intersections

Summer Reading Group :: What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

It’s hard to believe…but, summer is here. And with summer comes time spent with great books. So, re-church is announcing a Summer Reading Group. We will be blogging through What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, by John D. Caputo. This is an enjoyable and challenge jaunt into postmodernism, Derridian deconstruction and the gospel. Caputo has a playful, sharp and ironic style that is sure to rub us the wrong way and spark some great conversation.
There are 6 chapters and we will blog one chapter a week for six weeks, starting July 13, so you have time to get the book and start reading. Our bloggers will be:

::Ryan Bell, Senior Pastor of the Hollywood Adventist Church
::Samir Selmanovic, founder of Faith House Manhattan and Pastor of City Lights
::Zane Yi, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City.

Please drop a comment at the re-church blog if you plan to read along with us. The blogs will be posted there and we invite your comments, questions, challenges and insights. This will be a much more enjoyable experience if you participate in the comments.

Please invite anyone you know that might be interested in this group and lets have some fun this summer reading together.

Jean Vanier: The lonely task of leadership

I'm quickly reading through Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier's founder of the L'Arche communities around the world. In the first chapter entitled "Loneliness." I ran across this amazing statement. He is talking about the movement of our lives from order to chaos and back to order again as a necessary and inevitably movement of human evolution or maturity. He is describing the unhealthy tendency to resist this movement and preserve order because we don't want to go to that uncertain place. This change always engenders loneliness but we try to stop this process at our peril.
This statement contains vital lessons for anyone who leads or aspires to be a leader.

To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new.

Those who have the eyes to see this new order, as it arises, will often be considered too revolutionary, too modern, too liberal. Dictators everywhere have clamped down on movements for liberation; those who lead are always so certain that anarchy will arise if they do not govern with a firm hand. In reality, leaders are frightened of sharing or losing power. They too are frightened of change. They want to control everything. Those who see the coming of a new order will frequently be alone, persecuted (13-14).

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For more about Jean Vanier and the L'Arche communities check out these resources:

L'Arche: A Community of Brokenness and Beauty (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, August 2, 2007)
The Wisdom of Tenderness (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, December 20, 2007)
Adam, by Henri Nouwen

NEW BOOK: The Promise of Peace

There's a new book out from Pacific Press that I highly recommend. I had the chance to review the manuscript before it was published and write a blurb for it. Here's what I wrote:

Charles Scriven's The Promise of Peace will give hope to a new generation of Adventists who desperately long to re-appropriate their faith and traditions in a way that gives meaning to their lives and helps them shape a more peaceful and just world. I will be using this book with all my new members.

I just got my copy in the mail, but I plan to order a bunch more. After all, I have to make good on my promise!

Order yours here!

Anti-libraries

My friend and intern on our church staff, Scott Arany, sent me this quote. It's perfection! This is exactly how I feel about my library, estimated at around 1,000 - 1,200 books (not 30,000!).

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

From the introduction to The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

apocalypse: the revealing of GOD

Join us this Summer for a journey into popular culture as we search for glimpses of God's kingdom. Click here for more info. Download poster here.

In defense of my Kindle

I received my replacement Kindle yesterday. All the inconveniences with this new bit of technologies have reduced my unbridled enthusiasm. First, it ran out of batteries while I was waiting for my return flight home last week, which meant I couldn't finish the novel I was reading (frustrating!). Then, almost as soon as I got home, the screen malfunctioned and I had to get a replacement, which took nearly a week. Okay, so the thing is not perfect.

In the meantime, a few friends have asked why I like it, the uses I have for it and the extent to which it rules over my life. But the final blow came when my friend C. Wess Daniels Tweeted a link to a scathing social critique of the Kindle which ended with the irenic sentence, "The Kindle is the devil." Now, I love Adbusters and it pains me to have any disagreement with their author's analysis, privately harboring feelings that these folks are Ludites. So, after calming down, I think I can hazzard an explanation for my continuing, though tempered, affection for my Kindle.

First, you should read the Adbusters critique entitled, Melt Your Kindle. It's brief. But, in case you won't read it, for whatever reason, allow me to excerpt the main points:

Books I've been reading

I haven't updated my book list on the right column in a while, so I just put the last three books in there. I'm still working on Violence, by Slavoj Zizek. I'll be dropping quotes from that book here from time to time. I've only finished the Introduction and Chapter 1, and already it's rocking my world. I'm reading the Kindle version of this one.

Almost done with The Shack. Several of you saw my Tweet about my Kindle battery dying yesterday and asked what I thought of this book, so it seems I'll be writing a sort of review of this book in the near future. I say "sort of" because I really hate writing book reviews. I feel this compulsion to be comprehensive and thoroughly critical. I guess I'm just being lazy. Most books I just don't feel like going to that effort. But I'll share some personal opinions about it for ya'll.

Just finished What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church by John Caputo. Amazing book. I'll be saying more about that book in the near future. Stay tuned.

Current reading

It's only mid-February and already I'm off track with my ambitious 2009 Reading List.

While I have completed a few of the titles on my list I've gotten "sidetracked" into a few books that weren't on my list. I knew this would happen, but I always naively underestimate the degree to which it will happen.

 

Currently I'm reading...

• Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination, by Colin Greene and Martin Robinson
• The Orthodox Heretic and other Impossible Tales, by Peter Rollins (advance proof copy from the publisher). Available March 1.
• Manuscript of a the forthcoming Pacific Press publication, The Promise of Peace, by Charles Scriven.

I need to finish Scriven's manuscript this week to submit a blurb. So far this is a very good book that I am looking forward to using in my ministry with new members.

The Orthodox Heretic is outstanding so far. This is a book of short parables followed by equally short commentaries about the parables. Some are original with Rollins. Others are his adaptations of previously existing stories. Still others are retellings of biblical stories with major plot twists designed to draw attention to neglected aspects of God and faith.

As you probably know we will be hosting Peter Rollins here in Hollywood in two weeks for a gathering we've entitled Beyond Evandalism. You can read more about that here.

I'm about one third of the way through Metavista and I need more time before I can write anything cogent about this book. So far it has revisited the philosphical ground that I've read several times before in different ways about modernity and postmodernity. However, I would say if you feel you've been playing around the edges of philosophy and want to go deeper into this issues this book can help you. If you are not familiar with the various philosophers and their key ideas you will find yourself getting lost from time to time, but it is important to wrestle with these thoughts at this level. I will say more about this book soon.

My reading list for 2009

I've been meaning to finish this up and post it before now. At least I can console myself that it's still January. I'm not going to provide links to Amazon for all of these - just takes too much time. I'll let you do your own search.

One caveat: I'm very sure that an amazing list of great books will be published in 2009, so I have to leave myself a little room to read new books as they become available.

What are you reading this year?

Personal Growth/Spirituality
A Good Life, Robert Benson - FINISHED
Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen - reading
Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer
To Know As We Are Known, Parker Palmer
Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor

Philosophy
Critical Social Theory, Gary Simpson (re-read) – FINISHED
Zizek: A Critical Introduction, Sarah Kay
Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, James K. A. Smith
What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, Caputo

Theology/Culture
The Misunderstood Jew, Amy-jill Levine
The Apocalyptic Vision and the Neutering of Adventism, George Knight - reading
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson
The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggeman (re-read)
Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality, Jack Rogers
Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh
After Our Likeness, by Miroslav Volf - re-reading

Missional-Emerging Church
Journey Inward, Journey Outward, Elizabeth O’Connor
The Missional Church in Context, Craig Van Gelder
The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle

Interreligious Studies
No God But God, Reza Aslan
The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong
Introducing Theologies of Religions, Paul Knitter

History
The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins

Art
God in the Gallery, Daniel A. Siedell

Leadership
A Failure of Nerve, Edwin H. Friedman
A Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin

Fiction
Nemesis Train, Nathan Brown
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Politics
Resurrecting Empire, Rashid Khalidi - reading

Books I Should’ve Read By Now
Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
The Great Giveaway, David Fitch

A different kind of leadership

A pastor friend of mine in Moscow reminded me a great quote today and I think it's the perfect way to begin a new year of blogging. This quote comes from Alan Roxburgh's excellent book, The Missional Leader. I read this book when it first came out in 2006, so this quote is a great reminder.

It also comes at a good time because I was having coffee and catching up with a friend who remains fairly active in the Hollywood Church in spite of moving out of the area recently. We were discussing the relative merits of the numerical growth (or lack thereof) of the church. The pressure to "grow" the church is almost irresistible sometimes. We both agreed that if we wanted to pack out the Hollywood Church (it seats approx 300, I think) we could do that. Our group is smart enough and talented enough, and our leadership capacity has grown to the place that we could probably pack the place in a matter of a year or so. We weren't being arrogant. We were just being realistic. But we agreed that this was not the point. And, in fact, the whole character of the Hollywood Church would change such that many who have found the life-giving experience with a life with God would be devastated. Those who are unfamiliar with the missional church and still drinking from the fountain of "church growth" and attractional methods of church development will probably misunderstand what I'm saying here.

Anyway, enough commentary...now the quote.

Today, we give up on congregations that we declare are out of touch with the culture. We run to big, successful places with marquee-name leaders to find out how to be successful. In so doing we are going in exactly the opposite direction from everything we see in the Biblical narratives. We have forgotten that God’s future often emerges in the most inauspicious places. If we let our imagination be informed by this realization, it will be obvious that we need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation’s life. Instead, we need leaders with the capacity to cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God (21).

If you are a church leader, how do you hear this statement? In what ways do you sense God's Spirit calling you to a different kind of leadership - different than a CEO or "super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation's life?"