Tag Archive for 'emerging church'Page 3 of 20

mobile update: full disclosure

Published
by
michael lee
on 14 June 2007
in art and culture, emerging church, mobile blogging, philosophy and technology
. 9 Comments

mobile update: full disclosure

I think that this whole thing, this whole twitter, last.fm, myspace, xanga, podcast, youtube, meebo, friendster, del.icio.us, icq, instant messenger, wordpress, flickr, mobile blogging, stickam, facebook thing is all really just about one thing.

The search for social connection is the search for meaning.

Pick a person 15 to 25 years old. Anywhere in the country, any city, any school. It doesn’t matter if you know them or not. You can find their favorite movies, what books they’ve read, who they’re dating, where they live, what music they’re listening to, how they did in their classes this semester, what major they’re thinking of taking next, what they did over spring break (with pictures!) their room number, their cell-phone number, and most of the time, exactly where they are and what they’re doing right now. Right. Now. Does that sound creepy? It should sound creepy.

You don’t have to go looking; they’re already broadcasting it for you. They’ve put it all down in easily scannable, pre-formatted columns. You can get it delivered to your morning email. It’s a flood of full disclosure, a blow by blow account of every single thing that happens, every single day.

They update facebook every 15 minutes with accounts of what they’re doing. They text their twitter account with book titles and bowel movements. They stare into a tiny webcam, and openly divulge the intimate details of friends and lovers. Then they upload it to a server, where the link gets passed around faster than a business card and a fake lunch invitation at NAMM.

The flood of self-disclosure is epic.

This is what I think. We took away the meta-narratives, the structures that gave significance to the mundane actions of life. We told them that there was no reliable test for truth, and they believed us. We told them that good and bad had no meaning apart from what we decided they should mean, and they believed us. We told them that the dust between their fingers was the end of the world, the full substance of reality, and even though they knew it had to be a lie, they believed it. We stripped away everything that gave purpose, structure, dignity, and value to life, and left them nothing but doubt. They are grasping for meaning in a world where we have left them none.

And they, and we, all of us, found ourselves on Descartes stoop, listening to him lecture on the one true thing; if everything else is false, if the world and its tenants are the elaborate deceits of a cruel demon, then one true thing would still remain. Cogito ergo sum,

“I ponder. I exist.”

And we fling this one true thing out into the world, to listen for echoes. We strain to hear the shouts of others in this dark wood, to find comfort in the fact that, if we are lost, we are at least lost together. We spit out the running dialog of our ponderings, because they are the only evidence we have that something real exists.

And every time someone hears, and responds, that ephemeral tendril is drawn between us, between the thinker and the listener, and it gives meaning to both. The connection is meaning. We may not know what is true, or good, or real, we may doubt everything and anything, we may doubt even the words that we hear from the person we listen to, but the meaning isn’t in the words. It’s in the speaking and hearing. The connection is the meaning. The validation of existence is the meaning. Thin, fleeting, fragile, impossible to parse, yet it is still meaning.

Because it is so thin, and so fleeting, it takes quite a lot of it to matter.

William H. Auden was one of the great poets of the last century, maybe one of the greatest poets of the English language who ever wrote. In his poem “September 1, 1939“, written on the occasion of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Auden writes about the futility of modern life, in its relentless and ever-failing pursuit of meaning.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

In this same poem, Auden asperses love as a great deceit, saying that it is not enough for a person to be loved; what a person really wants it to be the only person loved. To be at the center of the connecting tendrils of meaning. To fling every act of disclosure out into the world, and to have it lauded and embraced, and not only that, but to be lauded and embraced while everyone else is ignored. If love is the escape from the meaningless existence, then it cannot be the kind of vacuous, self-embracing love borne out by massive self-disclosure.

What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

But Auden holds out some hope. He hangs it on two words. The search for meaning ends in despair if the the goal is to be “loved alone”. If existence is to have meaning, it can’t be because of a flood of disclosure, or the apoplectic grasping of echoes to the exclusion of others. Instead,

We must love one another, or die.

Very Advanced

Published
by
michael lee
on 8 May 2007
in emerging church, geek and technology
. 9 Comments

We just gave Sophia her first computer.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Michael, your daughter is clearly very advanced, a tribute to her Mother’s fine genetic material and persistent tutelage; why on earth did you wait until she was almost 2 years old to provide her with her own laptop?”

An excellent question, one that is easily answered - we were waiting for someone to give us one for free.

I was foraging through a back closet in the music office last week, and pulled out a dusty old Dell laptop that had clearly gone unused for a very long time. Donna, the office administrator, said, “Take it! The thing is so riddled with viruses and spyware that we can’t even get it to boot up anymore. Just make sure you use it for something School of Music related.” If anyone asks, we’re using it as a tutoring tool for a future School of Music student.

I got it home, and it turned out that the computer only had one virus on it. I immediately set about uninstalling the offending software, and replacing it with something more suitable for use by human beings.

edubuntu

I installed a free operating system on it, a version of Linux called edubuntu. It’s part of the Ubuntu project; a group of programmers who are working to make Linux just as easy to install and use as Windows or OSX.  Based on my experience, they’ve nailed it! Installing edubuntu took exactly 4 steps. I downloaded a disk image from their server, burned it to a CD, popped it in the drive of the Dell, and powered up. From there, the installation was almost identical to what you would experience if you were installing XP or OSX. A series of splash screens popped open, asking you if you wanted to run edubuntu side-by-side with XP, or if you wanted to completely reformat the hard-drive and start over. I decided to keep XP on the drive, just in case I ever needed it … like, if I was ever curious to know what a computer virus looked like, or something like that. Because I have no experience with anything like that. You know. Because I use a Mac. And Macs don’t have …. ok, now even I’m sick of it.

It took about 30 minutes to install, and this is on an old laptop with 256 MB of RAM. The great thing about the installation, and this was the big problem with Linux that the Ubuntu folks have solved beautifully,  is that it comes with default drivers for almost any computer configuration. You pop in just the single disk, it searches out what hardware you have on your computer, and automatically installs the correct drivers to make it work.

So, by that evening, my daughter had her first computer setup and running. Linux makes it very simple to control what individual users are allowed to do with the computer, so her user account has no internet access at all, and no ability to delete any files on the computer.

Edubuntu comes pre-installed with a whole suite of educational games. The simplest ones are just about at her level - hit a letter on the keyboard, it pops up with a flashcard of the letter, says it out loud, along with something that starts with that letter. “A - Angelfish!” and “K - Kangaroo!” are her favorites. From there, it goes all the way up to a full Office clone - word processing, powerpoint, spreadsheets, anything she would need to write her 8th-grade thesis on the viability of quantum position biasing at non-zero temperatures.

All free. Free as in speech. Free as in beer. That’s the amazing thing about all of this - the open-source movement has managed to thrive by replacing profit motive with community motive. Every piece of software that is running on my daughter’s new computer, from the basic drivers to the operating system to the educational games, was written by someone, and then released free into the wild. They have no expectation of making any money from my use of their software. Not only that, but they’ve invested time into making sure that non-geeky people can actually use it. You don’t have to be an initiate into the Cult of the Compiler in order to benefit from their work.

There are some serious implications here for the emerging church, I think. Somebody should get around to writing that post.

Sophia now walks around the house pointing to all the laptops, saying “Daddy ‘puter, Momma ‘puter, Phia ‘puter!” usually followed by a hands-up “Hooray!”  I love that my daughter’s first experience with computers will be with open-source. I love that she will grow up thinking that Linux is a real, viable option. I love that she has a laptop that she can make her own, and if she spills juice on it, no harm no foul. And I love that at 22 months, she knows which button to push to make the computer say “Kangaroo!”

The Words of Institution

Published
by
michael lee
on 11 April 2007
in church and faith and theology
. 13 Comments

I’m in the middle of reading 1 Corinthians right now for The Bible Podcast. This morning I recorded myself reading 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul smacks the church in Corinth upside the head for their mishandling of, well, pretty much everything. But in this chapter, mostly communion.

It’s the chapter that the famous “Words of Institution” come from …

The Lord Jesus, on the night in which he was betrayed took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, every time you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

For every time you eat this bread, and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In the middle of recording myself reading that chapter, I had a sudden vivid memory of the last time I had said those words out loud.

Our pastor Doug was out of town, it was toward the end of summer, I think, and he had asked me to preach. It wasn’t the first time I had given the message, but it was the first time that it had landed on Communion Sunday, which we celebrate on the first Sunday of every month.

I come from the low church tradition, Baptist and later Evangelical Free. We didn’t have much in the way of ritual, or liturgy. We believed strongly in the priesthood of all believers, in the personal dimension of each person’s relationship with Christ, in the primacy of the preached word, and our corporate worship was constructed along those lines. We celebrated baptisms with great fervor, because baptism meant conversion. We observed communion, but it seemed more out of obligation than any great sense of purpose or meaning.

That might be too harsh. Let me leave it this way - we were never taught to understand the value of ritual itself, how to find meaning in the repetition of words or actions.

When Pope John Paul II died, the funeral was televised live in the middle of the night here in LA. I was just coming home from a gig, and flipped on the TV to unwind. I watched, transfixed, as the BBC newsperson explained the meaning of every movement, every word, each act in the unfolding drama. Everything had purpose, everything was a symbol and a reenactment. As the choir sang songs composed 800 years ago, as the cardinals recited prayers written 1600 years ago, I had a profound sense of standing in the stream of history.

I had been raised in a tradition that viewed ritual as “dead acts”, a lifeless repetition of habit in the place of real worship, by people who didn’t have the Holy Spirit in them. But there was nothing lifeless about what I saw that night. It was made alive in the people who reenacted it, step for step. It had the breath of the Holy Spirit in it, from first note to final prayer.

I watched the whole thing. When I finally shut off the TV and crawled into bed, I lay awake for a while, thinking about what it means to be connected to 2,000 years of Christ’s People.

Rituals are reenactments of the sacred themes of life. Placing the ring on the finger, going under the water, eating the bread and wine, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed, they are all reenactments of true themes.

And in each ritual, there is a part to play. The bride and groom play the roles of Christ and Church, the child in soaking white robes is Good Friday and Easter, the leader and the congregation reciting the creeds become Prophet and Israel.

And on Sunday morning, when I raised the bread, and broke it, and spoke out loud the words of institution, “This is my body, and it is for you,” I become suddenly, manifestly aware of my role in the ritual.

It is Christ who lifts bread, and breaks it. It is Christ who drinks the wine. It is Christ who feeds his people, and who proclaims their unity. And in this reenactment, this remembrance, I was standing in his place for that congregation, that day, in that place.

The words caught in my throat that morning. I’m glad that they did. I would not like to be the sort of person who suddenly pictures himself in Christ’s sandals, and keeps right on going. The words caught in my throat, and I felt tears gathering in my eyes. I felt the crushing weight of my own dark soul, made evident in the glare of that moment.

It can be a beautiful thing to have such clarity right before you eat at the Lord’s table.

stained glass communionI finished the words of institution, and the elders distributed the bread and cup throughout the congregation. They returned, and knelt on the front step of the platform to receive their own portion. I handed bread and wine to these men and women, years ahead of me in faith and dignity, any one of whom would have been a more fitting representative of Christ that morning.

But the ritual doesn’t depend on the worth of the players. The proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection, the power of grace, the unity of all believers, these are the beautiful truths that the ritual proclaims. Maybe it’s better to have someone in the role at the head of the table who no one would mistake for the real thing.

And so, when I ate the bread, and when I drank the cup, the entire congregation did too. And I was with them, again, eating at the same table, receiving the same grace.

That morning, as I moved through the scenes of the play, and followed the motions, as I spoke the words of Christ by way of Paul, and played the part of Christ to his people in that place, I was doing two things.

I was remembering Christ.

And I was remembering his people, that great cloud of witnesses who, for 2000 years, have used this ritual to make present the mystery of grace.

Easter Opening 2007

Published
by
michael lee
on 7 April 2007
in art and culture, church, emerging church, faith and theology and technology
. 6 Comments

As per Paul’s request, here’s the full audio and video for the opening of our Easter service.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Happy Easter, everyone. Go find some joy today.

A blog post that I will title, but will not write, offered freely for you to use.

Published
by
michael lee
on 25 March 2007
in art and culture, emerging church, faith and theology and geek
. 12 Comments

“Linux and the Emerging Church: how decentralized authority, high-identity communities, and counter-culture cache led to the mainstreaming of formerly subversive alternatives.”