Tall Skinny Kiwi

Google's Emergent Church Leader

Preachin googled for an image of an emergent church leader and came up with this picture. He thought it fitted the sterotypical image of an emergent church leader pretty well.

Know the guy? I do - its none other than my Irish mate Si Johnston from Belfast, pictured in Pasadena with a group of us. He is Google's choice, for that day, of an emergent church leader.

Following Preachin's lead, I googled for "modern church leader" and got this:

I tried "Modern Pastor" and . . .

she was my number one.

This guy, known by Google as the "CAMP pastor director" was on the front page for "modern pastor".

"CAMP PASTOR DIRECTOR"

Anyway, I searched for the "emergent church leader" image myself this morning and saw that Si had moved down the scale to 7th place (sorry mate!).

So who is currently Google's emergent church leader? This guy gets placed number 1 and 2 on Google's aggregation.

Is this the new face of emergent? What's with the towel on the head? Looks kinda Hindu to me.

Its actually another good friend of mine, the Dutchman Marc Van der Woude sitting in a Finnish spa. Marc was with me all last week in Joburg, South Africa. He is connected to DAWN Ministries, the author of Joel News and gives leadership to an exciting emerging church leaders network called Connect Europe. He is also very tall and complains a lot.

I wonder when the Americans are going to make it into the emergent church picture?????????

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emergent missional, emerging church, emerging missional

A Flood for London?

Some prayer leaders have alerted me in an email that London might be in for a serious flood. And really soon. They think the whale entering London's harbour last month was a sign, as was the fire in London that I was privy to see from the airport. I noticed that LondonPrayer.net have posted the same information. They would have the skinny if the waters start rising over London. I know many of them and THEY ARE NOT LOONEYS thus i have giving space for them here.

“We see the need to warn and to prepare for major flooding from the Thames - covering significant areas of the London flood plain - inclusive of the financial centre of the city. It is foreseen that this will be of sufficient magnitude to cause damage and destruction to property - necessitating the relocation of people from the area." Link

Reminds me of when Prague flooded. In 2002, we were doing a prayer walk around the city and one of the girls in our group, Martina, saw a strong image of floodwaters rising up. That was 6 weeks before the flood came to Prague, exactly as she saw it. She also had a dream about the flood only 3 days before the flood hit. I blogged it here.

My Indian friends are quite convinced that the Tsunami that hit Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka was directly connected with the spiritual state of those areas. They believe the same thing about New Orleans. So, I will be keeping an eye our for London.

These are the posts that contain London, Flood, Prayer per day for the last 30 days. Lets see if the prophecy meter keeps rising.

Get your chart here.

Technorati Tags: flood, flood, london

Emerging Church in Korea and Hong Kong?

Fuzz Kitto of Spirited will be in Korea (March 3-9) and Hong Kong (March 9-15) and is on the search for people or churches "seeking the way of the emerging church". Let him know.

Technorati Tags: emerging church

Future of Blogging

Jordon is bored with blogging, having logged in a solid ten years on his site at geocities and then at JordonCooper.com. I am a year or so away from my decade of web journaling and I know how he feels. I wrote a sentence in his comments on the future of blogging.

"Andrew Jones is saying the future will come when all the media associated with our life (audio, video, shopping choices, poetry, text, event attendence, web site visiting, menus, etc) is automatically and effortlessly made public (published online). When this happens, the work on our part is not uploading more data but rather choosing to filter what we dont want people to access. That is the future of blogging."

Technorati Tags: blog, bloggers who dont know what they are talking about

Out of Africa - 1

I am back from South Africa and am very HAPPY. It was a fantastic time. The South Africans were great hosts and they treated us like kings. I have lots of stories and maybe some videos for later on.

One of the highlights for me was meeting some key leaders from India and hearing about their networks of house churches and simple churches. One lady at the conference ( I cant mention names for security reasons) together with her husband, has started 14,000 house churches in the last ten years.

I shared some of the thinking and terminology behind the emerging missional church and Olgavaro shared the example of the Latin American emerging church which is doing extremely well. It has been nearly 3 years since my last visit there (in Colombia) and the various countries all seem to be growing and impacting their regions. I was invited again to the yearly gathering in Brazil - have to check my schedule on that one.

My presentation on the global emerging church had a number of technical hiccups - I really should have used my own computer, rather than the offical PC up the front with an older version of Quicktime (perhaps did not recognize the H264 compression?). And I should not have tried to transfer all my videos from Arkaos VJ over to Powerpoint. Dangitt.
But regardless, I did get to share about the thousands of emerging-missional churches around the globe and what it might take to make that number tens of thousands (from song of Saul to song of David) in the near future.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church, home church, house church, mission, missional

Blog Fast. Back 25th Feb.

No blogging here for 10 days. I am in London tomorrow and Friday and then in Johannesburg for a week. I wont be responding to comments. Pray for me. Peace Out!

A New Kind of Hierarchy

The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 is now available and the graphs you see have a shape that is getting more common. Its not a bell curve but rather a curvy slide down with a long tail. This is because it follows a power law distribution which best portrays the kind of hierarchy we find in nature (yeast cells in a protein network) or in the blogosphere (BoingBoing's vast readership vs. our sad puny blogs).

This graph is the hierarchy of blogs from Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Part 2 (Feb 14, 2006)

Power laws don't have a peak in the middle, like a bell curve. They start out high, then taper off gradually with a "long tail" that can often begin to rise again slightly due to a second wind or renewal of interest. Most organic systems AND internet based hierarchies are scale-free follow a power law distribution and display the signs of a modular hierarchy. And church planting movements once they are running freely, I expect, would also display power law characteristics. Hence, my interest.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has some excellent thoughts on power laws and scale free networks in his book Linked. He says that by "viewing networks as dynamical systems that change continously through time, the scale free model embodies a new modeling philosophy" This philosohy, tied to network theory and complexity, involves a change of thinking from static to growing, from random to scale-free, and from structure to evolution. Power laws, says Barabasi, are "nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order . . they are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems". Or in other words, emergent behavior.

Power laws explain why BoingBoing.net can become so ridiculously bloated with permanent links and why our sad little blogs do not. Growth and preferential attachment, says Barabasi, are the two key factors. Because you already have lots of links, the search engine places you on top of the hierarchy for that particular search. Because you get placed higher, more people find you and more people read you and more people link to you and you get exponentially higher up the ladder of this new kind of hierarchy.

Kinda reminds me of when Jesus said "To everyone that has, more will be given". More on this and its relationship to giving here.

Also, take a look at Dwight Friesen's Scale-Free Networks as a Structural Hermeneutic for Relational Ecclesiology which not only outlines some good application to networks of churches [Christ-clusters] but its also great bedtime reading for your children.

Questions for theology geeks:
1. What is the relation between the hierarchical modularity of a complex system and what is found within the triune complexity of the Godhead?
2. Can Elohim, the Triune God, be a model for a new kind of dynamic hierarchy?

Technorati Tags: church, missiology, new media, power laws

My Blog's Family Tree - Yours?

Andreas pointed me to TouchGraph Google Browser. This is a topography of my blog and how it is linked in the blogosphere. Interesting to note that of the 7 hubs around me, I played a direct role in encouraging most of them (not all) to start and they have been generous in linking back and recommending others to my blog. In other words, my blog now has a family tree that this tool makes visible. (click to enlarge)

The advantage of using Touch Graph to map out your linkage is that you can add other URLs and watch the complexity happen as layer upon layer of relationships become visible. This image, though, is just my URL before I add layers. Anyway. I showed you blog's family tree. Now you show me yours.

Grokker is also good if you want to map out key words. I have been grokking the emerging church at intervals to track changes. Try it yourself. Go here and then choose the "Zoomable Map" button on the left. Heres how it looks this morning.

Technorati Tags: blog, google

Hanging with DAWN Ministries in Joburg

Olgavaro Bastos Jnr (from Brasil) and I are the two Emerging Church people giving presentations next week in Johannesburg. I have mentioned Olgavaro before. The Tribal Generation website is still all in Portuguese, but there will be an English translation soon. Both of us will be talking about church planting movements in the emerging culture.

We will be addressing the Global Associates of DAWN International. This meeting was supposed to be in Colombia but the Africans had trouble with their visas so the venue was changed to Joburg, South Africa.

DAWN Ministries International was started by 2 Latinos and an American. It is currently headed up by Ngwiza Mnkandla, of Zimbabwe. Ngwiza is a great guy. He told me once that the postmodern question is a very relevant one for African churches, in particular because the modern church introduced to them by Scottish missionaries could not deal with the demonic or the supernatural with its Enlightenment mentality. It will be interesting to hear stories of the new movements in Africa and to see what shape they are taking.

Technorati Tags: church, emerging church, mission

Emerging Movement: Future or Fad?

"the EM [emerging movement] is a missionally shaped ecclesiology that seeks to unite Christians for the sake of unleashing the gospel to change the world, rather than a theological movement designed to demand conformity on specific theological issues."

Scot McKnight, The Future of Fad: A Look at the Emerging Church Movement, (PDF)

Ahhhhh. Now I can exhale. An American academic gets it.

Just going to take a little space here to enjoy the moment

ahhhh . . .

ooo!!!!??!!!

uuuuhuhhhhh . . .

Scot McKnight is Karl A. Olsson professor in religious studies at North Park University in Chicago. But more importantly, he is a blogger. This article is an Evangelical Covenant Church publication called The Covenant Companion.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church

Valentines

Not very romantic. But I took Debbie out for a valentines lunch yesterday after showing her the flowers I picked for her. We went to the Flattie Bar at the Stromness Hotel and had a pint with our cheeseburgers. And then a game of pool. In the evening we gave chocolate hearts to the kids. Hannah (8) brought a big heart for Hamish at her school. And that was Valentines Day.

Gaming and Training

Hats off to the Christian Century Magazine who just published a (paper-only?) special on theological education for the future. Its entitled "Seminary 2050" and my copy just came to the door. Great to see other voices on the same topic from friends of mine like Brian McLaren and Maggi Dawn. Great also, to see my own humble submission which brings me to an editing point which, I know, annoys publishers to death, especially when authors are as picky as I am, and considering the laughably long sentences i write, broken by commas, and punctuated by afterthoughts and asides, as i do when i speak [its a blogger thing] and its a Pauline thing [see what large letters i write] and it sure sounds like i was sitting next to you with a coffee and a photo album but some publishers just don't want that, which is why I submitted a sensibly written document that would not require heavy editing. Even the right amount of words that was requested. Really.

Technorati Tags: monastic, new media, religion, seminary, training, video

Missional Order

A new missional order and network announced by leaders of Allelon. Alan Roxburgh describes it in this article as a multi-generational movement of missional leaders. This sounds like a continuation of the discussions we had in 2004 at Fuller with Alan and the Allelon group.

i LIKE this group and i LIKE Alan R. This would be a great order to be a part of.

At present, the name for the new missional training center (found on their site) is "The Allelon Center for Missional Leadership Center". Its a good name, but it sounds a little REPETITOUS. Dont know. Maybe its just me. Maybe its good to repeat things for emphasis. I would even suggest "The Center for Allelon Center for Missional Leadership Center" but thats taking a good thing too far.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church, missional, monastic

what i would say to the young american emerging churches

what would i probably say to young (north) american emerging churches? in this present climate of constant criticism? maybe i am scribbling this more to get something off my skinny chest before the day begins, but there might be something worthwhile in there.

"I have been listening to the latest wave of criticism against the emerging-missional church in USA and I don't know if i am more angry with the critics for getting it so wrong, or angry at emerging church practitioners for either not communicating the heart of what we (the global emerging-missional church) are doing . . or not knowing it in the first place.

The emerging church, if i listen to the more extreme critics, is just about changing the style of church to attract people and keeping them happy, of accepting any wind of doctrine without critique, of finding the coolest hippest trends and adopting them in a sunday service. Of being postmodern to attract postmoderns. Of careless adoption of any ancient practice regardless of its origin or affect, of finding identity in protest against the Modern, Enlightenment or Constantinian models of church.

What the heck is that? What does that have to do with the emerging church? If there are one or two new emerging churches who have lost the plot, or never saw it clearly to begin with, and are now giving the other hundreds of emerging churches a bad name, they should be lovingly confronted with the better way of Jesus. Do it yourself before other traditions do it for you. A little yeast impacts the whole lump.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church, missio dei, missiology, mission, missional

Stuff in Europe

Heres a PDF from Ian Nicolson of 24-7 Prayer. He says there is a Big Conversation in Belgrade May 19-21

Scott from EMRG tells me that have just updated their numbers on Europe spiritual condition.

Roundtable this August in Germany called Die Gefaehrten. 50 emerging leaders of underground ministry networks are being selected from around the world. Let me know if you think someone you know should be there. Initial website has gone up. I will be at this one. Underground Railroad is involved. So is Freakstock.
Flashback. A decade ago, when i was doing ministry in San Francisco among postmodern subcultures, there was really only ONE global network for emerging church that i was involved with, and that was Underground Railroad. Now there are dozens.

Satsang: my Aradhna CD

"aradhna means worship: the group captures the beauty and dignity of india’s bhajan devotional melodies with music that blends east and west" (From the Aradna website. Check out this video and see what i am talking about.)

My Aradhna (Satsang) CD finally arrived. Let me complain a little here. Apart from making me BUY it (how rude - i normally receive CD's free) it took far too long to arrive (its a belated Christmas present) the recording is poor, there is no meta-data for iTunes, their online shop did not recognise the United Kingdom and the actual recording is based on a mishap. Apparently, they were recording the final night of a tour for a CD and a 3 year old child kicked the cords and they lost everything. But they felt God wanted them to continue so they played to those in the crowd that wanted to stay . . thus . . this album called Satsang.

Having said that. The CD is absolutely incredible and curry nights at our house will never be the same. I also think you should buy it. In fact, if your music collection of worship songs does not include at least ONE Aradhna CD, then it is indeed one tuna casserole short of the potluck.

I took this picture at Greenbelt Festival last summer. The other bands were raving about Aradhna and I had to hear them for myself. Mike of RiverTribe, who has blogged about Aradhna, was the guy who told me to see them. Since then, other friends in my world have told me about Aradhna coming through their town (Barb in Lisbon, Linda B. in San Francisco) Jonny Baker had also mentioned them.

Anyway - a great band with a great missiological philosophy on why indigenous patterns of local worship are so important to God who does not want the whole wide world to be Maranathaized or Hillsonged out of recognition.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, missiology, mission

Blogging and the SBC/IMB

(Email from a SBC Pastor regarding this controversy)
"Andrew, . . . You pointed to the SBC controversy with baptism and speaking in tongues policies in the IMB on your blog a while back. I don't know if you have kept up with this any, but it is really heating up and is being driven by blogs (especially Marty Duren at sbcoutpost.blogspot.com. The trustees of the IMB pushed ahead with their agenda, but a trustee named Wade Burleson (pastor from Oklahoma who was the former state convention president) opposed them. They thought that they could just overpower him, but he started blogging (kerussocharis.blogspot.com) and exposed what was happening to the larger convention.

Technorati Tags: blog, ecclesiology, missiology, mission

40 Days of Emerging Church ala 1970

The cycle starts again today on Our Daily Blog and will go for another 40 days.

"Whereas the heady polarities of our day seek to divide us into an either-or camp, the mark of the emerging church will be its emphasis on both-and."

Larson, Osborne, The Emerging Church (1970), p10.

Technorati Tags: church, emerging church, religion

Tags and Cats

More discussion about tags and categories and a little TallskinnykiwiNo going on at Glorious Caustic Conversation. [hey, kids . . get off my back lawn before i come over there and HIT U WIT MY WALKIN STICK!] Maybe my way of blog organization is old fashioned. I dont know. Read my argument in the comments.

BTW - I am using ONE category on this blog post and about TWELVE technorati tags - all attached effortlessly and within seconds with ecto blog editor that lets me assign both typepad categories AND technorati tags AND keep them seperate. That means technorati handles the chaos and not me. That seems smart. Why do i want all those categories on my blog? What do you think?

I think young bloggers should listen to their elders, regardless of how old, crusty and stuck in their ways they may be . Start with my post on blogging.

Technorati Tags: blog, bloggers who dont know what they are talking about, bloggers who owe me coffee, categories, Glorious readers who think i am lame, people who complain about andrew jones, tags, tallskinnykiwino, web 2.0, young bloggers i am going to hit with my walking stick, young inexperienced bloggers who need to listen to their blog elders

Emergent at Yale and Masters

Emergent Conversations have been going on at both Yale Divinity School and Masters Seminary. Never expected to see both institutions in the same sentence.

At Yale, students were interacting with teachings by Miroslav Wolf. Yale Daily News captured the moment and there was some negative Catholic response who someone who wasn't impressed. Bloggers Jason, and Cleave WERE impressed enough to write notes and there is more at Faithasawayoflife,

At the same time, Masters Seminary are doing a series on the Emergent Church. John MacArthur Jnr has been describing the emergent church as the 3rd wave of movements that threaten our clarity of the Scriptures. The first two waves, according to MacArthur were the charasmatic momement (which he tackled in "Charasmatic Chaos" [see also Vineyard Response to Charasmatic Chaos .pdf, and this letter]) and the Seeker Movement (which he confronted in "Ashamed of the Gospel").

BTW - cant find any bloggers from Masters who have their own thoughts on this or their reaction to the professors at Masters. Anyone help? And not only this, but I have not been able to open all the audio files on my Mac. Must be a PC-Window's based audience.

The third wave, says MacArthur is the emergent church movement that he characterizes as believing the Bible is "hopelessly ambiguous" and avoiding debate with anyone except people like himself -who apparently - are the only people true to the Scriptures. [I feel a third book coming on] MacArthur believes the main threat comes from a lack of clarity regarding the Scriptures - that the Bible has never been clear (his take on MacLaren) or is only NOW clear (his take on N.T. Wright) rather than a MacArthurite Absolute Clarity, as expressed when in states in his presentation . . .
"We have the mind of Christ, We know EXACTLY how he thinks!"

John MacArthur Jnr says the two most popular emerging church books are Praise Habit: Finding God in Sunsets and Sushi by David Crowder and Faith of My Fathers by Chris Seay. I haven't read either of these two books (had not heard of Praise Habit) but I know the authors well from previous encounters at their old church. David was the worship leader at Chris's church in Waco. Both great guys. They are both connected to the Baptist General Convention of Texas (moderate) and not the other more fundamentalist baptist stream so sides have already been drawn in this debate.

Technorati Tags: Emergent, emerging church, missiology, missional, theology

Preparing for Africa

I leave in a week for Johannesburg (18-24th at Kopanong Conference Centre) and am preparing some presentations - including a 15 minute powerpoint on the emerging church in Europe.

Did you know .. .
- The world wide web was invented by a European (Tim Berners Lee) who described himself as an "Englishman working in Switzerland"
- 28% of the worlds internet users live in Europe. (Internet World Stats, Dec 2005)

Vizrea: Phone to Blog Software

Vizrea was "unstealthed" today and makes a splash on the Seattle Times. From its humble beginnings in the basement of our nu-monastic-community in Prague (the Giant Peach) to the computer screens and fancy Symbian-based phones of the world, Jarda's software, which became a joint Czech-USA project, has eventually been released. I am very connected to this software and will be using it WHEN it recognizes the MAC community and financially-challenged bloggers with old MMS phones.

The story of this software starts nearly 4 years ago in Prague when my good friend Jarda read a post on my old blog mentioning my desire to post images directly from my phone. Jarda, having left his Microsoft position, and giving some leadership to the Czech web portal Atlas, moved his office into the Giant Peach (our community) and got to work. Heres a short timeline with links to my old blog.

May 2002 - Jarda promises me some phone-to-blog software.
Dec 2002 - Jarda is working out of the basement in our house on his phone-to-blog software that is going to be called BlueLog.
May 2003 - Someone beats me to be the world's first phone-to-blog blogger. Dangitt!!!
June 2003 - I write "I also want to use my mms phone more but am still waiting for the right software to get developed."
2004 - Jarda hooks up with some old Microsoft buddies from Seattle.
2005 - I get an email from Jarda. "Hi Andrew, Andrew, Andrew :))))) Sorry, that it tooks three years and more to finish my promised blogging engine :))"
2006 - Software is eventually released as Vizrea Snap for the PC. Some say it will challenge Flickr.

Jaroslav (Jarda) Bengl is a great person, an avid photographer, a devoted follower of God, and a Geek par excellence. He is a considered the "father of the Czech internet" and we are very proud of him and his mates from Seattle. But here's the thing - Vizera doesn't work with Mac yet so I still cant use it. I also cant use it with my OLD Sony Ericsson T68i phone. That means, dear Jarda, that you are still not off the hook. Get back to work, dude!
HT: Alexandr 'Sasa' Flek (Jarda's spiritual advisor)

Technorati Tags: blog, phone, vizrea

Blast From the Past

I popped onto the website of one of my old churches (North Beach Baptist) where I used to pastor and clicked on the "beliefs" button. And there in front of me is the statement of belief that i wrote for their welcoming literature back in 1992. Word for word. 15 years later. Thats weird. Its also nice.

Bono, Porpoise Diving Life and Tartan Theology

Some chatter on the internet and suggestions from emails:

- PBS: U2's Bono got candid about his spiritual life at a recent prayer breakfast. [HT: Brad Culver]
- The Porpoise Diving Life is now online [thanks Brian]
- Alan Hirsch's recent talk in California was summarized on Sam Metcalf's blog.
- End of a Spear response from a Youderian family member.
- BeneDiction asks: "Why do bloggers blog? According to Hewitt, “Two reasons: to persuade; and, to leave a record of having been there.” Link
- WeeBeautifulPict, of tartantheology fame, shifts his blog location and offers free downloads of DJ Haggis's tartan beats on his wee pict player.
- Blogs4God captures the Christian bloggers response on the Mohammed Cartoon Madness.

Technorati Tags: emerging church

World Reformed Communion

WARC + REC = WFC
80 million Protestants will be represented by this new convergence of World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and Reformed Ecumenical Council (REC). The new group will be called World Reformed Communion. They are hoping for a renewed emphasis on mission.
Anyone out there on the inside of this?
HT: ChristianToday

Technorati Tags: church, religion

Blogging and Tagging

Time again to take your fingers off your keyboard and read the State of the Blogosphere, released this morning.

Highlights:
- Blogosphere is over 60 times larger than it was 3 years ago.
- a new blog is created every second.
- 1.2 million blog posts a day, 400,000 of those are TAGGED.
- "Sping" (spam and fake pings) are creating a lot of NOISE

I guess blogging didn't die off with disco after all.

There is a lot of information out there and we all need to TAG better or the right people will never find our stuff. I nominate Adam from the Garden of Eden as the Patron Saint of Tagging. If Adam didn't take the time to tag the animals, Noah would have had a helluva time sorting out what's what when it came time to fill the ark. And thats all i have to say about that.

Technorati Tags: blog, tags, web 2.0

Younger Leaders Gathering

500 young people (25-35) from 100 countries will be traveling to Malaysia this September for the Younger Leaders Gathering, sponsored by Lausanne. You get to recommend who should be there and you have until March 31st to do so. I will be putting some names of YOUNG people forward. Here is the Recommendation Form

Alas, I am too old, to be considered this time and am being shelved with the old fogies on the dusty bookcase of history past. But back in 2001, when they were not too strict on age requirements, I got to stir up things at the 2001 Great Commission Roundtable, also in Malaysia. The GCR was actually a combined effort on the part of Lausanne, World Evangelical Fellowship and the AD2000 movement.

For my presentation, I showed some footage from the Epicenter event (Austin, 2001) and gave stories of the artists and young church planters that were participating. The other presenter, who was representing the emerging generation from the non-western world, was Donny from Indonesia who is part of a ministry seeing punks give their lives to Jesus on the streets of Jakarta.

But this year I will be absent from the meetings altogether . . probably smoking a pipe on my rocking chair, with all my old mates at the nursing home down the road.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, mission, missional

John Piper in a Postmodern World

I have never met John Piper but some of his parishioners joined a church i was pastoring in USA and they spoke well of him. Piper has just written on William Tyndale who gave up his homeland (and his life) so that the English speaking world might read the Bible in their heart language (a fan of contextualization long before the term was coined).

John Piper and Desiring God are hosting a conference on postmodernism called "The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World" Sounds like the conferences we used to do back in the 90's. Despite what might be the longest and most commented on protest ever on emergentno.blogspot.com, I think its a good move, even though its a decade too late. I kinda wish they were tackling something more immediate - like the "Supremacy of Christ in a COMPLEX world" but that would mean their speakers would have to read some new books and deal with a subject that, although more timely, does not yet have a recognized canon of published works or recognized experts (or critics). And despite incredible leaps of understanding in the last few years, we still don't have a general theory of complexity. But that shouldn't stop us from bringing the wisdom of Scripture to bear on our present condition. Hey . . . maybe next year???

The Doxology Event

I must be the last one to blog on this - shame on me! Here are some images I took of the Doxology installation last October in Houston. This was one of the events I was involved in last year that DID NOT SUCK! Click on the images to enlarge them.

Rob Pepper, a friend and artist from London, created a series of large enamels picturing Christ as seen in church stained glass windows around London. Rob uses the 'conscious reflex drawing' method of creating these pictures, which are a significant part of his own spiritual journey towards Christ.

The Germans from Kubik came over to help, including their pastor Mark Reichmann (who let me preach at his church last year). Many of us wrote a chapter each for a book that will accompany the Doxology tour in its journey from here. The chapter that Debbie and I wrote was based on the woman at the well. Mark Fletcher (Rob's minister) gave some good spiritual direction to the flow of the book.

After viewing the pictures, there was a discussion with the artist about what inspired him to draw these images. There were also some spaces for people to pray and reflect in quiet.

Here are 3 images with my finger over the lens of my tiny camera. Hey . . at least I try! Here's some more . .

Emergent Plug-in for Mega Church Game

Its about time. I can't tell you how frustrated our family has been in playing this pathetic game called Mega Church, having to create large Orthodox cathedrals and Pentecostal mega-church stage shows and overgrown, resource-hungry EvangeMega WillowBackySaddle OsteenyServices for annoying yuppies who complain about the temperature of the Starbucks before the service. My kids are just TOTALLY SICK of building massive parking lots for SUV driving Christians who destroy the environment every time they drive across the other side of their city just to attend a slicker church service.

But wait . . .

Now, thanks to the emergent plug-in provided by the game's creator Tim Bednar (of "We Know More Than Our Pastors .PDF" fame), my family and I can enjoy hours of productive, informative family fun, and create churches with couches, candles, karaoke machines and video ipod stations with wireless connection to the main projection screen. How refreshing it is to have our virtual parishioners complain about the chai rather than the coffee.

So now . .  with the emergent plug -in (included free-of charge), I highly recommend this game for families everywhere seeking a new level of eccumenatainment that will transform the way we think about church.

Buy it here and vote for it at the Contagious Festival (number 21 when i looked) and don't believe a word i just said. Thanks Tim for your parody!

Sam's birthday

Samuel turned 15 on Saturday. He's doing well. Getting taller by the minute. Thats a screenshot of Sam on the left enjoying his birthday inside the online Runescape world. You know you have a geek for a son when you have to take screenshots to get a good image of him. Happy birthday, dude!!

What I Mean When I Say "Emerging-Missional" Church

I was asked again today so here is me, again, waffling on about  the "emerging-missional church" for those of you who are trying to either understand or tell the story correctly. If you hear other versions, know this . . . they are wrong and i am right. And if i am not right, please tell me because one day people might actually read this stuff and i want them to read WHAT ACTUALLY happened rather than someone's convenient "truth". So . . . this is what i mean when i say the "emerging-missional" church and why i prefer to keep the two words together. Add this to my other thoughts and the plot will thicken.

emerging

- a nod to the newness of the movement and its fluidity
- it is coming up out the previous wave of ministry, but not necessarily in protest to it.
- it displays characteristics of emergent behavior that are evident in any system when chaos finds order through self-organisation and other emergent criteria.
- the ministry is a biblically informed contextual response to the local emerging cultural context - something similar to what the wider church used to call youth culture, Gen X culture, postmodern culture, etc.
- it addresses issues of culture as well as mindset (postmodern) and life-stage (youth, genX)

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