Saturate Austin

Lie to Me: Leadership, Self-Deception and Self Awareness

There is a smart new TV series that reflects the emerging genre of detectives with a quirk – forensic scientists from Vegas to Miami to New York, The Mentalist, Psyche, obsessive compulsive detectives, detectives with facial tics, detectives with a southern accent whose guilty pleasure is a bon-bon, mediums who can see dead people …all geniuses at getting to the truth.  Set in Washington D.C. in what has become known as the city of lies, LIE TO ME stars Tim Roth, a human lie detector who reads the face and the hands, the eyes, the nose, the slightest microexpression of murderers, cheating husbands and runaway kids. 

It is a provocative idea that seems to resonate with the culture -- that we have to resort to either science or the supernatural to discover the truth because there is just so much lying going on today.

Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and A-Rod are all on the hot seat and the baseball steroid perpetrator’s list goes on and on.  U.S. track and field is perhaps the biggest doping cover-up in all of sports.   Dr. Wade Exum's report that 19 American medalists were allowed to compete at various Olympic Games from 1988 to 2000 despite having earlier failed drug tests shocked some people in the sporting community but was no surprise to others.

For years, insiders had speculated that U.S. athletes were not immune to delving into doping to get ahead of the competition.  But how could this be? American athletes often spoke publicly against illegal drug use in sport, cursing the sports regimes of East Germany and China for systemic doping practices.

"There is no commitment to stopping the drug problem," said track and field star Carl Lewis in 2000. "People know the sport is dirty, the sport is so driven by records."   Little did Lewis know he would be named in Exum's report.

The Chiefs of Enron deserve a category for themselves as the case is made by the Washington Post: “There are two types of liars…: the kind who back into a lie and find themselves lying to keep their heads above water, and the liars who act deliberately and without moral qualms.”

More recently, Bernard Madoff engineered the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. He lied to friends, investors, finance professionals, the SEC, and family for twenty years.

In Acts 5:1-10 there is a story of the most famous liars (beyond the Father of Lies) in scripture:  Annanias and Sapphira drop dead for “swindling God on a real estate deal”.  This is one of those texts that leaves me a little dazed and confused, a little shaken, a little nervous…because I am so disturbed by the severity of the consequence of this deception.   I wonder why I have not dropped dead because I have certainly told bigger whoppers, worked harder at making myself look good, created more false impressions and outright lied much worse than Ananias and Sapphira.  Not only that, but the Pastor who declares their death is only a few months away from having lied that he even knew who Jesus was!

In Psalm 116:11 the bible says, “All men are liars.”

When my daughters were just starting to date, I wanted them to memorize this verse.  Not that men corner the market on deceit, but this verse is pretty plain and simple-- an assumption that people lie.  When it suits them, when it gives them an advantage, when they can make themselves look better than they are, when the truth is too painful or too disappointing to admit, when they are afraid, and sometimes just for the heck of it…men lie, women lie, children surely lie.  It is in their nature to lie.

I remember catching my 3-yr-old son who has jacked a piece of chocolate cake and mashed it all over the lower half of his face as he has hurriedly shoved it into his mouth.  His cheeks are swollen with the evidence; his face screams the guilty pleasure of piles of icing, and I ask him, “Hey buddy, have you been eating cake?” and without blinking he says, “uh-uh.”  He says uh-uh because his mouth is so crammed full of cake he cannot say the audible lie, “NO.”  Are you sure?  “U-huh.”  Poke him in the cheek and ask, “what is that?”  And I have to wait a few seconds till he can swallow a little of the stolen sweet and what does he say?  “I don’t know.” 

“ALL MEN ARE LIARS.”  Those of us who have not had children yet or are not in law enforcement may be uncomfortable with this statement, but research validates the scriptural claim.  According to research conducted by Harvard-trained Professor Bella DePaulo and several other researchers,

--Most people lie to others once or twice/day and deceive about 30 people/week.

--The average is 7 times per hour if you count all the times people lie to themselves.
--We lie in 30 to 38% of all our interactions.
--10,000,000 people lie to the IRS each year.
--80% of us lie on our resumes.
--70% of all doctors lie to insurance companies.
--100% of dating couples surveyed lied to each other in about a third of their conversations.
--95% of participating college students surveyed were willing to tell at least one lie to a potential employer to win a job, and 41% had already done so.
--We are lied to about 200 times each day.

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References:
1. Dr. Bella DePaulo "The Truth about Lying," Psychology Today, Vol. 30 Issue 3 (May/June 1997), p. 53.

2. Kenneth Labich, "The New Crisis in Business Ethics," Fortune Vol. 125 No. 8 (April 20, 1992).
3. Valerie Frazee, "Students Tell Tales to Win Jobs," Personnel Journal Vol. 75 No. 10 (October 1, 1996).

By the way, the same study found that college students lie to their mothers in one out of every two conversations.  We are awash in a sea of deception.   However, there is something deeper at stake here than telling the truth.  On the TV show Lie To Me recently there was a compelling quote:  “Every lie has consequences that you don’t see coming.”  This is why God HATES lying.  He sees all the consequences that you don’t see coming.    

One of the most compelling forms of lying is self-deception.  Often a young man  comes to me intoxicated with the vision of becoming a successful missional entrepreneur, a.k.a., church planter.  To use the American Idol metaphor, they think they are the next Clay Aiken, but they are actually the hapless William Hung.  And no one has had the courage to say, “As far as church planting goes, you are no Clay; you are William.”

In our church planter assessment process, we screen as many of the "William Hungs" as possible, but no one is exempt from blind spots.  By their nature, "you don't see them coming."  Part of our task in the Church Plant Training Center Residency is to do some loving truth telling, to hold the mirror before a resident and ask, “Honestly, this is what I see.  Do you see it?”  All this “speaking the truth in love” holds the promise of assisting an aspiring lead pastor face weakness, stop the self deception, and become a competent gospel minister.  Unless he wisely gathers a strong elder board around him, this may be the last chance he has to receive vigorous feedback about his flaws in an environment that is committed to his success. 

As Daniel Goleman has expressed so well in his book, Primal Leadership, self awareness is a fundamental component of emotional intelligence…which spills into organizational intelligence.  We know that great churches are built by great men who understand themselves, refuse to lie to themselves, and have both the humility and intelligence to create a culture of truth telling.

Dream Evening with Emily and Brandon

 

Dream evening:  I sat in my daughter and son in law’s Omaha home this evening, and got lost in great conversation.  Nearly a thousand miles away from us, we rarely get to see them, so the times together are precious.  I introduced them to Crazy Love, hooked them on Francis Chan, and other vodcasts they didn’t know about. 

They sat wide eyed as I talked about what happens at a church planter assessment.  “They are asked to use three adjectives to describe their spouse…they are asked to take a “fast fire topic” out of a hat and explain extemporaneously:  “Is Christ the only way?” … “Imagine we are all completely ignorant of the gospel.  Explain in five minutes.”  … “You have just met a homosexual who is interested in going to your new church.  Walk us through what you say.”

They are perfect candidates for a missional core for a church plant.  They are young, attractive, articulate, likeable, leaders, who love lost people.  The majority of their friends are lost people.  They already host yard parties.  They have not bifurcated their lives into sacred and secular, so all of life is touching the tangible Kingdom.

So, what is the problem?  Their ministry is largely not integrated into the life of their church.  They fail to make a connection there.  If they engage the “Tangible Kingdom”, they will do it in spite of, not as part of their church.  Not that their church is a lost cause; it is actually a vibrant church, but the notion that they could call their connection with unchurched neighbors as ministry escapes them.

The greater part of the dream evening was the idea of seeing them in one of our plants, using their gifts to saturate Austin with the gospel.  Oh well, Dads can keep dreaming.

Moving Megan Home to Austin

Seems like just yesterday that Megan was boarding this train in Austin to visit friends for New Years in Dallas.  And just a few yesterdays earlier, she was boarding the station wagon to kindergarten.  She just completed a double major, in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Nebraska.  Very bright student.  Dean’s List yet again, in her final semester.  Taking a gap year to make money, save money, and prepare for grad school. 

 

I used to be able to engage  her philosophically, but as she has advanced, her grasp of the esoteric terms of the discipline has put her in the advantage position, so she can toy with me like a kitten playing with a ball of twine, or swat me down!

 

We took all her furniture to Lincoln Action Program for the homeless.  We loaded up all her possessions …the sum total of all she as accumulated…in the back of my Honda Element.  We start the trek home on Monday. 

Another Audacious Hope: 100 Churches Planted in 7 Years in One City

"Should I not be concerned about that great city?"  Jonah 4:11

Austin, Texas, like Nineveh, is a great city--Live Music Capital of the World, voted Most Creative City in North America, 300 sunny days per year, California-like ambiance, the home to movie stars, Tour de France champions, a plethora of Olympic champions, and the University of Texas.   "What starts here...changes the world," croons Walter Cronkite.  And he is spot on.  God has sent the world to a city that is an epicenter of culture shapers, thinkers, artists, engineers and business leaders. 

As stated in Wikipedia, there is an emerging "Creative Class arguably constituting a distinct social class that economist and social scientist Dr. Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, believes are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the USA."

Florida describes the 'Creative Class' as 40 million workers - 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and breaks the class into two broad sections:

• Super-Creative Core: This comprises about twelve percent of all U.S. jobs. This group is deemed to contain a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research) with arts, design, and media workers making a small subset. The Super-Creative Core is considered innovative, creating commercial products and consumer goods. Their primary job function is to be creative and innovative.
• Creative Professionals: These professionals are the classic knowledge-based workersand include those working in health care, business and finance, the legal sector, and education. They “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” using higher degrees of education to do so.

Additional to these two main groups of creative people, the usually much smaller group of Bohemians are also included in the creative class.  Florida concludes that the creative class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy, and is expected to add more than 10 million jobs in the next decade.

However, also like Nineveh, Austin is pretty Bohemian!  In fact, Austin is a convergence of Super Creative Core, Creative Professional as well as Bohemian .  Austin's beauty belies her disinterest in the gospel.  Church planters are first seduced by her charm, ride into town dreaming Mark Driscollian dreams of inventing the Mars Hill of the Southwest, but mostly they crawl out of town.  They step into the "church planter chipper shredder" of dog-loving, tree hugging, Obama devotees, and wonder why their Republican, suburban church planting orientation fails them.  These New Ninevites are not ambivalent about the gospel.  They tend to be hostile towards it. 

The reality is, my suburban cohorts and I do not fully have our heads around what it means to creatively engage the Creative Class or meaningfully contextualize the gospel in a way that makes sense to them. 

However, I believe that Jonah didn't know how to engage Nineveh, but God did!  Although we might have the visceral urge to run from our own Nineveh, the thought of winding up in the belly of a big fish gives us pause! 

To coin the now famous title, we have the Audacity of Hope, the audacity to believe that every man, woman and child in our great city should have the gospel declared to them in a way that makes sense to them (what they do with it is their responsibility; our responsibility is to declare and demonstrate the gospel).  This audacious hope is that we would foment a movement in the next seven years wherein we recruited, equipped, coached and resourced one hundred gospel centered communities of faith where the beauty and glory of Jesus Christ would be seen incarnated and declared in geographically dispersed areas of the city, focusing on unreached people groups in the city.  The first big shift our planting efforts has taken is sending planters away from the more receptive suburban areas and toward the less receptive areas of the city. 

How could this audacious hope become a reality?  Our threefold strategy involves making robust disciples, planting churches and partnering with like minded ministries in the city. 

To that end, we first work hard to develop robust, spiritually vibrant Christ followers in our own context -- people who love Jesus and are willing to move out of the comfort of the megachurch for the more humble, but incendiary environment of a church plant; Second, we are aggressively recruiting in order to plant five churches per year -- that would be thirty five in seven years.  How do we see another sixty-five faith communities planted?  We plant multiplying churches (we already have a a third generation church incubating with a resident who is planting this year).   Third, we partner with other gospel centered churches.  As hard as it may seem, we wish to stop competing for market share.  After all, according to demographer David T. Olson, only 8% of Austin is evangelical.  83% is "absent."  That's a lot of people we don't compete with other churches for!

So that's the dream:  we are praying that we could plant thirty five, that our spiritual descendants would plant another fifteen to twenty, and the rest would be gospel partners -- faith communities with whom we would seek to find the common ground of the great commission and the glory of Christ.  I know it sounds audacious, but God invites us into his audacious dream for a city resting under the waterfall of God's amazing beauty and grace.