We talked about fellowship at church
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20 October 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: failure,
silly,
video
The rules of my fight club
I watched Fight Club last night. I know this film has been out for a while, but as I was watching I was struck with a powerful, prophetic sense that it captured the zeitgeist of this generation of men. Now is the time for a paradigm-shifting change in the way we talk to the lost men of this generation. Now is the time to change the world. Now is the time for BREAKTHROUGH! That’s why I am starting a Men’s Missional Fight Club For Jesus. Here are the rules:
The first rule of my fight club is tell all your friends we’re starting a fight club.
The second rule of my fight club is here are some fight club leaflets you could put up in your office or village shop or whatever.
The third rule of my fight club is no hard punches. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.
The fourth rule of my fight club is you have to read and sign the health and safety statement and waiver of liability.
The fifth rule of my fight club is you have to sign up for the tea-making and mug-washing rotas which are taped up on the back wall.
The sixth rule of my fight club is the fights will last no longer than three minutes. You’ll be surprised at how tiring fighting actually is.
The seventh rule of my fight club is this isn’t about winning and losing. It’s just a bit of fun.
The eighth and final rule of my fight club is that there is no pressure to fight. You are welcome to just watch.
∗
And we wonder why our big ideas go nowhere.
2 May 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
church,
failure,
silly
One o' them there modern translations
But we have this treasure in saved, healed, delivered and supernaturally changed vessels, to show that God has given to us, right now, His surpassing power over every situation. We are no longer afflicted, perplexed, in conflict or defeated. No, we are alive with the power of Jesus, and the resurrection power of Jesus has changed us now…TODAY! In every way!. God wants you to see just what a Jesus-controlled person is all about, so the power of Jesus is on display in the life I am living, and those who don’t have this life, are miserable and dying. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11, MSV)
This is Michael Spencer Version of one of those bible passages that we don’t celebrate much because to do so would require us to be honest about ourselves, and who’s actually honest about themselves in church? Here’s the real version:
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11, TNIV)
The whole article is a bit long and in baldly exposing some of the lies we regularly live swings a bit too far to the dark side of life, but it is a Very Important Article for anyone who cares about realness.
11 April 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
failure,
faith,
humans
This is not the blitz. We have not been evacuated.
We just came back from a week’s holiday on a farm in the cotswolds. The cottage we booked was a converted dairy barn with a wall of big windows and three bedrooms. There was one problem. When we arrived we were shown into another end of the converted barn with almost no windows and two bedrooms. The cottage we had booked was not available. Other people were staying in it. We were not happy.
The manager was semi-aplogetic. He made a call to the owner to see what could be done. Nothing. He asked us to stay where we were for the night and speak to the owner in the morning when she was at the farm.
We went to bed thinking we would sort it out in the morning, get a fair bit of our money back and get on with enjoying our stay, even though the accomodation wasn’t as good as we wanted.
In the morning the owner did not come to see us. By the time I went looking for her she was gone. She did tell the manager that there would be no compensation for us.
Later in the afternoon, when we were somewhere with a phone signal, I called her. She explained to me that when we changed the date of our holiday – something a school schedule prompted this; she seemed very accomdating at the time – she had mentioned a cottage was available, but she didn’t say it was a different cottage because I didn’t seem interested. She corrected me when I told her that the two cottages were qualitatively different. She complained to me about how she lost a week of income because we booked from Friday to Friday instead of Saturday to Saturday – nevermind that she offered it to me. She complained more about how I took so long to confirm the date change by post – nevermind that she didn’t tell me that this was more important to her booking process than just record-keeping. She boasted to me about what a good job she was doing to make our holiday nice. She scolded me in tones of a teacher disappointed with a young student for even calling her instead of just getting on with our holiday. She finished by hoping (her voice sounded more like expecting) that when she came back to the farm later in the week that we would be enjoying ourselves instead of moping around. She pettily offered £10 back because our cottage was a bit cheaper.
Explain. Correct. Complain. Complain. Boast. Scold. Hope. Pettiness. I was glad get be off the phone!
One simple thing could have prevented this situation: One piece of information. The owner could have told me that if we changed dates we would have to change cottages.
Another simple thing could have fixed it: Mr Gill, so I’m sorry for the mix-up. What can I do to make this right?
If she had done that, she would have had fans. We would have come back. As it is she held on to a few pounds, sent our estimation of her into the cellar, and earned a letter to the local tourist board.
There are two lessons here for me and the rest of us.
1. Information is power. Power is better shared.
2. Saying, I’m sorry, and meaning it works wonders. Remember what my dad says: You don’t have to be wrong to apologise. Sometimes – a lot of the time – it is about understanding someone else’s pain.
(The rest of the holiday was lovely.)
6 December 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: communication,
failure,
humans
Uselessly beautiful
Yesterday, I received these two lovely pieces of mail:
Keep reading
23 October 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: communication,
design,
failure
Let's call this one Hope For The Future (because the present doesn't look too good)
Friday was fun. That was the day that I discovered that once again I messed up my tax payments. HM Revenue & Customs sent me a lovely little document explaining how I need to give them £800 now and another £1,000 in January and another £700 in July, bless them.
It’s not their fault. It’s mine. It’s also my fault that we have debt to pay off and that we have a £600 monthly deficit that we are trying to overcome. It’s my fault that my family is facing some very difficult months as we tighten everything to try and get back on track.
Probably the worst thing about this situation is how slow I am to change. I have been actively working on clearing up my financial mess for a year and only now have I started planning and budgeting! (Insert pejorative exclamation here.)
Probably the best thing is that I know it’s all my fault. That fact really gives me hope. I’m not at the mercy of weather or spiteful little deities or a Curse of Finance (Lay your hand on the television and say the name of Cheee-susss and send your biggest cheque to me and you will be fuh-REE-ah, my brother!) I’m just an idiot with money. And I can do something about that.
Here is one of the things I am going to change: in the past, when our income has increased, our lifestyle has always ‘improved’ to use up that increase. I think it is like that for a lot of people. I have known for years that my lifestyle should be beneath my income, but when it comes to what I have actually done my reasoning went like this:
- Hooray! More money!
- Now I can finally buy ____
- Ooh, shouldn’t I start saving?
- Yes, but I’ve been so poor for so long. I can’t be expected to keep living like this. I deserve a reward.
- Of course I do! I’ll start saving and investing soon.
- Yeah, right.
- Repeat.
Not this time, buddy. I don’t care how cheap and tight and stingy I feel like I am being, our lifestyle is going to improve more slowly than our income increases.
28 September 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: cost-cutting,
debt,
depression,
failure,
money
Eight reasons not to use lists
Keith Johnson is the Ah Ha Architect for Group Publishing. I don’t know what that means, but I think he’s great, especially when he lets rip with a rant on the blog he writes with Larry Shallenberger. His most recent is majestic with ALL CAPS and bold type and exclamation marks!!!. The article is great but his comment (No. 5) is my favourite:
Try this instead: “Have One Point”!!! That’s It! And state, “this was my observation, and you might have another one, that is why I left point #2 BLANK…
Go have a read. It will get you all hyped up for your pastor’s Sunday sermon.
28 September 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: blogging,
church,
failure
The ongoing journey to freedom
Are you reading Paul and Sonya Armstrong’s blog posts about how they are getting out of debt yet? Start now!
We tried numerous times to curb our spending; sell things we didn’t need, look at our budget (bought books on budgets and management of money, software and programs). And it came in spurts. When the bills piled up and we felt like we were breaking, we got “real serious” about our spending. But we’d go right back to our pattern. I’d get something at McDonald’s or Chick-Fil-A or Wendy’s for lunch, I’d buy a CD, something for my camera, get office supplies; Sonya would buy inexpensive shoes for the kids, clothes at Target, we’d eat out every now and then (to be with friends, etc). Little things. None of them wrong, but it gave us a small excuse to avoid real change. Change that went beyond numbers. We resisted a first step in a real direction toward change.
At the heart our problems was fear…
27 August 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: blogging,
cost-cutting,
debt,
failure,
money,
quotes
Epiphany is a strong word for something so obvious
After two years of helping to run a church my brain has finally started working. I just remembered what I’m good at:
- Connecting with and being liked and trusted by the people who run things
- The hustle – talking to people, selling ideas, making things happen
- Design thinking – coming up with the right idea to meet the need
- Presentation, especially on stage in front of an audience
I used these four abilities to build a design studio from nothing to way-way-way-too-busy in four years. Then I joined the i61 church plant and forgot. For two years, I have been making a lot of pretty things, physically and spiritually, for i61. I have been using those four skills to some degree in the church, but hardly at all to connect the church with the community.
When I went to work full time for i61 18 months ago, I had the idea of approaching ministry as a design job. I wanted to bring the thinking and creative skills that I had developed in five years as a designer to a new arena. But my ideas about how to do it were not well formed. It was all too nebulous, and it didn’t work. I soon slipped back into the place that was the norm for me during Ministry Career 1 in America: in front of the computer, comfortably afraid of doing the Things That A Person In Ministry Should Be Doing. I knew that i61 couldn’t operate very well without me, but What Was I There For, Really?
Was I actually contributing to the advancement of the kingdom of God? I’ve had very real doubts about that. It wasn’t a lack of ideas – I always have a million of those. It was a lack of connection. I wasn’t connecting what I am good at with the work of building God’s kingdom. I was trying to fit myself into my idea of what A Person In Ministry ought to be doing without even being fully aware that I had such an idea.
When I started my design studio. I had the advantage of not knowing how to be a graphic designer or how to run a business. I needed to feed my family and pay bills, so I just got on with it. When I went to work for i61 I had a decade of ministry experience and a lot of new ideas telling me what I should do. Somehow those things didn’t connect with what I can do best, what makes me thrive.
Last night in the bath, the place where most good thoughts are thought, I remembered the things that make me thrive. And for the first time I connected them with the works of God. Bam. I felt like I retrieved piece of myself from the shelf, the feisty bit that likes people and makes things happen.
The catalyst for this connection was a meeting with a high school assistant head teacher. I was talking to her about an event we do called Hi, School! Just having a meeting with someone outside of the church world was a buzz. During the meeting she invited me to do some school assemblies. I came alive inside. Here was a chance to start something. Starting things makes me happy.
Then I felt guilty. Shouldn’t I be focussing on what I’m already doing? This doesn’t fit perfectly with some of my New Ideas Of How To Do Ministry. If I like it, it is probably because it is an old, and therefore ineffective, way of doing things.
Fortunately, I came to my senses and realised that I get thrilled standing up in front of a crowd of teenagers and talking about the kingdom of God because Jesus in me gets thrilled to talk to a crowd of teenagers about the kingdom of God. It is one of the things I’m built to do.
That excitement has been bouncing around in me for a week, and last night it bounced off all the right things at once and gave me this really obvious realisation: The things that I love to do and do well are the things that will make me most effective in getting the good news of the kingdom of God to my community.
Damn the theories. I’m finally ready for action.
19 June 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
design,
failure,
kingdom of god,
leadership
A letter to my September self
Hiya, older person.
It’s September and there’s a chance that you already have a cold and there’s a heaviness on your shoulders and your neck feels like a rod of iron – if rods of iron were filled with nerves and could ache like crazy. Your brain feels fuzzy, the kids are louder and more problematic than they usually are – at least that’s how it seems.
Keep reading
28 March 2008 Christine Gill
tags: depression,
failure,
happiness
Even more shame on you
There are many, many churches and Christians in the world who have no interest in piling shame on anyone. But we still don’t see the masses rushing to talk to them about their lust and their gluttony and their failures and their griefs. Our minds tell us that those are secret and private. Our culture is in agreement: Hide it away! And we get no arguments from our own pride and shame.
The kingdom of God – and all the healing and life that come with it – doesn’t work well with a lot of secrets. 1 John has a lot to say about living in the light and bringing things into the open – stuff that goes against natural human inclination.
So when we are trying to move people away from shame and ‘into the light’, we need to be aware that we are not just overcoming church culture, but also the broader culture and human tendencies. And that leads us back to thinking about the questions I asked in part one of this little series.
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
failure,
grief,
leadership,
shame
Shame on you! And while I'm at it, let me give you some condemnation and rejection as well
In my experience, there are a number of life issues and sins-that-so-easily-beset-us that the evangelical church really stinks at addressing. We’re good at inspirational messages about How To Succeed and How To Get Over It (and those are often useful and necessary). We are very good at shock and shame and savagery when people Don’t Succeed and Don’t Get Over It. But we are not so good at teaching people How To Fail, nor are we very good at coming alongside the failures among us and walking with them into success. We are really bad at understanding Getting Over It and what an ordeal that actually is.
Keep reading
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
failure,
grief,
humans,
leadership,
shame