Chris sent me an advance copy, and I’ve been tearing through it and enjoying it even more than his first book, The Art of Non-Conformity. I had the pleasure of playing a small part in the launch of that book, and I’m hoping to catch up with Chris next week when his latest book tour brings him back to North Carolina.

This book is loaded with fantastic, practical information and advice, as well as inspiring story after story of successful entrepreneurs who took their ideas and a little bit of startup money and created a new future for themselves. Chris has done an incredible amount of research to put this book together, and more than that, he’s culled through thousands of stories and gleaned the-best-of-the-best ideas to share with all of us in a fun and quick/easy-to-read handbook to hustling, with great illustrations by Mike Rohde to boot.

While the ideas that Chris shares in this book are inspiring to me as a wanna-be entrepreneur (with a few side projects always cooking), I also believe they are transferrable (in some important ways) to the church work that I do on a daily basis. There is so much wisdom to be gleaned from here, that I’ll have to do several blog posts to really unpack all of them and show how they relate to church planting, missional community formation, etc.

For now, I’ll just leave you with this tasty tidbit from chapter 5 “The New Demographics”: “Most of us like to buy, but we don’t like to be sold. Old-school marketing is based on persuasion; new marketing is based on invitation.”

I would now like to invite you to purchase Chris’ new book through my Amazon affiliate link here — The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future. Seriously, it’s a great book! Get inspired. Pick up a copy. And go see Chris on tour right now!

One of the best TED videos posted this week features YouTube’s trends manager Kevin Allocca speaking at last year’s TEDYouth event on “Why videos go viral.” As Allocca entertainingly explains (in just 7 minutes), the three keys to viral video success are:

1. Tastemakers — famous people promoting your video to their large audiences
2. Communities of Participation — the Web community jumping on board en masse and remixing your video
3. Unexpectedness — basically, the X factor; your video shows something totally unexpected and/or something unexpected happens that propels your video to super-stardom

The line from Allocca’s TED talk that I want to highlight is this: “We don’t just enjoy now, we participate.”

The Web has not only enabled us to engage with information and media/content, but that enabling literally is moving us from being merely consumers (or enjoyers) to being co-creators and participants. We all have cognitive surplus, right? So let’s use some of that to contribute rather than just consume.

Irony Alert: Thank you for consuming this blog post! Now … What are you going to create? Any ideas for videos that could go viral?

Well, there’s a very promising new documentary film project that’s just getting off the ground, which promises to shine a spotlight on some of the more diverse voices in the conversation. I want to tell you about it so that you and I can help make it a reality. The film is called Anything Less Would Be Uncivilized, and the filmmakers are Alex Bowens and Tim Kennedy. Watch this preview:

My friends Brian McLaren and Glenn Zuber are both featured in the documentary, which I’m very excited about. But it’s the broader range of people that the filmmakers have chosen to interview that really has me intrigued.

They’re trying to raise a lot of money — $35,000 — via a Kickstarter campaign, in order to do post-production, marketing, etc. As of this writing, they’ve received a little more than $2,200 in pledges, or 6% of the total for the campaign.

I want to ask anyone who cares about seeing this conversation expand and bring new, more diverse voices into the forefront to please become a backer — for $25 you’ll get a digital download of the film when it’s completed or for $50 you’ll get a copy of it on DVD. At the very least, become a fan of the film on Facebook and tell others about it (who might then become backers).

These are important stories that need to be told and important voices that need to be heard. I hope you’ll join me in supporting this project.

The all-or-nothing Kickstarter fundraising campaign ends Sunday, March 18. Become a backer!

See the other Kickstarter campaigns I’m backing right now.

cross-posted from Emergent Village Voice

Then on Tuesday night, my friends at The Table in East Dallas collaborated with The Search and The Eucatastrophe in Fort Worth to put on an unofficial “Pub Theology” night during “Ministers Week” at Brite Divinity School.*

(*”Unofficial,” that is, until they announced it to everyone at the conference and invited everyone out for the discussion. Over 100 people showed up!)

Nathan Hill at The Table made a goofy flyer, using a photo of me looking like a Muppet and calling me a “missional theologian and writer.” OK, not bad. I’ll take it.

We met in the “Half Acre Hall” upstairs of The Flying Saucer brewpub in downtown Fort Worth, on the plot of land once known as “Hell’s Half Acre.” I spoke for a little bit on participatory church, and then Phil Shepherd (a.k.a., The Whiskey Preacher) interviewed me, followed by questions submitted via Twitter and shouted out by people who were there. Somehow we got a roomful of people to be quiet and listen for nearly an hour!

Phil recorded the whole thing so you can go download and listen to it if you’d like. I realized listening back to it myself that when you have to shout everything you’re saying (in order to be heard), you really have to believe the things you’re saying. I hope my passion for God and God’s mission in the world — and how the Church (and our churches) hopefully fits into all that — comes through.

If you do take a listen, I hope you’ll take the time to let me know what you think, any follow-up questions you might have, and whatever pushback you would have for me. I’d love to get that feedback and to keep the conversation going.

I then finished out the week by presenting my workshop on “Missional Transformation” twice during the Wednesday afternoon workshop time at Brite’s “Ministers Week.” I was excited to meet and talk with a number of people who are already planning on coming to The River Gathering retreat that Phil Shepherd and I are co-leading in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 23-25.

Next stops:
I’ll be in Atlanta next week for a retreat with other leaders thinking about the future of the Church and asking themselves, “Can these bones live?”

Becky Knight and I will be co-leading a seminar on sexuality and social media for parents in the Los Angeles area on Saturday, March 10. It’s open to the public, and there’s a party at Tripp Fuller’s house on Saturday night!

The Fund for Theological Education is hosting a conference in Asheville, NC, March 15-17, which I’m looking forward to participating in. We’re hoping to have a concert on Thursday, March 15, in the Century Room at Pack’s Tavern, so if you’re in the area, come hang out with us!

Anthony was my guest for last month’s #missionalchat on Twitter*. Right after that wrapped up, Anthony sat down with me for a Skype videochat interview. It was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 16), and Anthony spoke about his own personal family connection to Dr. King, as well as Dr. King’s larger legacy and influence on Anthony’s own missional activity through Mission House in Salisbury, North Carolina. Here’s that interview:

Read a detailed transcript of Anthony’s insights from the January 2012 #missionalchat over on the Emergent Village Voice blog.

*Tune into #missionalchat on Twitter on Monday, February 20 for a discussion with Chris Smith (@ERBks) about his new e-book The Virtue of Dialogue: Conversation As A Hopeful Practice of Church Communities.

The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced something called “A Joyful Path,” but it seems more geared toward churches than homeschool families. (We’re actually going to start using “A Joyful Path” with the kids in Open Hearts Gathering.)

Chris Smith pointed me to Peter Enns’ book Telling God’s Story (with teaching and student guides) and, from the same publisher, The Story of the World series. Chris uploaded his review of Enns’ book to the Englewood website.

Eliacin Rosario-Cruz, from Seattle, replied: “When we homeschooled, we brewed our own. Godly Play + Howard Zinn + Paulo Freire + Gloria Anzáldua + bell hooks + unschooling. Our daughter has been in public school for six months now, after four years of homeschooling. She had some struggle with some of the way the school did the academics. However, her teachers and fellow classmates know her as a compassionate, cooperative, justice-seeking student. She could speak with pride and authority about her Puerto Rican/Latino heritage, and, better yet, out of a group of 50+ kids (3rd, 4th and 5th graders) she was the only one who knew and could speak about Bob Marley and reggae music.”

One person suggested Waldorf Schools homeschool material.

Chris Hill, from Albuquerque, replied: “I use a standardized form of academic curriculum, and the progressive Christian part is when I have real discussions about spirituality, religion and Christianity (including the philosophical, theological, and historical) with my kids. Believe it or not, we have several discussions a day that pretty much naturally occur. I do most of the initiating, and my oldest brings things up from time to time. I offer my input, others’ input in terms of possibilities, and encourage my kids to think deeply, but not to fret. Life is more about growing into a fuller sense of Self than it is ‘getting it right.’”

Does any of this help you? Do you know of other resources that you’d suggest adding to this list? Please post in the comments!

Here’s my attempt at curating the content coming out of #EVTC:

Chris recently began hosting TLDR (The LockerGnome Daily Report), which streams live from his home office in Seattle and is then edited into short segments for broadcast on his YouTube channel. It’s an innovative use of live streaming and recorded Web video, and his ability to produce voluminous (and consistently good) content is impressive.

Recently, Chris posted this delicious morsel from TLDR, calling on his audience to help him craft the content for the daily show and making some salient points about how online content will be shaped now and in the future.

As someone who is very much interested in the intersection of TV and social media, Chris’ comments in this video are very intriguing to me: “This is a television show. … Watch it wherever, dude, I don’t care. You can watch it on a real TV set, a piece of hardware, or a smaller screen. It doesn’t matter. Television is, to me, anymore (sic) an ethereal concept.”

This seems to jive pretty well with the NPR report I heard recently about the recent changes to YouTube to ramp up millions of channels on YouTube to compete with traditional broadcast and cable TV.

Check out Chris’ thoughts on the future of TV and content curation: “Curation is the next level for publishing. You! You are the next level”:

Check out my recent thoughts on content curation.

Check out my YouTube channel, which I’m going to be giving some more love in 2012.

Now if I could just get my own damn TV to connect to the Internet so I could watch YouTube …

Is your TV connected to the Internet yet? Why or why not? Do you agree or disagree with Chris Pirillo? Or what’s your YouTube channel? Share in the comments!

Pete Cashmore from Mashable posted this interesting thought on Facebook Monday: “No industry will be spared from the changes that digital technology brings. This is like the Industrial Revolution condensed into a couple of decades.”

That’s a pretty sweeping proclamation from the world’s foremost experts and observers of the digital revolution. There’s a (very fast, compressed) revolution going on.

Then, Landon Whitsitt posted this fun little video of Seth Godin on his blog:

In the video, Godin declares, “The industry is dead!” to which Landon added, “regardless of what industry you’re a part of. That means the church, too.” Bam.

Point. Set. Match.

Sound scary? It is. And it isn’t. No industry will be spared. Viva la industry!

Adaptive Challenges
Well, on Wednesday, Seth Godin posted this on his blog:

“When the world changes … It’s painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model. … Again and again the winners are individuals and organizations that spot opportunities in the next thing.”

At the “Re-Mind and Re-New” conference in Tulsa this week, I had the privilege of hearing missiologist Craig Van Gelder talk about three key practices to developing a missional imagination: 1) dwelling in Scripture; 2) re-entering the neighborhood (as a learner, not a do-gooder); and 3) working at adaptive challenges.

It’s that third point that I want to tie into this conversation about the devastation of existing industries. The world is changing. The world has changed. Trying to fix things the way they are now is not necessarily worth much effort. That’s why we are changing the conversation from “revitalization” (getting back to the way things were) to “missional transformation” (becoming something completely different).

Instead our time may be better spent working at adaptive challenges. Van Gelder proposes this question: What issues are we currently facing for which we do not have an answer but we must address if we’re to have a future? The proper response is to become a learner, which actually frees us up to experiment and not be afraid to fail. “Adaptive challenges mean that we don’t have an answer. You know it’s not an adaptive challenge if you have an answer.”

Adaptive challenges. No set answers. Creating the future. The next thing.*

*Not in a commodified, consumeristic way, though. The goal isn’t relevance. The goal is faithfulness, being faithful to the Gospel in our time and our place.

So is Twitter really “the future of media”?

I have to wonder how long Twitter can continue to capitalize on the 160-character limit of standard text messages, created by communications researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand. With all the advances in technology, aren’t we ready to abandon such archaic limits on how much data can be sent in a text message?

Well, the reality is there are over 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. But the actual number of smartphones — capable of handling larger amounts of data — is still only a fraction of this number. I wrote about this explosion of global mobile phone use in my chapter for the Wikiklesia book, which at the time (2007) boasted these stats:

59% of mobile phone users are in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.

Africa is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world; growing almost twice as fast as any other region. While only 200,000 households in Kenya have electricity, there are already 7 million mobile phone users.

As long as mobile phones that are not smartphones dominate the world market — and as long as the GSM keeps the SMS standard the same — Twitter will be the platform for extending and broadcasting these short messages onto the Web, social media, and beyond. (Sorry, Plurk!) And that is definitely an important part of the future of media, if not the whole kit and kaboodle.