Hey you!
Let’s stop eating and see which of us drops first.
I’m ready to be mad.
I’m ready to be mad with you, too.
Have you ever kept a soul in your pocket for warmth?
I have.
It’s the saddest thing ever.
When your pocket finally breaks, it gets cold.
And the pocket never fixes
The same as it was.
And the soul just thuds angrily
Into the dirt.
Like you made the pocket or something.
Hey you!
Let’s stop sleeping and see which of us dreams first.
You dream like you're mad.
Do you want to be mad with me, too?
One time
I sewed up a pocket with dreams…
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
My Elevation Church Experience, Part 1
I think it’s been a long enough time since my initial experience at Elevation Church to be able to separate the emotions from the experience and tell why I have decided to drop everything and move to Charlotte.
We stayed up all night on Saturday. Since Chris started working at Blockbuster, we had made it a habit to stay up pretty ridiculously late watching movies (needless to say, we’ve watched a LOT of movies). On this particular Saturday night, at around three or four in the morning, the suggestion was made (I forget by whom… most likely Chris) that we just stay up and go to the early service at Elevation Church. The suggestion was accepted instantly… I mean, why not, right? Seemed like a good random idea. We had been talking about Elevation Church over the past few months, anyway. We had watched the worship videos and read up on what they were doing there. And it was a road trip, which is always an awesome idea. So we did it.
{Now I’ll just take a little aside here and say that I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this trip. I fancied myself a “church expert,” since I had grown up my entire life in churches and had been on Act 2. [For those of you who don’t know, Act 2 was a traveling drama team at North Greenville University.] Over the course of the two and a half years that I was on the team, I had visited tons and tons of churches all over South Carolina, so I thought that I had a sort of inside look into the workings of the church at large… mistake number one. I was expecting to go into the church and analyze it for creative potential, since, in my mind, no one was sufficiently doing any sort of legitimate creative work in the church worthy of attention… mistake number two. Yes, I’m often a smug little expletive. Hubris is more readily seen in hindsight. Ok… back to the story.}
Chris and I were driving down I-85 in his car early Sunday morning at around six-thirty. We were discussing the plans for the day. For both of us, this would be the first time at Elevation. Chris especially wanted to see two of the four worship leaders, Chris Brown and Mack Brock, but since Elevation had three campuses over which they spread their worship leaders, we were going to find out where they were both leading and then drive to each campus to check them out. Chris was just mentioning how he couldn’t seem to maintain a constant speed on hills when we got pulled for speeding. Of course we were. Three miles from the North Carolina border. Bummer.
We finally made it to Matthews, North Carolina almost an hour too early for the service. This was the main campus, located in a strip mall about fifteen minutes outside of uptown Charlotte. Compared to architectural behemoths like Brookwood Church or Marathon Church, this location was so understated I had a little trouble mustering up all the enthusiasm I wanted to… I was honestly hoping for something a little less cave and a little more obelisk… mistake number three. They had large flags and bright tents that clearly showed it to be a church… which was cool… but still. A strip mall? Ok… I could go with it… We ended up going to Hardees while we waited. Did you know that they give free coffee on Sundays? Well… this Hardees did, anyway. It was a welcome surprise after the ticket incident.
-----
Upon arrival at Elevation Church, a first-timer is asked to turn on his blinkers so that he can get priority parking. Once parked, the visitor is, for lack of a better term, bum-rushed. A greeter meets the guest in the parking lot and asks if it’s their first time. If yes, the greeter introduces him/herself and escorts the visitor into the building. He/she then explains the mission of the church, shows where everything is located, and talks with the visitor about things until the visitor is settled into the whole church-thing. Then the greeter returns to the parking lot to start the process over again, leaving the visitor feeling warm and very greeted.
-----
Our greeter was Charles. We met him mere seconds after emerging from the car. We were given a little folder that explained that we were VIPs and contained a sample CD of some of their worship team’s original songs and a welcome message from Pastor Steve Furtick. It was well-designed (something I’ve been more prone to notice recently). Charles escorted Chris and me inside and showed us around the facilities.
{Aside number 2. Having established my initial distaste that Elevation met in a strip mall, I will say that their facilities were very well thought out. Their worship space had a large stage, but the seating layout was small enough to still have an intimate feel. Overall, the church felt very warehousey, but I kinda like that kind of thing. Sort of highlights the temporal aspect of the whole church thing, in that we’re only here temporarily. But I take this aside to mention something small: the bathrooms. It’s said that the devil is in the details… which I suppose makes it an apt allusion in this case. It kind of snuck up on me, the bathroom did. I wasn’t expecting the little table at the exit door. This little table was humble enough, but spoke volumes about the priorities of the church. On this table was a basket of mints, hand lotion, and Kleenex. And it was well stocked. Call me crazy, but the fact that someone, first, thought of this table and, second, made it important enough to keep full kind of cocked my head to the side in surprise. And it made me feel appreciated, which is something I did not expect from a bathroom.}
Chris and I were there early enough to be there for the opening of the doors post-sound check. We sat in the first row to be as close to the action as possible. The anticipation was pretty high. We had just finished speaking with John Bishop, the campus pastor. Cool guy. He actually stopped to have a conversation with us, and, believe me, we didn’t look like to the cool guys that stop traffic in the church foyer. Well, at least I didn’t. Chris might have, and probably did, the beautiful man that he is. (On yet another random note, I just now recalled my freshman year at Cedarville University where my roommate said, “You know those guys that you see, like across the room or something, and you just think, ‘I really want to be friends or hang out with that guy’? …You are not that guy.” Good times. Thanks, Dan Harder.)
I was busy filling out the first-time visitor questionnaire as the lights dimmed and the worship service started.
We stayed up all night on Saturday. Since Chris started working at Blockbuster, we had made it a habit to stay up pretty ridiculously late watching movies (needless to say, we’ve watched a LOT of movies). On this particular Saturday night, at around three or four in the morning, the suggestion was made (I forget by whom… most likely Chris) that we just stay up and go to the early service at Elevation Church. The suggestion was accepted instantly… I mean, why not, right? Seemed like a good random idea. We had been talking about Elevation Church over the past few months, anyway. We had watched the worship videos and read up on what they were doing there. And it was a road trip, which is always an awesome idea. So we did it.
{Now I’ll just take a little aside here and say that I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this trip. I fancied myself a “church expert,” since I had grown up my entire life in churches and had been on Act 2. [For those of you who don’t know, Act 2 was a traveling drama team at North Greenville University.] Over the course of the two and a half years that I was on the team, I had visited tons and tons of churches all over South Carolina, so I thought that I had a sort of inside look into the workings of the church at large… mistake number one. I was expecting to go into the church and analyze it for creative potential, since, in my mind, no one was sufficiently doing any sort of legitimate creative work in the church worthy of attention… mistake number two. Yes, I’m often a smug little expletive. Hubris is more readily seen in hindsight. Ok… back to the story.}
Chris and I were driving down I-85 in his car early Sunday morning at around six-thirty. We were discussing the plans for the day. For both of us, this would be the first time at Elevation. Chris especially wanted to see two of the four worship leaders, Chris Brown and Mack Brock, but since Elevation had three campuses over which they spread their worship leaders, we were going to find out where they were both leading and then drive to each campus to check them out. Chris was just mentioning how he couldn’t seem to maintain a constant speed on hills when we got pulled for speeding. Of course we were. Three miles from the North Carolina border. Bummer.
We finally made it to Matthews, North Carolina almost an hour too early for the service. This was the main campus, located in a strip mall about fifteen minutes outside of uptown Charlotte. Compared to architectural behemoths like Brookwood Church or Marathon Church, this location was so understated I had a little trouble mustering up all the enthusiasm I wanted to… I was honestly hoping for something a little less cave and a little more obelisk… mistake number three. They had large flags and bright tents that clearly showed it to be a church… which was cool… but still. A strip mall? Ok… I could go with it… We ended up going to Hardees while we waited. Did you know that they give free coffee on Sundays? Well… this Hardees did, anyway. It was a welcome surprise after the ticket incident.
-----
Upon arrival at Elevation Church, a first-timer is asked to turn on his blinkers so that he can get priority parking. Once parked, the visitor is, for lack of a better term, bum-rushed. A greeter meets the guest in the parking lot and asks if it’s their first time. If yes, the greeter introduces him/herself and escorts the visitor into the building. He/she then explains the mission of the church, shows where everything is located, and talks with the visitor about things until the visitor is settled into the whole church-thing. Then the greeter returns to the parking lot to start the process over again, leaving the visitor feeling warm and very greeted.
-----
Our greeter was Charles. We met him mere seconds after emerging from the car. We were given a little folder that explained that we were VIPs and contained a sample CD of some of their worship team’s original songs and a welcome message from Pastor Steve Furtick. It was well-designed (something I’ve been more prone to notice recently). Charles escorted Chris and me inside and showed us around the facilities.
{Aside number 2. Having established my initial distaste that Elevation met in a strip mall, I will say that their facilities were very well thought out. Their worship space had a large stage, but the seating layout was small enough to still have an intimate feel. Overall, the church felt very warehousey, but I kinda like that kind of thing. Sort of highlights the temporal aspect of the whole church thing, in that we’re only here temporarily. But I take this aside to mention something small: the bathrooms. It’s said that the devil is in the details… which I suppose makes it an apt allusion in this case. It kind of snuck up on me, the bathroom did. I wasn’t expecting the little table at the exit door. This little table was humble enough, but spoke volumes about the priorities of the church. On this table was a basket of mints, hand lotion, and Kleenex. And it was well stocked. Call me crazy, but the fact that someone, first, thought of this table and, second, made it important enough to keep full kind of cocked my head to the side in surprise. And it made me feel appreciated, which is something I did not expect from a bathroom.}
Chris and I were there early enough to be there for the opening of the doors post-sound check. We sat in the first row to be as close to the action as possible. The anticipation was pretty high. We had just finished speaking with John Bishop, the campus pastor. Cool guy. He actually stopped to have a conversation with us, and, believe me, we didn’t look like to the cool guys that stop traffic in the church foyer. Well, at least I didn’t. Chris might have, and probably did, the beautiful man that he is. (On yet another random note, I just now recalled my freshman year at Cedarville University where my roommate said, “You know those guys that you see, like across the room or something, and you just think, ‘I really want to be friends or hang out with that guy’? …You are not that guy.” Good times. Thanks, Dan Harder.)
I was busy filling out the first-time visitor questionnaire as the lights dimmed and the worship service started.
My Letterman Music Faves
So, in the youtube game, inevitably you will run across live performances of some of your favorite bands on Late Night Shows. Here are some of my live Letterman favorites.
Failure is not Defeat
**I wrote this article for a Magazine Article Writing class that I had with Pam Zollman at AnAuthor World. The basic premise of my proposed series of articles was the application of basic improv concepts to real-world leadership situations. This is the first of that series. Or possibly the only in that series.**
Failure is not Defeat: Manage Risk like an Improv Coach
Improvisation is inherently risky. To put oneself in front of his peers and pretend without knowing what may happen… well, that might seem to be the definition of insanity. However, a good improv coach knows that his number one job is to give his actors permission to fail. He creates a “safe zone” that encourages failure. By permitting and encouraging failure, he in fact creates a space for surprise successes. And that is what makes improvisational comedy so compelling. It’s like watching a kid run at full tilt. He may stumble and fall, even viciously, but when he gets back up and keeps going you cannot help but root for him, like Sean Astin in “Rudy”: even relatively small successes in the face of such overwhelming failure is more than just cause for raucous celebration.
But how do you create an expectation that truly accepts failure? First, as an improv coach, I have to have an attitude that accepts failure as success, which is a pretty difficult thing to do when you are directing a scene where one person has decided to play John Paul Jones and the other insists that they are both pickles in a garden. It can be almost impossible not to grimace and bail on the scene, but that would be the wrong reaction. Second, I have to make sure that all the players are risking at comparable levels. It is not a supportive atmosphere when one player is risking everything and no one else is willing to follow him there. It is the leader’s job to create the supportive space (a padded room, so to speak) that spurs his players on to make massive and embarrassing mistakes in a safe and supportive situation so that he can learn from them.
It seems logical to say that failure is a negative thing, but it isn’t. It may feel bad at first, certainly. If a great amount of effort is exerted to the completion of a task, or the starting of a business, or perhaps even in the pursuit of love, when the desired goal slips from between reaching fingers there is a great feeling of loss and impotency. Yet in every unsuccessful venture there is a wealth of knowledge. In the famous legend, when Thomas Edison was interviewed during his battle with Nicola Tesla to invent the first working light bulb, he was asked how he felt having failed 1000 times, to which he responded that he had not failed, but had successfully proven 1000 ways NOT to invent the light bulb. Your perspective of “failure” is what determines your defeat.
Every failure has a commonality: a risk has been taken. Every risk may end in failure; but even with failure comes the reward of having defeated stagnation and motionlessness. It is said that love and hate are not opposites, because at least an active stance has been taken towards the person. It is indifference that is the true measure of one’s distaste. In the same way, failure is not the true measure of one’s defeat. Defeat is when one does not risk. An improviser has a little bit different mindset than perhaps a typical person in a team. They have to support their teammates while keeping the interest of the audience. To do that, they have to make risky decisions that will, more than likely, make them look like fools. But there is a paradox here: the more risky the decision, the less likely they are going to fail.
There is nothing worse than watching improvisers make weak decisions. In many ways, it’s like looking over a chasm to a cliff on the other side that you must reach… you may be completely terrified to fling yourself into the void, but to do any less would be much more likely to end in a Wile E. Coyote wail, thud and accordion walk-off in humiliation. No guts, no glory, right? But the more times that the chasm is vaulted, the easier the risk becomes. It’s a psychological thing: when someone walks along a sidewalk only two feet wide, there is no problem. But if suddenly the same path is suspended two hundred feet in the air, there is a huge problem. The trick is putting the seemingly dangerous path on ground-level, mentally, by creating the space in which to work on high-risk content without fear. In this way, the player will be accustomed to the rush of huge risks and be able to maneuver into the greater reward that all the weaker ones wouldn’t try to reach in a million years.
Failure is always going to be a scary concept; no one enjoys failing. But failure does not have to be defeat. Giving permission to fail, minimizing the negative aspects of failure and encouraging greater risks to acquire greater rewards are three concepts used in an improvisational comedy atmosphere to elicit unusual results from otherwise law-abiding citizens… well, most of them abide the laws, anyway. These concepts were constructed to harmonize a group full of disparate personalities into a strong unit that not only gets along but delights those invited into their space as they watch the team function well. The main entertainment of improv comedy is not necessarily the content generated; to be honest, the content is usually something less than Tony-caliber, and that’s being generous. It’s the thrill that the audience gets from seeing a group of people work together intensely to accomplish a common goal, however nontraditional that goal might be. These concepts are easily applied to any leadership situation. Every leader seeks the best out of his team. Lead them into risky behavior by providing them with a way to process “failure” as a positive step towards a successful goal.
Failure is not Defeat: Manage Risk like an Improv Coach
Improvisation is inherently risky. To put oneself in front of his peers and pretend without knowing what may happen… well, that might seem to be the definition of insanity. However, a good improv coach knows that his number one job is to give his actors permission to fail. He creates a “safe zone” that encourages failure. By permitting and encouraging failure, he in fact creates a space for surprise successes. And that is what makes improvisational comedy so compelling. It’s like watching a kid run at full tilt. He may stumble and fall, even viciously, but when he gets back up and keeps going you cannot help but root for him, like Sean Astin in “Rudy”: even relatively small successes in the face of such overwhelming failure is more than just cause for raucous celebration.
But how do you create an expectation that truly accepts failure? First, as an improv coach, I have to have an attitude that accepts failure as success, which is a pretty difficult thing to do when you are directing a scene where one person has decided to play John Paul Jones and the other insists that they are both pickles in a garden. It can be almost impossible not to grimace and bail on the scene, but that would be the wrong reaction. Second, I have to make sure that all the players are risking at comparable levels. It is not a supportive atmosphere when one player is risking everything and no one else is willing to follow him there. It is the leader’s job to create the supportive space (a padded room, so to speak) that spurs his players on to make massive and embarrassing mistakes in a safe and supportive situation so that he can learn from them.
It seems logical to say that failure is a negative thing, but it isn’t. It may feel bad at first, certainly. If a great amount of effort is exerted to the completion of a task, or the starting of a business, or perhaps even in the pursuit of love, when the desired goal slips from between reaching fingers there is a great feeling of loss and impotency. Yet in every unsuccessful venture there is a wealth of knowledge. In the famous legend, when Thomas Edison was interviewed during his battle with Nicola Tesla to invent the first working light bulb, he was asked how he felt having failed 1000 times, to which he responded that he had not failed, but had successfully proven 1000 ways NOT to invent the light bulb. Your perspective of “failure” is what determines your defeat.
Every failure has a commonality: a risk has been taken. Every risk may end in failure; but even with failure comes the reward of having defeated stagnation and motionlessness. It is said that love and hate are not opposites, because at least an active stance has been taken towards the person. It is indifference that is the true measure of one’s distaste. In the same way, failure is not the true measure of one’s defeat. Defeat is when one does not risk. An improviser has a little bit different mindset than perhaps a typical person in a team. They have to support their teammates while keeping the interest of the audience. To do that, they have to make risky decisions that will, more than likely, make them look like fools. But there is a paradox here: the more risky the decision, the less likely they are going to fail.
There is nothing worse than watching improvisers make weak decisions. In many ways, it’s like looking over a chasm to a cliff on the other side that you must reach… you may be completely terrified to fling yourself into the void, but to do any less would be much more likely to end in a Wile E. Coyote wail, thud and accordion walk-off in humiliation. No guts, no glory, right? But the more times that the chasm is vaulted, the easier the risk becomes. It’s a psychological thing: when someone walks along a sidewalk only two feet wide, there is no problem. But if suddenly the same path is suspended two hundred feet in the air, there is a huge problem. The trick is putting the seemingly dangerous path on ground-level, mentally, by creating the space in which to work on high-risk content without fear. In this way, the player will be accustomed to the rush of huge risks and be able to maneuver into the greater reward that all the weaker ones wouldn’t try to reach in a million years.
Failure is always going to be a scary concept; no one enjoys failing. But failure does not have to be defeat. Giving permission to fail, minimizing the negative aspects of failure and encouraging greater risks to acquire greater rewards are three concepts used in an improvisational comedy atmosphere to elicit unusual results from otherwise law-abiding citizens… well, most of them abide the laws, anyway. These concepts were constructed to harmonize a group full of disparate personalities into a strong unit that not only gets along but delights those invited into their space as they watch the team function well. The main entertainment of improv comedy is not necessarily the content generated; to be honest, the content is usually something less than Tony-caliber, and that’s being generous. It’s the thrill that the audience gets from seeing a group of people work together intensely to accomplish a common goal, however nontraditional that goal might be. These concepts are easily applied to any leadership situation. Every leader seeks the best out of his team. Lead them into risky behavior by providing them with a way to process “failure” as a positive step towards a successful goal.
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