Apomo

I just got an email from the exec pastor at my church. he’d asked me last week to help him w/some info about emergent gens so he could make a presentation to the staff this weekend at a planning retreat. turns out they want to start a another service aimed at pomos with the goal of this eventually splitting into a new church and moving off campus. wow! he said this is supposed to be kept to private on a need to know basis. my first thought is why am i one of the need to know people? hmmmm….? i hope i’m not reading too much into this because i’m kinda excited about the prospect…even if it’s an imaginary one.

that’d really be the best way to do it. have people, resources, support, and all that from the get go.

Man, what a crazy last couple of weeks. I’ve been overwhelmed.

School is slamming me with work. The class I take every Mon night requires about 2 hours of homework a day. Plus I have two other classes on top of that. The Dan Kimball class is in two weeks and I have 6 reports due when I arrive. I have three of them done and halfway thru the fourth and have one of the books for the other three almost read. I’ll get it done. I have to.

I preached at that church yesterday. It went well. I met w/the elder board for lunch and that went well too. They say they want to go emergent and point to John Burke’s church in Austin, TX as what they like. Although I give myself a C- as far as my talk went the people really acted like they liked it. Especially the younger people, 18-25 yrs olds. A bunch of that group came up and were like “Dude, that was really good!”. So i guess I connected w/younger people. Cool. That’s gratifying. The older folks responded positively as well. One guy came up to me and said, “Hey there fella. After a message like that you better plan on re-locating!” I just laughed nervously. How do you respond to that?

I have mixed feelings about pastoring this church. It has alot of potential but I’m not sure exactly what they have in mind for the future. Plus, they had a bad experience w/the last pastor and I think they’re a little wary of giving things over to another guy so soon, especially after doing so well w/out a pastor. I understand that reticence. But if I’m going to lead I gotta lead. I’m not gonna spend 5 years convincing people I have good ideas and can be trusted.

They said they want me to come back and preach again. So we’ll see how it all works out.

I’m going to Mens’ Retreat w/my current church. Maybe the pastor will talk to me then about any possiblities here. My wife would prefer keeping it local. I would too. I sent pastor an email this morning since he made sure to tell me he wanted to know how things went this weekend. today’s his day off so i’ll prob hear from him later in the week.

the church planting coordinator from the EV Free called me on Fri night and we talked for an hour or so. they’re very much wanting to plant emergent type churches and will give money, training, people, and support to help them get started. he said w/my background and vision it sounded like i was a good match. he said to get back w/him in the next few days after my visit to this other church.

sigh….everything is so overwhelming. it’s hard to believe that a year ago i had no plans to pastor and was planning to start and insurance agency. that seems like a lifetime ago.

The Executive Pastor of our church invited me out to lunch again. Ostensibly it was to “strategize” for our small group. However, we only talked about that for two minutes, literally, two minutes. The rest of the hour and a half we talked about ministry, theology, and he wanted to know all about my hopes for ministry.

During the converstation I felt strongly impressed to communicate two things. One, that I’m open to just about any sort of ministry opportunity if it helps me realize my dream of ministering to emerging culture. I made sure that he understood that I’m open minded, looking, and not sure exactly what God wants for me as it relates to ministry.

Secondly, I kept feeling the urge to ask him about the church starting a second service. A few days ago it occured to me that maybe my place would be to work at this church by starting a second service aimed at pomo people. The pastor has said several times in public and private that they’re not doing a good job of this and they need to since he feels they’re one generation away from extinction as a local church. A few days ago it occured to me that perhaps my place here is to start this second service and do all the things that are in my heart. Maybe. I didn’t actually plan on mentioning this, partly because I wasn’t convinced they could do this a church since it requires so much new kind of thinking and new forms of worship. I figured they’d freak out about it.

But, as we talked I kept feeling the urge to ask about a second service. Finally I just outright changed the subject and blurted out, “Have you guys given any thought to starting second service?” He said “Yes, we have. We feel that we need to do something to reach the younger generations. Something very different, some totally out of our current range of ministry and worship.” Then he spent about 20 minutes telling me everything I already know about how perhaps we should reach these people. I was pretty surprised. He said they’re having staff planning meeting in two weeks (the same weekend I’m preaching at the other church) and they’re going to talk about this.

He feels they can get the buy-in of the older people who will have to finance it’s birth. He says the previous pastor of the church built in a culture of change and culture of innovation into the DNA of the older church and they’ve never rebelled about anything they’ve done in the past no matter how outrageous or out of the box. Wow, that surprised me.

I told him that that I felt called to minister to the emerging generations and that I’d be very interested in being a part of this process if it goes forward. Maybe this is what I’m here for. Who knows. We’ll see. It seems odd to me that I’d feel such an urge to ask about a second service if the Lord wasn’t up to something. Hmmm….time will tell.

If you’re an American worker or you have kids that are in school, the younger the better, then I think you MUST read “The World is Flat” by 3-time Pulitzer Prize winnin journalist Thomas Friedman. I picked it up at Costco last week and I’m already through 400 of 600 pages. It’s fascinating and incredibly disturbing reading for Americans in regards to our place in the global economy. It’s more than a kick in the butt…it’s a kick in the nards.

A big part of his thesis is that the leaders of the world in the future will be the innovators in the areas of technology and science. Keeping in mind that this just a part of the problem read the following stats.

Just some same stats from chap 8, “The Quiet Crisis”. Of the 18,000+ employees of NASA more than 40% are 50+ yrs old. NASA’s 60+ yr old employees outnumber the those under 30 by a margin of 3:1. Only 4% of NASA workers are under 30. Friedman uses NASA as one example of many to illustrate the huge gap we are in our system in regards to mathmeticians and scientists needed for R&D.

The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century estimates that 2/3 of US mathematics and science teachers will retire by 2010.

The number of Americans 18-24 yrs who are getting science degrees has fallen to 17th in the world. In the 70’s we were 3rd. Of the 2.8 million bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million went to Asians in Asian universities, 830,000 in Europe, and 400,00 in the US (how many of these are foreign students that go back to their countries to work?). Asia produces 8x as many bachelor degrees than the US.

In China 60% of all bachelor’s degrees are science and engineering, 33% in South Korea, 41% in Taiwan, and 31% in the US.

The number of science and engineering Ph.D’s awarded in the US went from 29,000 to 27,000 in one year, 1998-1999. The total number of engineering undergrads in the US dropped 12% between the mid-80’s and 1998. On the other hand, during the same period the numbers are going in proportionate numbers (and higher) the opposite direction for foreign students in S&E.

44% of 8th graders in Singapore tested at the most advanced level in math, 38% in Taiwan, 7% in the US. The international average for % of number of students taught math by a teacher with a math degree is 71%. In the US it’s only 41%.

Johns Hopkins University says that 60% of their grad studens in the sciences are foreign students, mostly Asian. A couple of years ago ALL of the math and science grads from Johns Hopkins were from China.

Consider this quote from Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, and “American” company. “We hire talent wherever it resides… He said Intel can thrive as a company “even if we never hire another American…we can hire the best talent around the world and be very successful.”

Here’s a quote from the book, “That is Shirley Ann Jackson’s perfect storm, we don’t let the talent in from abroad as much as we used to, the growing opportunities for our best companies shift more and more to foreign markets, and we don’t do a better job of educating our own kids to fill the gaps. If that perfect storm comes to pass, American companies, like Intel, will just lift off American soil like rocket ships. They will hover over American. We will think of them s American companies, because they will be listed on the NYSE and have post office boxes here, but they really will be flat-world companies. Where innovation happens really does matter, because that is where the best jobs are going to be located, and those best jobs are spinning off more good and decent jobs in every community. It matters that Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, WA. It matters that Google is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. And one day it will matter when they aren’t.

‘Standard of living is related to the average value add of your workforce,’ said Barrett, “and that is related to average educationl level of your workforce. If you downgrade the average educational level of your workforce, relative to your competition, your standard of living will decline”.

Commodity jobs and skills are being outsourced and offsourced to India, China, Russia, and Malaysia. That leaves the US with only one thing to compete with in the globalized economy, our brains and creativity. Obviously we’re losing that battle and Friedman predicts that by 2020, when my oldest graduates from college, that the US could very well be in an intellectual recession and the balance of technological power and dominance will shift to the East.

The book is chock full of information like the above. It’s a compelling primer on the global economy both at the macro and the micro level and it’s a great primer on the laws of capitalism and applied economics. Like I said, every American worker and every American parent with kids in school should read this book.

For me, the relevance of all this information and prediction isn’t that I think a reduction in the wealth of America is that bad of thing. Friedman thinks that it’s terrible, as I’m sure do most Americans. I think in many respects being downwardly mobile in our culture isn’t a bad thing. I’ve chosen that route purposefully. However, the relevance to me is I ask myself what is the churches role in this? I wonder if we can take a two pronged approach to this.

One, begin teaching people to live simpler, less consumer oritented and materialistic lives. This counter cultural message will take awhile to resonate but if we start now when the time of simplicity arrives the church will be on the forefront of this shift and be able to offer real help based on solid theology and praxis rather than be behind the curve as is normally the case with the church relative to cultural reality.

Secondly, I wonder if it’d be a good evangelistic and ministry opportunity to direct our student ministries toward helping our young people, and the young people of our unchurched community, come to grips with this educational reality and help them gain the advantage they’ll need in this new globalized ecomony by teaching about it, give tutoring, and career counseling. I can see how this would help us attract students to the church, help us attract their parents, and help revitalize the image of the church in the community.

Saw two articles today that serve as more evidence, as least in my mind, that cyber-church is a viable idea. One was an article about how Warner is developing a website where people can interact with animated characters and use animation as avatars. The other was about virtual schooling. It seems that virtual schooling is ubiquitous in colleges and universities and starting to gain traction in high schools. I’d actually read about this as well in “The World is Flat” the book I’m reading by Milton Friedman. People are logging on and doing virtual stuff in real ways. Why can’t we figure out a way to do church online other than podcasts and vcasts of live events that require you to log in at certain times and merely observe. That’s just like watching TV. I think there’s gotta be a way for us to put the tools in people’s hands and have them create worship experiences and worship art and God/Spirit art and presentations for other people to enjoy whenever they want. There’s gotta be a way for there to interactive events where people can worship online and hear the word of God in a virtual community.

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On another note. I went to a bday part for a friend. Was talking to a board member of a conservative Pentecostal church. He brought up the subject of Iran. I said I thought it was time to stop killing people. He offered a solution. “Now I know alot of people got killed when we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But it saved American lives!! I think we oughta just drop the bomb on Iraq and end this sucker once and for all.” The sad thing is he wasn’t kidding.

Got started on an OT class last night studying Isaiah thru Malachi. I think I’m going to like this class. The teacher is a Baptist pastor and really seems sharp and a good communicator.

I’m more excited though because he’s teaching what is to me a new approach to the unity of the Bible. As a recovering dispensationalist I’ve been hoping to study other approaches to Scripture and this guy’s focus is on “Kingdom” which means he believes that the unity of the Bible is found in that it’s the story of God setting up a kingdom through the various covenants. He went over this idea last night and it was fascinating. He’s not a Covenant theologian, nor is he a Replacement theologian. It’s different than that. Maybe when I understand it more I blog in more detail. Even so, it’s fun to learn.

Ironically, the class I will be taking starting Mon is a dispensationalists class. So it’ll be interesting to have the two arguments going on side by side.

I recently read thru the entire Bible in a relatively short amount of time, about a month, and in doing so I became increasingly unconvinced of the the dispensational point of view. I couldn’t put my finger on it but it seemed obvious to me that there is more of a connection between the OT and the NT than dispensationalists like to acknowledge. There is a smoother, less disjoined and linear relationship between the various stories of the Bible than the chopped up sections called dispensations.

One of his favorite lines is “There’s nothing new in the the New Testament”. Then he went on to show numerous little known examples of OT theology and scripture references incorporated into key scriptural passages of the NT. One of which I’m going to use in my sermon coming up in a couple of weeks.

Well, got my new power supply today for my MacBook. Works like a charm. Sent the computer out Wed and got it back Fri but no new power supply. It came in today, and voila’.

Just got a call that the prof let me into the Mon night class that I was going to take on DVD. There are too many people in there but he let me in. I hate to spend the money on gas but I hate to turn down a favor from a prof. Don’t want to piss him off. I have a guy here in town who is taking the same class so maybe we can carpool and save gas and mileage on the ‘ol vehiculars.

School starts tomorrow night. I’m stoked. I’m taking 8 units which is full-time. Thanks N8 for the inspiration to get back in school. You da man.

Had a two hour lunch with my new pastor and the wives. They’re pretty cool people. He’s a little old school in some ways but progressive in other ways. Overall, I like him. He said he wants to get together again in the next few days for lunch again. Also told me to make sure I let him know what happens w/that other church because if it doesn’t work out for me there that he has some ideas for here. I wonder if that means a job? I kind of sounded like it. We’ll see.

Now that I got my laptop back up and running I’m going to try to do some vcasts and podcasts.

Been reading Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”. Excellent book. Super interesting stuff about how the world is changing through techonology and how we’re going into a new epoch of globalized business models that will change (are changing) everything at all levels of society in the world.

As he talks about how businesses are collaborating with creatives all over the world interacting on projects through work flow software, video conferencing, email, etc….how we could use that technology and new work paradigm to create a cyber-church of some sort. I know it can be done and I just can’t get away from it. It could be an open source type of creative community where programmers and creatives from all over the world contribute to the experience. There has to be a way that can happen.