free conference with top leaders
It’s been a long time coming, and it’s now around the corner. A $0 conference for Christian leaders to gather! For years the rest of the world has had unconferences that have shared valuable content and facilitated engaging conversations for $0 registration, but it was very hard to find a free Christian conference for church leaders. (Granted there’s a certain value to the traditional conference format with productions on the main stage and breakouts / seminars / workshops, and some even are profitable ventures, there are also other innovative ways in the Web 2.0 world.)
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m so grateful that Charles Lee is coordinating an unconference called The Idea Camp on February 27-28, 2009 in Irvine, California. SAVE THE DATES! Here’s what The Idea Camp is about:
The Idea Camp is a free hybrid conference for idea-makers to share, network, and implement ideas. We are gathering some of the most innovative and creative leaders from around the country (this means YOU!) to share ideas, intentionally network, and move collaboratively into idea-making. Whether your passion is church leadership, non-profit work, social entrepreneurialism, technology, media, creativity, culture making, church planting, spiritual formation, compassionate justice, etc., this is the conference for YOU!
The Facebook Group for Idea Camp is facebook.com/group.php?gid=41051955597 and using a Ning.com powered social networking engine, conference information is dynamically and collaboratively updated. See the list of people who will be presenting and/or facilitating conversations at The Idea Camp; it already includes: Brad Abare, Greg Atkinson, Eric Bryant, Mike Foster, Dave Gibbons, Jeff Shinabarger, Cynthia Ware, Robert Yang of Kindlejoy.com, me, and more! More will be added between now and then, and you could be part of it too!
New to the idea of unconferences? It’s where no one pays to get in, no one gets paid, the playing field is level, and everyone has skin in the game. Read more about it cf. what is an unconference, understanding the unconference.
Call out others you’d love to see there. I’m calling out Dan Kimball, Erwin McManus, James Choung, Ed Stetzer, Dallas Willard, John Bishop, Donald Miller. Come on down!
who do you think is older?
Talked with Dave Ingland yesterday (for the first time) as I was driving to DFW airport in stop-and-go rush-hour traffic. The phone call made for a good companion all the way to the rental car center, and we did some shop talk about church life, decision making, and dreaming of possibilities for our generation. I was resistant to giving advice for his adventuring into church planting in Sacramento, since I’m so uncomfortable with making decisions in my own life. I did share some of the things I knew. I hope I wasn’t too confusing, because the possibilities are endless and sky’s the limit.
I couldn’t tell how old Dave was, and wondering if you could. So, here’s our pictures. Who do you think is older?
Now, this is not a competition, it is only an exhibition — please, no wagering.
emotional intelligence and emotional maturity
Continuing the series on “Developing emotional maturity - part 4 of many”. [cf. part 1: what is emotional maturity? part 2: how to develop emotional maturity; part 3: how emotionally maturity is connected to spiritual maturity]
When I searched amazon.com, I found 199 titles with the phrase, “emotional intelligence” in it. That’s a lot of books on one topic! There’s even a Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.
Emotional intelligence is not identical to emotional maturity. It seems to me that “emotional maturity” is a broader general category for someone’s emotional life. Whereas “emotional intelligence” is the whole science of quantifyingly studying and understanding human emotions, both individually and relationally.[*] It’s probably right to say that if one’s EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) is high, that person is more emotionally mature.
Let’s use this working definition: “Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand and manage emotions.”
What does that look like? Daniel Goldman describes Five Components of Emotional Intelligence, according to [ht: Sandeep Gautam] :: Read more
blog book tour for Coffeehouse Theology
So many books, so little time. This one got my attention — COFFEEHOUSE THEOLOGY: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life by Ed Cyzewski. The title is inviting to the masses, but the part that is crucial is how it surfaces the issue of how culture shapes theology!
The blog book tour starts today, runs through most of October and spills over to November! Ed will stop by here at djchuang.com on October 13th. 1st stop at kingdom grace. I’ll dig into the book more by then, and raise more of the unexplored culture aspects of theology, particularly about the mostly missing multicultural perspectives and explore a bit on the bi-cultural perspectives of Asian Americans. (cf. complete list of bloggers where the tour will visit)
The introduction to Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life is online courtesy of Theooze:
CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY: UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES, UNDERSTANDING GOD
… Rather our culture—who we are and our values—becomes both our greatest strength and largest obstacle in theology. Culture can be a strength because it serves as a tool when we use our understanding of culture to study God. Think back to the Beatitude’s example: Christians in the U.S. tend to spiritualize the message of Jesus because we understand the pride so prevalent in today’s culture. Yet, every culture has weaknesses, too. God is so much more than what we can see by ourselves. So while addressing the pride of our culture in the Beatitudes, we can easily miss out on God’s concern for the poor and the blessings he sets aside for them.
finding better words that connect
Words mean things; they have a lexical definition. But that’s not all. There’s more! Words carry emotions based on one’s experience and context, both nature and nurture (personality bent and family upbringing, respectively.) And effective communication is all about finding the words that transmit the sender’s (speaker or author) ideas to the receiver (audience or reader).
Here’s a list of words that don’t connect with me. These trigger words are burdening, off-putting, unappealing, turn me off. I translate these trigger words into better words that better connect and/or motivate me, so I don’t feel weighed down or repelled. Don’t want to be wordy or verbose, so I’ll just list them [format= trigger word vs. better word]:
- discipline vs. habits
- obey/ obedience vs. do the right thing
- routine vs. rhythm
- challenge vs. adventure or rally
- decision vs. choice
- plan vs. choosing the future
- goals vs. milestones
- accountability vs. support or reinforcement
- performance - haven’t found a better word for this yet; I do work in a high quality kind of way, but the performance evaluation part gives me the willies
I could write paragraphs ad nauseum on why those trigger words don’t work for me. But, happy to entertain them in the comment thread (so I don’t clutter my blog post with extraneous tirades and rabbit trails.) And, this list is probably great fodder for a psychiatrist to analyze my psyche with.
These are kind of the word-choice equivalent of pet peeves. I’m sure you have some words that set you off too.
