Archives for August, 2008
Recently on Twitter
- Watching Tommy Bowden getting out coached by Nick Saban #
- @DashHouse You mean you don’t have to do a “Saturday night special” #
- @onehouse - I think a lot do. The evening news is still a ritual for those that are boomers and older. #
- I am working my last night shift of the summer. Going from days to nights with no day off (just 8 hours off) has been hard but manageable. #
- @andrewcareaga - It’s time to accept fate and become a Notre Dame fan. #
- Looking forward to a Monday off work. #
- The end of New Orleans? http://tinyurl.com/6nanxw #
What to do?
Some of you have asked what I thought is the best way to deal with the issues of poverty, crime, drugs, and homelessness. I wish it could be tackled in a blog post. After thinking about it everyday for years now, I do have some ideas but I’ll start with a basic framework.
While many problems are intertwined, for the sake of sanity, you have to deal with one problem at a time and then work out from there. A version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs may be helpful.
As a housing first philosophy shows, getting a place to sleep that is safe and some food in the stomach are pretty big steps when you are homeless and provides a platform to deal with other issues as an individual and as a community. Of course when you have the bottom level of needs missing or messed up, everything else gets really complicated. Feel free to disagree with me but for most churches, they focus on the top three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy and they do some food security work. In Saskatchewan and Canada which is welfare state we expect that the government will take care of at least the bottom two levels of that list through either a social safety net or through laws, a robust economy, and the police. I think it is just assumed and expected by many that the bottom two are taken for granted.
Of course it doesn’t happen like that. Drugs, sexual molestation, illiteracy, natural disasters, mental illness, physical abuse, recessions, all take a toll on those bottom two sections of Maslow’s heirarchy and the system doesn’t always work and people pay the price.
Traditionally the idea has been to say that people need to deal with their drug addictions or behavioral problems first but housing is a basic human right, and so should not be denied to anyone, even if they are abusing alcohol or other substances. Studies have shown that crime, substance abuse, and other problems go down (but are not eliminated over time). The City of Toronto’s Street to Homes program has a lot more information on it. Toronto’s is interesting in that they offer long term follow up assistance for those that enter into their program. As Malcolm Gladwell’s famous article, Million Dollar Murray shows, it is actually cheaper to deal with homelessness this way than it is to deal with it on a day to day basis.
O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. "We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often," O’Bryan said. "We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—and that’s at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand."
The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.
"It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray," O’Bryan said.
Of course relatively few cities approach it this way, even then there are critics to the idea. Of course despite the lack of a housing first program in a city, it is a philosophy that isn’t hard to adopt, even if the government isn’t there but I’ll post more about that over the weekend.
Recently on Twitter
- @mathowie Hasn’t Condi always said that she wasn’t interested in the personal scrutiny the presidency brings? #
- Say what you want about VP Palin but the selection knocked Obama’s speech off the front of the news cycle. #
The Cabin Weblog
I used to host this site on my site but since I migrated to WordPress, it was just easier to host this at Blogspot. After playing a bit with it, the cabin weblog is more or less online. We wanted a place to post the changes that we are making over the last couple of years and since quite a few friends have used it this summer, we needed something that we can give to people to find Arlington Beach and also so they know what to bring along with them. It is also a place for Wendy and I to post some links to some design and architecture sites and articles that we find interesting.
Recently on Twitter
- I am the only person on Twitter not tweeting the Obama speach. Maybe I am still bitter over being overlooked for VP/Dick Cheney II #
- @LineaLanoie I didn’t watch it either. I listened to the new Cold Play CD #
- @edstetzer - no football is better
#
Summer
Well this is the last weekend of summer. I don’t know what happened to mine but none of my summer plans came together. We did get to the cabin five or six times which was amazing but then July and August happened and I had to work nights on the weekends. It meant working Friday, getting 12 hours off and then working all night. It wasn’t horrible but it isn’t fun and it will be my last weekend of nights this weekend. It also means that I can actually sleep Friday nights and do stuff on Saturday and Sundays other then sleep.
The end result is that I still have 20 vacation and flex days to use up before December 31. We are heading to the lake for several days a week from now and then we are going to either Edmonton or Calgary for our anniversary in October (last years tenth anniversary was canceled due to food poisoning). I am taking the last week off around Christmas with some long weekends here and there. While it will be a lot of fun taking that time off this fall, in hindsight I should have taken a week off in spring. I won’t make that mistake next year.
At the lake, I plan to doing some reading, writing, and playing Madden 08 on the PSP. Of the three, I expect playing Madden 08 to be the most rewarding.
Subversive Relevance
This comes from OneHouse (via my comments)
Mother Teresa, a foreign-born nun in her late thirties, head of a girls’ boarding school, was going on retreat. As she traveled through the city she became overwhelmed by the sight of abandoned persons, lying in the streets, left to die. Some of these forgotten people were already having their not yet lifeless limbs gnawed by rodents. Under the impact of those grim sights she felt a call to a new form of vocation — a ministry of presence, service and care to the abandoned, the forgotten, the hopeless. In a nation and a world where scarcity is a fact of life, where writers and policy makers urge strategies of "triage" to ensure that resources are not "wasted" on those who have no chance of recovery and useful contributions, what could be less relevant than carrying these dying persons into places of care, washing them, caring for their needs, feeding them when they are able to take nourishment and affirming by word and deed that they are loved and valued people of God? But in a world that says people only have worth if they pull their own weight and contribute something of value, what could be more relevant?
OneHouse links to this post as by Darren Hughes
I’ve cherry-picked comments here, but "relevance," it seems to me, has become evangelical slang for "familiar comfort." And, to be blunt, I can’t think of a more damning critique of the church. It’s the type of relevance that leads to books like The Maker’s Diet and Wild at Heart, books that capitalize on "secular" trends (the Atkins craze or Mars/Venus pop philosophy) by refinishing them with a sanctified varnish. I mean, do I need Relevant magazine to tell me The Da Vinci Code "meets all the expectations of a great suspense novel without being formulaic or predictable"? Can’t I learn the same thing from a quick glance at the Best Sellers list?
Windrider Forum at Wycliffe College
Bill Kinnon has let me know about The Windrider Forum at Wycliffe College. It’s taking place September 9, 10 and 11 during Toronto’s International Film Festival. You can watch a couple videos and find out more information at the Windrider site.
The rather dull cutting edge
A friend just called and we were talking about my last blog post. We were talking about whether or not the person who e-mailed had a point. Part of me thinks that they do. Not that I shouldn’t be blogging (although we joked that it has happened regardless of the comments) but rather or not I am irrelevant to the conversation about the Gospel and culture because of where I am in life.
A mentor of mine told me in all seriousness that no one takes bi-vocational pastors seriously. Sad to say, in many ways he was right. Looking back at it, while I was criticizing those that lived and died on the words of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren, I was doing the same with different thinkers that met my idea of what success was in the church. The big difference was the metrics that we were using. The values may change. For some it was job stability and a sustainable size of church, for me it was may attraction to cutting edge ideas and theology. Both I think are flawed in a very similar way as they are both dependent on success (size of church | book sales | appearance @ TED)
For me my worldview changed overnight when I started to work at the shelter. I saw the poorest side of Saskatoon and while there are a lot poorer areas of Canada, it was a shock for me. 99% of it I can’t or won’t talk about here but I remain shocked over the impact of total family breakdown, heavy drug use and addictions, domestic violence, alcohol related dementia, and undiagnosed mental illness. Despite only living 15 blocks from it, I had missed it all. On Monday while heading home, I saw members of the Saskatoon District Health picking up needles. I looked in all four directions at a side street and everywhere I looked, someone was picking up a dirty needle. Being around it has changed a lot of things. I make our beds differently even at home (I flick the sheets away from me) without thinking about it and much to the families irritation when we have other things to do, I tend to talk with every panhandler and make sure they know they can get a meal and a room.
Over the last couple of years my theology may have gotten more complex but my praxis has gotten a lot simpler and focused on the poor. At the same time my vision for impacting change and the community has grown exponentially. At the same time a quick drive through the core neighborhoods of Saskatoon and other cities show that the homeless, drug addictions, prostitution, and poverty are not on the agenda of most churches. Much ado was made of one church who is doing "affordable" condos at $100,000 a shot. Yeah it’s affordable, if you are middle class and can get a mortgage.
The ratio of churches to homes are twice on the east side of Saskatoon as it is on the west side. Why, there is more money (and therefore better givers) on the east side of the city as there on the west. With most of the growth happening on Saskatoon’s east side for years, church growth practices dictate that you go with the growth. I should know as I found an old memo I wrote outlining a similar idea.
I guess if your idea of the emerging church is that it is the latest thing in a long line of church growth ideas and relevance, then I am pretty irrelevant and the stuff I link to and write about is pretty irrelevant. I think I am pretty cool with that.
Note: A couple of people asked where I am going to church now. I work a LOT of Sunday’s but Wendy is starting to attend Lakeview when she can. It is where many of our friends attend and Lakeview was there for Wendy when she was having Oliver.
Now more irrelevant than ever
A reader e-mailed me this week with "I think it is time you stopped talking about the emerging church. You haven’t lead a church in over two years. Your voice is irrelevant to the conversation since you are on the outside of it."
Well I don’t blog a lot on church mechanics anymore and I don’t think I did when I was a professional cleric but I think that opinion is a huge part of the problem. I hear Frank Viola (blog) getting ripped because he isn’t seminary educated but part of me thinks that his opinion and voice is important because he isn’t seminary educated and he has a viewpoint from outside of the system. It is one of the basic premises of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap and is the idea that too many experts tend to have too narrow of focus and view on any problem and there is a need for deep generalists to bring a wider perspective on an issue and perhaps facilitate discussion between different fields of discipline to bring about change.
Of course this misses the bigger rebuttal is that serving the poor and disenfranchised seems to be one of the basic themes of the Bible and I think I do a pretty good job of doing that. It’s definitely not cool (I came home spelling of dog, cat, and human urine today) but does that disqualify me from having a worthwhile voice in the church? I don’t know. If it was someone else I would say no but I feel a large distance between me and Christianity Inc. these days so maybe it is legit.
I went into the Christian MegaMart ™ the other night on a whim. I was looking for Jim Palmer’s book, Wide Open Spaces and a copy of Divine Nobodies (neither of which they had) and as I looked at what the Christian marketplace was, I realized that I don’t fit in the old evangelical world anymore. As I looked at the assorted titles in the section marketed "The Emerging Church", I am not even sure I fit in there. Maybe evangelicalism and the emerging church is a place best left to the professionals.
Where do I fit in that? I don’t know anymore. I don’t think it is just sitting in a pew listening to someone else tell me how to live but at the same time I don’t think I want to go back to the other side of the pulpit and tell other people how to live. I know we call that community but that isn’t community. We can quote Steven Johnson all we want but it isn’t emergent either, no matter how many tea lights get lit. Somewhere along the way, something got lost, misplaced, sold or changed. The vision of what was talked about a long time ago in places like Three Hills, Seattle, and online was changed, about the same time the marketers saw us as a market and the media saw this as a news worthy story. If there is anything I would love to do, it’s find that again. If it still exists, I’ll be over there.
Warren @ Arm’s Length
Warren Kinsella is video blogging at YouTube. It’s what you expect, high quality production, superstar guests, and lot’s of politics. Also as the commander of the "Piss Army", he shows his famous Risk strategy. Make sure you watch the video because within a year there will be a book about it.
Why Wendy and I never go to the movies together
She breaks most of these rules. It’s tearing our marriage apart. As a padawan, I have trained Mark in most of these rules but to paraphrase Yoda, “She’s too old”. Now we just go see different movies or the same movie on different days.
Abandoned Church in Fish Creek
Wendy and I dragged Mark and Oliver on a trip north of the city to find this church in Fish Creek, Saskatchewan (which is near to the site of the Battle of Fish Creek). Sadly the ghost town was well marked with “Private Property” and “No Trespassing” signs which we respected but I would have loved to have gotten a lot closer. Later we drove over to Fort Carlton which dates back to the early days of the Hudson’s Bay Company as a trading post across Rupert’s Land. We have more photos of Fish Creek here and more photos of Fort Carlton here.
One quick thing to note. I was dreading the visit to Fort Carlton a bit because the last time we went the tour guide was quite miserable to Wendy and I and was just going through the motions of doing her job. This time the guide was fantastic and Mark really enjoyed it. He had Mark totally engaged with the tour and the history of the place. It was fun to see Mark learning and if you haven’t been out to the Fort, it is worth a drive out to see.
Movie Pix HD
We bought one of these this week. I had wanted a camera that I could use at work and carry with me everywhere. It is basically a Flip Video camera competitor but takes HD video for a lower price. No internal memory but 1 gig SD cards are going for $7.99 in some places around Saskatoon.
As a PC user, I needed to download a QuickTime to AVI converter so Microsoft Movie Maker could import the video (yeah, the software is horrible). It won’t replace my DV Camera but it is great for taking to the lake, to the park, or just having around the boys.
I.O.U.S.A.
Rick Bennett has a good post about this. Head over there and for those of you who are too busy to click and read, watch the trailer below.
The question is can the United States recover from this. Several articles I have been reading lately all mention the lost U.S. manufacturing jobs which is painfully obvious. What many have brought up is that the U.S. is losing the skills to manufacture quality goods again. That sounds ridiculous but when you look at how hard it has been for General Motors to get quality up on a vehicle like the Malibu (which still lags behind Japanese car makers) you wonder if we are seeing a shift that could take decades to recover from. Of course the advantage would be that with a regionalized economy again, foreign competition (except from places like Mexico) is far less. Even electronics, when I worked at Computer Boulevard, nothing we sold was actually made in North America. Even the iPod is made in China and most MacBooks are made in China by ASUSTek (who also makes the PS2, HP, Palm, and other brands). I guess it asks the question, can North America even build the products that we deem essential? (the rebuttal to this is a couple blocks away at Vecima which shows that you can build high tech products anywhere - including Saskatoon)
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The Agenda Inside the Clinton White House by Woodward Bob October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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