Peggy Brown :: Friends blog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/473350774/john-and

Emergent Kiwi (Steve) says the Dranes are blogging. Fantastic. I saw John a few months ago at the Aberdeen airport. Their blog is called 2ChuchMice. How nice for them to blog together.

Technorati Tags: john drane, olive drane

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/472547632/states-i

I cant remember if we have been to Rhode Island or not. About 4 years ago, our family were passing by the top of USA again and wondered if we should finally go over to North and South Dakota since we had missed them when we went through in 1998-1999 in our Winnebago. We decided . . . NAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Maybe next time.

visited 45 states (90%)

Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/472249033/joe-aldr

Dan Wallace has written some great thoughts about Dr Joe Aldrich who has Parkinson's Disease and is "slipping fast". Joe was the President of Multnomah when i was a student there. Once he pulled alongside me in his car as i walked back from chapel and asked me if i wanted a ride. I was really impressed that he was not above hanging out with students. We chatted for about 3 minutes and then we were back at the College. I thanked him for his great book "Life Style Evangelism" and encouraged him on his upcoming book that would later be called "Gentle Persuasion". At the time, I thought the second book was a little wimpy and should have been tougher. But I had just come from 2 years of intensive overseas work with Operation Mobilization, and had been a street preacher for 3 years before that so I leaned towards the more confrontational side of things.

Looking back, Joe was right and his book was a fantastic gift to the church. - It really is about relationships, loving people, eating meals and spending time and being there to make the good news known when the time is right.

Technorati Tags: joe aldrich

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/471911048/

In order to really get to grips with the dynamics of these primal shifts (two posts ago) in community dynamics, I have found the anthropologist Victor Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas particularly useful Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Cornell University Press, 1969 ). Turner was an anthropologist who studied various rites of passage among African people-groups and came up with the term liminality to describe the transition process accompanying a fundamental change of state or social position. Situations of liminality in this context can be extreme, where the participant is cast out of the normal structures of life, is humbled, disoriented, and subjected to various rites of passage, which together constitute a form of test as to whether the participant will be allowed back into society and to transition to the next level in the prevailing social structure. Liminality therefore applies to that situation where people find themselves in an in-between, marginal state in relation to the surrounding society, a place that could involve significant danger and disorientation, but not necessarily so.

For example, in some tribes younger boys are kept under the care of the women until initiation age—around thirteen. At the appropriate time the men sneak into the female compound of the village at night and ‘kidnap’ the lads. The boys are blindfolded, then roughed up, and herded out of the village and taken into the bush. They are then circumcised then left to fend for themselves in the wild African bush for a period lasting up to six months. Once a month the elders of the tribe go to meet them to help debrief and mentor them. But on the whole they have to find both inner and outer resources to cope with the ordeal pretty much by themselves. During this time, the initiates move from being disoriented and individualistic to developing a bond of comradeship forged in the testing conditions of liminality. This sense of comradeship and communality that comes out of the shared ordeal Turner calls communitas. Communitas in his view happens in situations where individuals are driven to find each other through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization. It involves intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging brought about by having to rely on each other in order to survive. If the boys emerge from these experiences they are reintroduced into the tribe as men. They are thus accorded the full status of manhood—they are no longer considered boys.

So the related ideas of liminality and communitas describe the dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to ‘huddle and cuddle’, and form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places. A mission which calls the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into the world of action where they will experience disorientation and marginalization but also where they encounter God and each other in a new way. Communitas is therefore always linked with the experience of liminality. It involves adventure and movement, and it describes that unique experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people inspired by the vision of a better world actually attempting to do something about it. (Remember the response to the tsunami.) And it is here where the safe, middle-class, consumerist, captivity of the church is so very problematic. And it is here where the adaptive challenge of the 21st Century could be God’s invitation to the church to rediscover itself as a missional communitas.

While some missiologists use this idea to describe the experience of transition the church in the West is currently experiencing in moving from one state (Christendom) or mode of church to another (missional), the emphasis has generally been on the new state of the church at the end of the process and so liminality and communitas are viewed as temporary experiences. From my perspective, significant manifestations of Apostolic Genius teach us that liminality and communitas are more the normative situation and condition of the pilgrim people of God. This is certainly the case for the phenomenal Jesus-movements in view; it is in the conditions of shared ordeal that these Jesus movements thrive and are driven to the activation of Apostolic Genius. What is clear is that both the Early Christian movements and the Chinese underground church experienced liminality through being outlawed and persecuted.

In this perspective, the phenomenal Jesus movements were/are expressions of communitas and not community as we normally conceive it. And as far as I can discern it is always a normative element of Apostolic Genius. The loss of communitas leads to a diminution of the total phenomenon of Apostolic Genius—the life force of the authentic Christian movement wherever it truly manifests.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/471287451/a-millio

If you had a million dollars (and only a million), what would you do to help alleviate the pain of the current economic crisis?

Paul Watson asked this question on his blog a week ago. This his how I answered it.

I would "probably find a way to help the churches and mission organizations retool with an eye towards microbusiness and social enterprise in order to emerge from the recession equipped for long term sustainability. What about a million for 100 10k micro-loans for that purpose? Track all 100 of them and create a community blog so everyone can cheer them on and learn from them.

The need for churches and mission organizations to move from dependence to sustainability was one of my teaching themes in 2008 (Australia, Netherlands, USA, UK). Some of my thoughts can be found here. Cooperatives, Mission and the Fourth Sector, On Going Fourth. I don't think my sustainability message was taken very seriously during year, before the economic downturn, but am hoping that the new circumstances will create more openness to think again about how we do mission.

Technorati Tags: recession

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/471311053/new-york

Talk about David and the Web Goliaths. Look at me on the New York Times!

When I first discovered the internet in the mid 90's, the New York Times was my website of choice. Reading it for free, from my little cyber cafe in San Francisco, was an absolute blast. When I went on the web today, I found my blog headline on their paper [thanks to Blogrunner] and a stream of NYT readers coming over to my humble TallSkinnyKiwi blog. Gotta love it! God bless those NYT editors for their impeccable taste and faultless wisdom. God blessem, every one!

What post did they pick? They chose the post called Without God - which was a short Facebook message Alana Hurst from Portugal sent me today and asked me to pass it on.

PASS IT ON? HAH! I can do better than that . . .

Technorati Tags: new york times

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/471285938/top-5-wa

Thanks everyone for last week's discussion. I have collated the best ideas below on how to get over the recession and added, as I usually do, my own thoughts.

- Seek God. (Mike Lane) Maybe this recession is an opportunity for a midcourse correction, a time to reconnect with God, retool and get ready for the next season.

- Restructure training and gathering events to make them accessible and sustainable (Becky Garrison, Charlie Boyd) Give preference to local leadership for teaching over long-distance celebrity speakers (Rob Karch) In your thinking, think about houses instead of hotels, kitchens instead of restaurants, festivals instead of conferences, joining something larger rather than starting your own.

- Start micro-businesses (Zack Newsome, Bill, Mike, Bill Cummings). Start something. Start a few things. Its a great way of becoming financially sustainable and it also opens new doors into the community. Social enterprise and micro-business has been a normal activity for overseas mission for many centuries.

- Move in together. (Mike Todd, Andrew Jackson) Intentional Community is a wonderful way for a small community young people to mature together. Its ridiculous that we all need big empty houses for one or two people. Fill up those empty bedrooms. Maximize what you already have, or think about downsizing. And no . . . I am not suggesting you move in with your girlfriend.

- Live frugally - (Jordon Cooper). Beware of credit. Learn from the monks who took vows of frugality and poverty. Borrow stuff instead of buying it (Luke 10). Learn to cook. Learn how to do all kinds of stuff you don't know how to do. Walk instead of drive.

OK - heres the next question. How would you invest a million dollars to help the church get over the recession? Its not rhetorical - there are people out there who have a million dollars to invest and a little bit of crowd wisdom would go a long way. Start here.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Tallskinnykiwi/~3/471108473/without-

Without GOD, our week would be: Sinday, Mournday, Tearsday, Wasteday, Thirstday, Fightday & Shatterday.

Sent by Alana Hurst on Facebook

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/469815857/

I have been reading a book by the brilliant Catholic theologian and ethicist George Weigel called Faith, Reason, And The War Against Jihadism: A Call To Action. It just so happens that I was reading it as the Mumbai terror attacks happened and so I post the headings of his insights here. His issue is not with Islam in general, but with the particularly dangerous brand called Jihadism, and I do find these insights very honest, insightful, and confronting. I am inclined to agree. What think ye?

• Lesson one: The great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological


• Lesson two: To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three Abrahamic faiths,” the “three religions of the Book” or the “three monotheisms” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar descriptions ought to be retired


• Lesson three: Jihadism is the enemy in the multi-front war that has been declared on us


• Lesson four: Jihadism has a complex intellectual history, the chief points of which must be grasped in order to understand the nature of the threat it poses to the west


• Lesson five: Jihadists read history and politics through the prism of distinctive theological convictions, not through the lens of western assumptions about the progress of dynamic of history


• Lesson six: It is not “Islamophobic” to note the historical connection between conquest and Muslim expansion, or between contemporary jihadism and terrorism. Truth-telling is the essential prerequisite to genuine interreligious dialogue, which can only be based on the claims of reason.


• Lesson seven: The war against jihadism is a contest for the human future that will endure for generations


• Lesson eight: Genuine realism in foreign policy takes wickedness seriously, yet avoids premature closure in it’s thinking about the possibilities of positive change in world politics


• Lesson nine: In the war against Jihadism, the political objective in the middle East and throughout the Islamic world is the evolution of responsible and responsive government, which will take different forms given different historical and cultural circumstances


• Lesson ten: in the war against global Jihadism, deterrence strategies unlikely to be effective, because it is almost impossible to deter those who are committed to their own martyrdom


• Lesson eleven: Cultural self-confidence is indispensable to victory in the long-term struggle against Jihadism


• Lesson twelve: Islamist salami tactics (also known as the salami-slice strategy, a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition) must be resisted, for small concessions in the name of a false idea of tolerance inevitably lead to further concessions, and into further erosions of liberty and security


• Lesson thirteen: We cannot, and will not, deserve victory (much less achieve it) if we continue to finance those who attack us, therefore, a program to defund jihadism by developing alternatives to petroleum based transportation fuels is a crucial component of the current struggle


• Lesson fourteen: Victory in the war against global jihadism requires a new domestic political coalition that is proof against the confusions caused by the Unhinged Left and the Unhinged Right


• Lesson fifteen: There is no escape from US leadership

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/468604424/

The explorations of communitas (the theme for the next series of posts around The Forgotten Ways) took on a very personal form in my own experience as leader of South Melbourne Restoration Community (now called RED), the church I had the privilege of leading for 15 years. When I look back to the early dynamics of that vibrant community, especially as it was still forming, we were functioning as missional church in a very naïve, pre-cognitive, and instinctual kind of way. All we did was set out to build a community that was radically open and engaged with all kinds of people on the edges and fringes of society. Things happened. It was exciting— the community was focused and sharpened by a sense of destiny and mission and as a result we grew in a strange and wonderful kind of way. We were missional, even though at the time this was as yet largely unarticulated, and as a result we experienced a remarkable form of community.

But something seemed to change as we grew and self-consciously became a more trendy, pomo, Gen-X church. For understandable reasons lots of grounded middleclass Christians from Melbourne’s Bible belt moved to the inner city to be part of what God was doing—and we welcomed the newfound stability in what was to that point a very chaotic experience of ecclesia. These were established Christians weren’t needy and that was a wonderful change for us and we basked in a period of sublime stability. But something shifted as we became more stable. And while we gained a lot from the participation of these wonderful people, nonetheless something significant was inadvertently lost as the church culture changed and became more middle-class and steady.

There is something about middle-class culture that seems to be contrary to authentic gospel values. And this is not a statement about middleclass people per se; I myself am from a very middleclass family, but rather to isolate some of the values and assumptions that that seem to just come along as part of the deal. In the chapter on discipleship we noted that much of what goes by the name middle class involves a preoccupation with safety and security developed mostly in pursuit of what seems to best for our children. And this is understandable as long as it does not become obsessive. But when these impulses of middle class culture fuse with consumerism, as they most often do, we can add the obsession with comfort and convenience to the list. And this is not a good mix. At least as far as the Gospel and missional church is concerned.

Operating under the influence of these ‘bugs’ in our middleclass software, our community became a marketer of particularly zesty religious goods and services vying for the attention of discerning spiritual consumers. Flattered by the numerical growth, and driven by our own middle-class agendas, we thoughtlessly followed the ‘gather and amuse’ impulse implicit in church growth theory and so we grew in numbers, but something primal and indispensable was lost in the bargain. We got more transfers from other churches, but the flow of conversion slowed down to a trickle and then ran completely dry. Paradoxically, we became busier than ever before, but with less and less real missional impact. We had moved from the missional idea of ‘me for the community and the community for the world’ to the more consumptive ‘the community for me’ and it just about destroyed us. We recovered only by recalibrating the community along fundamentally missional lines, and this was not achieved without pain and numerical loss. But in doing so, we moved from an experience of church as community to that of communitas.