Happy My Best Friend Times, Blue Sky Together

May 8, 2007 //

Though it remains a bit of a mystery to me, I really enjoy kitschy things. Not so much the little state spoons one might find at an interstate rest stop or corny snow globes… my tastes tend to run toward silly things a person might find in a Morning Glory stationery store. Just point me toward a Mitsuwa and I’m good to go.

After all, where else can you find awesome, and delicious, candy products like these?

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something very pleasing to me about busted English translations on these kinds of products. It’s not about irony or condescension. I think it has more to do with subverting our understanding of language and the difficulty of communication (perhaps a bit like David Sedaris’ experience trying to speak French in Me Talk Pretty One Day). And, anyways, how can you not smile at this cheerful lion?

Check out this translation from Babelfish (which is actually quite useful for translating individual words or short phrases) of an article featuring Kye Chung and kamr.org:

How many the click frequency which the many people should have used it will lead and the site of the tolerable formation emigration church far even from the company ‘ the statistical ‘ egg which charges the Internet use ranking leyk it will surpass as between the English volume Korean interest boat song it is high.

[h/t to Kye]

I can just picture someone reading this out loud and making bunny ear quotes to let the audience know that it’s just a symbolic statistical egg, not a real one.

Categories just grinning

The Difficult Task of Building Community

May 4, 2007 //

Have you seen this ad? It is one of the popular series of Apple commercials touting the advantages of Macs over PCs. You can even find some church-related parodies of this ad, which are sure to spark some kind of discussion (I’ll save my thoughts on this for another time). In any case, when we purchased the laptops we use for church a couple of months ago, they came preloaded with tons of nonsensical trial software. If the goal of these companies was to harass customers and obstruct productivity, then job well done!

Fortunately, a church member recently offered to give our computers a nice little tune-up last week. In addition to receiving a much smoother-running computer, I experienced another corollary benefit: being without a computer left me with time to catch up on some reading.

I was able to finish Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth and most of This Beautiful Mess by Rick McKinley. For now, I wanted to share my thoughts about The Search to Belong, by Joseph Myers.

This book came to me recommended by Marko and, after finishing it, I can see why. As the subtitle of this book suggests, Myers wants us to reconsider some of our preconceived notions about intimacy, community and small groups. I have struggled with the way we often approach small group ministry — both as a member of such groups and, later, as a pastor trying to build community. As a member, I have often felt guilty for not sharing enough with the group; that, somehow, I let down the other group members by not spilling my guts every time. As a leader, I have felt disappointed in the failure of our small group ministries to yield success (deep connection! church growth! powerful community!).

Myers offers a welcome alternative to understanding what it means to belong. He expands our understanding of belonging by connecting Edward Hall’s idea of proxemics — “the study of how physical space influences culture and communications” — to building community in our churches. Hall identifies four different spaces in which people interact: public, social, personal and intimate. Myers argues that instead of trying to push people along the intimacy spectrum, churches must recognize that all four spaces are valid, important and necessary for building genuine community. As he writes:

We tend to think of intimacy as the “Mecca” of relationship. But would all relationships be better if they were intimate? Think of all the relationships in your life, from bank teller to sister to coworker to spouse. Could we adequately sustain all these relationships if they were intimate?

All belonging is significant. Healthy community — the goal humankind has sought since the beginning — is achieved when we hold harmonious connections within all four spaces.

It might sound like heresy in the contemporary church to argue that small groups are not the only way to build community, but Myers builds a compelling case for this idea. He writes about one pastor who led a church with a respected and successful small group ministry who confessed, “My small groups don’t really work. They never have. To be honest, I don’t think they’re for everyone. In fact, I have never attended a small group nor wanted to attend one.” It’s hard for me to describe the relief I felt after reading that quote — I’m not alone!

But this work is not an attack on small group ministry. Rather, it is a calling for churches to create environments where people can connect in many different ways. Myers posits, “If we would concentrate upon facilitating the environment instead of the result (people experiencing community), we might see healthy, spontaneous community emerge.”

Towards the end of the book, in the chapter called “Searching for a Front Porch,” Myers argues that churches should create “median spaces” that act as a symbolic front porch for people. He quotes Scott Cook, who says the front porch is “the zone between the public and private, an area that could be shared between the sanctity of the home and the community outside.” Now, I must admit that I am leery of writers who wax nostalgic about The Andy Griffith Show, as that has never been a meaningful cultural touchstone for me and often signifies a desire for a homogeneous white society. However, this is an important discussion — the disappearance of front porches from the architecture of most newly constructed neighborhoods mirrors the increasing privatization and individualization of American culture. In the current climate, churches can act as a “third place” (a location that is neither work nor home that provides community).

Myers devotes his final chapter to a dialogue (ah, postmodernism) between himself and a church leader who wants to put these principles into practice. I often find myself wanting to skip ahead to the take-away or transferable but, for me, the more useful part of this book dealt with the conceptual framework of understanding community. One potential concern: People often have a tendency to self-select into groups where everyone looks the same — without thoughtful and skillful leadership, emphasizing spontaneous relationships could end up feeding our highly individualized preferences rather than building loving, sacrificial communities.

This is a worthwhile book, perhaps even for the first chapter (“The Myths of Belonging”) alone. The Search to Belong provides eye-opening and thought-provoking insights into the difficult task of building community.

Categories books, church, community, reviews

Off the Beaten Path

April 26, 2007 //

A note of disclosure: As viral marketing is all the rage these days, publishers will often send out free copies of books to bloggers in exchange for a review on their site. One such title that I recently completed is Off-Road Disciplines by Earl Creps.

Earl Creps, by his own description, is a 53-year old man who takes Lipitor. Not exactly what a person might expect from someone who writes extensively about the emerging church. Now, just hearing any variation of the phrase “emerging” might send some readers into either a fierce attack mode or equally fierce defensive mode. Throughout the book, Creps speaks with a very humble voice that, hopefully, can serve to bridge the ever-widening expanse between these two camps.

Though much of the book seems to be written with the intent of helping baby boomers understand upcoming generations, I found that much of Creps’ writing actually gave me (an Xer serving Millennials) insight into the boomer perspective. His purpose in writing this book is to develop missional leaders. As he writes in the introduction,

Missional leaders see the world through the eyes of Jesus and see Jesus in the world. They assume the role of helping the body of Christ understand itself and make of it much more than a missionary sending agency, as if the “mission field” existed only somewhere else to be reached by someone else. Rather, these leaders cannot conceive of the Church apart from living the mission of God to touch the world with redeeming love in Christ… For missional leaders, then, mission does not refer to a framed paragraph hanging on the wall in the lobby… it refers instead to the Church’s very reason for being. To remove it or replace does not just make the Church less effective; it changes the Church into something else…

Creps structures his book into two parts. The first deals with the personal spiritual disciplines a missional leader should develop; the second with organizational disciplines in which such churches must engage. Creps is extremely well-versed in the language of leadership — from both within the church and outside of it. I must admit that I found myself lost, at times, in some of the vocabulary he borrows from the business world. He shares relevant personal anecdotes throughout the book to highlight major points.

When writing about the discipline of spiritual friendship with those who do not follow Christ, Creps creates a new vocabulary for the Church. Instead of referring to such people as souls with ears (yuck), pagans, sinners, or even seekers or pre-Christians, Creps encourages us to think of these people as the sought. This, he writes, “puts the emphasis on God’s mission in Christ on a wayward planet. A missional person, then, cultivates “Seeker-sensitivity” by staying attuned and cooperative with God’s efforts to reach the sought by expressing the power of Christ’s death and resurrection through the Church in its many forms.”

In some ways, this reminds me of efforts by Louie Giglio, Matt Redman and Chris Tomlin to replace our language of “worship leader” with “lead worshiper.” More than just clever wordplay (like the Sphinx in Mystery Men, who loved to reverse phrases), these re-workings of familiar phrases force us to reconsider our perspective on significant issues about which we probably would not give a second thought.

Toward the end of the book, I found Creps’ discussion about Timothy as a “third culture” leader to be very insightful. Third culture people, according to Creps, “bond both to their homeland and to their adopted nation, creating a virtual citizenship that does not exactly represent either.” This exegetical work on the relationship between Paul and Timothy has an important impact on both emerging and Asian American church leaders, who routinely find themselves walking a fine line between two vastly different cultures.

Categories books, emerging church, reviews

Are We There Yet?

April 24, 2007 //

In a furious attempt to lure buyers into the showroom, along with the usual bells & whistles (“Zero percent APR! Bonus cash back allowance! And then we’re going to Washington DC to take back the White House! Byaaaah!“) one of the Big Three American auto manufacturers recently introduced an added twist — if consumers would please just purchase one of their minivans, they will provide a drop-down DVD player free of charge.

This particular incentive package has a series of television ads, each with a similar theme. The scene opens with a group of unruly tweens, rough-housing and MySpacing it up with no regard for the adult authorities in their presence. That is, until the adult figure drops down the screen of a DVD player. Then, silence — blessed silence. The underlying message is clear and, just in case you missed it, the disembodied voiceover asks the rhetorical question all beleaguered adults were asking themselves as they watched the ad: Wouldn’t it be great if you had a DVD player everywhere you went?

The next, unspoken, message is just as clear — that way, you can get those kids to shut up already.

In fact, one of the ads features another disturbing voiceover: When they get what they want, you get what you want. In other words, children want/need the pervasive presence of entertainment to invade every moment of their lives. In exchange for numbing their minds into silence, we — the adults — get what we want: for those kids to stop being such an inconvenience, what with their talking and all.

Our family has used a portable DVD player during a couple of extended road trips — during the course of a five or six hour ride, we thought it would be a fun treat for our daughter to watch a couple of her favorite shows. But there is something troubling about the family who cannot endure even a ten minute ride to soccer practice without the anesthetic of DVDs. And, coming soon to an SUV near you, satellite TV…

I often deal with frustrated, heart-broken parents who have thrown up their hands in despair because of their distant, disconnected teenagers. Certainly, there are always unique and specific circumstances surrounding each family’s relational dynamics but, more often than not, the relationship patterns teenagers develop with their families are formed well before they reach their teen years. We can unknowingly form all kinds of unintended messages in our children’s minds: You must constantly be entertained. Silence is bad. Car rides are for SpongeBob, not conversations. We can only put up with each other if we’re not really engaged with each other.

I know I’m probably reading into this way too much, but having been a marketing major in college, I have some idea of the time, effort and money that companies pour into these ads. Whether the people who created these ads thought they were simply reflecting the attitudes of adults/parents out there (“We’re just giving them what they want”) or whether they’re trying to actively shape our opinions (“Let’s create a felt need in this consumer segment”), the underlying message is extremely sad.

Categories family, health

Singing the (Reconciliation) Blues

April 18, 2007 //

Reconciliation Blues by Edward Gilbreath achieves something more powerful than mere “balance” in addressing issues of race and reconciliation within the American evangelical church. [ht to DJ for highlighting this book on his blog] Gilbreath confronts the reality of racism in the American church (whether those in the majority culture choose to acknowledge it or not) with dignity and strength, while also offers a compelling vision for reconciliation — a rare feat in this polarized age of sound bites and pundits.

Gilbreath is interested in much more than simply “playing the race card” or doing a Geraldo-style undercover expose of how African American people get hassled at the mall (although this is still a shameful reality in our nation). In the prologue, Gilbreath introduces macro ideas about racism, “For many people, ‘institutional racism’ is now the term invoked to describe the unnamable brand of discrimination we experience today… sociologist James Jones provided the most concise definition in his book Prejudice and Racism when he described it as ‘those established laws, customs, and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequities in American society.'”

Perhaps taking a cue from chic-onomics tomes such as Freakonomics and The World is Flat, Gilbreath peppers his big-picture take on race, faith and reconciliation with a variety of powerful anecdotes throughout the book. I had to read this particular passage several times — I was at once outraged and stunned that such a thing actually happened in our nation’s recent past:

As Dolphus (Weary, national speaker and executive director of Mission Mississippi) left the library on April 4, 1968, a white student approached him and said, “Did you hear? Martin Luther King got shot.”

“I remember running to my room, flipping on the radio and listening to the news report,” he recalls. A rifle bullet had ripped into King’s neck as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was rushed to a hospital in serious condition. “I was devastated,” Dolphus says.

As he sat on his bed holding back the tears, he could hear the voices down the hall: white students talking about King’s shooting. but Dolphus quickly realized that they were not just talking; they were laughing.

“I couldn’t understand what I was hearing,” he says. “These Christian kids were glad that Dr. King — my hero — had been shot. I wanted to run out there and confront them.” Instead, he steeled his nerves and lay prostrate on his bed. Finally, as the newscaster delivered the awful update — “Martin Luther King has died in a Memphis hospital” — Dolphus could hear the white voices down the hall let out a cheer.”

I can barely type out these words without feeling my heart both ache and begin to boil over. But this is where the power of this book becomes clear. If we are to move forward into genuine reconciliation, then we must honestly address the ugliness of both personal prejudice and systemic racism. Otherwise, we achieve little more than photo-ops and temporary guilt relief.

As an insider for many years in “white” evangelical Christian circles, Gilbreath has a unique ability to shed light on something many white Christians may have never considered. Though they might not be perpetrators of hate crimes, many of these well-meaning people do not realize that the white, male, Western perspective on Christianity is not normative for all believers. In fact, that very worldview has often been the reason the church has shamefully lagged behind the world in terms of race. About his life within the white evangelical world, Gilbreath writes:

But it has also meant living within a religious movement that takes for granted its cultural superiority. It has meant disregarding the occasional stray epithet or ingoring shortsighted comments that beg for a retort. You’ve heard them, perhaps said them: “I don’t even think of you as black,” or “Why do black people need to have their own beauty pageants and magazines and colleges? If whites did that, we’d be called racists.”

If, by chance, you found yourself saying “Yeah, why do they need all that stuff?” I highly recommend that you read this book, along with Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum.

Gilbreath acknowledges the difficulty of moving toward reconciliation, sharing personal stories with candor. And yet his voice remains hopeful throughout the book — not a false cheer that turns a blind eye to racism and prejudice, but one that confronts its paralyzing effects with the Gospel of Christ for all nations. He shares examples of real church communities who are working through these issues together, including both successes and failures. I am particularly thankful for Chapter Ten, “The ‘Other’ Others,” in which Gilbreath thoughtfully addresses issues that other racial/ethnic cultures face in the American church — including Native American, Latino and Asian Christians. Even without this chapter, I would have heartily endorsed this book — its inclusion only deepens my respect for the author.

I hope this important book makes it into the hands (and hearts and minds) of many readers, especially those who might not ordinarily be inclined to take on issues of race and reconciliation.

Categories books, church, hope, race, reconciliation