Mine or His?

Guest post from Tom King:

Henry David Thoreau said, "All men lead lives of quiet desperation".  A few men shared on Friday what keeps them up at night.  We all have concerns.  But, we try to take control of it all and do it all ourselves and we can't.  We often forget that when we asked Him to come into our life and take control, we gave it all and He is in control.  Many times we do not understand the situations... we only see the immediate and it's easy for us to put our priorities first and think that that's God's priorities.  But, have we really given it all to Him?  He can handle it.  He is the main actor now and we are the understudy, doing what we see Him doing.  Are we in prayer?  Have we given it all to Him?  Are we still trying to control everything ourselves?  We cannot do it on our own.  It is only in Him and in Him alone that we walk.  Walk with Christ today.  Ask him to show you the way and walk in it.  'cuz it's not about me, it's all about Him.  He will carry you when you can walk no more...

Taking a shot at vision

Guest post from James Tate:

I have been thinking about guys in community who are "unconnected", so I modified our vision statement to:

"A community of men who identify and activate their individual gifts, passion, and relationships in order to connect the men of MFUMC with one another as well as the communities they touch, and join them in the journey of growth in discipleship of Jesus Christ."

Take your shot!

Target Practice: A vision

What I see us doing as the Friday Morning Men's Group.

What I see happening as we continue to do and we are doing.

A community of men who identify and activate their individual gifts, passion, and relationships in order to connect the men of MFUMC with one another and join them in the journey of growth in discipleship of Jesus Christ.

It needs some wordsmithing.

Help.  Take a shot.

Lil Lambs and Discipleship?

Yes.  At the core of the reason of why we do Lil Lambs is Discipleship...right?

Check out the video at: movie link to find out how.

March Madness

This is a wide side community building event.

We could:

Bring in food.

Find some guys to prepare the food as part of the community building.

We could:

Identify some wide side guys we know and each personally invite them to come.

Identify newer members of guys we might not know and invite them.

Remember the genius of the "and" here and maybe look to do both.

We need to:

Identify a date and figure out how to tell our story about why someone would want to come.

Is there a logical next step from this event we would look to point someone to?

Habitat Leadership Team on the Continuum

Commitment Level- fairly high- probably involves total of three meetings.  Take on a crew leader role for a build day or half a build day.  The primary responsibility of crew leader is to make sure folks who come to help are engaged in a meaningful way with others at habitat that day and with you as the crew leader.

Where exactly on the continuum?  Somewhere closer to deeper than wide.  Who would be attracted to it.  Maybe somebody who is ready to "take the next step".

Is there someone in your community that you would like to see offered the opportunity to take a next step in the discipleship journey?

Shoot me an email and we will invite them to the March 24 Leadership Team Meeting.

forrestcate@mariettafumc.org

Find the purpose of the FMMG

See if you can find the purpose of the Friday Morning Men's group in this video.  Brian McNair and Lowry Curry are working on this ministry, but why?

The first three to post a comment with the correct answer will receive a prize this Friday.

Taking Off the Blinders

My-father-in-law tells the joke about the blind horse that the farmer was using to pull the city slicker's car out of the ditch.  The horses name was Buster.  So the farmer hooks Buster up to the car and yells: "Pull Smokey."  Of course nothing happens.  And then the farmer yells: "Pull Midnight".  Nothing.  Finally he yells: "Pull Buster." Buster pulls and the car is freed from the ditch.  "Why did you yell those other names first?" asks the city slicker.  "Well," says the farmer, "because Buster is blind and he doesn't pull as hard when he thinks he is pulling alone."

Andy made an interesting point this morning when he talked about our relationships sometimes being about pulling together like work horses.  Does it matter why we are pulling?  Does it matter what we are 'doing' by our effort?  Does it make a difference whether we are pulling alone or with others?  And of course who has the reins?  Where's the feed trough?

That is a pretty good insight into our Friday Morning Men's Group and a part of it that should and will continue hopefully for years to come.

Many thanks to all the authentic conversationers and to Allen for his careful hand on the tiller (or reins) of leading the group today.

Please "extend" Friday Morning Men's Group weekly meetings until Good Friday, 4/3/09.  6:00 a.m. in room 220.  I hope you will opt in for another module.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if an ongoing weekly or every other weekly small group springs out of the FMMG moving forward.  We'll talk over the details of how we spend our remaining FMMG weekly time together on Friday 3.13.09

Next Steps

As we have traversed and travailed along the journey of getting a group of potential leaders for a men's ministry a funny thing happened: we became a community kind of.  A group of guys with diverse ideas about life and the spiritual life and spiritual leaders and men's ministry and ministry to men and how we fulfill the great commission and the great commandment and what the life of the church means and whether or not the factory is working and what the problem with men is and what the church is going to do about it.  We've had great discussions and we had an overnight.  We've studied books and we have seen things happened that otherwise would not have.  We have seen things come and probably already seen some of them go already.  (Prayer dots, maybe?).

So where are we now?  What do we know?

We've seen a couple of action verbs surface:

Equip-

A group of guys who are leading groups or who are interested in leading groups found some tools and learned about them with a collective consciousness so now we can move forward withe shared language and methods.

Fellowship-

We like getting together with a group of guys we would not have chosen for ourselves to learn more about each other and the way of Christ.  We share scriptural understanding, our experiences, our understanding of our tradition, and we reason things through.

We have had a core value that we want to honor:

We will have an end date.  We will be open to what happens after that as a good outcome, but the weekly meetings need to come to an end so that new things can begin.

So we will determine when the end date is and plan ways that we can continue to work and live together around our objectives of connecting men to each other and to us and to the cause of Christ.

We'll talk a little bit about these ideas on 3.6.09 and then more extensively on 3.13.09 and decide what to do then.

What other action verbs have you seen emerge from our group?

What other core values do we need to honor as this process of growing in community develops?