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praying for a first ten or five or two?

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For those of you that read this blog regularly, you know I’m a fan (past blog posts) of Seth Godin and his thoughts about marketing, leadership and etc. Three weeks ago he posted an article entitled, First, ten, and I’ve returned to it many times since then. Here is the gist of his thought about “First, ten“…

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don’t love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Is this ground breaking or new? Heck no. It’s a basic principle. It can be found in the movie Pay it Forward and it is pretty much the principle of “Spiritual Multiplication” – that is pouring ourselves out for the Glory of God, for the sake of others, so that, Lord-willing, they will enter a dynamic relationship with Jesus, and then pour themselves out in the same way. Furthermore, it’s also obvious that Jesus practiced this; however, he happened to have the “First, Twelve” in mind, instead of ten.

So if this isn’t something new, then why is it messing my head up so much? I’m not sure, that’s why I’m writing this. I know that I’m not trying to sell anything, and I’m certainly not trying to peddle something. I’m, with the aid of God, attempting to live, love, and speak in such a way where those around me are going to long to have what I have. No selling. No peddling. No convincing. But a lot of living, loving, laughing, crying, speaking, and more together, in hopes…. In hopes, that something, anything will happen. I guess, it is in this thought, that I’ve been troubled by this blog post from Godin. I pray for ten. I pray for five. I pray for two. I pray. I hope. I’m not trying to win, as Godin mentioned in the post, but in the midst of a culture that is very cold to things of God, it would feel that I’m on the “losing” end more than the “winning” end. That’s it. There it is. That is why this post has been haunting me! That connected with, the last sentence I quoted – “start over” and “find a new product.” While I believe in being a constant learner and always being willing to change our methods, I’m left scratching my head, because it would appear some days that I need to take that last sentence to heart. Especially, as I look at our work here in Prague. I think we have adjusted our methods (“start over”) and we are still praying for ten. Five. Two. Hmmm… Much more could be written, but I will leave on two things – 1) please join in praying for us/me as we/I live, love and speak here in Prague. Pray that God would raise up ten. Five. Two. 2) Be encouraged because Jesus said,

“I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18b

amen.

“where have you been zach?”

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That is a good question! Two easy answers:
here,


or here,

View Larger Map

I guess, maybe here too,

View Larger Map

1) In front of my computer planning and prepping for 4 guys from Rutgers here this week doing ministry with us, 2) running around Prague setting up stuff for the week (thanks Erin for your help too!), and 3) at practice. It was a good week, a full week for sure! Pray for me because I was also trying to get caught up on sleep from the lack of sleep at camp last week and also I was trying to shake a cold.

Good News! The Rutgers guys got here this morning! We had a full day, after getting them settled in at Hotel Denisa, then hit lunch, then went into the city for a walking tour. We hit 3 St. Bucks on the way from Wenceslas Square up to the Castle. For the record, I only encouraged stop number one, because I hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet. The rest were totally initiated by the guys! They are a great group and I’m so stoked to have them here! So stoked! Pray that God shows up in some cool ways this week, and His Kingdom is advanced in their hearts and all the football guys will connect with! Thanks! Hey, you being a revolution today? Just wondered…

hip hop culture, church & the czech rep.?

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This week, in the midst of things, two items, which are very different but oddly similar, peaked my interest. The first was this,


I watched a few back episodes of TheResurgence.com’s vodcast (I guess, I was trying to catch up to a degree) and I watched an interview with Eric Mason, pastor of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia. It was a great interview that challenged me to think about context of the place where I live, Prague, and how I do ministry, but more over way I do ministry. Eric talked about hip hop culture, doing church in the city and much more. I’m totally simplifying it, need less to say you should watch it!

What was interesting was that same morning I read an article about hip hop here in the Czech Republic, Hip Hop Hunger Rises in the East. I’ve posted about hip hop on my blog before, because I’ll be honest day in day out, I see American hip hop’s affects on the youth culture of the Czech Republic. This article really peaked my interest. Combine with Mason’s interview, it’s making me ask questions like:

  1. How does this change the way I do things, especially amongst my young guys?
  2. How do I engage this redemptively in the capacity that I’m in now?
  3. How can the Church engage youth in this area?
  4. And more….

So here are some portions of the article that peaked my interest. I would love to share my thoughts, but I will save that, mostly because I might fall asleep at my computer. Needless to say, this all is making me go “hmmmm” and makes me want to lay some beats down. Ok, not really, but maybe encourage others to lay some amazing beats!

When comparing Czech rap to European hip hop from other countries, Abraham said French or Polish rappers were more socially conscious and “a lot braver.” When Czechs rap, it is “more an occasion to express something funny, or something poetic than some sort of ideas or their own ideology,” he said. Marysko agreed that more politically aware rhymes are missing from the Czech scene, something he’d like to see more of. With an increase of wealth in the Czech Republic – from deep recession in the late 1990s to rapid economic growth now – the subject matter of rap is changing, he said.

As the Czech hip hop community grows beyond an initial tight knit group of devotees, it has also fragmented. “If you read what people say on the Internet, I have so many haters,” said Marysko. His eyes narrowed as he recounted malicious threats to him and his family for putting radio-ready rappers like Mike Jones on BBaRak’s cover and including gossip of feuds, called “beef” in its reports. “Czechs are always jealous. I am not Jesus but I am putting out my magazine and living what we dreamed together. What’s the problem?”

As much as hip hop has arrived in this unlikely hub, it may not attract fans and participants forever. “I don’t think hip hop is going to die,” said Marysko. “I’ve had goose bumps hearing kids cheer at shows. But I just know it’s not going to be the hottest thing forever.”

the liberated puritan, busting out of moralizing peeps!

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Quite some time ago, I read a post over at theresurgence.com , entitled The Liberated Puritan, which peaked my interest, but I never blogged on it and recently this week, for some reason I returned to it. I’m not sure why, but I think it was in my frustration as of late, with us (Christians) trying to moralize people!

“Moralize people Zach? What do you mean?” What I mean is this, we become so reactionary to the “so-called evils” of the culture and the world, we start trying to make the culture or people more moral! It’s as if we think, “Hmmm if I could get this person to stop drinking, or stop sleeping around, then they will be a better person and then the Gospel will make sense to them.” As I look through the pages of the Bible, specifically the New Testament, I don’t see this. I don’t see Jesus going around on moral crusades attempting to clean people up morally so they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I see Jesus, and his boys, moving within culture and peoples’ lives as they are and watching God change the hearts and then their actions follow. The examples of this would seem to be endless throughout the pages of Scripture. Take your pick! In every case of Jesus interacting with a moral “nobody,” so to speak, he comes to them, as they are. Then their interaction with Him changed the outworking of their life. It was never, “Change your sinful way, then I will come to you, and you will be good enough.”

Yet for some apparent reason, we, as Christians, continue to try to do this. Why? Why? Why? As you can tell, this makes me uber frustrated! Why can’t we love people as they are and bring a real Gospel to them that says, “You know what you, like me, are jacked up beyond what we can believe, and you can’t do anything on your own to clean yourself up, but my God says, ‘I love you anyway, and I’ll invade your world and give you the ability to break out of the rut you’ve been stuck in, through the life, death and resurrection of my very own son!” Can we get there? Or are we going to continue to push our morals on people who have absolutely no categories for them?

This brings me back to the post, The Liberated Puritan, it was interesting reading, because it breaks down the stereotype so many have against the puritans. It would appear he, Douglas Wilson, blows that up in looking at the earliest puritans who in his words had been slayed by the Gospel of grace and liberty not the Gospel of moralism and empty works!

How easily we forget! The potency of the Gospel is always seen best in what it does to old wineskins. Religious man, ethical man, always wants a certain kind of ecclesiastical doing and bustling about. This doing is always careful to color inside the lines, and to keep off the grass. But whenever the Gospel breaks forth in the church, slaying its thousands, one of the first casualties is simple moralism. In the Gospel of Christ, men are charged to repent of all their doings, and to be something other than what they are. This of course provokes the hostility of religious man because he is always in control of what he does, but only God can be sovereign over what a man is. The Gospel of grace is therefore obnoxious to such a man.

Hmmm… Strong words. There might be some disagreement with his words, but I see his words playing out in my life. See, before I left for college, I was the ethical/moral young man, who gazed down his nose at others who drank, smoke, fooled around with the opposite sex and more. College had (has) a way of undoing that to a degree, and I started to see myself slip away from my “moral self”, and it was in that season of life that the Gospel slayed me and I was free. However, something changed. As I became more and more entrenched into, what could be called, “The Christian Ghetto,” I found myself falling from the Gospel of grace and liberty and once again turning to a form of ‘baptized moralism.’ It’s this form of ‘baptized moralism’ that Wilson unpacks in the article. Generation, after generation something changed in the lives of the Puritans, they resorted to a mere moralism, which I can see happening in the life of a Christian within in a matter of a couple of years, not just a couple of generations.

Now please hear me, I’m not saying morals are bad, and I’m in no way endorsing license (going off and doing as we would like and then just dropping the ‘Grace card’ on sin and saying I’m forgiven!). Indeed, when we enter into a relationship with this God of grace and liberty holiness will naturally follow, in the process of sanctification. What I’m calling for is, us, as Christians, to bust out of pushing morals on people, and start getting grace in front of people! Thus, meeting them where they are at and allowing God to then change them! Oh I dream, long and pray for this of myself, my organization and the Bride of Christ, the Church! How would our lives look different? How would our organizations look different? How would our churches look different? How would others’ perceptions of Christians look different? Ultimately, how would the world look different? I will pray and dream to this end!

learning||taking criticism

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A week or so ago, I posted some leadership thoughts that have been going through my mind lately. If you read that, you can see God has been teaching me a lot as of late, and I’m grateful for every bit of it, even if it is a hard place to be and sit in. See over the last year or so, I’ve received some criticism, some constructive, some not so constructive and I’ve struggled with it. Really… I didn’t want to hear it, but yet I did. I lived in this paradox for some time; it has been hard for me to sift through it at times, but there was a thought I heard Mark Driscoll hit on at one point that has helped me in the midst of this,

“Turn your critics into coaches. Most criticism has some modicum of truth. Ignore garbage; receive truth.” {grabbed from a blog post at A29, Mission & Vision of Acts 29 Network}

This simple thought from Driscoll has been encouragement in the midst of ministry, and growing as a leader. I was reminded of this again, this weekend as I watched/listened to a recent talk about the movement that is Acts 29 Church Planting Network (They envision the A29 movement reaching 300,000 people in the next 7 years! Click HERE to watch the talk, or just watch in below, it was good stuff about movements in general!). This thought of turning critics into coaches isn’t original Driscoll, but he got it from Billy Graham, whom seemingly got it from a man named Fred Smith (read more HERE), but it is gold for the leader. Driscoll added another thread to this, in this most recent talk, that as we turn critics into coaches, we need to look for the kernel of truth and see if there is anything that God could use for good what was intended for evil, for our good, sanctification and for the saving of many lives! (echoing back to Genesis 50:20) Good stuff. However, this of course, requires a large amount of humility, that I don’t know how well I do with most of the time. Nonetheless, I’m in the process and attempting to see God take these things, some of which were attended for good and some of course that weren’t, to coach me along and make me the type of man, leader, Christ-follower, missionary and more that God has in mind for me.

So let’s get practical here. How does this play out in your life? Can you get here? Where do you struggle? How do you push through? Help me (US) out! Thanks for stopping by and engaging in some things God is teaching me with me!

listening…

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I, by my nature, am not a good listener. So over the last few years I’ve had to work at being a better listener. I would say I’m that. Better. Certainly not great. Not good. However I, by God’s grace, have a teachable spirit that isn’t content with mere mediocrity in any area of my life, especially in an area that will help me excel in many areas, and in the midst of that I’ve seen myself grow as a listener. This morning I headed over to theresurgence.com for my morning blog read and I loved a short post entitled Listening to the Lost. It was a good reminder for me and served as another piece of encouragement for me as I journey forward in my listening abilities. Here are two portions I wanted to share with you, but go read the WHOLE post too!

One of the most effective ways to know our “target audience” was to ask them questions…something that we really aren’t good at in the West. Instead, Christians assume a defensive posture, making conversations doctrinal battles or apologetic arguments. Ethnographic research forces us to take a more humble path, the path of learning from those we hope “to reach.”

By asking questions from concern and genuine interest, we will travel much further and faster in our relationships. But first, we have to be convinced that we have something to learn from others, especially from those who don’t believe as we do. Our biblical anthropology–all men are created in God’s image–should convince us of that, but only the Spirit of God can convict us of subtle self-righteousness in viewing non-Christians as projects to complete, not persons to love.

Francis Schaeffer once said something to the effect of: “Give me an hour with an unbeliever and I will listen for the first 55 minutes and then in the last five minutes I will have something to say.”

Practically, how can you step forward in journey of listening? What has God taught you in respects to listening? Do you have any insights you can share with the 5 readers of zACHhARROD.com land? 😉 Thanks for stopping by! Have a great Tuesday!

sign up! {slightly updated}

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That sexy logo you see above is a little magic from my stud of a graphic designer friend, Mike Gorter, (Mike did a sweet skyline of Prague for me, thanks again Mike!) and a bit of tweaking on my part. I like how it came out. I wanted to blend the old, classiness of Prague with a very contemporary, urban font and after trying some 20 variations our staff team sided on the first one, which you see above. So you can head over to the AIA site to read more about the project, and if you are a college athlete pray and consider joining our wonderful staff team, in this wonderful city, for a wonderful month next summer, and then tell your friends to do the same! Be a Revolution today!

made me go hmmm, and then pray for some!

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“Exercising Christian love and mercy and generosity to the poor, orphans and widows, priests, guests and travelers. Truthful in speech, fair in judgment, faithful to all which is entrusted to him, exceeding human limits in goodness. Never depriving anyone of anything through violence or trickery. Believing in God with all his heart, embodying goodness in all his life. Building churches in all castles and gathering God’s servants from abroad, introducing God’s worship as is customary in great nations. Spreading Christ’s message through good example, not by force.” -From a legend about King Wenceslas (Václav), as quoted from Czechs and Balances: a nation’s survival kit

I’m working on a talk/training/resourcing time we are doing for our STINTers/Volunteer next week, tentatively entitled “Cultural Landmarks and ‘Avenues’ to the Heart of Czechs“, and I found this quote in one of my favorite commentaries about Czech history, legends, and life. It is an amazing quote! Especially, when you consider that King Wenceslas is a major Czech hero and considered the patron saint of the Czech lands, come on the biggest square in the city is Václavské námestí (Wenceslas Square). So as I read and reread the quote on the tram home, I prayed that God would raise up Czechs in the same vain as this quote. Would you join me in praying for this? How beautiful of a picture does this quote paint? Well, imagine the Lord painting a much more brilliant picture if there were Czechs living this out boldly today! I love the church-plant hint that is in the quote too – “Building churches in all castles”! I guess, we aren’t building them in castles anymore, but it’s still there! May God increase His worship in this great nation! Thanks for stopping by, I’m off to bed!

an american-czech is inspiration for us

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For those of you that know me, and have heard my presentation about ministry here, know my three overarching purposes with AIA here in Czech are:

  1. To see a nation return to it’s spiritual roots and know Jesus as Savior and Lord.
  2. A movement that is led solely by Czechs.
  3. To see Czechs being sent into the world and reaching people of every tribe, tongue, and nation.

That is what I dream of, pray for and labor towards. This week while reading Radio Praha I stumbled upon an article, The Jan Hus Church in New York – a remnant of the Upper East Side’s Czech past, about a church in New York name after the famous Czech Reformer, Jan Hus (learn more about Jan Hus). I enjoyed most of the article, but really enjoyed the portion about a Czech immigrant to America that served as the pastor at this church for some time. This week, he served as some inspiration for me and the thrid purpose I’m here in Czech – To see Czechs being sent into the world and reaching people of every tribe, tongue, and nation. This man’s name was Vincent Pisek and he was the pastor of Jan Hus Church in New York. Well, I’m not going to recount it all, here is an excerpt from the article about him:

In what sense was he amazing?

“Oh my goodness. He was a tireless worker, he went all over the country in the summers – he traveled all over the world, actually. He helped found churches all over the United States, in Czech communities, and helped nurture them along. He really cultivated the sense of Czech culture…with music, he was a great music fan and he really fostered that here.”

Vincent Pisek was indeed a remarkable man. He became pastor at only 23 and, as we’ve been hearing, remained in the post for nearly five decades. Part of his work involved finding ministers to send out to newly founded Czech parishes in the “Wild West”, while Pastor Pisek also helped set up various Slavic societies and organized missions to Serbia during World War I. He also undertook a dangerous trip to Siberia in 1919-1920 to offer encouragement to members of the Czechoslovak Legion there, many of whom had not been home for six years. The minister made an influential friend in Dale Carnegie, who contributed funds to the Jan Hus Church’s Neighborhood House.

Pastor Pisek died in 1930. The plaque in his honor on the front of the church reads: “His ministry of fifty years was the means of advancing the cause of Christian religion and good citizenship among the Czechoslovak people of New York and throughout the United States.”

So cool. He was sent out to Slavs all over the United States, and even the world, and I’m sure in his journeys he had many opportunities to love on many other people, beyond just Slavs. As I sat reading the article I couldn’t help but pray that God would raise up more Vincent Pisek to cultivate community, reach Czechs, and also take this same spirit all over the world. What a cool piece of encouragement. I was disappointed to read more about Pastor Pisek’s church today. For instance, this sentence, “In terms of our theology we have a very progressive theology, and we’d like to believe that the forward thinking and spirit of the Hussites is still here.” What? I’m not sure how Jan Hus would feel about this, because he was returning to what the Scripture had to say not, what they were dreaming up. It was just a reminder about how striving for progressiveness in the wrong areas – i.e. theology – is dangerous. That’s why I’m down with being “orthodox in theology but progressive in methodology.” Besides this, the article was a great encouragement for me and has me praying again for this place…

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