One of the Weird things about writing a book

One of the weird things about writing a book is sending your ideas out into the stratosphere; beyond the people who you interact with face to face. So it is always interesting to see how people interpret, receive and expand your ideas. Here are a couple of articles about The Trouble with Paris, Checkout Crosswalk.com’s article Here and HeartsandMinds.com Here

R.I.P Bill Rice

I had my post for today all written out in my head. I had been thinking a lot about the death of shame in our culture, the way that self promotion in the form of notoriety has become standard fare today. People don’t care today how they get known as long as they are known.

A girl is busted in a prostitution ring with a Governor and becomes a myspace celebrity, a well known singer wears her crack cocaine addiction on her sleeve and it boosts her career. Organized crime figures become colour commentators on FM morning radio shows. 

I wanted to write about how shame is dead and superficiality rules.  How our hyper-consumer culture turns everything into a PR stunt.

Then last night my wife rang me from the hospital, her father Bill had died.  

Bill Rice was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He migrated to Australia as a teenager. Bill was the spitting image of Sean Connery, except that Sean Connery aged, whereas Bill for the whole of his life looked like a young version of James Bond.  

Bill’s athletic ability and determination saw him excelled at soccer. As the post war migrant boom in Australia saw soccer grow. Bill was signed by one of the top teams in the country at the time Footscray J.U.S.T. Playing for this team created by Yugoslavian migrants meant that for the rest of his life Bill would be a celebrity amongst Serbian-Australians. Bill would eventually be picked to represent the national team of Australia in their world cup qualifying campaign of 1966. The team devastated by food poisoning would just miss out on the finals losing to the great North Korean team who went onto to beat Italy and shock the world.

Bill’s Christian faith was always evident to whoever he met. This was not because he beat people over the head with a bible, what shone out from Bill was quiet Christian dignity. People who were not beleivers would say that Bill represented what a true Christian was.

Bill’s footballing ability attracted attention from scouts from top English teams, however Bill gave away the game to spend time working as a Salvation Army Youth group leader amongst disadvantaged young people. Bill loved getting alongside young guys and encouraging them in their faith. Author and missional leader Ash Barker wrote a chapter about Bill’s influence on his life in his book Finding Life. Bill inspired Ash and others because he was not about promoting himself, instead he promoted others. He understood the power of encouragement, and the importance of humility.

People wanted what Bill had. Through his integrity and witness at his work, Bill lead a number of people into a life giving relationship with Jesus. After Bill had retired, he decided to enter a new stage of his life as a prison chaplain, a role that he was perfectly suited to. Bill never judged, even in prison amongst those who were locked up, Bill’s dignity spoke loud and clear. The prisoners adored Bill, storing up their biscuits and cakes for Bill’s weekly visit. He would simply listen, he did not just act with dignity, he conferred it on those who he came into contact with. He created space for others instead of pushing his own agenda, thus humanizing the person whom he was with.

Even in his last years, in the midst of disease, pain and suffering, Bill did not think of himself, he acted with the same quiet Christian dignity which had marked his life. Even in his last moments his life spoke, the nurses who cared for him at the end adored him, one nurse told the family that it was a privilege to care for him.

No one who met Bill did not like him. He was a gentleman, his character spoke no matter where he was, be it on the football field, at work, at home or in the prison. His absence will leave a hole in the hearts of many, but the witness of his dignity will minister to us until we meet Billy again in the coming kingdom of God.

How our world needs such dignity now.

Personal Branding as Identity

“My generation does not have conversations. Instead we broadcast.”

                                                                           25 Year old female.

Before I got into ministry I studied advertising, and I have quite a few friends who have studied advertising, marketing and public relations. There are certain tricks and skills that you learn in such a field in order to create publicity for a product or service that you are promoting.

I find it fascinating that the average young adult, or young person today is skilled in public relations. The word of advertising and marketing has deeply shaped how we relate to each other socially, websites like facebook and myspace operate like personal public relations firms. Identity formation now looks more like brand development.

I often meet people today who I have not seen for a while and don’t need to ask them about how they are going because their ’status’ on facebook informs me, and I have already seen their photos online from their last party. Technology almost makes our catching up redundant.

The problem is that humans in order to be human need to relate, their is a difference between information harvesting and relationally connecting with others. The Google age in which we live is great for looking up information, be it the bio of that band your heard on the radio or the youtube exploits of your ex boyfriend, but information is different from intimacy.

Twitter or someones facebook status may let us know what others are up to, but this is very different from being ‘known’. In advertising you find yourself in a battle with others messages and brands in a marketplace, all competing for attention from your audience of consumers. Strangely this dynamic is being reflected in how we relate to each other, our personal branding must become more slick, we must make ourselves appear interesting, and popular, in order to receive validation as valuable people.

Our culture does not give us too many clues on how to develop deeper relationships it only tells us how to gather wider relationships. We have more contact with people than we have ever had before, but that contact is miles wide and only an inch deep. We are tech rich but relationally poor.

One of the missional roles of the church in the 21st century may be how to teach people again how to have actual friendships, that are long, deep and rewarding. The people of God may more and more find ourselves being prophetic simply because we are a community.

Leadership as Control vs Leadership as Service.

On November 18th 1978, over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement either killed themselves or were forcibly murdered in their jungle base in Guyana. Only hours before they had murdered several people including US congressman Leo Ryan and prominent journalists who had come to rescue members of this cult.

What was chilling about this whole terrible tragedy, was that in its earliest days the Peoples Temple looked like the ideal Christian community. It was a multi-ethnic. diverse movement, its services were filled with pentecostal vibrancy, featuring healings and powerful worship. Yet the peoples temple was also deeply committed to social justice and racial reconciliation. The group managed to live out a community life that looked like the early church. The group was also highly missional sending out buses to spread the good news amongst disaffected youth across the country.

Yet a time bomb was ticking in the soul of its leader Jim Jones. Jones’ childhood experiences had left him with a deep fear of abandonment. This grew and grew inside of him, creating a monster that would completely corrupt Jones with devastating consequences. Jones’ fear of abandonment caused him to begin to run his movement with cult like control. His dysfunctions would send him into a spiral of physical and sexual abuse, paranoia and drug addiction.

Jones would eventually reject the authority of the bible, in one service he threw his bible to the ground as he publicly renounced it. He became Marxist, declaring his new found atheism. With no accountability, and no higher authority to look to, the People’s temple movement descended into madness. Eventually Jones’ fear of abandonment would lead him to cause the death of over 900 members of his movement. His dysfunctions had remained unhealed and in the dark. They grew into a cancer which caused him to turn leadership into control.

When you are a leader you place a megaphone to your dysfunctions, amplifying their devastating effects on those in your sphere of influence.

The one ray of light in this dark chapter is the example of Congressman Leo Ryan. I know nothing of his religious beliefs, but in this story, he was a “Christ figure’. Ryan was no ordinary politician. He put his money where his mouth was. After serving in World War Two, Ryan was inspired by John F Kennedy’s call to public service and he became a politician to serve his community. After riots had devastated the African-American area of Watts. Ryan instead of just reading a report about the incident, became in his spare time a substitute teacher in Watts so as to understand ‘on the ground’ the poverty people were living in. When he heard about unjust conditions in the prison system, Ryan had his staff arrange for him to be imprisoned under a false name, so that he could understand the system from a prisoners perspective.

In the last few years of his life, Ryan worked tirelessly advocating for families of cult members. He was one of the first public critics of Scientology. Such was his dedication to these families, Ryan decided to travel to Guyana unprotected and against the advice of the authorities, in order to rescue members of the People’s temple who were being held against their will. Ryan knew that he was walking into a lion’ den, yet he took the risk such was his dedication to others freedom.

Ryan was not able to save the 900 hundred who lost their lives, yet he was able to save a handful of People’s temple members before he was callously shot to death by a member of the cult during the escape.

Jones will be remembered as a leader who let his dark-side take over, who’s insatiable desire for control lead to unspeakable evil. Congressman Leo Ryan will be remembered as a leader who understood that leadership is service and self sacrifice. History will honor him as a leader who gave his own life so that others may live in freedom.

Culture’s Lost Weekend of Addiction

One prism to view our culture through is the prism of addiction. In his book O Brave New Church Mark Stibbe compares our culture’s behaviour to that of an addictive person.

Our culture does not neccesarily overtly praise addiction, but we only have to look at the lives of its most lauded citizens to see the power of addictive behaviour. In the past PR guru’s covered up the addictive behaviour of celebrities, but now the young and blonde celebutant set in Hollywood wears their addictive behaviour as a badge of honor.

However this plague of addiction points to a deeper sore upon the Western soul. Read More

The Emerging Church: Left vs Right

I have been applying a cultural rather than a theological lens to the emerging church. Firstly I examined how the emerging church was a reaction to mass culture. I then made the point that the emerging church is heavily influenced by Gen X culture. Now it is time for  the third stop on our journey.

The emerging church was initially a grassroots movement, but now it is a media phenomenon.

The media in the United States sees the world through two channels, that is two grouping in which it can place phenomenon. In the last decade America has divided into two partisan camps, liberal and conservative. Everything and everyone is marked with one of these two strokes.

For example

• Red States vs Blue States
• Liberal Cities vs Conservative Cities
• CNN vs Fox
• Democrat vs Republican
• The Coasts vs Middle America
• New York Times vs New York Post
• Hollywood vs Nashville
• Bill O’Reilly vs Al Franken
• Organic vs Deep Fried
• Rosie O’Donnell vs Elisabeth Hasselbeck

You get the idea. The concerns of the emerging church reflect many concerns of the new left. A concern for global justice, for the environment, an interest in community development, for minority voices. In many ways what are seeing with the Emerging Church media story is the emergence of a left wing or liberal (in the political rather than the theological sense) evangelicalism. If you like, a reaction to the formerly dominant politically conservative voice of the evangelical religious right.

If American culture sorts everything into left and right, then it only makes sense that this occurs within evangelicalism, hence the Emerging Church.

One of the hallmarks of this partisan age in American life is a diminishment of conversation across the dividing lines of left and right. Instead of debate, and constructive argument, the two sides only listen to their own voices, rejecting any  ideas from outside of their own camp. All we have is shouting and name calling across the trenches.

One event, say a car bombing in Basra will be spun by right wing media voices as a justification for a military presence in Iraq, where as the left wing leaning media, will see the exact same events and use the event a justification for exiting Iraq. This is the end game of postmodernism in action, the victory of political relativism. Facts are no longer important, all that matters is how those facts are politically spun.

The problem is that many of us find ourselves unhappy with the labels of left and right. How would we categorize many hero’s of faith from the past. What about Mother Teseasa,? Well she was pro life, yet favoured an incarnational ministry amongst the poor. Where would she fit? What about the founder of the Salvation Army William Booth, he was theologically and socially conservative, yet also radical in his use of emerging technologies and was heavily criticized for his use of secular pop culture. What about Wesley, Chesterton, Lewis or Carey?

Many of the giants on who’s shoulder we stand, defy current labels, rejecting the simple categorisation of left and right.

Maybe so should we.

Change now happens in the blink of an Eye.

Things can change really quickly these days. In the past change took decades, even centuries. However our world today is so interconnected that one event can change the face of the planet.

I flew out of Melbourne Australia 24 hours before planes hit New York and Washington DC in the attacks of 9/11. I was greeted with a warm smile as I went through customs in New Zealand, it felt like I was not flying to another country but another state. However a few days later I flew home, I was patted down by Kiwi soldiers in battle fatigues, my luggage was searched meticulously, the world had radically changed in the blink of an eye.  Change can happen just like that!

• Ten years ago environmentalists could not imagine that McDonalds would stock fair trade coffee
• Twenty years ago feminists could not have predicted that today Playboy would make more money selling products to young women 18-35 than through hawking centrefolds to men
• Thirty years ago futurists could not predict the impact that hooking up all the computers in the world to each other would have on our culture
• Forty years ago politicians predicted that the West would be locked in an ideological struggle communism. No one would guess that Communism would fall and that radical Jihadist Islam would become such a powerful force.
• Fifty years ago Christians leaders could not have predicted that a secular Europe would be seen as a missionfield by Christians from places such as Brazil, South Korea and Ghana.

When I moved into my house there were two older people who lived across the road. They had grown up in the former Soviet Union. They had no car, rode bikes, collected fire wood and rain water, they recycled all kinds of things, propagated their own plants and lived within walking distance to their family. They seemed to live in another century. Their lives seemed and anachronism.

However fuel prices have sky rocketed, my state is in the midst of a record drought. All of a sudden my neighbours lifestyle does not seem so out of date, it seems completely relevant.

In his book Nothing Sacred Douglas Rushkoff notes that Jews have always made great futurists. He points out that they had to keep their fingers on the social pulse as persecution and pogroms could just be around the corner. It has always been in the DNA of the people of God to listen for the winds of change. The Israelites even had a role for those who would watch for the culture to change, they were known as Prophets.

Deeply embedded in the biblical imagination is the role of the prophet, the person who’s role is to keep a look out for the winds of change, and to speak out the voice of God. Yet people don’t like change, and thus they don’t like prophets. This is exacerbated today as people live through what Alvin Toffler called future shock.

We as Christians need act as lightening rods, looking out for cultural change and dislocation, not only for the sake of our own congregations and interests but as a gift to our culture.

We Need a New Generation of Cultural Prophets

 I am passionate as you can guess from this site about understanding the culture in which we live. Why? Because how we live out our faith, how we do mission and how we live as the people of God is deeply tied to our interactions with our culture. To communicate the good news of the gospel to our world intelligibly, we must understand our times if we are to speak with freshness and vitality.

The picture on the left was painted by Claude Monet. He was one of the group of painters known as the Impressionists. When people first saw his paintings at the end of the 19th century, people could barely believe what they were looking at. Monet and his friends captured the spirit of the day perfectly. They painted with feeling, Monet seemed to capture the essence of light on a landscape. They managed to paint in a way that was cutting edge, which captured the cultural moment in time, which spoke to the first generation of modernity. Monet put onto canvas how young people were feeling about their world. Put quite simply, Monet’s paintings were so vital and so relevant, they caused a cultural sensation, they changed how we see art and think about the world.

However Monet did not adapt. He kept painting the same paintings of landscapes and nature. The world around him began to change.

Monet presumed that what spoke with power and relevance yesterday would speak with the same force today.

The picture that you can see was painted during World War One. As Monet painted in his studio, he could hear the guns pounding the battlefield in the distance, as thousands of the young men died in holes filled with mud and blood. Trains would pass his country house, rattling his studio. They were filled with the generation he had inspired going to fight in the trenches of France. The world had changed, no longer did people feel excited about the future, they felt confused. People did not want pretty pictures of flowers and fields. Yet Monet kept painting the same paintings, yet a horrible irrelevance hang over them now. The world had changed. Monet had stayed the same.

The same danger always lurks for Christians. We cannot pay lip service to understanding our culture. We need a whole new generation who will watch, listen, keep their ear to the ground. We need Elijah’s and Isaiah’s for a globalised MTV world. The gospel remains the same, but how we communicate it changes, what worked in 1790 probably won’t work now, what worked in 1923 probably won’t work now, even what worked in 2000 probably won’t work now.

If you want to speak good news with freshness, vitality and impact, first open your eyes and ears to the world around you.  

Emerging’ Church is a Gen X not a Gen Y Phenomenon

I talked last time about how the Emerging Church is not a theological movement but a reaction to mass culture. 

The Emerging Church is also about Gen X culture.

The Contemporary Church model of grew out boomer culture, and thus naturally reflecting many of its values. So it is with the Emerging Church, which grew out of Gen X culture, reflecting many of its shared values.

Yeah but i heard you say that you don’t believe in generational theories. Don’t worry I did not either, that was until my phone started running hot with calls from Gen X young adult and youth pastors who were tearing their hair out trying to get their heads around Gen Y’s and their culture. So I read everything on Gen Y and interviewed as many Gen Y’s as I could, and it dawned on me they were totally different to Gen Xrs. If anything Y’s are more like boomers than Gen Xrs, hence the reason why advertisers call them echo boomers. They are boomers on steroids.

(and of course we are generalizing, you have to do that with cultural analysis Silly!)

Then it went crazy, everyone seemed to want to get their heads around Gen Y. I ran seminars, did consulting, and spoke with leadership teams, helping them get their heads around Gen Y. My colleague Sarah Deutscher and I even made a DVD for leaders to get their heads around Gen Y. Then two bombshells dropped for me.

The Emerging Church is Gen X

One day I was preparing a slide for my powerpoint presentation on Gen Y which compared the cultural values of Gen X vs that of Gen Y. As I looked at the left of the slide which described the values Gen X, I suddenly realised that I could replace the header of Gen X with Emerging Church. The value matched.

The second bombshell hit as I was at an “emerging church” conference. The person up the front was describing the emerging church as the newest expression of church. As I looked around the room I noted that the average age in the room was around the late thirties to forties mark. Not exactly the youngest group in the world! Down the road meeting at the same time was a large pentecostal Young Adult conference, for 18-25’s over 8 thousand people were in attendance.   

Lots of Gen Y’s tell me that they find themselves ‘out of place’ at emerging church events. They find the Xrs too obsessed with consensus and navel gazing; Y’s see Xrs as too negative and cynical. Gen Y’s have told me that they find Gen Xrs judgemental of Y’s confidence and aspirational values. 

Gen Y’s like action rather than talk, they like to be told in which direction to march, they don’t want to discuss the nature of truth they want to conquer and change the world. They know that they are children of consumerism, however they don’t pretend they they are not like their older Gen X siblings.

Strangely the emerging church may in the next few years find itself being hit by a boomerang of critique. Those charges of irrelevance that have been directed at the contemporary/boomer church just might to come back to bite them on the behind.

Pics from book launch

The very talented Matt Deutscher sent me these photos from the book launch, you can check them out here. Also make sure you check out his photoblog at flickr here

‘Emerging’ Church its about culture NOT theology.

Many people have examined the emerging church through a lens of theology. Whilst this is helpful, it is still quite a difficult feat, often such readings will focus on only a small faction of the emerging church, often its most visible American component. However this does not take into account just how varied this self describing movement is.

 I am finding it increasingly harder to find any kind of common theology as I meet all kinds of people who represent a broad theological spectrum yet who all self describe with the term ‘Emerging’. For example I have met conservatives, liberal, evangelicals, charismatic, orthodox, catholic, pentecostal, reformed, and neo-orthodox, who would call themselves ‘emerging’.

Well then we may ask is it all about church expression and shape? Well, things get sticky again; I could point you in the direction of house church groups, mega-church pastors, members of Roman Catholic parishes, traditional church attendees, people living incarnationally amongst the poor, all of whom would describe themselves to me as ‘emerging’. There are even now Jewish groups who would describe themselves as emerging. The label is becoming harder to pin down.

 I believe we must turn to the lens of culture to gain an important insight into what is going on. So I am going to do a little bit of series in which I examine the emerging church through a cultural rather than a theological lens.  Read More

Book Launch Went Well!

Thanks to everyone who came out and celebrated the launch of my book The Trouble with Paris. I was genuinely touched and surprised how many people turned up. It is nice to know so many people are behind this book. So thanks everyone for making it such a great day, especially those who helped out. I will put some pics up soon. Neal Taylor wrote a little bit of a review of the launch on his blog that you can check out here.

How our faith is ruined by the false split between the heart and the head.

One of the difficulties for those communicating or living out their faith today, is that Western culture has created a false split between our heads and our hearts.

We are told to live our lives with cool reason. We learn at school thathe world was created as a cosmic accident. We are told that life is a conglomeration of atoms and matter, and there is nothing beyond that. Yet our hearts act betray our rhetoric, just listen to how people speak at a funeral.  We feel that life should not end at death, we grieve and hope to meet again loved ones who have passed on from this life. When a tragedy like the Asian tsunami, the Chinese earthquake or September 11th happens we react with indignation, we feel that things should not be like this. Read More

Is the Sex and the City movie the last hurrah of the economic golden times?

Was chatting to my friend Ben this week, and we were discussing the almost unprecedented media blitz over Sex and the City. Ben after seeing the film asked if the film was the lash hurrah of the economic boom times that we have been experiencing for the last ten years. I think he may be right.

Sex and the City has proved to be one of the most insidious marketing machines of modern times. It pioneered and mastered a new kind of advertising where companies paid for their products to appear in the show. Whole storyline were sold to companies, the writers behind SATC wrote episodes around products such as a certain vodka.

The show created a kind of glitzy, bling world for women. When the girls on the show talked about men in the same manner as they spoke of products; it embodied hyperconsumerism par excellance. SATC echoed Swedish economists Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle sentiment that all that there is left in western culture is sex and shopping.  

The many luxury brands that have supported the show are being hit hard as the current credit crisis eats away at the contents of Louis Vuitton purses both real and fake. So they are pulling out all of the stops to save the sinking ship. Her Majesty the Queen of America Oprah Winfrey has decreed that all women must go out and support this film (um like it needs it?). Queen Oprah may wish her four girl pals well as they head off on their cinematic adventures, but someone better tell them about the economic iceberg in their path. 

How would you market the gospel?

Marie Claire magazine recently approached a number of Aussie ad agencies and asked them to come up with some proposals of how they would market Christian faith to young people. Check it out here

What surprised me was just how bad was what they came up with. It was the usual plays from the same old tired playbooks. Celebrity, irreverence, cool people, etc as they say in advertising nothing that stood above ‘the clutter’. I was surprised that such creative people were unable to come up with anything fresh, intruiging or creative. If my students had come up with this stuff I would have failed them. I guess it just shows secular culture’s lack of religious imagination.

Reminder of Book Launch

Just a reminder that I am having my book launch in Melbourne this Sunday, I would love you to come. Details here

Why Young Adults Leave Church Resource Freebie

I have finished my current series on “Why Young Adults Leave Church” for now. I have some more reasons but I will come back to them in the future.

In the meantime I have compiled the five reasons that I have already written about, put them into a pdf resource and added some simple yet important self reflection questions for people who want to think further about the issues raised. I have also designed it as a discussion starter for young adult small groups. Get it here sticking-at-it-why-young-adults-leave-church3

The Religions of the Secular West that Dare not Speak their Name

One of the things about our superflat, secular culture is that spirituality is not talked about seriously; we repress our desire for the transcendent. Therefore as with most things that we push down they tend to pop up in unexpected places. We may have a functioning secular culture however old habits die hard. Christendom may have moved out of the apartment, but it left behind some of it’s furniture. Read More

Evangelism the Uncoolest Word in Contemporary Christianity

Our word is stuck on repeat. Yet another movie remake, yet another old tune covered, yet another retro style plundered. There are precious few new things being spoken. Repeating the same things is just another way of being silent. Silence breeds sterility and barrenness. Nothing new means that things stay the same, there is no good news for tommorow because tommorow will be the same as today.  Our world is sick of words twisted into spin, of the same old rhetoric dressed up in new clothes.

Our world is desperate for fresh, new speech. Read More

Reasons Why Young Adults Leave the Church: Reason 5 Commitmentphobia

Last time we spoke about the effect of the worldview of consumerism on the spiritual lives of Young Adults. One of the flow on effects of the worldview of consumerism is that it has a caustic, corrosive effect upon our ability to commit. I remember as a kid seeing a shirt that I wanted to buy, I had my money, and was ready to head to the cash register, when my mother taught me a key tactic known to every shopper, that is shopping around for a better bargain. We headed off to the others stores to see if the same shirt was on sale for a cheaper price. Read More.