What book are you currently reading (or have just finished reading) and why?  If you want, tell us what you think so far.

In 2003 just before the war, gas prices were $1.40 and climbing.  Ugh.

What is the one song you can listen to that will pick you up?

For me it is Don’t Stop Beleiving by Journey.  Instant lift.

Think sports stars are wealthy and sitting in some mansion after retirement?  Chances are they’ve gone bankrupt.  Very funny.

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Let’s hope Willow Creek’s next step really is discipleship.

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Doug Pagitt interviewed on his new book A Christianity Worth Believing.

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Phyllis Tickle at Mars Hill on the Great Emergence.  This is a must listen for anyone wanting to understand what is happening right now.  Brilliant insights.

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Seven questions answered by the likes of Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Rick Warren and Mark Driscoll to name a few.

A lot of people talk about deconstruction like this.They say, “Well we’ve got to deconstruct and then once we’ve deconstructed, we can rebuild.”

And I want to stop at that point and say, “No.  We never cease to deconstruct.  Deconstruction is not like knocking down a building so we can clear a space to build something new.  Deconstruction is like the heat that keeps our ideas fluid and molten and moving and dynamic.”

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I do not believe Christians are called to believe in the resurrection of Christ.  I believe we are called to be the resurrection of Christ.  To be the site where resurrection takes place.

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Revelation has been reduced to the idea of God whispering something into your ear….but this is not what we find in the Bible or in the deep tradition of Christianity.  Revelation is not something that makes manifest an idea.  Revelation is what transforms us.  We know a revelation has taken place when there is incomprehension, bedazzlement, and transformation.

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But my favorite:

I try and keep in dialog by finding what is authentic and beautiful.  What we tend to do is…whenever we are in an argument I will argue from the place of strength, the strongest part of my argument and direct is at the weakest part of your argument.  And you will in turn take the strongest part of your argument and attack the weakest part of my argument.  And what I really want to do is to enter into dialogs where I can talk about the weakest part of my argument and you can talk about the weakest part of your argument.  and I can accept and celebrate the strongest part of your arguments and visa-versa.

Peter Rollins from the Nick and Josh Podcast Interview.

NOTE: If you read this in a reader in the morning, my original quote of some of Peter’s words were misheard, specifically the word “hate”.  He said “heat”.  It’s the thick Irish accent.  They have now been corrected.

These guys were poets extraordinaire.  But they disbanded in 2000.  Nail Holes still is one of my all time favorite songs.

So who is one of your favorite bands?

If you live in Norcal.

Obama caught my eye in the grocery store. It was the caption.

“What we need now is not a leader to assure us of our greatness, but one who will challenge us to reassert it.”

This is an article I want to read not just for Obama but also to see what the author thinks we need to reassert (which he never really quite does). But it also begs the questions, “What made America as a nation great in the first place?”

Because we’re talking about politics, the author begins by calling himself a cynic or “one who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view,” which is odd.  Why begin with such a negative statement?  But it becomes very clear why the author calls himself a cynic.

His initial criticisms of Obama to me are wanting for many reasons, chief of which is that he’s asking him to bleed in a season that bleeding is uncalled for.  We don’t want a President who intentionally crashes and burns before he gets to office.

“There is nothing about Obama that bleeds, not publicly. Everything about him that bleeds he left back between the covers of his autobiography. Look for it there, not in this campaign. But mainly, he’s not leading a movement because he’s telling people that, through him, and through their belief in him, they can reclaim the country’s lost greatness, as though the country he’s talking to didn’t hock all that stuff in the first place so it could afford guns and burglar alarms. He’s asking it to value what it’s already peddled on the cheap.”

Not the highest view of his readership, I would suggest.  But the author has essentially lost hope not just in the possibility or potential of Obama but in politics as well.  The author continues,

“But politics has lost its imagination and it is dead to metaphor, and the cynic sees the water tower that says “Freedom,” and it’s only a measure of how utterly lost he is.

Convince me, he says to himself.

Convince me that I’m wrong. Convince me that there’s enough left that’s worth saving. Convince me that there are enough people left who care enough to save it.”

And it is this “convince me” posture that is the most telling.  Convince me begins without participation.  Convince me sits on the sidelines waiting to jump on the bandwagon until the the winning team has already won the game.  Convince me sits back waiting for the cost to be so low that there really is no cost other than skepticism.  This is not what made America great.

But the cynic touches on why he and many others are cynical. His viewpoint appears to be that we have lost our sense of freedom.

“More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is — or, as a right, ought to be — about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo.”

He essentially concludes his diatribe with this,

“The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country.  Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost.”

The article does little to point to what made us great in the first place, which kind of surprised me given the title.  But hidden in the subtext is actually the answer. It is a quote from Pastor Alvin Love that reveals the origins of greatness AND one of the big reasons I think people are supporting Obama.  Love says,

“Pastor Alvin Love was finishing up Sunday service, and Pastor Love talked about the young Barack Obama, who’d come to him to do community organizing through the various churches in the area. ‘Barack kind of broke down those barriers for us, because it was easy for us to get into our own agenda,’ Love recalled. ‘And it was all the neighborhoods on the South Side, and all the pastors were saying the same thing, so finding out that we had more in common than we thought was an eye-opening experience.’”

And it is here, hidden in the line, “broke down those barriers for us, because it was easy for us to get into our own agenda”, that lies what has made America great in the first place.

America began with two essential frameworks: our God given dignity and the willingness to sacrifice deeply for that dignity.  What made our country great was always our ability to tear down what separated us and fight together for that collective dignity.  The founding fathers consistently asked for sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, which was embedded in our dignity.  They were willing to fight for it, even unto death, to remove people from oppression.  They understood that love and sacrifice was the defining ethic that guided their endeavors.  They also understood that we were broken human beings, prone to “our own agenda”, so they created checks and balances and a system of law designed to govern people.  But it was always the call to love and sacrifice that defined what move our country forward.

What made America great in the first place was not our cynicism, or even our ability to call out what was wrong with the old system.  It was our capacity to gather together in the spirit of unity, which required love and sacrifice. This is the call of sacrifice and what has always made great leaders.  Kennedy’s most famous speech included the line,

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your own country.”

Inspiration always appeals to the best in who we are as human beings.  It reveals who we want to be, not just who we are.  We want leaders who ask us to think outside of our own agenda and love our neighbor.  We may not like it but we want it.  Our greatness has always resided in our leaders ability to get us to think outside of our own agenda, one that is inclusive of our neighbor.  Ultimately we want leaders who can help us grow into mature citizens, one who don’t need our government to tell us what to do.  We want leaders who can help us self-govern.

Benjamin Zander, the noted conductor said,

“(The conductor) depend for his power on his ability to make other people powerful.”

And this is one of the central reasons why I like Obama.  The Yes, We Can video highlighted this.  It’s filled with hope because of the call to think outside of ourselves.  Obama’s appeal doesn’t reside in the fact that he’s black, or from Harvard, or that he’s a great orator.  His appeal resides in his call to become better human beings.  His speeches are filled with the possibility of participation rather than jaded cynicism.  Anyone can be a cynic but only the great can make people think outside of themselves.

You have to watch the video to get what this post is about but I can almost guarantee it is worth every second of the 18 minutes of your life you will invest.

About seven years ago Benjamin Zander spoke at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit.  For everyone there he was only second to Bill Clinton, and a close second at that.  He spoke of the posture of possibility and how to awaken that in our lives.

Much of Zander’s concepts come from one button playing, which is the moment when the musician stops thinking about the individual notes and focuses on the beauty of the music, enjoying the story the is found within it.  This type of musician has crossed over to a deeper level of playing.

And his concept of one buttock playing struck me then as it did now when I watched this video.  It made me ask, “What does one buttock Christianity look like?”  What does it look like when we have reached a place when we can stop thinking about, “Am I doing this right,” which begs the question of performance, and start enjoying His music that is played in our lives?  How do we ultimately participate in a way allows God to bring out His masterpiece in our lives, the one that looks like Jesus.

Zander says, “Because for me to join the B to the E I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E.”

I believe this comes through surrender.  It comes when we take the risk to let go of control and trust that God really does love us, and is not determined by what we do, but instead by who we are, His children.  It is at this moment that we can sit back and enjoy the long line of notes that He is playing in our lives.

How are you enjoying the notes?

I wonder if Jesus was ever accused of spreading a “social” gospel?

Recently I was reading a very good post from Darryl Dash about his experience with Sanctuary.  And a commenter named George said,

“It just becomes more clear they are all about works, social gospel, and they hope it’s in their works that they will find God’s favor. It’s not works flowing from faith.”

And I honestly had to step back and ask, “Is this for real?”  Is this the assumption people are making about the reason people serve the poor, that we are trying to earn God’s favor?  And even further is this the assumption that people are making about those who are engaging a missional practice?

Is it possible that we are a people designed to love, which is called out in the Great Commandments .  So much of my own restoration process seems to be wrapped up in my learning to think outside of myself.  And a lot of my brokenness is revealed the moment I “attempt” to serve the poor.  In the poor I find the face of Jesus every time I participate.  In the poor I find those who don’t have it all together and have little to no pretense about them.  Their poverty is written all over their body.  They can’t hide because everything is stripped away from them.

And in this poverty I see my own poverty reflected back that calls me to a radical grace and love.  It calls me to love in ways that I am not comfortable with.  But when I do, when I take the risk to move “with” not “for” I discover how God is calling me to participate with Him in His restoration process.  And by loving I am giving what I have received so graciously.

The assumption George seems to be making is that these people don’t know God or have never set foot in church.  In America, at least, this is likely patently untrue, where most people HAVE heard the Gospel.  But they have likely rejected it because they have never seen love in action.  They have heard the Gospel, but they have never seen it. And when someone comes into their world, not for the sake of doing it for them, but stepping into their world to participate in our humanity, this is the Gospel revealed.  This is Jesus meeting the blind man.  This is Jesus meeting the adulterous woman.

It’s easy to tell someone about Jesus.  But it’s really hard to be Jesus in the flesh for people.  And when we love, we’re doing both.

Last night some friends of mine had a date night that turned into a mini meeting about Tribe. Tribe is our dream about what church could look like, one that is bent towards following Jesus into mission.  In some respects its audacious, and is certainly bigger than the sum of us, which makes me realize I need to stay grounded in Him as much as possible.  It is why I am so blessed to have so many great people already a part of this.

My wife asked the other wives what they felt about what we were dreaming up.  It totally surprised me because I got to see the passion and beauty of my wife seriously wrestling with the call of God in her life, one that has pushed her in really great ways.

And then someone said, (I think it was Jeromy’s wife), “I’m afraid of not doing it.”

And at that moment there was a collective sigh, a pregnant pause that revealed what all of us were feeling.  You see, the more we took steps towards participating in God’s mission, the more it delighted us.  It stirred our hearts to consider doing something that we believed would reveal a more wholistic way of being the church and participating in what He is doing.

But the risk was that by talking about it we could create a hope that might possibly never be fulfilled.  By taking those first steps in some way meant that we were doing it.  And what if at some point we decided not to, that it was just too much to do? By talking about it we were exposing some pretty serious dreams that each of us longed for and hoped for.  But at the same time we were creating a risk that our dreams would never come true.

Several people at the table said, “I don’t want this not to happen.”

There is a moment of convergence when an idea takes root in a group of people, and the first step is hard.  But there also comes a moment when the second person takes that step and the third and suddenly everyone looks around and says, “Are we really doing this?”  Last night was one of those moments.

Have you ever felt like this?

“The Bible gains its authority from God and the communities who grant it authority.” - Doug Pagitt

Well said Doug.

How do you pray?

A little while ago I had a conversation with a friend who said, “I just don’t pray that much.”  He went on to describe that he spent almost no time praying.  He was busy.  He had so much to do.  He just couldn’t find the time to get on his knees and pray like so many great spiritual heroes had done in the past.  He had good intentions.  On several occasions as he went to sleep, he had every intention of waking up early to pray for an hour, or two.  Something big like that.  But inevitably something happened in the morning to distract him enough that he would forget and end up in bed the next night wondering where his commitment went.

It was obvious from the way he spoke about his prayer life that he had to “go” meet Jesus somewhere.  In order to pray, he had learned somewhere that he had to assume a posture, usually in a quiet place (some call it a prayer closet), and get on his knees.  And when he did, THAT’S when Jesus would meet him.

And as we talked, I asked him when Jesus left the room.  His head rocked back at what appeared to be a question he had never considered.  I asked him, “Do you have to assume a posture before God is willing to speak with you?”  It was obvious my friend had never considered the question, even though he HAD assumed this about God.

How often do we assume we have to fit within God’s world in order for him to speak with us?  And what if it is actually us that need to invite God into our world.  Because the truth is that Jesus never leaves the room.  The moment we get up off our knees Jesus hasn’t left the building.  He also doesn’t expect us to find our prayer closet to have a conversation.  We don’t have to assume a posture or close our eyes to hear his voice.  We just have to be open to the conversation.

And this brought my friend and I to a very real question.  I include myself in this question.  Why do we compartmentalize Jesus like that?  Why do we assume certain postures that leave him out of very important decisions that order our day?    And what hit me square between the eyes is that I’m afraid of what he might say.  I’m afraid that he might order my world in a way that is different from what I want.

I really get the value of prayer in a quiet space.  But I don’t do the same thing to any of my other relationships.  I don’t compartmentalize my wife or my kids.  Is it also possible that it becomes a convenient excuse to keep him at bay, available when I need him but not to invasive as to change my world?

What say you?

Thanks to KingdomGrace for doing this.  This is awesome.  Three things that stick out to me from this list.

1. It’s God’s mission.  I’m just a participant (or an observer).  Take your pick.

2. It’s about the restoration of all things.

3.It’s not (really) a marketing tool, new packaging or new spin on the old way of doing things.

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Sound Bites

The church emerges out of the mission of God in the world, not the other way around.  Actual mission must precede any new cultural understandings that the church might develop of itself.  -  Alan Hirsch

adding the label “missional” to their meetings and programs does not make them missional.  -  Alan Knox

It is often dumbed down by people who confuse it with “evangelistic” or “mission-minded”  -  Andrew Jones

finding those wells that still exist in our lives today…Places where people naturally gather…A place to share my life with them.  -  Barb Peters

So the word “missional” just becomes one more marketing tool in our attractional toolbox to get people to the show.  -  Bill Kinnon

a lifetime’s engagement with the communities where we have been strategically placed  -  Bill Kinnon

We need to be converted away from an internally focused, Constantinean mode of church and converted towards an externally focused, missional-incarnational movement that is a true reflection of the missionary God we follow. -Brad Brisco

there is no “40 days of missional” model  -  Brad Grinnen

sustainable change requires transformation at the deepest level in order to effect long-term changes at the surface level.  -  Brad Sargent

the church will be organized around mission as its sole purpose.  -  Br.Maynard

Drawing others into the deeply relational and loving arms of Jesus -Chad Brooks

It’s a scary world for the experts when the amateurs are out in front.  -
Chris Wignall

neither church nor human is the author of mission.  -  Cobus van Wyngaard

The essence of God’s mission is extravagant love  -  Dave DeVries

Jesus left the comfort of church err… heaven, and went to where people were at - David Best

(incarnational) rhythm contradicts the rhythm of an attractional church.  -  David Fitch

a way to be involved in God’s work toward the redemption of ALL THINGS.  -  David Wierzbicki

to reflect God’s character and God’s priorities in our everyday life  -  Doug Jones

the call of the church to love our neighbours, to make disciples, to be broken and poured out for others.  -  Duncan McFadzean

I hope that those of us seeking to imitate an incarnate God really understand that that means following a crucified One.  -  Erika Haub

engaging the world as living alternatives.  -  Jamie Arpin-Ricci

seeing life, ministry and mission interwoven together.  -  Jeff McQuilkin

following the lead of the Holy Spirit into restoring the world around us.  -  Jonathan Brink

little wonder then that so many who really get what missional is all about are labeled heretics.  -  JR Rozko

“you don’t even know, like really know, a poor person, do you?” -
Kathy Escobar

our participation in the joyful, ecstatic, overflowing fruitfulness of God.  -
Len Hjalmarson

get out there to be the church  -  Makeesha Fisher

did we sacrifice reaching out for a new sound system?  -  Malcolm Lanham

like spending a day at the office with God… every day!  -  Mark Berry

learning to dwell in the margins or risky areas  -  Mark Petersen

a radical departure from a focus on ourselves or on our own church...noticeably different from churches building their own kingdoms…  -  Michael Crane

an awareness of the great desire of God from the beginning.  -  Nick Loyd

the missionary of God to us now, to all of us…is the Spirit.  -  Patrick Oden

God’s mission – search and rescue – is participatory.  -  Peggy Brown

redemptive interaction with people.  -  Phil Wyman

a church that is not missional is no church at all. It’s a club for the already initiated.  -  Richard Pool

Believers need to see their life holistically and completely sacred before they can begin to grasp what it means to be missional.  -  Rick Meigs

to be all that the Holy Spirit desires as he shapes and forms Christ in us.  -
Rob Robinson

every living moment is a door into God into which the other is welcome.  -
Ron Cole

They focus on what’s outside themselves and spend their time and money there.  -  Scott Marshall

giving hope in a world of gray.  -  Sonya Andrews

not simply “what the Church does”, but chiefly “what she is”.   -  Steve Hayes

signing on to God’s project to repair the World  -  Tim Thompson

How missional is put into practice is the stumbling block for many in the “missional” conversation.  -  Thom Turner

“In the long run, what counts is how the next generation thinks. How far new ideas permeate culture is not measured just by attitude change during one generation, but by what is taken for granted in the next.” - Helen Haste
(The Sexual Metaphor: Men, Women, and the Thinking that Makes the Difference, page 149). (ht)

What do you think we are taking for granted?

Kamp Krusty said, “If this is true, I can promise I will never die…”

Which brings up the question, “If you could live forever…in this world…as it is now…in this body…would you?”  And why?

I’m reading Surprised By Hope, by NT Wright. To be honest it is not the easiest read but it is good.

NT brings up a fascinating quirk in the story of Jesus’ resurrection.  Women were the first to see Jesus the morning of the resurrection. But Paul, in his account, almost glaringly leaves out the women.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8: For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

I could imagine Paul’s reasoning. NT comments extensively that women were not considered credible witnesses in the ancient world.  But Wright actualy suggests that this lends deep credibility to the stories in the Gospels BECAUSE the writers include the women’s accounts.

I’m wondering if Paul missed an opportunity here.

This is from Ben Arment, who use to assess and review church planter.

The church planter comes up with a great vision that rivals Bill Hybels’ Acts 2 church or Rick Warren’s baseball diamond. He’s got a great website, flow charts, demographic studies and even a facility picked out for when he starts holding services. The church exists perfectly in his mind before he ever steps foot in the community.

Six months later, he’s still optimistic, but he’s taken a few hits from early set-backs. Some potential core group members dropped out; he didn’t get as much funding as he wanted; the worship leader he recruited got another job… out of state.

By sheer optimism, the planter pushes on. It gives him great joy to set a launch date that will most certainly deliver him into the land of milk and honey: a truly effective church. All he wants to do is start meeting weekly, and people will come. He’s sure of it. The vision is too great…

He works up to the launch date by meeting with his core team. They’re clueless about church planting, but he assures them they’ve got the right leader. So he makes them all read Erwin McManus’ new book and learn to run sound equipment. They hand out water bottles with their logo on them at the grocery store and buy down people’s gas at the corner Exxon. Everyone they meet acts interested in the new church, which gives them cause for celebration, but there’s no telling whether they’ll show up on Sunday.

When the grand opening day finally arrives, the planter can’t believe how many friends and family members attend. He’ll have to disclose the number of “illegitimate guests” to his ministry friends later on, but for now, it creates the sort of excitement a first Sunday needs. There’s even a handful of first-time guests that seem to enjoy the service. As they’re leaving, they say they’re planning to come back, and the church planter’s got enough momentum to prepare the second service.

What no one tells the planter is that attendance almost always drops by 50 percent on the second Sunday. The friends and family members are gone. Only one or two guests come back. And the core group begins to slowly realize that the Sunday work-load comes every week.

After sitting through scores of church planter reviews, listening to these heart-sunken church planters try to sort it all out and watching their wives try to fight back tears, it became very clear to me that a community’s need for a new church is not enough. There has to be a spiritual fertility in the community.

~~~~~~

Church planters rarely fail in the first year, and they rarely fail because of money. They hardly ever fail in the second or even the third year. Most church planters fail in year five when their churches have drifted into obscurity, when the luster has worn off, and no one is paying attention to them anymore.

By this time, the church planter is a mess. He’s defeated and discouraged, possibly depressed. And he’s formed all sorts of new conclusions about God that hinder his future walk with God. What’s worse is that the planter, for the life of him, cannot pinpoint what went wrong.

He blames himself - maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a pastor. He blames his circumstances – there simply wasn’t a good meeting location. He blames a bad decision – he shouldn’t have launched so soon. Or he blames the people – there was a deceiving family out to turn everyone against him.

But what he almost never sees is the need for cultivated soil. He showed up with a bag full of seeds to plant, but all he found were dirt clods. It never dawned him that he needed a hoe.

What is it about this story (of which this seems to be a conglomeration of many stories) that makes me sad.  Help me with this one.

This will be the shortest review I have every written about anything.  It will be entirely complex and simple at the same time.  It will be easy to understand yet I won’t give you every detail to spoil what will happen sonically when you listen to it.  I’ve tried to condense all of my thinking about the album into something compelling and yet accurate.  So with that said, here is my review.

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Buy this album immediately.

See that was easy.

Scot McKnight takes James Dobson to task for his comments on Obama’s speech.

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Internet Monk contemplates the life of George Carlin who passed this last week.  I still think his “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” was pure comic genius and classic.  Internet Monk says,

“What strikes me as continually ironic is that Carlin and other comedians have become the truth-tellers of our time, while Christians, especially in their official capacities as preachers, etc., have become the embodiment of truth avoidance and truth obscuration.”

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Very cool idea called patio parties.  Who said loving your neighbor can’t be fun. (ht)

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Out Of Ur repents?  Sorry, this is a lack of journalistic integrity.

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Josh on bringing spirituality back into the role of pastor, via Eugene Peterson.  Nice.

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This is an infectious song.  Thanks to the guy who doesn’t blog anymore.