Archives for July, 2007

The lowest 3% of our society

Scott has a great post on working in a rehab centre.

i had coffee with a kid today. she was a hurting, homeless, and desperately desperate beautiful young woman. and as i looked across the table, knowing how little i could truly offer, it occurred to me that, just for this one hour, i could choose to make a difference in one life, as pathetic as that might be.

i am reminded of campolo’s story that, had he been a pastor of a church, would have earned him a pink slip and a soiled reputation. he speaks of how, on one occasion, he picked up three child prostitutes and took them to a hotel room. he saw the broken childhoods, the ruined hopes, the tainted humanity. He took the young ladies of the night and bought them an evening of innocence, renting cartoons and ordering chocolate sundaes. They slept in a nice room, unmolested and unafraid. it may not have made a difference in their life but it clearly made a difference for that night.

when i hear that story it usually strikes me that what he did would be highly frowned upon by the religious right. it was too dangerous, too close to the edge, and too open to innuendo and gossip. but tonight i am encouraged. encouraged that though we cannot make a huge difference in the lives of the huddled masses, we can buy moments of peace and hope for people who wonder if anyone cares.

07/24/2007 | work | No Comments

Missional Shampoo

Bill Kinnon is talking about Missional Shampoo.

07/24/2007 | communications, emerging church | No Comments

Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church

Just when you think that everything stupid has already been said. I don’t know about you but I think the article crosses the line.

How long until a deck of playing cards with Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, and Karen Ward’s faces on it comes out?

07/23/2007 | Christianity, emerging church, politics | 17 Comments

My Flirtation with WordPress

The other night I deleted all of my posts out of jordoncooper.com and decided to install the latest version of WordPress here. It took about 20 minutes to import all of my posts and comments back into WordPress (8000 posts, 2500 comments) and then I decided to install some WordPress themes to see which ones I liked best. After fiddling around with it for a couple of hours, I deleted WordPress and reinstalled Blogger. Here’s why.

  • Themes work a lot better on Wordpress.com than they do with WordPress. Kudos to WordPress.com, which is an amazing hosted blogging platform but some features that I have come to accept as working automatically on Wendy’s weblog needed some tweaking on my site.
  • The themes that I liked didn’t have the functionality that I wanted and the ones that had the features, I didn’t like the design.
  • I enjoy tweaking and customizing in my antiquated version of Dreamweaver. While I will see what the new Mozilla web editor is like before I upgrade, I don’t mind tweaking HTML.
  • I stood by Blogger when it stunk so it makes no sense to leave as it is finaly getting good.

That’s about it. Nothing against WordPress.com users but I kind of like my site right now so there is no point in changing.

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07/23/2007 | blogging, technology | 1 Comment

Maxed Out

Great video on consumer debt on Google Video

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07/22/2007 | video | No Comments

Organic Community by Joe Myers

A couple of weeks ago Baker Books sent me a copy of Joe Myers second book, Organic Community. A book in which he builds upon the ideas of a Search to Belong. I finally got around to reading it yesterday while sitting under my patio umbrella. I am not sure how long it took me to read it but no longer than a couple of hours which is an endorsement of Myers’ writing style. Despite being a quick read, it had a lot of good stuff in it and made me rethink some ideas about Church of the Exiles, Resonate, and some other organizations I am apart of and I have several pages of notes and ideas that I took from the book and want to put into practice.

While in Search to Belong, Joe deconstructed the thinking that goes into small groups and gatherings in the church, he expands his thinking and looks at the impact of sacred cows like “vision casting” and planning have on church communities and how a change in the questions we ask can change the results. In the end, Myers is describing a community centric vision of a church (or business) rather an a hierarchical centric generated vision of the church which demands conformity with the vision about all else. By using real world examples from the church and his own business, SETTINGPACE, Myers shows that it is not only plausible theory but is happening in practice.

As I glance over my notes, the following thoughts hit me.

  • While not taking anything away from what was written, I think this is a lot easier to do in new communities rather than old ones. As Pete Ward talks about in Liquid Church, churches do have certain expectations of their leaders (Ward uses the illustration of prisoners and guards acting a certain way in prisons because that is what is expected of them by each other) and do expect others higher up the org chart to lead in a certain way. For some reason, many men cling to the idea that their pastor needs to be a visionary leader, perhaps to justify their involvement in the church.
  • True community and traditional churches are incompatible. Part of the problem is the idea of a pastoral calling being a career and also the view that church leaders are interchangeable parts that can be swapped in and out for the good of the community. In both ways, the commodification of those who are a part of the community destroys it and makes it not much different then any other profit driven company.
  • Speaking of profit driven companies, some official and many unofficial church vision and mission statements are variations and spiritualizations of the old axiom, “maximizing shareholder value” rather than existing as a community.
  • As good as Joe Myers book is (and it is excellent), it is a minority voice in a crowded market of people trying to sell the exact opposite of what Joe is writing. The leader/pastor has been so ingrained in how we see the church and we have spent so much time building him or her up, it is going to take a long time and a lot of discussion for the church to move away from it. Ironically, for the first bit, it may even take a strong leader to have the church to stop thinking in terms of heirarchical leadership and start thinking in terms of community (rather than just blather on about it).

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07/21/2007 | Books & Reviews, Christianity, Resonate, community, emerging church, leadership | 4 Comments

Did Harry Potter survive?

Wikipedia has the plot and ending of Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows. That’s all I have to say about it but if you can’t wait….

07/21/2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Surf’s Up at the Roxy Theatre

Tonight Mark and I walked the 15 blocks to the Roxy Theatre on 20th Street in Saskatoon. I am ashamed to admit that despite working a block away and being a big fan of the restoration, I had never been there since it reopened (although I did see Rambo there as a kid). It is really nice inside and it has a lot more atmosphere than the crime against architecture that is the Galaxy Theatres. It took Mark and I about 40 minutes to walk down and we got our tickets (only $4) and assorted junk food for the movie. The reviews for Surf’s Up were good and we both enjoyed the movie. There has been several articles about how the Galaxy is killing other theatre business in the city so I am making a concentrated effort to support the Roxy this summer and take in some other movies there with Mark. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you will definately want to. Mark has already secured some commitments to see Shrek the Third and Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer over the next couple of weeks.

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07/20/2007 | Saskatoon, film | No Comments

Contextless Links

07/20/2007 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Crime and No Punishment.

Last night I decided to ride my bike to work. The highlight of that trip was being hit by a car which I managed to avoid the worst of on Avenue C North. I was sent for a spin but my knee took the worst of it but I was okay.

I got to work, locked up my bike and a couple of hours later was in our back compound where we have some of the Centre vehicles and my bike wasn’t there. It was stolen at 6:18 p.m. according to our security tape and was most likely sold within minutes for $10-15 dollars or for some drugs. I had a good lock on it but it looks like it was smashed apart.

The weirdest thing is that we are pretty sure from the camera who stole the bike. Sadly it wasn’t the first bike in the last couple days stolen around here. A coworker was attacked and they stole his bike in the middle of the day.

I guess it comes with the neighborhood where anything seems to be fair game. Policing can only go so far and after a while a neighborhood itself has to want to change the culture of where it is at. We try to do that here but it is an upward climb.

Last night I was kind of down about it. Not so much the bike but I have witnessed a lot of evil lately both at work and even near home. Wendy and I witnessed one of the worst domestic beatings I have seen the other night (the cops were on their way by the time we heard the violence and others were there as well) and I have seen some at work that really gets to me. A while ago I was asked to write up something about where I find my time to listen for Listening Point and I think I am going to write about my desk. I have a prayer rope, a Bible, and the Divine Hours in my backpack and over my shift in the middle of craziness I find the time to listen and reflect on the here and now and remind myself that we are all sinners and we all need some grace and many nights, I am that agent of grace for people (so in other words suck it up and model some of that grace).

Speaking of work. I was here a year this week. I have some holidays coming in a couple of weeks and it consists of doing nothing other than doing some mountain biking. Oh wait, I guess I won’t be doing any other that either :-)

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07/19/2007 | justice, work | 5 Comments

Trading QBs

I grew up in Calgary and like all good boys, we collected and traded hockey cards. It wasn’t big business like it was now but you wanted to get the bad cards out of your collection (like Wayne Gretzky cards) for good cards (like Ed Beers and Kent Nilsson). Of course every once in a while you would get suckered and trade a great Pat Riggin card for a bad Mark Messier card and you would beg to get it back. You would go to the teacher, plead with your parents to intervene (mine never did but another teacher did get involved in a particularly bad deal between two kids which seemed to me at the time to be messing with the laws of the school yard) and use peer pressure to get your card back.

Anyways, in the light of the Michael Vick indictment and probable suspension, I wonder how much of that pleading is going on between the Atlanta Falcons and the Houston Texans over the trading of Matt Schwab. I can’t think that the Falcons are happy with Joey Harrington as their starter and it is a big risk to bring in a marginally healed and out of shape Dante Cullpepper.

07/18/2007 | justice, sports | No Comments

Signs of Emergence is now available in North America

Sings of Emergence is now out in Canada and the United States. I reviewed the U.K. version of the book on my blog but with the American release of the book, I thought it was worth a repost. I also submitted a review into TheOoze for the book but I think it is still in the publishing backlog.

I got the North American release of the book the other day and I was blown away to see an endorsement by me for the book. It wasn’t shocking that I endorsed it but for the first time in print, my name was spelled correctly :-)

If you don’t own the book, go out and get it.

A couple of years ago when The Complex Christ came out, I plopped down some puny Canadian dollars, exchanged them for British pounds and bought the book from Amazon UK and eagerly waited for it to be shipped across the Atlantic. When it did arrive in Canada, I had to plop down some more Canadian dollars, this time to the Canadian Borders Services Agency to free it from them. After paying three times what the book cost in shipping and duties, I sat down and started reading. The book was worth the cost and the wait.

The good news is that the book is being released in North America by Baker Publishing under the name Signs of Emergence with the easy to remember subtitle, A Vision for Church That Is Always Organic/Networked/Decentralized/Bottom-Up/Communal/Flexible/Always Evolving which means no more British pounds, no more voyages across the Atlantic, and no more donations to the Canadian treasury. The author, Kester Brewin is blogging at the official Signs of Emergence weblog so you can get a feel for his thinking and writing while you are waiting for your book to arrive (it doesn’t ship in North America until July 1st). Since my copy is still The Complex Christ, I am going to refer to it as Signs of Emergence in this review but when I quote from it, it will be from The Complex Christ and use those page numbers.

The book is as complex as the topic he covers and each time I have read the book, different things have hit me. Because of my context of involvement with Resonate and Church of the Exiles right now, I’ll concentrate on the ideas that from those perspectives.

Revolution vs. Evolution

What I was younger, I loved the idea of the revolution. One of my favorite books still is Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki and Gary Hamel’s book Leading the Revolution had an early impact on me (for good and for bad). My own neighborhood has seen church closings and no new church plants coming in to replace them so it seems like a perfect time for a revolution to me. However Signs of Emergence reminds me that there is a different way to go and that is the path of evolution. It reminds me that we need to take a closer look at what kind of change we are asking for. Revolution brings about change but they also seed havoc, pain, and suffering as well. Is that the kind of change that the church needs to be looking at? Brewin says no and starting on page 25, he makes a powerful cause for evolution.

Our history, both ancient and modern, has been transfixed by the idea of revolution, of radical change precipitated quickly, requiring an uprising, an insurgence, a head of pressure and a focusing of force; demonstrations, coups d’etat, armed struggles, wars and regime changes. Warriors, dictators and their critics have been clear about it for centuries. Chairman Mao Zedong wrote that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party. It cannot be so leisurely and gentle… It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’; Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics that ‘revolution will soon be entirely reduced to a permanent assault on time. The man on the battlefield has no safety other than in suicidal entrance into the very trajectory of the speed of [the guns]‘; and Napoleon that ‘the strength of a revolutionary army should be evaluated as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed’. Through all their blood and violence many of our politicians seem to believe that these revolutions bring genuine transformation. Yet it is abundantly clear that materially, politically, psychologically and spiritually, violent change tends to shear, to break the whole as one surface part moves and leaves the rest of the body behind unaltered.

In his seminal work Future Shock, Alvin Toffler describes the psychological damage that occurs to people when they are overwhelmed by intense change. He talks about ‘future shock’ being a disease of change, a sickness that people suffer that not so much about the direction of change as the rate of it. Future shock, he says, ‘grows out of the increasing lag between … the pace of environmental change and limited pace of human response’. In other words, for our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds demanded by power-wielding dictators or company board rooms, but at the evolutionary speeds of the empowered human body.

Party in response to Toffler’s concerns, people have begun to see that the nature of change has been itself been required to change. If we are to transform the whole, and truly alter the very nature of things for good, then the mode of change cannot be revolution but evolution. A gradual development over a long period of time. As Robert Warren notes, ‘A good case can be made for evolution being the best single word summary of an Anglican approach to change. It suggests creativity [and] responsiveness to present environment’.

The slowness of evolution certainly has a divine beauty about it with its gentle, unseen transformation so hard to plot yet so undeniable in its force. We would like change immediate effect — we want revolution — but God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are higher than our. Despite this, as we will see in the next chapter, we have projected our revolutionary tendencies onto God, and it is only as revelation has become clearer over time that we have seen that ours is not a God of violent uprising, but of slow, slow evolution. So since forever, and until whenever, those that have sought to change God’s way have had to endure a prefix of…

Waiting [from the Vaux website]

As Sarah waited: Ninety years for a son to fulfill God’s promise.We wait in hope for what we thought had been spoken to us.

As Moses waited: 40 years in the desert, being prepared by God to lead his people.We wait for emptiness and humility; for bravado to wither.

As Israel waited: 40 years of wandering, hungry, depressed, thirsting, unsure.We wait for the right time to act

As the Prophets waited: 1000 years of promises that God would raise up a Saviour.We wait for the signs that God has not forgotten.

As Mary waited: 9 months of her 14 years for the child of God.We feel the birth-pains, yet fear for the child.

As John the Baptist waited: Scanning the crowds for the one whose sandals he would not be worthy to untie.We long for an experience of the Divine

As Jesus waited: 30 years of creeping time.40 days in the desert of temptation.3 years of misunderstanding.3 days in the depths of hell.So we wait for God’s time. Preparing the way.

Our turn to toil on leveling mountains and straightening paths.Our turn to watch the horizon.

Our turn to pass on the hope that He who promised is faithful and will come back.

What do we do as we wait. Signs points us to Walter Brueggemann’s reminder that the first stage in this is grief which is not often popular in today’s church culture where assurance and vision outweighs the acceptance that society no longer cares what is happening in most churches. Brewin asks and answers the question of where are the Jeremiah’s of today, those to help us confront our grief in today’s church. The answer is those are found on the fringes of the church culture.

Signs asks us another hard question and that is what if God no longer is interested in what we are doing? From pg 35 and 36.

Once we have grieved, our tear-washed eyes can then properly open to the shocking fact that God allowed this to happen. God allowed us to climb this little peak. The denial may be over, and the cover-ups exposed, but a deeper resistance still remains. How could God do this? In the midst of our waiting for the news, we meet this intractable issue: if we are seeking the new, then what we practicing was the old, and therefore God was not in what we were doing any more. God has moved on back down the mountain while we stayed up our comfortable hillock.

Such a divine departure is rightly shocking to us. We see an example of it described in Ezekial 10: God ups and leaves the temple. To a people that had become over-familiar and blase about God’s presence with them in the temple, to a people who had become complacent about their special status as The Chosen, God showed God’s holiness. God got us and left. Bored by our ramblings, navel gazing conversation about internal tinkering, God hung up. God walked off, displacing a true, holy freedom that shouts clearly over its shoulder that no temple, no place, no people, no box, no church, no agenda, no theological position will ever require me to stay where I don’t want, be co-opted into something I only half agree with, be pressed into the service of some cause you made up because I AM who I AM. And SLAM, the door shuts and we left alone to wonder about God’s holiness, God’s transcendence, God’s otherness, God’s separateness, God’s difference.

As we enter this dangerous place of stopping and waiting we must face the possibility of experiencing God’s disinterest. Where we have proclaimed “God is in this” we must be prepared that God can and does leave. One need only consider for a second the other point where God was unable to leave any ministry, any place, any attempt at work, and we see that it would quickly draw us down the same path to the god who, not being allowed to permit suffering, intervened every time a child stepped toward a sharp object.

God will not be co-opted into our programs. And this actually turns out to be the foundation of huge hope. For if God could no leave, then we would be bound and trapped for ever inside structures that God “might just be blessing”.

Power and the City

Power and influence is a huge part of the evangelical church. Robert Webber said in an interview with Vineyard’s Cutting Edge magazine years ago that evangelicalism was about two things. Big buildings and influential pastors. A couple of weeks ago, I read this Washington Post story on Baltimore Raven’s head coach Brian Billick. Here is the quote that stuck out in my mind, “But for generations, the mandate of the NFL coach had remained unchanged: Get as much power as you can and don’t let go.”

Brewin is calling us to do it differently. How do we walk away from power and re-orientate ourselves as the church in the world. On page 45 Kester’s call is for us to become born again.

The Church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood 2500 years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as narrow minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings, ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready to lend support to unjust wars… And so we must do as God did, as Christ commanded and exemplified: we must be born again. Become nothing, removed of strength and power and voice and means and language…

We must re-emerge and grow up again in the place we are meant to serve. Understand it, learn from it, be in it, love it, listen to it, wait 30 years before speaking to it. We must, like God, discard any thoughts that revolution is going to effect change in the Church or our world, and become dedicated to change by evolution.

Brewin’s advice to the church is to leave power behind and take a different path forward. In that he is calling those in North America anyway, to take the path less followed. How do we do that? According to Kester, one of the ways is to engage in an urban theology. He reminds us that over half of us in the world live in the cities, our theology remains quite rural as it was developed largely before urbanization. My own tradition of Methodism early history was dominated by John Wesley and his horse as they traveled from town to town across England and most of my current tribe’s congregations are located in small cities and towns across Canada (well from Quebec west). It is going to take a major rethinking of what urban theology is going to look like.

In his discussion of how the cities have changed into complex, bottom up systems, Brewin says this (pg 63),

There are still those who cry for revolution, for a revival that will change things in a snap, make everything OK as thousands flock to church… But the days for revolution are over. The cry for revival is too often a cry for abdication: you do it all, God. Well God has done God’s bit, it is the systems that now need to change. This is the faith we have signed up for: the Church as the body of Christ where we have real parts to play, real responsibilities. We must not act rashly–diving in to this or that. We must do as God did. Stop. Wait. Grieve. Strip away power, might, pretence at knowledge, riches… and be born again. As Einstein famously said, “The same consciousness that created a problem can not solve it.”

So will we be the ones to solve the problem? My ego wants me to say yes but deep down I know better. What is the impact of the things like Vaux that have come out of the period of waiting and grieving? Brewin offers an interesting comparison. Punk music. As he says (pg 71), punk was never going to be the future of music but what it did was the give permission to those who did create the future of music. He points out the unsustainable energy needed to create alternative worship (something that I can relate to with the worship.freehouse) but does point out that even if like the Sex Pistols and it does implode and burn out, it has (along with other expressions of the emerging church in the west) clear the way for other things to come along and pick up the torch.

For whatever the future will look like, the book does call us back to the present. For many of us that is in the city. (pg 106).

We must learn to penetrate our communities and penetrate our workplaces. We must learn to penetrate our cities and find God in them, for the cities are our true destiny. They are where it will not be God alone, but god and us and him and her and white and black and rich and poor and illiterate and abused and day and straight and Protestant and Catholic and the whole feast of life. And only in the city can we get that message. It is not an easy message to tune into with so much white noise and hatred and difficulty and screwed up and transport and mugging and division…But with practice, with a commitment to engaging positively with the city and looking to catch it doing good rather than always on the lookout to knock it down, we can begin to see glimpses of why God is committed to the city as our future: because the redeemed city is the final expression of humanity and divinity in co-operation. It is the conjunction of God’s creation with our creativity, where we are building something together.

How do we interact in the city? There are a couple of ways we can interact with others around us. Perhaps the most popular is in a market economy. Just a grocer sells you ice cream and vegetables, churches offer you up religious services and goods for a price (tithe). Before one mocks that idea, I worked on a staff where we articulated it in those terms and so do many other churches across the western world. As Brewin points out, the most pernicious part of the market exchange is that every person needs to justify their existence and contribution to the market economy or in the lingo of the church, be aligned around the purpose/vision/mission… There is another way and that is the idea of the gift. His tie of worship to a gift was breath of fresh air for me. For too long the church growth movement has seen worship as a commodity which was to be traded for attendance and tithe. I remember talking to one worship leader who unabashedly would boast that if you gave people the worship style they wanted, the more money they would give. He was probably right in his analysis of the “transaction” but as Kester reminds us, there is another use for worship other then generating revenue and that is the metaphor and idea of the “gift”.

Looking back at to the reasons why a number of us started Vaux in the first place, it was because the churches we were part of gave no opportunity for us to give. Sitting a huge church full to the brim with about 600 people, mostly in their early twenties, many of them working as actors, writers, directors, graphic artists, and musicians, it seemed extraordinary that unless they were able to preach or play the guitar, their gifts were not welcome. There was no space within the normal weekly services for any of these other talents, yet it was these talents that were talents that were put to use in the marketplace week in, week out. Perhaps it was not less surprising that people were coming to church with an attitude of getting rather than giving, because there was actually no room in the highly structured, highly dictatorial services fortheir gifts to be given.

Speaking more on the idea of gifts and worship, Brewin captures what I think is a lost truth in the emerging church and our existence in a market driven church economy.

“Alternative worship” is not multimedia worship. It is about allowing people to use their gifts so that they can worship with integrity. It would be folly to pretend that by installing PA systems, video projectors and screens, and shipping in tea-lights by the tonne every church would suddenly be “doing alternative worship”. Buying a labyrinth or some ambient music and video loops doesn’t get you any closer to the original spirit of the movement, because what Vaux would call “alternative worship” cannot be bought into; it is not about commodity but gift, and gifts must come from those taking part, not be bussed in from outside.

In the Emergent Church, acts of worship will spring from the economy of gift. They will not be products that can be bought or sold, or commodities to be consumed in exchange for some devotion. However, we must not restrict our thoughts on gift to services. Thinking more widely about cities, they are massively dominated by market exchange - economic beats driven by capital and profit in ways that small villages a not. The Church would be foolish to try to play the city at this game and boost its “market share”, “reposition itself itself in the market” or “rebrand” its message with modern advertising and marketing methods, for the essence of what we have cannot be bought or sold. It is not to be consumed and is not a lifestyle choice. Its truth will not be fully told by glamorous girls with smiley pearly teeth, and eight out of ten people who express a preference will not express its depth and pain with richness or sorrow. In the face of the saturating and all encompassing urban market, which Hyde rightly associates with empty death that leads nowhere, the church must stand as a beacon of generosity, as a hub for gift exchange and all the relational enrichment that brings.

Of course he does cover the topic of dirt which gained notoriety after Steve Collins wrote about it in a 2002 column in Ship of Fools. I never found that much offense in the service (although back in 2002 when I first posted about it many did find a lot of offense with it). While the chapter was something to reflect on it, it does tie back into all of the other themes and ideas of the book and that is that the church finds itself in a different world and place than it has been for 2000 years and that is a missional movement that is often underground and back in amongst the city. Life is not as black and white as it once was (or perhaps as some in the church saw it then) and the nuances to live in the city are many at times contradictory.

I think I have read the book probably 20 times and I will soon retire the book as soon as Signs of Emergence comes out in North America for no other reason to give it’s battered binding a must needed break. If I had a list of the ten most important books for the emerging church and for the church in general, I think this one would definitely be on it. You can pre-order your copy from Amazon.com now, you will be glad you did.

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07/17/2007 | Books & Reviews, Christianity, Resonate, emerging church, environment, theology | 2 Comments

Sustainability

Jason Evans has an excellent post on sustainable community living and co-housing that you will want to read.

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07/17/2007 | emerging church, friends | No Comments

Contextless Links

07/16/2007 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Rehearing Colossians 1.1–14

Rom Targum 1: Rehearing Colossians 1.1–14 in the Context of Disquieted Globalism

But here is the rub. Everything in this monolithic culture of McWorld globalization is allied against you and will try to keep your imaginations captive, stripping you of the courage to dream of alternative ways to live. So may you be strengthened with all strength and empowered with nothing less than the weighty power of God in this disempowered culture of unbearable lightness. May your vision, your stubborn refusal to allow your imaginations to be taken captive, have an endurance, an ability to hang in there for the long haul and a patience that doesn’t need to aggressively and triumphalistically realize the kingdom of God now because it has the faith and trust to work and wait for a miracle, for the coming of God’s shalom to our terribly broken world.

From Colossians Remixed

07/15/2007 | culture, quotes, theology | 2 Comments

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