“Disruptive Discipleship” by Sam Van Eman

Most of not all Christians know what it means to find ourselves in a “faith rut.” We’re following the same patterns, the same procedures and programs, the same things we’ve always done. And while there may be nothing wrong with any pf these things we’re doing, we sense stagnation. We’re not growing. It’s the same-old same-old. We’ve plateaued, and we sense there’s more to faith than a plateau. Sometimes we’re playing it safe because safe is a good place to be when we find ourselves in a culture that’s turning upside down.

Sam Van Eman wants to disrupt that faith rut. H wants to explain how he became convinced of his own stagnation, and what he did to break out of it. He wants you to know that you don’t have to wait for a disruption that will lead to growth; you can design one yourself. And he wrote Disruptive Discipleship: The Power of Breaking Routine to Kickstart Your Faith to share what’s he learned and encourage anyone feeling stuck in their faith.

“If this book is broadly about going somewhere when we feel stuck,” he writes, “it’s more specifically about growing up when we’ve been acting like children.” Unwelcome events can force that growth, but so, too, can a deliberately designed plan. And that’s what Van Eman is arguing.

He’s got experience doing this – work experience. He’s a resource specialist for CCO – a ministry focused on helping college students “serve Jesus Christ with their entire lives.” But it’s not limited to college students; Van Eman co-creates transformational experiences for professionals and organizations as well. These experiences may be a trek in Peru, exploring caves, a “big woods” experience. Or a program in a board room or auditorium. But they’re designed (note that word) to break people out of the everyday routine and help them rethink what they’re doing to grow in their faith.

Disruptive Discipleship describes the problem of stagnation, considers options, and then moves toward practical ways to design a plan. With stories and personal anecdotes, Van Eman discusses different kinds of adventures, tests, and experiments in service. And then he explains to how translate change, navigate valleys (and heights), and how to work with others in these experiences. He includes a group study guide, a Bible study on what Jesus knew about experiential education, and even templates for creating a designed plan.

Sam Van Eman

Van Eman is the author of On Earth as It Is in Advertising: Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope. A public speaker and facilitator, he has written for PRISM Magazine, Christianity Today’s Faith in the Workplace, and other online and print publications. He also wrote a series of remarkable stories about his life collectively called A Beautiful Trench It Was. He and his family live in central Pennsylvania.

Disruptive Discipleship is not a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to grow faith. But it is a wonderful resource, with all kinds of practical suggestions and advice. And it will be helpful for anyone looking to move to a more dynamic, growing Christian faith. 

Related:

My review of On Earth as It is in Advertising by Sam Van Eman.

Top photograph by Mark Harpur via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads: A Beautiful Trench It Was

Last November, I went to Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country, southwest of San Antonio, for a staff retreat with The High Calling. We’re a staff that works almost entirely online; to have the opportunity to get together face-to-face is, well, the special thing you would expect it to be.

My roommate was Sam Van Eman. We got to talk like roommates thrown together do, we’d walk over to the programs and activities and talk some more, and we went hiking with Marcus Goodyear, the editor of The High Calling, and Jim Wood, he of Shrinking Camel fame and the Work Editor for The High Calling. After that hike, I thought of Sam as a mountain goat, with an unerring sense of keeping us going in the right direction.

Sam is the culture editor for The High Calling; I think of him as the Friday guy – he writes or edits the articles that appear on Fridays as the culture offerings. Sam is a staff specialist for CCO in Pennsylvania, a campus ministry that works with churches, colleges and other organizations “to develop men and women who live out their Christian faith in every area of life.” Once a year CCO hosts the Jubilee Conference, and in fact the most recent one concluded a week ago.

Sam was my pathway to The High Calling. I first ran across him several years ago, when he left a comment on a blog post at a site called Inside Work, which is no longer online. I followed his comment back to his blog, New Breed of Advertisers, and I was so taken with it that (Sam doesn’t know this) it was the very first blog I regularly followed.

Sam’s written a book, too: On Earth As It Is in Advertising? Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope. I reviewed it here in December of 2011.

If you seen his articles at The High Calling, you know that Sam writes stories.

Sam also tells stories.

A few weeks ago, with the help of Dan King (The High Calling’s social media guru and grand poobah of Bibledude), Sam created a site calls A Beautiful Trench It Was. I was one of the guinea pigs who got to “test hear” a story.

The site has six stories posted right now. They’re run no more than five minutes each. Sam talks about his growing-up years, and I have learned things I didn’t know. Things about Sam. And things about myself. I can’t recall a time I’ve been so moved to hear a story told. (True confession: I lost it listening to Tapes.)

Sam knows the secret of telling stories. Stories are powerful, because they connect us to each other.

That’s what Sam does.

Go listen to A Beautiful Trench It Was.

Photo of Sam Van Eman by Claire Burge. She doesn’t know that I’m using it, but I don’t think she would mind.

Sam Van Eman’s “On Earth as It Is in Advertising”

I am reading Sam Van Eman’s On Earth as It Is in Advertising: Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope. And I am thinking that I’m holding an incendiary, revolutionary document in my hands.

I am thinking that this book anticipates the Occupy Protest by a good six years (the book was first published in 2005), but then goes the protest one better. It keeps focused on the key issues involved and the practical ways to effect change in the culture and society.

I am thinking that author Sam Van Eman is tossing a live hand grenade right into the middle of Christian complacency.

And I am thinking these things became Van Eman is taking on what is still the most significant issue affecting American Christianity – how consumer culture has invaded and taken over the church, resulting in our inability to tell the difference between what he calls the “SimGospel” and the Gospel of the church.

The “SimGospel,” he says, is “a simulated version of the biblical narrative. It is goodness, borrowed. Like the game SimCity, a computer program that allows the player to create and govern a simulated city, the SimGospel is an imitated means to self-establishment. We follow directly on the autonomous heels of our Eden ancestors by overruling God’s intended order and creating our own way of life. We become little gods…”

And the SimGospel plays itself out in all of the little things that are so much background noise in our culture and society. TV commercials. Paying for the opportunity to wear a brand. Never being quite satisfied with what we have. Defining “success” in the church using the same yardsticks that are used in business. And that’s just the beginning.

This could have turned into a diatribe or a major rant, but Van Eman directs it another way – toward helping us understand how to reject the siren song of the SimGospel for the reality of the Gospel. And that reality involves understanding what it means to bear God’s image, and to bear the needs of ourselves and others.

This is where the hand grenade gets set loose. Like in where most of us spend a goodly portion of our adult lives – work.

“What if,” Van Eman asks, “we could see work in a new way – as something for others instead of as a means to our own ends? What if we were able to see work from a biblical viewpoint? What if work were considered a gift to others, and a gift to God in the form of contributing to the building of his kingdom?” Work is a noble task, he says, and “we are called to it for the purpose of serving the Creator and the created order.”

Imagine if we Christians “occupied” our work with the belief that what we did and how we did was just as important as any sermon, and worship service, any choir concert, any revival and any mission service. Imagine if we thought of ourselves as bearing God’s image in the workplace.

That’s the live hand grenade.

On Earth as It Is in Advertising is a profound, provocative book. It’s an ideal book to read between Black Friday and the commercial hype now known as Christmas.

I read it, and I feel the need for repentance.

Related:

Sam Van Eman blogs at New Breed of Advertisers.

The Faux Pas That's Now a Family Legend

In the time B.K. (before kids), my wife and I lived and worked in Houston. I was at Shell Oil, and she worked at the Houston Chronicle in the department that wrote and produced the travel sections and special editorial and advertising sections.

Her department had five or six people, including her boss. One of her co-workers, whom we’ll call Mollie to protect the identity of the innocent, had gone to college with us at LSU. And Mollie said she would be late one morning, because she had to first take her beloved but old and ailing dog to the vet to have him put to sleep.

My wife knew the people she worked with had a tendency to the cruel and cretinous. She could imagine what jokes they were going to come up with. And so that morning, before Mollie arrived, she put the fear into them. Don’t you dare make light of this, she warned. Don’t you dare make a joke about it. This is really upsetting, she loves this dog, so back off and give her some silence. Even back then, she was known for “the look” – which I had been the squirming target of many times, and our sons would be even more – the look from Mom that says don’t even think about it.

Her co-workers got the look. They promised to behave.

Later that day, my wife and Mollie would be going to get their pictures taken for passports, needed to do many of the travel stories they were being assigned. So they both planned to be a little more dressed up than usual (this was back in the days when people dressed like they were going to work in an office, because they were).

The department was working, when in walked a somber Mollie, quiet after bringing her dog to the vet and dressed for her photograph.

My wife, my poor wife who wanted to be encouraging and sympathetic, who had warned the cretins within an inch of their lives, decided to say something nice about Millie’s clothes.

“Mollie! You look dressed to kill!”

The words were out before my wife realized what she had said. There was a moment of silence. No one said a word; everyone focused on the typewriters in front of them. My wife thought she might have dodged the supreme embarrassment bullet, that everyone had missed the gigantic faux pas she had just committed – the very one she had warned the others against.

And then she saw shoulders shaking, as people tried to stifle themselves. She saw people shaking. And then it couldn’t be contained, as a huge wave of laughter erupted.

When she told me later what had happened, I tried to be sympathetic. But I was laughing too hard.

I got the look.

Two of my High Calling colleagues, Sam Van Eman at New Breed of Advertisers and Deidra Riggs at Jumping Tandem, are hosting a feature on laughter, Like Therapy Only Cheaper. To see the stories told by others, please visit Jumping Tandem for the links.

What I’m Up to At The High Calling Blogs

For several months, I’ve been posting occasional articles at The High Calling Blogs (HCB). The site is owned and operated by Foundations for Laity Renewal, whose mission is to renew society by renewing the church; renew the church by renewing the family; and renewing the family by renewing individuals. In addition to HCB, Laity Renewal also operates The High Calling web site (and I’ve written an article or two for that site as well).

How I got there is one of those “internet stories.”

Long before I was on Twitter or Facebook, I had been following a blog called Inside Work, which focuses on the integration of faith and business. I would occasionally comment on a post, especially those written either by editor Jim Hancock or a business executive named Bradley Moore. One day, I followed Bradley’s link to his blog site, Shrinking the Camel. And enjoyed it so much I started following that blog as well. A regular commenter on Bradley’s book was a guy named Marcus Goodyear, and one day I followed the link to his blog, Good Word Editing. That’s where I discovered The High Calling and HCB, because Marcus is senior editor for these sites. About the same time, I found another blog I liked – New Breed of Advertisers – by a guy named Sam Van Eman whom I didn’t immediately connect to HCB – but he’s one of the editors there, too.

Looking at my RSS reader, I can see that Inside Work, Shrinking the Camel, Good Word Editing and New Breed of Advertisers are among the very earliest blogs I followed. (One day, in a post or a comment at HCB, Sam – and I remember distinctly it was Sam – mentioned a book he really liked called Stone Crossings by L.L. Barkat. His comment led me to her book, which led me to her three blogs, which eventually led to me becoming a co-editor with L.L. and Eric Swalberg for TweetSpeak Poetry.)

So what was it that attracted me to these bloggers and sites like The High Calling Blogs?

Obviously, we shared a common faith – different backgrounds and affiliations but a common faith nonetheless.

We shared an intense interest in how faith does – and doesn’t – function in the workplace.

Even more significant (for me, at least) was the sense of community. People from all over the country and even outside the United States come together in the spaces called The High Calling and HCB. And they share their community by writing about life and work and culture and family and art and a lot of other things.

Earlier this year, I received a direct message on Twitter from HCB, saying they had a proposal for me. I didn’t hear anything else for a few days, but soon enough L.L. (the HCB managing editor) asked if I would be interested in being a contributing editor. I didn’t have to think about it. I said yes – a big fat enthusiastic yes.

What a contributing editor does is write posts or articles on a regular basis (mine generally fall into the category of “work”), participate in commenting and discussions about posts, and help build the community. On my posts, I work directly with Brad Moore, who’s an HCB content editor in addition to his day job as a senior business executive and (most recently) a poet, with his own poetry blog. Brad is one of the best editors I’ve ever had. This is a heretical confession for any writer to make – but I don’t mind being edited by Brad because he helps me be a better writer. (And my next post is scheduled for Tuesday.)

That’s what this community is about as well – encouragement.

If you haven’t been to HCB, you should visit. If you’re looking for community, you’ll find it. If you’re looking for good writing, it’s right there. If you’re looking to stretch and challenge your faith, you’ll find it there as well.

It’s a cool place to be a part of.

The 18th Day of Community: Sam Van Eman

I can’t recall when exactly I started following Sam Van Eman’s blog New Breed of Advertisers, but judging by where it falls on my RSS feed, it’s been at least several years.

Sam works for CCOJubliee, a campus ministry involved in colleges and universities all over the United States that seeks to develop young men and women to live out their faith in all areas of life. He is also the author of On Earth as It Is in Advertising: Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope, in which he discussed the negative messages of advertising and contrasted them with the positive messages of the gospel.

He calls himself both a “critic and a fan of advertising,” and he places advertising squarely in the midst of the concept of being a neighbor, as he describes on his blog: “You're good at what you do. You study and listen and read - honing your trade - only to understandably and occasionally forget that behind the progress toward success are real neighbors consuming your work. So you must ask - and keep asking - not the myopic, ‘How can I get customers to fall in love with my product?" but a more generous, "How can I love by getting this product to my customers?’"

It’s that belief, and how he writes about it, that first pulled me into New Breed of Advertisers, and kept me there. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is an ad about soup or Volkswagen or the NCAA, he takes the same insightful look, grounded in faith, and then looks at what the ad is really communicating.

Sam is also a content editor for The High Calling Blogs, focusing on the area of culture.

So check out New Breed of Advertisers. For someone like me, with a background in corporate communications, his blog and his writing in general provide the background story of familiar territory.


(In December, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” - see the button at the top right - sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I liked the idea so much that I’m going to continue to do that -- highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others.)