Knowtown…

To every thing
Turn, turn, turn,
There is a season
Turn, turn, turn…

This will most likely be my last post on this blog. I hope that there have been some who enjoyed it as much as I have. With all the problems I have had over the past week with my website and the Movable Type crashes I had to start over. In the process my rss feed changed and in the world of blogging that means this site is pretty much dead. Few people actually go to a website when their rss aggregator can do it for them. So I felt like it was an opportunity to be reborn. If anyone does stumble this way and would like to keep up with my new blog I would love for you to leave a comment there and let me know that you stopped by and what’s on your mind.

I recently finished reading a biography of one of my favorite historical figures—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, AMERICAN, by Richard Brookhiser. I have wanted to read this book ever since reading Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light. In my ongoing attempts to understand leadership from a more faithful perspective I find that my dreams of leadership pull me towards dissidents and revolutionaries. Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and yes, Alexander Hamilton. Brookshire makes these observations in the introduction of his book:

…Many of the leaders of the American Revolution were rich, powerful men—Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock. None had come from so far back as Hamilton.

But the Revolution was over. How then could the experience of Greene, or Hamilton, be repeated? What made Hamilton’s rise in the world more than an episode, or a detail in a dramatic life, is that he had thought of ways to bring light to the talents of other men as well as himself: an interlocking system of law, finance, and work that would enable his countrymen to become conscious of their resources. He did not outline his plans to his Fourth of July audience; there were not many details yet to outline. But he had been thinking of the problem for years, and the rest of his life, especially his term as treasury secretary, would be devoted to it. Most men who make it provide for their families, thank fortune, and maybe give to charity. Some raise the drawbridge behind them. Hamilton, who had already come from the Caribbean to the pulpit at St. Paul’s, and would go on to more glittering prizes yet, wanted to generalize his experience. That is why he is a great man, and a great American. Americans like to think of themselves as self-made, even though few of us are. Hamilton was, and wanted to give others the opportunities to become so. (emphasis mine)

I find Hamilton’s biography completely fascinating. He is known for writing the majority of the Federalist Papers, defending and supporting the US Constitution (even though he did not completely agree with it), laying the foundations of the US economic system, and setting many precedents in the US legal system. Many of the events of his life are overshadowed by his unusual and untimely death—killed by the Vice President of the United States in a duel. Ironically, Hamilton was not a very successful politician in spite of the profound influence he had in the forming of our government. The world of politics was not his venue. As the above excerpt points out, he was more willing to share his opportunities with others than he was to accumulate power for himself.

I find it unfortunate that leadership paradigms tend to value those who quest for power more than those who live to give their power away. As an ecclesial dreamer this tendency is puzzling to me. It is so strange to me that Built to Last and Good to Great are consistently recommended as good books for church planters when there are many much better books. Here is another interesting quote from Brookhiser’s book:

There is a statue of Hamilton in front of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and millions of tourist pass it on their way to the White House next door. But it is not a destination. Hamilton, we feel, belongs where he is, on the $10 bill, not on Mt. Rushmore.

All things being equal, I will choose Hamilton’s leadership paradigm over Jefferson’s any day. I have to admit I have a hard time understanding why people who give their power away are seen as a threat by those who try to accumulate as much power as possible. Maybe they know intuitively that the first will be last and they are trying their hardest to fight against that.

Last week was not a good week for the knowtown website. Twice in three days my host provider suspended my account because the scripts from my old version of Moveable Type were going haywire and creating a huge draw of bandwidth, cpu, and memory on the host servers. Apparently, there are many spammers out there that are having a field day with the older versions (2.x) of Movable Type. The first time they reactivated my account after renaming the offensive cgi script. Once I discovered this I was able to get back in to the blog and post the previous entry and back up everyones blog. The second time the host provider made it very clear that I needed to get my old version of Movable Type off their server. (I was told that if my account was suspended a third time it would be for good!).

Since I host other people’s blogs on my site I could not afford to upgrade to a newer version of Movable Type. That makes me a little frustrated because I really liked their interface and the ease of creating and modifying templates. As I was looking for new options I decided to go with Wordpress. I loved how easy it was to install but I am still finding the interface very unfamiliar and I despise the difficulty in modifying templates. I think I will eventually figure it out but right now I am just a little frustrated.

At any rate, I will be playing with it over the next few weeks and hopefully be more comfortable with it before I make my next jump to a new host provider. Once that move takes place I will be back to ecclesial dreaming. I have a lot I want to say about things…

Due to circumstances beyond my control blogs hosted on knowtown.com are going to be temporarily unavailable.

These include
Knowtown (www.knowtown.com/james)
Epicjourneys (www.knowtown.com/epicjourneys)
Anapapist (www.knowtown.com/scott)

Over the next few days I will be moving to a new blogging software platform and a new host provider. It will take a few days for the magic dust of DNS server replication to get everything mapped out and then these blogs will be back. The urls will remain the same but the rss feeds will probably change. If you visit any of these blogs or have them in your rss aggregator you may want to make a note to check back in a week or so and update your bookmarks/subscriptions.

See you on the other side.

Tonight was a good night of ecclesial dreaming. Colorado had been blessed with the CBA exhibit which means that a lot of big names are in town. Today, mid day, I got a call from a new friend and fellow ecclesial dreamer asking if I wanted to go hear Rob Bell promote his new book, Velvet Elvis : Repainting the Christian Faith at a local bookstore. Even though I agree with St. Christy’s perspective (Christy was cannonized by the Missio Dei community a couple of years ago at a Thai place here in Denver), it is truly a love-hate relationship. Rob Bell is one of my favorite “teaching pastors”. He is one of those guys that is so gifted in homiletics that it blows the curve for all the other people who attempt to follow that kind of preaching paradigm. I still think his teaching series on the Ten Commandments is strong medicine. Hopefully Zondervan will publish that in the near future(hint, hint).

Even though I had heard his talk before it was still very good. It sounds like his new book will be great. But what was really impressive tonight was the newest nooma video, Rhythm. It is the eleventh one in his series and it was really very, very well done. I think Rob is touching on a new way of using the powerful medium of film in a way that will really help churches that are trying to communicate in new ways. I really liked it.

After the dog and pony, I joined Duane, Rob and Doug for some really good conversation about church stuff. I think we were all a little amazed at how many people there were to hear Rob talk and buy his book. I was very surprised to see how many young people between 16-25 that were there. (I have my theories about why that is but that is another post). The Q&A was very good, deep, generous and productive. It was encouraging to see “God stuff” happening and so many people present. And it was good to share in dialogue with my conversation companions afterward. We talked a lot about the task of starting new churches. The lion is on the loose and that makes this ecclesial dreamer very happy.

But, (you had to know that was coming…) during our conversation I couldn’t help but flash back to an observation an old friend made about the movie Titanic. Many people believe that this is the best love story ever captured on film. My friend’s wife was arguing that exact claim when he challenged it with a more realistic interpretation. He countered that the only reason the love story works in the movie is because the relationship did not survive the tragic sinking of the ship. Anyone can be “in love” for 48 hours. My friend argued that if the Titanic would have made it to its destination that their “eternal love” would not have lasted. She would have discovered that he left dirty laundry around the house and he would have found out that she snored. Their different family histories would have produced even more problems. Her wealthy parents would not have supported the relationship and he would have tired of their caste ideology. Two weeks and it would be over.

You get four ecclesial dreamers around a table with coffee and two hours to kill and it can be awesome. But I secretly kept hoping the iceburg would come and let us all leave happy. We can’t let anyone discover that I am not a real pastor and that I am actually a computer technician for my local school district. Don’t want them to know that I was on the losing end of church politics at my last church and that the only two churches I have spoken at since then both folded within weeks of me being in the pulpit. Am I merely a poser? Do I even have a right to sit at the table and talk about ecclesial dreams? I don’t know how to answer that question so it is better to end the discussion before it comes up.

But I can’t walk away from the question. Something has been born deep in my soul that compels me to find other followers of God and through this mysterious, sacramental, perichoretical fusion into an ecclesial we be formed into a person of faith. Maybe the iceburg I am waiting for will not come and I will be forced to come our from behind myself and make something real. No doubt it will be broken and wounded. No doubt the relationships that make up the ecclesial we will change painfully as we struggle to be open with one another. I remain convinced that if we can stay the course, and keep the conversation going we will find something that has been there all the time.

Tonight as I get ready for bed I have Jeremiah 29:13 on my mind. If I understand the central point of the nooma video and Rob Bell’s talk tonight it is this. The Good News is that God is with us. That he has become flesh and made is made his home with us. When we look at those people whose lives intersect our own and divide them into the “haves” and the “have nots”, or think of them as “lost” in opposition to us being “found” we have fundamentally changed the Good News into something significantly less. When we cannot see the imago dei in the other we are not seeking with our whole heart. My hope and prayer for Missio Dei is that we would become a people who seek until we find.

Tonight a small group got together to watch Groundhog Day and talk about ecclesial dreams. It was a great group of people. Some I have known for a while, others I have only recently come to know and one I met tonight for the first time. It was another step in very long ecclesial journey. This particular film has long been one of my favorites but tonight it hit me in a new way. I am beginning to see that in a strange way I have been living the same day over and over. Unfortunately, instead of improving each time around, I seem to be getting worse.

I thought back to the days of my first church plant in Denver. I still remember the day I left that church. I was tired. I felt completely drained of anything meaningful and I was completely disillusioned about what an ecclesial community should be. I remember the tears that I shared with my wife as we attempted to discuss our shared dreams of any kind of ecclesial future. That future was dim. Most of all I remember thinking to myself that I would never be involved in church at that level again.

Years later I woke up and found that even though the clock had rolled from 5:59 to 6:00 the day was still the same. But this time things would be different. We had all the pieces in place. We owned our building. We had a good core group of people. We had a leadership team that “got it.” I remember vocational changes pulling important people out of the mix. I remember sitting at a table with the pastor and worship leader sharing the vision of the ecclesial dream and having my wind knocked out as my pastor announced his plans for resignation. I remember the demons of ecclesial politics reminding me once again that churches are places of power. I remember the morning after a meeting of the pastor search committee meeting when I realized that, for some, that power was a thing to be grasped. But mostly I remember going home after my last Ten Commandments class at that church and shaving my head. I remember sharing more tears with Janell, seeing the ecclesial future go from dim to dark, and saying to myself that I would never be involved in church at that level again.

Two weeks ago I was kindly told how much God has blessed that church since I left. This morning that was echoed again as I wrestled with the idea that the problem is me. And tonight I felt the ecclesial dreamer clock roll once again to 6:00.

Tonight I reflected on our journey with my wife. Not much has changed since leaving that first church plant. I am getting better at holding back the tears, but I have to avoid certain topics to pull that off completely. I still have a lot I want to say and share but I guess I feel like I have lost my right to say it. I am pretty confident that I will work through my own private existential turbulence because I have been here before. And I am equally persuaded that I will wake up tomorrow and be living in the same damned day. I have learned not to say I will never be involved in church at that level again out loud — but I still think it. I am sure that my convictions and context will make that a realilty whether I want it to be or not so it is really not relevant whether I say it.

Of course, I do not deny that God’s blessings are new every morning. But maybe my friend from my old church is right. Maybe those blessings are meant for somebody else.