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.

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.

Stories of Failure

My friend Yaroslav, who lives in Moscow and was our patient and attentive host while we were in Moscow last October, recently entered a context for the most embarrassing outreach stories. His short story was chosen as one of the winners. Congrats, Yaroslav, on being one of the biggest losers! (Sorry, American TV show humor - I'll explain later). Here is an excerpt...

I was on an outreach errand with a fellow believer, doing colporteur evangelism (carrying literature) in an apartment house. We had sold several Bibles and Christian books. All was going great. At the following door, we rang the bell. After several minutes of waiting, we heard someone approach the door quietly and then retreat. We rang the bell once more. Nothing.
We looked at each other for a moment, and then it hit us!

You can read the whole thing here, along with the other winners.

This reminds me so much of something profound we did at the re-church conference in 2002 entitled, Loving Babylon, in which we invited several pastors to come up to the front and tell their stories of failure. At most pastor's conference I've ever been to, tremendous success stories are told. We wanted to share our weakness. At the end we were blessed by an amazing prayer of an unbeliever. You can read that story in Samir Selmanovics forthcoming book, It's Really All About God.

48-hour Film-A-Thon

This weekend my congregation is doing something incredible. It's called a 48-hour film-a-thon. Perhaps some of you have heard of this type of thing before, but it was totally new to me. The idea is simple: write, cast, shoot and produce a short film in the space of 48 hours.

We will begin on Saturday night, around 7:30 pm, with the writing process. By 7:30 pm on Monday, we will have a short film in the can. At least that's the plan, and given the creative and talented friends I have in the church, I believe that it is possible. My main role will be some kind of second or third assistant producer (I think) which basically means I do what I'm told (running errands, moving stuff around, helping people with whatever needs help). I'll all be a part of the writing team. I'm pretty excited about this.

Cinema Divina
We're not just doing this film-a-thon because it sounds like a fun project or even just for the end product. Like a walk-a-thon or a bike-a-thon, it is a fundraiser. So, participants are getting sponsors (either a per hour sponsorship or a flat donation). All the proceeds are going to a new production company called Cinema Divina that our congregation is in the process of starting. These funds that are raised this weekend will go toward our first short film that is slated to be made this summer.

So, I could really use your support. Please help me support these uber-talented  filmmakers in our congregation and the other Christian filmmakers in our community by making a pledge toward our film-a-thon.

If you want to pledge, please email me - rjbell  (AT)  hollywoodsda  (DOT) com.

Join me at "Transforming Theology"

This Friday night, from 7-9 pm, I'll be at Claremont School of Theology for meeting entitled, "Transforming the Church." Tony Jones, of Emergent Village, will be present. Tony writes a little bit about this event on his blog, here. My friend, Trisha Famisaran is working on this initiative in her role at Claremont's Center for Process Studies.

You can learn more on their website or join the Facebook Group.

I hope you'll consider joining in the conversation. It's going to be challenging and provocative. It's an important conversation for some of us in the Adventist Church and the re-church network.

Check out the video below...

"With Friends Like These"

Tomorrow night, March 6, Dateline NBC will be airing a program called "With Friends Like These." (check your local listings). This is the story of the two women pictured above (Helen Golay, 77, left, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75) who were convicted last year of murdering two homeless men. These women were Hollywood residents as were the two homeless men they murdered. My friend, Charles Suhayda, who is one of the pastors at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, was interviewed for this epidode of Dateline because the homeless men were part of the ministry his church offers.

So, this touches me and my community personally. I hope you have time to watch this or tape it and watch it later.

Hollywood Church like Google?

Our senior lay leader at the Hollywood Church, Neville Salvador, sent our staff a link to this video today, along with the following comment.

"I believe we kind of have a Google-like environment going on at Hollywood--just not the budget!"

I found this to be an incredible compliment. Those of you who know the Hollywood Church from the inside, check out the video and let me know what you think of Neville's assessment. I'll share some of my thoughts, too, but you go first!

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?"

2008 in Review

There is so much I could say about 2008. It has been, by far, the biggest growth year in terms of the Hollywood Church. And I don't mean primarily numbers (though the church grew by 20% this year). More people found faith, more connected to Christian community as something healthy and life-giving who never thought that would happen for them. We have more leaders in the church this year than last year. We've also had our setbacks: our mural project got stuck in the city-wide legal problems surrounding public art murals (it's a long story). We've had key people move out of town and some hit hard by financial and other life challenges. But I would say that overall, our life in the city as witnesses to God's reign is stronger than a year ago. More on this later, perhaps.

Our children are in a new school that is working out much better for them. We are all VERY pleased that Sophie started Kindergarten and Zoe is now in 3rd grade at Franklin Elementary.

In addition to this here are some other highlights of our year...

Travel

Obviously, the traveling Elysabeth and I have been privileged to do has been probably the #1 highlight of our year. In addition to traveling to Moscow (here, here and here) and St. Petersburg in October and Israel (here and here) in December, I went to

• Washington, D.C. in January for research meetings about PICOs ongoing work around health care reform.
• Princeton, NJ in June for the Envision '08 conference. (Also here).
• Orlando, FL in September for the annual Spectrum/Adventist Forums Conference.
• Columbus, OH in October for the Innovation Conference.

Community Beautification Grant
The Hollywood Adventist Church received a $10,000 Community Beautification Grant from the City of Los Angeles to paint an art mural on the wall of our church that faces the freeway. (More here and here).

Interfaith work
2008 was the year I got deeply involved in interfaith work. Some of the highlights of this was participating in the Memorial Day Interfaith Service at All Saints in Pasadena, meeting Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad from the Parents Circle Families Form and being elected Treasurer of the Interreligious Council of Southern California (website).

Community Organizing with LA Voice/PICO
We have had another amazing year partnering with LA Voice in local community organizing, mostly around the crisis of affordable housing in Los Angeles. My participation in the national work really dwindled this year as I had so many other travel commitments, but I'm looking forward to getting back involved in early 2009.

Adventists Against Prop 8
I am so proud of the work our little group did in speaking out, as Christians, for the rights of gays and lesbians in California (website). This is a fight we temporarily lost, but our work united many good people who have either left the Adventist Church, have been on the fringes of the church, or who just never imagined that anyone in the church would stand for religious liberty and human rights in the way that we attempted to do. I am also very grateful to the leaders of the local Conferences and the Pacific Union who worked with us to allow a different voice to be heard in this debate. I'm glad my church can tolerate diverse viewpoints.

And of course, for me, one of the greatest highlights of the year was...

the election of Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States

BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2008

I've read a lot of books this year, as usual, but I really haven't read that many good ones. I'm not sure what that means. And I can't tell you how many I've started but never finished. Here are the cream of the crop from what I read this year, in no particular order. As usual, these are not books that necessarily came out in 2008 (though some are).

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson

The Fidelity of Betrayal, by Peter Rollins

Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, Joan Chittister, OSB

Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright

Evangelism After Christendom, Bryan Stone

Here's to a healthy and joyful New Year!

Aaron Beaumont - A review

My friend, Aaron Beaumont, is playing again at the Hotel Cafe (does he own the place yet?) this Friday night and L.A. Weekly is promoting the show. What's great, though, is that the music editor for L.A. Weekly gave him a really glowing review. You can read it here.

You can buy Aaron's amazing new album on iTunes.