Our friend Eric Bryant, of Mosaic in LA, will be sharing his thoughts with us again soon. Eric is the author of Peppermint Pinatas: Breaking Through Tolerance and Embracing Love. Eric will be touching some two important themes that resonate with our mission to read culture for the purpose of reaching children. First, he’ll help us figure out how we should respond to CA’s overturning of the same sex marriage ban. Secondly, he’ll explore what the relationship between the economic recession and generosity.

The WordPress blog tools allow me to see how people find this website. Searches for “Craig Jutila” are among the most common searches. For those looking for all-things-Craig, he’s got a power article in K! Magazine about lessons he’s learned about balance, family, and personal health. It’s worth the read. For more information, visit www.liquidleadership.tv.  

I’m working on our next family ministry night and crack open one of Willowcreek’s FX DVD’s — Compassion. These are excellent resources. I love the brevity of these pieces, the production is excellent, and they set up conversations well.

At last week’s staff retreat I was reminded about the importance of both metaphors and measures.

At one part of the discussion I balked at the verbage in one of the goals– “Lifting Jesus Up.” Derek had to remind me that Jesus himself said these words. My beef wasn’t with Jesus, but the impreciseness of the word picture. “Lifting Jesus Up” in all our of educational settings could mean anything to a number of people– is it a red-face shouting of Jesus name? Are we only teaching the Gospels and select passages from Paul?

My hunch– and I admit that I haven’t looked through my tools– that “lifting Jesus up” is might be an allusion to Moses lifting bronze snake on the pole (the nehustan) as a means of salvation from the plaque of snakes. Another possibility is that it’s an allusion to the banners that Roman soldiers would raise to proclaim the rule of Caeser. Or both. Once you get the ideas behind the word picture, creative power is unleashed.

Metaphors are powerful because they are evocative and creative. “Lifting Jesus Up”– if explained– has more power than “present, through a variety of hands-on learning methods, the historical Jesus and provide a template that allows the learner to imitate him.”

The power of an objective is in it’s measurability.  If you write a good objective, anyone can read it and know whether or not you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do. A good objective measures one three things– speed (when will you accomplish this), quantity, and quality.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, a cool study finds that if a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she’d rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year.

That’s according to a pre-Mother’s Day study released Thursday by Salary.com, a Waltham, Mass.-based firm that studies workplace compensation.  See the complete story here http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080508-1424-momssalary.html

Just returned from an overnight staff retreat (Yes, just a few days after returning from the Children’s Retreat). Oh Lord, Kumbaya. (Emphasize any word you’d like in the sentence to the immediate left.) I work with an amazing team. Thirteen of us went to a Christian resort in NY and spent twenty four hours listening to God, goal setting, worshipping, and playing together. Some of my take aways:

1) We discussed the importance of inviting Millenials into key leadership (not just volunteer positions, but volunteer leadership positions). We need to stay young. (I feel like we had just gotten young 10+ years ago when they hired two punk twenty-something kids, Derek and I, to run the youth and children’s ministries, respectively. (I turn forty in July)). I looked around the room at the retreat and realised that we had late Xers and Millenials on the staff– lots of them. I spoke about the opportunity to recruit Millenials at Willowcreek and some of their characteristics. I had a first hand reminder at the retreat as to what that looks like.

2) We opened the retreat by being given three questions to ask God, a Bible, and 1.5 hours. During that time I was confronted by 2 Corinthians 6:11-13. Paul confronts the Corinthians that their lives feel constricted because of where they invest their affections. They felt like they had small lives because they had small love.

3) I blogged a while back about finding opportunities to embody Jesus while going to bars listening to my wife sing in her trio. I haven’t done that in a while do to this crazy month of speaking, retreats, and launching our family ministry. It’s time to get back to that.

4) Chris Yount Jones told us about an exercise her team to sharpen their vision. It was good, so we stole it. We had to write a six word memoir about where we came from and then where we are going.

Here’s my group’s results:

Our Past: External focus makes Grace vital again.

Our Future: Cross-shaped lives will transform Erie.

5) A prediction: The words “mentoring” and “missional” are going to transform our culture.  

Parents can play a key role in determining how their children react to trauma, U.S. researchers say.

The review, published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (http://www.jmft.net/), suggests the quality of parenting practices following trauma mediates the relationship between the traumatic event and the child’s subsequent adjustment.

Study leaded Abigail Gewirtz of the University of Minnesota reviewed the existing literature to inspect the ways in which parents can affect children’s recovery in the aftermath of trauma. Gewirtz says certain parenting behaviors have the potential to significantly improve children’s outcomes.

The review finds that parenting practices that provide structure, security, emotional warmth and an environment that addresses the traumatic event serve to surround children with a protective environment.

“By providing an overview of the evidence to-date, and a proposed prevention research framework, it is our hope that others will see and respond to the need to advance this field,” the study authors said in a statement.

In a very challenging case for school officials, a 9 year old child (and of course the very accomodating parents) is asking to start dressing like a girl. The school decided to let the other 100 Third Grade families know about the “transition” in a meeting.

About one in 5,000 people is transgender, said Walter O. Bockting, a psychologist and coordinator for transgender health services at the University of Minnesota. Bockting said he sees about 10 children a year who are 9 or younger.

“It’s a little early, but occasionally that happens,” he said.

Not all transgender people have sex-reassignment surgery in adulthood, and such surgeries are not typically performed on children, said Sharon Garcia, president of TransYouth Family Allies, a non-profit group that helped the Chatham Park student and school officials devise a way to explain the situation to parents.

So far, 49 families have contacted TransYouth Family Allies asking for help with a transgender child, Garcia said. Most of the children are between 6 and 10.

See the complete article at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/chester/20080503_School_challenge__Transgender_student_is_age_9.html where the writer seems to avoid the tabloid topics and has done some pretty thoughtful research. For Children’s Ministries there is an opportunity to share how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, Male nor Female, while at the same time demonstrating a love that transcends our gut response. We had the same polarizing discussions when AIDS/HIV was discovered among children (should we allow them to be in the same class, let’s have a well-child-policy) and now we are all pretty informed so we can be calm!

What do you think?

See Henry Zonio’s excellent blog post about criticisms about some questionable pictures of Miley Cyrus that will appear in a future Vanity Fair. The child singer is obviously positioning herself for a singing career as an adult. That strategy has included dropping the Hannah Montana character when not performing for pre-teens.

I was surprised, when at my church’s children’s retreat this weekend, that the fifth grade girls were aware of the upcoming photo shoot. I’m saddened that so many child singers feel the need to emphasize their sexuality to reach an adult audience.

Much is made about Millenials and Futuristics being natural multi-talksers. I walked into the front-room and witnessed my son playing the piano (well, I might add) while listening to podcast through his Ipod.

Call me old school, but I put my foot down.