Countdown to Tübingen

This could be yours for the low, low price of $1, $5, $15, $30, or $100. Your choice.

Remember when I talked about Kickstarter being a possible avenue for raising support? Well, I’m proud to announce our very first Kickstarter project: a sequel to the “hit” game Hast Du Eier? Please check out the Kickstarter project and donate to make this “dream” a “reality”.

Of course this whole project comes as a part of a support raising push for Unterwegs. Our ministry works as a group, but all staff are individually financed. Shalynn and I have just dipped into the red in our funds, and we’re looking to get back into a good place financially, along with some other staff. Apparently, being in the red happens time to time for every ministry, but that doesn’t make it any less comfortable a squeeze to be in.

We’re looking for some other creative ways to get back on top as the summer semester starts here in Tübingen. Let’s see what doors open for us.

It's so lovely out. Why not go for a walk on the river?

Snow, ice, frozen winds… Even the Neckar is suitable for walking upon. This is the bleak mid-winter that was made so famous by the beloved carol of old. Garrison Keillor always made the frozen tundra landscape of rural Minnesota sound so charming and even humorous – but the thermometer in Tübingen, which has been hovering at -15 degrees Celsius for the better part of three weeks, tells a story distinctly lacking in those same appeals.

It’s semester break, and I’m spending the better part of it cuddling up to the heating elements in the Unterwegs house while I take on some technical projects, venturing away from the heat sources occasionally to meet with students that have not yet gone home. It’s a necessary break – the run from January to the end of semester has always required lots of energy for little payoff. Smaller numbers and seasonal depression are the signs of the season.

But wouldn’t it be nice to get away? This weekend I will be going to sunny, sunny England. It is my honor to have been invited, along with team leader Beth, to be the retreat speakers at a Canvas “Weekend Away”. It will be my first talk in English in quite some time.

We’ll have three talks total, each no more than 15 minutes, so we’ve broken it down to covering faith, hope, and love – in that classical, time-tested order.

The trick, really, is to convey something significant in less than 15 minutes. A typical sermon in church in Germany goes 40 minutes, even amongst the quickest, most concise speakers. An audience with that kind of patience is an incredible luxury. 40 minutes is an absolute eternity when compared with the 10-12 minutes we allocate for the talk at Donnerstagabend.

Incredible 15-minute talks are not unheard of. That is what makes TED so unique: Experts, normally afforded an hour – or perhaps a semester – or more to impart wisdom, are challenged, for once in the career, to compress their wisdom into a quarter hour. At Unterwegs, we do it every week. This weekend we’ll do it three times in two days.

The heat is on. Which is good, since it’s so freaking cold here.

One of these Christmas mascots speaks German as a first language. Can you tell which?

Support raising is a lot like going to a job interview that never ends – and in which the employer lives on a different continent and, for the most part, doesn’t ask questions. In order to gain the confidence of possible supporters – and to keep the confidence of current supporters – we constantly present our strong points and our successes.

Having success stories is incredibly legitimizing. Raising support before we left for the field – when our ministry in Tübingen was a goal, not a reality – was incredibly difficult. Ministry supporters are not like Venture Capitalists – their financial investment is one-way, and it often comes at a greater personal cost than it might to most wealthy investors. Naturally, they would want to support something that’s guaranteed to work – and the best guarantee that something works is if that something is already working.

David Damberger, a former member of Engineers Without Borders, gave some food for thought on the subject of sharing weaknesses and failures with supporters at a TED Talk last year. Robert Braden, the former team leader of England, once said in a supporter newsletter: “We share our hard times as well as our successes, so that people don’t get the impression that what we do is easy.” And to top if off, the Evangelical Church in Germany has chosen a verse from 2 Corinthians 12 as the Biblical focus for the year: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Every ministry, like any organization, has weaknesses. Globalscope Germany is no exception. Language is definitely one of them. German is an old, inflexible language that doesn’t extend much grace to the learner. Even after 17+ years of practice, I’m still being schooled every day.

And yet we are called to work within exactly that weakness. It is our job to communicate incredibly deep thoughts and feelings in the one language (out of our possible two, or in Pam’s case, three) in which our communication is the weakest. It is an unusual irony – after repeated offers to our student leaders to speak to the group, almost all of them have refused. They would rather listen to us speak as we stumble over conjugation mistakes and repeatedly confuse dative and accusative. It’s the whale that swallows our Jonah, God’s reminder that it’s our work to do, at least as of now.

Still, the fact that Globalscope Germany has produced as many success stories as it has is proof of the sufficiency of the grace given us. The power present in our ministry cannot be accredited to our team of capable individuals and our mastery of the language – because we haven’t mastered the language. It is a testament to a strength that we rely on that comes from outside of us. I think that’s what Paul was getting at :)

Not only did we break our previous attendance record at Thanksgiving - we doubled it.

On November 17th, Unterwegs hosted 140 at the annual Thanksgivingsfest Celebration. It’s a purely American tradition (the pilgrims, after all, celebrated leaving Europe), but there’s something about it that draws an international crowd.

The notion that we should be thankful for what we have is broadly shared. Even those on the edge of belief in God can agree that thankfulness – to someone – is a virtue. Several of our students stood up in front of the group to share what it was they were thankful for. They expressed thankfulness for a community like Unterwegs where you are taken in immediately, as if people had already known you forever. Some expressed thankfulness for their faith, and that being in a community like Unterwegs had confirmed their decision to become – or stay – a Christian.

As team leader Beth says, Thanksgivingsfest has always been the ultimate expression of the Unterwegs community. People who cannot normally come to a Thursday event will set aside time for this once-a-year event. Core students were moved by the mass of people that came to be a part of their community, and people on the fringe of the community who don’t come to Unterwegs events got to see (finally) what Unterwegs is really about.

The day after Thanksgiving, our exchange students overheard conversations in the bus from students who experienced Unterwegs for the first time the night before. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one to the other. We find Unterwegs name tags from Thanksgivingsfest all over the city – plastered to signs and bus stops, free advertising, and confirmation that Unterwegs, three years in, is indeed growing and infecting the city of Tübingen.

The very first Unterwegs game - with built-in advertising.

Who says a degree in Computer Science isn’t directly applicable in campus ministry?

As we went out onto campus and advertised for Cafe English, I went out into the electronic frontier of the internet to do the same. I wrote this little game, based on Shalynn’s true-story experience of running across the street to the Jet gas station to buy last-minute eggs for Cafe English cookies.

It has worked to build interest among students – people have been posting their high scores to Facebook for some time now. Still others have walked in to an Unterwegs event with their latest score in hand, ready to compare.

That’s Unterwegs, building better Christian community through better programming and better online content! And that’s something worth supporting.

Click here to play.

Young Lincoln and the Americans: band name or advertising hook?

There is an ease and a grace at Unterwegs that wasn’t always there.

Things seem to be growing, happening on their own, more freely and organically. Our confusion and frustration now comes less from questions like “what do we have to do to be able to advertise in the cafeteria?” to “which students do we want to use to help us do outreach, and in which buildings of our choice?” It’s as if the seed that we had planted three years ago and have been constantly tending day and night ever since has finally taken root and sprouted.

It’s something we didn’t accept at first. Pam and Nathan Heald came in the middle of last semester, and it was otherworldly to watch them not go through the same awkwardness we did of starting conversations with complete strangers and struggling to come up with something enticing to invite them to be a part of. Now we have Unterwegs events, now we have homes and personal lives to invite them to.

Today a new student walked in to Unterwegs for the first time because we put a sign out on the street for Just Lunch in front of the house. He stayed for two hours and talked to what must have been a dozen solid Unterwegs students. In three years, we have never started a relationship that easily.

I’m still kind of incredulous. Not skeptical, per se – just surprised at how well Unterwegs is doing compared to how much superhuman effort has been required in the past to budge that boulder up the hill.

Next week we’re kicking off a semester of talking about the Kingdom of Heaven at Donnerstagabend. I’m using the Parable of the Hidden Treasure to launch the discussion for the rest of my teammates to carry through the semester. I believe it will come down to this…

At Unterwegs, we have seen the Kingdom of Heaven. We see it in small ways. Our students dress up like historical American figures to invite people to come be a part of their community. Students volunteer to clean up after events. We see it in larger ways. Students grow, and the way they see the world changes. There is an electricity in the air at the End of the Year Awards Show. 60 students crowd together to get a photo together so they can remember the moment.

Unterwegs has many parts to it: sports, food, music, free wireless internet – but the one thing that sets it apart from everything else in Tübingen, any team or apartment or major or business or whatever group students may be involved in, is that at the heart of Unterwegs is the human relationship. When the Kingdom of Heaven comes to Earth, it’s through the people around us that we experience it.

And what does it cost us to get the Kingdom to come to Earth? According to Jesus’ parable: everything. What bitter pills do we swallow, what indignities do we forgive, what sacrifices do we make for another person’s sake? Well, that’s worth coming back to hear more about.

At Taize, every meal is al fresco.

Our team spent the last week in southern France with several Unterwegs students at the Taize monastery – a monastery that holds a special place in the hearts of Christian college students throughout Europe. Young people come for a week, Sunday night through the following Sunday morning, to live a more monastic life and get closer to God. Simple living conditions (no electricity), simple food (small portions), worship three times a day (as tolled by the bell), and Bible study in between (with some of the brothers teaching, small groups meeting to discuss afterwards).

Taize is not the typical Unterwegs scene – along the continuum from non-Christian to Christian, Taize is closer to the latter, a place for people who are either Christian or interested in the Christian faith. Unterwegs is closer to the former, a place designed for people who are not Christian and are generally not interested in faith.

But there is a minority of Church-engaged Christian students that do participate in Unterwegs. A few others, as team leader Beth framed it, have grown up Christian but are “ready to walk out the doors of the Church“. These are the Unterwegs students that came with us to Taize.

And for these students, Taize was a wonderful experience. When we went around the circle to share what we had learned during the week, one Unterwegs student said “I’ve been struggling the past two years about if I wanted to stay a Christian and this week was really important for me because I felt like I needed to make some big decisions. This week has helped me decide to stay a Christian. And I want to share this with more people and make this a part of my daily life.”

What a wonderful invitation for Unterwegs – to help this student grow closer to Christ and to help him share that with others.

Funding for specific projects: support raising of the very near future.

It’s been a good month Stateside, considering. Currently, Shalynn and I calculate ourselves to be at 75% of our monthly support needs. That’s a good step from the 60% support we were at when we came back a month ago, and a far cry from the 40% support we were at when we left for Germany in January.

So how do we make the other 25% happen from the field?

We may be considering funding for specific projects, via Kickstarter. Say, for instance, we need to replace/improve some sound equipment at Unterwegs (two out of our three microphones are Radio Shack brand, after all). Instead of going directly into our slightly limited funds, we might create a Kickstarter project to buy the equipment through a sound project… Kickstarter helps us raise the money through patrons of the creative arts; we get our band to record some music on the new equipment; and our Kickstarter supporters at different levels get rewards, ranging from a hand-written “thank you” to an MP3 recording of us performing a song of their choosing.

If we’re clever about it, we can do these projects in such a way that our students get more involved and receive more ownership of Unterwegs. If we’re professional about it, we can get financial support from outside our network of current supporters – possibly even from people more interested in creative endeavors than in Christian ones. Kickstarter has an unusually good record of getting people to support weird projects – if we’re regular about it, we can offset part of that 25%.

Us.

So, there’s this notion going around that Facebook is killing the church… Or, at least, that the church today is suffering because youth have found other ways to connect socially with each other outside of attending a worship service. While previous generations have suffered the church it’s problems for the sake of meeting and coordinating with other people, mobile/social networking has lifted the children of Generation Y of that burden, and they have moved on.

Where to start?

I think it poor form on the part of church leaders to misuse the church in such a way that the main draw is the talking to people before and after a worship service – that the hour and change of singing and sermon that falls in the middle is the price to be paid for the chance to connect. That’s a bait-and-switch, not all that different from requiring hungry clients who come through the doors of a soup kitchen to listen to a sermon before they get something to eat.

To temporarily withhold from people the something they need, be it soup or social interaction, in order to promote your own agenda – that’s rooted in selfishness, something incongruous with Jesus’ style. Instead of asking people to bear a few hymns and a message from the pulpit as entry fee for a social connection, why not offer the social connection free of charge, and let your ministry and worship be done through the meeting, interacting, and affiliating?

Jesus was a masterful socialite. His did his greatest ministry when he was talking to strangers at wells, inviting people in trees to lunch, and walking around town without much of an agenda, freely and willingly being interrupted by anyone who came to him with a request. I would say with some level of confidence that Jesus gave personal relationships a higher priority than worship services.

That is the story of Unterwegs, and every other Globalscope for that matter. People come to connect with other people – and not only do we encourage it and give it first priority, we offer them a level and quality of relationship they can’t find anywhere else – and that’s what keeps them coming back. Students pull out cell phones to call their friends and get them friends to come. They post on Facebook that they’re coming to Unterwegs events. They invite their Facebook friends to come with them. Afterwards, they post on Facebook how much their time at Unterwegs means to them, and they look at the Facebook pictures of themselves taken at Unterwegs and click “like”.

Perhaps Facebook is not the problem.

The curse of building a ministry where none exists is that, oftentimes, it requires money from a budget where none exists.

Coming back to the United States and sharing the stories of Unterwegs and all that has happened over the last semester, perhaps the most common reaction we have received from people is surprise. Those familiar with missions would say of Europe that it may be the most difficult scene for a ministry of any type, and the fact that we have gone and have found a level of success impresses.

After being back in the States for two weeks to raise support, I can say with conviction that, as difficult a work such as ours in Germany may be, it does not approach the difficulty for us in raising support in the United States.

The topic of raising support and the difficulties associated with it are something often discussed by us campus ministers. Some go so far as to call it a curse. While I agree that there is fear in support raising that comes from fear of men, for us, the bigger fear in support raising comes from the fear of finding ourselves falling short of our call to be campus ministers.

When young Globalscope hopefuls sign on to go plant a ministry or support an existing ministry, the most important thing in a candidate is their conviction of being called to the work – because as soon as the support raising process starts and the people you were sure would support you say “no”, doubt sets in. Appointments get stood up. Phone messages and emails don’t get returned. Hand-written letters never get opened.

We feel called. We have repeatedly been confirmed in our call and our conviction, and not simply by words of affirmation from Americans, but by the lives we have been a part of changing in Germany. Would God prepare us and call us to such a work and have us do the work – only for us to come up short of the financial means to do it? That is the fear in support raising.

Two years into ministry, and the three year-old blog remains dedicated to the support raising side. We still have 40% to go.