Ben Meredith, Author at BenandJacq in the Browser

July 27, 2010July 27, 2010

My Critics are Correct. Are Yours?

Brian Barela, a friend and social media guru within CCC, commented on yesterday’s post:

i’m an early adopter and i DON’T expect others to be what i am.

my experience in the church w never adopters is this:

i’m a never adopter and i EXPECT you to be what i am.

I heartily agree with him: you don’t have to be an Early Adopter, like I am. There’s no need for everyone to push the envelope, to try all the new technology, to constantly be changing, adopting new strategies, and the like.

It’s even ok with me if you are a Never Adopter. I know folks that are being fruitful, obedient, and God-honoring by doing the same things they were 30 years ago. That really is OK. It’s more than OK, it is necessary.

Here’s what every Christian should be: OK with the presence of the other two categories. The honest truth is that we all have blind spots. As an Early Adopter, my blind spot is a tendency to throw out a technology or method while it is still useful, in favor of something shiny. Never Adopters have a blind spot centered on an aversion to change. Ministries that have no Early Adopters become totally irrelevant. Ministries that have no Never Adopters lose their core identity.

We need each other. So we need to stop shooting at each other.

Our critiques of each other are correct. Let’s learn from them.

July 29, 2010

If Pregnancy Were a Baseball Game…

If pregnancy were a nine-inning affair as opposed to a nine-month affair, we’d be stretching our legs about to start the top of the ninth.

I am at best a utility infielder when it comes to pregnancy. You can expect me to make one or two great plays, heading off a craving at midnight with a Wendy’s single, or pulling a 6-4-3 double play and also tackling taking out the garbage at the same time. I’m not gonna make the All Star team, but I’m gonna give you a solid game every night, and take my paycheck without causing any drama in the locker room.

The coach just put me in as the closing pitcher. He called the bullpen, and the guy from the bullpen ran out to shortstop to tell me to take the mound.

Jacqueline has been put back on orders to rest (low–but not critically–amniotic fluid) for at least 2 hours at a time, two to three times per day.

I am on kid detail, and expected to hold the lead we’ve got going into the ninth. We called up a veteran (my mom) who hasn’t been out of the game for too long, and she’s in town helping.

Pray for us, as we have to simultaneously continue to work toward being fully funded in ministry, and toward being fully prepared for boy #2, and toward keeping Jacqueline off of her feet (which involves me changing the diapers, cooking the food, doing the laundry, and everything else–whenever mom isn’t in town). And we’ve got to do all of this with our boisterous two-year-old.

And I’ve gotta work on my change-up. Never been good at the off-speed stuff.

August 2, 2010August 2, 2010

Have You Ever Agreed With an Atheist?

Last night, my favorite atheist, Nick Wood (seriously, apart from the whole Jesus thing and the fact that I can get a suntan–redhead low-blow–we are pretty much the same person separated by ten years and a landmass called “the bulk of North America”) liveblogged his trip to a “Christian MegaChurch” in WA.

Here’s my favorite of his updates (well, it’s a tie between this one and the one where he made the “high five, Jesus!” joke about a lady lifting her hands in worship):

“Quotes from Rocky Balboa: 2-3. Verses from the Bible: 0”

If the atheists in attendance don’t hear scripture at your church, something needs to be shuffled. I’m just saying. God didn’t say that the praise music is God-breathed and profitable. God’s Word is powerful. The electric guitar is emotional at best, and fake at worst. The lights, the sound, the cool graphic behind the words on the screen, the sweat running down the faces of people excited for Jesus–NONE of them have the power of God like the WORD. It’s weird enough that we believe in a living book, there’s no need to add fuel by being fake and electric-lights-showy at the expense of reading from that living book.

I am not attacking this one church. (If I were attacking it I’d have linked to it or called it by name) I wasn’t there, and their webcast didn’t work–when I tried to view it in Safari, it said something about Internet Explorer. (insert appropriate jab about not caring to reach people like me who are allergic to Microsoft) I am confronting the “evangelistic” mindset that we need to get excited for Jesus, then people will see how excited we are and come to Christ.

You didn’t win Nick over. You scared him off. His last tweet from the building:

“OH GOD I’M OUTTA HERE THIS SH** IS SCARY”

People being excited for what appears to be no reason is not winsome. It’s really weird. Give Nick a reason to be excited. Tell him that all of his striving to be known and loved can end with Jesus, who fully knows us (even our really dark, twisted thought lives), but still fully loves us. Read to him from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and then apply that ancient document to his passionate, urban, technologically saturated life. He’s dying to hear just one Christian make sense without being a total fruitcake. But he’s pretty jaded. Your message is going to have to head him off at the pass, a bit. You’ll have to respond to his objections lovingly. You’ll have to actually listen when he makes good points, and respond to them.

But you have to start by not scaring him away by speaking a language that is totally foreign, and giving no indication that his point of view is at all valid, or prevalent. There are a lot of folks like Nick that aren’t going to be ignored away.

I wholeheartedly agree, Nick, we Christians can be some scary, weird folk. But let’s not toss out the Bible. Like you said, they didn’t even preach from it. Might wanna give it a shot. And as I said last night on twitter, if you are game to discuss Jesus with a guarantee that I won’t at any point bust out a streamer or speak in tongues*, holler at me.

*this is not a jab at the practice of speaking in tongues. It’s a jab at using glossolalia as an evangelistic tool. Nick and I both speak English. So I’ll just use English to explain the gospel to him.

August 4, 2010August 3, 2010

Lay in the Floor. Laugh at the Wall.

My son likes to mess with the spring-style door stop on the wall between our rooms when he gets up in the morning. It’s near the top of his to-do list every day.

6:35 AM: “boinggg. boyoiinng…. boyoyoyoing.”

It helps me to remember that no matter how hard, messy, and difficult life is–he’s concerned about the neat noise that door stop makes. And I think he’s onto something. Life is stressful, MPD is difficult. But God wants me to lay my head down beside LB on the carpet, and be amazed by the sound of a door stop. I can’t think of a better use of my time.

When’s the last time you stopped to make funny noises with a door stop? That big problem will wait. In fact, in light of the joy you find laying in the floor with a toddler laughing at the wall, those big problems don’t seem so big anymore.

August 6, 2010August 6, 2010

We’re Leaving Staff.

Jacqueline had just found out we were pregnant with LB a few months earlier. Then it happened. Due probably to a combination of poor communication and wishful thinking on our part, some folks who we thought were going to give a total of $10,000 in the month of October, 2007 ended up giving us a couple of emails saying they weren’t able to give. That 10 grand amounted to $7500 in annual support, or $625 per month. For perspective, in a healthy economy, it takes on average one week to raise $100 per month. So we were put 6 weeks in the hole, in a matter of days.

We have spent the last three years trying to recover from that month. Instead of recovering, we have consistently continued to lose financial support. We’ve raised much over that time, to be sure. Just this past year of raising support full-time has seen more than $1,000 in monthly support come in. But over the same time, we’ve lost about $1,300 per month. We’ve worked extremely hard, prayed harder, and given it the best shot we can imagine.

So, when I say we are leaving, I don’t mean that we are leaving with our head hanging down or our metaphorical tail between our legs. That’d indicate we don’t believe in a sovereign God, or that we think we didn’t work hard enough. And neither of those is true. After much prayer and involving more than a few tears (even some tears by Ben in public coffee shops, thanks to Neale Davis), we’re moving on.

We’ll miss being on staff. It is still sinking in that we won’t be at the conferences, seeing our dear staff friends. The last time I went to a New Years Eve party that wasn’t at a CCC conference was 1997. Well, since they shortened the conference thanks to the Y2K scare, I think I technically partied like it was 1999 in a non-CCC fashion–but you get my point.

Check out the two updated links above “Give” and “CCC” (same text in both, now) in the top bar for details about giving. Please don’t just stop giving. Read that first. We love you all.

More clarifying posts to come. And Im looking for a job, if you’re into worship music/tech/social media/good at making coffee type people. Holler at me.