A Call For Submissions

Jason and Brooke Evans are looking for submissions for a cookbook of recipes for and from missional communities.  Check out this post for more information.

Technorati tags: cookbook, Jason Evans, Brooke Evans

The War Room | Lesson Four: Get Your Message Out (For Money!)

Okay, back to the War Room.  Lesson Four is why and how you need to get your money out with paid media.  It's an interesting chapter if you are a fan of political history and offers the background into how political advertising evolved over time.

Kinsella talks about Daisy, perhaps my favorite part of Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics.  Of course the important lesson from Daisy is not that you need to convince your opponent that he or she will lead us to nuclear war but rather that advertising can reinforce an idea that is already in voters mind about your opponent.  If you have never seen Daisy, it is embedded there to the right.  This started me thinking about two recent negative campaigns across the country.

The first one is the Conservative Party's Not a Leader campaign directed at Stephane Dion.  Several pundits have said that this has hurt Stephane Dion and has allowed him to be framed by the Conservatives.  While I saw the commercials and thought they were well done, I didn't think that they were that accurate.  In the Chretien cabinets I thought Dion was quite effective.  The timing was brilliant in that he had just won a hard fought leadership campaign and the party was divided.  Capitalizing on the internal dissension which is a normal part of politics, the Conservatives used the opportunity to attack and used the words of his own leadership rival and Dion's words against him.  The Liberals either facing a shortage of cash or didn't have an operating war room to strike back quickly didn't follow James Carville's rule and didn't hit back and now many think that the charges laid by those ads has stuck.  They did run their own ad several weeks later but by that time, "Not a leader" had done it's job.

The second campaign I keep thinking back to the recent Saskatchewan election and the NDP Wolf is sheep's clothing advertising campaign.  While the ads were hard hitting, they had no impact on the election or the polls and even NDP members I knew didn't care for them.  People didn't believe that Brad Wall was like Grant Devine and b) we couldn't figure out why it was necessary to bad mouth Alberta all of the time.  The other thing is that the Saskatchewan Party did hit back with a pretty good ad of their own.  Their counterattack ad which came out soon after the NDP spot aired did got in a shot of their own that did articulate what many people in Saskatchewan thought.  Again, even die hard NDP commented to me that they thought the spot was excellent.

Both of those examples feature negative ads which makes sense because as Kinsella points out on page 123, negative ads work.

There are two reasons for this.  First, television is an emotional medium, and emotional messages work best with voters.  "With too much information around," the professors wrote, "our senses are overloaded and advertisers have turned away from information imparting ads to an approach that 'goes for the gut,' appealing to core values... Negative ads are crafted in the best dramatic tradition:  they contain characterization (implicit or explicit), plot and conflict."  Second, they wrote, negative ads work because they are negative.  "Simply put, negative information is more powerful in crystallizing decisions than positive information.  In politics, it is said, 'mud sticks' and negative ads are the way in which seeds of doubt about an opponent are introduced and negative perceptions are reinforced"

Okay that all makes sense but this is supposed to be a review from a NGO point of view and my advertising budget is pretty small with not a lot of cash for negative ad buys.  How do I get my message out?  How do I survive in the data smog that is today's media market?

As I was thinking about this while reading the next part of the lesson on how to do a ad buy when I got distracted by an article on how much it was going to cost for the Democratic and GOP candidates to do ad buys in all the February 5 state primaries.  They are confronted by the same problems that I had.  Too much message, not enough money to get it out.  As I looked around at the Sask Party and Saskatchewan NDP YouTube sites it hit me that this for NGO's, this is where much of the media efforts are going to be.  It won't replace advertising during Hockey Night in Canada or the Grey Cup but it is a distribution system that does have some power that is going to grow. The NGO's are not the only ones who are discovering this, Tony Blair launched Labour Vision on YouTube (whose main video has Gordon Brown now claiming credit for it) The often stodgy Conservative Party has one.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is using it.  Even Hillary Clinton is creating ads just for the web.  If The War Room is a partial update to Kicking Ass, I imagine that the next update will feature not just a ad buy guide for network and cable audience but one for the web as well.  Before you guffaw, before long everyone will have moved to a smart phone or media device like a iPod Touch which include YouTube capabilities.  In case you haven't heard, a tiny company called Google is getting into the mobile phone market.  Do you think that phone may have YouTube built into it as well?    I am not saying that television is going away but it is going to be increasingly hard to ignore the impact of YouTube and Google Video in the future.  Some more about this will be said when I get to Lesson Nine but if I was running a lot of organizations, I would start thinking long and hard about how you use video, how one creates a network to get the word out, and how that can grow, even if a Super Bowl commercial isn't in the works.

Book Information

The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win by Warren Kinsella
Published by Dundurn Press

Technorati tags: The War Room, Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics, Warren Kinsella, Hillary Clinton, Saskatchewan Party, NDP, YouTube, Stephane Dion

The War Room | Lesson Two: Get Spinning

This is the second lesson from The War Room by Warren Kinsella.  When I started to read the chapter I thought to myself that I was just going to be frustrated with the chapter as I hate spin but as the old adage says facts tell, but stories tell.

If there is any truth left in politics--if there is anything at all that any smart politician or war room soldier knows to be beyond dispute, beyond debate, that can never, ever be refuted, even by God--it is that.  Facts tell, stories sell.

The other Big Truth is that you need to stick to your story, once you figure out what it is.  But first, let me tell you what I mean when I (and others) proclaim that facts tell, stories sell.

The tidy tautology or that truism was made clear to me in the fall of 1993, during the federal election campaign.  Michael Marzolini, a smart young guy from Toronto, was the Liberal Party's pollster.  Nobody as young had ever been in a position like that before, but Marzolini didn't let us down.  His ability to analyze the polling numbers and tell us what we needed to know, and not what we wanted to hear, was remarkable.

One day during the campaign, he said something that may have been total and complete bullshit.  Even now, so many years afterwards, I don't know if Marzolini--who is the pollster I use, whom many of my clients use, and who is respected from coast to coast--was pulling our leg.  But here's what he said: "Forty percent of Canadians don't know how many millions are in a billion." (page 65-66)

I read a study on why American's voted the way they did in 2000.  It was bizarre.  Giving Cletus the vote may not have been the best decision for either party.  Several hundred thousand voters decided based on the amount of rainfall they had had the year before.  You can blame Bill Clinton and Al Gore for a lot of things but rain levels?  There were some that voted for Al Gore not because they liked him but because the garden was doing pretty good and they decided not to mess with success.

It was an epiphany to Kinsella and in addition to unlocking other mysteries of the universe, also explained to him how Ronald Reagan became President of the United States.

In October 1980, just a week before Election Day, Reagan won the keys to the Oval Office when he went toe-to-toe with the guy who was then still working there, Jimmy Carter.  Carter was an amiable, decent man, but he was also completely unable to communicate in a simple, compelling way.  He couldn't spin his way out of a wet paper bag, in fact.  The United States had been going through an economic and post-Vietnam existential crisis, and the Democrat from Georgia appeared completely incapable of describing what needed to be done... So during the second Presidential debate, Reagan turned to the camera and delivered the line that would bring an abrupt end to Carter's re-election hopes: "Are you better off then you were four years ago?"  It was simple and (to some) simplistic, yes.  But it did the trick.

Communicating in a deliberately uncomplicated, unsophisticated way is not condescending.  It does not suggest that you think your audience are dummies, or slow, or poorly educated.  Far from it: taking pains to ensure that your words reach the greatest number of ears-- doing all that you can to ensure that you are understood--is the very essence of democracy.  It is respectful.  It acknowledges your obligation to win the support of the greatest number, and not a select few.  If voters and consumers have a problem in the new media environment, it is not that they are intelligent.  It is that they lack the information that they feel to make an intelligent choice.

Okay, I can agree with that but I am left with a couple of questions.  The first one is why most political parties tend to ignore this.  Spinning on television has become a parody of itself.  I was watching some old video clips of George Stephanopoulos spinning and I compared it to the debacle on Mike Duffy Live that is our Canadian MP's and spinners and I realize that spinning today has just become a parody of what Kinsella is saying.  Spin is one thing but today we hear talking points repeated over and over and over again often at higher and higher volumes.

The other thing is showed me is why Karl Rove's divisive campaigns worked so well.  They appeal to the lowest common denominator and when a large percentage of your voter base is deciding who to vote on based on rainfall or they can't figure out how many millions in a billion, it explains how Karl Rove can get away with what they have in the past. 

It also explains the disconnect between preaching and the congregation.  I know story telling is mocked by many theologians and some pastors but I have heard more than one sermon featuring theological phrases that I may have been the only person on the congregation that understood them.  I can remember one in particular that the substance was amazing and profound but it left the congregation feeling bewildered.  Darryl Dash is much more of an expert on this than I am but too many pastors/priests do not take the time to ensure that your words reach the greatest number of ears.

Tomorrow is Lesson Three.

Other Lessons

Lesson One: Let's Get Started

Book Information

The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win by Warren Kinsella
Published by Dundurn Press

Technorati tags: The War Room, Warren Kinsella, Michael Marzolini, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Cletus the Slacked Jaw Yokel, George Stephanopoulos, Mike Duffy Live

The War Room | Lesson One: Let's Get Started

Here are some thoughts on the first of ten lessons that Warren Kinsella offers up in The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win.  

Before I get into that, I thought I would post this line from the forward from the Rt. Hon. Jean Chretien.

I am delighted that people have bought Warren Kinsella's new book, but I would be more delighted, and so would they, if they bought mine.

The book is somewhat reminiscent of Buck Up, Suck Up, and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room by James Carville and Paul Begala.  Both books look at political campaigns and then take what was learned from campaigns and places them in the context of business and organizational development.  Campaigns whether long marathons (U.S) or mercifully short (Canada and the U.K.) have much in common with the rest of life.  Unfair media (okay everyone complains of unfair media coverage), limited budgets (every company not named Microsoft or Google), mistakes (like this guy), gaffs, and competitors that want you to lose spectacularly. (PS3 vs. XBox 360 vs. Wii).

Lesson One: Let's Get Started

Campaigns contain too many unhelpful variables--inexperienced candidates, wonky policy, bullheaded fundraisers, overeager volunteers, unstrategic advertising, nasty journalists, unrealistic deadlines-- for one person, or one war room team, to fully control.  Campaigns are a mishmash of emotion and ambitions that are sometimes too big and budgets and resources and timetables that are usually too small.  When you have worked at the centre or a political campaign, what is extraordinary is not that things go wrong.  What is extraordinary is that more things don't go wrong.

Thus, the need for an organization, a comprehensive, detailed, written down plan, or blueprint, about how to win.  Hard work and good intentions won't suffice.  As David M. Shea wrote in his valuable book Campaign Craft, "Neil Armstrong could never have reached the moon by simply pointing the rocket." (Page 44-45)

What does that plan look like?

In my experience, you need to address ten things in your campaign plan.  Number one, money.  Two, a campaign structure, identifying who does what.  Three, a campaign calendar.  Four, everything there is to know about your candidate--particularly what he or she believes in, and why.  Five, everything there is to know about the opposition--and how those things make the opposition an inferior choice.  Six, what the target audience believes about your policies and plans and about the policies and plans of your opponent.  Seven, the key messages, and how to communicate them to the media and through your advertising campaign.  Eight, the campaign context--just a fancy way of describing the other things that are going on in the world, which may or many not have an impact on what you hope to do.  Nine, the geographic outlines of the place where the campaign will be fought, and everything you need to know about the battleground.  Ten, the campaign strategic theme - that is the front step pitch.  As in, your targeted supporter has opened his door to you, you've told him who you are, and now you need to tell him what you stand for: "Hi there.  I am running because I want every little girl to have a pony and because I favor ballistic missile defense systems." (It's not much of a campaign theme, admittedly, but it's something.) (Page 45-46)

It also varies on the candidate and the context

The campaign plan is going to vary depending upon the candidate, the cause, the consultant, and the context.  Because I am a Liberal and a liberal, I typically tend to agree with these rules, laid out by Dick Morris, a former advisor to Bill Clinton.  "Message is more important than money: Issues are more central than image.  Strategy matters more than tactics.  Positives work better than negatives.  Substance is more salient than scandal." (Page 45)

Does that plan work outside a campaign?  Yeah.  Money? I have have tried to do a lot of things without money. Some worked.  Many others did not.  A campaign calendar?  I would have a stronger case to argue against it if I wasn't looking for a good project management program tonight.  Geographic outlines of your riding?  Working in Riversdale is a lot different than trying to do something similar on the east side of the city.  The list goes on and on.

In unpacking the things that need to be a part of every campaign and organization effort, he brings up the concept of hard market research.  Working in non-profits and churches, there isn't the money or desire to spend money on market research for a couple of reasons but often times it means that big expensive decisions are made on anecdotal evidence or just as bad, really poorly designed surveys.  Everyone has anecdotal evidence to back up their beliefs and I enjoyed this story about Gerry Schwartz/Onex's failed takeover of Air Canada a few years ago where the research showed that their personal feelings about Gerry Schwartz were not held by all Canadians.

A few years back, for example, I was part of a war room that had ben set up to beat back a hostile airline industry takeover by a respected business leader.  This guy was a formidable adversary: he had lots of money, he was a philanthropist, he had shrewdly hired every lobbyist in Canada, and he was a red blooded Canadian.  I also happened to like him personally.  It looked like he was going to beat us.

But war is war; so we commissioned a battery of polling and public opinion research to determine what folks thought of him and what he wanted to do.  While respondents didn't seem to be staying awake at night fretting about the impending buyout, we found--to our genuine surprise--that they didn't like this man.  Something about him rankled them, big-time.  We didn't agree with their assessment, but we weren't about to argue, either.

So we made certain everything we did, every speech, every press statement, every leaflet, even every button airline employees wore on their lapels--mentioned this fellows name.  We made certain that he became the public face of the hostile takeover.  His own pollsters eventually warned him out the problem, but by then it was too later.  We had won the battle of public opinion and, therefore, the support of the public opinion-obsessed politicians who would be needed to okay the acquisition.  We beat back the takeover bid.  Moral of the story: if you can afford it, always do solid public opinion research.  It's worth it.

Of course the tenth step is important as well.

What you need, desperately is the campaign theme.

Many campaigns are busy.  They raise money, hire staff, and start printing up brochures  They do all of the things you'd expect they'd do.  But a few campaigns--and quite a few more than you'd expect--have no clear sense of what they want to accomplish.  "They know they are trying to win," notes Joel Bradshaw, a Democratic political consultant, "but they never come to a resolution as to how they are going to win... they fail to define a strategy."

When that happens, get ready for a lot of seriously unhappy days on the election trail.  With no coherent, cohesive theme, you can fully expect to be tossed around like a piece of lint in a hurricane.  To win, you will be depending on luck, or some unforeseen external event (like a flood in Manitoba), or a screw-up by your opponent.  More than once, I've been in a smoke-free backroom, and some genius will say, "Just wait.  You'll see.  [Insert opponent's name here] will say something stupid.  It'll happen." And it never, ever does.

It reminds me of the last provincial election here in Saskatchewan.  While I think the people of Saskatchewan liked former Premier Lorne Calvert, he just didn't give them a compelling reason to vote for him other than the other guys are no good and wanted to make Saskatchewan more like Alberta.  It is a lot more complicated than that but calling the other side evil only goes works so often.  A former mayor of Saskatoon kicked off his re-election campaign years ago musing that if he wasn't the mayor, he didn't know what else he would do.  He lost.  Stepping outside of politics for a second, I have been in too many meetings where it was apparent that no one knew why we were doing what we were doing outside of the fact that for a long time people have done it before us.  I am not a big fan of the mission/vision statement thing as they can be written about anything but it does occur to me that much of what goes on in society happens for no reason and therefore it is impossible for a coherent or cohesive theme.  Of course that I was in meetings as well that had a reason to exist but because someone didn't do what Kinsella writes about, the meeting went no where because there was nothing to rally around.

That's enough for tonight, tomorrow I will post some from Lesson Two: Get Spinning and as I go along, I'll link all of posts together.

Book Information

The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win by Warren Kinsella
Published by Dundurn Press

Technorati tags: The War Room, Warren Kinsella, Onex, Gerry Schwartz, Air Canada, Dick Morris, Jean Chretien

The War Room by Warren Kinsella

Well I finally found the time to sit down and read Warren Kinsella's latest book The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win. The plan was to purchase the book when it came out but Wendy encouraged me to wait until after Christmas if I knew what was good for me and our marriage. Sure enough the book was waiting for me under the Christmas tree. After I read The Blind Side, I cracked this book open and started to read.

I had planned to review the book in one post but as I got more and more into it, I realized it was going to be too long to post here all at once. The plan is to review each of the ten lessons from The War Room here each evening over the next two weeks.

I read the book from the point of view of a political junkie (who somehow also holds a Hauerwasian view of politics) as well as from a perspective of someone who works at a NGO. My review will be more from the NGO point of view but I imagine some politics will work its way into the book as well.

More thoughts to come later tonight.

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis

One of the books I received for Christmas was The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, a book where one of my favorite authors tackles my favorite sport. In the 1980s rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme (at about the same time Bill Walsh was reinventing offensives to make the quarterback more important) This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast outside linebackers like Lawrence Taylor, who you may have seen snap Joe Theismann's leg before. To stop the unstoppable, you need giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.

The book is the story of Michael Oher, a kid from the ghettos of Memphis who somehow ends up at a private Christian school and is taken under the wings of a wealthy family and almost accidentally discovers football (his passion is basketball) and whose combination of strength, size, agility, and speed makes him the kind of left tackle that colleges and the NFL fantasize about. As a confessed NFL-aholic, I have to admit that I loved the X and O's in the book but in many ways the book is a story of living out the faith.

A big part of the story is about the Tuohy's. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy were wealthy white evangelical Christians from the south. They were Republicans and had a daughter in a prestigious private Christian school not known for having a lot of blacks. After Sean initially made sure Michael's lunches were paid for (lunch isn't free at private schools), the got more and more involved until on Lee Anne's initiative they took a 16 year old kid who would not speak, had no social skills and in many ways had no hope into their home. There are a couple of memorable lines from this transition.

The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business — she had her own interior-decorating firm — turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.

“Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?” she asked.

“How big?”

“Not big enough.”

Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another — and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.

After the Tuohy's decided that Michael would be moving in with them, there was one big problem where do you put a guy who a fifty-eight long is too small for.

As she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do--"it was ruining my ten-thousand-dollar couch"--but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or, if it did, it might collapse during the middle of the night and he and it would come hurtling through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. The day the futon arrived,s he showed it to Michael and said, "That's your bed." And he said, "That's my bed?" And she said, "That's your bed." And he just stared at it a bit and said, "This is the first time I ever had my own bed."

This line kind of blew me away.

From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. ("Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.") Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn't seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he'd been good enough of the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. "And if I figured if he wasn't, I could make him good enough," said Sean.

Of course the next year he discovered football and became dominant but his marks were too poor to get into college. That didn't stop Sean or Lee Anne.

To get into the N.F.L., Michael Oher needed to first get into college. And to get into college, he needed to meet the academic standards prescribed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade-point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required G.P.A. Given Michael’s best ACT score, to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall G.P.A. He had finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance at the back end of his junior year, when he moved into the Tuohy home, raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That’s when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael’s senior year, she called all his teachers at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael had to do to earn at least a B in their classes. She didn’t expect them to just hand Michael a grade — though she wouldn’t have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking, a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.

Two days into his senior year, he came home, dropped his massive backpack onto the kitchen table and said, “I can’t do this.” Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning, she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that’s when Leigh Anne brought in Sue Mitchell, whom she met at a sorority function.

As a tool for overhauling the grade-point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her 35-year career she taught at several Memphis-area public schools. At Bartlett High School, just outside Memphis, she took over the cheerleading squad and whipped it into five-time national champions. She applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest rejected her out of hand because though Mitchell said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. (“The application did not have one question about education,” Mitchell says. “It was all about religion and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”) She wasn’t born again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”

Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Mitchell was relentless and effusive — the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war. And that’s what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss, her alma mater. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. “There were days when he was just overwhelmed,” says Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. “He’d just close his book and say, ‘I’m done.”’ When he did this, Mitchell opened the book for him. She didn’t care much about football, but she fairly quickly became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard and for so little return. “One night it wasn’t going so well, and I got frustrated,” Mitchell says, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.”’

His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”

A lot of people would have given up at that point.

Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

The book is about football but it is also a story on what the Christian faith looks like in practice. I think many people would look at a Michael Oher when he was 16 and think twice about talking to him let alone adopting him. As Lewis writes the story, it isn't just his salvation that Tuohy's were interested in, it was about helping a person for the sake of doing the right thing (something they had a history of doing according to book).

A combination of work, the holiday season, and the book has had me thinking about how to tackle bigger societal problems. I understand what Sojourners is trying to do and I am a liberal and believe that the government has a role in the solution (and helps create problems as well) but I am under no illusions that by fixing the system, one can solve societal problems.

I grew up going to good schools and while there were many idiots there, everyone knew how to read and write. They had learned to learn over the years and while some chose not to, it was their choice. Working at the shelter, I found myself amongst many people who are not in the rat race but are simply struggling to eat and stay warm. That's it. The system keeps them going one day more at a time and for many that is it for their entire life. Poverty has become a life sentence. Maybe it was caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, untreated mental health issues, abuse, or generations of indifferent parenting but it is going to take a long term effort to work itself out.

For FAS victims alone, they many experience secondary disabilities on top of the FAS.

• Mental health problems — Diagnosed with ADHD, Clinical Depression, or other mental illness, experienced by over 90% of the subjects
• Disrupted school experience — Suspended or expelled from school or dropped out of school, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Trouble with the law — Charged or convicted with a crime, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Confinement — For inpatient psychiatric care, inpatient chemical dependency care, or incarcerated for a crime, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Inappropriate sexual behavior — Sexual advances, sexual touching, or promiscuity, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Alcohol and drug problems — Abuse or dependency, experienced by 35% of the subjects (age 12 and older)

All of these make it extremely function within society which is combined with a relatively low income earning potential. So whose responsibility are those that can not function well in society? Canadians tend to default to the government (our social safety nets) but that only helps a certain percentage. Social workers tend to be overwhelmed since the budget cuts in social services in the mid-90s. Several churches I know have really tried to make a difference but many efforts are programs where the end result is the distribution of goods on a limited scale which can be a good thing but as David Fitch argues effectively in his book, The Great Giveaway it isn't justice we are performing. We aren't changing lives (although it is important to help a person continue on until help can be had). The solution isn't to not help but rather go further and get more involved and work towards something better in community. Of course that sounds a lot easier than what it is to do which explains why it doesn't happen more.

The church does get bashed unfairly at times because in many ways the inner city ministries and churches that are the most closely situated to the problem often have the fewest resources for dealing with this. Those that have the resources are often a long way removed intellectually and world view from those that have the need. That may make what happened in the book all the more remarkable, someone moved out of their comfort zone and at risk to their family and themselves and became intimately involved in that person's life. Churches are often hindered by a classroom/lecture style of discipleship (the sermon and class) that is ineffective with people who have never been taught that style of learning (Saskatoon has around 1500 truant school kids according to several reports and when they grow up, I would imagine they would be very similar to Michael Oher and very hard to teach).

I don't know in the end what to make that part of the book. It is an issue I wrestle with and wonder what I need to be doing to make a bigger difference in more lives. I see an awful lot of pain and suffering and my prayer every morning is that I make some positive difference in the lives I cross at the shelter and at home.

Technorati tags: The Blind Side, Michael Oher, Big Mike, Ole Miss, Briarcrest Christian School

The War Room by Warren Kinsella

Warren Kinsella's latest book is now out.  I was going to head to McNally Robinson tonight and purchase it but after checking out the price on Amazon.ca, I decided to order it online.  I hope to get a review online within a week of getting the book but I am looking forward to it.

As Amazon says

Warren Kinsella's The War Room profiles and analyzes some of the best political warriors and spinners around. He employs personal anecdotes, political wisdom culled from his extensive experience on Liberal Party federal and provincial election campaigns, historical examples from other Canadian and American campaigns, and generous amounts of humour to deliver a book about what it takes to survive challenges not just in politics but in any kind of business or non-governmental agency, whether it sells music, movies, cars, or computers, or raises money to preserve the environment, combat cancer, or save animals.

Since I have used Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics and Fury's Hour in quite a few talks over the years, this should be good.

Technorati tags: The War Room, Warren Kinsella, politics

Coffee For People Who Want To Think Returns October 7th

For those of you who are in Saskatoon and are looking for some theological discussion and dialogue, Coffee for People Who Want to Think is returning on October 7. We are discussing Kester Brewin's excellent book, Signs of Emergence which you can pick up from Amazon.com, Scott's Parable or McNally Robinson. More information over at Church of the Exiles.

Theology Pub

We are looking for a new location for our Coffee for People Who Like To Think discussion group and would prefer a quiet lounge or pub. Any suggestions in Saskatoon, let me know.

Madeline L'Engle Dies

From the CBC

Born in New York on Nov. 29, 1918, she was educated at Smith College and published her first short stories while still in college.

She lived in Greenwich Village in 1941 and there met her husband, actor Hugh Franklin.

Her first book, The Small Rain, was published in 1945, followed by Ilsa in 1946.

She and Franklin moved to an old farmhouse in Connecticut and operated a general store while L'Engle wrote. The couple had three children.

She published two more novels but didn't achieve success until 1963, when she and Franklin moved back to New York and he landed a plum role on a soap opera.

That same year, A Wrinkle in Time was published to critical acclaim and lasting commercial success.

L'Engle won the Newbery Honour for A Ring of Endless Light in 1981.

One of her books for adults, Two-Part Invention, was a memoir of her marriage, completed after her husband's death from cancer in 1986.

Deeply involved in community and church, she also served as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York.

Her Genesis trilogy, including 1983's And It Was Good, 1986's A Stone for a Pillow and 1989's Sold Into Egypt are based on biblical characters.

Founders at Work

The book Founders at Work arrived in the mail yesterday and I dived right into it. The book is a series of interviews of founders like Blogger, SixApart, Adobe, Apple (Woz!), Hotmail, and a bunch of other startups that changed the way we live and interact. The underlying narative is: entrepreneurship is all about tactics, guts, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. In other words there are a lot of lessons for church planters in this book as well.

Some thoughts from the book.

1. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”

2. Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”

3. Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”

4. Paul Graham (Viaweb): On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

5. Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”

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).

Related Links:

• Language of Belonging: Joe Myers personal site and weblog
• Purchase at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca
• Download a sample chapter from Baker

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....

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.

Related Links

• Signs of Emergence: Buy from Amazon.com Amazon.ca :: Ships July 1, 2007
• Official website and weblog: kester.typepad.com/signs/. Some of the prayers and liturgies in the book can be found in an earlier form (pre-evolutionary?) at http://www.vaux.net/.
• Steve Collin's visualization of an urban church
• Len Hjarlmason writes on the urbanization of faith here which points to an article written on the topic back in 1973.

Technorati tags: Signs of Emergence, Kester Brewin, urban, church, Christianity, emerging church

2007 Summer Reading List

I have been reading Rebecca Blood's excellent collection of Summer Reading Lists and after putting in a big order to Amazon.ca, I decided to create my own. In no particular order...

• No Future Without Forgiveness by Archbishop Desmond Tutu :: I picked this up this spring and read it again and I forgot what an amazing book this is and a story of living out one's faith in the most troubling of situations.
• Soul Graffiti by Mark Scandrette :: One of the best books I have read this year and it wrestles with the question of how to actually live out the teaching of Jesus in a post-Christian world.
• The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne :: A book of theology and stories of how those that make up the Simple Way have lived among the poor of Philadelphia.
• Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect by Joe Myers: Community is a fundamental life search and one of the key aspects people look for in a congregation. But community can’t be forced, controlled, or easily created. The problem is that churches are too focused on developing programs instead of concentrating on environments where community will spontaneously emerge.
• An Emergent Manifesto of Hope edited by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt :: I thought the book had some excellent chapters as well as some weaker ones (all multi-authored books suffer from this) but as a whole, it was worth reading, even for us non-Americans who get a glimpse of how the American emerging church sees itself.
• The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon :: The book is about how society will deal with increasing costs to get oil out of ground and the challenges and opportunities that will bring but it could as well be read in light of any context going through any great change. (My review can be found here)
• The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson :: A way of sacrifice. A way of failure. A way on the margins. A way of holiness. All of these ways prepared the "way of the Lord" that became incarnate and complete in Jesus. But somewhere along the line, Peterson reminds us that we have lost the "way".
• Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson :: There has been a lot of books out there criticizing contemporary media for much of societies ills but Johnson makes the contrarian argument quite convincing. Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex. Furthermore, he says, consumers are drawn specifically to those products that require the most mental engagement.
• How (Not) to Speak of God by Pete Rollins :: Not the easiest book to read but a powerful theological and philosophical treatise on the emerging church.
• Signs of Emergence by Kester Brewin :: It used to be called The Complex Christ but a new continent and publisher have given it a new identity as Signs of Emergence. One of the best books on the emerging church and now new to North America. You can read my review of the book here.

Suggestions or feedback? Leave them in the comments below.

Technorati tags: Summer Reading List, reading, books, theology, church, Christianity

The Simple Way

Shane Claiborne writes this in his book, The Irresistible Revolution. (good book BTW, worth reading)

Not too long ago, those of us at the Simple Way were about to speak to a congregation. The person doing the introduction said, "These folks are a voice for the voiceless." And something inside me hurt. I gently corrected them. Everyone has a voice. I know many amazing people who have used the old "voice for the voiceless" line (Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, even the book of Proverbs). But it just felt strange. Perhaps we are too quick to assume folks cannot speak for themselves.

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their neighbors. Lots of folks have put there hands over their ears to drown out the suffering. Institutions have distanced themselves from the disturbing cries. When Paul writes in Romans 8 that the entire creation is groaning for its liberation, he goes on to say that "we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly (v. 23). This is the chorus of the generations of seemingly voiceless people we have joined.

And God has a special ear for their groaning regardless of who is listening.

It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream, and struggle. one of the verses I have grown to love is the one where Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples and says, "I no longer call you servants....Instead I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Servanthood is a fine place to begin, but gradually we love toward mutual love, genuine relationships. Someday, perhaps we can even say those words that Ruth said to Naomi after years of partnership: "where you go I will go and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17)

And that's when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friend with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara, "When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist." Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them. Pg 127 - 129

He later writes this...

Almost every time we talk with affluent folks about God's will to end poverty, someone says, "But didn't Jesus say, 'The poor will always be with you'?" Many of the people who whip out this verse have grown quite insulated and distant from the poor and feel defensive. I usually ask, "Where are the poor? Are the poor among us?" The answer is a clear negatory. As we study the Scriptures, we see how many texts we have misread, contextualized, and exegeted to hear what we want to. Like this one about the poor being among us, which Jesus says in the home of a leper and after a poor marginalized women anoints his feet with perfume. The poor were all around him. Far from saying in defeat that we should not worry about the poor, since they will always be among us. Jesus is point the church to her true identity -- she is to live close to those who suffer. The poor will always be among us, because the empire will always produce poor people, and they will find home in the church, a citzenship in the kingdom of God, where the "hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty."

I heard that Gandhi , when people asked him if he was a Christian, would often reply, "Ask the poor. They will tell who the Christians are." Pg 159-161

I have been reflecting on what he wrote lately in the context of what do I want to do with the rest of my life. A couple of weeks ago I had to weigh a career offer that would have provided a tremendous amont of security to me and my family. It would have required moving and the end of my involvement at the Church of the Exiles. As I thought through my options, I realized that the last year of working and living amongst the poor has really changed me. Security and money may be worth something but as Clairborne writes, it also comes with a cost to living in conflict with a large part of Scriptures which I never hear as part of the discussion in most local churches.

Technorati tags: Shane Claiborne, The Simple Way, The Irresistible Revolution, poverty