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Sunday, November 27, 2005

The Cellular Church via The New Yoker

I enjoyed the article The Cellular Church which takes a look at Saddleback Church and the small groups that power it. Gladwell s known for the books "Tipping Point" and "Blink".

Friday, November 18, 2005

Why Do Many People's Faith Drift After College?

For the last twenty years I have spent a portion of my time each week working with college students at my church. I have generally found the college students' faith vital with a great interest in making a difference in the world. I have watched these young men and women invest time into serving their communities, devoting time and energy into learning more about God and looking for ways to live out their faith. When I connect up with many of these students several years after they have completed college I typically find folks who still have vital spritual lives who are actively serving in their churches. This is encouraging. Yet, I believe this is the exception. It seems that a large percentage of people who have vital spiritual lives in college end up being "sunday christians". I have been asking myself and others the question "Why do people see to lose their vitality after college?"

The first thing I have noticed is that once people leave college, they often leave behind a tight knit and supportive community. Often times, people go from living in close quarters, sharing a dorm or a tiny off campus apartment to a place of their own which doesn't require day to day sacrifice and interaction with others. The Bible makes it very clear that living in community is very important to ongoing growth... but our culture encourages use to "get a place of our own" rather than look for how to build and deepen community. Secondly, young people are often encouraged to "make a good start" in their field of choice. This often means moving to a new city and starting a job that wants way more than 40 hours / week. People do this to get started and tell themselves that once they get established they will be able to balance life. In the mean time, they have a nice income and have the expectation that the their standard of living should go up now that they are no longer students. So money gets spent. Sometimes consumer debt is rung up, sometimes not. But it is no longer possible to live on the same money that was adaquate during student years because the appatite has grown.

So is that all there is to it? Keep hanging with friends and don't get too caught up with money and you will be find? Unfortunately, I think there is more to it than that. I had a wonderful opportunity to talk with a number of church leaders in the last few months. There are two topics which repeatedly come up.

College Discipleship Often Misses Spiritual Formation

A number of leaders from the church planting community have noted that college discipleship typically stressed learning disciplines and basic practices, but often failed to get to heart transformation or spiritual formation. This is the very lack which Renovare is trying to encourage. More on this later.

Vocation and Work

One of the most common issues is that many people have not been taught to integrate their lives, to understand vocation. So they have a “spiritual life” and a “working/secular” life which don’t get combined. As these two world tug on a person’s heart, the work world often dominates. I tend to agree that this is one of the major issues. The college students that we have explicitly talked with about vocation and integrating faith into all aspects of life have tended to do better in later years.

I believe that the modern church has been it’s own worse enemy in this regard. While the scripture talks about the priesthood of all believers, we need to quickly divide things into spiritual and secular, and clergy and laity. I believe these divisions make it much harder for people to see it is possible to live an integrated, incarnational life dedicated to service.

If I may, let me expand on this a bit. I was at the Intersection conference a few weeks ago. This is a conference dedicated to the mobilization of the church and had a track specifically about the workplace being ministry. In the professional track there were a number of very moving discussions where people like Brett Johnson told stories about how business men were learning to be a blessing to their communities through their businesses, touching people spiritual and materially. There are a number of people who have been seeing first hand revival as well as positive economic and development results such as described in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C. K. Prahalad.

Yet I had a somewhat discouraging discussion with one of the gentleman who was in the pastor’s / mobilizing track. This gentleman is a good hearted pastor who has been looking to help his congregation integrate their lives. He asked a simple question to his fellow pastors. He said: “There is a woman in my congregation who is an executive recruiter and a staffing specialist. She has her own business which is reasonably successful. How can I help her be an effective minister of the gospel?” The answers he got were teach her evangelism and take her on short term mission trips. That’s it!! Yet, here is a women who is in a great position to use her business as a way to minister to people. She can help people find their vocation and calling. She can resist the temptation to place the first qualified candidate in a position to quickly get a commission, and instead work for the long term of getting great matches for people and companies (which in the long term pays dividends). She can work with people to find their skills, there calling, which helps those people be more marketable, and helps the companies hiring them find what they really need. I could go one, but I am sure you can see how there are many ways that she can bless her community while at the same time be even more successful as a business women. Even pastors and mobilizes who are attending a conference which is encouraging integration seem to be missing the mark.

What To Do?

Live intergrated lives. Understand that the workplace is as much a ministry as someone who is a fulltime pastor. Your ministry is not just evangelism... it is how you love and serve your coworkers and customers. If is making a difference by bringing character and quality to your work. It is makes good things that will last. There are a number of resources which can be helpful. One of the best books on this subject is Richard Lamb’s Following Jesus in the Real World has been a helpful resource.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Improve the human condition? Start with the mind and spirit

Today I read a blog posting of my friend Ed on Positive Psychology and Authentic Happiness. His posting got me thinking. In the last few years it seems like a lot of clueful folks have concluded that the best way to improve human-kind's lot is to work on understanding and enhancing the mind. A common observation is that people who have a lot of money and no material cares are often no happier (often less happy) than people who have no material goods. What's the deal? Maybe there is something more important?

In recent weeks the Dalai Lama was in the news because he was speaking to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience where some scientists were going to later present a paper on the effects of meditation.

Jeff Hawkins, of Palm / Handspring fame, and most recently the author of On Intelligence. Jeff helped found Redwood Neuroscience Institute which is now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley because he believed that the best investment (the most good to be done) would be in understanding the mind.

There is a long tradition in the Christian faith which suggests that a communion with God changes everything, and that reflecting on and interacting with God transforms the mind. There are countless passages in the bible that talk about the importance of our mind such as Philippians 4:6-8, Colossians 3:1-17, and Romans 12:1-2.

Years ago there was a study done at Dallas Theological Seminary by Paul Meier reported in the book Renewing Your Mind in a Secular World. Meier administered the MPPI on a large body of the students and staff. He was looking to correlate a balanced score on MPPI with some aspect of a life of faith. At first he was disappointed. Time someone had been a Christian made no difference, but then he found a correlation. It was people who meditated daily on the scripture for three or more years. His conclussion? The transformation of the mind takes time, but continued focus make a huge difference. For a few more thoughts along these lines you might enjoy reading God’s Call to Christlikeness and an article on Biblical Meditation.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

new job: metaweb

At the end of July I quit working for Tellme fulltime and starting consulting with a number of companies. The plan was the consulting to be a short term thing until I was able to get a company started with a friend. Long story short, the company didn't look like it was going to come together and a didn't enjoy consulting. There are a lot of start-ups which have recently launched. I chatted with sixteen companies. Most didn't have credible business plans and/or had weak teams. There were a few start-ups which looked interesting, though most didn't fire my imagination. In the end, I joined metaweb which is a a spin-off of applied minds (applied mind featured in newsweek). metaweb is now a free standing, venture funded company. I joined metaweb because the team has a number of people I want to work with, and they have what I think is a "big idea". I can't say a lot about what we are doing, though we are fully web 2.0 buzzword compliant. One big change is that metaweb is the SOMA district of San Francisco. This is the first time in 24 years that work is more than a 30 minute walk from home. Well, actually it is a 25 minute walk, but there is a one hour train ride in the middle of the walking. I am hoping that the time in the train will be good for reading and reflection, something that modern life tends to crowd out.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Renovare Conference

This past weekend I attended a Renovare conference hosted by MPPC. Our primary presenters were Dallas Willard, John Ortberg, and Richard Foster. It was a lot of fun to watch these three men teaching and interacting together. You could tell they held each other in great respect and are great friends.

Renovare is an organization formed to promote spiritual formation. At the core of Renovare is the belief that God's wants us to experience continual renewal. The conference highlighted six "streams" or traditions related to spiritual development: contemplative, holiness, charismatic, social justice, evangelical and incarnational. These themes are fully developped in Foster's book Streams of Living Water.

The conference was wonderful balance of encouragement, practical exercises, and teaching. It is easy for a conference to be so focused on knowledge transfer that people walk away bloated. Other conferences focus only on encouraging folks and leave them with a "rah-rah" emotional high, but little more. Renovare attempts to facilitate transformation. If this conference is any indication, I think they are doing a great job.

I would highly recommend checking out one of the Renovare conferences. You might also want to consider the Spiritual Formation Forum's Conference

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Business is the Way to Address Poverty

Many people are aware of the excellent work done by the Grameen bank. They have pioneered micro loans as a way to fuel economic development. A new twist to this is http://kiva.org which is attempting to link donors to the people who are taking the loans. They describe their system as P2P micro loans.

Over the last few years there have been a number of people who have suggested (rightly I think) that the most effective tool against poverty are jobs, and one of the best creator of jobs are for-profit companies?! A couple hundred years ago this wouldn't be a suprise. But in our age of corporate greed people seem to have forgotten this. C. K. Prahalad has written widely about how business can eradicate rather than promote poverty. A nice introduction to some of his work can be found in the article The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid which appeared in Booz, Allen, Hamilton's strategy+business newsletter, issues 26, published in 1st quarter 2002. For significantly more details check out his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. The world bank hosts a private sector development blog which periodically has interesting information posted to it.

There has been a growing interest in the Christian community in considering how business folks can live out their faith in their work, and turn their jobs into a real vocation. Global Spectrum has been sponsoring the yearly Intersection Conference which brings together pastors, missions thinker, and people from the "secular" world to discuss how their faith can make a positive impact.