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Emerging Churches, the book I wrote with Eddie Gibbs in 2005, was just translated into Korean! Here is an English version of the Korean web page and, here is a blown up picture. How cool is that? I really love the cover.

In talking with young Korean leaders this summer, I found out there may be up to twenty emerging churches in Seoul, all younger than two years old. Very exciting stuff.

Saatchi and Saatchi are moving from green to blue. They feel that green is a focus on the environment while blue connects that environment to people. Green focuses on the huge problems, but neglects the resources that might provide the solutions, i.e. people (blue).  Green remains pretty abstract; but blue connects the environment to people, making those same issues concrete and real. Green makes you choose environment over people, but blue helps you say ‘yes’ to both. Blue builds on green but takes it in a new direction. Here are some of their first thoughts on changes:

As I read this, I thought about the Christian faith — do churches have a color? Is it our task to come up with another color, as Saatchi and Saatchi has done, or is our task to work with the colors already there, the greens, the blues, and make them brighter — or maybe darker in places? Or maybe we create some sort of hybrid color? Or rainbows?

What are your thoughts — does the church have a color?

I don’t consider myself a liberal, or a conservative, or even a middle of the road type of person. Although others may categorize me as white, evangelical, and male, I am first and foremost (I hope) a follower of Jesus. When I make big decisions, I try to root my decisions in how I understand Jesus to have lived. I don’t believe in the divisions that create some issues to be moral or personal or ethical or secular. I believe all of life is to be lived spiritually, and life is most fruitful if we look to Jesus in all things — not just ‘religious things’ . Basing my decisions on him may put me in different camps, depending on the time and context in which I live. In the past, I’ve voted Republican, I’ve voted Democrat, and I’ve not voted out of Christian convictions. I’ve considered these three options for this election as well. For the following reasons, I decided to vote for Obama on Tuesday:

1) The poor will be better off with Obama. I believe this to be the first question we must ask of a candidate. Jesus promised a jubilee to his followers. He created a community that shared generously with one another. For a Christian to support a candidate, that candidate must look to create a system that resembles this community of sharing. I don’t call it “socialism” — I call it gospel…

2) Blessed are the peacemakers — we must support people who strive for peace. And Jesus was not saying use the sword to achieve peace — it was ‘use the means of peace to achieve the ends of peace’ (why would he say ‘love your enemies in the same Sermon?). I believe Obama seeks to end the war. I’ve been concerned by the strong military talk by both candidates. However, I think Obama is taking a more direct route to peace. We must support the peacemakers to align ourselves with the Sermon on the Mount.

3) I believe Obama will begin to repair the damage done in our relationships with other countries. I believe he will look to bring reconciliation where there are divisions. In Christian baptism, the two peoples, Jews and Gentiles, become one. The body of Christ, made up of many members from many races, is to be one. It is at the heart of our faith that we overcome our divisions while celebrating our differences. For a candidate to receive the Christian vote, he or she must seek to do likewise. In the United States, I believe that Obama will be a force in healing the racial divide in our country. It is a huge task, and we might not get very far, but I think he will move us in the right direction.

4) I believe Obama will bring other voices to the table. Jesus spent time with the outcasts and sinners shut out from the main halls of power. I believe a candidate, to get the Christian vote, must create a space to hear other voices. I believe Obama himself is one of these other voices. In addition, we need to talk to those who hate us, and we need to know why. I believe Obama will do this in foreign policy — and I believe he will do it here in the US.

5) We are to be better stewards of creation. Right now, it appears we’ve damaged the way the earth is to function through driving our cars and consuming so much of our natural resources. We need to move in the direction of better stewardship of creation as we honor God’s gifts to us. I believe Obama has a better plan to move to alternative fuels and energy than does John McCain. I believe, after 9-11, we should have pushed for energy independence for many of our families through tax breaks for solar panels on houses.

For these five reasons, I’m casting my vote for Obama on Tuesday…

A while back, Andrew Jones noted the significance of the DailyKos. For the last week or so, I have compared the political/social/religious change strategy of Jesus, in his context, with dailykos founder Marcos Zuniga’s strategy in Taking on the System. My hope is to create a hybrid of the two — to see what Jesus-like social engagement might look like in 2008. In this 3rd installment of Jesus and Kos (part 1, part 2), I look at mobilization strategy.

Zuniga discusses the need to take charge and create a group of followers who exist outside the media and political establishment. He exhorts activists to raise up an army of volunteers who, although newbies at first, become experts as they participate in change. He encourages activists to go ahead without authorization — to not wait for the experts (the gatekeepers). These political change movements create alternative sources of information that come from the margins — the unauthorized. These bloggers do not possess the sanctioned qualifications to write or speak — they lack degrees or the right kind of experience. The expert gatekeepers get very upset about these boundaries breaking down, because the experts’ great influence depends on limiting those who are considered to be credible. Zuniga encourages activists to ignore them. Respect comes to those who create great content, not to those who have all the extra letters after their name. Finally, in this Chapter 2 — he writes that collaboration is key – networking with those who share similar passions.

Jesus created a movement outside the halls of power in Jerusalem. He was not a rabbi or official leader or any kind — he probably was a carpenter. He asked people to follow him, to join him in the movement. He did not wait to get approval; he created an alternative movement, unsanctioned by political/religious authorities. The gatekeepers became very frustrated by Jesus bypassing them — if people could be forgiven on the periphery, who needed the temple? To his hearers, Jesus taught as one with authority and not like the other religious leaders. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have the proper schooling — his message of the kingdom of God captivated his hearers. Like John the Baptists’ movement (a related network?), Jesus’ activities in Palestine engaged the populace and ignited a movement of political, religious, and social change.

How do we mashup these two mobilization strategies? Here goes: 21st century Jesus-followers must consider participating in a network of bloggers who exist outside the typical church, media, and political structures. These unauthorized writers, who have no seminary, media, or political credentials, create great content about God’s dream for people (the kingdom), both inside and outside the church. The message and the movement of these bloggers may frighten the gatekeepers, because gatekeepers form their identity around the idea that they,  and not these upstart bloggers, speak for God.

Although these new forms of community may not resemble anything like a congregation, is it possible we may be seeing a new form of religious structure emerging?

From Harvard Business this month, Vineet Nayar wrote that it is time to invert the management pyramid. In this article he cites how management was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing command and control structures within organizations. Over the last century, cultural change drove new ways to innovate in organizations, most frequently through collaboration and teamwork. However, organizations still kept the classic management structures, which worked against innovative processes.

In our churches, similar changes have occurred. We’ve inherited management structures that were introduced to our tradition fifty or more years ago. In our day-to-day lives together as a church community, we assume a command/control structure is the way to get things done. However, the culture has moved on — one person cannot, within their person, have all the tools to direct an organization in an informed and intelligent manner. Likewise, our churches falter when it is the pastor who is assumed to do most of the ministry and leading. It does not need to be this way. Within most church traditions, appeals can be made to move towards a collective priesthood, one where a variety of gifts might lead and inspire the community at different levels. The pastor must shift his/her role towards one that creates space for the people to take center stage.

Nayar asks the hard questions, ones we must pose to the churches: “Do we have the humility to step out of our egos and hand over the mike to our subordinates? Do we possess the courage to unstructure an existing, rigid regime that we have known to work in the past?” Do churches possess the humility and courage Nayar talks about? I think many of our churches do, and now is the time to change.

For more thoughts on this topic, check out this post over at Subversive Influence…

Wow — saw this yesterday. A woman, who had married a guy in “Maple Story” (an online virtual world similar to SecondLife), got angry and killed his avatar (online persona) after he divorced her in the virtual world. He reported his tragedy to police and they arrested her yesterday in Japan. For murder? No — but for illegally hacking a computer. As Manuel Castells said many years ago — it isn’t virtual reality, but real virtuality.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_avatar_murder

I had the opportunity to meet with a delightful group of Fuller grads from the early 1990s. About fifteen in number, these men and women serve as PCUSA pastors and once each year they get back together. I was invited to come and chat with them about my research interests. We had a great back and forth and the two hours went by really quickly — lots of laughter throughout. I spoke on the nine patterns of emerging churches. We talked about how the emerging practices are flowing into the denominational systems as a renewal movement. We talked a bit about the move of the church into new forms of social media. A rich time…

In this part 2 of a mashup involving a read of Taking on the System by Markos Zuniga and the life of Jesus, we look at how to interact with gatekeepers. For Zuniga, social change process focuses on changing the conventional wisdom of a particular culture. If you shift conventional wisdom, then change will occur. From part 1, we saw that gatekeepers are those in the media and politics to whom we need to get approval in order to have a voice, to influence the conventional wisdom. Without approval of the gatekeeper, it is normally thought, social change cannot occur.

Who were the gatekeepers in Jesus time? It was those in religious/political leadership in Jerusalem. They guarded access to the temple, and they were able to declare who were legitimate members of the people of God and who were not. Jesus spent time with those who were considered outcasts, rebels, and sinners. These were those who were excluded from the promises of God.

So, what are our options regarding the gatekeepers today? Kos says we can bypass them, crush them, or influence them. Bypassers are those who self-publish their work, either in print media, music, or film. These artists let the media giants know they can do it without them. This scares the media gatekeepers and in many instances they quickly change their tune. Crushers are those that create an alternative to the media source and thus destroy the gatekeeper’s popularity or significance. Influencers are those who threaten the media outlet with irrelevancy. The media outlet must change or lose its market share. These three approaches in engaging the gatekeeper are similar and overlap a bit — they vary in the directness of their approach. What they share is pushing at the media gatekeeper’s fear of becoming redundant.

In a similar way, Jesus utilized these approaches in Palestine. He bypassed the gatekeepers — there were those who were sanctioned to offer forgiveness, to say who was “in” and who was “out”. By granting forgiveness to the outcasts on the periphery of society, who lived outside the religious establishment, Jesus rendered the temple irrelevant. By redrawing these social boundaries, political control passed from the religious establishment to Jesus. Jesus also crushed the gatekeepers — he turned over the tables in the temple as a direct action against the gatekeepers. He exposed, to all who were there, what the temple had become. He offered, in his person, another way. He also influenced the gatekeepers, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. For the most part, however, when we look at the social/political/religious movement of Jesus, the gatekeepers were bypassed. Jesus created a community that no longer required the blessing of those who held religious and political power.

To perform the mashup we must add another element to the puzzle. In Jesus’ day, religion and politics were one. The political leaders were the religious leaders and vice-versa. Today, they are separate. In order to envision what missional engagement for communities connected through social media might look like, we must engage the religious gatekeepers as well. With that in mind, here is a try at a mashup:

Jesus-following bloggers must change the conventional wisdom of the church and the media through creating an alternative message to the status quo of church and culture. As they connect online, they facilitate conversations that threaten to bypass the gatekeepers of traditional church structures. They also create their own media, i.e. writings, music, video, thereby threatening to bypass the media conglomerates as well. In addition, they push the culture to reconsider the practices that do not mesh with the dreams of God for humanity (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) – e.g the activities in society that disenfranchise people. In the end, these bloggers do not have the power on their own to be the “church”, to be the source of all their own media, or to create acts of justice. However, they can push both the church and the culture to listen to what they have to say and move the conversation and practices into more inclusive, just, participatory, and egalitarian directions. In turn, this will transform the conventional wisdom on what it means to follow Jesus.

More to come…

Today I’ll be liveblogging The Future of Global Theology event at Fuller Theological Seminary. It coincides with the public launch of the Dictionary of Global Theology edited by William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, with Simon Chan and Juan Martínez serving as associate editors. It will begin at 11:00am PST and conclude at 2:30pm.

Please join us — feel free to ask questions as the proceedings go along…

UPDATE:

My deepest apologies — the room where the event was held had NO internet — wired or wireless. Wow. I had absolutely no idea of this beforehand. Again, I’m sorry and frankly embarrassed about how this transpired. If I can get a hold of some transcripts — my notes were sketchy because I was looking endlessly for web access – I’ll post them.