my only question is why bother with the structured part

First of all, productivity is overrated, I’m just sayin’. Discover this truth and your life will become much richer.

Once you are enlightened, go ahead and read Marc Andreesen‘s take on productivity. I love his essay, even though I’m no longer in one those privileged positions of corporate cog-itude. I might make minor amendments to his “keep no schedule” directive (if you work with any other human being who is not inferior to you on the vocational food chain, at least a skeletal schedule is a must), but I have not owned even the simplest of planners since 1993, and the ones I owned I never used. That’s why I stopped buying the stupid things. Today the only things on my google calendar are my route assignments (and that’s only so I can check my pay stub for accuracy), and the occasional freelance appointment. My own rule for over approximately twenty years of graduate school and three disparate careers has been to never put more onto my schedule than I can remember without having to write it down. I’ve never missed an appointment, and my short term memory sucks. I think Andreesen is on to something.

He also makes mention of structured procrastination, of which I am an expert practitioner. I didn’t know what I’d been doing had a name, I simply called it procrastination and thought it a misunderstood virtue. Andreesen points to this essay by John Perry. It made me laugh out loud, so I’m linking to it.

Another beautiful item in the list is strategic incompetence. I’ve always enjoyed thinking that my incompetence was somehow strategic.

Perhaps Andreesen was simply trying to be iconoclastic with his recommendations, but I think he was quite serious and you might give his list a shot. I dare you.

 

I found Andreesen’s essay via Web Worker Daily, through which I also discovered a piece about web friendly franchises. I almost blogged about that yesterday, but everyone who reads this blog already knows about Panera which is the only chain in their list worth mentioning.

the sad facts

Randy posted some sad statistics he got from Jared’s post at The Thinklings this morning. Though Jared rightly calls for more encouragement for our ministry leaders, I think Randy’s title, “Death By Ministry,” makes a much more salient point. Ministry kills, and it must be stopped.

I’m half joking when I say that, but only half. One of the best decisions I ever made was getting into ministry because I found out what God made me to do. One of the best decisions I ever made was getting out of ministry; I left because God made me to do ministry and that wasn’t what I was doing when I was in ministry.

Doesn’t make sense? Welcome to the world of fifty to eighty five percent of full time ministry professionals; good people, faithful people, disciples who have chosen a vocation that slowly eats them alive. True, there are many pastors who just kind of take up space in their churches. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about people who want (or did want at one time) to make disciples and help them live into God’s call for their lives. In my own limited experience, those are the ones who are most likely to get frustrated and leave. Because they were never qualified in the first place? I don’t buy that. It’s because the church we have isn’t qualified as a place of discipleship. Whether or not it ever was is a fair question but one I’m not much interested in anymore.

Randy’s right about the church needing a biblical model of ministry. In fact she needs a biblical idea of church, the one she has (yes, generalizing, live with it) is not. If your church is one of those where the pastor is happy and encouraged and leading a congregation that is a community of disciple makers, by all means stay there. If not, well at least you’re not alone. You probably feel like you’re alone a lot, especially if you’re on the staff of that church, but you’re not.

We don’t train people effectively for ministry (which is admittedly hard to do since you only learn by doing it) and then when we stick them in churches they’re confronted with a situation they weren’t trained for and which also is not ministry. And we wonder why they get frustrated and leave? I don’t. Not anymore. I left.

And I may go back, who knows. But I’ll be older and wiser and unwilling to put up with anything less than a community that loves one another other in the name of Jesus.

Or else, if I may borrow from Tony Campolo, “I’ll preach that church down to four!”

How ’bout it… I mean, amen.