power law

I’ve been trolling the internet for Clay Shirky ever since I stumbled on him in some random post somewhere. He’s informed, insightful, well spoken, bald, and entertaining, and listening to him helps me make sense of what’s going on in the world a bit more. My beautiful wife recently cashed in some Air Miles to get me a bookstore gift-card, and I’m thinking really hard about blowing it on his latest book.

This video is why I like him. He describes a power law for we non-statisticians, eloquently and graphically explaining the law behind that oft quoted stat: 20% of church members do 80% of the work. He also makes some great predictions for where we’re heading. Pointing to the rise of social networking and cheap communication, he argues that we’re at the beginning of a time of chaos, much like the one that followed the printing press, guesstimating that it will be 50 years before we really know what the new structures will look like. In the meantime, non-institutional groups willing to give away control and work for less or no profit will garner incredible cultural capital. The reason behind this is institutions’ inability to capture the contributions of the high percentage of single-contribution-participants in the power law, because single-contribution-participants are not cost-effective. Flickr is happy to have someone contribute a single photo, because it adds to their pool. Nobody wants an employee who contributes one idea (unless it’s really valuable), because they don’t carry their weight. Blogging, I’ll point out, is an example of this sort of phenomenon. Unfortunately for me, I make no profit without any real cultural capital. Blast! That’s alright. I notice that Clay turns to writing a book for institutional publishers and distributors when he wants to make a buck.

What’s this mean for disciples of Jesus? Others have already pointed out the structural (not ideological) similarity between missional church and terrorist networks. If we take this seriously, it means rethinking how and if we identify who’s in, and looking hard at networked groups of smaller churches as part of the way forward. As Clay so poignantly says, we’ve no idea where this is taking us, so we might as well get really good at it.

On the flip side, just because it’s the way things are going doesn’t mean that we should go blindly along with it. Is including and encouraging single-contribution-participants congruent with Jesus’ demands on our lives in His radical call to discipleship? Should we not call people to something higher?

Yes and no. Creating an environment where hundreds of people drift in and out of a church without ever being asked or expected to sacrifice, commit, or spend time with people they don’t automatically like is not the church Jesus founded, even if it’s done in the name of being seeker sensitive. On the other hand, networking Christian communities of various sizes in such a way that devoted followers of Jesus can make occasional contributions to shared projects and one another’s communities is incredibly cool. The first scenario flies in the face of Ephesians 3. The second sounds a lot like Paul’s offering for the Jerusalem church.

I’ll give you a quick example of what this looks like, and then I’ll stop typing before this gets out of hand. For our last day at the BSM club table, we had a friend spend several hours aggressively and effectively passing out flyers and signing people up for our club. Somehow she was able to yell at people, and have them like her for it. It’s a gift. She’s not a member of our club, or any other, as far as I know. Had we limited participation to committed members, we would have connected with far fewer students on Friday. She blessed us, and while she may not be committed to us, she is a regular in the chaplains centre, and, to all appearances, a devoted follower of Jesus.

The Kingdom of Heaven, as we learned at Tapestry Sunday morning in Matthew 13, is difficult to define, and surprising and mysterious in its workings. We try to take control, and in so doing, we lose it.

Alan Hirsch – The Forgotten Ways

I picked up Alan Hirsch’s book in January and really enjoyed it. And then something happened (well I got a job) and it took a back seat. I guess my reading overall has taken a backseat (but hey I am still at 17 this year). But I really enjoyed this book. Hirsch does a great job of being very brainy and breaking down the thought process behind becoming a more incarnational church planting movement. This guy has a lot of very great thoughts and I have been making some mad notes that I hope to explore again later. Much of what he wrote in the organic systems chapter I found very helpful for our churches current transition.

I will give this a CP rating of 4.5/5 for any church planter who is going to engage an urban setting and would like a great handbook to help through the intial stages of the church planting process. I have been at it just under 3 years and I think this book could have really helped me in the initial stages.

My only critiques are two things. 1) Hirsch has to be the worst illustrator in the world. No he didn’t draw cartoons, but he might as well have because I found his illustrations quite hilarious as he attempted to make points through graphs and diagrams (no offense Alan, but I laughed out loud). 2) Sometimes (and I mean very rarely) Alan got a little too smart. I have been reading this stuff for many years and loved all his thoughts but I think the new church planter might find it a little over the top.

At the end of the day Alan is real, honest and brilliant. Read this book and while your at it, read this review by my bud Nick at symbiosis who has many other very insightful things to say.

stations of the cross

We’re praying the stations of the cross for the first time next Sunday, and I would be interested in any resources you have or stories from your own experiences doing this. You can read about it what we’re planning here.

NT Wright – Surprised by Hope

I seem to be given books and seem to be reading books at perfect times in my life. This new book by NT Wright called Surprised by Hope has been a great encouragement to me at this point of my life. I have been reflecting over the past few weeks how timely many of the books I have read have been in my journey, especially in light of role in my church. (Although I am starting to think my goal of 48 books by January 1st is a two year goal).

Anyway to return to this book, the key concept that NT Wright is trying to get across is that there is a connection between the present (life now on earth) and the future (this concept of heaven that so many of us have). That how we live now actually extends into the future. It revolves around this concept that NT Wright calls life after life after death. This concept is very powerful as our church entertains and moves in a new direction and I begin to think about how I might teach in this space. I now see so much more clearly how important it is for us to grasp that how we live now matters in the future and that we are not simply trying to get through this life in order to have a better life later. Wright continually tries to destroy this idea that heaven and earth are separate and there are few verses better than the Lord’s prayer that says Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven that Wright exemplifies this fact through.

The goal is not to get our beliefs right here, so we can get to somewhere else later. The purpose is that we are all part of God’s renewal and reconciliation of this earth now (including all of creation) and we can choose to take part in this exciting work with God, or we can choose to go our own way and reject it. Wright joins this role with Jesus resurrection and how the power of that event and its meaning for us (that we too will be resurrected into our perfect form, placed back on this earth in its perfect form) will lead our churches in an exciting direction on this earth.

If we can begin to see that our role on earth matters now and in the future, we might begin to see our relationship with God in a whole different light. We no longer are trying to do all these good things to confirm our position in heaven, but instead are participating in all these good things on earth in order to see these good things extend into the future when God puts the world to rights.

At this point I digress and invite you to read this book. It is well written and gives some great practical examples of how the church can live this out in the world that are very helpful. I give this book a 4.5/5 for church planters and hope you enjoy it.

Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer

I met Jim Palmer on a bus in the Bahamas on my way to a private island as a part of the first day of Soularize. He sat beside and me and was really nice, of course I was being very Canadian and didn’t say much back so I doubt he remembers, but anyway in one of his seminars he handed out his book and I grabbed it.

I started reading it a while back and couldn’t get past the first few chapters. I found myself in a period of life that wasn’t up for another “emergent” type book. But I decided to pick it up again just recently. I have to be honest…I almost put it down again.

Let me first say that the book is basically Jim’s journey from being a “successful” minister to falling apart (personally and professionally) to getting his soul back and the people who helped him on this journey.

The reason I had trouble getting through the first half was because of how much Jim talked about what it used to be like being in the big evangelical circles. I am not sure why he felt he needed to recall over and over how successful he was (even if it was drenched in sarcasm). There just seemed to be too much comparison happening. But the 2nd half I truly truly enjoyed. Jim’s honesty about his family, about ministry and about his friends (Richard, and especially Bill, wow that was an intense and well written chapter) was great and it felt like Jim changed tones. It was almost as if the first half was a reaction, and the second half was Jim just being himself.

At the end of the day the book is a testimonial read, with extra testimonies of friends of Jim who taught him along the way how to just be, not to try to achieve. In my CP rating I give it a 3/5, but I recommend it for anyone who is stuck in the “only professionals can be ministers” type mindset. If you do pick it up push through the first part, you wont regret it.

Video Interview w/ Brian McLaren

Good video interview w/ Brian McLaren….touches on emerging church; analytical thinking vs. holistic thinking; individual faith vs. corporate faith; orthodoxy vs. orthopraxis; disintegration vs. reintegration; church decline; importance of Jesus and his core message of the Kingdom of God; top global crisis: poverty, war, environment , war, religion; bringing new questions to presidential election; role of the cross in peacemaking; inter-faith relations; following Jesus vs. Christianity. Great intro to Brian McLaren.

quote.: relational web

A few years ago, when doing research for The Shaping of Things to Come, I contacted a Christian faith community in California and asked if I could meet their leadership team and attend their weekly gathering. Their reply initially confused me, but today makes perfect sense. They said that they would allow me access to their community and its leaders only if I agreed to live for four days with them. I wasn’t sure I had a spare four days and was annoyed that they would be so uncooperative. I just wanted to look at their worship service and interview their leaders, but reluctantly I agreed. It was a profoundly important time because it taught me that a genuinely missional community operates at multiple levels and different times, as any organic, dynamic web of relationships would. Their corporate worship times, when viewed in isolation, weren’t that big a deal (neither are the worship times for smallboatbigsea), but having spent several days with them, I found their corporate gathering to be a rich and fulfilling time of connection with God because it was representative of the interconnections between the members and their ministries. In a very real sense, if a missional church has a public worship service, it is literally the tip of an iceberg – a very small, visible part of a much larger body.

Exiles | Michael Frost

True community requires both frequency and spontaneity. That is, people must be around each other often, without planning to be around each other often. Thus true communities resist definitions and labels based on planned meetings, and resist defining membership primarily by attendance at them. This is important to understand because there are a lot of people talking about new ways of doing church that are primarily new ways of doing weekly services. Missional church is a way of being the church together. The biggest impact it seems to have on the weekly gathering is not to hype it up and make it more tech-savvy and action packed, but to de-emphasize it by putting it into its rightful place as a piece in the life of the community. We’ve had people join us from other churches who find themselves a bit surprised that what we do on a Sunday really isn’t all that different. Let me assure you that this has never been our intent. Our prayer is that what is done in our lives and in the world will be very different than what they’ve seen before.

Becoming mainstream?

“Too often the solution has been ‘How do we take what we have and reconfigure it, ‘pretty-up’ our programs to make them more attractive?’ The true missions enterprise as found in Scripture has never been about attracting people and bringing them to a building. The early church didn’t even have buildings.”

“Jesus Christ never said we should go out and invite people to come to a meeting; instead, He was attracting them to an incarnational lifestyle,  He was living out, among them, who God was and He them to live out that lifestyle wherever they went. Being a Christian in the First Century wa not about joining a social club like it has become today.”

“I think a big problem with reaching the lost world is that we project the image that to be a Christian new believers must come and be with us and act like us. We should spend less time trying to get them to adapt to our evangelical subculture and more time helping them live out incarnational lifestyle among their unchurched friends.”

“Today, most of our evangelism efforts center around inviting people to church to hear the gospel. In reality, all missions and evangelism should occur primarily in the community outside the walls of the church”

“We have to rethink how we do church…our ecclesiology, our doctrine, has to flow out of our missiology. We need to go back to Scripture and determine what church is really about. It’s not about buildings and budgets and programs, though those are good. It is about being a missionary people and equipping them to be missionary whether or not they are funded.”

- I read these words by Curt Watke, (Exec Director Intercultural Institute for Contextual Ministry) in a major Baptist newspaper… are these ideas becoming mainstream? Let’s hope so.

Chasing Francis by Ian Cron

I need to thank Ian personally for this book (I received it as part of the Soularize experience) as once again a book came at the right time for me. I met Ian briefly on a boat in the Bahamas on our way to swim with sharks, but never knew this was his work.

To give you a run down, the book centres on a character (Pastor Chase) who is the founding pastor of a large protestant church in the New England area. Chase, as you find out early is going through a lot of questioning on what the church is to be and during a passionate moment, vomits these ideas all over his congregation. (Sounds like something I would do). This leads to a forced leave of absence so he can work through where he is at, and allow to elders to assess whether he should stay on.

After working through some of the issues with family (and getting hurt by a lot of church members) he decides to leave the country and go visit his uncle in Italy. In Italy he studies with a number of Saint Francisan monks and they begin to shape the way he sees the world and ultimately the church.

If I was to write a book in order to teach a way of life, this is how I would do it. The story was very well written and believable (more believable from an American stand point, as I have heard how churches are down there, but understandable as a Canadian). And for me it was a great way to get introduced to more of Saint Francis, a Saint I really only knew as a few famous quotes. Near the end when Chase is connecting back up with his old church, I felt that Saint Francis was given way too much credit in his speech, but other than that I loved this book entirely.

On my CP scale I give it a 4.5/5, and recommend it to any church planter, leader or whatever that needs a pilgrimage to work through how they feel they about how the church should be and the role they should play in it.

My friend mike made a short mention on his blog about this book as well.

Quarks, Chaos, God

Here’s a fascinating podcast: interview with John Polkinghorne, both a theoretical physicist, who played a significant role in the discovery of the quark and an Anglican priest. He handles many of the science/faith issues with ease.