Playing Fantasy Football for MoneyA few weeks ago I joined eleven fellow churchgoers in my brother-in-law’s basement for 2 hours of drafting fake teams made up of real players. Some call it, “The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard Of”. We call it “Fantasy Football”. For the third year in a row, one of the new guys approached me and sheepishly asked:

New Guy: “So, um, are we playing for fun, or are we…playing for a little, um, money?”Me:

“Yeah, we each put in $20.”

New Guy: “Good, it’s always more fun when there’s a few bones on the line.” (At which point I would immediately kick him out of the house. Anyone who refers to money as “bones” should be banned for life from your fantasy league on principle alone.)

The topic of gambling is a HUGE can of worms among Christians, and I’d be lying if I said part of me doesn’t want to leave that can unopened on the shelf next to the bottled water and the rest of the Y3K preparedness kit. The truth is, some of you reading this are completely against gambling in all forms, and are already giving me dirty looks through your screens (I can feel them). Others of you passionately love gambling and have already placed prop bets in Vegas on how many comments this post will get (Vegas currently has the under/over set at 32.5).

There are Christians on all sides of this issue, and while many of them know exactly where they stand on gambling, not everyone is sure where they should draw the line when it comes to risking their hard-earned money (which technically belongs to God anyway, right?). Can I buy a $5 powerball ticket and still go to heaven? Can I take communion on Sunday if I wagered twenty bucks on my golf round yesterday? Is it true that NCAA Bracket Pools were created by demons who had grown tired of waiting around for Armageddon?

I can’t answer those questions for you. But what I can do is give you a list of guidelines to help you figure out whether or not you should play fantasy sports for money. Bet you $5 it helps you out.

SHOULD I PLAY FANTASY FOOTBALL FOR MONEY?

If you’ve always wanted to be a part of the NFL and this brings you closer to the game, then go for it.
If you currently play, coach, or referee in the game, then maybe not.

If your league’s $20 entry fee means skipping a movie or dinner out for a month, then go for it.
If your league’s $2,000 entry fee means skipping a mortgage payment and tithe check for a month, then maybe not.

If no one else in your league has ever watched a football game before, then go for it.
If you’ve never watched a football game before, then maybe not.

If you found $50 in your Bible on the way to the draft, then go for it.
If you stole that Bible from someone at church to sell on eBay, then maybe not.

If you’re excited about the fellowship you’ll get from interacting with other owners during the season, then go for it.
If you’re excited about colluding with other owners to cheat your way to a tainted championship, then maybe not.

If you’re favorite Bible passage is “the love of money is the root of all evil”, then go for it.
If you’re favorite Bible passage is “then they cast lots for Jesus’ garments”, then maybe not.

If the thought of it reminds you of when you used to make friendly wagers on games with your dad or your kids, then go for it.
If the thought of it reminds you of when you used to steal from the offering plate to pay your bookie, then maybe not.

If you plan on donating all your winnings to the Church’s prison ministry, then go for it.
If you are currently a part of the Church’s prison ministry because you’re incarcerated, then maybe not.

and finally,

If you heard an audible voice from heaven say, “Hey! This is God. Don’t gamble.” then maybe not…but…If you heard an audible voice from heaven say, “Hey! This is God. Let it Ride!”, then hey…Let it Ride!

So what are your thoughts on friendly wagers, Fantasy Football, and waking up in Vegas?
Let ‘em ride in the comments…

PS…for daily doses of Bryan’s nonsense, check out his blog and his Twitter Feed.

And so, being the friend I am, I have been praying for him. Most of my prayers look roughly like this:

“Dear God, please surround my friend with positive influences. Cover him in love. Comfort him in this difficult time and remind Him how much you love and care for him.”

Now clearly I left out some key phrases in that prayer. There are a few things missing.

I didn’t say the word “just” one time.

I didn’t ask God to “love on” him.

I didn’t ask for a hedge of protection or let God know that my friend was backsliding or that God needed to rain down on him.

I left out a lot of things, but ultimately the thing I really left out was what is secretly bubbling in my heart sometimes:

“God, I ask that you accomplish all these things in my friend’s life as long as it doesn’t involve me in anyway. I pray that you will surround him with love as long as that surrounding doesn’t involve me making a phone call or going out to dinner with him or anything like that.”

I didn’t say that to God, but I should have, because that’s where my heart is often. I want God to surround this guy with positive influences, as long as one of them is not named “Jon Acuff.” I want God to comfort this friend as long as that comfort is not expressed in the form of us having a long phone call or cup of coffee. I want God to remind him he is loved as long as I’m not the vehicle for that reminder.

I mean come on, I’m really busy. I’ve got so much going on. I’m a really important blogger. I’d love to help God, I would, but look at my schedule! I’ve got a family and a full time day job. I haven’t even had time to get rid of my unibrow! I’m that busy. I’m too slammed right now writing a Christian blog and speaking around the country on the topic of community and how we should love people in God’s name and oh … dangit.

I can’t blog about the need to love people and then not love people.

I can’t pretend people matter to me and then not spend time doing the stuff that matters to people.

I can’t pray for a miracle I’m not willing to be part of.

This is a ridiculous phenomenon, asking God to accomplish things just as long as they don’t involve you. That is the kind of thing that my friends who use the word postmodern to describe everything from scholarly papers to pancakes would probably say, “how pomo of you.”

Hopefully, as you’ve read this post you’ve thought, “That sinner. That filthy heathen Jon. What a sucky friend. I am so glad I don’t suffer from that.” But if you do, if you’re even a smidge like me, let’s reexamine our prayers and see if what we’re praying and what we’re living aren’t lining up.

And then, after we’ve done that, after we’ve looked at our prayers and our lives, let’s breakdance in joy that we’ve got a savior who never stops saving us from our own silliness.

Have you ever done this?

Me? I’m sweaty. I’m anxious. The butterflies in my stomach aren’t tangled and nervous, they’re on meth.

Maybe I’ll lose that if I get the chance to speak more, but for right now that’s what happens in the moments before I speak. Except at the North Points Singles Retreat. That one was a little different.

Ten minutes before I jumped up on the stage and did my thing in front of maybe a few hundred people, I told a friend about one of things I was going to talk about.

He casually replied, “Oh, that’s cool. The woman who spoke last night covered that same verse and idea.”

If it were possible to do it without anyone seeing, I probably would have thrown up in my pants pocket at that exact moment.

Let me translate what my friend said into Jon language:

“Oh, that’s cool. The woman who spoke to everyone who is about 10 minutes away from hearing your breakout message spoke about the same thing. Her speech was really original. You should have heard it. You would have liked it, much like everyone else. They loved it. You should have heard the life change that was happening in the room last night. I mean it was audible, like bubble wrap popping. Just amazing. I’m sure they’ll like hearing that same message a second time though, ten hours later. Sure, it’s always fun to hear something ‘newish.’ I mean brand new is great, but newish is nice too. You should probably change whatever your opener was though to ‘I’m not original.’ Good luck with all that Jon.”

Into an already cluttered head, that message tumbled like marbles down a flight of wooden stairs. I started to worry that everyone in the crowd would think I stole that idea. That I was a hack of a public speaker. That I couldn’t come up with material and that they shouldn’t have invited me to speak. Me, me, me, me, me.

Suddenly the whole thing was about me. My ministry. My reputation. My speaking. My message. Suddenly I crowded God right out of the picture and made the whole thing about me.

And it’s weird how that happens. Sometimes even when you think you’re headed in the right direction, even when you think you’re out serving the Lord it gets tangled. You get a few readers to your blog. Your church grows a little. Your ministry gets a bump and people start thinking you’re something a little special. And then it’s complicated, much like Avril Lavigne tried to warn us. The lines of doing something for God and doing something for yourself get a little blurred.

I want it to be simple. I don’t want it to be so complex and it turns out it is. Though I often wrestle with issues without consulting the Bible first (which is ridiculous when you think about it, we’ve got more than 1,000 pages of God saying “here, this is what life is all about”) this time I did. And lo and behold, the Bible has five words that to me, define what it’s all about to have a ministry.

In John chapter 1, John sees Jesus for the second time. At this point, John has his own followers. He’s built up a nice little ministry. There are disciples of John. He has a crew. An entourage if you will. And what does he do when he sees Jesus walk by? What does John say to his disciples in 1:36?

“Look, the lamb of God.”

What do his disciples do in response?

They leave. They follow Jesus. They abandon John standing there suddenly short two disciples.

I didn’t want that to happen when I spoke a few weeks ago. When I found out I might look repetitive or like a copycat during my speech, I got worried that people would leave my ministry. I missed the point.

The point isn’t me. The point is Jesus.

I think the point, no matter if you’ve got a blog with two readers or a church with 20,000 people attending is pretty simple:

“Look, the lamb of God.”

Look the lamb of God.

Don’t worry about yourself. Don’t get lost in trying to grow your thing. Just say five words and get out of the way. It’s that simple.

Look, the lamb of God.

You see, right now my wife and I are “stealing Awanas,” the Bible club VBS type class kids attend at church. Our church doesn’t offer it. It’s not their thing and I’m cool with that. But in order to have our kids involved in it we had to scout out other churches in the area and then quietly embed ourselves as if we were members. Like some sort of spiritual SWAT team we swing through the windows, grab all the ministries we need and then high tail it out of there.

And we found the perfect church down the street from us called First Redeemer. So every Wednesday night we drop our kids off and then buy dinner in the dining hall with all the unsuspecting attendees of First Redeemer, but last night I almost messed up the whole thing.

The problem was that my wife wasn’t with me. She was at a consignment sale at another church we don’t attend. (We’re a couple of pew pillagers aren’t we?) So after Awanas was over, I took my daughters to dinner at the church. Everything was cool until a man walked up to me and said, “Mind if we join you?”

“Oh snap, ” I thought to myself. “Be cool, Jon, be cool.”

“Sure, go ahead.” What do I say, what do I say to this guy? Make conversation, talk about the traffic, this is Atlanta, that is a fallback, go to topic. Instead I heard my mouth utter the worst possible phrase, “Do you attend here?”

He immediately looked at me with a quizzical expression and said, “Of course.”

Worst is over right, we’ll move on and talk about something else? Wrong. He continued.

“My daughter is in the choir.”

Uh oh.

“My mom is the one serving food right over there.”

Oh no.

“I actually work at this church and have for years.”

Yowza!

“I’m also on the security detail that tasers people that use our facility without attending this church.”

OK, he didn’t say that last one, but I was sitting with “Joe First Redeemer.” This guy was going to figure out we didn’t belong here. It was only a matter of time, so I did what any mature Christian parent would have done in that situation, I told my daughters to hurry up and finish their chocolate pudding and I got out of their as fast as possible.

What mistakes did I make? What things do you need to be aware of if your church is focused on certain things and therefore doesn’t offer some services/ministries you’d like to be part of? How do you pew pillage without blowing it like me?

Here are a few pointers:

1. Never make eye contact.
The more you look people in the eyes the more likely you are to get invited to a new members class. Focus on your feet when you’re at the church.

2. Don’t give people your real name.
Pick one of the gospels, “Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.” The least real info you can leave behind at the scene of the crime the better. Now clearly I couldn’t have given fake names for my daughters last night. Like her adorable habit of yelling “They’re not wearing a bike helmet!” at families we see not wearing bike helmets, my 3 year old would have correct me if I said, “This is my daughter Orpha.”

3. Don’t linger.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, like the Cranberries warned us all those years ago, “Do you have to let it linger?” No, you don’t. My family eating dinner at the church is a bit like showboating. We’ve already won, we’ve already gotten what we came for, the Awanas class, there’s no reason to stick around and celebrate our theological theft with a fried catfish dinner. And yet, we do. Like joy riding the stolen car instead of taking it straight to the chop shop, dinner is probably a mistake.

You might not need any of these tips if your church offers everything you like to do. Or you could also hypothesize that if First Redeemer found out that we were using their Awanas program they’d say, “Awesome, that’s why we do it. It’s an act of community outreach. We’re thrilled that your kids are learning about God.” I mean I suppose that could be the case, but regardless, please know that next Wednesday when we go back to dinner I’m going to be looking for that guy on the church security team and probably wearing a fake mustache. Don’t tase me bro, don’t tase me.

Have you ever visited another church for a ministry or activity your church didn’t offer?

“The Power Team. One of the rules I live by is never make fun of ministry that are based on feats of strength.”

I don’t care who you are or what your blog is, that’s just smart living right there. But maybe you’ve never heard of the Power Team. They were/are a group of weightlifters that travel the country doing strong man acts like blowing up water bottles with their lungs, ripping telephone booths in half with their bare hands and breaking baseball bats over their knees. Or as we call it at the Acuff house, “Saturday afternoon.” What can I say, that’s just what we like to do.

Today, instead of making fun of the Power Team, I decided to give them a few free ideas. Ways to become more Biblical, relevant and dare I say, awesomer? And if the Power Team doesn’t like these, well, I once heard Carlos Whitaker say that he didn’t like your tank tops so you should probably arm wrestle him first instead of tuning me up. I digress.

Without further ado, I give you:

Stuff Christians Like Suggestions for the Power Team

1. More Animals
I don’t know if it’s difficult to get a lion, but please get a lion. My friends parents toured around the country with one in a motor home during the 70s as part of a promotion for the Born Free motor homes and their stories are fantastic. Think of all the Bible tales you could reenact. Benaiah in the pit on a snowy day. Young David out in the field playing his pan flute like Zamfir suddenly having to wrestle a lion. Daniel in the lion’s den. Yes, things briefly did not go well for Siegfried and Roy but that was a tiger, not a lion. And if a big jungle cat is too expensive, at the bare minimum train doves to fly around the room dropping souvenir olive branches on people. (Insert your own worship eagle joke right here.)

2. More Mountain Dewish
Is “dewish” not a real word? Well it should be. If you’re not willing to change your name to the “iPower Team” or the XPower Team,” the least you can do is to start working some X-games like flair into your routine. Instead of trying to do a walk on water feat of speed, get somebody who is really good at skim boarding to slide across the stage. You’re chopping through boards with your hands? Boring. Chopping through Zoo York skateboards? Relevant! Look at your entire program and ask yourself “What Would Dew Do?” And then laugh that you just said “Dew Do.” And then get Xtreme!

3. Better Nicknames
I took a look at your site and I gotta be honest with you, you guys need better nicknames. That’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. I tried to get people to call me “Jonathan Atuff” instead of “Jonathan Acuff” in middle school and that didn’t catch on. You know why? Because I’m not tough, but you guys are. You’re doing some big, cool, crazy things right now. Your nicknames need to reflect that. I saw that one of the girls in your group is nicknamed, “The minister of pain.” That’s a good start. On the other hand I saw one of the guys is named “Jonathan.” Seriously? That’s my name, that sounds like a pale skinned, soft handed copywriting blogger. No one in the history of spoken English has ever yelled, “Watch out, it’s Jonathan!” Please start calling him “Hammer of God” or the “Missionary Machete” or something like that.

4. Throw more things
I’ll admit, I haven’t been to one of your shows in a long time. (Ever?) But I guarantee that you guys aren’t throwing enough things. If I was running the Power Team, I would focus on three activities: Breakin’, Liftin’, and Throwin’. Based on your web site it appears you’ve got the first two down, but it’s time to up your throwin’ quotient. The best event on the television show, “World’s Strongest Man” was when the contestants would try to throw as many empty beer kegs over a high wall as they could. Granted, we’re going to need to change that one up a little, but what if you threw old school Old Testament cisterns over a high wall? Or what if you ripped doors off of hinges a la Samson and then threw those? I’m just saying, start throwing. People love throwing.

Those are my four recommendations for the Power Team. And I want to reiterate, I am not making fun of the Power Team. I’m talking directly to you right now, Jeremy the “Human Canonball.” I read your bio. You live in Atlanta and are capable of diving head first into a 9 foot thick wall of ice. I live in Atlanta too, let’s not be rash.

What feat of strength would you love to see the Power Team add to their show?

Now is your chance.

They just released a new album called, “Church Music” and I’ve got three copies to giveaway. Enter by leaving a comment on this post until Wednesday, October 7 with the one question you’d love to ask David Crowder. (Possible questions might include: How was recording the new album? What’s your favorite book? Any advice for someone thinking about growing/manicuring a significant goatee? Etc.) Seriously, ask whatever, you guys are too creative to ask boring questions.

I’ll pick three winners, send them to David Crowder and then post his response.

Sound good? Let’s do it.

What would you like to ask David Crowder?

“Hello, my name is Sue Ellen McDenomination, and my eldest grandson is a sophomore at State University. I’ve encouraged him to get involved in the Campus Crusade group on campus, but I wanted to see if you’d go by and invite him. He loves the Lord and is looking to get plugged in to a Christian community on campus. I’ve included his contact information below. Thank you and may God bless your ministry.”

Due to the nature of my job with Campus Crusade, and the fact that my name is on our ministry’s website, I get emails like this about once per week right at the beginning of school each semester. Here’s what she meant to type. Must be some sort of weird spell-check error.

“Hello, my name is Sue Ellen McDenomination. I have this grandson who may or may not be the antichrist. He lights things on fire, got the youth group banned from McAllisters for the rest of this decade, and once received the atheist club’s “most outspoken” award at his high school. How he even got into the college where you minister I am not sure. If I’m being honest, the last place he’d ever willingly go would be to a campus ministry. He’d be a lot more likely to be perfecting his keg-stand form, if his facebook pictures are any indication. He currently holds the fraternity record for most consecutive mornings waking up in someone else’s underwear, at 5.

Once at a youth retreat he stood up to place his faith in Christ, but mainly because Kaylee, his girlfriend, said she’d break up with him if he didn’t.

I’d love for you to stop by and convince him that, even though your group’s name is “Campus Crusade for Christ” and he’ll immediately associate you with the horrors of 15th century Europe (if you’re lucky) or our youth pastor (if you’re not), you’re a great group to get involved with. On second thought, could you hold back any information regarding your name or affiliation until he’s been coming for a few weeks? And I’d avoid giving him the website name for your group. Our church’s website has been redirecting to one of three Russian mail-order bride websites for over four years after he hacked it.

Can you actually forget the whole campus ministry thing for about six hours per week, (what do you people do for 40 hours a week anyways?) and just go and make sure my grandson doesn’t hurt himself or anyone else? I have a spare key to his car that I’ll be sending you via FedEx, and would love for you to hide the vehicle from him. That’s where he keeps most of his illicit drugs, though, so I’d obey all traffic laws. I’d hate for you to get pulled over “ridin dirty” as Chamillionaire so aptly put it.

Thanks so much for your time reading this. God bless your ministry. (but, again, I’d avoid calling it a “ministry” for at least a year after you invite Jimmy.)

PS. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him how you got his information, or his car keys. Thanks!”

(For more great stuff from Ben, check out his blog.)

I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, you’ve got a book coming out, don’t you have an entourage with one really big guy that everyone calls ‘Tiny’ and another guy that can always talk his way out of a jam and possibly a really tall guy who can reach things on shelves that you can’t? Aren’t you rich?” Yes, I mean globally speaking I am rich in that when I went to pick out shoes to wear today it was a multiple choice test. But I don’t have an entourage, a request that Zondervan continues to ignore. When I travel it’s just me and my backpack. No luggage, no baggage, just a seemingly bottomless LL Bean backpack which makes me feel a bit like Dora the Explorer.

So without an entourage, I decided to request that a guy drive me to the airport. I just wasn’t comfortable with the idea of spending an hour in LA traffic alone with a girl. That just didn’t seem smart to me and the conference was completely cool with that request. They found a guy, everything was good.

That felt like a no brainer to me. But what about other less obvious situations? When you get married, you’re suddenly thrown into all these awkward opposite sex friendship moments.

What about having a one on one meeting with a woman? Is it enough to just leave the door open? Or do you have to have three people present at all times? I know churches who use both approaches. My boss is a woman. When we talk about my salary and the exorbitant raise she’s not aware yet she’s giving at the end of the year, do I have to invite someone else to the conversation? What if I forget to? Can I grab the janitor on the way to the meeting and just tell him to maybe vacuum in the room we’re in if he feels weird and wants to multitask?

What about a lunch meeting? A married friend recently told me that if he couldn’t go out to lunch with females he couldn’t do his job. Is lunch with a lady a date? What if it’s a business lunch? The CEO of Zondervan is a lady, what if she calls me and says, “Jon, we’d like to give you a 37 book deal and your own Honda Ruckus Scooter for a cross country tour called ‘Ruckus by Ruckus,’ can we go out to lunch to discuss the details?” Do I have to invite someone along with me? What if my wife is not available that day?

And when you get married, at what point do you have to officially retire the silly sentence, “I’ve just always gotten along better with the opposite sex, that’s how I’m wired?”

I don’t know. I don’t have the answer on this one. Just the idea that things get a little awkward when you get married and have to figure out friendships with the opposite sex. But of the two camps, “Jeez you’re such a Puritan, loosen up” and “Better safe than sorry, can a dude drive me to the airport,” I know which one I want to fall into. Because no one ever wakes up and says, “Today I’m having an affair.” They’re slow burn decisions, with a wick a mile long made of little steps and little compromises.

Are you single?

Did your married friends of the opposite sex dump you the second they got hitched?

Are you married? What’s your approach? What are your boundaries?

But think about it, no one ever says, “You know who is cheesy? Muslims.” Rarely will you hear someone proclaim, “The Hindus are all uptight.” And when Buddhists are stereotyped they’re labeled as being “relaxed and peaceful.” Christianity though has a lockdown on dork status and you know what?

I love it.

I used to hate it. From the time I was in the seventh grade right up until I became 33 I railed against it. I did everything I could to prove to the world that I was not some cheesy Christian. I distanced myself from Christian culture as fast as I possibly could because it all felt so overwhelmingly dorky. But then something weird happened, my five year old tried to get into pop culture.

I’ve got nothing against the particular pop star my daughter suddenly became fascinated with but the transition from “I love the Wiggles” to “the Wiggles are for babies” was ridiculously fast. (In her defense, that Captain Feathersword who the Wiggles run with, scares me to death.) Up until that point I really hoped my daughter would grow up to be a cool kid. I wanted her to be part of the popular crowd at school and be considered hip. But when she started sweating pop stars and other little girls in our area started getting into teenage television shows, I had to pause.

Those things weren’t created for a 5 year old. The entertainment she wanted to watch was not written for a girl two years out of diapers. It’s got boyfriends and girlfriends and topics that are way out of her understanding as a little kid. She might love it. She might sing all the songs and have a blast doing it and fit right in with all her friends. But if I encourage her to do that, if I push her toward that, I fast forward her through childhood. I speed her up from a 5 year to a 10 year old. And although I make about 47 dad mistakes a day, I have learned one secret about childhood.

You can fast forward childhood, but you can’t rewind it.

I wish I could but I can’t. Childhood only goes one direction and I want her to stay a little kid for as long as she can. There will be plenty of time later for her to think boys are cute and interesting. (Right now I’m pushing for “smelly and cootie laden.”)

Until then though, she’s not going to be hip. I’m going to raise a dork. Which is different from naïve, don’t misunderstand, she’s going to be wise like a fox. Granted, I hope I don’t help create one of these sheltered Christian girls that just goes insane when they get to college. But I promise you that I’m going to do everything I can to keep her young, out of the loop as far as the world goes and maybe even dorky. And when she yells at me when she’s 13 because she can’t go to a party with a bunch of boys, who I know are going to try to kiss her, I’m going to show her this post. And she’s going to yell some more, but at least I’ll kind of look like I predicted the future, which is fun.

I was wrong.

Before I had even finished saying, “thank you for having me,” a guy in the front row had his arm up. And then a lady in the back row starting waving her hand and then like popcorn, hands started going up in the air and I started getting sweaty.

Without realizing it, I was suddenly thrown into an “Instant Sermon Feedback” situation. Never experienced an ISF? Allow me to explain.

An ISF is a quick Q&A session that immediately follows a message. It could be at a conference, in a Sunday School class, at an all members church meeting, etc. It’s simply your chance to respond with no wait to what you’ve just heard. And they can be tricky.

Usually in those situations, I bite my tongue because my first desire is to ask a fake question whose goal is only to get my across my own point and make me look smart. Basically I make a statement, instead of asking a question and essentially say, “Hey everyone in this room, I want you to think I’m smart and all bibley, so I’m going to pretend I have a question but really I’m just adding my own P.S. to this sermon.”

That’s ridunkulous, (a phrase I would say constantly if I could actually dunk which is why God cursed me with a low vertical leap, it’s my thorn in the flesh) but I do it. And chances are I’m not the only one who could use a little refresher in popular Instant Sermon Feedback.

So here are the three most common ways people respond when given a Q&A moment with a speaker:

1. Yeah, but.
If you’re a speaker and you hear this phrase, “Yeah but,” get ready for a wild ride my friend. No one ever starts a sentence with “Yeah but,” and then ends it with “you’re really awesome and a great communicator.” During my Biggest Gift ISF a woman asked me to “define intimacy.” I replied, “Intimacy is the ability to be emotionally naked and vulnerable without fear of consequence.” She immediately said, “Yeah but, I’m not talking about being all naked under the sheets.” Thrown into a weird tailspin by the “yeah, but” I had no other choice but to respond, “Neither am I, but I am a big fan of naked under the sheets.” I think I even gave naked under the sheets the double thumbs up as I said it. I’m such a smooth operator.

2. The Challenge
This one is fun to experience when it’s not you on the stage. Jumping right over “yeah, but,” someone in the crowd just busts out a question that lets you know they disagree. This happened to me, when a woman asked, “What would have been a gracious way to handle that situation you described?” What she meant was, “The way you handled it wasn’t gracious, can you please give us an example where the main character in the story, in this case you, isn’t a jerk?” Touché. She was referring to a story I told to illustrate what happens when you over share on a date. Once on a first date in college, I went to a girl’s apartment. She went back into her bedroom and emerged with a pillow case full of journals and diaries she had written over the years. She then proceeded to read them to me. In that moment I started to calculate how many of my keys I didn’t need and which ones I could throw into the kitchen to make a shiny, loud distraction so that I could sneak out a window. On a first date, the answer to the question, “Do you like living in Atlanta?” is never “My dad didn’t hug me enough or ever throw the baseball with me.” But the woman in the crowd was right, I could have handled that situation with more grace. So she got me, and you’ll have the chance as a crowd member to get a speaker with your own challenge during an ISF. I highly recommend it.

3. The curveball
Another great approach is to throw out a curveball, some completely unforeseen sentence of awesomeness that reduces both the speaker and the crowd to fits of laughter. That happened to me at the Christian Web Conference a few weeks ago. During the Q&A session I told the crowd, “humor is a gift from God and when we refuse to accept it, it makes him want to take it back, like the unicorns.” Minutes later, a very serious looking, bearded gentleman raised his hand. I called on him and he said, “Sure, but why did God take away the unicorns?” I loved that and responded with something like, “Because we took their beauty for granted and did not respect their ‘stabbing horns.’” He responded, “Well I think you’re disrespecting unicorns. I have a site called stuff unicorns don’t like.com and you just made that list.” I thought that was hilarious and chased that guy down later to ask him to guest post on Stuff Christians Like. Few things are as delightful as a perfectly thrown curveball.

Those are the three options I see most often, but what about you?

Have you ever experienced one of these three Instant Sermon Feedback moments?

What’s the funniest or weirdest or most awkward thing you’ve experienced during a church flavored Q&A?