Reality and Memory

The truest statement I have read all day.
"Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened."
-Chuck Klosterman

Worship is Empty?

The last show of the two-year-43-country-tour of rockers from another era came to a close in Vancouver’s BC Place only weeks before the roof blew off. The Rolling Stones played an amazing show complete with songs from their newest album along with re-makes of all of the old classics. The show, while absolutely amazing and heightened by a weird and colorful acid trip, raised some pretty serious questions about God and church worship music. Like, for example, why is it that worship music seems to be so similar to every other kind of music but its words are so empty? Or, why is it that when we find ourselves at a show the expectation is that we are moved with our emotions to some sort of response while at church we are told to be wary of emotive response to music?

That is, at least, what my tripped out friend on acid asked me the other day.

French Love Songs

Last night I found myself sitting in an old English pub in downtown Abbotsford waiting for a friend of mine who is helping me with a writing project that I am working on. I showed myself in and found a table near the back of the pub where I sat down, pulled out my skinny Mexican pen, my journal, and a book I am reading. I was alone.

Completely.

In fact, it was an eerie alone feeling that you get when you are all by yourself but instinctively know that someone or something is watching you. My instincts, though not surprising in any way, were completely bang on. A skinny bohemian looking guy walks onto the small stage in front of the smaller dance floor and turns on a karaoke machine to which he begins to wiggle his hips, tap his toes, sing, and play lead guitar solo’s to 80’s pop music. All of this wasn’t weird at all except for one small thing which I think is important for you the reader to know, bohemian-karaoke-lead-guitar guy was singing love songs. And for the record, it’s pretty hard to concentrate on anything at all when a skinny bohemian is singing love songs to you.

Thankfully, later on in the evening my world began to make sense again…I found out that he was French and it explained everything.

Long Live Church Programs

A quick post just to remind people that I do still exist in the blog world. Something cool hip and trendy that has found its way into the DNA of the cool hip and trendy pastors starting cool hip and trendy churches that look like cool hip and trendy cults is the mantra that says, "People don't connect with programs." Programs are not organic church, emerging church, authentic church, relevant church, relational church, church 2.0, or whatever the heck church....programs are to be distrusted, scrutinized, and reek of institutionalization.......or so the cool hip trendy non-conformists would tell you.

But...Is a program anything more or anything less then intentional relationships? Programs are intentional relationship - are they not? Anyhow, end rant.

Leadership, Submission, Church Authority

Part of the sermonizing process in our young adult community involves many people in helping shape the teaching time. This week's discussion has been based around church leadership, submission, and authority. Many who read this blog are pastors and church leaders...your thoughts would be appreciated on this topic.
Merry Thursday.
-Jer

Oh, one other thing...check this out: People are finding Jesus on myspace. There's got to be a sermon illustration in here somewhere....!

Collectively Dubm...I mena dumb,

One of my favorite things about this emerging cultures appetite for ‘power given to the masses’ is that it allows for the masses to control popular thought and opinion. Wikipedia is a great example of the collaborative muscle of our culture working together to create something that is far greater then itself. We love the idea of having control and access to information that has traditionally been behind closed doors, in files marked ‘confidential’, and held by higher ups who can wield and manipulate it to suit their needs and wants. It’s a great idea. The cheese-eating-cigarette-smoking and topless French peasants thought it was a great idea too…that is until they had control and decided that they, like their predecessors, did not want to share. Not too terribly surprising.

At present, our intellectual elite are progressively becoming only side notes in history as psychologically and intellectually we are becoming more and more Marxist-like in our thirst for information. Anyone with a computer and a wifi connection has access to the same information jamming us all into an information and technological middle class. But really, who cares.

Anyhow, my point is this: ‘nobody is smarter then everybody’ is a bit of an ideal way to live and teach. We are deceived by this cute little collection of words because it plays to the thing that we very much want – anti-authority, or, more precisely, our own authority. That said, there are some great times where using this statement and viewpoint in life is very helpful; i.e. in the realm of ideaing, brainstorming problems, collaborative learning, and creativity the more perspectives applied to said problem the better. However, the ‘nobody is smarter then everyone’ cliché breaks down the moment it comes to applying specific skills to specific tasks.

Do we let everyone with a seat on WestJet flight 178 from Abbotsford to Saskatoon to visit the in-laws give advice, suggest flight patterns, and take a crack at flying the jet…or, do we leave it in the hands of the pilots who, after many many hours of skill and knowledge development, fly the jet? We trust the pilot.

Do we let everyone with a seat in a church take a crack at teaching and preaching…or…do we trust the teacher who has spent many hours in study, prayer, and preparation? We very much want to trust a pilot; why not a teacher?

Collectively we can come up with some amazing ideas; collaborations and innovations that come only as a result of people getting together co-creating and co-developing something magnificent. However, collectively we can also become dumb and ignorant in our quest for anti-authority.

Death

Sorry for the lack of posting lately; I've been doing piles of research work lately logging major hours in study filling up coil ring notebooks and piecing together some thoughts on the early church. That, and I've been sick, we've started a new blog, and their has been 100% growth at our young adults in the last three weeks. Anyhow, that is my excuse for not writing here.

My excuse for writing here is a coincidence. In the last couple of months I have had two different books given to me by two unrelated and non-connected people who told me that I really need to read the particular book they were giving me. So, without knowing the content or themes of each of these books, I cracked them open and read them.

The first book was about death.

The second book was...wait for it...about death.

I've never really experienced death before too closely; my grandpa died when I was six years old and I had some friends die when I was in high school. Reading these books I began to realize that I have no feelings that I can remember that are directly related to death...and I suppose this is good. I don't want to experience death in any close proximity but at the same time I guess I need to realize that there is no life without death. And that's scary. It's scary to think of what life would be like without someone you love, its scary to think of how I might respond, its scary to consider how they might respond if it were me. I don't think that death, when it comes, will in itself be scary - I more afraid of pain and spiders, but what about the people around me? I hope these two books were only a coincidence.

New Entry in the BlogRace

New clcc young adults blog that you can feel free to add to your bloglines and check regularly. It is also a space for sermonizing which, if you don't know, is part of our collaborative sermon building process. Would love to have your thoughts and ideas as we teach about Jesus.
Grace and Peace,
-Jer

Home?

Jesse posts a great post here. If you are somehow involved with ministry to young adults or transient type of people it is definitely worth the read and time given to thinking through its implications for your ministry context. Great stuff Jesse!
-Jer

The Death of Sermons?

Communication, as we in the church know it, is under attack.

As a communicator I am constantly trying to learn how to become more effective in preparation, truth telling, story telling, persuasion, stimulating thought, conversation, and delivering compelling anti-conclusions. I genuinely enjoy studying and looking for seemingly unrelated bits and pieces of truth to link together to shape worldviews, beliefs, and lifestyles and I love the challenge of trying to find the language that speaks most relevantly to the people I am communicating to.

One of the aspects of church liturgy that the emergent church has called into question is how we, as communicators, most effectively communicate this life altering story of Jesus Christ to the emerging generation. On one extreme, there has been an almost violent reaction against the didactic “pastor as authority” teaching that has been so prevalent in churches for centuries in favor of conversation, dialogue, and narrative/experiential learning. On the other extreme, we find young pastors deciding against the 20 minute seeker-friendly sermons in favor of much longer and indepth teaching that moves the listener from theology to doxology to biography.

My personal response to this has been to take a little bit of the good from each of these to create a method of three part preaching that I don’t actually do very well. The upside is that I have the space and time to be constantly experimenting with how it actually could work. I have begun writing my definitions and ideas for these three parts but, before I post it here, I’d love to read your thoughts on this. Following are three numbers, six pieces of punctuation, and six words that make up the calcium malnourished skeleton of this teaching idea.

1) The Prologue.

2) The Dialogue.

3) The Epilogue.

If I had to get an idea across and these three are the variables of how I accomplish this; how should I do this?

-Jer