Mission Archives - Ryan Weaver

.: Remedy is Multiplying…

February 25, 2016 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

Remedy Church is excited to announce that we are multiplying to plant Iglesia Remedy in Downtown Salisbury on April 3rd of 2016!

Iglesia Remedy is launching with a blended model as a multi-site church campus, and a new church plant. Iglesia Remedy is a multi-site work as an extension of the Go.Be.Do. mission of Remedy Church, retaining the DNA and oversight of the Remedy elders, and sharing resources as a network. Iglesia Remedy will also be a new church plant work, with the strategic vision to reach second-generation Latinos in our surrounding city and region.

Salisbury has never seen a census when our population has decreased.

And through the past two decades, we have become a strong regional center for migrants, who are moving to Salisbury to work and raise their families. We are planting Iglesia Remedy to help meet this need! In fact, we like to think of Iglesia Remedy as an intentionally “Spanglish Church Plant” that will serve Latinos and promote greater diversity in Downtown Salisbury.

We desire to see local expressions of the local church planted to meet the needs of our local context.

Our strategy for this church planting adventure is really two-fold:: we are planting Iglesia in the CC and re-planting Remedy in HQ. Our current 10am worship gathering is relocating into a music venue in DowntownSBY called HeadQuarters Live. We will essentially be re-planting ourselves in this mobile-site only two blocks away from our present location. The goal of this relocation is to shift our present congregational worship gatherings on Sunday mornings so we can create space for Iglesia Remedy to launch in the City Center building with an already established location.

It is no secret that we consider ourselves willing experimentalists at Remedy Church… and this is the next step in the adventure!

.: a Haitian wedding…

January 20, 2015 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

Amanda and I are with the Weaver Boys on our first trip to Haiti as a family. I’m writing this blog from our last stop in Florida before we fly into Port-Au-Prince.

The occasion is a Haitian Wedding!

Our partners and friends in Haiti, Junior St Cyr and Dominique Alexandré, are getting married this weekend. This is exciting stuff.

Amanda was able to snap this photo of Junior and Dominique this past summer.

Before the wedding, Amanda has been asked to lead an open photography conference through Manda Weaver Photography tomorrow afternoon at Eglise Baptiste de Compassion. The goal of the photography conference is two-fold:: education and job stimulation.

Haiti is a nation with many challenges… but few are as desperate as the lack of employment opportunities for Haitians. As organizations and governments continue working alongside our Haitian friends in so many vital arenas (child-trafficking prevention, health care, medicine, education, etc.), one of the most important for the future of Haiti is job stimulation and employment.

My friend, Corrigan Clay, has been engaged in the realm of Haitian job creation for many years. This is an area of emphasis for which he and his family have sacrificed much to champion. Corrigan believes that job creation should be the top priority for Americans who desire to partner in Haiti.

Pastor Jean-Alix Paul, one of our Haitian partners through Help One Now since 2010, has been preaching the importance of job creation and education for as long as I’ve known him.

Amanda will extend the training after the photography conference by selecting at least one Haitian photographer who will shoot the wedding with her. Our hope is that the training and donated photography equipment will be used to stimulate the local economy in some small but practical way.

I will be leading a Narrative Discipleship conference tomorrow as well. And as strange as the following may sound to some… this short discipleship seminar is far from the most important element of our trip.

This will be a transformational trip for my sons.

Updates are sure to come over the next few days…

.: Broken Places & Sacred Spaces…

November 14, 2014 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

The following story is long-overdue for publication.

One year ago, I was invited to be one of a few featured speakers at the very first Ignite Salisbury event. It was an honor in the highest regard to be included with so many of my friends and partners in this city I have embraced as my own. The event itself was magnificent. There are some events that catalyze momentum for a community… and this truly was an one of those events for the City of Salisbury in 2013.

Each speaker had 5 minutes and 20 slides to translate their passion for a topic into compelling and informative words (with visuals). The subjects were numerous and diverse. The venue was electric (even without central heat on a very cold night). The speakers were engaging and endearing. The gathered audience was generous with their ears and their laughter. The event was a landmark city-building moment for Salisbury.

The talk that I gave centered on the theme of “UTOPIA” and HOPE.

It was entitled “Broken Places & Sacred Spaces“.

The following is the Ignite Salisbury documentary from our local PAC14 public access channel. My talk is featured at about the 40th minute. I encourage you to watch the entire video because each speaker added such nuance and value to the event.

(view my slide-deck here)

#welcometotherenaissance

.: the CLIMAX of pseudo-life…

May 31, 2014 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

Wasted.

Wasted. That’s the post-bellum of the pseudo-conquest. That’s the after-taste of pseudo-love.

In a recent TED talk, respected psychologist and Stanford professor, Philip Zimbardo, presented his assertion that pornography and video game addictions are (at this very moment) re-wiring the mental, sexual, educational, and social desires of an entire generation of men. The self-stated goal of his 4-minute talk was not to present solutions, but to shock his listeners into action. He followed this talk with a digitally-formatted TED book, which seeks to delve deeper into gaming addiction and porn addiction. In both publications (the talk and the book), his intention is not to deal with the morality of porn and gaming, but to present his research on how this is re-wiring manhood and our society as a contextual whole.

Russell Moore, recently published his thoughts on Zimbardo’s research in an article on the DesiringGod blog entitled, “Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games“.

After reading Moore’s article and watching the TED talk, I decided to prioritize reading Zimbardo’s book yesterday for two reasons::

ONE… I am raising two men who are continually being forced to deal with social, mental, sexual, and educational realities of the world in which we live, breathe, move, and love.

TWO… I shepherd men who are living pseudo-lives in constant contrast to a life completely engaged in the world in which we live, breathe, move, and love.

I believe that every sunrise, every sunset, every breath, every heartbeat, every moment is an invitation to live my life completely engaged.

I preached this core belief this past Sunday… but I strive to live this core belief in the messy reality of my life every sunrise, every sunset, every breath, every heartbeat, every moment, every day.

I believe that men are intended to reject the pseudo-life by receiving the invitation to live completely.

The etymology for the prefix “pseudo” in the English language finds it’s root in the Greek:: pseudos. Pseudos is false. Pseudos is virtual. Pseudos is the exchange of truth, reality, a life engaged… for the fake, the lie, a life wasted.

Wasted.

Wasted. That’s the post-bellum of the pseudo-conquest. That’s the after-taste of pseudo-love.

And after all this… I wonder::
What’s the climax of a pseudo-life?

.: returning to Haiti…

May 29, 2014 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

On January the 12th of 2010, while Amanda and I were celebrating her birthday, the Republic of Haiti experienced a catastrophic earthquake. The quake occurred only two days after the public launch of Remedy Church, and compelled our young church to gain global perspective in a way that we couldn’t have anticipated. After several months of researching potential partnerships with NGO’s who were working in Haiti, we connected with Chris Marlow and his organization (Help One Now) that was working to engage the global orphan crisis and global poverty through sustainable efforts.

From that first conversation with Marlow in June of 2010 through today, Remedy Church has been blessed with the opportunity to dig two water wells, creatively partner with Pastor Gaetan’s orphanage and church, support a Haitian teacher, and fund one of our Remedy Covenant Partners as a missionary alongside Help One Now.

In July of 2011, Wayne Witzke and I travelled to Haiti with Chris Marlow to meet our Haitian friends and partners, and explore the next steps for our partnership with Help One Now. Over the past three years, I have prayed for an opportunity to travel back to Haiti with my wife.

That opportunity has finally arrived.

I will be returning to Haiti in July of 2014.

Amanda and I will be traveling with a team of Covenant Partners from Remedy Church. This will be our first team to send to Haiti. We will be supporting (financially and physically) Haitian builders in the building of a solid home for a local Haitian family who own the property and will inhabit the home once it has been completed. We will also be doing some CPR training, photography work, and a couple of other futuring projects while we are on the ground.

I am overjoyed that I will see my friends in Haiti again soon.

And I can’t wait to introduce them to my wife… and a few of the amazingly generous people from Remedy who have sent love, prayers, and support since 2010.

.: against omnicompetence…

May 10, 2014 by Ryan Weaver Leave a Comment

There are many approaches to leadership development, mentoring, and discipleship within organizations and churches.

And there is no leadership development approach that is flawless.

One of my mentors exposed me to the “strengths-based movement” when I chose to follow the path of pursuing a minor under-grad degree in leadership while attending SOSU… but I didn’t truly invest energy or mental bandwidth toward this leadership development approach until August of 2010 (at the beginning of my sabbatical).

The most attractive part of the strengths-based approach to leadership is the simple focus that it gives to a leader. By the very nature of the model, the strengths-based leadership approach rejects the ideal of omnicompetence.

We utilize the strengths-based approach in our leadership track at Remedy Church because we want to catalyze each of our leaders to be as effective as possible beyond the doors of our church building. We have discovered that leaders are more passionate and focused when they lead from their strengths. We have also found that our Elders are better informed in how to shepherd our organization (because the local church is BOTH an organism and an organization) effectively when we understand the natural (and nurtural) strengths of each leader.

This is a pallet wall that we have just begun building in our Shepherding Office. This strengths wall design has already helped us during a recent organizational transition because it made the strengths of our current leaders more tangible. We hope to expand this beyond our current leaders through our entire Covenant Partnership in 2014.

When we have the beautiful opportunity to commission and send one of our leaders… we give them their individual strengths board as a relic of remembrance and appreciation.

Again, there is no approach to leadership and discipleship that is without its’ flaws because each leader, each disciple-maker, and each organization has blindspots and baggage. But the greatest travesty for emerging leaders is working and serving in organizations that think leaders will simply emerge “naturally”.

Leadership development doesn’t happen on accident.

Recently, we discovered a free strengths assessment tool that is comparable to the Clifton StrengthsFinder. I still believe the Clifton StrengthsFinder is the superior test… but if you are in a pinch financially (or just ultra-skeptical) this strengths assessment tool is “close enough”. The primary downside (beyond the poor branding) is that you will have to translate the names of the 34 themes from the hacked-monikers to the true Clifton StrengthsFinder themes. I also dislike the fact that the free test generates a ranking of all 34 themes for the leader… this steals from the beauty of the StrengthFinder’s simple focus. Alas… the test is free, and in our local comparison tests, it produced results that were very similar to the results of those who had previously taken the official Clifton StrengthsFinder.

And so (without further delay)… here are my strengths::

+ Strategic…
+ Activator…
+ Command…
+ Self-Assurance…
+ Futuristic…

What are your strengths?

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