whatever you do.

While Wordpress 2.5 sounds sexy, I hate having to update my blog structure every month. Why oh why can’t there be some sort of automatic update. Or is there and I am just missing it?

Bah.

How many categories do you fit into? I think I spot at least 15 that would describe me… Man, I’m a Geek!

The sketches continue at ExtraLife’s flickr stream. He is a fantastic cartoonist.

“Our organizations have tended to value control, stability, and the ability to quickly resolve tension with a solution. However, one of the dominant currencies of creativity is tension – the ability to hold seemingly opposing forces in dynamic relationship without privileging one at the expense of the other or too quickly resolving it. New life is messy and doesn’t always fit neatly into preexisting categories . . .

“. . . Creativity values tension because it creates possibility.”

Tim Keel, Intuitive Leadership, 200-201

Often we jump to answers before we have even asked the questions. We live in the assumption that until we have something pinned down we are unable to truly engage it. We love specimens, artifacts, conclusions, and statements. The problem is, once we have successfully avoided the tension by assuming a standard we have precluded the need for creativity and possibility. Nothing will be birthed.

Ever noticed how every time someone is born they are a new thing? Fascinating. We never biologically birth something that is exactly the same. In our most creaturely engagements with creation we can’t help but be wondrously imaginative.

I’m going a bit nuts with implementing some plug-ins on the site today.

One such plug-in is avatar images in the comments. Pretty simple sign-up to join the fun. Simply visit here and upload an image. It is a fairly common avatar program around the blogs. Have fun!

I’m also playing around with Mint. Pretty sexy stats implementation. If you know of any really handy Pepper plug-ins that I should attach let me know about them, please.

“We do not need more Christian leaders building church empires at a time when our culture is dismantling other such structures around us. We must deconstruct ourselves in love. A postmodern context requires leaders who instead of seeking to dominate the environment are willing to become environmentalists – people who create spaces that allow God’s people to have the possibility of an encounter with God and other people. Such an environment allows people to discover a future together under God instead of reducing them to mere pawns serving some larger agenda that comes from outside themselves.”

Tim Keel, Intuitive Leadership, 111-112.

Tags: leadership, emerging, church

Today I continue and complete my lately read summaries. There is not nearly as much of a theme with this bunch as there was with the previous list. However, each of these four books were no less formative. Let’s dive in.

1. Pagan Christianity - George Barna and Frank Viola

Straight into the fire. First, the airing of grievances. Frank really diminishes his very important points in two big ways.

First, the word PAGAN. From various interviews and responses to critics it is clear that Frank’s argument in this book is not that Pagan = Evil. The discussion goes along great until the inevitable mentions of the P word. It’s gets to be just about as bile-inducing as Heretic, or Biblical, or American Beer. I wish the title of the book was something like “The Fossilizing of Christianity” or “Calcified Christianity”. I don’t know. The idea that the God of the universe would be concerned with paganism is so daft to me.

Second, there is a lot of rigidity in the way Viola and Barna present this organic dream of church. Josh Brown’s misgivings after hearing Frank speak in Florida speak a bit to this. I really was taken back by the idea that someone so infatuated with an organic church model could be so rigid in how that works itself out. I just don’t understand the New Testament community as being meant to be prescriptive to all eras. Certainly Jesus’ reminder to make love of our neighbor on par with our love of God (indeed the two should be and must be indistinguishable and inseparable) is a very really need in every faithful community, but not the skins that we wrap around it.

Viola’s warnings to avoid deifying our church structures that are not “biblical” (ew!) are very important to heed when these structures obscure a picture of loving, worshipping, formative community.

There are a few opportunities for imagination that I have taken from the reading of this book:

• Full understanding and implementation of the priesthood of all believers.
• Movement toward every member functioning, and given space to contribute in our meetings
• Imagination with regards to compensation to staff (bi-vocational pastorate, etc)
• Revisiting giving
• Communion in community (Party!)
• Reworking Christian education and programs

I am very glad to be done with this book though. It was not a pleasure to read. I did not leave it feeling positive, but I am determined to work with it and leave behind the foulness and build love and creativity from Frank’s work. Not in an effort to be more biblical or less pagan, but in an effort to be a fuller representation of Christ’s body and Kingdom resident.

2. The New Christians - Tony Jones

Two words sum up this book for me. Inviting and Hope.

This is a book that is very inviting to anyone who has questions about the bold frontiers of Christianity in America and the world. This is not a harsh book. Tony is gracious in his arguments and easy to engage throughout the work. He is honest when it comes to past criticisms of Emergent and even includes a fairly even handed early history of the friendship. Incidentally if anyone was skeptical about that word choice (friendship) to describe emergent, I think TNC does a great job of laying bare just how much this really has grown out of friendships. And it continues to evolve new kinships and conversations. Discussions with Jewish communities who also find themselves in this emerging landscape gush with grace and honesty.

The New Christians helps us to understand that we can’t pigeonhole emerging into a Christian phenomenon. This is just one part of a world wide shift. We can either embrace the changes and live fully into this moment God has given us, or we can continue to recede into our caves of comfort and modernity. One thing is clear, the God’s world will not stick around to wait for you.

I really appreciated the final chapters where Tony engages with a variety of emerging communities and developing philosophies (wikichurch). The beautiful messiness of these communities really draws me. These communities are nobody’s attempts to be trendy or relevant, they are just the only way we know how to do things. Sitting in church structures that were normal for our great grandparents just doesn’t make sense anymore. This is the Hope. God is not done yet. See, he is doing a new thing. Even now it springs up. Can’t you see it? Our hope is fully in him as we march on into the frontiers of now.

Man, now that was meandering…

3. What is the What - Dave Eggers

I don’t know how this book pulls it off! And I don’t know how I’ll explain that exclamation without giving away too much of the story!

One day, around 10 years of age, I was deep in my own dreamland as usual. I miss-judged the edges of my bed and summersaulted right out into open bedroom air and landed squarely on my upper back. I felt that horrible woosh as the last pockets of air jumped from my lungs and I wheezed and cried feebly for them to come back inside. This book is that experience, but repeated every 10 minutes for 350 pages.

The plight of the Lost Boys of Sudan make me wonder if I will ever experience life. How could I really know what a good day is when I have been able to avoid seeing my friends snatched away in the jaws of lions. Or had to walk past children barely old enough for school as their life leaked away from starvation. Reality is too real. My selfishness inside wishes this book was not around to confront my fat belly and overextended credit.

It seems that great stories of life aren’t read so much as they read us.

4. The Shack - William P. Young

A book that opens up a possibility of what it means to claim you can say anything of substance about what God does or doesn’t do. Secondarily this book imagines possible dance steps of a God who is Three in One (Father, Son, Gardener). William Young seems to have provoked the wrath of all those critics who just can’t stay away from their keyboard long enough to wait for Brian McLaren’s next book. Personally, I loved it. This book claims nothing about truth, but rather dreams a dream. I haven’t studied trinitarian thought enough to say anything about the theology in this novel. So I will end here. It didn’t change my life as some have said, but I won’t deny the tears on my cheek near the end. Good stuff.

NO DEAL

Making a New Year’s Resolution to read a certain number of books means that you end up reading some books. Seriously. So, in order to do some worthwhile reflecting and remarking, here are the books I have recently read and some minor thoughts that have arisen in me from them. I think I will split this into two or more parts, assuming that many eyes glaze when reading long passages on a screen. I know mine do.


The first four are in definite relationship:

1. Everything Must Change - Brian McLaren

Much has been written about this book. So I will not really interact with it in depth. Just a couple of thoughts. I appreciate so much the work that Brian is doing. The conversations he is involved in all over the world are so important. The trajectory of his life has made him the center of a hurricane of criticisms.

After considering this work from a social point of view I find myself lacking in resolve in so many areas. I drink too much, I buy too much, I work too little for the luxury I have. I neglect my neighbour, I dislike my neighbour, I work against my neighbour, I don’t know my neighbour. I am grateful for someone like Brian who will confront me and witness to the mission of Christ that we are called to that manages to wind its way out of the church buildings that use to captivate our Saviour (perhaps to keep him from being crucified again.)

When considering Brian’s book from a theological point of view it is another effort to get us to shed this diabolical notion that God’s work (and the church’s) is to save individual souls from eternal hell. More than anything we need to surrender our warehousing instincts. No more pray a prayer and saved forever. However, this DOES NOT mean we are otherwise left to work out our salvation through our works.

Jesus proclaims that simply believing his good news brings salvation. This is “salvation by grace through faith” in a planetary sense: if we believe that God graciously offers us a new way, a new truth, and a new life, we can be liberated from the vicious, addictive cycles of our suicidal framing stories. That kind of faith will save us. If we don’t believe, we will persist in trying harder and harder, again and again, to acheive our own salvation through our existing narratives and the techniques they inspire. Even if Jesus’ “saving poetry” is true, our failure to believe it will keep us from experiencing its saving potential, and so we’ll spin on in the vicious prose cycles of Caesar.” (McLaren, p. 270)

This leads me to a thought I have had recently. Should our salvation as fully expressed in the work of Jesus Christ really be coupled, and really, made one with a subsequent (and preexistent) call to follow? Whether through believing or working I am thoroughly suspicious of a salvation story that ends in something WE do. But I will leave this thread alone for now.

2. Irresistable Revolution - Shane Claiborne

Another World Is Possible.

There isn’t much to say other than GO READ THIS. This book stirred my imagination and dropped a 50,000 pound weight on my pride and greed. There is not a page in the 300 or so that does not convict. Unfortunately I read it a while ago and have since loaned out my copy so I can’t drop down the myriad of quotes that I have underlined in it. I do have one which I had copied into a text file.

“When we are trying to teach kids not to hit each other and they see a government use violence to bring about change, we start to consider what it means to give witness to a peace that is not like the world gives. (John 14:27)” (Shane Claiborne)

As he mentions in his book, it is in much sadness that we hear this kind of life being called Radical. This is the way we are supposed to live! It should be Normal. Everyone, can we please pledge to help make Shane normal?

3. Colossians Remixed - Silvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh

The imagination thing continues in this epic outpouring from the lives of Silvia and Brian. And I mean lives. These two live out their theology, which is the only way to do it. Praxidoxy? I don’t know.

Anyway, Colossians Remixed is one part commentary, one part translation, one part targum, one part social conscience, and four zillion parts pure creation/gospel/reconciliation-particaptory imagination. How has our current social structures and abuses disguised the subversive culture confronting message of Paul to the Colossians? Now that we have rediscovered the danger inherit in this text how do we translate it to speak into the powers and principalities of our own times? And dare we? If anyone knows of similar treatments of other books in the Bible please send me in their direction. 5 Stars. (note… I actually somewhat dislike the giving of a rating, but I just can’t help it here…. 6 Stars!)

4. Martin Luther King Jr. (Penguin Lives Biography) - Marshall Frady

I’m pretty sure this guy was quoted in all three of the books mentioned above. What to say…

Marshall does not sugar coat King. I really appreciate this. King was in this world just as much as George Wallace. King had no intention of trying to separate himself from the dirt of life. He lived an imperfect life and made it his goal to live intentionally whole. The weight of his choices crushed him from every side. And sometimes he melted. But he could not be moved. As much as we would like to imbue King with angelic status it just doesn’t stick. And I am glad that we are kept from that in Frady’s biography. We can more easily march alongside King and stand against the firehoses and know that while we go home and weep, so does this man who only hopes to have the strength to do it all again – only because he must.

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

Here stands another Radical. Let us stand with him! Please!

Next time….

5. Pagan Christianity - George Barna and Frank Viola

8. The Shack - William P. Young

I think the last design probably lasted longer than any other I have had… but I needed a change. I’ve decided that 2 sidebars is way more than what is necessary for this space. So I am trimming down to one and placing more focus on the content rather than on the flash. I’ve temporarily done away with the sacred cow of a header image, but I’m sure that won’t be gone for long. My arting instincts will kick in. Probably later tonight.

While I’m tempted to say the world needs more Anne’s, I would also be deeply offended to find another.

Below is an interview with Anne at the 2007 Writer’s Symposium by the Sea. She is so engaging and honest. I absoutely adore her.