Entries from February 2008 ↓

If the Churches of Christ had given equal time and energy in equipping the people of God in missional aptitude as it has in convincing and pacifying its membership in transitioning from acappella to instrument accompaniment the Churches of Christ would be much closer to reversing the decline in its membership.

Jesus incarnated and engaged an oral culture. Centuries after Jesus’ resurrection humanity transitioned an oral culture to a print culture. Uniquely my generation has seen rapid transition from print to broadcast to digital. This rapidity has caused overlap between the eras and the predominant teaching methods of each era. Oral readily contributed to experience (and irrationality), print to rationality, broadcast gave us a global perspective and digital is shifting our way of knowing to an interactive, global, anytime, anywhere experience. This will continue to complicate methods of teaching—reaching far into the future. Even more interesting is how these changes are forcing God’s people to carry out mission in an environment similar to the time when the ecclesia was born. Michael Riddell says, “Mission is always in the direction of the other, and away from ourselves.”

Don’t leave this post until you watch this podcast. You’ve got to. Take the time; it’s an awesome conversation illustrating what it means to follow for Jesus. It runs for approximately 30 minutes. Grab a coffee, a Latte, or a Mocha and sit still for a few.

Do it. Now!

Get out of your own backyard. […link]

I’ve been an off and on blogger for the past 5 years and I have to admit at one time I was overly concerned with posting at least once a day but I’m learning that…

• Traffic is irrelevant to this blog’s success– What matters most is whether I’m reaching my target audience (which is narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read my posts. Engaging with the audience I want to have a relationship with is a much more important to me than how frequently I post.
• Daily post doesn’t make readers loyal– As the blogosphere grows and matures (I read somewhere that the blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months), the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. My perception is if a reader has the expectation of coming back to this blog, or any blog, and finding a new post ever day and then they do not find that post the blogger runs the risk losing of losing reader loyalty. Loyal readers subscribe to a blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.
• Frequent posting creates a blogging landfill – According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write often contributes to people abandoning their blogs.

This round of blogging didn’t begin with the expectation of catching Andrew Jones or Jordon Cooper. I simply want to post my thoughts with the hope of reaching a small audience of missional believers. That’s my target audience. If you want to catch the top bloggers or become a top 50 Technorati blogger, you probably will need to post daily. But for the rest of us, we just need to blog within our limits, knowing our purpose with the sole intent of engaging an audience and creating a small community. Be satisfied with that. According to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

1. Why does the body of Christ follow rather than lead in social reform—and then dishonestly claim leadership in reforms after the fact?
   
2. Why do so many Christ-followers pilgrimage through life without ever considering the veracity of unbelief; never allowing it to challenge their faith?
   
3. Why does the church speak of absolute values without every pointing to the scriptural examples of situation ethics?
   

Last week at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta, Georgia; Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter talked openly about the Southern Baptist Convention’s fault lines, including abortion, gay rights, the ordination of women, clashing accounts of creation, global warming, the death penalty and the separation of church and state. This unprecedented summit drew about 10,000 Anglo, African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic Baptists from 30 North American conventions and organizations linked to the Baptist World Alliance. A quote from former president Clinton’s speech is worth noting:

“Baptist (I would insert Christians) should focus on the verse in the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which he stresses that it’s impossible to understand everything about God’s will because, in this life, “we see through a glass, darkly.” Clinton stressed, “it almost doesn’t matter whether the Bible is literally true, because we know in part, we see through a glass darkly. Humility is the order of the day. The reason we have to love each other is because all of us might be wrong.”

Preach it Bill! 

Terry Mattingly on Religion

Culture is shaped by a small number of gatekeepers. Majority perspectives have little bearing on culture formation. Instead, elites dominate. Neuhaus notes: “Even though [these elites] may be a minority of the population, they succeed in presenting themselves as ‘mainstream’ through their control of powerful institutions in the media, in entertainment, in the arbitrations of literary taste, in the great research universities and professional associations, and in the worlds of business and advertisement that seek the approval of those who control the commanding heights of culture.” Increasingly, grassroots political efforts to reverse the current cultural direction are proving futile. Politics reflects culture; it doesn’t direct it.

taken from The Challenge of Cultural Influence
by John Steel

Innovators are gifted with an irresistible impulse that burns deep within. They are the fountainheads of originality. Challenging the status quo with a creative idea has the potential of carrying them across the endorphin threshold. It’s about the danger of crashing. It is immeasurable, magical, and unpredictable.

Uncertain of the outcome and fearful of a congregation’s reception, immeasurable (creative) ideas are rarely implemented.  Most often they are capped in favor of measureable results. There is little room for the imaginative in a layered institution. If the creative doesn’t know, he or she soon learns not to force the issue.

They operate independent of the crowd. They set aside any herd longing of sameness relying instead on their God-given faith and creative talents.  They side-step the disparaging remarks, ridicule, and disapproval—knowing they “must” if they are going to gain the briefest hearing.

I thank God for these persevering pioneers. We need the creativity of the maven.

Having trouble with the idea of your own genius? My guess is that there was a time—perhaps when you were very young—when you had at least a fleeting notion of your own genius and were just waiting for some authority figure to come along and validate it for you.

But none came.

Of course not. It’s not the business of authoritative figures to validate thinkers; creatives threaten conventional wisdom.

But there is hope. Choose to become your own authority figure. If you do you’ll soon find yourself in position to redeem the creative genius in you that was put to sleep when the Fool was being tamed.

Reviving the creative genius in you is the beginning of Orbit.

Global Church Advancement recently held a five-day conference in Orlando Florida. You can browse the conference information or visit the Global Church Advancement Blog and read the notes from the Missional Conference. I particularly liked Randy Pope’s distinction of people-based churches and programmed based churches.

A church is program-based when its primary method of making mature and equipped followers of Christ centers around the delivery of truth through the vehicles of church programs (i.e., seminars, preaching and classes, etc.). ~Randy Pope; Life on Life Missional Discipleship

Have you ever wondered what those little squiggly lines are that float across your line of sight? I call them eye floaters. Some view them as tiny flecks or “wormy” substances floating about their field of vision. If you try to stare at them for a better look, they float off to the side. Look the other way and they reappear.

Creativity is like that. It will not be looked at. As soon as you become conscious of it—it vanishes. Forget about it…stop focusing on it…and it returns. Simply put—you cannot measure the creative process.

In the eye of most church leaders, anything that cannot be measured is of doubtful value. For some, the immeasurable likens doubtful existence.

No surprise that conventional church leaders are loath to commit resources or moral support to the amorphous concept of creativity. It’s all about the bottom line. Yet I find it both curious and peculiar that church leaders lust for the fruits of creativity, but mistrust the act of creativity.

Renegades who orbit the conventional church, removed from the compulsive preoccupation with results and bottom lines, are the ones free to reap the unpredictable amplitude of the creative process.