Oh Life

Have you ever kept a journal or diary? If so, how’s that been going recently? I kept one (multiple actually, moleskine’s are my favorite) for a few years but the discipline of remembering to write on a regular basis proved less than consistent. I love going back and reading them occasionally but after reminiscing through thoughts, events, prayers, and whatever else I wrote, I usually wind up feeling a touch guilty about not keeping up with it. Enter Oh Life.

My wife told me about it and I was captured by it’s simplicity. Oh Life is an free online service that sends you an email once a day, at whatever time you choose. Simply respond to the email and your journal entry is logged. It’s all private, encrypted, confidential, etc, etc and all you have to do is log in whenever you want to read back. Here are a few entries from this past year:

Sometimes I’ll recount a story from the day. Other times, just a word, thought, or phrase. I’ve been trying to journal my prayers recently, remembering to go back and see how God’s been faithful to the things I’ve been bringing before him.

The best part is that it’s as simple as responding to an email – I’m usually doing that on a regular basis so it’s simple to remember.

You can sign up for your own online journal at Oh Life HERE.

The Ten Principles of Burning Man and Student Ministry

In case you’re unfamiliar, Burning Man is a music, lifestyle, and art festival held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Some have labeled it this generation’s Woodstock while others consider it the biggest collection of weirdness in the world. Regardless of what you’ve heard or believe about Burning Man, after reading about it I was struck by the inclusive nature of the event. In particular, the organizers have put together 10 principles to guide their community. It’s a great list and has many values in common with the church and student ministry in particular. The Principles are really a Community Manifesto. While it’s not a faith-based event per se (but many attenders most certainly consider it a spiritual experience), the principles point to (for me anyway) many of the natural ways in which God’s created all of humanity to live in shared community. Now, I’m not suggesting all our ministries start to look like Burning Man, but how might our ministries be able to create an inclusive environment where students feel welcomed to be themselves? Many of these principles actually have some parallels to Luke’s description of the early church in Acts 2 and 4! Here are the 10 Principles and I’ll leave it to you to creatively consider parallels to a ministry context:

Ten Principles of Burning Man

1. Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
2. Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
3. Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
4. Radical Self-reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
5. Radical Self-expression: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
6. Communal Effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
7. Civic Responsibility: We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
8. Leaving No Trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
9. Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
10. Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

N.T. Wright’s Astonishing Preface

Bishop Tom Wright is a giant in the world of Christian theology. He has his Doctor of Divinity and Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford, has held distinguished professorships at Oxford among other great universities, and served as the Bishop of Durham from ’03-’10. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, his training as an historian focuses on 1st century, 2nd Temple era, Israel. Essentially, much of his scholarly work and writings on Jesus emphasize that Christianity, the Bible,  and Jesus cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the context within which Jesus did his work, teaching, and life in 1st century Israel. Much of his writing is very heady and scholarly but for a primer, please check out The Challenge of Jesus and Simply Christian. If you really want to dive in, check out his 5 volume work on Christian Origins and and the Question of God Series – The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, and The Gospels and the Story of God. It’s enough to keep you busy for long time!

I’m reading (re-reading) The New Testament and the People of God for class this quarter and something struck me in the Preface that I’ve never noticed before – Tom Wright’s humility with which he approaches his work. Here’s a guy at the top of his field, one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet in Christian studies, and a lifelong devout follower of Jesus – yet he still holds open hands when it comes to what we can know about God and about Jesus studies. Reminds me of Paul who said he could boast about being at the top of his field and yet he still holds it all as nothing compared to knowing Jesus. Also reminds me of Paul’s encouragement to the people of Berea to check all that he was saying against the holy scriptures for themselves, to test and prove what he was saying and to diligently search for potential flaws (Acts 17). Here’s one of the most humble statements in a preface from a major Christian scholar that I’ve ever read:

This all leads to a final word of warning. I frequently tell my students that quite a high proportion of what I say is probably wrong, or at least flawed or skewed in some way which I do not at the moment realize. The only problem is that I do not know which bits are wrong; if I did I might do something about it. The analogy with other areas of life is salutary: I make many mistakes in moral and practical matters, so why should I imagine my thinking to be mysteriously exempt? But, whereas if I hurt someone, or take a wrong turn in the road, I am usually confronted quite soon with my error, if I expound erratic views within the world of academic theology I am less likely to be convinced by contradiction. (The first person here, as sometimes in Paul, includes the generic.) We all have ways of coping with adverse comment without changing our minds; but, since I am aware of the virtual certainty of error in some of what I write, I hope I shall pay proper attention to the comments of those – and no doubt there will be many – who wish to draw my attention to the places where they find my statement of the evidence inadequate, my arguments weak, or my conclusions unwarranted. Serious debate and confrontation is the stuff of academic life, and I look forward, not of course without some trepidation, to more of it as a result of this project.

To Love is to Suffer

Last fall while wrapping up a message series on the Gospel of Mark, I focused on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. We’re given a glimpse into a holy and heart-wrenching moment between Jesus and his Father where Jesus is wrestling with what would become a terrible yet glorious and history-making few days. It seems that Jesus was going through more than just some existential turmoil but was actually suffering internally even before the physical suffering began. And what propelled his acceptance of his suffering? Obedience to his father and his love for you and me. In his humanity, he was experiencing what many of us know – somehow, paradoxically and counterintuitively, to love is to suffer. It’s the human experience. In his divinity, he chose obedience to the Father as he said, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

To set up the point in my message that to love is to suffer, I remembered this scene from Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.” Diane Keaton’s character sums up the human experience nicely…and humorously:

Top 20 Most Inventive Towns in America

Here’s a fascinating list of the most innovative and inventive towns in America. The list is compiled according to patent submissions from 2005 – it’s a bit dated but you get the point. Seven of the top ten towns are right here in Silicon Valley within a few miles of each other. Add in four more Bay Area towns in the top twenty and you’ve got eleven of the top twenty all along the thin strip of real estate between the 101 and 280 freeways from San Francisco to San Jose including the little towns of Menlo Park & Saratoga. Both these towns have populations right around 30,000 & boast more patents than New York City with a population over 8 million! That’s a lot of invention, innovation, venture capital, and IPO’s. Probably why home prices are so ridiculously high. Seriously. There’s a nasty tear-down in my neighborhood listed north of 1 million.

I’d be willing to bet that the majority of patents are for technology related inventions. Since at least 2005 and in many cases earlier, we’ve seen the rise of new local Valley companies like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Netflix, TiVo, and even WordPress – not to mention old stalwarts like Apple, Google/YouTube, Yahoo, Cisco, Intel, HP, Oracle, Adobe, Amazon, Pixar, and eBay to name a few. There are literally thousands of other smaller companies (Evernote, Dropbox, Box.net, Orchestra, Pandora – 9 out of 10 apps on your iPhone probably) start-ups looking to make it big that began in a garage like many of the heavy-hitters (or as a Stanford computer science thesis project). Layered on top are the VC’s – venture capitalists or angel investors just waiting to drop serious cash into the next big thing. Add it all up and you get a crucible wherein an entrepreneurial spirit reigns and sticking with the status quo means being left hopelessly behind. It’s the California Gold Rush all over again with a touch of Vegas and a smidgen of Hollywood self-promotion. Reminds me somewhat of another part of California I know well – if Orange County prides itself on being hyper-cool and ridiculously good looking, Silicon Valley prides itself on being hyper-smart and innovative.

So what does this all mean for the Church? Especially churches in the Valley? If the Church is the light of the world called to influence not only individuals but societies, cultures, governments, businesses, and institutions, how do we go about speaking the language of the culture we find ourselves in like Paul speaking to the Greeks in Athens (see Paul’s brilliant re-framing of the Gospel message to Greek philosophers at Mars Hill in Acts 17)?

Furthermore, what does reaching out with the Gospel to this kind of culture look like? What does discipleship look like for ultra-creative types at the top of their fields? What does the coming of God’s Kingdom and taking seriously the claims of Jesus in the Bible look like in a place where 2010 is ancient history? The culture within which any church exists should serve to shape the style and presentation of the Gospel – the Gospel story doesn’t change, only the way it’s presented. As with many things, context is everything. We speak of the same Jesus in Europe, Africa, and Asia, only with different, nuanced language in response to different cultural questions.

I’ve got a few thoughts but wrestling with the questions is equally as important as answers and this post is getting a bit long already. What are the defining characteristics of the culture in your area and how does that shape your ministry?

More to follow soon…

A Tale of Two Tables from StickyFaith.org

Here’s a great video from our friends at the Fuller Youth Institute describing the split between generations that characterizes many (most?) churches in America. I love the controlling metaphor of sitting at the dinner table – reminds me of Jesus’ description of the Kingdom feast in Matthew 22. For more compelling statements on integrating generations within the church and the role that youth ministries can play, visit Sticky Faith.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s Greatest Sermon

The greatest sermon in our nation’s history was not preached in a church…

Thanks for a Great Year! Matt in Menlo 2011 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 39 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 96 posts. There were 213 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 40mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 15th with 1,246 views.

The Most Viewed Posts were:

1. Three Lessons Youth Workers Can Learn from The Social Network
2. Senior Weekend – Generational Integration in the Church
3. Why We Do Missions – Worship is Service
4. Woodleaf Summer Camp
5. Costa Rica Missions Trip

The top referring sites in 2011 were:

• networkedblogs.com
• facebook.com
• mppc.org
• mail.yahoo.com
• mppchs.com

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Thanks for reading!!

Click here to see the complete report.

Been a Long Time Since I Rock and Rolled

Floor of examination room 8 at Sage Veterinary Hospital, home for 3 weeks.

To put a twist on a classic Robert Plant lyric, I’ve been out of the game for a while. I’ve hopelessly neglected my blog this past fall. I halfway expected it to be gone, somehow lost to the dungeons where all disregarded blogs wind up. But it’s still here and one of my resolutions for the new year is to be more consistent, even when writing is the last thing on my mind. For most of the fall, sitting down and putting a few thoughts together simply seemed to much. The fall started out well enough but turned out to be one of the most trying seasons of my family’s life. In order:

1. My dog developed a severe reaction and infection to something (undetermined) that triggered an auto-immune disease. Fourteen days in the Veterinary ICU, 5 blood transfusions, surgeries, steroids, antibiotics, amputated tail, and a ridiculous amount of treatment and she’s alive and recovering.
2. My son had a few febrile seizures one night after we came home from visiting the dog in the ICU. Rushed him to the ER, overnight and next day at Packard Children’s Hospital, EEG, blood work, and he’s recovering well.
3. My wife and I developed a nasty bronchitis that kept us up most of the night for 10 days. We weren’t sleeping much anyway with my son’s and dog’s issues.

More than anything, we learned to rely on God when we had nothing left. We’re grateful to have our family healthy together at the start of this new year.

At work, our ministry hired a new staff person to oversee Small Groups and Leadership Development. Jacque Becwar was the High School Pastor at Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa for 4 years and now joins us at MPPC. Total stud whose made an immediate impact. Blessed to have him on board. If the image above encapsulates my life experience this fall, the pic below will be the enduring image for me from our Fall 2011 Student Ministries staff:

So, all in all, grateful for this past fall, trials and all, and looking forward to a great 2012…and hopefully some more blogging.

Thanks for reading.

New Ways of Telling the Timeless Story

Merry Christmas! One thing’s for sure, the birth of Jesus is the most profound, meaningful, and enduring story in human history. Because of this, humanity will continue to find new and creative ways to tell Christ’s amazing entrance into our world. Here are a few new ways of sharing the timeless story along with a few classics:

Children of St. Paul’s Church, New Zealand

Christmas 2.0

Christmas in 50 Words

Facebook Christmas

Linus shares Christmas

The Christmas Story, music by Michael W. Smith