’s not what God likes or wanted for us.
• Control is the root of all sin.
• God does not make you love Him. He gives you a choice.
• Authentic, real loving relationships are made between people who have a will to love one another.
• Freewill is an act of love from God.
• People fill their lives with false, Act 3 climaxes.
• Most people realize those are empty when they get them.
• Put the Act 3 climax at our reunion with Christ.
• That makes all of life about heading toward that climax and taking people with us. That’s evangelism.
• Your motives change.
• It’s less about the praise of people and more about the advancement of the mission.
• On his next book… it’s going to be a CS Lewis Screwtape-style journal of God’s account of creation and the fall.
• On the Blue Like Jazz movie… we hope it changes Christian media. It releases in April.
• The Bible is a great narrative of flawed people who chose to give their lives for the love of God that captured their hearts.
• We need to learn to accept the beauty of people’s flawed humanity.

Donald Miller became best known through his New York times bestseller, Blue Like Jazz, the story of his experience at Reed College, voted at that time as “the most godless campus in the country.” Since then Don has written other best sellers: Searching for God knows What andA Million Miles in a Thousand Years (the story of his writing of the screenplay for Blue Like Jazz-the movie).

In the fall of 2011, Don created The Storyline Conference, a two-day event to help individuals, churches and business staff write a better story for their life and work. We are excited to be a part of what Don does best—help you find your story, see how God is redeeming it and allow this to help you see the story of others that God longs to redeem. Learn more about Don at www.donmilleris.com.

• 2% of the population of Portland regularly attends church.
• Don recently relocated his office above a bistro in Portland.
• He developed a great relationship with the owners of the restaurant, and they discovered that he was Christian.
• Their reaction was, “how in the world could you possibly believe that?”
• It’s hard for the world at large to believe that Jesus is alive today.
• Wouldn’t it help you, as a Christian leader, if Jesus would come back every 5 years and did a press conference? Just to let people know He’s alive, that we aren’t crazy, etc?
• Our narrative is quite mysterious.
• Our Savior comes in a manger.
• He spends 32 years on earth.
• He only does about 3 years of ministry.
• Then He ascends and disappears.
• He’s gone.
• He leaves the rest of it to us.
• What happens when Jesus is gone?
• Time magazine asked: “Is God dead?”
• Portland is statistically 25 years ahead of the country.
• If that’s true, only about 2% of the people you know will attend church in 25 years.
• That doesn’t mean that people won’t know Christ, it’s just that their engagement with their faith will look different.
• We live in a culture that assumes God is dead.
• One of Don’s friend went to Rwanda and saw a tribute to the genocide that happened there.
• Most people would see that and say it’s evidence that God is dead.
• Rather, his friend had the opposite experience.
• She felt God saying, “See what happens when I leave? See what happens when nobody brings the light?”
• Is Jesus gone? Where is He?
• Colossians 1:27 – Christ is in you, the hope of glory.
• Every day your feet hit the ground, it’s Christmas morning.
• Jesus chooses to take up residency in you.
• Jesus doesn’t take up residency church buildings.
• He lives within you.
• We bring hope into the world because Christ is in us.
• Colossians 1:28; Colossians 3:11; Galatians 2:20
• Christ is all and in all.
• It is wrong for us to look for hope in the world externally.
• We have the tendency to take someone to church instead of taking people to Jesus that’s inside of us.
• Bring yourself, all of you, to the people in your life.
• Confession is really helping people understand the difference between Jesus and me.
• My real ministry is not writing or speaking, I love to practice hospitality.
• Last year he had over 100 overnight house guests.
• Writing and speaking is fundraising for me to do the ministry I feel like Jesus is calling me to do.
• What is Jesus doing inside of us?
• Don shared this iconographic image of Christ:
• 
• Jesus’ left eye is convicting you of your sin.
• Christ divides.
• He comes with a sword.
• And He’s the Prince of Peace.
• His right eye is designed to represent His forgiveness and grace.
• He convicts us and shows us grace.
• Why does our culture have so much trouble seeing God?
• It’s because Jesus does not look like what evangelical culture in America wants Him to look like.
• If we were to create a Jesus that would build our churches and represent our community, He would not look like the actual Jesus.
• Who do we like to have represent us as Christians?
• What do our politicians look like?
• Jesus had no form or comeliness that we should look upon him; no beauty. (Isaiah 53)
• Often in our strategy we want to say, “you can have everything the rich young ruler had… you can live your best life now.”
• I don’t think that’s true.
• When I look at pre-fallen man, there’s only one defining characteristic: he walked around naked and was not ashamed.
• He was hardly self aware.
• When we are naked, we know.
• You will not live your best life now.
• You will live it when you are reunited with Trinity.
• We invite people into hope.
• Christ is so difficult to recognize because He isn’t offering people what they want, He’s offering people what they really need.
• He’s not offering people a coping mechanism; He’s offering people hope to endure.
• When we translate our theology through the filter of the lies of marketing we make people believe falsely about their faith.
• It’s not your best life now.
• It creates false expectations.
• Jesus is operating in the world in beautiful ways.
• Evangelism no longer looks to me like the sharing of information.
• It’s not about sharing truths.
• It’s about bringing people to Jesus.
• “I set people up on a blind date with Jesus and hope they hit it off.”
• We all have mysterious relational encounters with Christ.
• But then we rationalize our experience and boil it down to a formula.
• We are not saved through right theology; we are saved through Christ.
• We don’t need to depend on a church program to bring Jesus to the world.
• Jesus will go places I don’t want to go.
• Jesus will forgive people I don’t want to forgive.
• Are we bringing Christ into our house?
• Are we bringing Christ into our neighbors house?
• Do we believe that Christ is within us, or are we looking for Him externally?
• He’s inside of you bringing hope to the world.

Read more about Lake Forest’s story here.

Lake Forest is hosting a leadership weekend congruent with the other festivities, welcoming pastors and church leaders from 11 different ministries and churches across the Charlotte area.

The goal of the weekend is to remind leaders of the power of hope and the fact that we need to not only cherish it but share it with those who do not have it yet.

I’ll be blogging notes from those sessions.

“Hope in the House of Blues” is an annual series hosted by Lake Forest addressing hurt, hate, hope and healing with an inspiring, blues-based musical backdrop. Lake Forest has literally built a ‘house of blues’ in their foyer! Pretty wild.

Stay tuned throughout the weekend for updates.

Thanks to Pastor Mike Moses and his team for the opportunity to hang with them and to see first-hand the great things that are happening here.

• Great managers help people see not only the purpose of their work but also how each person’s work influence and relates to the purpose of the organization and its outcomes.
• Companies with high engagement levels had a 19% increase in operating income and almost 28% growth in earnings per share.
• If a company’s goal is associated with helping people there’s an increase
• Having your associates better engaged in your project promotes growth.
• Engaged employers believe they can impact customer satisfaction.
• Engaged employees believe they can impact the profitability of the organization.
• How do we better engage the people we work with?
• We need to see projects not as projects but as narratives.
• What really engages the human mind is a story.
• Do we like the elements of the narratives we hear?
• We frame ideas as narratives to deceive and manipulate people.
• There’s a lot of companies that do technology but Apple has a compelling narrative.
• Apple is the Robin Hood of the tech world. They take it from smarties so simple people can use it.
• TOMS Shoes has an amazing story – giving shoes to children who don’t have any.
• TOMS makes ok-looking bad shoes but they make an awesome story.
• We value the story over the inferior product.
• We have to tell better stories.
• When you write a project you want to end with a single climactic scene.
• You start planning with a single climactic scene.
• If you say you need a new building that seats 5,000 seats but don’t have a story connected to those people you won’t have a compelling story.
• Your story has to be a picture, not a number.
• You should be able to draw it on the back of a napkin.
• A question gets asked in a story — that’s what engages the mind.
• Will the guy get the girl? Why are they on the island?
• Will we be able to build this building on time and on budget is a BORING story that people won’t care about.
• We run our projects that way and expect people to engage in our projects that way.
• We have to put real people and real life change in the building and symbolize what will happen in that building.
• We have to put flesh on the idea.
• The fully-fleshed personal end goal associated with a visual image that is emotionally and intellectually compelling to the point that it instills sacrifice.
• People walk away from bad stories. They engage with good ones.

Developing Your Single Climatic Scene

• What project or near term responsibiltiy do you need to create a stroyline for?
• What are the outcomes you are responsbile for in this effort?
• Why is this good for your organization, your customers, and your community?
• Describe one of the many ancillary scenes that can ONLY take place if you’re successful in bringing about the SCS (Ride:Well)
• Using your answers to the previous four questions, write your Single Climactic Scene

SCS Validating Questions

• From my associates perspective, why might the SCS not be engaging?
• Have I captured a scene that employees, stakeholders, and customers can envision?
• Can my people make an emotional and intellectual connection to my SCS?
• Does bringing about the SCS mean we’ve accomplished all we are responsible for?

Conflict

• Conflict is a necessary part of story.
• It creates the risk.
• Conflict makes the story question more interesting
• Our scenes should be impossible without God’s intervention.
• We have to help people see that life has conflict in it and that God likes conflict.
• Conflict makes for great stories.
• Conflict is the forces of resitatnce the heighten tension, increase risk and complicate the actualization of the single climatic scene.
• There’s a difference between minor conflict and major conflict.

Conflict Questions

• What are the most obvious major conflicts we’ll encounter as we pursue the SCS?
• List all major conflicts that you can anticipate. If these go unaddressed, the SCS will not happen.
• What is the deadline for the SCS?
• With that deadline in mind, when must we respond to our anticipated conflicts?

The Characters

• A character is someone strategically placed to enter and engage with the fulfillment of the single climatic scene.
• Characters are hired to live the story.

Story is designed by God.

• God creates us to desire and to want something.
• He created people to want each other, land, to learn.
• God increases the conflict in people’s lives to teach them the value of what they should pursue.
• God gives us a blank page on which to write.
• With Him, tell a really hard beautiful story.
• Risk, take the chance, engage people… pursue the single climatic scene.

• A good story has a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
• What’s meaningful in a story is meaningful because it’s meaningful in life.
• Story teaches us what is beautiful, what’s worth dying for and what’s worth sacrificing for.
• Story has an incredible power to engage the human mind.
• There’s a difference between music and noise.
• We engage narrative differently than the language of experience.
• Narrative teaches us what we should be living for.
• Lists of values outside of narrative are meaningless.
• Stories in the Bible don’t stop and tell you what the moral of the story is.
• The story is ongoing.
• We sit down with the text and ask, “what’s in this for me?
• What if God was just in it?
• What if it’s just a relationship with Him that we’re meant to engage in?
• Story adjusts our moral compass.
• We learn by living a story.
• It’s possible to live a good story.
• All of the elements of stories are conditional.
• Characters are important, but they don’t have to be perfect.
• Characters have to sacrifice of themselves for the benefit of others to make a good story.
• Oftentimes our stories are selfish and self-serving.
• Success doesn’t tell a very compelling story.
• A character is not who they feel they are, think they are, or who they want to be.
• A character is only what they actually do.
• What we do tells a story about who we are to the people around us.
• The story we’re telling ourselves is often different than story we’re telling other people.
• We have to want something.
• If the protagonist doesn’t want something, the story can’t start.
• What story are you telling with your life?
• A story cannot be meaningful unless it involves conflict.
• We are taught that there’s not supposed to be conflict [ by the media and in church ].
• What does it mean to be “who God designed you to be?”
• We are born into conflict.
• We cannot reverse the role of conflict in our lives.
• Conflict is here to stay.
• Dark conflict entered into our lives as a result of the Fall.
• God created a protagonist in us.
• We desire what we cannot have.
• Conflict is beautiful.
• Conflict is the only way a character changes.
• The only way we can change is through pain.
• It’s true in a story and in real life.
• Conflict adds value to what we are trying to obtain.
• The Christian worldview has been hijacked by commercialism.
• It’s robbing of us of great stories.
• We need to look at conflict differently and share our stories, embrace conflict.
• If Christians could have a courageous attitude toward conflict, we could change the world.
• In story, there’s a desire for a climax, an act 3.
• In one action, conflict is over.
• The desire for climax is fascinating.
• We are a protagnoist… conflict has to take place to give life meaning.
• There’s always been a desire for conflict to go away.
• It manifests itself like wishful thinking in our lives.
• We’re taught conflict goes away through the climactic act of Jesus.
• The an inference is that Jesus is the climax and an end to our suffering.
• Jesus was not the climax.
• The truth is, in our theology, our conversion is not the climax.
• Conflict just gets worse.
• Can you imagine an infomercial with the Apostle Paul trying to sell Jesus?
• There’s a difference between the Biblical epic and the story we are taught.
• We’ve filtered our theology through commercial messages and lost the true power of our story.
• We are in Act 2 right now.
• Act 3 takes place at the wedding feast of the Lamb.
• When we die and are reunited with Christ.
• Paul didn’t sell Jesus as a product to take pain away, he talked about HOPE.
• What we have is incredible hope.
• The number one way America consumes stories is not through film, television or books, the number one way we consume stories is through each other.
• Tell beautiful stories with your lives.