This morning, I begin my last week as a pastor at Pathways Church. Next Sunday morning, I will teach in our morning service and then watch the Super Bowl as the first former staff member of Pathways.

We have been blessed in our time at Pathways — from helping to shape some of the earliest dreams, to connecting with people in the community, to our first Sunday gathering and on. The blessings continue as Pathways is going to continue to support us in the coming months while we lay the groundwork to begin a new adventure in forming a faith community.

Many have asked if I am sad about our time at Pathways coming to an end. Yes, and not yet. This has been the plan since we first moved to the Seattle area, so we have lived in anticipation of it. But, what we value most is the relationships we have in Pathways, and we will continue to be a part of the community in the next few months as we will stay here while I finish up school this spring. So the sweet sorrow of parting is not upon us yet.

What’s next? That’s a good question, and one we are eager to explore. We strongly considered moving to Austin before coming to Seattle, and that is where we are directing our dreams now. We’ve been having great conversations with others about what that might look like, and I’m excited to share more as things take shape.

Things have been quiet around here as my blogging energy has gone toward getting Creativityist off to a strong start these past few weeks. In spite of the attention I’ve given over there, I have no intention of dropping this blog. It will continue as an outlet for my personal and theological wonderings…and wanderings. I have a few posts in the works which should show up soon, and I’m kicking around some ideas for a larger series I might do.

In the meantime, here are some notable writings from over at Creativityist:

• creatvityist…one who practices creativity
• “but i’m not creative”
• getting things created
• workflow tools: hardware
• creative space
• workflow tools: software
• i’m such an amateur
• daily pages
• capture everything: buckets
• seusspiration

It’s been quite a while since I passed along some notable links, but I’ve run across a few in recent weeks that are worth passing along:

• Our Compact Life - Tom and Malora are related to some friends of mine. They have made a compact to not shop this year and you can follow their experience on this blog.
• The Green Room - It’s been over two years since I called out Steve Carter to start blogging. He’s finally complied with my demands, and he’s off to a good start.
• JoshuaLongbrake.com - The Longbrake has started selling limited prints of his photos. “Get ‘em while they’re hot…they’re lovely.”
• Creativityist - Pardon the self promotion, but this is a new blog I have started focused on trying to learn habits and practices to enhance creativity.

Some books read like a light snack…maybe a small package of pretzels on an airplane. Snacks aren’t bad, but sometimes you need a hearty feast. Transforming Mission satisfies the belly and fills the mind with memories and Ideas to revisit.

This book is a classic on mission, and rightfully so. David Bosch traces the history of how mission has been understood, and how that understanding has been shaped by context. When seeing how others have formed their understanding of mission from their context, it helps us to step back and form a more clear image of how we have rightly or wrongly understood mission in our time. This seems like such an important book for anyone in a primary role of shaping a church community, because if you get mission wrong, pretty much everything goes askew.

Here are some table scraps from my reading (heck, some of these could be a full meal by themselves) to whet the appetite of any hungry or ambitious readers out there.

• We have to distinguish between mission (singular) and missions (plural). The first refers primarily to the missio Dei (God’s mission), that is, God’s self-revelation as the One who loves the world, God’s involvement in and with the world, the nature and activity of God, which embraces both the church and the world, and in which the church is priveleged to participate. (pg. 11)
• Even so, personal conversion is not a goal in itself. To interpret the work fo the church as the ‘winning of souls’ is to make conversion into a final product, which flatly contradicts Luke’s understanding of the purpose of mission. Conversion does not pertain merely to an individual’s act of conviction and commitment; it moves the individual believer into the community of believers and involves a real — even a radical — change in the life of the believer, which carries with it moral responsibilities that distinguish Christians from ‘outsiders’ while at the same time stressing their obligation to those ‘outsiders’. (pg. 117)
• There have, of course, always been Christians (and theologians!) who believed that their understanding of the faith was ‘objectively’ accurate and, in effect, the only authentic rendering of Christianity. Such an attitude, however, rests on a dangerous illusion. Our views are always only interpretations of what we consider to be divine revelation, not divine revelation itself. (pg 182)
• it should be clear that theologies designed and developed in Europe can claim no superiority over theologies emerging in other parts of the world. (pg 189)
• The Protestant preoccupation with right doctrine soon meant that every group which seceded from the main body had to validate its action by maintaining that it alone, and none of the others, adhered strictly to the “right preaching of the gospel”. The Reformational descriptions of the church thus ended up accenuating differences rather than similarities. Christians were taught to look decisively at other Christians. (pg 248)
• The Enlightenment tenet that all problems were in principle solvable had an equally far-reaching effect on theology and the church. … Where God was still used as a hypothesis he had become the ‘God of the gaps’. We needed him only for exigencies such as cancer and similar incurable diseases. Step by step, however, our knowledge was expanding; the gaps were being closed. God was pushed further and further back and was becoming more and more redundant. (pg 273)
• Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission.” (pg 390)
• The primary purpose of the missiones ecclesiae can therefore not simply be the planting of churches or the saving of souls; rather, it has to be service to the missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world in a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. (pg 391)
• Evangelism should never deterioriate into coaxing, much less into threat. It is not the same as (1) offering a psychological panacea for people’s frustrations and disappointments, (2) inculcating guilt feelings so that people (in despair, as it were) may turn to Christ, or (3) scaring people into repentance and conversion with stories about the horrors of hell. (pg 413)
• Even so, the gospel is not individualistic. Modern individualism is, to a large extent, a perversion of the Christian faith’s understanding of the centrality and responsibility of the individual. (pg 416)
• Contextualization, on the other hand, suggests the experimental and contingent nature of all theology. Contextual theologians therefore, rightly, refrain from writing “systematic theologies” where everything fits into an all-encompassing and eternally valid system. (pg 427)
• If it is true, as has been argued throughout this study, that the entire life of the church is missionary, it follows that we desperately need a theology of the laity — something of which only the first rudiments are now emerging. (pg 472)

My Amazon Kindle arrived last Monday — it has been a good week. I finished reading my first book, so here are some impressions of my experience so far.

The Good

• The text is crisp, clean, and readable.
• The battery life and wireless signal have both been excellent. I’ve charged it a few times, but haven’t even gotten the battery below halfway yet.
• For all the critique about how ugly it is, I don’t think it’s so bad in person.
• I just read a book that didn’t require a tree to be produced. It also isn’t going to require space on a bookshelf.
• I love the fact that I can read with one hand. Sometimes I try to read while feeding my son a bottle. With a book…not so easy. With the Kindle…a piece of cake.
• One of my personal concerns was that it is so easy to purchase books that I would get myself in trouble by making a lot of impulsive purchases. It’s actually worked the other way around. I’ve only purchased the one book that I’ve read so far. Usually I buy books because I want to have them available for when I am ready to read them. With the Kindle, I don’t have to buy them until the moment I’m ready to begin.
• The fact that you can download samples means that I have been able to explore a few other books I had on my wish list. This is actually helping me make better decisions about books to read. I have had The 4-Hour Work Week on my wish list for a while. After reading the intro and sample, I decided it wasn’t a book that was going to be worth my time.
• I’ve been able to load a few .doc and .pdf files on there as reference material. It is a piece of cake to search through those documents for what I’m looking for.

The Improvable

• I wish the screen had a little more contrast to it, or could be adjusted. With good lighting, it is very readable, but in medium to lower light settings, I think it is actually a tad bit more difficult to read than a book.
• The library of what is available is still quite limited. I’m hoping that the initial popularity of the Kindle will help change that more quickly.
• The case that came with the Kindle looks really nice. When it is closed, the Kindle is secure, but when the case is open, I wouldn’t want to rely on it to keep the Kindle securely in place.
• I like that I can easily copy highlights and notes from my Kindle to my book notes database on my Mac. But, it is cumbersome. All the notes and highlights for all books live in one file which is quickly going to grow pretty large unless I regularly clean them out, but then I think I lose the highlights and notes made on the Kindle itself.
• I’d like to see more ways to sort through the contents of the Kindle. I usually have it set to sort the books based on how recently they have been accessed. That is pretty useful, but more options would be helpful. I had a spare 1gb SD card which I put in. I’d like to use it as an archive of sorts for books that I want to search, but not have to see all the time. Unfortunately, there is no way to have the Kindle home screen hide the titles that are on the SD card.

The Jury Is Still Out

• My next purchase will probably be a TNIV Bible. The idea of having a Bible on here is appealing, but obviously the structure of the Bible makes it unique to navigate through. From the sample, it seems like they’ve made it pretty easy to work through with lots of links to chapters, etc. but I won’t know until I’ve had multiple chances to use it.
• There has been a lot of critique of the buttons on the side. I find that the buttons on the left side work well for me as I often just hold it in the left hand. Because the one on the right hand side is angled down, it does seem a bit awkward. Because of the way I’ve been holding it, it has worked fine so far, but I might find that I’m limited to only holding it this way which could cause some fatigue.

Last year, for Macey’s fifth birthday, one of the presents we gave her was some money to give to a microfinance loan through Kiva.org. That money was repaid in full to us a few weeks ago, so this morning, we sat down and selected a new recipient of those funds.

Macey was first interested in South America this time, but there were no business owners available in South America, so we looked at Africa. There were many choices, but Macey selected a tailor named Magdalena. Macey was excited that Magdalena makes clothes and has two children close in age to Macey and her sister Ellie. As of right now, Magdalena’s loan still needs $675 to be fully funded, so if you’d like to join in, as some friends did last time, we’d love to share in the project with you.

On a side note, we checked the site about three times since our first loan was repaid, and they had no loans available. Kiva has drawn so much interest that what loans they do post generally fill up quickly. I think that’s great and it’s exciting to see how something that makes such a big difference can be so simple to use.

This week, I finished reading The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch. With the forming of a new faith community in our near future, this will likely be one of the most important books I’ve read, and it will be one I revisit often in the next few months.

Hirsch makes a call to the church to rediscover the Apostolic Genius that helped it thrive in the first few centuries, and has been at the heart of the Chinese church. He argues that the current structure of much of the church is not poised to meet our rapidly changing culture.

As I often do, rather than spend a lot of words summarizing or reviewing, I’ll pass along some thoughts from the book I found compelling and worth thinking about. In this case, the list is a little bit longer than usual — and I cut it down quite a bit!

• The whole organism can be reproduced from one single cell. So I come to believe that every church, indeed every Christian, if truly birthed in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, has the full coding of mDNA and therefore has direct access to the power of Apostolic Genius. It is there, only the more institutional forms have simply forgotten or surpressed it, because its primal and uncontrollable nature represents danger to the institution itself — it is so different and uncontainable. (pg. 77)
• Consumerism as it is experienced in the everyday and discipleship as it is intended in the scriptures are simply at odds with each other. (pg. 110)
• Inspirational leadership can be described as a unique kind of social power that comes from the personal integration and embodiment of great ideas, as opposed to the power that comes from some form of authorization of external or structural authority like that of government, corporation, or religious institution. (pg. 117)
• If this is not already obvious by now, let me say it more explicitly: the quality of a church’s leadership is directly proportional to the quality of discipleship. If we fail in the area of making disciples, we should not be surprised if we fail in the area of leadership development. (pg. 119)
• It’s hard to critique the genuine sincerity of outreach and evangelism that aims at growing the church. In so many ways, it is right, and it feels right, and at times it has been very effective. But I have come to believe it was not the way the early church operated, and neither is it present in other genuine expressions of Apostolic Genius. (pg. 128)
• By my reading of the scriptures, ecclesiology is the most fluid of the doctrines. (pg. 143)
• All authentic apostolic ministry does this. Apostles are not just hot-headed entrepeneurs; they are also working theologians — or at least ought to be if they are genuinely apostolic. (pg. 156)
• the church in is most phenomenal form (when it genuinely manifests Apostolic Genius) organizes itself as a living organism that reflects more how God has structured life itself, as opposed to a machine, which is the artificial, inorganic alternative to a living system. (pg. 180)
• Planting a new church, or remissionalizing an existing one, in this approach isn’t primarily about buildings, worship services, sizes of congregations, and pastoral care, but rather about gearing the whole community around natural discipling friendships, worship as lifestyle, and mission in the context of everyday life. (pg. 185)
• We must constantly subject our institutions to prophetic critique, because it is the prophet, in his or her simply call to faithfulness to God alone, that is most aware of the dangers of the claims that institutions make on faith. (pg. 195)
• Adaptive leadership, on the other hand, is displayed by the type of leader who develops learning organizations and manages to help the organization transition into different forms of expression where agility, responsiveness, innovation, and entrepeneurship are needed. (pg. 255)

One of my favorite things about having a Mac is the active community of independent software developers. There are countless specialized apps out there designed to improve just about any aspect of your workflow. Some of the activity in the Mac software world this week is worth passing along.

Don’t even get me started with OmniFocus. I got a deal on the pre-release (as in free) and have been using the beta for a while. Yes, it was released this week, but it’s been in use by many for quite some time. Kudos to OmniGroup for doing such a great job of letting the user community be a part of helping make this product happen.

Last year, I raved about MacHeist. A new package was launched yesterday. Personally, I’m not as excited about it this year, but I already own the three or so applications that would be most interesting to me. But, if you are a Mac user, it’s worth checking out.

However, if I am tempted to spend money anywhere, it is on Bento — a personal database program. I already made a slick little shopping list database for my wife, and can see lots of potential uses for it. I’ll put the trial through the paces to see if it would be worthwhile for us, but I’d sure like to see some academic pricing. (ahem)

Maybe I’m a little late to the game, but I finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. I originally started reading as a result of some of the email that was making its way around urging Christians not to see The Golden Compass. The claim was that the movie was a setup to lure kids into reading the trilogy with it’s atheistic message. Most of the messages seemed rooted in second or third-hand information, so I set out to read the trilogy for myself.

Be warned that spoilers might follow. Also, just for the sake of clarity, I’ve only read the books. I haven’t read anything else, such as interviews with Philip Pullman, etc. I’m merely offering my perspective of the books as a Christian reader.

Much of the critique I’ve read claims that Pullman does not portray the church in a favorable light. That is a fair critique. I think Jason Clark characterizes it well when he states that Pullman primarily is responding to his own “caricatures of Christianity“. However, some of the ways Pullman portrays the church have been accurate in it’s history, and I would even share some of his critique. Yet I also have to recognize that any characterization of what we might call the church is going to fall short of the diversity of belief, structure, and practice that is the Christian church. As one in leadership in the church, my best response is to hear the critique that Pullman offers and evaluate how it might be true of my context and how I can respond to it.

To say that this series is an attack on God is to miss the point of the previous paragraph. Yes, the characters do set out to destroy God, but it is a God that is also a caricature of what has been portrayed by the church. The Authority, as God is called, is not a god at all, but an angel who set himself in power. Even in Pullman’s fictional universe, there is still a sense that there are greater realities than the this finite ‘God’. In the church’s desire to have certainty of that which is greater than us, we are often more guilty of confining God to our understanding rather than inviting ourselves and others into the grand mystery of God, and that is what I think Pullman reveals.

I guess the ultimate question is whether or not I would allow my own children to read these books. I would, however I don’t think they will be ready for them anytime soon. I noticed that Barnes & Noble shelves these books in a a section for 7-12 year olds, and I think that I’d likely not introduce my children to them until they are around 12 at the earliest. Besides religion, there are some dark and mature themes in the book. Though I don’t want to shelter my children, my young girls have very tender hearts that would be troubled by these stories. When and if the time comes, I would mainly be willing to let my children read them because I’ve read them as well, and could engage in conversation with them about the books and ask them questions about how they perceive the story.

As a Christian, I see no benefit in trying to silence the stories of others. Even in Pullman’s ‘anti-Christian’ work, I have been offered much to think about, and I welcome this creative expression of who he is. Yet, I believe that there is a grand story at the heart of all reality that is true. As such, I desire not to attack the stories of others, but to be the best storyteller of what I find to be true.

Last week, I took my oldest daughter to see Enchanted. Yes, it was good and we had fun, but that’s not the point.

The theater shares a parking lot with a mall, so I assumed parking would be at a premium due to the post-Christmas shopping madness. I made sure we arrived early to be in the theater with plenty of time to spare. I hate missing the previews, but that’s not the point.

One of the previews was for Prince Caspian. I had already watched the preview online, but there is something special about seeing it on the big screen. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe hadn’t quite lived up to my expectations, but it was still good and I’m looking forward to the series’ continuation. Once again…not the point.

As the preview drew to a close, my soul swelled. Something deep in me wants not only to experience great stories, but to tell them as well. As a pastor, as a Christian, I want to be one that experiences, lives, and tells a great Story. Stories hold deep beauty and truth, whether they be fiction or a retelling of actual events.

Since seeing that preview, I’ve decided that I don’t read enough fiction. I only read eight works of fiction last year; as I look back at them, I read each one because there was some kind of extra motivation to read it. It’s almost as if I’ve operated with an unspoken understanding that fiction doesn’t have a point. What a pity.

I’m not big into New Year’s resolutions, but I will make one. My nightstand is going to be a resting place for more pointless works of fiction, for more beauty and truth. I usually am reading 3-4 books at a time, and I’m adjusting my habits to always have something story related in the mix — whether a novel, or perhaps a biography or an anthology.

Hello Kite Runner.