The State of the Blog 2006

Over the last couple of weeks and months I have been thinking about this site and what I wanted to do with it.  It has been around in some form or another since 1996 when I launched my first personal site on GeoCities.  It started just a couple months after I started pastoring in Spiritwood and was a tool I relied on heavily when I was at both Spiritwood and Lakeview Church.  For me, it was an online database of resources, links, and unexplored ideas.

By the time I quit Lakeview Church, it had taken on a life of its own but recently I have been questioning it's worth.  I am not pastoring and the need to keep track of my links can be handled pretty easily by del.icio.us  Yesterday a friend of mine sent me this in an e-mail.

are you as bored with blogging as i am? wondering what is next. once upon a time we were on the cutting edge, now every wallmart housewife is blogging. read your link to the future of blogging.

when will the future be now?

 

It's hard to claim you are a part of the cutting edge when even MC Hammer is blogging away.  Venture capitalists are tossing a lot of money at podcasting.  Andrew Jones (who left the following in the comments) is saying, "The future will come when all the media associated with our life (audio, video, shopping choices, poetry, text, event attendence, web site visiting, menus, etc) is automatically and effortlessly made public (published online). When this happens, the work on our part is not uploading more data but rather choosing to filter what we dont want people to access. That is the future of blogging."  While Marshall Mcluhan is right that the medium is the message, I think my dissatisfaction goes beyond the medium to the message itself.  I am finding myself increasingly bored with what passes and is written for the discussion on the emerging church.  It isn't just the blogs, the books are boring as well.  Over the last couple of years a couple of friends have said to me that the problem with much of the discussion about the emerging church has been it is the same people talking about the same things that they have for years.  I am looking at a bookshelf of books that I have read over the last 12 months right now and I am counting and counting and counting the books that all feature at least once reference to The Matrix (and I am not counting Chris Seay's book on the subject)  If we can't move past The Matrix, maybe we are stuck and think that by spinning our wheels we are making progress.

 

My own personal fatigue goes beyond The Matrix.  When I was pastoring I felt surrounded at times with those that have a self-professed prophetic calling to the church.  Despite all of the people that claimed prophetic gifts around me, I know of three of them.  One person would deny any such gifting but has the ability to understand the future.  One had a God given talent for speaking prophetically in the Old Testament tradition of prophets and I experienced it myself when I was younger.  The third person was my grandmother Jenner and she could read tea leaves.  From what some friends of the family told me, she was quite good at it (and no I can't reconcile her ability to read tea leaves and being a wonderful Christian leader either).  So many times those that have these prophetic messages hurt my eyes with a blinding flash of the obvious or so completely over simplify a situation that they have little experience in that it isn't any help at all.  I want to move away from these conversations and to a degree, the people who think this way.  As Guy Kawasaki said in Rules for Revolutionaries, "don't let the bozos grind you down".  I am not saying that people can't tell the church what to do and remind people of their problems and how all pastors like me have sold out for the money and posh parishes and only house church/emerging church/urban churches/purpose driven churches are the only ones that are faithful to God's word.  I am sure that someone will be listening, it just won't be me.

 

For me when I was happiest in life was when I was exploring outside of the Christian sub culture.  I went through some old reviews that I had posted on TheOoze.  Some books that at the time no one else had read or was reading and I forgot how much fun it was to explore a new area of learning and think through it.  My friend Jared Siebert got me listening to science/tech/sociology podcasts on topics I have no expertise in.  I don't know what he gets out of them but for me, I loved the sense of exploring the unknown and the next and finding a couple more puzzle pieces that may or may not fit in the jigsaw puzzle that is my life right now.  Everyone is asking me how much I like work.  The first couple of days I was in deep over my head trying to figure out hardware combinations that I had no idea what people were talking about.  I liked that feeling of needing to find out more, understand more, and finally making progress.  That is what I want jordoncooper.com to be more like.

 

The big difference on the blog will be in content.  Some of what you have noticed already.  The Contextless Links will be replaced by that day's Open Thread.  It keeps my number of individual posts down and makes it a little easier to find the mini posts that make them up.  For over a year many of you begged me to open the comments on my Contextless Links and now that I have, almost no one is commenting.   Excuse me while I call you all losers.

 

Another difference will be a lot more longer posts and fewer of the shorter posts.  I do have net access at work and I do post a lot of stuff to my del.icio.us page but that is often work related and is posted daily over at my link blog.  While I doubt that people would mind if I blogged occasionally from work, I am paid to work and while there are quiet times there with little to do, I would rather spend that time scribbling in my Moleskine (Darryl Dash sent me one and I am now a convert to them) than posting incomplete thoughts on Blogger.  Some of the longer posts and reviews will be reworked into some longer articles for Next-Wave, TheOoze, and the Resonate Journal.

 

I also want to spend some time helping tell the stories of what is happening in the Kingdom of God (or as Brian McLaren says, the "Enterprise of God") in Canada and around the world.  While I am bored with the rants, I still find passion and hope in the stories that get told of what is happening.  I would love to have those stories of hope define the conversation about the Gospel and culture.  My contribution will be to link to those stories and hopefully tell some of my own.

 

There is my road map.  Feel free to pull me over for coffee if you like where it's going and of course, there are a lot of places to go if you want to get off at the next stop too.

 

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