Integrating Missionally

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Find your Passion

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, U.S.S.R. (today Belarus) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. He graduated from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA. After taking over his father’s local liquor store, Shopper’s Discount Liquors, and building it from a $4 million business to a $50 million one, he created the wine-tasting blog Wine Library TV and discovered the power of the Internet for driving sales. This book shares his experience and step-by-step advice for using Twitter, Facebook, etc., and suggestions for monetizing an online persona, reiterating that the Internet makes it possible for anyone to make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand.

Crush It! encourages people to determine what truly makes them happy and pursue monetizing around it on the internet. It argues that because of recent social and technological trends the cost of producing content has been driven low enough that passion, knowledge, and effort, which the book calls “sweat equity”, are now all one needs to build a brand and business.

Content
As I began to read the book I thought it was going to be another one of the “You Can Do It!” (a la Tony Little) motivational books. It does that in the beginning, inspiring you to move past the passionless work we often engage in to discover what you truly love to do. However, it goes past this to provide you the internet tools to help you develop your own personal brand and begin to monetize it.

In it, the author seeks to help you learn:

1. Why social media has evened the playing field, destroying the “gate-keepers” who had previously dictated the distribution of content.
2. How to beat unemployment and create wealth-building opportunities by building and maintaining a personal brand.
3. Why storytelling is the most important business concept in the current marketplace.
4. How you can build an online business around your passion without quitting your day job.
5. Why Twitter and Facebook are just tools and not a social media strategy.
6. How to take advantage of the half-billion dollars in advertising that are moving to the internet.
7. Why transparency and being true to yourself are now winning marketing formulas.
8. How to build and maintain an online community around your passion and brand.
9. Strategies for turning attention into money.
10. Why the legacy element of the internet era is so underrated.

Thoughts
First, let me speak to the readability of the book. It was very easy to read. I read 140 pages in the course of 2-3 hours. Part of that short read time was my familiarity with the internet and with social media. Yet, in general, it was a very easy read.

Next, let me speak to the content. The author speaks to three areas that I think are crucial if a person is going to be able to Crush It! First, he talks about self-awareness. Most of us do not really know who we are. We are who we have been socialized to be, but most of us (I believe) don’t really who we are and where our passion lies. We have to uncover those to be crushers. The next thing he notes is the necessity of great content. People will flock to those with great content. This doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of the content, but content that people are interested in and talking about. That is not to say that your content doesn’t need to be good. It means that the quality of your content is secondary to your passion about the content and your ability to convey it as well as it being content that people are interested in. Finally, he speaks to the necessity of hard work. He says over and over that this will be hard work and take time. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This process requires patience, persistence, and hard work.

The author also provides good information on many of the social media tools available. He talks about Twitter, Facebook, and blogging tools. He shows how to use them to build a brand, develop content, and build a community.

This is not so much a “how to” book as it is an idea generation book. Everything is a reflection of his journey toward brand development. But it does not provide a step by step methodology. It really is the story of the American Dream, of someone who worked hard, took advantage of the tools available to us all, and built a brand. The author says anyone can do it, and I believe they can if they want to.

However, I also believe that while anyone can do it, most people won’t. They will not because of two reasons: they don’t want to work hard enough, or they don’t want to take the entrepreneurial risks. I believe God created us all with a creativity and entrepreneurial mindset just like His. However, I don’t think people really want to put in the work to uncover it in their own lives, they don’t want to work to become self-aware and whole, and as a result, they don’t want to take the risks or make the investments to see their dream and passion lived out.

To Crush It! you have to Change It! If you are willing to Change It!, you can Crush It!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Primal

Mark Batterson serves as lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C. NCC was recognized as one of the Most Innovative and Most Influential Churches in America by Outreach Magazine in 2008. Batterson is also the author of the books In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars and Wild Goose Chase: Reclaim the Adventure of Pursuing God and blogs daily at www.evotional.com.

My wife read In a Pit when it came out and enjoyed it. I read Wild Goose Chase and thought it to be simplistic and uninteresting. However, Primal: A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity has a quality to it that shows Mark’s progression in his depth as a writer as well as a providing us a significant challenge for all of Christianity to consider.

The premise of the book is that Western Christianity needs a reformation. That reformation will come, not with the discovery of something new, but in the rediscovery of something ancient and primal: the Great Commandment: And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. (Mark 12:30, NLT). The heart of Christianity is this challenge. It is the foundation of our lives as Christians and it should be the focal point of communities of faith as they gather. In Primal, Batterson explores each of these elements, challenging us to be part of the new reformation that expresses itself through action towards others. Uncovering the lost soul of Christianity begins with rediscovering what it means to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.

Batterson says that the heart of Christianity is primal compassion. Christians are often viewed as heartless, and Mark believes that is because we have chosen to engage the culture mind-first instead of heart-first. Minds often remain closed to the truth until hearts have been opened by compassion. “There is certainly a place for logical, left-brained explanations of faith. But compassion is the ultimate apologetic.”

To love God with all our hearts means our hearts break for the things that break the heart of God. It means that we have identified the God-ordained passion that makes us glad, sad or mad. It means inaction is not an option, because the compassion of Christ is the driving motivation of our lives.

The result of this God placed passion is that we find ourselves adopting children, feeding the homeless, building wells for clean water and helping others eat and gain access to good education and medical attention among other things.

Mark then says that the soul of Christianity is primal wonder. The creator’s own reaction to his creation was wonder. It could be that is why we feel so spiritual when we watch an ocean sunrise or summit a mountain. Our reaction is a godly reaction. In that, we are really loving God with all our soul. When we lose our sense of wonder, what we really lose is our soul. Our lack of wonder is really a lack of love.

Descending into the soul of Christianity, we discover primal wonder. “When you get past all the traditions and institutions, all the liturgies and methodologies, all the creeds and canons, what you’re left with is raw wonder that is beyond logic and beyond words.” Loving God with all your soul means a soul full of wonder, a soul flooded with the glory of God, a soul awed by beauty and mystery, a soul that hallows God above all else.

The mind of Christianity is primal curiosity. “Loving God with all your mind means making the most of your mind by learning as much as you can about as much as you can. But the true litmus test of spiritual maturity isn’t how much you know. It’s knowing how much you don’t know. It’s coming to terms with the fact that God is not an object of knowledge as much as He is a cause of wonder. And that sanctified sense of wonder fuels a holy curiosity to keep learning more about the Creator and His creation.”

The strength of Christianity is primal power. Compassion, wonder and curiosity aren’t enough. Strength is the final frontier. A heart that breaks for the things that break the heart of God is where love begins; burning calories for a kingdom cause is how that love expresses itself to others. “It means expending a tremendous amount of energy for kingdom causes. It means blood, sweat, and tears. It means servanthood and sacrifice. It means good old-fashioned hard work.”

What I really appreciate about Primal is the combination of right and left brain writing. He makes great use of multiple metaphors for each of the qualities of loving God, showing the depth of those qualities in a way I have not read or heard of before. I am a big science guy, which is one of the reasons I’ve been drawn to Mark’s writing. He allows science, as well as other disciplines to provide unique insights into each of the aspects of loving God. This provides a depth of understanding and meaning that many miss in these elements; in fact, I dare say most Christians have no real idea what these elements mean because we read right through them, applying our own understanding to them.

In addition, by calling us back to this primal mentality, Batterson is calling us back to a relationship with Jesus and God, instead of merely a relationship with the Bible that so many have traded a relationship with Jesus with. He reminds us that life lived with God is much more empowering, freeing, and biblical than a life knowing about God. To know and be known, rather than to know of, should be our heart cry.

This is some of Mark’s best writing, and I appreciate the opportunity to truly recommend it to you. Read it and provide those in your network a copy as well.

For the sake of the US Government: This was book was provided for review by WaterBrook Multnomah.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Lectionary Resources

Recently, I decided to begin using the lectionary texts as my primary plan. I decided to use it for a few reasons. First, it means I don’t have to constantly try to develop series. Some say that is a lazy way to preach, but it really isn’t. In fact, it actually allows me to fulfill the second reason for going to the lectionary: it allows us to follow the Christian calendar centered around the birth, life, death, resurrection and second coming of Jesus. In this, we don’t follow the civil religion of America, but a calendar ordered around the one who paves the way for an eternity with God. Third, it takes a church into passages it would not consider otherwise. When was the last time you read from Zephaniah, much less preached it? Finally, it puts us in the company of those who have gone before us for centuries, even millennia.

When I decided to make this change, I began to look for resources to help in the preparation of sermons. I quickly realized that four or five commentaries for each of the four passages would mean a lot of trips up and down the stairs to my library, and a lot of books in my study. For a guy with bad knees, that was a daunting thought.

While doing some searching, I discovered this series of books being published by Westminister John Knox Press called Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Common Lectionary. They are putting out several volumes for each of the three years of the lectionary cycle. For instance, now we are in Year C – it just started last week. I currently am using Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 1.

Each week in the lectionary has four texts. For each of the four texts, there are thoughts from four different pastors or theologians looking at the text from a different perspective. There is a theological, a pastoral, an exegetical, and a homiletical perspective for each of the texts. Each perspective would be around 1-1.5 pages each, so their thoughts are not exhaustive. However, it provides a great starting point to understanding the text and allows you to begin to see how the four texts are related. If you need more exhaustive resources, then you could pull a commentary if necessary.

This is a tremendous resource for those who are using the lectionary as a preaching plan.

I have a question for you regarding the lectionary:

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Popularity: 5% [?]

I love simple ideas and concepts. They work for my AD(H)D. The book, Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life, was great for that reason. Now, I want to introduce you to the power of 10-10-10.

Suzy Welch is the wife of uber-exec Jack Welch. She has written a great book about how to look at life and decisions called 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea. 10-10-10 is not just a tool for decision-making. It is a tool for reclaiming your life at home, in love, and at work. The process is clear, straightforward, and transparent. All it takes to begin are three questions: What are the consequences of my decision in 10 minutes? In 10 months? And in 10 years?

This concept allows us to look at the long-term impact of our decision-making, not just the short-term. It also allows us to examine our priorities, values, and points of fear and pain that live within us all.

In the book Suzy demonstrates how the process can have an impact in a persons marriage, parenting, career, and relationships. She even notes how the process has worked in her Christian faith.

The book reveals how Suzy developed the idea and refined it over a period of years. It also reveals the impact it can have in all of life as Suzy shares with the readers real-life stories from people she has helped using the principle as well as others who have heard about the principle and applied it to their own life.

In a world where we too often overlook the impact of our decisions after several years, this book, and principle, is a blessing. I will integrate this idea in with my coaching and teaching ministry. I recommend you do as well.

Get 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea at amazon.com

Popularity: 2% [?]

In this MORPHE podcast, David interviews author Steve Addison about his new book, Movements That Change the World.

 

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Popularity: 2% [?]