Jesus For President

June 27, 2008. 7PM. Calvary Baptist Church. Washington, DC.



it was good to see shane and chris again. last time I saw chris was in his living room when the book was just being started and ... well, some interesting conversation indeed broke out. which is why i really want to say that while i think i may bring other perspective to the conversation - i really really appreciate the things these guys are saying. and doing. i think its spot on. i think its needed. particularly within american evangelical, let alone christian fundamentalists circles. i perhaps most appreciate the constant theme of the upside down ness of the kingdom of god - which we dont get. i mean we dont understand. which is to say we really dont get it. and we need to talk about it. and keep talking. and keep reminding each other. i also like that they aren't leaning or pointing in a particular political direction. and on top of it all - i think their presentation is gracious and respectful for both people and process. i highly recommend attending an event if you can - to catch up with (or even make) new friends (and not to celebrate emerging church celebrity) and/or reading the book. its in my currently reading queue right now!

it was also great seeing some psalters action again. they bring so freakin much prophetic intensity with them...



and Jay is always such a musical badass motha monster.



J4P interview on CNN

on american news

lara logan on john stewart.



zactly.

emergenting

re: emerging-vs-emergent-redux

i think its incidental that emergent is both emerging and missional in that venn diagram. its a compliment to emergent - but its not the point.

i would like to see emergent acknowledge its identity rather than try to blur the lines between emergent and emerging.

to do so adds clarity! to acknowledge and know and embrace who you are - is healthy!

you say your a node - right up there. so say it! loud and proud! youre a node. youre an organization. you have a logo. people can put a gif on their blog. you have no reason to hide from that.

its not creating artificial seperation and fragmentation. even bush knows the difference a letter makes can mean attacking the wrong country.

to blur it may fit better your discomfort with brands and identities. with walls and borders - however porous. or maybe there isn't a border and people orbit your node - thats how we think of it. but i dont' see how its integrous to resist embracing your node-i-ness and pretend you have cloud-i-ness.

you knew you were starting a something when you started emergent village. embrace that. you guys are a great organization! and the way you run it so loosely is awesome! your a great leadership model for other to look at and learn from.

but - youre a degree of freedom away from the beginning, and blurring this issue allows those who are just discovering the emerging church (sans logo) to think were based on emergent village (mit logo), rather than the root concept of emergence. and that misdirection and loss of richness of understanding is incalculable in my estimation.

say youre a node. say the emerging church is a cloud. end the confusion.

COIN

the military may occasionally refer to it as the long war, but they don't often refer to it as the "war on [verb]"... mostly 'cause they can't get [verb] to hold still long enough to ask him to stop. no, the military knows it is fighting against an insurgency - i.e. a Counter Insurgency - or COIN for short - standing for Counter Insurgency OPerations.

while ceaser may have impressively stupid ideas of how to create and then drag out a war out for a hundred years or more - many of the best military and other thinkers outside the military - such as the iraq study group report - have done some much better thinking. some of that thinking is done at blogs like Abu Muqawama's COIN blog (he often blogs opposite the reputable Small Wars Journal but with an increased arab awarness. Abu Muqawama is almost a cross be SWJ and the Arabist, a renowned egyptian blogger).

recently, abu muqawama featured a gentlemen named Greg Mortenson, and his co-author David Olivier Relin who have written a book called: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time; an abject lesson on gaining influence in the world's most difficult and dangerous places. the whole article is really good (although the verbage may seem impressively hard to the uninitiated), but i wanted to include a quote here - just to blow your mind about what categories of stuff fit into where.

With due ceremony, Syed Abbas tilted back the lid of the box, withdrew a scroll of parchment wrapped in red ribbon, unfurled it, and revealed (Greg) Mortenson's future. "Dear Compassionate of the Poor," he translated from the elegant Farsi calligraphy, "our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend to the poor and sick. In the Holy Koran there is no law to prohibit an infidel from providing assistance to our Muslim brothers and sisters. Therefore," the decree concluded, "we direct all clerics in Pakistan to not interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers."

amen. and amen.

now that, my friends, is a blessing.

and it just so happens building schools for girls is sound counter insurgency strategy too. who knew the gospel and doing good for the poor could have such a clear voice in ceasers newest, uh, coin?

a citizen of rome

like paul i have found myself to be a citizen of rome. and like paul, i didn't ask for this citizenship. or do anything to deserve it. i showed up, and presto - citizen of rome. so weird.

anyway, turns out i have certain rights and privileges that most of the world & history doesn't have: i have a certain degree of affluence that most of the world / history doesn't have; i have a certain degree of education that most of the world / history couldn’t conceive; and i have an incredible degree of opportunity that most of the world / history couldn't comprehend. take me out for a hundred dollars of sushi and i will tear up and pontificate on this all night.

what i dig about paul's perspective on his citizenship - is that he wasn't afraid to actually suffer a little bit. that is, he didn't seriously consider this birthright to be part of his intrinsic worth. but at the same time he wasn't afraid to casually mention his citizenship when it would highlight an injustice or upset the status quo. i fuckin dig that about paul.

it may not be apparent but i was a centurion in caesars army at one point - in command of a hundred. i basically looked like this:

i would tell this man to go and he would go. and i would tell this man to bring me a latte and he would look at me funny. but mostly i was smart enough to know i didn't know what i didn't know - and i listened to what my old school non-commissioned officers told me... and taught me. about human nature. and about how to trust my gut and make decisions quickly about people. i owe two of these guys in particular a debt i will never be able to repay.

i also had a few real smart soldiers who followed me not because of my rank, but because i didn't actually wear my rank. they would salute me with the wrong hand on purpose just so i would make them do pushups. this deconstruction of rank vs humanity was threatening to the old timers there - but the games encouraged me.

this last weekend i saw a commissioning of future centurions at one of caesars most prestigious schools (make sure you make 'prestigious' sound cool when you say it). i'd always appreciated the numbers of senior officers that were christians - i believe christians desperately need to be in the military, if we have one - and this weekend indicated those numbers haven't changed much, unless they've increased. yet the discomfort i have with the relationship between church and state and the state and church has never been more present to me. i'm not sure its easy to quickly separate these threads - i couldn't think of a way to express it succinctly last weekend - but i'm pretty sure the direction of the relationship is where i think things are so very wrong.

so - with that as background, as a citizen of rome and a former centurion, i've introduced a new piece of who i am, and things i want to talk about.

besides the aforementioned church and state issues - i also want to share what i believe are common misconceptions about the relationship of the military to our foreign policy and the role of the citizen. even more complex, is how a christian thinks in the midst of all this.

mayberry

if you haven't seen the blog indexed - you're missing out on a little daily morsel of conceptual fun.



anybody thinkin the gospel as also been sanitized for the protection of our american way of life?