social enterprise Archives - Ministry Incubators

Students Leading Students to Worship: Olivia Williamson’s Story

October 6, 2021 by Ministry Incubators Leave a Comment

By John Harrell
Ministry Incubators staff

“Worship me.” That’s what Olivia Eckart Williamson experienced as God’s call to her when she was a senior in high school: to worship the Lord, with her school as the venue.

She remembers being at a restaurant with a friend, three hours into planning for a student-led worship event, and seeing the word enlightened. It had been printed on a piece of paper that was sitting on the table.

That’s when she knew she had the name for her venture. “We need to tell our peers the call that we have,” she said a half-decade later of her vocation then, “and enlighten them on the call to do ministry in our school. It’s a mission field.”

That’s how Enlightened Students was born, a ministry that grew to the nationwide youth-empowerment movement that it is today—one that sees high schoolers leading worship events with their peers, and which God uses to catalyze healing amid cultures of violence and despair that can often take root within a school’s walls.

Williamson knew that she was on to something when she came to one of Ministry Incubators’ early Hatchathons back in 2017, and the process helped her to clarify and refine what she wanted to accomplish.

“The biggest thing I took away from Hatchathon was how to communicate your vision,” she says, “how to be really clear about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Because when you have a chance to present your passion and what you feel maybe God calling you to do—what you feel like you need to do with your life—you sometimes only have a few moments. And so Hatchathon really helped me find that sweet spot.”

As the ministry has grown, it has joined forces with Never The Same, a ministry startup led by Williamson’s father, the Rev. Geoff Eckart, which has seen student-led prayer ministries so impactful for a school’s climate that grades have been known to rise.

Now, Enlightened Students has a portfolio of 50 events completed in just seven years, including a 2021 summer tour. When the pandemic hit, Williamson and her team pivoted online and served over 2,000 youth, including in places far enough afield that they wouldn’t have been able to reach them otherwise. In all, over 5,000 students have been impacted through Enlightened Students since its inception. During this year’s tour, 18 students were baptized—all but two of them spontaneously in answer to a call to new life in Jesus.

“I don’t know where Enlightened Students would be today if I didn’t have a space to learn,” she says, looking back on that early Hatchathon—“to experiment on some things, to try some things—but to hear advice from people who have done” the work of innovation before.

As she looks ahead to the next horizon—more schools blessed by the love of Jesus, more students’ lives and futures changed, more communities made healthier—she stands rooted in a moment of courage and obedience to Christ’s call. It was the moment when she said “yes” to a Lord who calls high schoolers to take Jesus’ love to the world.

Check out Olivia’s ministry

Enlightenedstudents.com
Instagram:
- @enlightenedstudents
- @itsoliviawilliamson

Enlightened Students closely partners with Claim Your Campus, a student-led prayer movement.

Learn more about the impact of CYC here:

Drowning in Details? Maybe We Can Surf Instead

October 1, 2021 by Ministry Incubators

Task management can be discipleship

By John Harrell, Ministry Incubators Staff

It was a typical weeknight shortly after Ana and I were married and we had just finished inching our little car home through the molasses of Seattle traffic. We had no way of knowing that as we clomped up the stairs to our apartment we were carrying two different visions of how the evening would look.

After barely a moment’s pause, I moved to the table and whipped out my laptop. The end of the month was coming and the rent would be due. With all the vigor of a workaholic and the obliviousness of a husband who hadn’t bothered to communicate with his wife, I jumped into tapping out numbers on the keyboard.

Ana, now finally home from her day at a demanding job, had been hoping for quality time with me when we got home. But instead of enjoying her husband’s attention, all she could see across the room was the ugly computer lid partially obscuring her tone-deaf beloved, who was engrossed in what I now know was the Urgent but Fleeting of something else that wasn’t the Essential and Life-Giving of her.

We laugh now looking back on that early weeknight in our life together. Like all relationships, marriage at its best is a symphony of dialogue in various forms, mostly unspoken. That night, when Ana and I were set up to play a beautiful, cheerful duet with our time spent together, my contribution ended up sounding like an out-of-tune solo on a kazoo.

Why? Because in those days I didn’t have a system for making sure things stayed off my mind until the time was right. It typically meant that I would sacrifice the crucial in the name of the pressing.

My personality type tends toward hoarding things—tasks, resources, attention, control—as a kind of security blanket. Worries, particularly about details, can make that list too. They’re on mine, and woven together they make for one scratchy blankie. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Not that it’s bad to pay rent, check e-mail, or file the reports that keep our lives and ministries going. It turns out that God cares a lot about the mundane, or else the Second Person of the Trinity wouldn’t have toenails. Jack Levison suggests that in Acts 6:2, when the earliest apostles are faced with a supply-chain crisis and observe that “it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables,” what they’re really saying is that the “mundane” matter of keeping widows fed is so essential that it merits a vocational calling for those who are gifted abundantly for that specific task. And it allows for others to focus on the specific ministries of love to which they are called instead. Everybody wins.

The Lord seems to take a similar posture toward periods of time: this, and not that, is the time for Jesus to incarnate, die, and rise again. This is the time for Esther to spring into action (4:14). This, and not that, is the “day” and the “hour” (Matt. 25:13). Everything has a season (Eccles. 3:1) with a name and a duty that the Most High has ordained.

You and I get to ordain time too. God’s grace has allowed us to “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), which for us includes an element of controlling the things that are controllable toward holy ends. That means using the tools at our disposal to take care of the important things while also allowing for the mundane elements of everyday work not to become so covered in dust that they stunt the growth of what God is birthing through them.

Christian social entrepreneurs are no strangers to the vulnerability that comes through non-controllables. The world of the innovator is fraught with them. Will the economy tank before my donors make good on their pledges? Will my health hold up long enough to see the project through? Can I sustain enough interest over a long enough time that my community receives fruit from what I’m doing? Can I be a fully present spouse, friend, daughter or son, dad or mom, while also carrying out what God has given me to do?

It turns out that the answer is often yes—we can do all of those things, given enough practice. But it means doing some homework in advance to clear our minds for the crucial things when their moments come, things like loving our families without distraction, standing for justice on a moment’s notice without having to put gas in the car first, closing the deal with that critical donor without letting something as silly as a piled-up inbox crowd out her once-in-a-lifetime moment on the calendar.

But how to get started? I’ll tell you what I did: not long after that day with the laptop, I realized that what I was doing to organize my life wasn’t working. (I would come to see that I was stressed, distracted, and absent more than was healthy for anyone around me.) I started to look at how to keep my head clear enough to focus on the things that matter most in the times when they need attention. Here are some things that have been helpful for me.

In general, avoid your inbox like the plague until 3:00 in the afternoon. Mornings were made for playing offense; afternoons were made for playing defense. Answering e-mail is a defensive posture. By waiting to deal with the day’s correspondence until after lunch, we refuse to allow someone else to determine what’s most important about a day that will never come again.
Curate a list of things you’re waiting for and update it once a day. That’s everything, by the way, large or small—e-mail replies from others, documents, donations that were pledged, Amazon deliveries, stimulus checks. Look it over it at least once a day if you can. It takes practice, but it keeps those things from swirling around inside your mind at moments when you should be focusing on something or someone else with your whole attention.
Once a week, plan your work-blocks out for the following two weeks. Make a weekly, full-day Sabbath the first thing that you place on the calendar. Arrange your blocks into roughly four-hour chunks if you can—morning, afternoon, and evening. (Leave time for e-mail, texts, and other messages at the end of each day except Sabbath.)

Make an appointment with yourself at a consistent time each week to do this. Stick to it. Get accountability if you need to. The object here is to give yourself permission that (for example) next Thursday from 8:00 to noon, you are allowed to think only of that important project, that crucial donor meeting, that get-together with an old friend, that time in Scripture and prayer, knowing that the other details of life and work will take their places at the proper times.

Above all, be patient with yourself as you work these ideas. The Lord is faithful to God’s servants. It’s been years since I brought out my laptop that night in Seattle and gave my wife disappointment instead of company because I hadn’t cleared my mind for her sake in advance. In a fallen world no system is perfect. Some weeks it still feels like I’m just riding the wave of changing circumstances and shifting priorities. I don’t always do these things perfectly.

But Ana, my bride, tells me that I’m more present now. I’m better able to say yes to my son when he asks for daddy’s attention than I would have been otherwise. And I can tell that my work is more focused. Are there stressful times? Are there weeks when I feel like I’m being dragged behind the wave, rather than staying ahead of it? Yes. But they’re less frequent now, and by God’s grace and with a little practice every day, I’m learning how to surf.

Resources

To read about what we call the “rhythmic week,” see Mark DeVries, Sustainable Youth Ministry: Why Most Youth Ministry Doesn’t Last and What Your Church Can Do About It (InterVarsity, 2008), 114–117.
For a great discussion on how to organize one’s day to capitalize on the right energy for the right moments, see Ian Cron’s Typology podcast, episode s06–007, “Escaping Burnout and Living At Your Best,” featuring Carey Nieuwhof, author of the new book At Your Best (which I haven’t read yet; tell me if it’s good!).
David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, rev. ed. (Penguin, 2015), and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (Penguin, 2009). Descriptions of the waiting-for list and the idea of keeping one’s mind clear are heavily indebted to Allen and his magnificent work in those books, which have been game-changers for me.

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John Harrell is Ana’s husband, his kiddos’ dad, and lead project manager at Ministry Incubators. He is also a freelance editor and a pastor in the Free Methodist Church – USA.

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Discipleship and Missional Innovation: What’s It Called?

September 4, 2018 by Kenda Creasy Dean

I spent so long groping for the right words to describe “missional innovation” (I still don’t like the phrase) that it’s easy to feel like no one else in the church “speaks” this language. It goes by many handles: Christian social innovation, faith-based enterprise, redemptive entrepreneurship, spiritual entrepreneurship.

As the church’s unofficial R&D department, youth ministers have been missional innovators forever, intuiting spiritual entrepreneurship’s ability bring young people and Jesus onto common ground. Youth ministers, working with youth themselves, have been engineering new ways for young people to be the church, in the pews and in the world, for decades. Every Christian youth organization’s history is full of stories of social innovation: Christian Endeavor fostered women’s leadership before women had the right to vote. YoungLife was an interracial organization before the civil rights movement. Church camps and conferences pioneered new forms of worship and music that, a generation later, became standard-issue on Sunday mornings. Countless vocations have been launched by mission and arts ministries that allowed teenagers to imagine church differently from their parents.

Yet without a name, we miss the force of these innovative instincts and are very likely to miss their connection to faith. Young people gravitate toward the impulse to infiltrate the world with good, but they’re more apt to see Tom’s Shoes as fulfilling this promise than the church. Young adults recognize missional innovation as a way to test-drive, in small batches, lifestyles that challenge our “me-first” relational and economic practices. They may even notice that this bears more than a passing resemblance to the last-shall-be-first teachings of the gospel. But if you ask them who is most likely to change the world, they will tell you “Spotify,” not Jesus (see http://www.businessinsider.com/brands-millennials-love-think-do-good-2017-6).

So what shall we call it? What “handle” binds our work to Jesus, and not merely to good intentions?

Both words– “missional” and “innovation”–are long past their sell-by dates. But what alternatives do we have? We could try the Trappist route: “Preach the gospel; when necessary, use words.” But we also know that, with rare exceptions, faith without words can’t reproduce. At some point, we need to claim who we work for, lest we start taking credit ourselves, or (worse) go off the rails and imply that our failings are God’s failings. We need to articulate how missional innovation is the natural consequence of following Jesus. At the very least, we need to be transparent about where the money goes. The communities we invest in want to know why we’re there. Saying that we want to take part in what God is doing in a place makes no sense (it could even be dangerous) unless we are clear about which God we mean. If we can’t tether this thing we call missional innovation to Christian discipleship, then we risk—to quote Dr. Amanda Drury–sending out ambassadors who don’t know what country they’re from.

Discipleship formation is the Achilles’ heel of missional innovation. It’s easy for us to think our actions are enough, that people will see Jesus in what we do. They will—but only if they know what to look for, cues we glean from the stories and teachings of Christian tradition that allow us to name our experience with God. Words matter. Metaphors shape us—even metaphors about God and God’s mission. Faith needs more than body language to explain, even to ourselves, the humble attempt to live a cruciform life in the marketplace. Yet here we are, called to help people who could care less imagine what following Jesus looks like—living a cross-shaped life, a life of self-giving love.

That would make Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—the original cross-shaped life–the mother of all innovations.

So what shall we call this thing that smells like church but lacks every trapping we’ve come to associate with religion? What do we call this upside-down way of life that bears witness to the last-shall-be-first gospel of Jesus, that challenges transactionalism and economics of scarcity with a gospel of abundance? What shall we call the incarnational impulse to infiltrate human culture with grace and joy and purpose? What do we call this strategy for hope?

What do you call it?