Archive for August, 2003
how can I be trusted
Do you know me? How can you really know me? Does my sharing of my thoughts and connections for all these years here online, openly and vulnerably, give you enough to believe I’m credible (believable, trustworthy, acceptable)?? [I didn't say you have to agree with me]
I’ve encountered an interesting call recently, from an ethnic Asian [1st generation] pastor, who was inquiring about who I was. He didn’t know me, and the people he knew (and thus, trust) didn’t know me. He was checking me out to make sure that a program that I help coordinate was legit, and not some malformed cult that would lead people astray.
Okay, fair enough, he don’t know me from Adam, and apparently he doesn’t know the throngs of people that do know me. I couldn’t very well just point him to my web site (though after the conversation, I did my share of Googling and found that he does have email). Should I show him my Th.M. degree from DTS (it’s accredited), or that I know certain seminary professors? Do I need to namedrop some big name pastors? Do I recite the Apostle’s Creed, Nicene Creed, and Lord’s Prayer word-perfect? Will a personal visit be enough? Do I need to pass a theological examination?
In an emerging culture, how does someone know and trust? And can you know someone online? (I’m of the opinion that I know some people online better than some other people that I’ve met in person)
From God’s perspective, He’d look over from His throne to Jesus, and see if He knew me and if I know Him. If He doesn’t, then I’m cooked (“I’m toast!”, to quote a friend.) [cf. Matthew 7:23] How much do I have to do? How much do I have to know? How many people do I have to know?
Xanga attack
here’s why you’ve not been able to Xanga.com
Due to continued and ongoing DDOS attacks, Xanga has now been down for over 24 hours.
This is the most concerted and determined of all the attacks we have experienced. Every time we bring the site back up, our attacker will find another avenue to renew their attack. I’m sure whoever is attacking us sees this all as a game, and is having a grand old time. I don’t really get that mindset. Also, each and every one of these attacks is a felony charge.
These attacks have placed us in a classic Catch-22.
We want to share as many details as possible with our fellow Xangans
We don’t want to give information that our attacker can use against us
We have chosen to break that conflict by upgrading both our hardware and our ISP. As many of you have pointed out, it is difficult to defend a Distributed Denial of Service attack. However, there are things that you can do to greatly increase your defenses – and rest assured, we are doing every one of them.
Many of you have asked for an ETA on bringing the site back up. Here’s the deal – there’s a chance we can get the site back up tonight, at our current ISP. If that doesn’t work, then we will move the site first thing tomorrow morning and have it up by the afternoon.
We will find a way to make it up to all of you. In the meantime, our entire team is working around the clock to bring the site back up – better and stronger than ever.
Thanks for your patience,
The Xanga Team
Best practices of innovative churches
being a big fan of innovation and change (b/c no change = no growth), for the 90% of church leaders who are actually followers (but still serving in leadership positions), this new book is a nice case-study kind of a book from 2 of the leading church consultant types, Bill Easum [of easum.com] and Dave Travis [of leadnet.org] — Beyond the Box: Innovative Churches that Work – read its introduction, which can’t be found on amazon.com
what is faith and works?
Query>> Questions I have to ask myself and other people – what do we bring to
the table? is it the work of the Holy Spirit in personal study – thus we bring ourselves + a little Holy Spirit action? or do we just come as we are and then meet the Holy Spirit with nothing? Where does “works/effort” get us?
i.e. someone had said – the results you get are the direct result of how effectively your systems designed them to be.. Then is our system the issue? Where do we incorporate faith into our systems – where in a very structured society we go for a 6 sigma, a flawless, ISO “big number” quality standard?
Interested to hear your thoughts on leadership, where you find good sources of refreshing thoughts, popular agreed/disagreed thoughts
djchuang>> This is a big question, that of faith and works. Having been discipled in largely conservative evangelical contexts since college, and educated in that similar system in seminary, and trying for years to get with the program, the bias I picked up (and infused myself) was all faith and no works, prayer is all that matters, “let go and let God” was the mantra. You had to be careful that you’re doing something in the “spirit” and not the “flesh.” (whatever that means). Don’t let the worldly business practices contaminate the sacred ministry of the church. You know the drill. It bordered on guessing one another’s motives and devotional life, comparing piety, or something I don’t know what to call it.
At this point in time, how I put it all together is that God created this integrated world. Business practices are part and parcel of how the physical and organizational world works, it’s part of general revelation. Follow good principles and systems, you get corresponding results that confirm the quality of your strategic planning and assumptions.
In the work of Christian ministry as an organization, one of the working assumptions is to factor in the role of God and faith and spiritual disciplines. That would be the difference of a faith-based systems thinking organization, vs. an organization without faith.
In applying faith to a system, there is not as easy an one-to-one correspondence of how much we do in faith and what results we can expect. For example, we can’t systemically develop a ministry plan to evangelize all of [insert locality here], recruit 1000 prayer warriors for 24/7 prayer coverage for a month, and expect 1,000 conversions to “just happen” because God is supposed to respond to our diligence in prayer.
It bothers me that some people put up a dichotomy of church being an organism vs. organization; it’s BOTH. It’s both organism and organization, it’s both faith and works. And this both/and is one of my attractions to the postmodern ethos.
My sources for inspiration: reading blogs, and trading readings lists with Gid.
new book on the horizon
Jordon scooped this new book release from Spencer Burke, Making Sense of Church, which if I’m reading it correctly, is largely comprised of the message board discussions from TheOOZE, where I’m at best an irregular conversationalist. I like it that he’s releasing the content online in an approximate weekly basis, behind schedule if you actually check each chapter, and then it hits the presses like in September. I think it’s a great way to get the message out, and not be bound to the publication industry, where a neophyte author might get what 25 cents per book sold?
By distributing the content online, I think what the author does is highlight the essential threads so we online readers don’t have to wade through hundreds of messages + work thru the signal-to-noise ratio to find the “good stuff”, and then by distributing the content in print, it will invite new people to the conversation.
And with this yet-another book on the emerging church, on the one hand rehashing conversations that’s already surfaced 2-3 years ago, but there are so many more who are just getting introduced to it. (or resisting it)
Many others books are on the docket and/or have been released in the past few months, as I browse the amazon.com catalog, and frankly, I can’t keep up (and don’t want to spend my $$s) on getting every single title. (as an aside, skimmed Kimball’s The Emerging Church, and it was a case in point that he wasn’t saying anything “new”, BUT that book is a nice handy reference manual to doing church differently). My wish to actually get into those conversations in person instead of reading about it, and pining away for innovative churches that I only get to visit here and there a few times a year.
I’ll be making my pilgrimage end of this month to Spencer’s beach shack (aka garage), and we’ll have some great dialogue in person.