Community

Yesterday our church experienced a great example of Christian community.

One of our church members has been in the process of re-roofing his house. Sunday night there was only a 20% chance of rain in the forecast, but if you are from around the Tulsa area you know that 20% quickly turned into what a friend of mine used to call a “toad strangler.” At about 3AM water started to drip from the ceiling in several places inside the house. One of those places was directly above where my daughter and one of theirs were sleeping. Soon the ceiling gave in to the weight of the rain-soaked insulation in several places and it wasn’t long before the whole house was a mess. I found out when my wife went to pick our daughter up in the morning.

By 10:30 AM we had people from the church showing up to help out in whatever way they could. In all there were more than 25 people, from youth on up, who came to help clean up the inside and finish roofing the back section of the house. It was a tremendous outpouring of help. At one point I told someone that it felt like an Amish barn raising with power tools. On their day off they volunteered their time and energy to help their brothers and sisters in need.

I just wanted to write this in celebration of Christ at work through his people in a dedicated, self-sacrificing way. Thank you Faith Baptist Church!

Picture This

These are some photos from the Sapulpa Junior Olympics recently. This first one is Victor in the football throw.

This is Jessica in the long jump.

Originally uploaded by plittleton

Perplexed

There’s a question I’ve had for some time now.  I’ve asked this question on other blogs and have never received an answer of any kind.  Perhaps you, dear reader, would like to take a stab at it.  [By the way, this isn’t one of those “set up” questions.  You know, the kind where I already have an answer and I’m just asking you so that I can pounce on your wrong answer if you give one.  I hate those kind of questions.  This is an honest one.]

It’s specifically a “Baptist” question, but even if you’re not Baptist and you have a perspective I hope you’ll share it.  Let me begin with some background. Read more

Picture This

Bengal

Old Man Monkey

King and Queen

Originally uploaded by plittleton

Some recent pics from a day at the zoo with my son’s first grade class.

Slap It, Son

Busy-ness

Posting has been light because things have been hopping busy for me lately. I’ve been on field trips to the Tulsa Zoo with my son, to the Omniplex (I can’t get their url to work right now, but it is www.omniplex.org) with my oldest daughter, had a funeral service and I’ve enrolled in an online course through Northern Seminary for the summer, so I’ve been flying around trying to get through the admission process and enrolled in the class.

The class is Readings in Postmodern Philosophy/Theology led by David Fitch, and it looks like it’s going to be goooo-ood.

Psalm 137 For The Year 2010

Alan Roxburgh shares this poem that was written by a participant at a conference he was leading a few years ago.

137 For 2010

In the midst of this crazy world I look around and
wonder what has happened.
How do I talk to a kid with a ring in his nose?
Does “The Old Rugged Cross” mean anything to him?
He asks me to sing a song about “my Jesus”.
From what I can tell he is from another planet,
or am I the stranger here?
I think it’s time to sell the wurlitzer.
So how do I tell Martians about Jesus,
when the only language I speak is 1955?
How do I write a headline for them
that doesn’t screw up the Good News?
I kind of wish it were the way it was,
but it’s not. So I need to figure out
how to sing the old lyrics
with a whole new tune.

Missional MapMaking

Alan Roxburgh has a writing project that’s posted on the Allelon website titled Missional MapMaking: The Art of the Missional-Shaped Church.

In chapter one he discusses the assumptions we bring to life - assumptions about what the world is like, who we are, what is of value and importance, how to get along in life, etc. In western cultures we live under the assumptions of what is often called “modernity.” They are assumptions we inherited from the Enlightenment project and the philosophy of René Descartes. You may not know much about the Enlightenment or who René Descartes was, but if you’ve seen a recent job posting (either secular or religious) or if you’ve been to church lately, then you’ve seen the Enlightenment and the philosophy of Descartes in practice.

Does this sound familiar?: Wanted, self-starter who is highly motivated, can multi-task and is seeking to maximize his/her potential in a setting that offers great advancement opportunities. Or have you read “40 Days of Purpose” or “Your Best Life Now”? Whatever you may think of the content of any of those examples, they all share a common way of looking at the questions above and they all answer them from that fundamental understanding of life. Most modern preaching is more of the same, by the way (even those of you who assume you are giving good old fashioned expository/exegetical sermons. No, especially you).

Roxburgh writes:

We’re born into a world and cultures that already have maps. …[F]or us in the West that map has been modernity and that modernity in many ways has profoundly reshaped, even deformed, the Christian imagination in our culture. From birth we’re formed and shaped by the maps of the culture into which we’re born to the point where we assume this map (in our case modernity) simply describes the way the world is. Our cultural map of modernity shapes how we see the world, ourselves, and our relationships. These maps “make sense” because we a live inside their world.

We don’t know how profoundly we have been influenced by the “maps” of the world we’ve been given because this is all we’ve known. As a fish doesn’t notice the water it swims in (until, of course, it is out of it), so we do not fully understand the culture we swim in, the presumptions we make about life. But as Roxburgh says, the map of modernity has, in some cases, deformed our understanding of God, life and the church, even many of the religious expressions of this modern mindset. Roxburgh calls us to become new mapmakers.

[W]e are in a time when the maps of modernity with their promises of management, control, and predictability are no longer sufficient to describe the places where we find ourselves. The rapidity and extent of these changes create disequilibrium, anxiety, confusion and disorientation among people in North American culture, and this means that our maps of modernity again need to be re-imagined. Once more we are required to become mapmakers. In order to move into God’s future, we must assume that the maps we have inherited no longer adequately describe the realities we face. We must release the desire to copy our inherited maps and … learn to listen to the stories of pioneers so that we can make new maps. In this way, we can re-shape the imagination of God’s people.

Check out chapter one of Missional MapMaking here. You can find the Introduction and other chapters here.

Becoming A Flockstar

If you haven’t seen the new Flock web browser (powered by Mozilla, the people who brought you Firefox) you should check it out. It is a web browser with integrated social networking features.

Are you on Facebook? Flock integrates with your Facebook account and can add a Facebook sidebar complete with all your Facebook friends and shortcuts to some of your most-used functions. Got a Flickr account? Flock will integrate that, too and can open your photos, or your friend’s photos, in a media bar. Do you blog? You can set up your blog account in Flock so that you can publish to your blog straight from Flock. In fact, if there’s an article you find on the web that you want to blog about you can simply right click on it and “Blog this” right from your browser. It also integrates with webmail accounts like GMail and Yahoo! mail, social networking sites like Twitter and media sites like YouTube. It automatically opens a My World tab that you can customize to include all of your favorite friends and content.

And because Flock is made by the same people who brought you Firefox many Firefox extensions will also work in Flock. In addition, there are custom extensions available just for Flock.

I’ve hated Internet Explorer for some time now because it jams everything into one package whether you want or need all of its functionality or not. I’ve used Firefox for quite some time because it both runs faster and because I can leave out the things that I don’t need (which would only slow it down) and I can add what I do need, or just what I want.

But Flock may become my new favorite browser. I’m still learning all of the ins and outs, but if you’re in to social networking and/or media content I’d encourage you to check out Flock, the social web browser.

[HT: Todd]