intersections

Envision '08

There is a very exciting conference happening June 8-10 in Princeton, New Jersey called Envision: The Gospel, Politics and the Future. The focus will be Christian Engagement in the Public Square. Not unlike the theme of my post here and the upcoming Adventist Forums Conference (check it out here). Uncanny, huh?

I was going to post on this later, but I just realized that the early bird registration of rate of $99 ends today. It's an amazing deal because tomorrow it goes up to $249. My understanding is that a donor paid down the registration fee for the early registrants.

I wouldn't usually travel across the country for a conference where I'm not speaking, but this seems like something special to me. Also, my dear friend Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan, is co-presenting with Miroslav Volf on pluralism or something. Actually, I don't even care what they're presenting about. Whatever it is is worth hearing.

I'll say more about this in the future, but right now I'm just wondering if any of you are going to be there. If you are, leave a comment to that effect. I'd like to organize a 'meet up'.

Cobalt Season coming to Hollywood

I first heard about Cobalt Season just over a year ago as their album, In Search of a Unified Theory, was being released. My wife and I drove to Orange County to hang with Aaron Flores' community one night last Spring to hear them perform. I was immediately drawn into their artistry and the subversive power of their lyrics. If you haven't heard their music, run - don't walk - to their MySpace page and give it a listen. It's not every day that people of the Jesus Way produce music like this. Mmmmm!

We've stayed in touch a bit in the intervening year and so when they said they were passing through L.A. this Spring, I naturally offered to host them here for a night.

So...on Thursday night, April 24th, at 7:30 pm, Cobalt Season will be performing at the Hollywood Adventist Church. They upcoming CD, Fragile Iconoclast, is being released any day now, so they will be doing songs old and new.

Admission is free, but we are going to be taking good care of our friends, so please come prepared to help us take care of them. Also, their CDs will be on sale so come prepared for that. See y'all in a few weeks!

Is Our Gospel Too Small?

The Christian Vision Project has been asking recently, "Is Our Gospel Too Small?" They have several excellent essays posted on their website which you can see here. One that especially grabbed my attention that I would encourage everyone to read is by my friend Tim Keel, called "An Efficient Gospel?" In this article he challenges our reductionistic tendencies and our desire to make our gospel efficient.

One of the features of the modern world was "reductionism": the belief that complex things can always be reduced to simpler or more fundamental things. To reduce something is to take it out of context and to take it apart. Church leaders have become experts at reductionism. Ministries that are successful in one context are reduced to "models" that we try to duplicate in other contexts. Sometimes such reductionism is effective. But when we use reductionism indiscriminately, we end up in a world so simplified it is barely recognizable.

This reductionism directly effects the gospel. Tim discusses his gradual discovery of the deeper meaning of the gospel in this article. What he describes relates directly to something I've been saying for some time. Here's how Tim puts it...

Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel

I just finished reading the latest book in the Emersion series from Baker - Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel. Tim and I have spend a little time together over the years at various Emergent events and the like. I first met Tim in October of 2001 at The Ooze gathering in Seattle. We happen to meet up at a coffee shop just before the opening day of the conference and we hung out a bit at that time. They were just getting their new church started back then. Now, seven years later, God has done some pretty remarkable things at Jacob's Well.

For those who are used to reading books about leadership, this is not what you're thinking. The subtitle says it all: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos. Tim has spent some time with Alan Roxburgh in recent years. Alan also wrote the forward to the book. Since I have been a doctoral student mentored by Alan for the past 4+ years I can definitely see some of the influence. The truly amazing this is that Tim was intuiting many of these things before he met Alan. I needed 2 hard years with Alan before I started to get it. I knew I was completely fed up with and frustrated by the "church growth" models I had been exposed to. Natural Church Development was more of the same (to give just one example). I just never realized how embedded in a modern, corporate mentality I was until stepping into the space that my D.Min. afforded me.

What Tim does in this book is basically share his personal journey and the journey of the church that he leads. However, I suspect that many readers will be disappointed that he doesn't let us in on more of what Jacob's Well has done and is doing. This is intentional. Instead, Tim offers what he calls "postures" of intuitive leadership, like "A Posture of Learning: From Answers to Questions" or "A Posture of Surrender: From Control to Chaos." In fact, this chapter is really the gem of the book, I think, for those who are wanting to come away with something to do. The first revolution is internal. Leaders need to find ways to change they way they think about the task of church leadership. Our role is no longer devising strategic plans, getting the congregation lined up, and pursuing some ideal future. For one thing, we're discovering that there is no "ideal future." There is only the future that God is bringing to pass in your time and place.

I would highly recommend this book to any pastor who is struggling with corporate, managerial leadership styles that they've inherited. Many of the ways of being church and being in leadership that Tim describes here are the same things we are learning in Hollywood. I can affirm the truth of everything Tim says because we are beginning to live these realities as well.

I'll end with a couple of choice quotes.

We have a mounting leadership crisis in the church. We are facing a crisis of imagination, an ill-fed spiritual attention span nourished by novelty. I believe this dynamic has debilitated local churches....

We are missing prophetic leaders who are able to read the signs of the times, who listen carefully, thoughtfully, and theologically, who respond in faithful and creative ways based on an imagination baptized and engaged in a missional reading of scripture, the environment, the people God has provided in their midst - not to mention the resources at hand that God has supplied....

At it's worst, this reduced pictures of reality has drained the landscape of color and creativity under God, and imagination has been lost in favor of a very small and uniform version of life. Our churches are the religious equivalent of strip malls with the same ten massive retailers located in Anytown, USA (76-77).

How well do our organizations create spaces that allow for diverse people with varied experiences and multiple intelligences to gather in order to discern signs of life intrinsic and extrinsic to our communities? How willing are we to do the hard and long-term work of creativity and contextual engagement? Will we create systems and structures that allow for a new imagination to emerge?

The reality is that creatives walk into our communities, systems and structures all the time, and when they do, they intuit the environment we have created and know immediately whether there is space for them. Most often, they discover there is not (209).

Stumbling into Soliton

Last night found me in Ventura at the Hush Lounge. I had been corresponding by email with Kendall Payne, who is a Christian recording artist and a friend of my friend, JR Woodward. I was unable to catch her CD release party at JR's church a week or so ago, because I was out of town, so Kendall mentioned the gig in Ventura.

Little did I know it was the opening of the Soliton Sessions. About a week prior to this I had made my final determination that I couldn't make the time to be at the Soliton Sessions. And there I was. So I got to hear Kendall play some of the songs from her new CD which you absolutely MUST get. You can order the hard copy CD here or download from iTunes here. It looks like we may set up a Kendall Payne concert at the Hollywood Church in the near future! Stay tuned!

On top of this, I finally got to meet Ched Myers (author of Binding the Strong Man and A Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics). Last Winter I registered to attend Bartimaeus Institute but was unable to attend. Ched remembered me from our phone conversations and emails around that time, but we have never actually met. We talked for the better part of 30 minutes with me explaining Adventist theology and sharing with him that a core group of younger Adventist pastor/theologians are interested in shaping the theological imagination toward a postmodern, social justice position. He was very excited and is more than willing to meet with us.

I've talked to a few people about my desire to re-vive re-church and make it useful for our current time and place. Perhaps we can convene a group of people to share our lives together and invite Ched to stir up our pure minds around issues of peace, restorative justice and Sabbath economics. What do you say?

Conversations: Walking Hollywood with Steve Taylor

After 3 1/2 hours of hard work cleaning up outside the Hollywood Church I had the privilege of spending about four hours with my friend across the seas, Steve Taylor (aka e~mergent kiwi). In fairness, it's not like we're 'old mates,' or anything. I met Steve around this time last year when he was teaching a class called Living the Text in a Postmodern Context at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. I was only able to spend one day in his class, but I learned enough in that one day to know that Steve was someone I wanted to keep listening to. I recently finished reading his book, which I highly recommend. His Ph.D. is on new forms of church and this book is a distilation of his research and personal experience, written for the layperson. (Actually, I'm guessing here. I've never read his dissertation, but it seems like this is likely.

Anyway, Steve is back to teach the same class again. He arrived in the US a couple days early to allow for biological clock adjustments. He is the pastor of the Opawa Baptist Church in Christchurch, New Zealand and the author of Out of Bounds Church (2005).

Recently, Alan Roxburgh interviewed Steve for his blog, The Roxburgh Journal - you can hear it here.

************************************
Since it's difficult to show people Hollywood except to take them shopping, I did what I love to do most with visitors - show them "my" Hollywood - the Hollywood that I know and love and interact with each and every day. We essentially walked around my block and explored the diverse community that is our ministry context.

After touring our church building and our community, it was time for coffee (of course).  So we headed off for my new favorite coffee shop - Capprezio - just a short walk from my church office. Finding that they are closed on Sundays, we continued our walk just one more block to my next favorite coffee shop - Sabor y Cultura. We spent the next two hours there sharing stories from our research and ministry.

Amazingly, Steve's research and experience in emerging and missional forms of church directly parallels the work that Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson have done. This, to me, is an unmistakable evidence of the hand of God over this conversation.

We talked about the joy and struggles of ministry in the Hollywood Church. He gave me a lot to think about regarding missional leadership. I'll save some of those insights for another post (when I'm not so hungry.

New Earth or Renewed Earth?

We live in a disposable culture, where we often throw away something when we have finished with it. My parents had their first washing machine for nearly two decades; now we think we have done well if it lasts 8 years, before we discard that last one, to buy the latest version. So it is with computers, cars, MP3 players, and almost everything else we possess. So have we created God in our image? Have we made Him act in ways that we act?

So begins a great post at my friend Jason Clark's blog. Read the whole piece here. It's not long.

I've been saying this for quite some time. Seventh-day Adventists love to talk about the end of the world, the destruction of the earth, and so forth. Yet the more I study the Bible the more I come to the conclusion that nothing could be more inconsistent with the overall message of Scripture than a God who destroys the earth.

First of all, God six times called his creation "good" and finished by calling it "very good." Second, God experimented once with destroying the earth (remember the flood?) and he decided that wasn't a good solution and promised never to do that again. Third, the whole redemption project is about restoration and renewal, not destruction.

As Rupert Ward points out (writing on Jason's blog), there is a two-pronged effect of fire - destruction and purification. I personally think these are two sides of the same coin, but the overall purpose of God is not the destruction of the earth but the renewal of the earth. Similarly, "heaven" is not our home. This earth is our home. We need to read Revelation again and get this straight.

Ward rightly points out that this means we cannot disregard the earth as though it were as disposable as your paper plate. We have a responsibility, born out of our eschatology, to care for the earth as stewards of God's good creation.

Cobalt Season rocks the empire

On Saturday night, Elysabeth and I headed down to The Abbey in downtown Santa Ana to hear the latest from Cobalt Season. I'm very new to this husband and wife group, but I am a huge fan of their work already. Please visit their website or their MySpace site where you can hear some of their music.

And please, by all means, buy their stuff! You will support this amazing family and get some real kingdom music while you're at it.

Ryan and Holly are the husband and wife team that comprise Cobalt Season and they are a part of a community called ReImagine in San Francisco, led, in part by Mark Scandrette. We also have the privilege of meeting Adam Klein who read his amazing and challenging original poetry. I am looking forward to finding an evening to connect with these guys while I'm in the Bay Area next month.

Enjoy a few of my photos after the jump.

What is your theological worldview?

Find out what your theological worldview is here!

I should say that this quiz is just for fun. There are many issues with this, though in the end I guess it's fairly accurate. Not sure what the author of the quiz means by Evangelilcal Holiness/Wesleyan, but anyway.... The primary issue is, of course, whether one can measure one's theological worldview with these 63 questions, many of which are written in "either-or" fashion.

And, I guess Brian McLaren is the face of Emergent/Postmodern Theology! But, it's fun little thing to do.

Hat tip to my friend Julius at Progressive Adventism for pointing this out. There is a great conversation going on in the comments of his post. Check it out!

Pitching My Tent with Manhattan Faith House

By now, most of you probably know about Faith House Manhattan. If not, click on over and check it out. My dear friend, Samir, is leading this innovating ministry in New York City.

I recently posted an article there called Pitching Our Tents. This, in many ways, is the heart of Missional Church and the work we are trying to do in Hollywood. Samir's vision is bold and risky in many ways and my request is that you check out what he's doing and simply ask yourself, "If Jesus came to our world today, as he did some 2000  years ago, what strategy would he take?" What does the incarnation mean in our world today?