Reviews & High School English Class

One of the most nerve wracking things about writing a book is waiting for the first reviews. I always get flashbacks to high school reports. Fortunately the first two have been great. (One day I will get over you English Year 11 Class!)

The Vertical Self: How Biblical Faith Can Help us Discover Who We Are in an Age of Self-Obsessions Mark Sayers (Nelson) $14.99  Sayers wrote a stunningly important and woefully under-appreciated book and DVD a few years ago, a clever and engaging study of consumerism (The Trouble With Paris.)  This is a perfect follow-up (or perhaps it could be read first) to that fabulous book about consumerism, false hopes, disillusionment and grounding a realistic faith in the doctrines of creation and incarnation.  What a book (and contemporary DVD) that was!

In this postmodern, hot-wired culture, where we are offered the plastic promise of “being whatever we want” Sayers reminds us of the fundamental truths of our identity, and our placed-ness in God’s good but fallen creation.  Our carefully cultivated personas just frustrate and confuse us, finally, and this book invites us to rediscover the one thing that can really fulfill—radical holiness, and a desire for appropriate health before a loving God.  It has a blurb on the back by Chris Seay and a forward by Len Sweet (which is one of his more interesting ones, and he is always a great foward-er!).  It is not another self-help book, in fact, he teaches us howthat view of self is itself part of the problem. A quick skim of the footnotes, showing forth deep and important stuff like Richard Middleton’s vital work on the image of God, The Liberating Image, Rushkoff’s DVD The Merchants of Cool, the acclaimedThe Saturated Self, Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie, and the very important work of Christopher Lasch.  And nearly any book that cites Walsh & Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed is worth reading. Fun, informed by the best scholarship, culturally-relevant and deeply spiritual.  Perfect!

Hearts and Minds Books

The Vertical Self by Mark Sayers, Thomas Nelson, 2010, 224 pages, ISBN 0849920000

Mark Sayers has written an engaging study of the way modern people struggle with the question of identity. And when I say “engaging, I mean I couldn’t put it down. We live in the age of the “horizontal self”, pressured to create public personas based on the images around us. We brand ourselves in order to become socially acceptable and relevant. We compartmentalize our lives to fit in with different groups. Our horizontal selves worry about what others think, about status, about achievement, about today.

Whether we realize it or not, we’ve lost our “vertical selves.” The vertical self is concerned with character, holiness, contribution, eternity. Even believers and churches fall prey to the trap of the horizontal self: we want to be Christian and cool too. We’ve chosen self over soul.

What is the answer? Discipleship and accountability. We must rediscover what it means to be holy.

I found the history of how we arrived here fascinating: when did it become cool to be cool, how the definition of “sexy” has changed, how we’ve traded spiritual holiness for secular holiness. I will never look at another advertisement, movie, or staged political event the same way. I highly recommend this book for everyone, Christian or not, because Western society is playing us for fools. And we’re playing along.

The Cypress Times

Signs of the Times

There are two interviews with Australian men in their mid thirties named Mark in the March edition of Signs of the Times magazine. Both are unshaven, one drives a formula one racing car and earns millions of dollars. The other drives a Mitsubishi covered in pigeon faeces, and is often found scrounging for loose change off his co-workers in order to buy a chicken sandwich from Box Hill Central food court. You can check out the interview here

The Parable of the Lotus, the Impossibly Handsome Man and the Church

Imagine a man, a good man, a kind man. A man with a purpose, a man who sees his mission to bless the lives of those around him. An individual with character and depth who spends his time serving his neighbours, providing for his family and being a good husband. Then one day this man comes home early from work to find a brand new super luxury Lotus in his drive way.

The man enters his house and to his shock finds his wife in the arms of another man. But not just any man, a man dressed in the sharpest of suits, a man of obvious wealth and means, an impossibly handsome man, perfectly tanned and built like greek statue. Inevitably there is the screaming, the crying, the hurt and the pain. There is the counselling and the reconciliation. Our friend being a good man, stands by his wife.

But there is a splinter in his mind. Every time he closes his eyes he sees the stupendously attractive lothario who seduced his wife.  He starts to look at himself in the mirror and see his flaws, how his body is not well built, how his jaw is not chiseled, how his skin is pale and patchy. He thinks of his reliable yet boring sedan.

This begins to eat away at our friend, he fears that his wife could leave him at any moment for the impossibly handsome and obviously richer man. So he starts to work out, he starts to research get rich schemes, he begins to visit tanning salons. But he cannot lose the weight, his body does not respond. So he begins to crash diet, he considers taking steroids. He finds himself gambling for hours on end hoping for a huge win.

His neighbours wonder what happened to the man who brought so much life and community to their street, his children wonder why he no longer has anytime for them. Our hero is no longer a hero, he no longer is spoken of as a man of character, he no longer has a purpose or a mission. He is no longer a good and kind man. He is now an anxious wreck.

I have come to the conclusion that many leaders and pastors out there are like this man. The vast majority are committed to mission, to seeing people outside of the church come into a life changing relationship with Christ and to see their communities transformed, the poor served and justice done. But there is a problem. No longer do many have congregations who will aid them in this mission, instead they look out into the mass of faces that they see on sunday and are confronted instead with highly critical and opinionated consumers. People who find themselves torn between faith and the glitzy power of the Western Dream. The post-war generation who has been born into a post-Beatles post -Disney world, where the concept of commitment and service has been replaced by the demands of entitlement and entertainment.

These pastors feel that they are one error, one wrong word, one wrong decision away from losing their flock to the culture, or to the cooler, hipper church down the road. They know that they cannot compete with MTV, or with churches with multi-million dollars budgets. So in a panic, gripped by fear, they attend conferences, pick up books all of which promise that their church can be exceptional, earth shattering, and inspirational. They develop a case of Ecclesia Nervosa. For a while they are hopeful and excited, but then reality smashes into them at the board meeting, during the pastoral visits or the thursday night bible study. And so many, fall apart on the inside, addictions develop, marriages and families fall apart, some just pick up and leave the ministry all together.

As I think about all of this, as I recall the heart to heart conversations that I have with leaders and pastors who have been overcome by anxiety and expectation. I cannot but think of the silence of that haunting moment on Golgotha; a silence punctuated by the sobbing of Mary. On the cross dying is the greatest leader earth has ever seen, he hangs bloodied and shorn of his closest confidants and disciples. He is a leader with virtually no followers left, yet stunningly, yet counter culturally, he is a leader who has fulfilled the ultimate mission.

Disney vs Reality

“Pornography takes all the reality out of sex and Disney does that to family life.”

Jarvis Cocker. The Big Issue, December 2006

War Is So Hip Right Now.

I while ago I posted this From Duty to Self Actualization in which I discussed the way in which the Australian military was advertising itself to young people as a chance for self actualization rather than selfless duty.

Then this morning I saw this advertisement by the Danish Army. For those of you who thought the military was about war, guns and conflict you are wrong. Becoming a soldier is all about becoming a pensive post-post punk hipster.

This video illustrates the power the cult of cool exercises in our culture. For youth and young adult culture it has become one of the chief motivating factors in inspiring us to action. This video is one of the most powerful illustrations that I have seen of the horizontal self at play.

Collide – Sydney

I will be speaking at the Collide event in Sydney on March 7th. Might see you there! Here is the write up and info.

A night of music, story and teaching all driven by the question, what is the church supposed to be doing in this space between the world here and now and the world we’re yet to fully see? Special Guest Speaker – Mark Sayers from Melbourne.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

5:30pm – 7:30pm

Fairlight Studios

3 Williams Street, Fairlight

Coffee and Cake will be available on the night.

Rob Bell on the Dangers of Video Preaching

The following is an excerpt of a fascinating interaction between authors Skye Jethani and Rob Bell.

Skye Jethani: Your NOOMA video series has been popular. What do you think about the increasing number of preachers and churches using video technology to expand their reach?

Rob Bell:  It’s powerful but there’s also a dark side. Video is not church. You put images and music on a screen, and people will listen. But it’s also dangerous. You’re playing with fire. I think video technology deserves to be scrutinized heavily.

Skye Jethani: Go a little deeper. What makes video dangerous?

Rob Bell: I don’t think we know yet what the long-term impact will be on disciple-making. In 10 years we may discover what particular kind of Christ follower is formed by video preaching. I see warning lights on my dashboard. It’s unclear what video may do to the ways we conceive of life together.

In the New Testament, there are 43 “one another” passages, and during a Sunday morning service you might be able to practice three or four of them. And as the service gets large, you can probably do fewer. A massive group setting is also dangerous. You can come, sit, listen, and go home and think, I’ve been to church, even if you haven’t practiced any “one anothers.” And with video that only gets more intense. I’m not sure that’s the direction we want to be heading.

We want to be calling people to deep bonds of solidarity with one another. We may gather in a massive group, but from the stage I often say, “This is just a church service. Church is actually about caring for one another, and serving one another, and speaking truth to one another in love. Don’t get the two confused.”

Skye Jethani: The evidence suggests that video can have a fast and broad impact. So what’s the alternative?

Rob Bell: There is something more powerful than simply beaming yourself into other locations, and that is raising up disciples. Over time that will go farther and faster, but right now it will be more work and slower. With technology today it’s easy to spend all of your energies reproducing your own voice, but there is a longer view that says, what if instead of beaming video to those ten locations, we train ten people who can go there and lead? That’s a very basic question that should be in the mix somewhere.

Read Full Article Here

US Young adults ‘less religious,’ not necessarily ‘more secular’

Young adults today are less church-connected than prior generations were when they were in their 20s. But a new study finds they’re just about as spiritual as their parents and grandparents were at those ages. Members of today’s Millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are as likely to pray and believe in God as their elders were when they were young, says the report from Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. ”They may be less religious, but they’re not necessarily more secular” than the Generation Xers or Baby Boomers who preceded them, says Alan Cooperman, associate director of research.

Interesting research out of the US, which is in contrast to research coming out of Australia, The UK and New Zealand which says that in those countries young adults are not only becoming less ‘religious’ but also less ‘spiritual’. This shows in part the way in which the US lags behind in the secularisation trend when compared to other western countries. Read Full article here

The DarkSide of the Creative Leader

Whenever I have done one of those leadership review surveys, I always come up as an entrepreneurial leader. I tend to start new projects often and have no problem coming up with creative ideas. I have only ever gone to one job interview which was for my first ministry appointment, every other job I have had I have either convinced someone to create, or just gone out and raised the money for that position myself.

People love creative, entreprenurial leaders. They have energy and vision, they see the world differently and are always doing seemingly exciting things, and starting unique projects. However one thing that I have learnt is that there can be a dark side to being a creative leader. This struck home to me recently as I was watching the documentary The Naked Lentil. Here is a write up from the site that fills you in on what the documentary is about.

“Nine years ago, charismatic Sri Lankan migrant Shanaka Fernando dropped out of law school to open ‘Lentil As Anything’, a crazy little restaurant in Melbourne where there are no prices, no cash registers, and no rules – but where you can always get a great vegetarian meal even if you can’t pay a cent. Today Shanaka runs a string of busy pay-as-u-feel venues staffed by 100 migrants from all around the world, who rely on the organization for work, training, accommodation, driving lessons and a vital social network. Shanaka even won the Australian of The Year Local Hero award in 2007. But while he may be a visionary, he’s no business manager, and his quixotic creation has racked up a huge debt that’s threatening to sink the whole organization and pull everyone down with it. Now the question is – can a place that relies solely on human generosity survive in this world; or will it be torn apart by competing egos, chronic chaos and crippling debt?”

At first as I watched the show I recognised a lot of similarities with how Shanaka thinks. I have been to his restaurant and loved the experience and saw lots of great things, in some ways in was tiny vignette of the kingdom. But then as you watch the show, you begin to see the downside of both Shanaka’s organic vision and his lack of structure. The cook is forced to work so much he can barely see his family, which places huge strain on his marriage. Another employee who has saved up money to go and see his sick father in Nepal, has to give that money to another worker who has not been paid in order for his family to not be deported. Then there is the elderly supplier who is owed thousands of dollars by the venture and is forced to work himself to the bone in order keep his head above worker. There is Shanaka’s offsiders who are always having to apologise for him and clean up his messes.

As you watch you realise that there is an unintentional darkside to the entrepreneurial leader. Bizarrely this justice driven project begins to create its own subtle form of injustice. This unitended result is almost completely down to the creative leaders inability to create a sustainable structure and his lack of self discipline to do the mundane jobs that are needed to prop up the fun creative stuff.

I have seen this in my own life and ministry and in the lives of other creative entrepreneurial leaders, who sadly sometimes create tremendous pain and pressure on those around them when lack of attention is paid to necessary structure and details. Charisma, creativity and a lack of self discipline can be a damaging combination in a leader. Therefore the successful creative leader, must also work on their weak spots or at least surround themselves with people who can fill in for their deficiencies.

TechnoCocoons and What Come After Gen Y.

“iGeners, however, are different. They know no other world than that of the Web, texting and social networking. They were online when they could sit up and sent an e-mail to Grandma; they made MySpace a household name by their early teens. They live in their own bedroom “TechnoCocoons,” where new technologies appear and penetrate society in months rather than years.”

Read Full Article here

From Internet Guru to Internet Boohoo

In the early to mid nineties there was a glut of books and documentaries all predicting how the internet and virtual reality would subvert our culture and usher in a kind of decentralised utopia. One character who would always pop up in such discussions was Jaron Lanier, the tech guru, multimedia artist and advocate for virtual reality.

Thus you can understand why I was shocked when I read the following article, in which Lanier has turned on the internet and in particular the open culture movement. In the interview Lanier makes some fascinating points about the turn digital culture has taken.

Something is missing here. Something has gone terribly wrong,”…It’s just astonishing how it takes hold of you. It’s like a demon or something.”

“The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush,” he writes. “You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.”

One of the main targets of Lanier’s critique is the concept of the “wisdom of the crowds” or the “hive mind”. This is the idea beloved of so many social media enthusiasts that the collective wisdom of a large number of people, generally harnessed online, will exceed that of the individual. Wikipedia is the classic example often cited in support of this theory. Lanier believes that by fetishising and over-stating the power of this collective so-called intelligence we undervalue individual humans.

“The ‘wisdom of the crowds’ effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool.” He considers that “an adventurous individual imagination” is far more valuable than anything produced by a crowd. Yet we continue to overestimate the potential of computers and the web to behave intelligently, talking down the power of our own brains and consciousness and talking up the abilities of the machines.

You can read the whole article here.

The Vertical Self Now Available on Amazon. Plus Radelaide Book Launch

The Vertical self is now up and available on Amazon ahead of schedule! You can get it here

The Vertical Self and I will be coming to the city of churches. CitySoul will be hosting an Adelaide book launch. Here are the details

March 17th 7:00pm

(Upstairs) 40 Waymouth Street, Adelaide

Details and RSVP timhein@citysoul.org.au

Hope to Catch you there!

Tiger Woods, Moral Licensing and Why Green Shoppers Are More Likely To Steal

“Buying an organic apple instead of one caked in pesticides eases your conscience, there’s a good chance that your next ethical decision might not be a good one.

“According to the results of a University of Toronto study, participants who assigned more social value to ‘green’ shopping were more likely to cheat and steal in subsequent tests than those with less stringent shopping habits.

The study, to be published in the new year in the journal Psychological Science, is the latest in a growing field of research called “moral licensing.”

It’s a relatively new concept that posits humans might store up a reserve of good karma only to squander it later. It’s a little like Tiger Woods spending thousands of hours on golf and earning hundreds of millions of dollars on the PGA tour, only to fritter it all away with a few nights of extramarital indiscretion.”

From an interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen. Read Full Article here (H.T Arthur Davis)

The New Green Sins

“Recently while I was brushing my teeth, my 6-year-old son scolded me for running the water too long. He severely reprimanded me, and at the end of his censure asked me, with real outrage, “Don’t you love the earth?” And lately he has taken up the energy cause, scampering virtuously around the house turning off lights, even while I’m using them. He seems as stressed and anxious about the sins of environmentalism as I was about masturbation in the days of my Roman Catholic childhood.

Not too long ago, at a party, a friend confessed in a group conversation that he didn’t really recycle. It was as if his casual comment had sucked the air out of the room—I think the CD player even skipped. He suddenly became a pariah. A heretic had been detected among the orthodox flock. During the indignant tongue-lashing that followed, people’s faces twisted with moral outrage.

Many people who feel passionate about saving the planet justify their intense feelings by pointing to the seriousness of the problem and the high stakes involved. No doubt they are right about the seriousness. There are indeed environmental challenges, and steps must be taken to ameliorate them. But there is another way to understand the unique passion surrounding our need to go green.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to notice that religious emotions, like guilt and indignation, are still with us, even if we’re not religious. He claimed that we were living in a post-Christian world—the church no longer dominates political and economic life—but we, as a culture, are still dominated by Judeo-Christian values. And those values are not obvious—they are not the Ten Commandments or any particular doctrine, but a general moral outlook.”

From The Chronicle Review. Read Full Article here

Unhappy Hipsters

Great photographic satire on the painfully cool. Click Here. (HT) Marty Frost

Free Books!

If you are a blogger and you would like to get a free copy of The Vertical Self for review on your blog. Click here

Obama’s Favourite Theologian

Interesting article over at CNN on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who President Obama has recently named as his favourite philosopher. Read full article here

Gen Y + Booze + Peerants = Trouble

Generation Y has been shaped in an environment of more permissive parenting where their parents have given them more freedom younger, and for many, parents have morphed into ”peerants”. The lack of boundaries and a failure to emphasise personal responsibility has created a context where there are choices without an understanding of consequences. Far from instilling independence and maturity, too much freedom too early creates a ”safety net syndrome” where young adults are less likely to worry about the risks of their behaviour.

From an interesting article by Mark McCrindle in The Age. Read the full article here

Alex McManus’ Radio Show

Tonight/Tomorrow morning depending where you are I will be appearing on Alex Mcmanus’ internet radio show. You can listen from here

I will be on Feb 5, 11.00am US Eastern Time and Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 3:00am Australian Eastern Time. Will be great but I am thinking that I will need three cups of coffee the next morning!

The Vertical Self Arrives and Grace Steals the Show

Well if you thought that the revealing of the Ipad was impressive, wait till you see what  magic can be weaved with a well worn shirt, a kitchen knife and a two year old.