This is the drawing from Hugh MacLeod that we chose as a key 'Christmas image' this year:
I've pulled the December Poll early, because so few people seemed interested! U2 were overwhelmingly voted 'Greatest Band in the World', getting 7 of the 8 (yes 8) votes cast. This includes the adjustment for one voter who tried to vote for U2 but was diverted by the software onto the Rolling Stones...
a quick follow-up poll - does the above result indicate:
1. The genuine world-beating status of U2?
2. The age-profile of the people who read this blog?
3. An unhealthy regard for Mr Bono?
I'd like to think 1. is true, but feel compelled to take 2. and 3. seriously....
This is Brilliant....
I received an e-mail about this a few weeks back, but other than thinking 'seems like a good idea', I did nothing about it. Then I took a second look and found out:
a) That this initiative comes from some guys I know down in Hobart, Tasmania. Third Place Communities are a non-profit group with strong links to the Forge Network. I met some of them when I was in Australia in 2003, and am very inspired by their passion and creativity.
b) That this is a simple, elegant, beautiful and compelling project... the best Purple Cow I have come across for a long time.
The idea is simple - get as many people as possible to donate One Dollar (Aus - approximately 70 Eurocents). Keep going for just over a year, then start giving the money away to the poorest people in the world...
The target is 7 Million Dollars - and to be frank, they deserve to reach it.. Visit the website to get the background on the project, then join in by donating One Dollar through your credit card. If you love the idea, use your Paypal account (or create one) to give a Dollar a day, week or month... And buy yourself a sweatshirt in the process...
Tell your friends...
I came across the cartoons of Hugh MacLeod by accident at gapingvoid.com when I was tracking down an image to send as a digital Christmas card [we used 'love begets love']. Hugh has some really thought-provoking images around themes of marketing, new technology and life in general. This one 'Holy Unholy' had me thinking so deeply that I couldn't help but post it...Click on the image for a larger view, then just sit and look at it for five minutes: I guarantee you won't be bored.
TimeOut, London's highly regarded news and events magazine, recently devoted a whole issue to the religious life of the UK capital, under the title 'God is a Londoner'. Religions of all types and traditions are thriving in the City, according to the reports - the magazine even created a photo-shoot of religious fashion, showing what the trendiest young Christians, Jews, Sikh's and Muslims are wearing. One very striking article was written by atheist Tim Arthur, who visited Kensington Temple, one of the UK's most thriving, ethnically diverse Pentecostal churches.
Led by Colin Dye, who has the distinctive of having trained and danced with the Royal Ballet before becoming a pastor, 'KT's' has grown massively in recent years, developing a high-energy, dynamic worship style. Surpisingly, the Time Out article sees these as very positive and welcome developments. Tim Arthur concludes his article:
"As an atheist I have serious problems with the church’s views on many areas of morality, yet they do reach into the community and offer help and comfort for many lost souls. They were also some of the most welcoming and generous people I have spent time with. I believe they are wrong, but I admire their strength of conviction. They are acting out of a bona fide passion and love for the truth they believe has been given to them through direct experience of the divine. Watching these people transported to other realms you realise that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are missing the point. For these people it is not an intellectual argument – God is as real to them as you and I. They know he’s there because they experience him. They know Him. As Dye says, ‘If you say God’s alive then it makes sense that there would be some direct access to his presence.’
This is only one article - a few thousand words amongst the millions printed every month: but it offers yet more evidence that faith is alive and well in the major urban centres of Europe.
My good friend Jason Gardner from the LICC (London Institute for Contemporary Christianity) has an excellent article in Youthwork Magazine this month on 'the Rise of the Tesco Church'. As far as I can tell the article isn't available on-line yet, but keep an eye on Youthwork in case this changes.
Jason looks at the growth strategy of Tesco in the UK, and more recently around the world, and wonders if the same pattern - long established in the USA with Walmart - is also evident in the church. The growth, in centres of urban population, of large, highly-resourced churches seems to bear this out, and may well present the same challenges to the smaller neighbourhood churches that small-scale retailers experience when Tesco comes to town. I agree with Jason that this is a change driven more by demographgics than by choice or design, and that our primary question should not be 'are we happy about this?' so much as 'how can we make the best of this for the sake of the Kingdom?'. I came to Crossroads Amsterdam with the conviction that there is indeed room in the major cities of Europe for large, well-developed churches - so long as they are ready to act as 'hub churches' for missional engagement, and be outward-focussed and self-giving rather than inwardly-obsessed and self-serving.
I also wrote some notes recently on the fact that this is not the only significant development in the European church. I see it as one of three areas of growth - all of which offer significant opportunities for mission.
Where Jason calls this first model 'Tesco Church', I have come to think of it as 'Ikea Church' - the large, regional centre that draws individuals and families and resources them to 'self-build' their faith experience. Most people both love and hate Ikea, and there are two positives of the retail giant that I believe are transferable to this scale of church:
The first is that at Ikea on an average weekend, tens of thousands of people move through the same essential experience and draw from the same range and catalogue, and yet most leave feeling that they have just done something genuinely original. No-one else, they figure, will combine this bookcase, that print and that rug in quite the way I am going to. Ikea delivers 'mass customisation' - the combination of economies of scale and customisation of outcomes. This remarkable feat is made possible by digital technology and was predicted ten years ago by Michael Moynagh in the Tomorrow Project as a key direction for the church. The second, related achievement of Ikea is to make high-level design accessible to ordinary consumers. Some of the designers involved with Ikea are, quite simply, brilliant - they are among the best of their generation. But they have been persuaded to turn away from elitism and make design available to all. Can 'Ikea Churches' do the same for theology - making PhD level thinking relevent and accessible to everyday Christians?
The second model which is growing alongside these large-scale churches (I resist the term mega-church as it seems to carry overtones of the Death Star) is the 'Googlechurch'. This is a movement which includes many strands of the 'emerging Church' along with the Alternative Worship movement, some expressions of the missional church movement and the fast-growing 'Household Church' networks. It consists of small-sacle, local, organic churches, very often with a high commitment to art, community transformation or both, working at an experimental and very permissive level to draw people through relationship into faith (see the blogs of Andrew Jones, Jonny Baker and Alan Hirsch). There is far more diversity in these movements than most of the literature so far gives credit for - to talk of THE emerging church as if it was one, coherent movement is as off-target as to talk of THE American church or THE Black Majority Church - but I use the term 'Googlechurch' because the one thing that does link all of these diverse movements is their embrace of new technology and the internet. It is the inter-connectedness of the web that has made the fragmentation of these organic groups possible: they are the first truly indigenous church-plants of the Google generation. These groups have quite extraordinary missional opportunities amongst the young, amongst largely professional urban populations and especially amongst media-savvy and aesthetically sensitive social networks.
The third emerging model is the only one, perhaps, to offer hope to the more traditional denominations - it is the 'Boutique Church' offering an experience of worship that appeals directly to particular niche or people-group. Classical musicians, for example, often find the standard of music in our indie-rock-meets-country-lyrics mainstream churches intolerable at the level of toothache. Highly educated scientists, too, often struggle with the hug-me-and-we'll-all-feel-better churches. Even though 'Ikea Churches' appeal across a wide demographic, and the 'Googlechurch' picks up many of the dissenters, there are still those who long for the beauty, mystery, solidity and wonder of the older churches - those Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton call 'Deep Church'. Leaders called to develop these churches have the joy and challenge of creating an authentic worship experience for a (perhaps) small but (probably) discerning group - like the butcher who gives up the 'Friday night family meat pack' offers in favour of 'exclusive home-made leek and mustard sausages'.
The great thjing about these three groups (if this is an accurate picture) is that they can co-exist; can each thrive in the emerging cultures of the 21st Century: and can be a massive support and help to each other. To do this, though, they need to do three things:
1. Acknowledge one anothers existence and their shared goals - setting competition aside and pursuing unity in diversity.
2. Stop judging each other according to their own inwardly-derived criteria ('you're too big and market-driven'; 'you're too weird and experimental'; 'you're out of touch with contemporary culture').
3. Learn not only to work together, but to complement one another and even prospser one another's efforts, openly and gracefully swapping members, sharing converts and celebrating one another's strengths.
The Europe of the 21st Century has good news for each of these three strands of church-development. There are sound sociological reasons to look for growth in all three. But there are also very sound reasons for acknowledging that no one of these models is THE answer we are looking for. Big or small; mainstream or niche; coporate or organic - we all NEED each other...
I have been resisting posting 'the' Paul Potts video... but it's now turned up on Seth Godins blog and on The Hour in Canada - the salesman from Carphone Warehouse in Cardiff has gone global. This clip, of Paul's first appearance on the TV show ' Britain's got Talent (which he went on to win) has become the most viewed clip on Youtube ever... and it is a very moving moment. Paul was shy, awkward; bullied at school - his refuge was to sing. And sing he does. Watch the clip (if you haven't already) and enjoy the moment of an ordinary man revealing, and revelling in, his inner voice...
I blogged about Anne Rice's book on the early years of Jesus this time last year, but since Christmas is coming and a paperback version is now available, I think it bears mentinoing again.
I loved the richness, beauty and delicacy with which this narrative is written, and its genuine attempt to imagine - in earthly, human, flesh-and-blood terms - the life of Jesus. The book is built on the same deep and detailed research that Anne Rice has always applied to her writing, and it brought the likely life of the family of Jesus alive to me as never before.
There have been rumours for some time that Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt would be committed to film, but the latest news is that the project has been scrapped. Better news, though, on the sequel front: Christ the Lord: The road to Cana - will be published in March 2008. It is available for pre-order on Amazon and other sites.
Time Magazine this month has a profile of Rob Bell, Pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and founder of the 'Nooma' video series. Rob is a great communicator. His two books (so far) are 'Velvet Elvis' - an imaginative, readable and thouroughly refreshing exploration of what it might mean to follow Jesus in the 21st Century and 'Sex God', a surprising and very inspring attempt to find the connection between two of the most important three-letter words in our vocabulary (links below).
This is a preview of the latest 'Nooma', the 18th in the series, called 'Name'.
This great image of the Crossroads mirror-ball is made up from all the visuals we have used in the past year. A full-size version , on canvas, now hangs in the Ministry Centre. Click on the image to catch more of the detail. Thanks to Jurjen for working on this!
