I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the Theology After Google conference last week at Claremont School of Theology.

As one of the presenters, I was challenged to follow the TED Commandments and present something original and entertaining and funny and succinct (I had 10-12 minutes). With at least one TED fellow in the audience, the pressure was pretty intense to deliver. Well, let’s just say I had fun despite having to work through some technical difficulties (I could’ve definitely planned better than I did). You can see the results by watching my presentation:

Philip Clayton is the main proponent behind Theology After Google and the broader Transforming Theology project at Claremont, which I’m tremendously excited about. Philip interviewed me following my presentation to dig deeper into the question of whether online community is “real community” and what practices we can bring to our online interaction that can lead to a better world. Here are my responses:

Highlights from Theology After Google (#tag10 on Twitter) for me include the brilliance of Callid Keefe-Perry, Monica Coleman, Dwight Friesen, Jeff Jarvis, and Barry Taylor; the fun of competitive cornhole; the rare opportunity to sit in conversation with John Cobb and Glen Stassen; and most of all the joy of new connections and friendships.

And from now on, I can say I spoke at the same conference as Jeff Jarvis. That’s a dream come true.

Bonus: Watch more presentations from Theology After Google »

Action: Leave a comment with your thoughts on “theology after Google” »

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking, via Skype, with the “Theology After Google” class at Claremont School of Theology. Tripp Fuller, who is co-leading the class with Phillip Clayton, recorded my abbreviated talk on “The Theology of Twitter,” and I’m grateful to him for posting it online:

I’m extremely excited to be speaking at the “Theology After Google” conference, March 10-12, at Claremont. I’ll be joining Tony Jones, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Spencer Burke, John Franke, Dwight Friesen, Jon Irvine, and others. If you’re interested in learning more about using social media in communicating ideas (especially folks on the West Coast), I hope you’ll consider coming out to this unique conference!

My Take on the Apple iPad
The big news last week was the launch of Apple’s much-anticipated iPad tablet computer. I wrote up the story for the Halogen TV website with my prediction: “It’s not the device itself that’s magical. It’s the innovation that the device now allows—the new interactive games/applications and multimedia ebooks/e-publications (magazines and newspapers) that are going to be developed—which will make the iPad a ‘revolutionary,’ must-have device.”

“Theology After Google” student Wesley Menke nicely synthesized the iPad news with my presentation in his blog post “Apple’s ‘Magical Realism.’” His take on the “magical” language employed by Apple in its marketing of the iPad and contrasting it with the “liturgical” (“work of the people”) concept of Web 2.0/new media is a great observation. This is, in fact, one of the big criticisms of the iPad—that it is a device for consuming media rather than creating media.

I don’t think this is in any way an “accident.” Apple is, no doubt, banking on the market being ready for a consumer device for reading/experiencing multimedia e-books and e-publications (magazines and newspapers). Other companies are quickly joining the e-reader/tablet PC race, but their offerings will now have to stack up against the iPad. And, besides, Apple’s computers are built for creating, while their other mobile devices (iPod, iPhone) are not. In that sense, iPad fits perfectly with Apple’s other mobile devices, and this makes perfect sense now that Steve Jobs is calling Apple “a mobile devices company.”

I was “quoted” today in Rick Bennett’s blog post “An Obituary for the Emerging Church.” It’s an honor to be “cited” in the midst of such esteemed company. Yes, I’m using effusive quotation marks to denote that this article is pure satire. This is actually the culmination of a trifecta of posts from Rick.

All I can say is: It’s Thursday … but Saturday’s comin’!

If you wonder what led to all this, this latest round of doom and gloom about the emerging church was sparked by Andrew Jones’ missive “Emerging Church Movement (1989-2009)?”

Andrew and I have been exchanging quite a few emails these past few days. Since writing the controversial “end of an era” blog post, I was saddened to read his “Goodbyes to Emergent Village.” He’s leaving the TransFORM Network, as well.

I understand and respect that Andrew has a different focus in the work he is trying to do, and I wish him all the best. His contributions to the global conversation will no doubt continue to challenge and make Emergent Village (and TransFORM) better, whether he considers himself a part of it or not.

I have a guest post up today at CatalystSpace.com. It’s called “Community Is Crucial, Especially Around the Holidays,” and, as you can imagine, I wrote it last month, reflecting on the suicide of my online friend Gideon Addington.

I talk a little about the “weakness” of social networking in creating the kind of community that can address deep emotional and psychological pain.

I’d love to get comments and feedback on the article, especially if you are challenged/encouraged to reach out to anyone you may know who is hurting or struggling with depression. Don’t hesitate to show your love to those around you—reach out to someone today!

Thanks to Jesse Phillips, the editor of the Catalyst blog, for posting my article.

I want to invite my friends and other interested folks in Charlotte to consider coming out tomorrow morning to hear my friend David Pierce speak at Center City Chapel.

David and his wife Jodi, who is traveling with him, are international evangelists who started an off-shoot ministry of Youth With A Mission back in the mid-1980s called Steiger International.

My wife, Becky, and I worked with Steiger for two years (1996-1998), and we are still supporters and friends with many in Steiger today.

Here’s a short video to give you a taste of Steiger’s ministry – taking a message of God’s love in Christ to the darkest corners of the punk/underground culture in Europe/Asia/South America/Middle East/etc.:

Here’s an interview I did with David on my blog last year:
My Interview with David Pierce (a.k.a. the “Rock Priest”)

David will challenge you to live more radically for Jesus. This is really a rare opportunity to hear one of the most unique counter-cultural ministers of the Gospel in person! I hope you’ll come hang out with us and hear David and be challenged. Here are the details:

Sunday, September 20, 11 a.m.
Special Guest Speaker: David Pierce
at Center City Chapel
2920 N. Tryon St., Charlotte, NC
(upstairs on the second floor of the Allison Erwin Building)

Please let me know if you can make it! Hope to see some of you there …

(P.S. There’s a Facebook event set up for this also, in case you want to RSVP that way. Otherwise, just show up!)

UPDATE 9/20/2009:

On this anniversary of 9/11, I want to pass along an interview I did last year with my friend Rev. Dr. Fred Burnham regarding his personal experience at Ground Zero and how it led to his discovery of emergence theory, as he saw it play out in real life in the days following this national disaster.

When planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Fred (then Director of Trinity Institute) was hosting the Most Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams (then the Archbishop of Wales) at Trinity Church, just one block south of Ground Zero. Both Fred and Bishop Williams (the future Archbishop of Canterbury) thought they were going to die many times that fateful morning. But they both survivied, and Fred threw himself into the recovery effort, becoming a night supervisor at the relief ministry for emergency workers that emerged at St. Paul’s (a chapel of Trinity Church), directly across the street from the World Trade Center site.

Since the recovery operation closed down in 2002, Fred has traveled the country speaking about the holistic healing process at St. Paul’s Chapel that brought about the miraculous transformation of countless lives at Ground Zero. Through stories about heroic acts of goodness and compassion in the face of desolation, Fred seeks to contribute to the creation of a new global sense of human dignity and solidarity.

Fred has said of 9/11, “As a night supervisor of the ministry at Ground Zero, I watched as a totally random but amazingly gifted gang of volunteers spontaneously organized themselves into the most loving and compassionate community of ingenious human beings that I have ever known—a vivid and dramatic foretaste of God’s kingdom.”

Watch my video interview with Fred Burnham:

Educating My Kids About 9/11
I had a conversation about the 9/11 anniversary with my two oldest kids on the way to dropping them off at school yesterday. My daughter, who was not even one year old when 9/11 occurred, was able to tell me that 9/11 was when the “twin buildings collapsed,” and when I asked her why, she said it was because a plane hit them. She thought it was an accident, and I had to tell her that there were actually two planes (one for each building) and that it was not an accident. That, in fact, “terrorists” had done this, which leads to the whole “What is a ‘terrorist,’ Daddy?” conversation …

I’d love to find a video online that gives a sober, accurate re-telling of what happened on 9/11 that can help educate my kids about this day and the significance of it. Unfortunately, it appears that nearly everything on YouTube is a “9/11 Truth” conspiracy video. Does anyone have any suggestions for 9/11-related videos that give a good overview for kids (ages 3-9)? Please post the links in the comments!

You’ve heard the word. You’ve probably used it yourself a few times. Missional. But what does it really mean?

I’m not going to tell you. Instead, go read/watch/listen to what these folks have to say!

Julie Clawson: Missions vs. Missional

Andrew Jones: Is Mission the Mother of Theology?

Anthony Smith has an article coming out soon (sometime?) on the meaning of “missional.” I look forward to others reading that and engaging with it.

This is pretty funny (HT: Jonathan Brink):

I’ve been trying to start a meme on Twitter using the hashtag #missionalmonday. Hopefully in the future we’ll see more tweets on Mondays from folks engaging “missional.”

I have some other thoughts of my own on “missional” brewing, but I don’t have time to fully articulate them here now … So I’ll just give you my premise (in 140 characters or less):

“Missional” will replace “evangelical” as the primary adjective for “Christian” in this next era of the Church.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let’s discuss … (see you in the comments)

I’ve been listening to (and really enjoying) N.T. Wright’s 2004 lectures on “The Future of the People of God.” All of the audio of those talks is available as free downloads from Andrew Perriman’s Open Source Theology site. I’ve listened to this particular section of Wright discussing the Cross, the Resurrection, and Easter several times, and I wanted to transcribe it here for others to read and reflect on with me:

“The question faced by Jews in the 1st Century was, ‘What’s it gonna be like be when God comes back?’ because nowhere in second temple literature does it say that the God who abandoned the Temple, a la Ezekiel chapter 9 and so on, has actually returned. Malachi, in the post-exilic period, says he will come back, but nowhere does it say he has come back. …

“So when Jesus comes to Jerusalem on his last fateful journey, he is actually acting out the return of Yahweh to Zion. … You have to hold all that Old Testament stuff in your head and say, ‘That’s what was going on. It didn’t look like they thought it would, but this was God’s way of doing what he’d always promised.’ …

“If you were to come to it completely fresh not knowing what it was about, the Passion narrative in all four Gospels would say to you, ‘This is a political story. This is not first and foremost a theological story.’ So many Christians, so many in our churches, have read the Passion narrative as atonement theology put into a loose historical context. That’s not what the narrative is about. It’s about how the living God took flesh and engaged with the multi-layered empire of his day and suffered the inevitable consequences. And you find the theology inside that political story, not super-imposed on it or loosely joined with it. You get to the theology by wrestling with the political story. …

“[And] you find the personal within the theological. It’s like a Russian doll: The big story is about God and the world, and the world means Caesar and Pilot and Caiaphas and all the rest of them and how the living God in the vulnerable person of Jesus comes into the middle of that and gets crucified. And inside that you discover the theology: This is what the story of Israel was always about—to redeem the world. …

“The Gospel stories have woven in ways in which we can see how this plays out for individuals—the women who are weeping, Joseph of Aramathea doing what he could, et cetera—the way in which our individual stories are woven into the theological story, which is itself the deeper meaning of the political story. God help us that we have divided what Scripture had put all as one! We need to learn to re-read the narrative, because it’s within that large narrative that atonement thoelogy and political thoelogy belong together and together generate an eccelesiology … which is rooted in the one-off achievement of Jesus but which goes out in the form of a church that stands before the world like Jesus standing before Pilate … as Jesus stands before Pilate and Pilate asks him that wonderful postmodern question, ‘What is truth?’ and Jesus can’t answer it because he is the Truth, John’s already told us that five chapters earlier. The only answer Jesus can make to Pilate’s question is to take upon himself the wrath of Rome which is the wrath of God that it may be finished and dealt with in order that God’s new creation may now be. …

“Easter is about the renewal of creation, the renewal of the kosmos into which we are introduced like the disciples trembling and frightened and not knowing what the dickens is going on. … God forgive us that we’ve belittled Easter.”

Here’s some more N.T. Wright/Easter link-love (happy reading!):

• Easter and Embryo Cloning by Mike Moses
• The meaning of the gospel: Surprised by Hope (and an announcement about N.T. Wright’s new book Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision) by Byron Borger
• The resurrection from the dead by Andrew Perriman
• Good Friday by Julie Clawson

Photo by frangipani photograph