(Ir)religiosity

So, I’ve been really busy this week and haven’t had time to blog.  I’ve been at Annual Conference in Tulsa until yesterday.  For those that are unfamiliar, AC is basically a huge committee meeting for United Methodists. Anyway, I’ll be back to my normal routine next week.

Here’s the scoop.

Josh posted an update and a final call a few days ago. Over the course of month we’ve raised around $3000 which is amazing. Great job.

Because of the time sensitive nature of this project (the fact the Amit needs these funds yesterday) we as a cluster have decided to continue for another 2 weeks and raise as much as we can–getting as close a possible to our $7500 goal–at which point we will stop raising money and loan Amit however much we have.

This is the contingency plan: in the event that we don’t reach our initial goal we will loan whatever we have raised and Amit. He’s wife is in desperate need of medical treatment for her pregnancy so instead of investing in the taxi business as originally planned, Amit will use the funds we have raised and run and operate a store front. He will continue to run it through his wife’s pregnancy and continue to pastor and plant churches following it.

So here’s the deal–we need a surge of the next few weeks. If you have been thinking of getting in involved in the cluster but haven’t yet there couldn’t be a better time than now. If you are involved in the cluster and have been thinking of contributing more, now is the time to do so.

For more information email me or click here.

DONATE VIA PAYPAL.

DONATE VIA REVOLUTION MONEY EXCHANGE.

Thanks so much for all the help.

Here is the fourth installment of Tony Jones’ encounter with Trucker Frank. (See the others here, here, and here): 

This was a really fun book to read. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that is in a narrative format much less a spiritual memoir. It was a breath of fresh air.

Many of the reviews I’ve read suggest that Gall is a sort of St. Augustine-Don Miller hybrid. I echo their sentiments. Pete’s story is a confessional, sometime brutally so, but it is also engaging, funny, and deeply emotional. It is a story we can all connect with because on a certain level Pete’s story is our story. It simultaneously portrays some of the darkest and most endearing aspects of human nature. And it is real. Pete is real. He doesn’t gloss over his story and bares all so to speak makes himself very vulnerable. In our world that is encouraging and inspiring.

Further, Pete’s story is call to remember. To remember our distinctive mark as followers of the Way to deny self, take up our cross live for others. It is a beautiful reminder to reject our idols and anything else that stands in the way of realizing God’s alternative reality and our synergetic, interactive participation in the life of the divine, the process of creativity, and the ongoing narrative of cosmic restoration and renewal.

If you like a good story of personal journey and spiritual discovery in the style of Don Miller, Anne Lamott, and yes even Augustine then you will thoroughly enjoy this book. It is an easy read, an engaging read and an inspiring read. If you’re looking for some good summer reading I’d recommend picking this one up.

[Over the next few months, as part of a Missional Synchroblog collaboration at Missio Dei, I will be sharing and reflecting on being “missional.” This is second post of the series. See the bottom of the post for a participant link list. They are all excellent bloggers and I would strongly recommend subscribing to each of their feeds if you haven’t already. They put out some good stuff.

Part I: What Does Missional Living Look Like?

“Mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belie. It is good news of God’s love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.” –David Bosch

In my last post I tried as best I could to briefly describe what I believe it means to be missional that being the new evangelical and the new evangelism that reclaims the orginal veracity of the Jesus message within specific communities, contexts and locales.

Now I’m going to try to and describe something much more difficult: why am I missional?

At first thought, it seems that this shouldn’t be a hard undertaking, but as I was reflecting on this over the weekend, it became apparent to me that it is much easier to describe a movement or a belief and much more difficult to actually, personally, and frankly discuss why I believe it other than to use the typical response a parent might when convincing a child: “just because.”

So bear with me.

Simply put (and to slighty paraphrase Walter Wink) I am missional because I not only believe it is the best and most faithful response to God’s grace in authentic contextual community as incarnational, synergetic participants in the process of creativity, but because I believe it is the best, most compelling and liberating remedy to the “worldly” (and I use the word with a bit of hesitation) systems of domination and coercive power in which we all live and participate.

And that gives me some serious hope.

We live in an emerging, postmodern and postcolonial world and because of that context we’re beginning to realize our past mistakes in proclaiming the good news and as a result we’re reinventing what it means to live and proclaim (and proclaiming by living) the counter-cultural good news of Jesus of Nazareth.

And really, when you get down to it, it’s not that complicated. It’s just hard to actually do. Mainly because it involves a completely different way of “being” and living. One that denies self and lives for and in service to the entire world; one that takes Jesus at his word.

So, when missional persons read things like: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Love your enemies” and “Forgive those who persecute you” they try their best to not reduce them to cute one-line catch phrases but actually put them into action by exemplifying what Paul Tillich calls an “ultimate concern for ‘the other.’”

And that’s why I am missional.

Because it involves living out the good news not just talking about. It involves an ethic that is not divorced from but it vital to the ongoing, interactive narrative of salvation. Rather than humor oneself solely with sophisticated theological or philosophical reflection, a missional follower of the Way participates in theological praxis alongside theological reflection. Furthermore, a missional agent, a missional insurgent, sees any theological reflection that is not preceded, accompanied, and followed by praxis as inherently counter-productive to and Jesus message and God’s dream for the world.

I will never forget the tragedy that happened a few years ago at the Amish school in Pennsylvania. And even more compelling the response of the Amish community to the tragedy will be forever ingrained in my memory. Rather than acting in anger and revenge, the community destroyed the school where the shooting took place and moved on by responding with an overwhelming outpouring of forgiveness and reconciliation. They reached out with compassion, mercy, and grace, grieved along with the family of the perpetrator and set up a charity fund in that family’s name. They attended the funeral of the perpetrator and responded with further acts of forgiveness and love. They became Jesus.

And that is why I am missional.

Because, to me, being missional is the best possible way to live the good news of the Jesus movement and participate in God’s alternative reality (God’s kingdom) in the world today. It is the best possible way to be Jesus in the here and now and to convey the message of restoration and re-creation. It is the best possible way to seek justice, resist evil and do good.

Simply put, it is the best possible way to live.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

List of Participants:

Jonathan Brink – “Why I Am Missional”

Jeromy Johnson – “Why I Am Missional: Three Reasons”

Ben Wheatley – “What Would Shepherd Book Do?”

Bryan Riley – “Jesus is the Way and He was Missional”

Alan Knox – “Demonstrating the Heart of God”

Tim Jones – “Participation or Observation?”

Dave Wierzbicki – “Why I Am Missional”

These are some selected quotes from Noam Chomsky’s, Manufacturing Consent:

“These are not just academic exercises. We’re not analyzing the media on Mars, or in the 18th century, or something like that. We’re dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving, because of policies that we are involved in – we as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and responsible for. And what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the interests of suffering people and not the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that’s dripping from their hands because of the way they’re allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system.”

“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of our industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now it’s long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it’s possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can….At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, and sympathy and concern for others; or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control….The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must – namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved, or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.”

I need help.  

Because I have an old school notebook, I have to keep all my music on an external hard drive to conserve space.  It makes things a little inconvenient, but I manage.  About 6 months ago my drive crashed and a lost all my music among other things.  So I bought another drive, wiped my iTunes and started the long process of recovering everything.

As of yesterday I had 85.59 GB of music (that’s around 15,000 songs or 88.1 days) and 13.52 GB of podcasts (604 tracks or 15.5 days).  Not quite back to where I was, but I’m getting there.

Anyway, here’s the problem.  Since my drive crashed and I’ve been recovering everything my iTunes has been acting a little weird.  Every now and then I’ll run across some music, music that I know I’ve recovered but music that iTunes can’t seem to “find.”  And when I come across the files I get the dreaded gray exclamation mark just to the left of the track title.  It looks like this:

Then I’ll double-click the track in question just to make sure and I get this message:

And then I’ll click “Yes” and go find the actual file on my external drive.

And what do you know, there is file right where it should be and right where it has been since I copied it back into iTunes.  But for some reason iTunes can’t find it.  So I select the track and click “choose.”  Done!  

The only thing is I have this problem with a lot of my music.  A whole lot of my music.  Just skimming through I’d estimate that around 1/3 of my iTunes library is “unfindable” like this.  

That makes for a lot of find and clicking.  Too much.  Yesterday I thought I’d go through my whole library and manually fix all this.  I spent around 3 hours and didn’t even get completely through the letter “A” in the artists section.

I’ve thought about completely wiping iTunes again and starting from scratch, but that takes some time as well, not to mention the fact that I’d lose most of my ID3 tags, my podcast information, my playlists, and other information (like play count most played etc.).

So here’s my question: is there a way to refresh my iTunes all at once without 1) having to completely wipe it and start back at square one or 2) having to manually find each track that iTunes can’t find and re-selecting it myself?

Any suggestions?

“In the 1970s, around 47 percent of Americans were overweight or obese; now 66 percent of us are. In addition, the number of just obese people has doubled, from 15 percent of our population to 30 percent.”  Why?  We keep eating and drinking more and more.  We’re killing ourselves.  

Here’s the third installment of Tony Jones’ encounter with trucker Frank.  See the first two here and here. 

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the buzzwords and catch phrases and all the other “church” language Christians like to use. Words like, evangelism, discipleship, “good news,” faith, mission, and so on. One the most popular and overused of these phrases is “the kingdom of God.”  Now, I’ve already expressed my distaste with this phrase and the need to abandon it elsewhere, I don’t really want to rehash that here. What I do want to reflect on is the way that nomenclature is normally used.   

I hear people say it all the time.  They use the phrase “to build the kingdom of God” or “building the kingdom of God” or something to that effect.  I’ll confess that I’ve used it myself to some extent.  But when I stop and I think about it I wonder about the verb: build.  I wonder if that is the right word to use.  Even further I wonder what the implications are of using words and phrases like “to build” and “building” with our pet phrase “the kingdom of God.”  

And the more I think about it, the more reservations I have. It seems to me that it is this “building” mindset that has lead to the perversion of Jesus message in the name of nationalism, empire and colonialism.  I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t come to building another “power over” empire.  In fact, I get the sense from reading the gospels that Jesus actually resisted the building of oppressive empires.  Instead he spoke of an alternative reality, not “power over” but “power under,” not building, but nurturing and participating—participating in a process that already is and continues to be, a reality that is already “within.” 

But for some reason Christians over the course of church history have really latched on to this Constantinian idea of “building.”  We hopped in bed with the empire in hopes that we might spread the good news more effectively and “build” our church more efficiently.  We’ve done some terrible things in the name of “building”: the Crusades, the Inquisition, subjugation of native peoples, slavery, war, colonialism, jingoism, I could go on.  But we rationalized that all of those things helped “build the church” and “build the kingdom.”  And, in turn, as a civil religion we helped build and expand the empire. 

So, I’ve said all that to say I dislike speaking of “building the kingdom of God” just as much as I dislike retaining the archaic image of the kingdom itself.  I’m not sure what to replace that verb with and I don’t necessarily think that is a bad idea.  As I’ve always said, I tend to be apprehensive at global, catch-all phrases.  I think perhaps it is better find ways of reclaiming the original veracity of the Jesus agenda within specific contexts and locales rather than taking the easy way out of constructing some sort of abstract template or stencil that can be thrown about.  

What do you think?