This weekend I’m in Charlotte with some of the Church Solutions Group team helping Lake Forest Church celebrate the grand opening of their new worship space and the kickoff of their “Hope in the House of Blues” series featuring gospel and blues artist Mike Farris and best-selling author and speaker Donald Miller. Needless to say it’s a big weekend for them and I’m excited to be here.
All posts tagged Donald Miller
Monday Morning Mind Dump
- Last week was my first official full week working with Church Solutions Group. While filled with many meetings to kick off the year, it was great to get a sense of the heart of the company and to meet so many remarkable men and women who are passionate about the Church. I’m so excited to be a part of this team and to help them help churches around the country!
- For the record… it’s weird not going to work for a church. But as I mused last week, sometimes you need a new pot.
- On a somewhat related note in case you didn’t see it, Donald Miller wrote a fantastic article last week entitled “Is Church Life Stifling Your Creativity?” A must read.
- My car started acting weird on my drive home from Christmas and I haven’t driven it since… I’m officially a commuter! I know I shouldn’t be so excited about such things, but with gas prices in Chicago being the highest in the nation, it’s good that I’m relying on public transportation… and cabs. Many, many cabs.
- Call me crazy, but I’m really going to miss Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC. [For the record, I watched for the fun, not the politics.]
- I did an interview with Kevin Hendricks on ChurchMarketingSucks.com that posted this morning. I am the final in a series of interviews Kevin did with board members for the Center for Church Communication. Check it out.
- There’s a lot happening behind-the-scenes with Cultivate… we’ve got four confirmed speakers that are exceptional! One that has never graced the stage of a faith-based conference before. The site should be going live very, very soon. Watch for details!
- In other conference news, last week the Elephant Room was announced. Holy… elephant? It looks AMAZING! I love the idea, concept and conversation. Kudos to Ben Arment for his help in making it happen.
- Quick update on my theme for 2011… health. I went the entire last week on fruit and vegetables only [with some beans and tofu for protein] and feel amazing! Training starts this week. EEEK!
- I may potentially have some more exciting news later this week. I’m soooo excited!!!!
- Ok, back to work! Have a great Monday!
ECHO 10 :: Donald Miller
Donald Miller grew up in Houston, Texas, in the shadow of the Astrodome, next to a cow pasture. When he was a kid, his single mother took him to a Southern Baptist church because she couldn’t afford reform school, which is probably why he writes about religious themes. He left Houston at 21 in a Volkswagen van, and later wrote a book about his trip called Through Painted Deserts. In his travels, he ran out of money in Portland, Oregon where he audited classes at Reed College, then selected as the most godless campus in the country. He wrote a book about that experience called Blue Like Jazz that eventually became a New York Times Bestseller and is now being made into a movie. Don then followed up with the best-selling Searching for God Knows What. After thirty-years of no interaction with his father, Don found his biological dad and wrote about it in a book called To Own a Dragon, which is being re-released in Spring 2010 under the title Father Fiction. About that time, he started The Mentoring Project, an organization that seeks to respond to the American crisis of fatherlessness by inspiring and equipping faith communities to mentor fatherless boys. Don’s work with The Mentoring Project led the Obama administration to invite him onto the President’s task force on fatherlessness and mentoring. Last year, along with the Ride:Well Team, Don rode his bicycle across America in an effort to raise money to drill wells in Sub-Saharan Africa. This experience, along with the writing of the screenplay for Blue Like Jazz, provided material for his newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (also a New York Times Bestseller) for which Don spent the fall of 2009 promoting on a 65 city national bus tour. He is a frequent speaker at National Conferences and Universities across the country. He has appeared at such diverse events as Women of Faith Conference and The Democratic National Convention. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his dog Lucy.
Note: Got here a few minutes late, so I missed the opening!
- 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.
Story :: Donald Miller
Donald Miller left home at the age of 21, traveling across the country until he ran out of money in Portland, where he lives today. He wrote the New York Times Bestseller Blue Like Jazz and started The Belmont Foundation, which is recruiting 10,000 mentors from 1,000 churches as a response to fatherlessness in America. His newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, shares how to apply the principles of writing great stories to real life.
- 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.
