Recently, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma. I have a friend who is making bad decisions. They are the kind of decisions he will regret one day if the fog clears. They are the kind of decisions that are painful to watch. They are the kind of decisions that I myself made and suffered for.

And so, being the friend I am, I have been praying for him. Most of my prayers look roughly like this:

“Dear God, please surround my friend with positive influences. Cover him in love. Comfort him in this difficult time and remind Him how much you love and care for him.”

Now clearly I left out some key phrases in that prayer. There are a few things missing …

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God is weird.

Prayer is weird.

Faith is weird.

When you stop to think about it, being a born again Christian is a weird thing.

I believe that I have the power of the God who created the solar system inside me. I believe that the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead flows in me and lives in me. I believe that at any given point in any given day, I can reach out to a holy Lord who set the entire universe in motion and have a conversation.

That is weird, but it’s also surprisingly easy to forget …

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I have a box full of Stuff Christians Like buttons.

They come in three flavors:

1. Booty, God, Booty

2. I heart side hugs

3. SCL

You can see what they look like right here. (Something is not working with my wordpress photo upload)

If you’re at Catalyst or going to the National Youth Worker’s Conference in Ohio or Atlanta or coming anywhere I am going to be in the next few months, follow me on Twitter or Facebook and we’ll figure out a way to meet up and get you the buttons. I’ll tweet or facebook status, “Hey, I’m by such and such booth” during a break and then hook you up.

We’ll figure out how to get them to folks that are international or not attending any conferences. (Maybe via mail like the stickers?)

See you today at Catalyst! The Off the Blogs lab is at 1:00.

Jon

It’s only a matter of time until I get caught and the other night, I almost blew it.

You see, right now my wife and I are “stealing Awanas,” the Bible club class that is kind of like VBS our kids attend once a week. Our church doesn’t offer it. It’s not their thing and I’m cool with that. But in order to have our kids involved in it we had to scout out other churches in the area and then quietly embed ourselves as if we were members. Like some sort of spiritual SWAT team we swing through the windows, grab all the ministries we need and then high tail it out of there.

And we found the perfect church down the street from us. So every Wednesday night we drop our kids off and then buy dinner in the dining hall with all the unsuspecting members of this church, but I almost messed up the whole operation.

The problem was that my wife wasn’t with me. She was at a consignment sale at another church we don’t attend. (We’re a couple of pew pillagers aren’t we?) So after Awanas was over, my daughters and I walked over to the dining hall. Everything was cool until a man walked up to our table and said, “Mind if we join you?”

“Oh snap, ” I thought to myself. “Be cool, Jon, be cool.”

“Sure, go ahead.” What do I say, what do I say to this guy? Make conversation, talk about the traffic, this is Atlanta, that is a fall back, go to topic. Instead I heard my mouth utter the worst possible phrase, “Do you attend here?”

He immediately looked at me with a quizzical expression and said, “Of course.”

Worst is over right, we’ll move on and talk about something else? Wrong. He continued.

“My daughter is in the choir.”

Uh oh.

“My mom is the one serving food right over there.”

Oh no.

“I actually work at this church and have for years.”

Yowza!

“I’m also on the security detail that tasers people who use our facility without attending this church.”

OK, he didn’t say that last one, but I was sitting with the ”President of this Church.” This guy was going to figure out we didn’t belong here. It was only a matter of time, so I did what any mature Christian parent would have done in that situation, I told my daughters to hurry up and finish their chocolate pudding and hustled us out of there like we were the Usain Bolt family. (Topical!)

What mistakes did I make? What things do you need to be aware of if your church is focused on certain things and therefore doesn’t offer some services/ministries you’d like to be part of? How do you pew pillage without blowing it like me?

Here are a few pointers …

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A few weeks ago someone asked me, “Is there anyone you won’t take a shot at?” The truth is that although I fail at this sometimes, I don’t like to take a shot at anyone not named Jon Acuff. Mockery gives you a shortcut to an easy laugh right now but it takes away your ability to speak love later. But the more I thought about the question, the more I realized I did have a specific answer to who I won’t take a shot at:

“The Power Team. One of the rules I live by is never make fun of a ministry that is based on feats of strength.”

I don’t care who you are or what your blog is, that’s just smart living right there. But maybe you’ve never heard of the Power Team. They were/are a group of weightlifters who travel the country doing strong man acts like blowing up water bottles with their lungs, ripping telephone booths in half with their bare hands and breaking baseball bats over their knees. Or as we call it at the Acuff house, “Saturday afternoon.” What can I say, that’s just what we like to do.

Today, instead of making fun of the Power Team, I decided to give them a few free ideas. Ways to become more relevant and dare I say, awesomer? And if the Power Team doesn’t like these, well, I once heard Carlos Whitaker say that he didn’t like your tank tops so you should probably arm wrestle him first instead of tuning me up.

Without further ado, I give you:

Stuff Christians Like Suggestions for the Power Team

(Click “continue reading” below for the rest of the post)

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Thanks for the great feedback yesterday on the new Stuff Christians Like site. It’s a big change all at once and I really appreciate folks being willing to dig in and reflect back what they like and don’t like. Fresh Stuff Christians Like will return tomorrow and hopefully I’ll have the chance to bump into a lot of you this week at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta.

Here’s where I’ll be at Catalyst:

• Wednesday at 1:00 speaking at a lab with Carlos Whitaker and Anne Jackson.
• Wednesday night, bloggers meetup. (You should go.)
• Thursday and Friday, walking around in a Booty, God, Booty t-shirt handing out free buttons and stickers to anyone who says hi.

Last year we did a side hug photo on Friday. Do you think we should do that again? I’m up for it, if you are.

Above all, I’m really excited about Catalyst. Every year, I am completely caught off guard by how much of a worship experience it really is. My prayer this year is that I will suspend my desire to be cool and just worship.

See you there.

Jon

If you’re reading this, you’re one of 7 people who still found Stuff Christians Like. Not really, but that was my fear leading up to the launch of this site. I figured that everyone would hate the new site, not be able to find it or just all collectively and simultaneously decide they were finished with Christian satire and I would be forced to get a job working on the docks and would need to start calling my wife, “Gina.”

That is dumb. I digress.

So what’s new?

Well along the top you’ll see a set of pages designed to answer the most common questions I get. “Do you speak?” “When is the book coming out?” “Do you ever feel like Scott Baio and Scott Bakula are really similar but also really different at the same time?” Etc.

And those colorful little chewing gum little icons along the left side make it easy to subscribe to Stuff Christians Like via email or RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook that way as well.

The search bar is a work in progress. As we continue to tinker with the site, that will only get better. I just searched the word “God” and it came up with no results so there’s some button I need to click or uncheck in the settings somewhere to get that thing humming.

Upper right corner? That’s the nano note, a shorter than twitter space to talk about/link to/celebrate random awesomeness.

We decided to go with Intense Debate since it was really difficult for people to respond to specific comments. Hopefully this will help increase the interaction between folks and eliminate the sense of having one way conversations.

There’s a spot for some select “non teeth whitening” sponsors. Testamints this is your chance to make things right between us, come on you know I was kidding about the “send bad breath to hell” campaign.

There’s also a subtle, whisper quiet promotion for the Stuff Christians Like book hidden on the page. You probably didn’t even notice that one.

I’m really excited about the work John Saddington did on the site and hope that as I learn wordpress and get less internet dumb, the site will continue to get even better.

What do you think? Do you like the new site?

If you find something broken or weird, please let me know. With over 50,000 comments and 350,000 words to bring over, I am bound to have missed some things.

Did you dig the new Stuff Christians Like?

(Ben Meredith writes really funny comments on Stuff Christians Like. His is funny. And it turns out he’s pretty generous too because he was willing to share a great guest post with us today about the weird things that happen when you’re a campus minister. And I was the student he describes in this post so hopefully this will serve as a bit of a tribute to the campus ministers that put up with me in college. I really dug this post and I think you will too. Enjoy.)

“Hello, my name is Sue Ellen McDenomination, and my eldest grandson is a sophomore at State University. I’ve encouraged him to get involved in the Campus Crusade group on campus, but I wanted to see if you’d go by and invite him. He loves the Lord and is looking to get plugged in to a Christian community on campus. I’ve included his contact information below. Thank you and may God bless your ministry.”

Due to the nature of my job with Campus Crusade, and the fact that my name is on our ministry’s website, I get emails like this about once per week right at the beginning of school each semester. Here’s what she meant to type. Must be some sort of weird spell-check error.

“Hello, my name is Sue Ellen McDenomination. I have this grandson who may or may not be the antichrist. He lights things on fire, got the youth group banned from McAllisters for the rest of this decade, and once received the atheist club’s “most outspoken” award at his high school. How he even got into the college where you minister I am not sure. If I’m being honest, the last place he’d ever willingly go would be to a campus ministry. He’d be a lot more likely to be perfecting his keg-stand form, if his facebook pictures are any indication. He currently holds the fraternity record for most consecutive mornings waking up in someone else’s underwear, at 5.

Once at a youth retreat he stood up to place his faith in Christ, but mainly because Kaylee, his girlfriend, said she’d break up with him if he didn’t.

I’d love for you to stop by and convince him that, even though your group’s name is “Campus Crusade for Christ” and he’ll immediately associate you with the horrors of 15th century Europe (if you’re lucky) or our youth pastor (if you’re not), you’re a great group to get involved with. On second thought, could you hold back any information regarding your name or affiliation until he’s been coming for a few weeks? And I’d avoid giving him the website name for your group. Our church’s website has been redirecting to one of three Russian mail-order bride websites for over four years after he hacked it.

Can you actually forget the whole campus ministry thing for about six hours per week, (what do you people do for 40 hours a week anyways?) and just go and make sure my grandson doesn’t hurt himself or anyone else? I have a spare key to his car that I’ll be sending you via FedEx, and would love for you to hide the vehicle from him. That’s where he keeps most of his illicit drugs, though, so I’d obey all traffic laws. I’d hate for you to get pulled over “ridin dirty” as Chamillionaire so aptly put it.

Thanks so much for your time reading this. God bless your ministry. (but, again, I’d avoid calling it a “ministry” for at least a year after you invite Jimmy.)

PS. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him how you got his information, or his car keys. Thanks!”

(For more great stuff from Ben, check out his blog.)

A few weeks ago, Anne Jackson offered up a signed copy of her book, “Mad Church Disease” to readers of Stuff Christians Like. The question of the day was, “What is something you can’t confess in church?” There were some tremendous comments. To see them all, click here.

The winning comment was submitted by Tanya. Please email me at theacuffs@yahoo.com with “Jackson winner” in the subject line Tanya.

Thanks for the great comments everyone.

Tanya said
I posted earlier as one of the numerous anonymous’.I woke up this morning and prayed for the people who have posted their confessions and for the people reading them.We are broken and tired. Our masks that serve us so well in church are cracking and falling away. Some of us do not even remember who we are because of the masks. Thank God this is happening.Depressed, lonely, angry, confused. The voices in our head shrieking. Sounds like the valley to me. Valleys tend to be dark, lonely and fertile places. I have to remind myself that mountain tops are nice, but you cannot live there and real growth is not sustained there.I heard someone say once that you are vindicated in the valley.Knowing this does not make things easier. Reading what is going on here reminds me how not alone I am. God Bless all of you

A few weeks ago I spoke at a conference that required me to fly. Months before the conference, I asked the organizers if I could have a guy drive me to the airport. Not that a girl driving me was a big deal, but my wife and I had discussed it and we both felt better about me avoiding awkward situations like that. Three of my favorite pastors, Andy Stanley, Craig Groeschel and Billy Graham, live by that policy and I felt fine with putting it in my life too.

I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, you’ve got a book coming out, don’t you have an entourage with one really big guy who everyone calls ‘Tiny’ and another guy who can always talk his way out of a jam and possibly a really tall guy who can reach things on shelves that you can’t? Aren’t you rich?” Yes, I mean globally speaking I am rich in that when I went to pick out shoes to wear today it was a multiple choice test. But I don’t have an entourage, which is a request that Zondervan continues to ignore. When I travel it’s just me and my backpack. No luggage, no baggage, just a seemingly bottomless LL Bean backpack which makes me feel a bit like Dora the Explorer.

So without an entourage, I decided to request that a guy drive me to the airport. I just wasn’t comfortable with the idea of spending an hour in LA traffic alone with a girl. That just didn’t seem smart to me and the conference was completely cool with that request. They found a guy, everything was good.

That felt like a no brainer to me. I had a chance to honor a commitment I made to my wife, so I did. And at the conference, one of the female staff made a point of thanking me for making that request, so I felt good that I had not disrespected anyone by asking for a male driver. But what about other less obvious situations? When you get married, you’re suddenly thrown into all these awkward opposite sex friendship moments.

What about having a one on one meeting with a woman? Is it enough to just leave the door open? Or do you have to have three people present at all times? I know churches who use both approaches.

What about a lunch meeting? A married friend recently told me that if he couldn’t go out to lunch with females he couldn’t do his job. Is lunch with a lady a date? What if it’s a business lunch? The CEO of Zondervan is a lady, what if she calls me and says, “Jon, we’d like to give you a 37 book deal and your own Honda Ruckus Scooter for a cross country tour called ‘Ruckus by Ruckus,’ can we go out to lunch to discuss the details?” Do I have to invite someone along with me? What if my wife is not available that day?

And when you get married, at what point do you have to officially retire the silly sentence, “I’ve just always gotten along better with the opposite sex, that’s how I’m wired?”

I don’t know. I don’t have the answer on this one. Just the idea that things get a little awkward when you get married and have to figure out friendships with the opposite sex. But of the two camps, “Jeez you’re such a Puritan, loosen up” and “Better safe than sorry, can a dude drive me to the airport,” I know which one I want to fall into. Because no one ever wakes up and says, “Today I’m having an affair.” Affairs are slow burn decisions, with a wick a mile long made of little steps and little compromises.

Are you single?

Did your married friends of the opposite sex dump you the second they got hitched?

Are you married? What’s your approach? What are your boundaries?