First Drafts: life & movement planting

I'm currently involved in coaching a team of Staff in Mexico City as we seek to launch missional Christ-centered communities on some 400 universities consisting of 1 million university students. Needless to say, the task can often feel a tad bit overwhelming. Add to this the constant difficulties of living in a city of 28 million people, speaking a different language, urban fatigue (walking to the metro to take a bus to walk another 1/2 hr to a campus), and cultural suprises, and you are beginning to get a feel for what our daily lives are like.

In September and October we stepped foot on 85 campuses looking for students that God had prepared to reach their peers and transform the communities around them. It was exhausting and overwhelming, yet very rewarding to see how God would show up in the process. Not just because of the students we met, but also because of the ways he was growing and changing us.

During this time I had to constantly keep the vision we were setting out to accomplish before my team, and I used outside resources to help us gain focus on the important things and not get too bogged down in results or lack of results, depending on the day.

One of the outside resources I used was the book I referred to in a recent blog, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing and Life. We went through two chapters that I thought would really speak to what we all needed to hear. The first dealt with writing first drafts and it rang home true for each of us. Here's a few excerpts with my comments on how it helped us with movement launching...

"...first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the unitiated" (p. 21).

As we read this I asked a question, "Is this how you picture, more or less, that others experience their time on campus?" Meaning that they walk onto campus ready to conquer another day of movement launching, stoked, amped, full of faith, knowing exactly what they are going to say, and that God is going to show up in mighty ways. They all nodded.

Each person always thinks that the others are super movement launchers, when in fact we are all ordinary people following a supernatural God. I don't wake up breathing in the air of movement launching. I wake up wishing I hadn't stayed up so late watching that episode of 24. I wake up (though I hate to admit it) often wishing it was the weekend and it is only Tuesday. I wake up needy and wanting and desperate for God to show up and prepare the way for us, or all else will fail. And this was helpful to discuss.

Here were some of the things we came away with as we discussed movement launching and applied the idea of writing first drafts to later obtain "good second drafts and terrific third drafts."
+ Movement launching is a process.
+ We are pioneering this ministry called Enfoque Mexico, so this IS our first draft. We're figuring it out as we go, so there isn't a place that we should be at already. We're learning as we go.
+ It's not easy to write first drafts. It hasn't been. It's work. It's messy.
+ Some days we only get a sentence down on paper and others we get ten pages worth of stuff to follow up on.
+ Currently we're just trying to put everything down on paper, going with it, following it, and later we'll make some changes to improve it.
+ After writing the first draft there is a fear that people will judge us for it, rather than seeing the potential within it.

Anne Lamott goes on to say on page 25, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something--anything--down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft--you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy."

And this is indeed what we are doing as we set out to pioneer spiritual movements. We are simply trying to get something started--anything at all. And then hopefully giving direction to that something with a little more clarity. And lastly, helping people involved formulate and tackle new ways to touch and transform their communities with the hope found in Jesus Christ, thus making them into a multiplying spiritual movement. It's a process with failures and successes all along the way.

But they all start with getting something down first, letting our first efforts be first efforts, and improving them from there. Thanks Anne for your insights into life and writing. They have helped us maintain a little sanity as we think about seeing a city transformed and lives and communities touched. More to come.

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