Here and Now

I've been writing - fiction, songs, autobiographical stuff... I have this unquenchable urge to create right now. I wonder if that's how God felt. If it was like, "I have to do this. I can't wait to see it all unfold." I dunno. That's how I feel. I don't know if it's appropriate to talk about God "feeling" anyway. But I think that's one of those strong connections to God that we have - to be in the image of God is to be creative. I know people say they aren't creative, but everyone I've ever met is creative - just in different ways. The math whiz shares more with the piano prodigy than either of them would probably recognize. The painter and the landscaper - the bowler and the sculptor. The singer and the speaker - the mother and the doctor. It is when I stand back and look at what people do that I see the genius and the creativity in their lives. My uncle owns a trucking company and he's a great mechanic. In fact, he...

My grandmother came over to see Rachel's first speaking role in a church musical. She was Angel #5. She was amazing. Okay, the girl who played the whale (it was called "Oh Jonah!") was the show stopper - but, you know, Rachel's my little girl - and she was fantastic! But that's not the point. Gram handed me a small package. Inside were these two small new testaments and this grungy little folder. She said that she's pretty sure the tan NT was her father's and that he took it when he shipped out for World War One (you know, that war 5 or 6 wars ago that was the "war to end all wars"...sigh...). It's a very worn book - especially the Gospels. Half a page is torn out, but other than the very end of 2 Corinthians, it looks intact - just really, really used. I don't know much about my great-grandfather's service - I'll have to ask Gram. Truth be told, I didn't know he served during the "Great War." The black NT was a Chri...

So, a pastor friend has a dilemna that he shares with me (and with a few other pastors around the table). He goes to visit a couple from his church. They are both retired, strong church members, good attenders and givers, devout, all of that. But he's been wondering something: they have different last names. She has been introduced to the pastor as, "this is my wife..." so he's thinking maybe, long before it was in fashion, she retained her maiden name when they married. No, they aren't "really" married. But it's not that they don't love each other, in fact they WANT to be married. They are totally committed to each other, and have been for several years. The thing is, if they get married, somehow they lose about a third of their income. They can't afford to get married. So, my friend asks, what do you do? Do you insist they get married? Do you give them a blessing on their "marriage in the eyes of God?" Do you tell them they're...

I was wondering this morning why guys read in the bathroom. I know that some women read in the bathroom and some men don't read there, but most every guy I know reads "in the can" as one guy puts it. Nope, I don't know why. But I remember that my introduction to Kafka and Freud and a whole world of literature was opened up to me in the bathroom at my parent's house when I was a kid because my dad would leave his books lying around and I'd pick them up and try to figure out why a guy wakes up as a cockroach...pretty heady stuff for a ten year old. Truth is I don't remember a lot of those books - my dad read philosophy, psychology, and a lot of "informational" stuff - but I remember the plight of poor Gregor Samsa who could no longer communicate with those around him and died a neglected and starved...um...bug... Stories are powerful. I didn't understand what Kafka was getting at when I was ten (not sure I get all of it today - I just read ther...

So I've been offline for a while. Too busy...sorry... I literally spent two days (about 8 hours one day and about 10 the next) trying to rip video from a DVD to insert it into a powerpoint program for our cluster worship service. Now, understand, I have all kinds of tools to do this - but I couldn't get the quality that I wanted. It would be blocky or the lines refreshing would be obvious. It was unbelievably frustrating. So I kept downloading new tools, trying out new demos. One program promised to give me full DVD quality video - but it was slow. In fact, after an hour it was still at .4% complete (yep, 4/10ths of ONE percent). So, well, you do the math as to how many days it would take to rip that file (it wasn't even the whole DVD - a 3:48 short film....ARGH). So, we pressed on with what I felt was one subpar video clip in the presentation (the other one was just fine) and I came in late last night to polish it up for our District Superintendent and captured the video d...

So, I'm surfing a page full of quotations for no reason other than that's how the web works - I linked from a link from a link...um... But I came across this quote from Frank Zappa: One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds. Here's the thing: he's pretty much right. We rarely argue people into changing their minds. EVEN if we point out that what they've hung their hat on is complete fiction - How many times have you been told that Aspartame causes cancer ? It doesn't seem to matter if you SEND PEOPLE TO THE FDA or the American Council on Science and Health. Nevermind that the AMA (yeah, search the document - you'll find it) seems to suggest that all the studies thus far linking artificial sweeteners to higher cancer rates are pretty much bunk... And why are there warnings posted at gas stations to not use cell phones while pumping gas? Yet - most peop...

So - I'm processing stuff from Innovate 2007 - and one way I do that is to review, of course, so here's my run down of Guy Kawasaki's Innovation Top Ten: (oh, by the way, Guy was an executive - actually a software evangelist for Apple and is now a venture capitalist - so his approach is basically from a business standpoint, though he is a Christian) Make Meaning - the root of all innovation is the desire to make meaning - not to make money, members, etc. Make Mantra - express why you exist in 2 or 3 words - NOT a mission statement, which is too long - Mantra is short and memorable. Examples: NIKE - Authentic Athletic Performance; eBay - Democratize Commerce Jump to the Next Curve - innovation strives not to be 10% or 20% better, but 10 TIMES better. Example: 130 years ago in the Northeast, ice was harvested by sawing blocks out of frozen ponds and lakes and then stored in warehouses and used in shipping. Eventually, ice factories were built in cities - they could freeze...

Here 's a link to a website that tries to match you up with candidates based on a handful of major issues. What I learned from the exercise is that I don't know enough about ANY of the candidates...good, bad or ugly...

Spent a big chunk of last week at the Innovate 2007 conference at Granger Community Church in Granger Indiana. First off, I was pleased to discover that GCC is a United Methodist church. I was not surprised to find that they don't make the denomination a part of their name. We're in an age where Community is much more likely to engage someone and "United Methodist" is much more likely to disengage someone within their target demographic . Understand, they don't want (or need, for that matter) me to come to their church (though I want to, I really do). Their target on Sunday mornings is, you guessed it, the Seeker (tm) ** (see note below) either has never gone to church or who has become disenfranchised by organized religion. Okay, fair enough. I came to a realization that every church has a target demographic. We have a very formal and traditional service at 11:00 here at First. We should not be surprised that we tend to attract folks who like formal and traditio...

So I spent the last two days helping to replace a hundred feet of sidewalk for a parishioner. Man, concrete work is really demanding (I was going to say "Concrete is hard work" but, well, the pun...you know...) and my back and knees and...frankly, every part of me hurts right now... (okay, that's not a picture of the actual sidewalk replaced...I forgot my camera, okay?) But, that's not the important thing. We tried several times to get guys from the church to come out, but the homeowner really wanted it done on weekdays - otherwise there was a pretty steep additional charge for the concrete (most of which she was getting for free from the city as part of what they call the "pridewalk" program) - so that limited the number of people who could help. Most of the women from the church who were able, schedule-wise, to help, didn't feel they could do the work physically... So... that left me and Stan from the church on Monday (Stan is an EMT and all-around gre...

I broke the rules, but I didn't do anything wrong. So, why do I feel kinda guilty? Here's the thing. We have this municipal parking lot where you get a ticket when you go in and then when you leave you stop at a little booth to pay your fee. The first half hour is free and then it goes up in quarter increments (okay, this isn't the biggest town in Western PA, okay?). So, I'm only in there like 20 minutes but when I stop at the little booth, it's locked up. Now what do I do with my little ticket? The RULES say I have to turn it in...but, I don't owe anything...um... So, it was a really little moment in my otherwise fascinating and exciting life - but as I was pulling away clutching the ticket I felt...weird. You know, I didn't do anything wrong...but I broke the rules... And I wonder if Jesus ever felt that way when he healed on the Sabbath. Okay, maybe that's a bad example because Jesus is...well...GOD. So, how about Peter and John. Do you think those gu...

So we were talking about chaos theory and the butterfly effect yesterday in my youth class (heh, probably not your standard youth fare...but it applied) and I remembered a quote from An Unstoppable Force (the book I'm teaching in our adult Sunday School class right now) by Erwin McManus that ties into this new line of thinking that God is leading me on - our deep interconnectedness. Okay, this is kinda long, so bear with me: "When God creates, he creates with relational integrity. Everything is connected and fits together. This is true not only in the physical realm, but even more so in the spiritual. The Bible tells us that when man sinned, all creation groaned. "Those who study science have told us that a butterfly fluttering its wings in South America could, in some sense, be the primary cause of an avalanche in Antarctica. This level of complexity strikes us as new and innovative, and yet the Scriptures have advocated this kind of interconnection for thousands of y...

As a tie-in to the last post: I just saw a group of daycare kids walking down the street "attached" to a bright, lime-green rope. I don't know how common this "chain gang" daycare travel method is, but everytime I see it I smile (you have an adult at the front and one in the rear - and then this long line of kids holding on to a rope - sometimes with straps over their wrists "attaching" them to the rope). Of course, there's nothing like a bunch of little kids to make me smile. And then I thought, "Sandpeople travel in single file to hide their numbers..." Man, I am a geek. But... Here's what also struck me. Last week's Gospel reading in the lectionary was the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin and on the GBOD website Taylor Burton Edwards asked some pretty pointed questions: So who has gotten lost where the people of your congregation live and work? How do people in your congregation treat these people? ...

Well, it's not snowy season yet, but I was thinking about snow the other day. Now, once the weather gets cold enough around here that cars need to "defrost," I usually get up early with Lori and clear her car off for her (heh - which usually just involves starting it and letting it idle with the heat on - but sometimes I actually have to brush the snow off the car, too...). Anyway, when it's snowy and I make fresh prints in the snow, invariably I think of this scene from Star Wars: A New Hope (that would be Episode 4 - of course we all just knew it as Star Wars...but I digress): So when I make tracks in the snow, I always walk back in the very same tracks (heh, I guess "to hide th[e] numbers..."). I don't know why I do it - maybe I'm just a little bit neurotic, I don't know, or maybe I'm just the uber-geek that people think I am... But what I have come to realize is that I hold on to stuff from movies in my head for a long time. Scenes, i...

So I discovered this video this morning and, well, it was my youth... Now, if you don't get it - or if you just think it was "cute" or something - then you probably won't like Dork Tower either... (and if you DID get it...or, um, lived it...check out the Dork Tower archives - of course, if you lived it, you've already read the DT archives...) Ah, youth...wasted on the...thoughts of whether Spidey could take the Hulk... Oh, he could, definitely...

So we're trying to get Scott Phillips to come to The Crossing *** for opening night - that would be New Year's Eve - so I've been listening to his stuff a lot lately . I had two albums (the first self-titled and the newest one, Next Stop Willoughby which is, by the way, an amazing album) and I've purchased the other two (man, itunes is an addiction - I need to join IA or something). *** sorry - right now it's just a link to the survey - go ahead and take it, though. I'll wait. Really. Go ahead... Anyway, I've been in a pretty deep funk for a week or so - it's all stuff that I've brought on myself (if you must know, my defense mechanism for stress is avoidance - so when there's something I don't want to do - or something that's causing me stress - I procrastinate - and I can do that in a HUGE way - in fact, if it were an Olympic event, I'd be a world champion). So, I've dug a hole - more of a pit - no, how about gaping chasm... A...

Through a series of links (you know how the web works - I'm reading this blog, which links to this one, which links to this site, and on and on...) I came across this site with nominations for America's Most Innovative Churches (with Outreach Magazine) and I checked out the form for "nominating a church" and one of the questions asked was, "What makes a church innovative?" So, what DOES make a church innovative? Is it a cool website or having a Starbucks in the parking lot - so the folk waiting for the shuttlebus to the sanctuary can be refreshed before they are brought into the carefully designed for traffic flow entry/lobby where they can get another latte and even a muffin to take into the "worship space" to watch the "pre-show" entertain...uh, ministry and, perhaps, chat with one of the carefully selected Official Greeters (tm)... Sorry if I sound a little sarcastic... It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with all ...

Double Post Wednesday.... Read somewhere the other day something about evangelism. The core of the message was: we've been too busy trying to get people saved FROM hell, when we ought to be busy getting people saved INTO the Kingdom of God. It's a huge difference, and one that I really hadn't given a lot of thought to. But think about this: if all the emphasis is placed on getting people to "say the sinner's prayer" or whatever, once a person gets to that point - let's call it repentance and acceptance of Jesus as their Lord and Savior - what's left? If your goal is to "get them saved" - well, you've done it. So, drop 'em like hot spuds and look for the next sinner to grab by the collar and get all "Jesus in their face" til they repent. OR... We could welcome people INTO something. The sad truth is that too many churches don't have any "something" going on, so they can only offer saving people from hell and...

Well, two things have come together again and my mind is spinning. First, the article on Mother Teresa and the very, very...um, VERY long dark night of her soul that Time Magazine reported on not long ago. It seems time and again that Teresa complained that God was distant - even so distant as to seem to not exist (though she only makes THAT complaint once). Still, I get it. I've been going through that kind of struggle, though not to the depth or length of Teresa's... Then I read a quote in a sermon from William Stringfellow, "Prayer is being so alone that God is the only witness to your existence." I need that place right now. I suspect that Teresa found that place often enough, but she never could shake the feeling that God wasn't witnessing her existence. I wonder if God wasn't closer than ever - so close that she couldn't sense Him becasue God was overwhelming her. I wonder sometimes if we could dive so deeply into Christ that we wouldn't see...

Well, I'm part of an accountabilty group and we go through a list of quesitons (I know I've mentioned it before). I was thinking last night about the questions that Wesley had his group go through (the whole list is here - scroll down and you'll find them). So, I thought I'd deal with the questions as an exercise in blogging...or, um, something. Anyway, here goes.... Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am better than I really am? In other words, am I a hypocrite? I've done it. I know I have. I remember the days when I wanted to impress people. As much as I get away from that attitude, I still find myself doing it. Politicians call it spin. When I was a kid, I'd try to minimize my apparent involvement in the bad stuff I'd do. You know, it's not really my fault, after all... As an adult I may be even better at it. So, in some ways I create "the impression that I am better than I really am" by minimizing my own failur...

Rachel had allergy testing on Tuesday. It was hell for me - and worse for her. "Lay down on your tummy - I'm going to write on your back." "Daddy, are they going to use the needles?" "Yes, honey, they are." "I don't want the needles." "I know, but they have to." As the first round of tests - twenty four pokes in her tiny back - proceed, she is very strong at first, but after about a dozen it just hurts too much and she breaks down. "Make them stop, Daddy." But I can't. I want to, but I have to watch my little girl hurt and cry and I can't do a thing about it. In fact, I brought her here for this. And thank God it went quickly, though it seemed forever. And she can't scratch her back ("But it itches soooo badly") and she has to just sit there for fifteen minutes. And those 24 didn't show any allergies. "Hold very still or these next ones will hurt." Next ones? And ten more - stronger,...

I missed it, but the story is going all around the staff...Lori has been telling it...so, here goes... I guess my girls have been rehearsing the crucifixion scene. They've heard it so many times, I probably shouldn't be surprised. Rachel very seriously and carefully tells Elie about Jesus' death for our sins. And they...act it out. Now, I don't know if I'm the proudest dad in Warren, or the most horrified... Rachel laid Elie on the floor, stretched her arms out and pretended (with Elie's toy hammer) to nail her hands to the imaginary cross. They were very reverent and, actually, I guess Rachel did a pretty good job in explaining it. So, the other day, Lori is doing dishes and Elie comes out into the kitchen and lays down on the floor and spreads her arms and says, "Nail me down, Mommy! Nail my hands and my feet." "Now, honey, that's a very serious and important story..." "I know it is, Mommy. Jesus died for our sins. He was nailed do...

I am, it seems, a "frequent contributor" over at http://www.crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com/ (though I think I've probably only submitted a dozen or so...and only had four or five actually make the cut - 'cause most of what I've seen around here is soooo yesterday). So, I've decided that I'll only submit crummy church sign photos - and I have my first sighting here . I'll stand by my review, but I wish I had thought of this: Exodus 3:13-14 (NIV) 13 Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?" 14 God said to Moses, "Um...no, don't tell them who sent you. In fact, just forget we ever had this conversation..."

So I just read a moderate response to immigration over on Keith McIlwain's blog McIlWeb and I guess I'm now understanding Michael's ambivalence toward a moderate position. I mean, basically I agree with much of what Keith is saying, but in the end I felt like saying, "So what? Is there a position here?" Keith, I know that's not fair - and really, it's me, not you... Because I'm that kind of moderate. I pretty much weigh the pros and the cons and find the common ground and here's my position - as non-threating as jello... What do I think about immigration? Find a way to encourage legal immigraion and stop illegal immigration - without too much suffering on the part of those who hav chosen the illegal route...yet just...sigh...really, what am I even saying? Jesus - the ulitmate radical...moderate? Hmmm, maybe not so much... Elie can't wait to have her first soccer practice. Truth be told, I can't wait for it, either. She's four, s...

I read an interesting article online the other day (I'm still wrestling with this whole "Emergent" "Postmodern" thing...where do I fall in all this theologically?) Anyway, it's a sort of "anti-postmodern rant" but one part really struck me: I'm fully prepared to admit that when we boomers were young, we faddishly embraced church-growth ratios and sociological analysis; we praised these modern tools as the salvation of the church. So it's poetic justice for us now to sit in the back of the room, the balding and befuddled, as the next generation praises the postmodern matrix as the salvation of the church. But we're both wrong. We've already got a salvation for the church, and he will not share his glory with any current cultural form, no matter how valuable or necessary it may be. If the church uncritically embraced modern culture, the solution is not to uncritically embrace postmodern culture. Every extreme in position is wrong - it...

Well, I was reading something about Rob Bell (a friend of mine was ranting about what a heretic he is so, of course, I had to check him out). Short of buying Velvet Jesus (um...not sure I'm quite ready to do that and never mind Sex God ...) I thought I'd do a little online research. It seems that I probably won't agree with Rob in a number of areas. But I happened on this critique of Bell's theology here where the guy goes off on Bell's interpretation of the Trinity. Here's the quote of Bell on Trinity: This doctrine is central to historic, orthodox Christian faith. While there is only one God, God is somehow present everywhere. People began to call this presence, this power of God, his 'Spirit'. So there is God, the then there is God's Spirit. And then Jesus comes among us and has this oneness with God that has people saying things like God has visited us in the flesh (John 1:14). So God is one, but God has also revealed himself to us as Spirit...

I recently had a conversation with someone about the emergent church. He's super critical of anything labeled "emergent" - as if, somehow, it's a monolithic movement and not just a whole bunch of people trying to figure out life and faith... Here's a bunch of anti-emergent posters to whet your appetite (okay, they really are funny...heh) http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/posters.htm And here's my favorite. Thing is - this poster can be applied to EVERY "group" of believers. Listen to the very liberal interpretations of the Bible and the very conservative and you're still probably hearing people make the Bible say what they want it to say. We ALL do that to a degree. I have heard more sermons that dissect single words in Greek and Hebrew to tell us "what it really says" - ignoring the context as a whole, of course. And I've done it, I know... But - this isn't really about that. This is about my problem with the whole "emergent m...