This morning I emailed the first draft of my project to my editor. It is a strange feeling to let a project that big out of my hands. It is only 165 pages, but it felt like 250.

I am writing about introducing spiritual disciplines to a group in a five morning series. I've got a little bit of time without children so I am headed to a rose garden to think this through.

Nearly all of my research is done. Before I charge into the practical chapters explaining the project this paper proposes, I am going back through and editing the 120 pages that precede it. It is a strange feeling to be able to read through all of this work in one sitting. There has been so much thought, so many issues percolating in my brain as I drift off to sleep and as I step into the shower in the morning, so many hours of reading and searching through sources, so many paragraphs that seemed to take a whole afternoon to nail down. It is strange to see it all in one relatively small contained piece.

Implications of sections worry me. Because I am arguing that we demonstrate our faith through community as an organic and interactive form of evidence for our faith, I worry it could be interpreted as pietistic, that I could appear to be creating an atmosphere that puts pressure on individuals in the community to live up to a standard of good works. Reading through the flow of the chapters alerts me to this and has left me dwelling all morning (as I made meals, got kids dressed and played candy land with them) on how I can emphasize the continuity of our focus on grace and God's loving acceptance of us.

This doesn't have a lot of impact on you, my readers. I just wanted to write a few words about what it is like to go through this dissertation process. It is a struggle because it is academically difficult and because it feels so vulnerable. I am taking a position and making an argument. It reflects on me. To the degree that people like or dislike it, agree or disagree with it, it reflects on me.

I am counting on my expectation that very few people are willing to read an academic paper like this. If the first 20 pages of the history, grounds and programmatic details of Calvin Crest don't make them put it down, perhaps the interaction with Lyotard in Chapter 2 will, or the somewhat tedious analysis of Jesus' use of the kingdom of God in Chapter 3.

And then, if I do not post it electronically, it will only exist in the few hands that get a hard copy, and in the bowels of the library at Fuller Theological Seminary. Perhaps a lack of access, too, will save me.

How many dissertations or DMin ministry focus papers have you or anyone else read? I have read a few, but primarily as examples for how to write my own. I expect to be protected from readers and critics just by how boring it is.

I am tired. I keep writing. I am almost done with the rough draft of my forth and last theology chapter. I am getting there and it will be done.

I keep reading and taking notes. I keep writing. Some day, my dissertation will be done.

I have met many people who finished everything in their doctorate and then failed to write their dissertation. The pitfalls are many. In a weekend seminar they warned us of the many obstacles we may face. I am trying to overcome a writers block about my chapter on our changing culture and the ways those changes lead to the need for new models of ministry.

I paused to record some of the barriers keeping me from wanting to write.

• Expectation that I won't like what I write. I think this block comes from the sense that I don't like where I am headed with something and I just want to stop writing. To head this off, I tried to start over in a new direction to find the one that I actually feel in my gut. When the structure of my writing leads me in a direction that falls out of step with my gut, I hit a block.
• Concern that my content reader won't like it. This is related. It is a sense that I am headed in a direction that is open to criticism. I can try to step back and start again. Maybe though, I need to just get the whole thought out there and then decide whether to trash it and start again or revise it.
• Frustration that I have written a chapter like this before and I don't want to have to write another one for this setting. I have to be more concise here than I was in previous papers. It is frustrating writing something again, gathering resources and citations again, knowing that I've done it before. I can not just use what I did before, though, because it doesn't fit the space or flow.
• A gestalt feeling that I just want to stop this and do something else. In the end, it all leads up to this, defeating that inward drive to quit.

I was emailing about a friend about a tension I am finding in my DMin project and I thought I'd blog about it.

I am in an interesting position with this project. I had to choose a ministry setting to write about. I chose Calvin Crest both because I have served there longer than I have anywhere else, and also because I still really care about its ministry. We are required to write a project like this to put feet on the ministry ideas we have studied. I have to identify ministry challenges, write about them biblically and theologically and propose solutions to those challenges. The tension for me is that I want to be successful in writing the project, and at the same time not appear to be criticizing the present ministry or future direction of Calvin Crest.

I haven't been on the Calvin Crest staff for eleven years. I'm not actively doing the daily work of ministry there. I am confident that the staff are faithfully adapting the ministry to the changes in culture that we face. Still, my task, as an at-home dad living in Iowa, is to apply the ideas I've studied from folks writing about ministry amidst postmodern changes to the Calvin Crest setting. My hope is that my project would not be perceived by anyone outside my project committee as an argument that Calvin Crest needs to change any particular practice or head in any particular direction. Rather, if it is of any benefit to folks related to camp, I hope it might be an interesting point of discussion about possibilities that might not otherwise have been considered.

I am not sure yet how I will accomplish those competing interests, but I am going to keep trying.

Thinking, thinking, thinking. I've been doing a lot of thinking as I revise my final project proposal.

Tracy's brother Bret, in an effort to keep from steering my final project too heavy handedly into his field refrained from offering some fascinating commentary here on the discussion of thinness and the kingdom of God. Bret did his PHD in an interaction of Theology and Geography and has some very significant things to say about place as a dynamic creation of humans and non-humans. It turns out, the question I posed, Can Calvin Crest be a thin place, is exactly a question of the theology of place.

I wish for my readers' sake that Bret had written his thoughts here. Alas, we spent an hour and a half on an intercontinental phone call hashing out the issue. I have to go read a chapter of his dissertation.... and I have four or five new titles to pick up.

Calvin crest is a place by the testimony of many witnesses where God and his activity are more apparent. Because it is such a place, we take pilgrimages there. We leave our normal settings to spend time in this place. While we are there, we have an opportunity to encounter God, to grow as people, and gain a God-oriented perspective on our life back at home.

Why is Calvin Crest such a place? It is a dynamic between non-human things are and aren't there, and our activities there. It is a place formed by the lack of things that distract us from God, by an abundance of the beauty of God's creation, by a community that is devoted to attending to God's presence, and by God's kingdom manifested through that community and place.

So, how does that happen? Is there a part we should play? Yes. What is it? I am working that out. I've revised my proposal. I expect I will begin shifting my thoughts to my introduction and first chapter soon.

In the last two weeks I flew to New York with Indy for medical tests, and Bakersfield with Liam for my Grandmother's memorial service. Tracy is on service now, and I'm trying to get my mind back around my final project.

My proposal was accepted with revisions. I am now a doctoral candidate. I've been mulling the committee's directive that I address the limitations of one week, discuss what kind of transformation can happen in a week, and consider using language more precise than evangelism - I expect because they feel one week of camp is likely too short a time for someone to experience conversion unless it is supplemented (or is supplementing) the ongoing evangelism work of the church.

What are your thoughts? Is it likely that you would experience a conversion to discipleship in Jesus Christ through one week of camp? Driving to the coffee shop, I was thinking that what we were doing when I as at Calvin Crest was not a holistic evangelism program. Rather, we were taking kids who had grown up in the church and giving them an intense opportunity to consider the gospel and commit or recommit their lives to Jesus Christ.

I have a lot of thoughts about what we were accomplishing. Mostly I believe we were giving students an experience of an alternate reality. We were showing them the possibility of the kingdom of God and the reality of God's presence there on the mountain in a way they did not experience anywhere else. They had an opportunity to be someone different in that alternate reality, and from that place they had a new lens to consider their home life with God. When they went home, they kept with them this monumental mountain top experience that they could refer back to as that time when they were distinctly aware of and certain about God's presence with them and in their community.

So, what am I seeking to offer as I consider a strategy for evangelism for camping ministry? I am seeking to offer an experience of the Kingdom of God. This is a powerful addition to the knowledge and experience of God they would encounter off the mountain. It could be the beginning point of a larger experience of growing and learning enough to commit their lives to service and submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It could be an experience standing on the shoulders of a robust experience and knowledge of God through the church and be an opportunity to knowingly commit their lives to Jesus Christ. It could be an opportunity to consider the commitments they've made to God before and recommit themselves to the lordship of Jesus Christ as we do when we stand before those who are being baptized.

It could also be an opportunity for someone to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and savior based only on their experience of God at Calvin Crest. This is problematic, though. While God is capable of taking that person and creating a worldwide evangelist like Saul of Tarsus, it seems at least as likely, if not moreso, that this person would be like the seeds that fell on the rock and sprung up quickly and died just as quickly.

I corresponded some with Amy Hall, who emphasized the instantaneousness of conversion in a radically God oriented perspective. Perhaps she will interact here. I do not discount the work that God did in Paul and others through instantaneous conversion. I believe, though, that God also and perhaps more often works through a longer journey like the disciples and their three years of eating and working beside Jesus.

In the end, I want to receive the great commission and make disciples of Jesus Christ. I do not want to settle for making people who utter the words, "Jesus I accept you as my Lord and Savior," though that certainly moves me deeply. I believe Jesus commissioned us to something more, something deeper, something harder, something more abundant... something that looked liked Jesus' life, the disciples' lives, Paul and Timothy's lives, and the many Christians of the early Church who did more than profess a faith....

Just a good quote from Dan Kimball, They Like Jesus but not the church

The reason I am writing this book and the reason I continue to go out of my way to meet, befriend, hang out with, and talk with those who like Jesus but not the church is because I so desire for others to experience the full Jesus, not just the good teacher or the friend but also the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings and the Savior who changes lives.