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I am Depending on You!

Monday, January 28, 2008
I spent this past weekend with my Kansas State Let's Start Talking mission team back in the glory land of Norman, Oklahoma. It was the always-grand experience of Intensive Training weekend, which is about 38 hours of non-stop team building, mission learning, role-playing, and other wonderful training exercises for six weeks worth of surviving in another culture across the world, sharing Jesus and sharing ourselves.

Which brings me to something I must ask of you. As part of my commitment to Let's Start Talking and my team of students, I must have half of my total $3,500 fundraising commitment fulfilled in less than one week from today. As of tonight, some of you plus other incredibly generous people in my life have given exactly $1,170, leaving less than a week to see another $580. This, of course, still means another $1,750 by the end of May.

Will you help me? The fastest and easiest way to contribute is to go to www.supportcary.com and enter your contribution directly online. If you prefer to send a check, email me and I will give you all of the information on what to do.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Let's Start Talking, it is a 28 year-old missions movement within Churches of Christ that sends hundreds of teams around the world at the invitation of local missionaries to help people improve their conversational English ability. This is done by using the Bible as a text for reading and conversation. It is relationally-based, non-confrontational, and does not seek artificial conversions. It believes in the power of the Spirit, the Word, and Godly relationships to plant seeds of faith in the hearts of people. Every year it reaches thousands of people who have never touched a Bible in their lives or known a Christian. It is wholly dependent on the work of God among his people and has no expectation that LST workers will be the ones producing conversion. I believe it is one of the most Godly ways of carrying the message of Christ around the globe that we have. It gives college students a chance to see how the message of Christ transcends culture, time, and custom, and understand the diversity of the world.

One pressing question is "Where are you going?" This will be decided by the LST ministry in February, but as of right now Japan may be the most likely for us. This could change, though, so don't count on it yet.

Many many thanks to all of you who have helped make this mission possible so far. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

www.supportcary.com

Thanks a lot, Mom!

Thursday, January 17, 2008
In thinking about how digital media influences lives and ultimately culture, I think there is an interesting new phenomenon that is going to be something that a lot of future adolescents and adults are going to have to deal with in some way or another: the renlentless blogging that their parents did about them as babies and children.

I keep up with about 90 blogs daily, a good handful of them being young parents of babies through pre-teens. One thing is abundantly clear - these parents love to blog about everything that happens with their children, plus post loads of pictures. These children's lives are being put on worldwide broadcast. This makes me wonder what the lifespan of many of these blogs will be and how much of this information will still be available as these children move into the teen, college, and adult years. How will they perceive all this? How will their peers handle it? In what ways will it be prized or hidden? Will these children appreciate the detailed accounts of their parents' trials, joys, and anecdotes regarding them as children? Will it even be an issue at all?

Guess I'll have to have some patience on this one.

Globalization in the Classroom

Today I embarked on something I've thought for a long time that campus ministers should do – take classes at their university. Michael Wesch is an anthropology professor here who has started to gain significant recognition for his work and teaching methods – even a feature in Wired magazine. Dr. Wesch is actually only five years older than me so he has a strong pulse on Generation Y culture. He does a lot of work in digital ethnography, a field he is a pioneer in. (Digital ethnography is the study of digital media on culture – social networking, internet, connectivity technologies, media sharing, etc.)

So, in our class of 200 in the lecture hall today, Dr. Wesch (or Mike, as he prefers), did a survey of backgrounds and global experience among the students. As is usual, about half the students are from urban or suburban backgrounds and the other half are rural. A massive portion of the class, which consists of a broad range of undergraduates, have traveled internationally. This was more than he had ever seen before, and I was definitely surprised. Even as recently as my undergraduate days there would not been nearly this amount of experience – and this is K-State, an Ag college! And these students have been everywhere: Africa, China, Indonesia, Eastern Europe, you name it. Global culture is not happening just because the world's information is coming to us – we are apparently going to it en force.

Wesch is also a proponent of the need for entirely new approaches to learning. His body of work and the way he approaches his career make it very obvious that he is not a fan of the long-standing educational system. One of his questions to the students is "How many of you do not like school?" At this the expected number of hands go up all around the classroom. He then asks "How many of you do not like learning?" No one. "But school is supposedly all about learning. Something is wrong here." Some articles of his that I have read recently have put forth the concept of "anti-teaching," which I fully expect to play out in this class and I'm sure I'll talk more about it as we go along. One thing I'm really looking forward to is the massive "Global Simulation Project" which will be the climax of the class and will have all 200 students acting as an entire world's worth of nations and cultures interacting with each other over a period of several thousand years. It's big and takes up the whole Ballroom in the Union.

But, alas, it is not just about the class. I often hear the question put forth by other campus ministers: "How do you meet students outside of your ministry?" I think this is one of the best and most apparent ways to do so. So, to all campus ministers, look up your university's audit policies, then pull up the course schedule and get to it!

Dark realities

Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Today I was looking at websites for various community service agencies, one being an organization that helps victims of domestic and sexual violence. What was sad was a warning on the front page of their site that alerted visitors to the fact that website usage is stored on many computers, and if need be, please call their hotline. This is an organization that knows that for the people they seek to help, it is often dangerous for them to even access their site.

There are some very evil people in the world.