In class my adviser, Ryan Bolger, often tells a story about a pastor of a mega-church in Arizona. One day the pastor, while walking with his son across the campus of the church he built, said, “Son, this is all going to yours someday,” and his son took a step back and responded, “I don’t want anything to do with this kind of Christianity.” It was then that this pastor realized his church was rooted in a boomer culture phenomenon (and has since gone on to rethink their mission as a church). This “mission-station” approach is rooted in a different time and sensibility than that of our younger generations. Theirs is a do-it-yourself culture: sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and open-source community-based software need community cooperation in order to work. These sites represent a rejection of powerful top-down hierarchies where the flow from producer to consumer maintains control, predictability and efficiently. Those influenced by the participatory culture, actively participate in creating where they see need and they do it with or without permission from those in power, they share information and welcome low levels of control, they are highly energetic and creative and they want to be active in shaping their future through a variety of grassroots means. (From the article, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century by Wess Daniels)

Recently I have been thinking a lot on two terms that author/consultant/professor Clay Shirky used in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He discusses, among many other things:

1. An “architecture of participation” (coined by Tim O’ Reilly)




2. Communities of Practice

Both embody what I think are two important necessities for the Church. That we create an environment that allows for and encourages participation among everyone. Not just pastors, directors, paid staff, or those that we often single out as having special gifts. Rather it is a community that everyone brings something to the table. And that we foster a community environment that encourages practice, which allows for mistakes, failures, successes…everything that comes along with practicing.

Churches are often bad at these two things. We don’t allow for failure, and therefore we inhibit a participatory community.

That’s why you rarely see anyone up front during worship on Sundays unless it is the paid staff. That is the way that we minimize mistakes, which therefore limits total participation. It’s a vicious cycle which eventually leads us to being consumers of Church, the community and all that is offered.

I have great hope for the Church as I see many new communities and Churches embracing some of these values of participation and practice, while also moving away from being consumers of the Church and worship. Many are also moving away from top-down hierarchies that maintain command and control. I think these moves are a step in the right direction.

Wess Daniels has got an amazing post over at Barclay Press, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century. I leave you with another great quote from the article. Then go read it for yourself because it is well worth the time.

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, “Nude.” Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

I’ve been given the advice before that 5 years is a good length to stay at a job. I know of people who switch every 5 years to keep themselves fresh, and constantly learning. Many, who are Christians feel this a good opportunity to take some risks and step out in faith as well.

Some people master a job in a few years and get bored. Or the routine just kills them. I wonder how many of us stay in jobs we don’t love or are passionate about…just because we fear change, failure, etc.

I made a commitment to myself when I took the college director job at Bel Air I would stay at least 5 years. I stayed 6. And I think it was a good opportunity for both sides (Bel Air and I) to branch out, try new things and continuing learning.

Charlene Li of Forrester says the best career advice is:

I’d love to say that a wise mentor told me to do XYZ and that it changed my entire career. It was much more blasé.

At a career management course for HBS alumni, I learned that a person typically gets sick of a job after 18 months. This is a natural cycle, as you go through the excitement of learning a new job, become expert at it, and then gradually, it gets routine. So the advice I got was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months. This didn’t mean that I had to leave the company and go to a new place – it had more to do with redefining my current job first to incorporate new challenges.

The impact has been tremendous – I’ve stayed at my current job at Forrester for almost seven years because every 18 months I’ve essentially gotten a “new job”. I actively think about what I need from the job and fortunately, the management at Forrester have been extremely flexible and helpful in helping me find those challenges. They have included:

- Moving into management

- Moving out of management

- Moving to California to manage the San Francisco office

- Shifts in research coverage areas

- Starting a blog

- Championing new research themes at Forrester

- Initiating new products and services for clients

So my advice is to think “outside of the box” but within the job. It’s much easier to design your dream job within the confines of a company that likes and trusts you.

18 months! That’s about the average length of a youth pastor in the United States.

What is your best career advice?

I was going to post some quotes from Mark Driscoll that would give you a sense of some of the views that he holds that seem to promote a Christianity that is both sexist and violent. But it was too much work…there were way too many. Just do a search on my blog and you will find some.

Read on.

My friend Wess has a great post on the recent issue of the satire magazine, Wittenberg Door. The magazine takes a look at Mark Driscoll and what are his….well, let’s let Wess state it since he puts it much more eloquently.

Most of you know about Mark Driscoll, he’s a mainstream pastor from Seattle with a church of about 6,000 people. He’s also infamous to many for being rather misogynistic, and focused on an overtly-testosterone reading of the Scriptures…..

Wess goes on to say,

After you read that, then read Halden’s post called, “Who Can Driscoll Worship?” where he looks at Driscoll through the eyes of astute theological criticismThis caught my attention partially because of a recent workshop I went to outlining the growing trend in masculine-focused spiritualities: promise keepers, John Elderidge, and the most recent (and most extreme) GodMen, a guys only church where the power-team, meets GI Joe, meets Sunday morning worship. You can see a promo video here. It’s interesting because in a way, it’s not at all surprising that there is an increase in a violence-oriented ministry, given the violence-saturated culture (movies, music, video games) we live in as Americans, but this certainly doesn’t make it okay. What are your thoughts?

Here’s a quote from the article (satire magazine people, remember that):

“Numbers aren’t important, but we’ve grown 81.7% a year since our launch date and I still can’t get the guys to step up and be warriors,” said Kinston. “We want to love our city and we can’t do that with a bunch of pansies who would rather play video games than go to a monster truck rally or tattoo their faces like Mike Tyson.

I’m so glad Wess has written this post. I, as well as many others have been concerned for a long time at the growing trend in men’s Christian movements that seems to equate male Christianity with violence or roughness. We all like the movies Gladiator and Braveheart, and I know Jesus was not just meek, but also a tough person. But they are movies. And his toughness seems to lay in the fact that he gave away his life, and suffered at the hands of men and women who betrayed him…eventually leading to his death on a cross. Not because he fought back with fists and weapons. I just don’t know how we can read the Sermon on the Mount (just to take one examples of Jesus’ teachings), and walk away with any notion that our maleness as a Christian needs to be draped in violence, fighting, fists, and male stereotypes.

True male Christianity (if there is such a gender stereotype) lay in our ability to lay down our lives for others. Jesus says in John 15:12-14:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command.

Or in Mark 12:28-34 when he talks about the two greatest commandments:

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.[a] 30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[b] 31The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c]There is no commandment greater than these.”

I know men and women are different. I know men and women express their spiritual lives often very different than one another. I know little boys often pick up sticks on the ground to use as weapons (without any teaching), and girls sometimes move towards dolls, etc. I know the stereotypes, and I know that we are wired differently as well.

But just because we are made different, doesn’t mean that we need to go on and practice a violent, distorted view of Christianity in our lives. Were Christians killed in the arena? Yes. Is it a violent world? Yes. But living as Christians in this world requires a toughness greater than what you see in the UFC…it requires a toughness to love our enemies, lay down our weapons, and ultimately to lay down our lives. That is what Jesus did, and if we are followers of him, then we don’t need to be men who try and do it differently.

I thought that Brent had a great post Chopping Off Heads and Crying on Shoulders a while back.

Believe it or not I think Mark Driscoll has some good things to say on many issues, but I think they are often clouded because of the rhetoric coming from him in regards to this issue.

What do you think?

There was a time when I used to listen to James Dobson. I was a young kid in high school and college and you heard his name a lot. I read a couple of his books, and I even had friends whose parents played his cassette tapes on the birds and the bees for them. But somewhere in the past decade or so he seemed to become more and more irrelevant.

Now two things are probably happening:

1. I have gotten older, matured, and my views: spiritually, theologically, psychologically, politically, etc. just don’t line up with James Dobsons’.
2. The current younger generation (late teens to early 30’s) just don’t find Dobson to be very relevant. A lot of people in my Christian circles as Tyler mentions, don’t even know who he is.
3. I think we are tired of some major evangelical figures coming out and acting as if they speak for us. Whether he is trying to do that or not, that’s how it appears, and it rubs people the wrong way. This isn’t just limited to James Dobson. But why do we see the same evangelical leaders paraded before the media for a sound bite on various issues? I don’t think most of us believe they speak for us.

Now, I don’t think Barack Obama or James Dobson speak for me, but I just wish there would be some new Christian leaders..not to speak on our behalf..but to offset some of the noise coming from certain evangelical circles. In this day and age there are many, many voices, and therefore not one voice speaking for all of us. Rather, I think you will find a majority of younger Christians identifying with ideas and thoughts coming from a variety of people, rather than one person.

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Social Networks have been one of the greatest things to happen to college ministry. There are many reasons why I have found them to be so helpful, but let’s begin with a video primer, because I know some of you, though familiar with social networks, may wonder their exact purpose or how they function. For that I turn to the awesome video series Social Networking in Plain English by Common Craft

I believe that it’s important to have your college ministry in a social network, and that that network should act as your central hub. There are several reasons for that as I want to discuss further with you.
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I thought this video is appropriate in light of a couple of posts back..

It’s part of the Plain English Series:

Wikis in Plain English

I used email in the coordination of our Student Sunday service at Bel Air this last June. Big mistake. Email is terrible as they state in coordinating stuff. I’ve been playing around with Wet Paint, Wikispaces, and I’m also registered with Wikipedia to edit, etc., but I don’t have a handle on that site yet.

Do you use a wiki? Which one? Do you like it?

I know Neal Locke is a “wiki evangelist” so maybe he has some thoughts or suggestions. Neal?

Check out Carlos Whitaker’s story on how Twitter (or the people on Twitter) ministered to him.

Big Blue Embraces Social Media

Adapting these tools, according to IBM, is also important for recruiting. Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard ’90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.

I still use email and the phone, but I understand what they are saying. 9 out of 10 communications with my college students was via text messaging and Facebook.

And at least 5 out of 10 of my communications with staff was via text, Twitter and Facebook as well.

I know some churches have done away with work email and are now communicating and collaborating on inter-office wikis.

What is your pervasive form of communication with friends, family and co-workers?

This last week I have been video streaming, reading blogs and following Twitters about the PC(USA)-218th General Assembly in San Jose, CA. If you are involved with the denomination then it can be somewhat interesting…at times. Otherwise, it can be quite tedious.

It’s interesting to watch them discuss at great detail issues that I thought had been decided 2-3 years ago…and they have been by many other denominations, churches, and culture itself. So from that viewpoint the whole process seems “for show” at times.

That had me thinking about one issue in particular…

Women in ministry.

Now, this blog isn’t to debate whether women should be in ministry or not, because many of us have differing opinions. But because I believe they should be in ministry at all levels, I want to hear from mainly those who also hold the same view.

What concerns me is when we say we are for women in ministry, or our church and denomination claim women have a role at all levels of ministry, yet you look around and wonder if that is true or not.

I have talked to more women recently who have become disillusioned, or frustrated when the believe they are serving in a church or denomination that stands behind women in ministry, yet behind the scenes they realize they are actually quite limited, finding their hands tied at all levels.

So my question: Do you, your church, or denomination really believe in women in ministry or is it just lip service?

It’s a question of praxis. Do you put your beliefs and theories into practice in this regard, or would one look around your church and realize that it’s just a good idea and theory, but not good in reality.

At least those who don’t believe women should be in ministry are quite up front about it (i.e. the men at Together for the Gospel. They don’t communicate one thing, but do something different behind the scenes.

So as you look at your church, and if it’s a church that advocates women in ministry, I’m wondering a few things:

1. Do women have equal say as the men in decision making?




2. Are women afforded the same opportunity to preach as the men, or are they placed up there a couple of times a year as almost a token?




3. Are the male staff members really advocates of women in ministry, or do they quietly believe that a woman’s place is in the home?




4. Are the women staff members equally respected as their male counterparts?

If we really believe that women should be in ministry, then shouldn’t we be living that out in our decision making?

And, if we are part of the PC(USA) of which I am, then shouldn’t our churches reflect our position of women in ministry more thoroughly?

Here is the LA Times Article that Dr. Mouw was quoted in and is responding to in his blog.

He states in his blog:

In the debates about public policy, however, I know that I cannot simply quote Scripture or cite ancient theologians in order to defend my position. I do not believe that everything that is declared sinful in the Bible ought to be decalred illegal in contemporary pluralistic societies. Here we enter a more pragmatic arena where we need to explore with our fellow citizens whether we have any common assumptions about what makes for a healthy society, and whether we can then figure out a workable arrangement that can accommodate our respective moral convictions. Unfortunately, that is not an easy discussion to have in the present climate. Many of my fellow Christians simply want to condemn the idea of same-sex unions as sinful. And many defenders of those unions seem eager to use terms like “homophobia” in describing anyone who disagrees with their views. When both sides are shouting at each other, it is difficult to have a discussion that clarifies the issues.