one month later, i have not stopped thinking…just lacked time to document my thoughts.
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at the beginning of April the CEO of Pixar, Robert Iger, was having to respond to questions about the commercial viability of Pixar’s latest film, Up. industry insiders were concerned that it wouldn’t have mass appeal for a variety of reasons highlighted in a New York Times article. Om Malik grabbed this gem of a quote for a blog piece based on the article:
We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.
as i’ve been studying church models recently (including reading Simple Church), evaluating the future of youth ministry (including the Seismos posts on this blog & reading Youth Minitry 3.0), and through a myriad of conversations & thought processes related to my vocational role in ministry, i think the Church has much to learn from Iger’s thought process. Read the rest of this entry »
I was out of town & offline this weekend when everything started breaking loose with swine flu. I believe it’s tragic that people have lost their lives because of this disease & I hope that people wiser than i are able to quickly and effectively provide treatment and help for those suffering from it.
however, i’m deeply, deeply concerned by the media and general public’s response to this disease outbreak. Read the rest of this entry »
Seth Godin recently had a provocative post on the current state of marketing. the basic gist of it was that marketers have abused their power so much that now, to properly spread a message, you have to go above and beyond and “overwhelm the market with long-term, generous marketing that we (the customer) have no choice but to start paying attention again.”
Jesus had just started. he was just getting going. and some guys came to ask him questions. his cousin, John, had heard the rumors that Jesus was claiming to be the One. the One that generations had longed for. the One that John was wacked out for, living a life so outside the box that people couldn’t help but pay attention.
and so he sent some guys to find out the truth.
they arrive and ask this Jesus character if what they’ve heard is true. is he the One?! and Truth answers:
Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosyare cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.
wait.
that’s not what i was expecting. if the church today were “the guys,” what would we have told John? because this seems a bit off message… Read the rest of this entry »
and, surprise surprise, i disagree with both of them. first off, i don’t think we’re a “center-right” nation. secondly, i don’t think that our tradition is defined by a “progression of individual freedoms.” Read the rest of this entry »
It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to save 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.
Colossians 2:6-23 “My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him. You’re deeply rooted in him. You’re well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.”
After a few temper tantrums & a bit of false starts, I really loved college. At first, in my youthful zeal, I wanted to have no part of it. “Why sit in a classroom and process when you can be out in the world practicing” was my early mantra. Several of my professors (wisely) sought to re-channel my impatience into a more vigorous embracing of my school work as something to be done “for the glory of God.” And they were right. They also pushed me into internships so that I could immediately put into practice what I was learning.
I came to love the college experience. I loved learning & theorizing & philosophizing. I loved coffee shops & late nights & questions without answers. And so when graduation came around, while I was ready to go “live it,” I was actually starting to think about grad school, something I’d mostly only swore I’d never do early on in college.
I haven’t made it to grad school yet, though I hope to some day. But as I read Colossians 2 over the past couple days I was struck by, even without formalized “schooling,” how easy it is to settle into talking about practices rather than actually practicing them.
Churches are one of the most guilty parties in this. Bring people into our doors where we can teach and instruct and equip and grow them and…and…and when do they actually live it out? Well, hopefully in their lives somewhere…in their vocation, in their neighborhoods, in their families. But is the church meant to be a place only of instruction or also a place of practice? Do we keep people at spiritual infancy by continually spoon feeding but rarely letting people handle the spoon themselves while still in the “safe” community of the church?
As I wade through re-designing the youth ministry at First Friends, these thought are ringing in the back of my head…
we live in a country that cares only for itself. if the rest of the world enters into the picture, it’s only because of what it could give us (or what we could extract from it).
today, US media is totally caught up in Hurricane Gustav. this would seem worthwhile (and is a proper partial focus).
however, hop over the BBC and you find out that 1/2 a million people who live in India are stranded in villages that have been devastated by monsoon flooding. half a million. Gustav hasn’t even touched land yet. oh. wait. it has. but “only” in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba. 85 people have already died. and i haven’t seen one story about it yet.
so this is an email i sent to some friends recently:
So I don’t know how familiar you gents are with web 2.0, but it’s generally the idea that the web is transforming from a universe governed by what the few could post and maintain (those web-savvy webmasters & website designers) to being a universe governed by the many, and by many I mean any, as in anybody who wants to can know post, interact, share, network, and broadcast themselves, their thoughts, feelings, and dreams to the world.
Honestly, it’s a bit like when the Reformation hit the church. The power transformed from the Priest to the parishioner, from the elect to the everybody.
This short little piece gives an interesting take on web 2.0.
Of particular interest is that people really believe in this transformation. Enough that they are creating movies like this, publishing articles, and that web 2.0 has become an actual term that people recognize. The idealized ending is fascinating to me.
And so how does this affect us? Does any of this translate into our context? I propose that perhaps the emerging conversation is a second, mini-reformation. Religion has gone corporate, with mega-churches, political jockeying, conservative lobbying, and new papal-like empires such as Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority, and the Christian Coalition. The emerging conversation, ideally, pushes the power back to the people, per se. Not to say that it doesn’t have it issues. Like web 2.0, a lot of useless waste accompanies this opportunity. For every worthwhile blog, youtube video, facebook connection, there’s plenty of wasted myspace pages, pointless online journals, and maybe even some stalking. But the potential of web 2.0 is incredible. And worth rethinking how we use technology at all, computers specifically, and how we understand the internet altogether.
To those who have spent their lives building what we have, I ask: Is the church now too established to expand? Too complete to recreate? Too near an end product (and the end-times) to explore new territory? Dreaming seems too often squelched by evangelicalism today.
To those who spend their time frustrated with what we’ve become, I ask: Is the church too dead to dream and resurrect? Too derelict to redirect? Has the sun set or is it on the horizon, ready to burst into the brightness and beauty of a redemption-filled, re-imagined day? Dreaming seems too often squelched by post-modernism today.
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jdh etc
howdy. my name is joel daniel harris. people call me jdh. i do youth stuff, social justice stuff, tech stuff, worship stuff, outdoor stuff, and all sorts of other stuff. this is my place to talk about my stuff. enjoy.
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