Andrew Jones Says Goodbye to Emergent Village

"Also over is any official relationship I have left with one of those emerging church groups called Emergent Village."

link

Andrew Jones on the Emerging Church

"In my opinion, 2009 marks the year when the emerging church suddenly and decisively ceased to be a radical and controversial movement in global Christianity."

Andrew Jones

Andrew posts some reflections on the international history of the emerging church conversation.

from blogs to facebook

"Why keep up a blog for friends and family? FaceBook is much simpler. Twitter is even faster. Blogs are content-heavy. The other social media sites keep it simple and light. With the turn to other social media, the number of active blogs is on the decline."

Trevin Wax offers some great thoughts on the current state of the blogosphere.

I have noticed this myself.

From 2001 until 2008 I blogged very frequently, often daily. But I've noticed that since I've started using Facebook, my blog posting has declined significantly.

This shifting in the social networking universe makes some sense. While blogging is very easy, starting and maintaining a Facebook presence is even easier. This means that over 350 million people are today on Facebook (more people than reside in the United States and every other country except for India and China) and, as a result, many bloggers are spending more time on Facebook where there are more people who read their comments.

A downside of this, however, is that it's tending toward more superficiality of expression. The driving force of this is the 420 character limit of Facebook status updates (despite the fact that Facebook does offer the Notes option which has no such limit).

The relative potential superficiality of online expression - on blogs or Facebook - is also a function of the declining cost of information. When publishing is expensive, published expression is more carefully considered, created, reviewed, and edited. When publishing is very inexpensive, patient creation and approval is no longer necessary and quality can decline. The brevity of expression can exacerbate this feature of online expression.

Thankfully, online expression is only potentially relative and not necessarily so. Facebook is very popular now. Over time, I believe different social networking venues will feature different levels of considered expression and the desired qualitative level of expression will be more easily found.

the writings of dr jon gold and the faithmaps discussion group

After being unavailable for the past three years, I'm very pleased today to be able to announce that the posts of the late Dr. Jon Gold - fully indexed - are again available to the public on the faithmaps discussion group.

In addition, all faithmaps discussion group posts are now available and searchable here.

On 1 September 2006, I posted my last moderator's message to the faithmaps discussion group on yahoogroups. I had decided to shut down the group and had announced that decision on 22 Aug. It was a controversial decision. The group was launched on 16 may 2001 (see the first post here) as an adjunct to the faithmaps.org site. It grew to have over 325 registered members. There were several months where we ran over 1000 emails. It became an online community. It was not a church but church happened on faithmaps. Friendships started on that group. There was, yes, a lot of controversy but that was sort of built into the group's design as there were only two criteria of participation:

1 - an interest in "tools for navigating theology, leadership, discipleship and church
life in postmodernity," and

2 - mutual respect. On the latter, once a month we posted this message which detailed the group's expectations and consequences for disrespect.

But after five years I finally came to the point of realizing that I no longer had time to moderate the group properly and so shut down the group.

But when I did so something happened that I did not plan. Shutting down the group caused the archives to no longer be public. This was not my intention at all. I had wanted our public conversations to remain public for those who were interested in them.

One of our participants was a professional philosopher - Dr. Jon Gold - and I especially wanted his contributions to the group to remain public. He wrote with a vast knowledge and understanding of philosophy and theology combined with deep Christian conviction and so his posts were of particular significance. Making his writings again available to the public has been very important to me as Jon passed away on Friday 23 July 2003. In fact, I viewed Jon's contributions to our online community as so critical that even before he passed I had indexed his posts by subject. That index is available here. I had also gathered in a separate list books that Jon had either recommended in group or to me personally here.

So since 2006, from time to time, I've attempted various things to make the group's archives public. A few days ago, I succeeded.

Enjoy!

• faithmaps.org
  
  
• the faithmaps discussion group
  
  
• the first moderator's post
  
  
• the last moderator's post
  
  
• an index to the posts of Dr. Jon Gold
  
  
• an index to books recommended by Dr. Jon Gold
  
  
• the post announcing the death of Dr. Jon Gold
  

Matt Chandler

Matt is the Lead Pastor for The Village Church in Highland Village, TX. Today he had a seizure, fell and hit his head. After being rushed to the hospital, it was discovered that he had a small mass in his frontal lobe. He'll be seeing a neurosurgeon next week.

Please pray for Matt and his family.

Mark Oestreicher is...

...blogging again!

Free Tim Keller Sermons!

Justin Taylor reports:

"Redeemer’s Sermon Ministry has been faithfully recording, cataloging and reproducing all of our sermons for the past 20 years. To celebrate all 20 years of our history, and to meet the growing demand for our church’s teaching in New York City and around the world, we have created this resource of 150 sermons and lectures covering a broad array of topics, completely free to download and share.

The recordings chosen for the Free Sermon Resource were culled from classic sermon series as well as lectures and seminar addresses delivered to various Redeemer ministry gatherings, and are intended to present to the listener the full scope of teachings they would receive over several years of active involvement at Redeemer."

Free sermons are avail here.

Mark Oestreicher is Leaving Youth Specialities

Read the Zondervan Press Release here.

Mark's a friend and I was sad to hear this. However, I feel confident that he will soon find a new platform for his kingdom service.

Toward More Effective Leadership Teams: The Necessity of Open Disagreement

Cross posting a link here to something I just posted on OrgImpact on this subject.

The Objective and Subjective Nature of Morality

Author Joseph Myers asks:

"Morality is relative. It is seen as a circumstantial stewardship of good instead of a constant set of settled rules...good or bad...thoughts?"

I definitely believe in moral absolutes (e.g. adultery is always wrong) but there's a particular scenario that I've been thinking about that makes me think sometimes there might be relatives. I would love to hear responses to this:

If I find a Salmon P. Chase $10,000 bill (which has not been printed since 1946) then I think it's morally incumbent on me to make some attempt to find the rare bill's owner.

But if I see a penny on the ground, I think nothing of simply picking it up and walking away.

OrgImpact and Shelby Foote's The Civil War

I'm not abandoning the faithmaps blog, but I have started a new Organizational Development and Leadership Blog entitled OrgImpact. Today I posted some thoughts about Shelby Foote's The Civil War.

Please Pray for Rick Meigs

Please keep Rick Meigs in prayer. I just learned that he was riding his motorcycle when he was hit by a truck that crossed the double-yellow line and then drove off. He is in the hospital in critical condition in Boise, ID. He has two broken rips, a broken arm, two collapsed lungs and a ruptured speen.

Rick blogs at The Blind Beggar and has been a critical voice in the missional church conversation through Friend of Missional, a very important networking and content site in that movement.

Looks like Brother Maynard is doing a good job with updates.

A CRITICAL TV ALERT

If you with me are one of the 16 of us that religiously watched Pushing Daisies, the last three episodes of the series are showing tonight at 10 PM ET/9 PM CT and then on the next 2 Sats at the same time. Fire up your DVRs!

My Favorite Copyright Notice

Loraine Boettner's 1932 notice for his The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination:

"Any one is at liberty to use material from this book with or without credit. In preparing this book the writer has received help from many sources, some acknowledged and many unacknowledged. He believes the material herein set forth to be a true statement of Scripture teaching, and his desire is to further, not to restrict its use."

New Susan Boyle

"More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time"

Wow - this is kind of surprising.

Tony Morgan Leaves New Spring

However, yesterday afternoon we (Tony, myself and the rest of our leadership team at NewSpring) all came to the incredibly difficult and painful conclusion that Tony should no longer be a part of the staff at NewSpring Church. It was not a decision that was made in the moment; in fact, lots of prayer and discussion has taken place over the past several months leading up to this…and everyone knows that though it was not an easy choice, it was the right choice.

- read the rest of the announcement from Perry Noble's blog

Are you a Dragon?

"When attacked by a dragon, do not become one." Marshall Shelley

Great quote posted by Paul Littleton.

The Death of Perspective?

Today, Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade publication that I read regularly to keep up with the industry I was a part of for 20 years, reports

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released this morning the spring figures for the six months ending March 31, 2009, showing that the largest metros continue to shed daily and Sunday circulation -- now at a record rate.

According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707 [link added].

The Wall Street Journal just launched an interactive site that documents current circulation and negative events for major newspapers in the United States since 2006.

Meanwhile, online media continues to grow at an unprecedented rate.

Twitter, the online service that allows users to post updates on whatever they wish in Wired reports that in that same month, US users doubled to 9.3 million bringing the number of users worldwide to 19 million. Significant growth continues. Web 2.0 Journal estimates that 1.2 million people have joined Twitter since Oprah featured the service on her show on Friday 17 April. Though blogs are far from dead, Twitter is the new blog and extends the popular media trend that combines truncated content with heightened immediacy.

Closely related to the Twittering phenomenon is the growing popularity of Facebook updates. On Wed 8 April, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the online site had crested the 200 million user mark. A significant portion of this growth is now comprised of those over the coveted demographic of the 18-35 set. Carmen Musick of the Kingsport Times News reports, "Between June 2008 and January 2009 the number of Facebook members between the ages of 35 and 54 nearly quadripled - increasing 276 percent- and members older than 55 tripled...."

Only the most anachronistic Luddite would depreciate the enormous benefit that online media brings to the developed world. But, at the same time, this type of growth is coming at a cost:

I am concerned that the ubiquity and immediacy of information can precipitate a loss of perspective.

For example, there used to be a typical news cycle for most journalistic organizations that allowed for reflection when considering the events of the day. This enabled writers and editors to bring perspective into their coverage of news events. The 24-hour news cycle, on the other hand, tends to erase this advantage. Media observers such as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their book Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media Culture note that journalists have gravitated toward "sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion" and have moved away from "verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation" (see 24-hour news cycle).

Francis McInerney and Sean White, authors of FutureWealth: Investing in the Second Great Wave of Technology, might characterize this trend as another example of how society changes as the cost of information declines.

But I do not believe this trend is permanent.

I do believe that the natural desire for wisdom means that, despite the current upheaval in media, new (or, perhaps, renewed) journalistic voices that balance breaking news with relevant perspective will rise through new media. Sensationalist fare can only satiate the superficial palate.

Until then, those who desire reflective perspective will have to search a little harder for it, listening carefully through the din for the more discerning voices that can still be found.

Analagously, I believe that those of us who participate in online expressions of spiritual community - whether through blogs, twitter, facebook, or what have you - need to be cautious that we don't lapse into religious superficiality. Loving and following God takes time. Deepening spiritual friendship and community takes loads of time. Working through differences of opinion cannot generally be done via blogger or twitter. Nearly by definition, meditation can't be done quickly!

I love online media. I enjoy blogging, facebook, twitter, online community, all of it. But from time to time we need to remind ourselves that this new form of communication is not omnicompetent.

The Origins Project

Dan Kimball, Erwin McManus, Scot McKnight, and the good folks at the Origin Project have relaunched their site as they launch their organization. This is a group I'm very excited about. I see them as working to capture the best of the emerging church conversation while staying tied to Christian orthodoxy through their commitment to the Lausanne Covenant and other historic creeds. You can read more about this new group here.

• Their blog is here.
• You can sign-up to get updates on the group here.
• Keep up with upcoming events here.
• Participate in their online community here.