I had the delight of meeting Tom and Christine Sine at their Seattle home on Monday. They're both terrific people, and a real delight to be around - gracious and hospitable. We were mainly just meeting for the first time, but we spent some time talking about Tom's new book, due out in early spring, called The New Conspirators.

Related to the book release, Mustard Seed Associates is putting on a really great looking conference by the same name. It'll be Feb. 28-Mar. 1, 2008. They've assembled a really terrific lineup of speakers, from diverse backgrounds and experiences.





Check it out . . . and stay tuned here. We may try to throw together a little shindig at The Purple Door after the conference.

Labels: conference, friends, Seattle

Wow, this has been a heavy set of days for me. Having come off of two conferences last weekend (one of which involved around 12 hours of driving round trip to attend), I've had a heavy school project working - hard work on structuring my dissertation and outlines. Much frustration here. I know the work will pay off, but oi! It's funny, because words and writing and ideas have always been pretty easy for me, but there have been multiple moments this week where I've felt the same as I did in my college chemistry classes - completely stuck. I'm making small breakthroughs, so no worries. I'm just whining.

In better news, we had another teach-in with inter::mission last night. Good times. I made enchiladas, guacamole, and some cinnamon tortilla chips. Tasty, if I must say so myself. Mike Gunn, pastor of Harambee Church in Renton, WA joined us for a discussion of gospel and culture. I really enjoyed that a lot. Mike is skillful at reading culture, as evidenced by his movie reviews over on Hollywood Jesus. His approach to culture is in the tradition of Lesslie Newbigin. He also made reference to Kevin Vanhoozer's book, Everyday Theology . . . though that mention made me sad, as that book has been sitting unread on my desk for the past two or three months . . . even now, it's only about thirteenpointfive inches away from my left elbow, mocking me, taunting me, daring me to lay aside the piles of school books I'm already delinquent on . . . but I digress. Mike hammered the Christian ghetto culture more than the culture of the bigbaduglyworld, which is a no brainer for some of us, but a stunningly new approach for many. All in all, it was another stellar evening at The Purple Door, and another signal that we're continuing to move in a quality direction.

Labels: conference, culture, inter::mission, school, the purple door

On days like today, I haul my tired butt out of bed, and at some point look at myself in the mirror and say, "Dude, you're looking old." Typically, I'm more oriented toward "feeling as old as I think," which is to say, fairly young.

Happily I can say on this Monday morning that I'm tired from having had a weekend of seeing good friends. I spent Thursday evening and Friday morning/early afternoon at the Off The Map Live event. Got to at least touch base with a number of friends and acquaintances that I only see at events like that. It would have been really good to be there longer and relax a little with some friends. But I had to jump in my car with a couple of my younger friends (a.k.a. my staff team) and drive many hours through the dark of night to get to eastern Oregon. We were attending the Northwest Collegiate Ministries fall conference. I'm grateful to have some fun, good hearted, and adventurous people - the road trip was good. Being at the conference was good, too - I respect and enjoy my counterparts in ministry, and I don't get to catch up with them often enough.

At the conference, we had Lauren Winner come and talk through her book, Real Sex. I've not read the book, but I definitely appreciated her perspectives. She debunks many myths we hear in the church about sex, and does so in an intelligent way.

Yesterday afternoon it was back in the car for the road trip home. It's good to be back.

So, while I didn't have my favorite person in the world with me, I had a tiring weekend of rich relationships, all of which I'm thankful for. I would have name dropped specifically who I'm talking about, but I'm too lazy to link them all here. A younger version of me would have done a better job at this.

Labels: campus ministry, conference, friends, travel

It's becoming a sort of default calendar item for me, but it's the first weekend of November, which must mean I'll be at the Off The Map event, this year codenamed Hear, Listen, Connect. I've been so cranking busy over the past few months that I've not had the time to be as involved in some of the behind the scenes stuff as in previous years, but I still love going to these things - mainly for the people I get to see. I won't be able to stay for the whole conference, but I'm sure it'll be fun. I'll definitely miss seeing some friends that aren't making the trip this year, though.

Labels: conference, Seattle

I spent the past few days in the land of paradoxy. I was at a retreat for my colleagues in Northwest Collegiate Ministries - folks from all over Oregon, Washington, and Northern Idaho. The topic of the retreat was Sabbath . . . which sounded ever so refreshing to me. Unfortunately, because I don't get a chance to see my friends in ministry that frequently, I stayed up way too late, and got way too tired . . . quite un-Sabbath-like! But hey, at least it took place just in front of a three day holiday weekend, right? Sabbath time indeed!

The presentations given by my boss-man, and good friend Wes and his wife Charlene were really terrific. It wasn't just about convincing us that it's good to take a day off - they actually did a terrific job of making it real for people. In particular, I was pleased with how they integrated personality types into the discussion.

At one point, Charlene talked about how inconsistent and hypocritical we are when it comes to the 10 Commandments. We place great importance on the marital fidelity thing and the coveting thing (which is, of course, good), but we very regularly totally dismiss the Sabbath rhythms that remind us that we're finite, and most assuredly NOT God.

I am going to make strong efforts at developing a workable Sabbath rhythm. It'll be hard, I know. But what a great place to start in being counter-culture in our workaholic, consumeristic culture.

Labels: conference, sabbath

At the conference I attended at University of Aarhus last week, I very quickly noticed that I was the only person there that didn't have some sort of affiliation with some form of the Lutheran church. There were faculty members from a few "public" universities in Denmark and Sweden, but by virtue of these countries having state-endorsed churches, they're connected. Also, a couple of participants were there from the Lutheran World Federation mothership in Geneva.

I had one very interesting discussion over lunch with a couple of professors - one of whom has served at very high levels in the World Council of Churches. I was asked about the nature of the emerging church movement in North America, so we talked about that for a while. We also talked about the degree to which this kind of a renewal movement would be possible/likely within the Scandinavian context. They didn't give the emerging church much of a shot at bringing about renewal - at least not within the state church. In large part, they said, it's because if you start messing around with the ways they do church, you're literally messing around with the ways they do citizenship in the country. Wow - very different. Interestingly (frighteningly?), one comment was made to the effect of, "You can deny the resurrection of Jesus, deny the virgin birth, deny the Trinity, but don't you dare mess with baptism because that's how citizenship is sealed."

Is it any wonder that while everyone "belongs" to the church, virtually nobody shows up? Not to these professors. They're in an interesting position, though - they are not officially employed by the church, so they don't fear for the loss of their jobs, and yet they're able to make some critiques based on their observations.

I actually do have a bit more hope for the emerging church viability than my learned friends. Mainly because of the decidedly non-Christendom approach that the emerging church ethos involves. It won't require or significantly involve the state church to make it work. Tony Jones' recent trip to Scandinavia is a good example of some connections being made.

Within the context of a conference discussing the church in the global south and east, it's more than a little ironic to me that the theological conversation is still very Euro-American centric, despite the fact that the church is far more alive in the south and east than in the west. It's validated some of the directions of my doctoral work, but also potentially significantly shifted the practical focus of my work. I'm still chewing on some thoughts in that regard, but maybe I'll put some sentences together here in the days to come.

Labels: Christendom, conference, culture, emerging church, travel

I think it's because my trip was so short that I never adjusted fully to the time shift, but I slept very poorly while in Denmark - average of about 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep. So I did a bit of Danish/German TV channel surfing. I watched a fair bit of CNN Europe (or whatever they call it). Anyway, this "world" news was extremely U.S.-centric. I wasn't that surprised about it, but there were a couple of times where I thought, "Why do people in Denmark or Sweden or Germany need to know about an anti-meth ad campaign in Montana?" The funny thing was that there were all these U.S. news stories, with a few world (as in non-Iraq) stories mixed in . . . and then they went to the sports update. Rugby, soccer, cricket, sailing, formula one car racing . . . and one quick Kobe-Bryant-had-a-big-game basketball highlight. I think there was a gold update too. So the "world" aspect of CNN's coverage appears to primarily concern sports. Apparently Europeans don't care about regular local news, just sports.

In a somewhat related story, while I was at the conference in Aarhus, one of the speakers was from Nigeria. After he presented his paper, during a Q&A time, someone made mention of Western political and media influence - he responded to the question, but made an aside reference that woke me up: "Much of the time when it comes to how evangelicalism is presented in Africa, it is assumed that George Bush speaks for the evangelical church." Well, now, that's a bit of a problem, isn't it? Regardless of how you personally feel about this prez and his performance, it's jarring to hear that he's assumed to be speaking not just for the U.S. government, or the people of the U.S., but for mainstream Christianity in the U.S. Apparently Christendom is alive and well. We have far to go.

Labels: conference, culture, travel

Well, I'm back home after a few days away in Denmark. It was a good trip, but too short and too lonely (in other words, I wish Michelle had been able to go with me). I went to a conference on Church, Religion, and Politics in the Global South - it was a school related thing for me. Basically, I was looking for a conference to go to, and this came up on an internet search, and when I looked into it, I found a phenomenal price for a nonstop flight from Seattle to Copenhagen. So, I went to this thing in Denmark for less money than I would have paid to go to a conference in Los Angeles or Atlanta or Boston. Cool deal. The conference was held at the University of Aarhus - a very large school about 3 hours by train from Copenhagen. Aarhus is a great little city - full of life and energy.

The conference was good - highly academic (all of the speakers who gave presentations read their papers) and helpful. Not exactly compelling, life change oriented stuff, but again, from an academic standpoint, it was very helpful to me in my research. Plus, I got to be with some very smart, gracious, and interesting people. And now it's time for a little name dropping. I got to share lunch and conversation with THE Viggo Mortensen. No, no, not the actor, the highly regarded missiologist.

I was able to spend two nights in Aarhus and two nights in Copenhagen after the conference. I've got several items of reflection and commentary on this trip, most of which are random and unrelated to each other. So, I'll post a few times over the next few days and process some of my observations and things I found interesting.

Labels: conference, missiology, school, travel