The employer that shall remain nameless

So as I’ve mentioned before, I work for a large, multi-national coffee company that shall remain nameless. I know that they are a huge and potentially evil monolith, coating the world with sub-standard coffee products. I get it. I also get that I’ve got kids to feed. If you want to talk about how much better that little shop on the corner is and how awful its been since my employer came to town, go ahead, I’m not going to argue. But they don’t pay my mortgage.

I knew when it came time to plant our church that I would have to find another job. Altogether, I’ve spent almost ten years in the restaurant business, so I was able to put together a decent resume. I knew I wanted to be in management, because table or bar service by itself bores me now, and I knew I didn’t want to be working until 3am. That left my current employer or someplace where all the menu items start with Mc and a guys got to have some standards, right?

I’ve experienced few conversations more awkward than this one with an overdressed person judging my resume:

“So your last title was minister of urban outreach. What exactly does a minister of urban outreach do?”

“ummm… I ministered … to urban …. people… and did … out, er, reached out”

I realized then that I never wanted to have another job that I can’t explain to a two year old. I do two things. I make coffee and I talk about Jesus. I could make my job description more complicated than that if I wanted to feel important, but really, those are the two things I need to get right.

Really, any job is as simple as you want to make it. Even when you work for the company that shall remain nameless.

Listening to: My wife playing scramble on facebook

52 books #8: The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture – Shane Hipps

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture – Shane Hipps

Around the end of 07 I decided I wanted to read 52 books this year. I read a lot, so that’s not really a step down in quantity for me, but I wanted to step up in quality. So I got on my email and facebook lists and asked everyone for book recommendations. I’ve got a great list and this one from Dale Dirksen is the first of those. Dale was a professor of mine and Teddi’s and is a friend of Bridgepointe. It would be safe to say that worship is his area of expertise so I was looking forward to reading this.

First of all, Brian Mclaren wrote the forward. Just to make things clear, I like Brian Mclaren. I thought Generous Orthodoxy was brilliant. But I’m beginning to tire of of his recommendation being the ultimate stamp of approval for anything emerg… whatever. I don’t think it’s his fault, it just that he recommends and does forwards for so many books I don’t know if I can trust him. As an aside two guys whose recommendation is completely irrelevent to me because they attach themselves to too many books: Tony Campolo and John Ortberg. Publishers take note.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. This is a good and helpful book. It’s basically a walk through Marshall McLuhan specifically for the contemporary church. McLuhan is one of the most quoted and least understood thinkers of the twentieth century. As we have, and continue to pass through an age where communication and media are changed incredibly quickly by the blistering pace of advancing technology, the church has struggled with media and electronic culture. We struggled with the planet being round and the earth revolving around the sun, it’s no shock that that the television age makes us sweat. Like so many other things, the church has tended to fall into two ways of relating to electronic culture: Blind acceptance or stubborn resistance. as most of us realize, neither of these are very helpful.

Hipps uses McLuhan’s work as a platform for rational discussion and engagement with new media as they appear in church life. Very basically, any new media’s impact can be divided into four categories: The media can enhance something, the media can reverse into or degrade into something unintended, the media can retrieve something held in the past, the media can make something obsolete. We can apply this to something to something like the digital projector.

1. The projector enhances the human eye and makes us able to view written song lyrics and announcements. It can enhance the communal experience the communal experience by lifting heads from individual hymnbooks onto a shared screen.

2.The projector reverses or can become a television screen, rendering the gathered an uninvolved observing mob.

3. The projector, through its use of images, can retrieve the stain glass that was commonplace for non written communication in our churches.

4. The projector makes obsolete the overhead (thank God) and the hymnbook, as well as possibly the bulletin and the service program or service books.

Now there could be any variety of opinion on the value of or problems caused by bringing in a projector, but at least we have a common language with which to discuss it. The truth is, the good news we share is affected drastically by the ways in which we share that good news. To ignore this reality by behaving either as technophiles or as Luddites is dangerous and irresponsible.

Hipp’s strength is that this book is about how to discuss these things, rather than what to think about them. He seems to acknowledge that there may not be a single right answer for all congregations in all places and Hidden Power is better for it. I would have left out the last chapter as it has been written better in other places but, all in all, a good book. Thanks, Dale.

Listening to: Peter Elkas, Nathan Carroll

Confessions of a Failed Faster

I know you’re not supposed to announce your fasting, but I’m not fasting anymore, so I think it’s okay. I’m not trying to raise my spiritual profile with tales of exorbitant fasting. I don’t have any.

In the tradition I grew up in (mental fundamentalist) we didn’t really talk about fasting. We didn’t talk about gluttony either, for that matter, but the only spiritual disciplines we talked about were refraining from smoking, drinking, card-playing, movie-going, and non- King James reading. We figured if we had those down, we had fulfilled the law and the prophets.

So, while I have a much more robust view of the disciplines that I used to, I haven’t been in the habit of fasting. I know it’s a good and godly thing to do, it just hasn’t been a part of my life. I have occasionally, and more often in the past couple of years gone on one or two days fasts, but never anything of consequence. Last week, inspired by a friend, I decided to fast from solids for seven days. Admittedly, I didn’t have much of a plan, I just felt the need to pace myself in a more open posture before God to allow and I figured a fast would be a decent way to do that.

I probably should have prepared better, but I only made it to day three and a bit. It wasn’t the hunger discomfort itself, that did me in. One of the side effects of food withdrawal, especially for those with not the greatest of diets, is irritability. I got home from work this afternoon and I hadn’t slept well, and it had been and early morning and … whatever. I snapped at my daughter. It’s not the first time, of course, lest ye think I’m some sort of saint, but it is pretty rare. Anyway, I stopped, apologized. She forgave me and she went back to playing with her pet snail/sock Shrudshire. I went to the kitchen and had a bowl of cereal.

I have a few callings in my life. I’m a pastor, a preacher. First of all I’m called to be disciple, but the main burdens I have been blessed to shoulder are that of husband and father. I could have the most successful (however you may choose to define success) church on the planet, I could preach like the apostle Paul, and in the midst of that, if I fail   Teddi and Zoe and Simon, I’ve lost everywhere. I don’t always remember that.

Starting this fast, I wanted to become more aware of God’s goodness and where he wanted me to grow. I realized this afternoon that my spiritual growth doesn’t come in spite of at the expense of my wife and children, but through them and with them. They are God’s clearest and most consistent reminder of his love for me and his desire to make me new. They way I interact with them is a picture of how I’m relating to my Lord. I can’t grow closer to him while being selfish to my family. So because I have two small kids who need me to be present and pleasant, I went back to eating. Less and more simply, but eating still.

I wanted to become more aware of God, he told me to be more aware of my family.

I think I got what I wanted

52 books #7: A Short History of Nearly Everything-Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

When I was in elementary school I loved science. It was my favourite subject and if you asked me then what I was going to be when I grew up, I would have said “detective”, but my second choice would have been doctor. I didn’t realize at that point that I was way more interested in the stories than the science.

When I got into junior high and high school science became less interesting. You had to memorize stuff and there where all these numbers and formulas, and it was more like math than anything else. I managed to get all the science credits I needed to graduate (thanks to the generous inclusion of oceanography and conservation) and declared I would never take another math or science course again. Thus far in my life, that has been my easiest commitment to keep.

I’m still fascinated by the natural world and how it works, and I love to bring my completely uneducated brain to the wellspring of scientific information and Bryson’s book is a perfect read. His bias, I believe, turns to the stories as well, and this book unfolds as the story of our planet and how it came to be floating (or more accurately, falling) in this part of the universe made up in this particular way inhabited by this particular gathering of plants and animals over which homo sapiens happen to be dominant. It is also the story of the strange batch of persons who dedicated their lives to discover bits and pieces of this story and trying to make sense of them.

So, what do we know about the history of the universe and our planet and ourselves. Well, it appears the most accurate answer is not much. We don’t know nearly as much as some would claim we do, and even what we do know is often educated guesswork. And often, what we know at one point in time with the greatest of certainty, turns out, upon further review to be completely wrong. And the interpretations of the data that is discovered seem influenced as much by the personalities and situations of the discoverers as a thirteen year old girl is by her peers. If the sum of what there is to know about the universe and our place in it fills the Grand Canyon, what we know is a grain of sand.

But that’s okay. Though  we’re often put in opposing corners, the pastor and the scientist have much in common. We are trying to discover the nature of life and how it works. We want to influence the way the world around us is seen. Sometimes we just interpret the data differently.

The way I interpret the data, I believe that everything was created by a powerful creative force.  I believe the story of Jesus and the Bible make sense of my life and the world with which I engage. In this I may be a silly and naive person who ignores the overwhelming lack of verifiable evidence that there is a God who is in any way involved with the planet we live on.

Whatever

I’ve always liked the stories better anyway.

“If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here… To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only begun to grasp.” (p. 478)

My wife talks about my kids… again

My wife is funny, as are my children, although in entirely different ways.

For example, when Simon throws up on the carpet while trying to do pushups, funny.

When Teddi does it, not so funny.

Here’s another update on our family

how you know you’ve spent to much time in revelation

So we’ve been looking at revelation since September.

At work a common combination of items with taxes adds up to 6.67

One day this number came up on the till, and I announced to the customer and my co-workers “all together… 6.67. Ah, six six seven, the neighbour of the beast”

no one laughed

what happens while you’re doing other things

I’ve been having a bit of writer’s block lately. Mostly feeling like I don’t have anything interesting to say. In a moment of desperation I asked my wife what I should write about and she said I should write about her, and love, ‘cause it’s Valentine’s Day soon. She didn’t think I’d actually do it, but I would like to have this down so my kids can read it some day, so here goes.

Teddi and I are a living cliche. We met at bible college. Thats really boring, I know  but it’s the truth. I wish we had met while we working for the Barnum and Bailey circus, or while backpacking through Uzbekistan, but we met at Briercrest. I was 23 and had come to Caronport at the end of my prolonged adolescence and after I had learned the following things about relationships.

1. Dating sucks. Not in a Joshua Harris, lets call it courting, which is somehow radically   different sort of way, but in a tiring, soul draining way.
2. If you would rather play playstation until 4 than spend time with your significant other, you probably shouldn’t have a significant other.

3. Sometimes it just has to end badly. It’s not necessarily your fault, it’s just that too much emotion has been in invested, and there’s no way out without tearing something.

4. She’s just not that into you.

5. Sometimes it is your fault.

Anyway, I arrived in Caronport with a healthy disdain for relationships and for the female of the species in general. I was never exactly the most coveted gentleman around, but for most of that year I wore a general air of grumpiness that  I hoped would push most people away. For most of the year it worked.

to be continued…

tonight

Sorry I’ve been less regular.

Tonight is the night to get back on rythm

See you later

Preach it, brother

I preach. I like it.

There’s a certain peace and freedom that comes when you’re doing the thing that you were made to do. I don’t know if I’m any good at preaching. I know I’ve got a lot to learn, but I think I was made to do it.

Now, before I get letters, I don’t think that preaching is the most important thing or that preaching itself will change lives or that preaching has to be done wearing a tie or behind a pulpit or anything else. I just like it.

You can listen here or you can find it on itunes.

To warn you, some of them are terrible, listen at your own risk

Lent

So my wife decided to give up ellipses for lent… I laughed, but then I had to look up on wikipedia what ellipses are. My wife is smarter than I am, so I’ve gotten used to this.

I grew up fundamentalist (with an emphasis on the mental) and our church summarily ignored lent and most anything else that had a whiff of historical Christianity. To participate in lent or acknowledge it’s existence would have inevitably led to a swift decent into papacy, and that was the worst thing that we could imagine.

I rebelled as an adult and became Anglican, which is where I experienced lent for the first time. I was never very good at giving things up for lent. I tried to give up smoking once, but that lasted about 14 minutes, until I realized I was to cranky to be around people. The point of lent is to take part in suffering myself, not to cause it for others, right?

I think we had the most success when Teddi and I tried to give up complaining. I didn’t do very well, but I did realize how much time I spent complaining and wasn’t very happy with it.

This year I’m taking the Jesus Creed challenge. Basically, rather than taking something away, you add a morning and evening recitation of the Jesus Creed prayer, and also any time It comes to mind through the day. So far the fruit of it (two days worth) has been a growing awareness of how far from Jesus my thoughts can wander through the day, and how easily I descend into being critical, angry, and bored. All things I could use less of in my life.

Are any of you giving up or adding something for lent?