Change is a word that creates fear and unrest in most people. Change means uncertainty. Change means that we loose a little control. When we change something we venture from what is safe to what is unknown.

But to improve we have to change. To not change may be safe and comforting, but it is boring. Typically change will only happen as a result of a crisis. Things have to become so bad that we have no other choice but to change. I suppose a little change is better than no change at all, but we could have so much more. Why wait for the Great Depression, or a church collapse, or being at the end of your rope before you change? Why not change for the better when things are going well? If your business made $1 million, why not see if you can make $2 million? If your church saw 50 people come to the Lord this year, why not try for 100 next year?

Most of the organizations I’ve observed in my adult life have started out with a bang. After the first few years the pioneer spirit dies, the innovation stops, and people repeat over and over again what was done before. If it’s a business, there are processes in place to sell and build product. If it’s a church, there is a certain way things are done in meetings and a certain belief system. These organizations will act like they are pressing forward by setting every increasing goals like more sales or more people in the church, but nothing is changed to bring this increase about. If things don’t go as well as expected all other avenues will be tried before anything changes. And change will only come through long deliberation. Once the changes are made and the crisis is averted then the natural tendency is to fall back into the sleepy way of life, just repeating things week in week out. There will then be another crisis looming and the cycle will repeat indefinitely.

The only way out of this mad cycle is to create a value for continuous improvement in all areas of our lives – our jobs, relationships, and church life. This means that we turn off automatic pilot and take control of our lives. We stop doing things because that is the way they’ve always been done. We probe. We think. We pray. We discuss. And then we do.

This is especially important for those in leadership. Leaders naturally strive for control and certainty amid all the variables of life. But people want to belong to something dynamic. They want to go to work excited about what they are going to do. And people want to go to church wondering what might happen. Reruns can be fun, but they get old real quick.

I’ve talked in two posts now about how to get good at something. Now I want to encourage you to go deeper in your chosen discipline. You may find what I’m about to say discouraging, but I’ll say it anyway. In “Talent is Overrated” Geoff Colvin says that across almost all disciplines there seems to be a magic number of practice hours required for mastering. That number is ten thousand. That is two and a half hours a day seven days a week for Eleven years! Crazy. My point in saying that is not to have you throw your hands up and accept mediocrity. It is to help you realize that if you truly want to excel at something you need to practice more than seems reasonable.

Right now I’m trying to learn how to sing. After I put the kids to bed I go down to my basement, get in the closet, close the door, and sing for twenty to twenty-five minutes. I hum for ten minutes and do lip rolls for ten minutes and then maybe a little something more. Based on this schedule I will master my voice at the age of 96. Do I want to be the next Andrea Bocelli? Well, actually, yes but I’m not banking on it. All I really want to be able to do is sing worship songs; not opera. That doesn’t require vocal mastery. But I think it might require me to practice more than twenty minutes a day; particularly as I take some time during every practice session to hit myself out of frustration.

The thing about increasing my practice time is that it really starts to eat into my day. Say I want go from 25 minutes to an hour. During the weekend that’s not a big deal. I can break that into two half hour sessions. But I can’t during the week. That means I have to put the kids down at 7:45 and go in my basement closet until 8:45. Ouch! Not much time left in the day now. Commitment. Discipline. What hard words!

Now maybe I decide that music isn’t important enough to me to put that much time into it. That’s fine. But I’m not ok saying music is that important but I’m too weak to put in the time it takes. For me, that is the struggle. Being strong enough as a person to push through those times when I would rather be doing something else like staring into space. Even if we really enjoy our hobby there are going to be times when we would rather be doing something else. We have to practice anyway. Do you think Michael Jordan had more fun playing basketball than you have working at your job? Of course he did. So why did he get to play basketball for a living? Because he spent all those hours practicing when he didn’t feel like it. The pay for the long hours is the joy of excelling at your craft and hopefully bringing joy to others through what you do.

When reading this please have an open mind. Whenever evaluating long held beliefs about scientific questions it helps to understand that much of what we are told is simply scientists guessing. They make guesses (hypotheses), do some preliminary testing and then tell everyone about them. I don’t have a problem with this. What else can they do? The problem is that these guesses often prove false, and the scientists won’t admit that they were wrong. Or people have believed these guesses so long that they can’t accept that they are wrong.

Take margarine, for example. This was created as a healthier butter replacement. We now know that margarine is about the most unhealthy thing you can eat. I wonder how many people died prematurely because of this guess.

This post is me summing up “Body by Science” by Doug McGuff and John Little. If you want more details, get the book. I’m not going to try to go through it in order. If something seems wrong or doesn’t make sense it is likely a deficiency in my explanation or understanding.

First off, they make a distinction between health and fitness. For them being fit means you are maximizing your physical capacity. Being healthy means the absence of disease and a balance between the body tearing itself down and building itself up. The idea with exercise then is to maximize fitness without damaging health. Sounds like a plan to me.

In the next section of the book they explain metabolism and exercise. It’s pretty technical so I won’t summarize. I’ll quote a bit that I think is helpful – “Over several decades, all sorts of positive health benefits became associated with this specific metabolic adaptation (related to aerobic exercise – my comment). Soon, it became a foregone conclusion that aerobic conditioning was cardiovascular conditioning and that the two were interchangeable. What never seemed to have been pointed out is that the heart and blood vessels support the entire functioning of the cell, not just the mitochondria.” They then go on to say that strength training is the best way to train the cardiovascular system since it stimulates all the components of metabolism. The point is that doing aerobic exercise conditions only a part of our cardiovascular system, while strength training trains all of our cardiovascular system. Why do aerobic exercise, unless of course you really enjoy it?

McGuff and Little quote two studies that were done showing that a few minutes of intense exercise is as good as or better than several hours of “cardio” exercise. Check out the links below
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/06/06/sprint.training/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7429028/Short-blasts-of-exercise-as-good-as-hours-of-training-scientists-find.html

Another issue with doing low intensity repetitive exercise is body wear and tear. Remember, the idea with exercise is to maximize fitness while improving, or at least not damaging, health. Doing exercises that impact your joints over and over are clearly out (who thought high impact aerobics was a good idea?). I forget the percent of runners who are injured every year, but I believe it’s over half.

As an aside, studies have been done showing that marathon runners seem to have more heart problems than the average person. I wonder if this is from the stress that running puts on your heart?
http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2009/11/1/cardio-causes-heart-disease.html

Back to the book. Putting this together, then what we want to do is intensely stimulate our muscles while minimizing impact on our joints. What “Body by Science” recommends is one set each of a few exercises that hit all the major muscle groups in your body. The exercises are to be done slowly, say 20 seconds per rep, for roughly 90 seconds. The weight should be such that you are at failure after the set. You then wait for your muscles to rebuild, which varies for everyone, but roughly a week. They then go into advice on various routines and exercises you can do and what equipment to use.

There are many wonderful things about this method of exercise but maybe the best is people who want to be fit get their lives back. People no longer need to be on the trail or treadmill an hour every day. Fifteen minutes a week is enough. Plus for men, we get to look buff instead of gaunt.

Buy the book.

I really enjoy a good hard boiled egg. One whose yolk is orange instead of green and whose white is springy instead of firm. They’re really easy too.

Leave the eggs out until they come to room temperature (or you could put them in warm water for a while to speed up the process). This first step is important, because if you put them in cold the shells will burst. Heat enough water to cover your eggs to a boil. Take it off the burner while you put the eggs in. Put them all in as close to the same time as you can. Then put the pan back on the burner. Set heat for a gentle boil. Cook 9:30 to 10 minutes. 9:30 is good for eating by themselves. 10 min is good if you are putting the eggs into a recipe like egg salad. Pull them out as soon as possible and put into cold water. Leave for a minute and then change the water. After another couple minutes takes the eggs out and peel them. The shells should come right off.

Many of my friends will understand Aja and my reasons for leaving traditional church settings, but I’m all too aware that to some we seem flighty or even just plain off. In light of this I want to write a little something to explain where we are coming from, if not to persuade others to join us, then at least to make them understand.

At the heart of our decision is a plain straight forward reading of the Bible. For those who don’t know me very well one of the main things that I can’t stand is compromise. I’m not talking about weakness because I certainly understand that. I’m talking about knowing something to be true and saying I don’t care I’m going to do something else. This is an issue with most of traditional Protestant church life. Take the church meeting itself for example. The New Testament gives us basic guidelines on what to do when gathered and why we should do it in the first place. In short, the reason we go to “church” (the statement itself showing you how far off we’ve gone) is to use our gifts to encourage one another. The only real rules are that the results of our participation have to be edifying and that everyone should be allowed to participate. God, on purpose, made up the church so that we would need everyone’s participation when we come together. Are these simple guidelines followed? No. Why not? I can’t answer that, but I would presume the answer is that that is not the way things have been done. And because we don’t understand the goal of the church in the first place (coming to the fullness of Christ, which requires the use of the gifts of the Spirit, which requires Biblical gatherings)

On another point, take the role of the pastor. Do we ever see a pastor participating in a church gathering led alone running the meeting in the Bible? No. Should they participate? Of course, but as part of the body. Why are 99% of churches run the way they are? Again I can’t answer that, but it isn’t ok. It hurts the leaders and it hurts the church. How did we go from shepherds caring for people to shepherds becoming administrators and charismatic public speakers?

Lets move to the teaching itself. When Jesus sent his disciples out he said “go and preach the gospel saying, ‘the kingdom of God has come near.’” Paul was accused of treason because of his gospel preaching. The gospel as preached in the churches I’ve been in has been something akin to “ask Jesus to come into your heart and you will be saved.” Do you see the difference there? We have gone from saying Jesus is the king of the world who is going to make everything right to offering Jesus as fire insurance.

The things I like most about leaving traditional church setting is that I get the Bible back and I get the believing community back. I can read the Bible for what it says and not for what it supposed to say. I get the whole story, not a list of random verses to support whatever teaching is popular in the blog/book circuit. And I am in relationship with people, not because we happen to sit in the same room for an hour and a half once a week, but because we are family in Christ. The point is no longer to grow an organization, but to worship God together and grow into the fullness of Christ.