gmail

I've got 6 gmail invites. first come, first serve. Please leave a comment on this post with your name and email addr and I'll send an invite to the first six I get.

Stephen Olford with the Ages

Stephen Olford, a champion of expository preaching and a mentor to many evangelical leaders, died Aug. 29 at age 86.

more

When I first became a Jesusfollower, I used to listen to Stephen Olford.

Stages of Emergence

Len Hjalmarson does something of a rewrite of my earlier Wrapping the Brain Around the Emerging Church on Resonate's Blog with some original material. I find his additions/edits helpful.

Toward an Emergent Church Values Set VI: Mystery

Paul Soupiset in his continuing series

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first

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Finding Your Strengths

I'm enjoying reading Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Dr. Donald Clifton. Great book. I had thoroughly enjoyed First Break all the Rules and have written an outline on it that will probably soon morph into a book summary.

Last night I started took the online StrengthsFinder test. Of the 34 themes, I'm

Input
Maximizer
Individuation
Activator
Ideation

I'm looking for one or two other great strengths evaluation tools, Christian or not. Do you have any suggestions?

Laura Branigan Dies

Laura Branigan, a Grammy-nominated pop singer best known for her 1982 platinum hit "Gloria," has died. She was 47.

link

There's also a biography and a beautiful tribute on her website.

Thanks for the joy and beauty, Laura.

Streaming Audio: Eugene Peterson, Gordon Fee, Alister McGrath, & NT Wright

courtesy of Regent Radio.

props to jordon on resonate for the heads up.

It's official.

Jordon's just called me Resonate's Token American.

I love it. ;)

creating syndicated feeds

the free service that blogstreet.com offers where they create a syndicated feed for you now seems to be down all the time. anyone know of a similar service anywhere?

a personal comment: scattered and rootless

I don't use this platform very much to talk ab my personal life. But if this find resonance with one reader, perhaps it's helpful:

I do not want my life to be froth.

I don't want my life to be collapsable to mere meme generation, propagation, and execution.

My life is too small to be the focus of my life. I don't want to be the center.

This morning I am striving to get reconnected.

follow up to LA Times' article on Spencer Burke and Friends' Ecclesial Adventure

Spencer posted a comment to my earlier blog on this article that I thought was worth highlighting here:

it is difficult when someone is trying to describe what we are doing as a church, especially when they are looking from the outside in. connie did a great job of listening and researching, but what we are doing is very different from other communities i am aware of. that is not a "good or bad" statement, just we have started from different premises.as a community we decide to start with only those things that helped us "be" the church in our context. when i have planted other churches we started with those things that helped us "do" church - 501c3, the sunday event, budgets, staffing, mission or purpose statements...i am not against these things. as steve points out we will probably "need" at some point to "do" those things as we journey together. but my thought is, we probably can do with out much of the "cooperation" of church and only add them to our "overhead" when they help us...a little like the question jesus posed - is sabbath made for humans or are humans made to serve the sabbath.

Thanks Spencer!

Sudan Atrocities: What is our Response?

An intensive U.S. government-funded study has confirmed widespread atrocities against Africans in the Darfur region of Sudan, including mass rape and summary executions of male villagers, the study's director and senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday.

...

In some instances, she said, the janjaweed would take infants from their mothers' backs. If the child was a boy, he would be killed by crushing or knifing. Female infants would be tossed aside.

...

More than 30,000 people have been killed ....

"Report verifies Sudan atrocities", Thursday 26 August 2004 - The Miami Herald

karen neudorf alerts us to a recent article by joan chittister in National Catholic Reporter ab the killing in Sudan.

On 1 August, 35 Evangelical Leaders urged President Bush to take more aggressive steps to address the situation.

If you wish to keep up, The Washington Post has an entire section of their site dedicated to the Sudan.

thanks to jordon for the heads up he gave us on resonate.

resonate blog

Though I live in the US, the kind folks at resonate have invited me to participate in their blog for purposes of internationalization. I'm honored to have been asked to associate with this group.

baby and bathwater

chris monroe said some great things ab the church and the emerging community.

Another Significant Site:
millennium matrix is launched

In addition to the launching of resonate, I just found out that my friend Rex Miller, author of The Millennium Matrix, has also launched his new site. On his site you can read endorsements of his book, review a list of chapters, keep up with cutting edge rex thru his blog, see a list of articles and resources, and enjoy other tasty offerings as well.

If you're looking for the syndicated feed of his blog, after I bit of sleuthing I was able to find

http://www.millenniummatrix.com/content/blog/atom.xml

Enjoy!

resonate launches!

Good news for all Canadians and friends of Canadians!

This from Jordon Cooper:

Several years ago Beyond Magazine started and hosted what was probably the first national conversation talking about the Gospel in a postmodern culture. It was a national dialogue with pastors, people who have left the church, artists, theologians, and people new to the faith coming together to talk about issues that were not being even thought of in many circles in the church. When Beyond decided to leave the discussion a couple of years ago, it kind of languished in Canada. Some of us started talking this summer that while we appreciated the conversation south of the border, our context was very different and there was a need for something Canadian. From those conversations, Resonate was born. Resonate is a national conversation that has brought together people from across the country to talk about newways of living out the Gospel in a Canadian context.It happens nationally online through a variety of online means. It also happens regionally in a variety of a cities across Canada and like any groups of friends, we like to help out when we can. We have also created a collabrative online community to share worshipmedia using Flickr. There is also a space for some news and view from not online Canada but also from our friends around the world on the Resonate Blog.

Learn more here.

George C Marshall, the Internet, Technological Innovation and the Future of Theological Discourse

Earlier in posts both here and here about the degree to which online discourse will modify (while not completely revolutionalizing) theological discourse I mentioned George C Marshall and his views on military technological advancement and the execution of war. I found the exact quote and thought I'd post it.

Ed Cray, in his wonderful biography of George C Marshall - General of the Army - writes:

In a speech on March 2, 1939, he detailed a long list of military innovations that supposedly would dominate the battlefields of history: chariots, then elephants, the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan, armored knights, artillery, tanks, and now the airplane. ‘But in all these struggles, as the smoke cleared away, it was the man with the sword, or the crossbow, or the rifle who settled the final issue on the field.’

In other words, Marshall understood that these advances definitely affected how wars are fought but eschewed triumphalism about any specific development (the quote above was in the context of Marshall's fighting against the notion that airplanes alone would defeat the Axis).

Similarly, I believe it's most helpful if we strike the balance between appreciating what can happen online for God's kingdom and believing that the online world is a wholesale revolution.

a denial of ephemerality:
a tiny rebellion / bit of a rant

andrew jones declared earlier this year that a blog post lasts 3 days. this moved maggi dawn to comment:

I've noticed that the blogosphere shares one of the tendencies of tabloid news - as if each issue is only today's news, and it's over in a few days. Andrew Jones said the other day that the maximum life-span of a blog post is 3 days. This may or may not be true (I think it's both true and false, depending on what you mean...) But if it is true, how do we connect up with stuff 3 or four weeks later. In my academic work I'm reading stuff that's been written over a period of years (centuries even), not just a few days. 'Recent' can mean anytime in the last 10 or 20 years. 3 days just isn't enough...

I entirely agree and so for some time now...

...I don't hesitate to post about someone else's post here, or comment on a post on someone else's site just because someone else's post is not recent,

...or not to reply to a discussion group note just because it's not new.

...Further, I am an enthusiastic user of bloglines and clip with wanton abandon posts I wish to read more carefully later and/or posts on which I wish to comment or to blog about. And there is no expiration date for a great post. I care not for their putatively short shelf life. How silly. Noveau is not an intrinsic good. I am temporarily trapped in time but my Lord is not. Neither is His truth.

I deny that blogging must be ephemeral.

I further deny that substance cannot be addressed thru blogs.

I deny that serious conversation can't occur here.

I deny that significant spiritual community cannot be created through this medium.

I deny that we can't love God and others here.

We haven't begun to profitably exploit blogging and the online world for His glory.

background to kerry swift boat controversy

if you're trying to get a bead on the swift boat question kerry is dealing with , the post has put together a pretty good summary of the issues involved (free registration required).

"my place is of the light
this place is of the dark
I do not feel the romance
I do not catch the spark"

- Emily Saliers

Recently I met Anne Hefley online after noticing her blog on crablogs (where I'm also listed as a Baltimore blogger). Anne's ok now, but recently she was assaulted. A few weeks ago, Anne was contacted by a man who told her about how his son had also been assaulted but did not survive the attack. Anne then writes:

I then watched a documentary television show about New York City police, profiling a murder in New York City. I saw the victim, a handsome sandy-haired young man, and thought, "He looks like the type of guy that I would date." His face smiled up from his driver's license. The smile of someone who would never be able to do so again. A life cut short by complete losers who accosted him and a friend on the street and demanded what they didn't want to work for.One shot was fired, killing one Burke O'Brien. It's a senseless crime that is still unsolved almost a year later. The man had pointed me to the website of the show after it aired, and I mentioned in a return email how sad it was watching the parents come into the city to identify their son. Their world completely shattered into a devastating reality. In his return email, he said, "yes, that was me."I was at work when I got that response, and it shocked me. I had no idea I had been exchanging emails with the very person that I'd just watched on television and felt such empathy for. I wondered, why he had reached out to me? What could I possibly offer someone who had suffered such a loss? And then it became clear. I can spread the word. I can be one link closer to the police finding the killers. A chainlink of me and other bloggers who can shake the rafters and call attention to this crime and the subhumans who did it and are still walking the streets. Perhaps you brushed by them in the subway, or helped them at your retail job. Perhaps you are only a degree or two of separation from the people who did this or someone who knows something. Eventually, the net will close in if enough people are made aware.

Then, tragically, Anne just found out that Brien's dad, Mark O'Brien - who had contacted her - was just killed recently in a traffic accident.

And so I join Anne's quest to publicize this incident and perhaps in some way make it more likely that the police can catch Burke's killers. For more info see Seven Inches of Sense or Burke O'Brien.org.

But I also wanted to post this because it was just another reminder of how very tenuous and brief life is. The older I become, the more I realize this. It was also a reminder of evil in the world.

I do not understand God; I do not get God.

In the town where I grew up some time ago, a child died after being left in a hot car for hours. God could have arranged for someone to have found that baby but He did not. Why did he not? I do not understand. Someone once said that God must view death very differently than we do and I think that may be the case. We can hold nothing in this place tightly to our chest; it will be taken away.

Now I am not shocked that I don't get God. The finite cannot be shocked that she does not understand the infinite. I haven't yet read a theodicy that made me go, "Ok, now I get it! That makes perfect sense!" But if it were one of my dear ones that died in some similarly tragic way, well....

I think the late Malcolm Muggeridge did have a bead on things when he wrote:

How can I ever explain to those who insist that we must believe in the world to love it that it is because I disbelieve in the world that I love every breath I take, look forward with ever-greater delight to the coming of each spring, rejoice ever more in the companionship of my fellow-humans, to no single one of whom – searching my heart – do I wish ill, and from no single one of whom do I wish to separate myself, in word or thought or deed, or in the prospect of some other existence beyond the ticking of the clocks, the vista of the hills, the bounds and dimensions of our earthly hopes and desires? To accept this world as a destination rather than a staging-post, and the experience of living in it as expressing life’s full significance, would seem to me to reduce life to something too banal and trivial to be taken seriously or held in esteem.

…

In other words, the Christian proposition that he that loves his life in this world shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall see it projected and glorified into eternity, is for living, not for dying. After all, it was a St Francis who truly loved the world he so gaily abjured, as his enchanting prayers and canticles convey; not a Pere Goriot who so cherished its commodities. It is misers and Don Juans who moan; spendthrifts and saints are always laughing.

….

All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving; and that the world itself only becomes the dear and habitable dwelling place it is when we who inhabit it know we are migrants, due when the time comes to fly away to other more commodious skies.

Chronicles of Wasted Time

(Malcolm Muggeridge led an interesting life. He was the British journalist who popularized Mother Teresa in his Something Beautiful for God. He was a journalist in England for the Manchester Guardian. He was with the British intelligence unit serving as an operative during WWII with the MI5. He went on to become an editor of the famous British satirical journal Punch. I believe he became a Catholic while in his 70’s. )

If we are paying attention, I believe that there are reminders every day that we must be forever people.

But I frankly confess that I don't understand all of them. If and when you talk to God, please mention the O'Brien family.