Tasty ‘Leadership in Your Twenties’ Morsels#3 Self Promotion

Ok now this thing is getting serious. It’s time for tasty morsel number three – self promotion. Am I getting paler by the minute? By the next video I could be fully goth.

Stillness and Happiness

“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Blaise Pascal

Easy laughs: why Hollywood loves mocking Christians

Interesting article from the Punch. (h/t Glenn)

Tasty ‘Leadership in your Twenties’ Morsels#2 You are not a ‘Kid’!

Our culture tells us that when we are in our twenties we are still kids. Being a kid means having no responsibilities or commitments, two things that leadership is built upon. Ok enough reading, its time to watch the vid. Watch for my horrendously corny sign off.

Tasty ‘Leadership in your Twenties’ Morsels

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the fact that there are not a whole lot of people around me my age in ministry. The Church really lost a whole generation of Xrs like me. I fear that the same could be happening with Gen Y’. So with this in mind, I am going to do a little bit of a series in which I will share tasty leadership morsels that I have learnt, that will help you stay in ministry beyond your twenties. This is the first one it is called Character vs Career. Hope it helps.

A Letter to the Church in Sardis/Southern California

Last month I spoke at Dave Gibbon’s NewSong Church in Southern California on the Letter to Sardis in the book of Revelation, you can watch the video of my message by clicking on here. Once inside the page just click on the Eyes Wide Open talk.

New York, Hyperreality and the Horizontal Self

If you have read my book the Vertical Self or the Trouble with Paris, you will find this article interesting/disturbing/hilarious. It is like all of the bad cultural issues I outline in my books have come crashing into each other. Sometimes I read these articles and it feels like they are a satire, but alas. Basically it is an article about how one woman from the suburbs of Sydney leaves family behind and reinvents her self in New York, check out these classics,

The Big Apple is also the perfect place for reinvention and rediscovery. Each borough catered for a different one of my multiple personalities. So, rather than channel a desperate housewife from Wisteria Lane, I was more Toni Collette’s character in United States of Tara as I morphed from one repressed self to another.

I took full advantage of being able to do what I wanted, where I wanted, when I wanted. New York is all about independence and attitude and I wore them like a fabulous frock. I pursued the opposite of my normal life, seeking decadence, spontaneity and spoiling.

So, did I miss my bloke and kids? There were tears in the Sydney taxi but the Stockholm syndrome dissipated as fast as the bubbles of champagne on the plane. I decided with the first sip that guilt was excess baggage I could not afford.

Read Full article here.

The Radical Act of Remembering

“When we are young we are fascinated with our future worlds. That’s natural, since when we are young we possess no past, or none worth mentioning; but we possess an endless future stretching before us. But I am no longer young. When we are old, the future vanishes from our life to become replaced with death. Accordingly we become intrigued, rather, with the past. We have the same escapist urge we had as youngsters, but it takes us back, into memory”

Adam Roberts. Yellow Blue Tibia

“When your’e young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car.”

Margaret Atwood. The Blind Assassin

About ten years ago I saw in a magazine a list of what experts thought were the best 100 novels of the 20th century. I have since tried to work my way through most of them. As I did, I noticed that a theme kept creeping up again and again – the theme of memory. So many of the great works of art explore the idea of of time passing, the past and the act of remembrance.  Most of the writers who explore this theme I noticed were older, writers who were younger were far more interested in the experiential, be it romance, sex, war and adventure. But it seemed that ageing sharpened the senses, helping people realise what the real issues and questions of life were. I think this is in part what Proverbs 20:29 is getting at

The glory of young men is their strength, grey hair the splendour of the old.

Popular culture with all of its obsessions with Youth only focuses on the first part of this verse. Thus we are rarely confronted with the idea of remembering, instead Pop Culture focuses on the immediate and the sensate, demanding that we view the world through a myopic lens thus leading us up a garden path when it comes to our lives and our faiths. The Bible has a very different idea, it is a narrative which encompasses the past, the present and the future. It is future orientated but it also values the radical act of remembering. Israel was commanded to practice the passover each year in order to remember. Passover was and is a deeply counter cultural act of protest. It, through a wonderful set of symbols invites the participant to remember what God did in order to save Israel, it is a reminder that the the power of God is greater than the powers of the day.

Communion acts in the same way, it is a lived symbol, a reminder of Christ’s work on the cross, his defeat of sin, the powers and principalities of this world, and of death. When we partake of communion, we place ourselves in a long spiritual linage, with millions of others throughout history, it is a reminder that we are not just rugged individuals bumping around an atomised universe. Rather we are part of the fabric of God’s redemptive purposes in history.

Therefore the empires both governmental and media, wish us to remain in the moment, to stay in the ephemeral, to focus on their promises to deliver us a glitzy, wonderful future. The radical act of remembrance, reminds us that God has acted in the past, and that is why we know he will act again in the future. It reminds us that humans are fallen, that we cannot keep making the mistake of the builders of Babel. That our hope comes from an act that occurred two thousands years ago on a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem.

 

A Story of Leaving Church

For that reason I continued to trot off to church each week; I’ve always believed in God, so it wasn’t a huge leap to make. I started getting really involved in church activities and ended up getting baptised in February 2008. Then, almost immediately, I realised that I had been going to church for all the wrong reasons.

Initially I was attending because the boy I was going out with went to church and I wanted to make an effort for him, and then it was because I was lost and lonely. What kept me going was that I really did want to experience all the joy and fulfilment that all my friends seemed to have in their lives, but I just wasn’t feeling that and it got to the point where I couldn’t pretend any longer.

I guess it didn’t help that the particular church I was going to was so big that I didn’t really feel a sense of community or belonging – in fact, I felt a bit like I was swimming against the tide in a sea full of really good-looking, well-groomed, talented young things waving their arms about for Jesus. I felt like a fraud.

So I stopped going and haven’t been back.

The above is from an article which Roshan Allpress of Compass fame showed me recently while I was in New Zealand, I think that it is a really good example of how young adults who are super fervent, unintentionally find themselves exiting faith communities. Check it out the full article here

For some of my thinking behind why so many young adults leave church – check out this free resource

The Weakness of Social Networking vs Discipleship and Depth

This molto bene article from Malcolm Galdwell (Cheers Al for the heads up), has solidified a lot themes that I have been talking about on this blog for ages. Gladwell speaks about the relative weakness of social networking as a tool of social change versus the tied and tested methods of believing in something passionately and being really organised. Despite reading Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody and getting slightly excited, I have had this funny feeling for a while that what we are seeing a lot of hype over ways of reaching people with a lot of breadth but not a whole lot of depth.

When Al Qaeda exploded into the international consciousness on 9/11, it seemed to herald the arrival of a new fluid, organic style of organisation which would come to dominate the world. The power of a loose and flat network seemed to be have dealt a huge blow to the structural solidity of the US industrial military complex. Back then I read Gunaratna’s Inside Al Qaeda and began to publicly speak of the way in which this new organic network was changing the world. I remember a talk that Alan Hirsch and I did in Tokyo where we spoke about how Al Qaeda although evil was the model of a new kind of organisation which would change the world. However almost a decade later we have a wounded and dysfunctional Al Qaeda, a recent report suggested that Al Qaeda have given up on even trying to get their hands on explosives, and instead will attempt to use small arms to instigate their attacks. A far cry from the sheer scale of the attack on 9/11/. Lawrence Wright’s  thoroughly researched pulitzer prize winning account of Al Qaeda The Looming Tower paints a very different picture from that of an organic loose network, Al Qaeda was actually a top down, well organised military unit. Ironically now Al Qaeda is a loose, organic, decentralised network and thus a shadow of its former effectiveness. Gladwell writes,

“Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.”

What loose, organic networks provide is breadth, a scope for communicating information across a broad spectrum of people. But as we all know the more invites you get on facebook the more you ignore them, the larger and looser the network the less effective it becomes. Real social change as Gladwell remarks is borne out of a deep commitment to the cause, and thus a deep connected engagement, something facebook activism, ,and ‘come as you are’ networks don’t provide. Archie Brown notes that communism survived in isolated, and poor Cuba, while it died in the much more powerful and connected Soviet Union and Eastern Europe because the Cuban leadership actually still believed in it fervently. Steve Addison makes this point convincingly stating that all movements begin with white-hot faith.

This is what gets me worried about our current predicament. We have developed a extremely wide view of ministry with young adults, most people have jumped on social networking, many have learnt how to do excellent large scale events, we have discovered how to focus on ‘hot button issues’ that resonate with young adults. But my fear is that we have done a terrible job of going deep in creating the kind of personal commitment, discipline and readiness that we need to turn our situation around. It is far better to have a smaller group who is deeply committed to the cause versus a large semi interested crowd.

What Gladwell is saying is that ultimately the methods of creating social change has not really changed that much. Commitment to a cause is infectious, but it is hard to catch across a computer screen or at a large event. It is caught in person. Therefore at the end of the day it is about discipling others, or as Dave and Jon Ferguson helpfully reframe it – apprenticing. It is all contained in that helpful little book by Robert Coleman, Jesus was born into a culture where the apprenticing model of the Rabbis was normative.  Brad Young has noted that Jesus’ statement that his followers must hate their families’ in order to be his disciples, so deeply shocking to our modern sensibilities, was actually not so shocking to Jesus hearers because it was a well know Rabbinical saying, underlying the importance of apprenticing yourself to a spiritual guide. Thus the challenge for us is to meld all of the tools which give us such breadth, with a challenge to go deeper. Screens – both on our laptops, iphones and stages can transfer important information. But the task of discipleship, of creating passionate followers prepared to die for a cause can only happen face to face.

God’s Subversive Cells

What is uncool? Families! Nothing is as Unhip as a Honda Odyssey. Yet strangely despite our misgivings about family, the bible positions the family against the power of Empires and Nations as a subversive cell of change, a small grouping that contains the seeds of God’s redemptive action in the world.

The Multiple Life Crises

We are all familiar with the idea of the mid life crisis which hits around the mid forties. Recent years have also seen a number of books written about the quarter life crisis that hits young adults at age 25, and of course there is the crisis that many twenty somethings hit as they turn 30. New research has found that now increasingly men are having crises at age 35.

Well is this all an attempt to sell books and newspapers. Well partly, but also I think that these crises which are essentially existential, are never really addressed at their cores. Thus our culture offers kinds of off-ramps from the freeway of existential crisis. In the past when you hit an existential crisis, you asked the deep questions of life, you examined your mortality, searched for God, stared at the stars and meditated on your cosmic smallness. Now when one of these moments hits, when the weak story that we are given by 21st century culture is exposed, instead of plumbing deeply for meaning, we exit at the off ramp – we leave our boyfriend/girlfriend, go backpacking across Chile, or join a Zumba class and wonder why these life-tweaks don’t provide us with deep meaning.

Without truly looking at our culture’s meaningless malaise we will continue to have these crises every five years or so. To have a life of meaning, is to live fully in a story. The narrative of scripture provides us not with off ramps but with a redemptive, robust story that we can truly live out of.

Spiritual Consumption vs Production

How are out spiritual lives like failing economies? What happens when contemporary faith becomes all about consumption but not about production? Is spiritual bankruptcy the inevitable result? How can the difference between Abraham and his father Terah help us sort ourselves out of our spiritual debt crisis? Why do I keep asking so many questions in this post? Check the vid people! Plus here are the photos of Detroit’s decline that I mention in the video.