Middle Schoole Parent Night

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Young Adult Issues in the News

It seems the economy is hitting the young adult population pretty hard.  According to the New York Post, the Labor Dept. declares that the unemployed young adult population has hit a post-WWII high.  This often translates into more young adults living at home after graduating college, which was reported by CNN Money this summer.

Thanks to Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance for tweeting these thoughts and links.

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Erin Bird
erin.bird@newcovenantbible.org
Young Adult Pastor
www.newcovenantbible.org
erinbird.posterous.com

Twitter: erinbbird
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Don't Assume You are Good Soil (Francis Chan quote)

"In the parable of the sower, Jesus explained that the seed is the truth (the Word of God).  When the seed is flung onto the path, it is heard but quickly stolen away.  When the seed is tossed onto the rocks, no roots take hold;  there is an appearance of depth and growth because of the good soil, but it is only surface level.  When the seed is spread among the thorns, it is received but soon suffocated by life's worries, riches, and pleasures.  But when the seed is sown in good soil, it grows, takes root, and produces fruit.

My caution to you is this: Do not assume you are good soil.

I think most American churchgoers are the soil that chokes the seed because of all the thorns.  Thorns are anything that distracts us from God.  When we want God and a bunch of other stuff, then that means we have thorns in our soil.  A relationship with God simply cannot grow when money, sins, activities, favorite sports teams, addictions, or commitments are piled on top of it."

(from Crazy Love by Francis Chan (with Danae Yankoski) pg. 64-65)

To watch a film (shot in a documentary style) about the parable of the soils, click here.

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Great Interview Excerpt of Matt Chandler's Walk with Christ

Matt hits on a couple of things that have started becoming key for me and my own spiritual growth.

Retreats
I take the last Friday of each month for a personal spiritual retreat. This has been a habit for the past 4 or 5 years or so.

Yes, I realize that my job affords me the opportunity to do this, but I recommend that every follower of Jesus find SOME way to get extended solitude time with God. My days-away used to be hard to keep - something was always trashing to crash in to keep that day from happening. Now, it would take something pretty major to keep me from heading off alone with God for 6-8 hours each month. These retreat days have become so life-giving to me! In fact, I'm thinking about expanding these retreats - once-per-quarter doing a night-away retreat, and once-per-year doing a two-night retreat. (However, I hesitate at doing these because of the time away from my family.) I'm also considering doing half-day retreats every week or every other week. But like my monthly retreats, I need to get these scheduled in my calendar or they will never happen.

I'm often asked what I do on my retreats. First, I love being outside, so if the weather is nice, I head to one of the local county parks (Pinicon Ridge, Palisades-Kepler, and Squaw Creek are my favorites). As far as "activity", I read my Bible - usually 3 or 4x as much as I do on an average day. I also spend time in prayer. I'm not a great "prayer", so something I've done to help me pray is walk. Even if I'm inside someone's house, I'll walk a path into the carpet and often pray out loud. This keeps me focused (and keeps me from falling asleep!), and next thing I know an hour has gone by. Usually in my office or at home, I'm lucky if I even go 5 or 10 minutes in solid prayer.

I will then often read a book. In August I read "Living the Cross-Centered Life" by CJ Mahaney. Last Friday, I read 3 chapters out of "Crazy Love" by Francis Chan.

This winter I started doing something new on my retreats. I started using the afternoons to write. I started writing a book (which I passed to my best friend in June to add his thoughts, stories, etc. since I'm hoping we can be "co-authors" on it (I'm not holding my breath it will ever be published - neither of us pastors a church large enough to get a writing contract!). I never knew how much I would enjoy the discipline of writing. I'm not all that great at writing, but I sure enjoyed writing, crafting, teaching, etc. through my keyboard while listening to tunes on my headphones. It was a nice surprise to see how the things I wrote would turn around and be the very thing God used to draw me closer to him.

Affections
Unlike Matt, sports aren't an issue for me. I love sports, but somehow in the last 10 years they have taken their proper place in my life. I no longer obsess, read everything I can, get worked up during the game, and nurse a grudge against the opposing team if they beat my team. Nowadays, I can get excited and worked up during a Cornhusker football game or Hawkeye wrestling match, but once the game or match is over, I can usually let things go and enjoy who I'm with and focus on the task at hand regardless of what happened in the game (the Nebraska loss to Virginia Tech put this to the test!).

Instead of sports, my weakness is movies. I find myself constantly thinking of excuses and ways to catch a film. Our budget doesn't allow for us to go to the theater, so it's usually a redbox movie or a library rental. But I've been realizing lately that my affections have been for movies more than for the Lord some days. I'm not cutting movies out of my life, just praying and disciplining myself to put them in the proper context like I have with sports.

And you?
So what about you? If you are a follower of Jesus, what are you doing to cultivate your relationship with Him? Just like a dating, marital, or parental relationship takes time and work to be healthy and strong, so does your relationship with your Creator. So what are you doing to grow in that relationship? Or what do you need to start doing to grow in a relationship with your Heavenly Father?

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Getting ready for our first small group night

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Playing with Fire (staff fire training)

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Family Night at the Playstation

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Raking the slow path of leadership development

My five-and-a-half-year-old son, S, and I were raking some leaves in our back yard this afternoon. (My ash tree freaks out whenever the temps drop below 60 and starts dumping it's leaves far before any other tree in the neighborhood.  It's usually naked by October, but I digress...).  Because the rake is slightly large for S, I thought he'd enjoy dumping the leaves into the organic waste container (nicknamed a "Yardy") with a plastic kids shovel.

As S slowly and poorly shoveled leaves into the container, I found myself internally wanting to just do it myself.  I could do it better.  I could do it faster.  And I could do it without daydreaming and singing songs that would distract me from my job. (Well, ok, maybe not that third one...)

Then it hit me - if I want to truly be an "equipper" (we call our pastors at New Covenant "Equipping Staff") and equip others to do the ministry, I have to coach and model, but I also have to have patience and actually allow others to minister.

This path is slower.  This path is bumpier.  But this path will yield far better returns in the long run.

Which hopefully means my son will be able to rake the yard by himself before he's 8.

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BE[cause] Bunco

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Ramadan Fasting

I have done a few short-term fasts over the years as part of my walk with Christ, the longest being 8 days leading up to the Starving Jesus tour stop here in Cedar Rapids.  I have done several 24 hours fasts since then, but nothing of substantial length.  I have considered doing some longer fasts - and there are two particular times during the year I have thought most about doing one.

The first is Lent - I've considered doing a 40-day fast, or some sort of fast, during the season leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. (Well, one year LeAnn and I gave up ice cream - THAT was hard :o).  But the other time I've thought about doing an extended fast is during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.

Each year, our church prays for the Muslim world during Ramadan.  As Muslims are fasting from EVERYTHING during the day, including water, (they break their fast each evening at sunset), we are praying that God would reveal himself to them through the person of Jesus Christ.  Many Muslims are much like me - passionate seekers of God.  And God has been revealing himself to thousands upon thousands of them through dreams and the witness of Jesus-followers, some of whom at one-time considered themselves good Muslims.  In fact, this Ramadan, my wife and I watched a DVD with five personal stories of Muslims in different nations around the globe who had dreams of Jesus and began to follow him (you can download and watch the personal stories at this website).

As part of our prayers for adherents of Islam, I have considered fasting during the day just as they are abstaining from anything touching their lips.  And when they are praying, I would be praying for God's work in their lives drawing them to the way, the truth, and the life.

This week, I learned I'm not the only follower of Jesus to consider this idea.  But these Christ-followers have gone a bit farther than I was thinking - which has caused a bit of controversy.  Here's the USA Today article.

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New Blog

A short post for anyone following the feed of this blog I infrequently keep up...

I am "moving" my blog to Posterous. Because Posterous is so web-connected, whatever I post there will automatically load here. However, I will be making my posts for Posterous, not for Blogger, so I can foresee some occasional issues arising. If you want to ensure you are seeing and reading what I have posted, then head over to http://erinbird.posterous.com. If you don't want to bother with resetting up a new RSS feed or changing your bookmarks, you can continue to visit this site - I'm 95% sure you'll get 95% of the content I post. :o)

Bobcat Blast

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Leading Teams

I'm growing as a leader (and always will be!), but I've been especially growing since coming to New Covenant. While I have a LONG way to go to being a Level 5 leader, I think back to my leadership capacity when I started this pastoring gig almost 7 1/2 years ago, and I am thankful to the grace God has shown me in growing me.

In my desire to lead, equip, and serve others, I read various things on leadership - books, blogs, articles, magazines, notes from leadership conferences, and now tweets. I just read a great, yet short, article by Perry Noble on 8 Principles for Leading Teams (and read the first comment left by Rick Roman - adds even more great thoughts to the article).

Whether you lead a team at work, in a ministry, or even just your family, many of these 8 ideas will be helpful. At least I hope you find them helpful - otherwise I haven't lead you well!

Two NCBC Young Adult Publications

Last week the Post Office received the latest installment of The Connection (see link below), the quarterly young adult newsletter here at New Covenant. Issue 7's topic is the final purpose from New Covenant's mission statement - equipped servants. I hope you enjoy reading through it. Thanks to Billy for being interviewed, and Kim for writing a short article.

As New Covenant gets ready to release their annual report, I thought I'd publicly release my Young Adult Annual Report (see link below) as well. I chose to do mine completely differently this year and focus solely on the stories of some young adults I know God has been working in. I'd like to thank Travis, Jenelle, and Shane for sharing their stories with me (and you). I'd also like to thank Apple's Pages program for making the report look good (I didn't have time to truly design it myself this year).

Without further ado, here are the publications:

• The Connection - Issue Fall 2009
• Young Adult Annual Report (2008-2009)

Catching Up to the 21st Century

Another Catch-Up post:

• I'm catching up to the 21st century. On Sunday, I had my first Skype video chat ever. I'm doing premarital counseling for some friends who are currently in California, but coming back to Iowa for their wedding. Our first couple of "sessions" were over the phone. I must say it was much nicer having our conversation via Skype. Other than the occasional visual freeze, audio worked consistently, and we could hear each other just fine.
• Last week on 9/9/09, I watched The Nines for most of the day. The premise? What one thing would various church leaders/pastors say to other church leaders/pastors in nine minutes or less? I really enjoyed the format (and I'm not even ADD!) and some of the 9-minute speeches really challenged me, some encouraged me, and I found my faith inspired and my prayers going to another level. I missed the last couple of hours, so I hope to go back and catch some that I missed and rewatch some with my wife.
• During The Nines, they were giving away some books, curriculum, and other items during their short breaks. But the only way to have a chance at winning a giveaway was to Twitter. However, I didn't have a Twitter account. I complained via their feedback system, but heard nothing back. :o) And this isn't the only time this has happened - I've seen other giveaways that are only for people who tweet with a specific hashtag. So I've been left out of the party. Therefore, I've decided to join what I thought would be a passing fad (it may still, but it's lasted longer than I expected). I have no illusion that the masses are just waiting to know what I'm eating for snack with my boys and other such drivel, but I hope to be challenged and learn from some others in ministry as they tweet various thoughts about faith, life, and ministry. If you have any suggestions of who I should follow on Twitter, leave me a comment.
• I upgraded to Snow Leopard on both my laptop and iMac at home. Two years ago when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I had very few "hiccups", which exceeded my expectations. With this upgrade, I had very high expectations, and unfortunately the upgrade hasn't been as smooth. Things don't feel that much faster, and while I save a ton of gigabytes on the iMac, I didn't see the same savings on my laptop. My printer at home no longer works. I had a half-day trying to figure out how to get email working again on my laptop (which was confusing since Apple was touting the improved Exchange support). I'm running smoothly again most places (except the printer still isn't working at home), and Snow Leopard seems like a great OS, but I was surprised at the bumps I encountered. I should have known better than to place my expectations so high, but hey - I've drunk the Kool-Aid.
• My daughter is truly in the right family. She came home and complained today about the fact that her school switched to all PCs.
• My wife is also entering the 21st century with me. She now has an iPhone 3G. And she is thinking about signing up for Facebook (but for her to find more than 5 minutes to spend at the computer might be hard to do).
• I've not read any blogs in a LONG time. But my input strength has been satisfied by the books I've been reading lately. Right now the book in my bag is Made to Stick. I've also read Love is an Orientation, Case for the Real Jesus, Living the Cross-Centered Life, and When God Writes Your Love Story in the past 2 months.
• I'm preaching October 18th. I have a VERY creative idea, but if I'm going to pull it off, I have to work on it now. I sure hope it works out! (If you want to know what the idea is, you'll just have to come to New Covenant that Sunday, or listen to it on the web the week after.)

Well, that should do it for now. Guess I should go Twitter that I posted a blog which will import into Facebook. I feel so "hip" and important all of a sudden. Or maybe that feeling is just being out of breath trying to catch up to the current century.