This was just too clever and well done to pass up.  Enjoy!

Curious to see what you would have added if you were the one who made this.

My partner in (missional church) crime out in LA, JR Woodward, has put together another unconference (remember Verge LA from last year?) where a host of church leaders get to share some thoughts and kick start some conversation, this year, around the topic of discipleship.

Check out JR’s post on the event here and register by way of their Facebook page.

This is a piece that my friend Jason Coker wrote recently.  I linked to it in other places, but it’s so good that I wanted to repost it in its entirety.  Visit Jason’s blog for more of his excellent insights and writing.  You might even consider supporting him and his family in terms of the ministries and projects they help lead by becoming a member of his blog community.  Here’s the post…

She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment

Dear Fyodor,

It’s getting rough for the old girl. Despite the rattle of death in her chest, there’s still a hint of the former beauty and dignity behind those eyes and, as anyone would tell you, she’s as feisty as ever. Still, the truth is she’s dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. As we sit around her bed praying and waiting, her moments of lucidity come with rapidly decreasing frequency.

Everyone here is dealing with the ugliness of her death in their own way. My sister refuses to let her go. She stands just beyond the door, arguing in harsh whispers with the doctors and nurses. She won’t believe the facts of the case, and it’s easier to argue over the interpretation of charts and data than to look straight at the old girl herself. I don’t blame her. Looking is hard.

My older brother looks but doesn’t see. “She’s just a little out of shape,” he says optimistically. “If we can get her up and out she’ll be back to her old self, ruling the roost!” And so he hangs a dress on her and rolls on rouge and glides her round the ward in a wheelchair festooned at the handles with curly ribbon and helium balloons so she might speak with the people. I tell you it’s horrible. Such a thing would be bearable (commendable even!) if compassion was his aim, but it’s not compassion he seeks from her fellows in the ward. No, it’s her rulership he hopes to re-animate and so he props her up like some animatronic relic – a broken-down ecclesiastical Chuck-E-Cheese promising fun-and-games for all the good little children.

Sadly, she scares the children. They weren’t around when she was bright and beautiful. They never attended her grand parties. They don’t know who she was (and let’s face it, as good as she might have been she was also a hard taskmaster, perhaps taking her job of keeping us safe too seriously and – I think – secretly hoping we would never grow up). So the children shrink and shriek and their lack of piety (or pity) has fermented my brother’s optimism into a swill of bitter insistence, rendering him defensive and defiant and refusing the temporary inebriation of grief.

(Can I tell you the truth? I fear her death is more than he can take. He always seemed the stronger one growing up, but I’m not sure he can keep his sanity without her strict order around the house – without her barbed-wire fences to separate the wild vines from the cultivated ones. I don’t think he realizes it was always her intention that we harvest the whole field, and I think all these years later she might even be happy to see us tear down those fences if keeping them meant letting the whole field go to waste.)

For me, it’s her delirious rants that are the most heart-wrenching. She’ll stubbornly hoist herself up to rebuke people who aren’t even in the room – resurrected memories of conflicts and passions long dead and gone to everyone but her own cruelly vivid memories that now, in her mortal distress, seem to have taken on a quality that simply overwhelms her present reality. Perhaps it’s for the best – perhaps it’s mercy – but for better or worse I find I’m not just grieving her death, I’m grieving the robbery of her chance to see the transcendence of death by the legacy she leaves in us. I think she would rejoice in that. I think she would look us in the eye and say, “It’s good to grieve me, but celebrate too. If I live on like this then death wins by making me into a mockery of life. But if I die then the life I lived will be victorious by passing on to you. Now take the best and go.”

She deserves that moment; it’s her birthright. But we won’t let her have it. We insist on preserving her because somehow we think our life is in her, when actually her life (all life!) is a gift that grows in the giving, until one day it grows so fat it swallows every one of us whole, death and all. Who would have thought, Fyodor, that the nihilism you so strenuously decried would lead not to the depraved insistence on rationalized death, but to the dogmatic insistence on irrational life?

You must be wondering how she can possibly endure for so long. It’s the machines that keep her alive. Pray for a death rattle in the chest of those monstrosities so she might finally be free from our obsessions, and enjoy a long night of rest in a well-deserved sleep.

I’ve been wanting to do some blog redesign for some time and while my wife being out of the country for 10 days is not something I’ve enjoyed, it has given me some time to make some changes.

So what have we got?

New background, new header, some new colors, an updated intro and connecting blurb, and all my posts categorized under the general headings of, “Bible & Theology, “Church & Culture, “Life & Mission.”

The changes aren’t quite as revolutionary as I had hoped when I started, but it feels freshened up a bit and I taught my self some new CSS & HTML stuff.

If you tend to just read my posts in a reader, I hope you’ll click through and let me know if you notice any errors on your end.

In case you missed it before, I am doing all of this on top of a cool theme that my friend Todd built. If you are looking for a great WordPress theme and a cool guy to work with, give Todd a shout.

Here’s the thing I hate most about blogging – it’s all about the now.  Doesn’t matter how much time you invested or how much thought you put into that post or series birthed by your creative genius – your precious content is forgotten and buried faster than Superman tweeting on speed!

Enter Tweet Old Post.

I stumbled upon this brilliant wordpress plugin recently that resurrects that old content and brings it into the land of the living.

You select an interval (I’ve chosen twice a day), and BOOM – your old content, selected at random based on the criteria you choose, is tweeted.  It even comes packaged with the ability to choose a link shortening service.

One downside – as I have figured out since beginning to use this plugin.  If your readers/followers don’t pay attention, they will think that you’re posting new content and ask you if you’re alright after your car wreck (that happened 4 years ago!).

So, my fellow bloggers, hop on over to here and tell Ajay thanks for writing a plugin that helps us repopulate the interwebs with the precious fruit of our labors.

Get in on this!

Here’s the twitter stream for the #ecclesia hastag
[iframe http://twubs.com/ajax360/embed/ecclesia/? 500 400]

I have had something like a 15 year love affair with Boston, which is strange for someone who has never actually been there, but that’s about to change.  Amy and I are currently planning a long weekend in Boston and various excursions from there around New England.

So, who’s got the 411 on Boston and the surrounding area?  What and where do we need to make sure to check out?  What’s our best bet for scenic, yet affordable accommodations?  Looking for any advice anyone wants to throw our way, thanks.

If it wasn’t obvious by my open letter to HR, I have been looking for work.

When Amy and I got engaged, we went round and round about whether to be in Memphis where I was pastoring or in Chicago where she was just getting settled into a pretty major career position.  Through lots of prayer, discernmnet, and discussion, Chicago won out.

I moved up here at the beginning of May and since then, beside keeping myself busy with wedding planning and then getting us settled into a new apartment, I have been teaching an online class, The Emerging Church in the 21st Century, for Fuller Theological Seminary.

With the wedding behind us, the apartment pretty much in order, and the class coming to an end, I am getting more focused on looking for work.

Both because we are so at home in our church community, Life on the Vine, and because we are trying to make decisions that offer us the flexibility to be part of birthing a new missional comminity, I’m not looking for church staff positions.  Instead, I have mainly been looking for staff positions at colleges and universities as well as with non-profit organizations whose work in the Chicagoland area I could get excited about.  I have also given some consideration to working my way into the world of web development through project coordination and information architecture.  I am definitely open to continuing to be involved with online education.

While I am conducting the job search 1.0-style (job boards, websites, and other manner of non-relational means), I’d rather go the route of Job Search 2.0, via relational connections, leveraging the power of social connectivity.

So, at the risk of this being misinterpreted as some sort of act of desperation (IT’S NOT), but because I tend to be a relational networker, I thought I would open my search up to a broader audience to solicit your ideas and feedback.  Anyone, especially those of you who know me well, have any bright ideas about jobs, resources, or people I should try and connect with?  If it helps, here’s a basic resume and CV.

It’s not a new conversation, but there has been some recent discourse & interest around virtual community and the use of video venues for church communities. I wanted to point you toward a few resources of interest.

© Oleg Gerasymenko | Dreamstime.com

Bob Hyatt has written a great piece entitled, Video Venues: The Death of Preaching.  And I wholeheartedly agree with his thesis as well as closing remarks

…just because God honors our silly methods occasionally doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for better ways, perhaps less silly, perhaps ones with fewer unintended consequences.

Shane Hipps, an acquaintance from Fuller, has caught some heat for his take on virtual community and in a recent podcast, “The Papacy of Celebrity,” had some good things to say about video venues as well.  The great thing about the perspective Shane is coming from is that he doesn’t need to demonize anything, he’s just trying to be honest about the full scope of these things.

I wouldn’t presume to speak for Bob or Shane, but as I have followed the various discussions and listened to what is being said, it’s because of my heart for spiritual formation that I lament the idea that connecting with people virtually could ever be God’s full intention for community.  More saddening, is the way in which we fail to see how the medium of video venues disfigures some of the most precious characteristics of the gospel and the Body of Christ – not because God can’t show up, but because of the adverse formative effect they have on people.

If my kid steals some money from my wallet, I can probably fix the problem by crushing his hand with a wrench, but the point isn’t just fixing the problem, it’s fixing it in the right way.  There is no room in the Christian faith for being connected in community “at all costs,” much less for, good preaching “at all costs.”  That just misses the bigger point.  The medium really is the message, they are bound up with one another, which is why, in terms of discipleship, it’s not just about doing the right things, but about doing things the right ways.

Perhaps for utilitarians, the means justify the ends, but for those who follow Christ and his invitation to “pick up your cross and follow me,” the means and the ends are indistinguishable.

Amy and I are looking for some help with our wedding and the events (including honeymoon) surrounding it.  Aside from it being a beautiful and memorable day, we are hoping to infuse as much of what we are going to do with theological significance and creativity.  We already have a good number of friends that are going to be vital in helping that to be a reality, but, believers in networking that we are, we’d just assume hear from as many folks as possible.

So, wonderful people out there, what ideas, experiences, and resources do you have that you’d like to share – we’re all ears!

(think… cost saving, creative enhancing, meaning infusing, deal finding, value reflecting, & God-honoring)

Please pass a link to this on to anyone that you think might have something to contribute – facebook it, twitter it, bookmark it, whatever.

Just had to note one more free mac-only app – Adium.

iChat is a pretty sweet deal for instant messaging. And if you want to do audio or video chat, it’s still the way to go. But if text chatting is your deal, then Adium is what you want.

Aside from already being able to connect to all your AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Skype, and other contacts through one application, they just added Facebook support in the latest beta release.

The other thing I really like is how much you can customize the look and feel of the contact list and messaging windows. This is what I am looking at on my screen…

See that little deal, yeah, that’s all I the screen space it has to use up!

When you throw in a little Growl support (pop-up notifications) on top of that, it is a really, really great application.

In conjunction with my previous 2 posts, I was reminded of this post which I titled, but never wrote. It is something I have been thinking about for a while and maybe now see a bit better, or feel a bit stronger, what I meant when I thought it up.

There is something in each of us, in my opinion – part of what it means to be made in the image of God, that wants to be known. This is almost certainly bound up with (if not the same as) the desire to be loved. This is perhaps the great common denominator of humanity – the search and desire to have others truly know us.

Social networking, in fact, all forms of communication, are tools which, to greater or lesser extents, assist this process. We talk, chat, text, share, link, and otherwise connect to know and be known. We long for connection – for those times when, in pregnant expectation, we reach out in communication to another and find common ground, affirmation, validation, appreciation, value, and mutuality. It is a powerful and empowering thing to feel and now that you are not alone.

But for all the tools at our disposal, I don’t think many are experiencing what they long for – what they were created for. Many more, I am afraid, end up convincing themselves that their superficial avenues of connectedness are in fact, the best anyone can hope for in this day and age. Or perhaps worse yet, people are so scared of actually being known that this is where they end up living – in a shallow state of community and connectedness that allows they to remain finally hidden.

There is no substitute for authentic, face-to-face, life-on-life, warts-and-all, community and connectedness. And it’s a huge risk to go there. It takes patience, sacrifice, discipline, courage and vulnerability – all of which are rare virtues in a culture stripped of its need of those traits (one can get by today without them with relative ease).

I am increasingly convinced that one of the greatest opportunities presented to the church in Western culture today is that of cultivating communities and disciples whose character reflects these virtues. How often do we talk about creating a patient community or vulnerable disciples? If these sort of virtues really are the sort that make it possible for us to know others and be known by others – and if doing so is analogous to knowing and being known by God, then surely these ought to be among our chief concerns.

I’ll leave it up to you to make the final decision on how related these two thoughts I have been having are…

At Living Hope, we have been talking about and trying to get to a place where some of the practices that typically happen on a Sunday morning (baby dedications and baptisms for example), happen at other times because they are the sort of things that really pertain to those who truly share life together, not a general population of people who are gathered on a Sunday morning who may or may not have much of a real connection with one another. We have talked some about the ways in which we can actually create a false sense of community by giving people glimpses into really important facets of the lives of others – devoid of any real relationship. We are sensitive to this, I think, because we have a strong conviction that both personal discipleship as well as the life of Christian community in general needs to flow out of people sharing life together in a deep sense. To give anyone a false sense of community then, would be to rob them of the actual need they have to both be investing in the lives of others as well as being invested in by others.

Texting and IMing can be convenient means of communication, but there is also an intrinsic distance introduced. Devoid of the presence of the other, you miss out on non-verbal communication, the investment of time that it takes to actually be in the presence of one another, and other facets of face to face relationship. It may not be going too far to say that instant electronic communication actually winds up commodifying and objectifying the other. We are more easily able to see and treat others as resources at our disposal as opposed to relationships we are bound to.

Or what about something like Facebook? How much of a temptation is there for me to fool myself into believeing that I actually know someone because I am pretty up to speed on where they’re at, what they’re doing, and how they are (electronically) interacting with others?

I suppose the point of all I am saying is this; we live in a day and age where people are starved for community and connection. Sadly, the information age has provided us with innumerable options of instantly connecting with others, but at what expense? What if the very thing we relied on these mediums for was obscured or lost altogether by its shadow? Worse, what if we slowly but surely began to lose our ability to authentically relate to one another across the range of human emotions and dispositions because we had become so used to a dehumanized sort of communication?

So I had someone ask me to check out their profile a while back on Facebook.  But, in order to see it, I had to register.  Before I knew it I started receiving friend requests, which was both cool and surprising.  Anyway, I am thinking about trying to do a bit more interaction with Facebook, but I don’t want to become overly consumed with the endless vortex of social networking.  Anyone have any thoughts on the matter or advice on using Facebook?

I added a Facebook link to my profile over to the right (if you go to the actual web page).  Hit me up!

 

Do you really like social networking (flickr/youtube/delicious/blogging/etc) but hate the visual awfulness of myspace?  You might want to consider being a Virb(er).  I am.