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!

This month I’m looking forward to chatting with Bruce Reyes-Chow about his latest bold initiative — developing a new Presbyterian church on the Internet. As Bruce is very clear to point out: “Not an online church. A church that meets online.”

Bruce and I will be talking about this new church experiment and how Bruce’s views about “missional” are informing this process.

Join us on Twitter via the hashtag #missionalchat at 9pm ET tonight!

cross-posted from Emergent Village Voice

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?

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!

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

I just finished reading the Steve Jobs biography, and it didn’t quite end the way I expected it to. But as the author, Walter Isaacson explained, it only made sense that the last chapter would be largely written in Jobs’s own voice. That’s the way he was. The quote above is from that penultimate section of the book.

I believe what’s coming (not yet written on the page) is a major backlash against Apple as a corporation. Following the monumental campaign to stop SOPA and PIPA (as well as other recent victories, such as the Keystone Pipeline), I believe one of the next major popular movements will be to reform Apple as a company and the abuses to human rights it has allowed (and is allowing) to go on in its factories in China.

Public awareness is reaching a tipping point thanks to recent news stories highlighting the ongoing environment created by Steve Jobs during his tenure as Apple’s CEO.*

And, the fact is, many of us who use Apple products are also people who care deeply about the environment — and Apple’s record on that is not spotless. We also care deeply about human rights, and this is where we’ll stand up to the company that we cherish because of the “amazing” products it produces that we use every day. We’ll keep buying those products, but we’ll demand change from Apple. We’ll demand that they do better, because they can do better. They can certainly afford to do better. So they must do better.

Start by signing this petition to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook to do more to protect workers in Chinese factories.

(*It’s interesting to note that Cook is challenging the veracity of these stories, but it only makes one wonder if Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” is simply still in effect.)

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.

Back in December, the conversation was around the terms “incarnational” vs. “missional” for the type of ministry we’re talking about in the emerging church. I had the privilege of doing that first experimental #missionalchat with Kathy Escobar, co-pastor of The Refuge and author of Down We Go: Living Into the Wild Ways of Jesus.

Afterward, Kathy was kind enough to join me for a short Skype videochat interview, to continue the conversation from our online Twitter chat and to talk more about the themes in her book and the kind of ministry she is committed to modeling for others. One of my favorite quotes from Kathy in this interview is this: “To me, downward mobility is not really about money. It’s about this attitude of the heart.”

Here’s my interview with Kathy Escobar (the lighting wasn’t great on Kathy’s end, but the conversation was enlightening!):

I’m going to be doing another #missionalchat tonight at 9pm ET with Anthony Smith, a.k.a. Postmodernegro. There’s no one I can think of who most embodies the ongoing spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his prophetic speech and pastoral ministry, than Anthony.

Anthony, Rod Garvin, and I did a podcast together several years ago entitled “Practicing Pentecost” for the Wired Parish network. Anthony’s writing has developed a faithful audience on his own blog, as well as through his contributions to several Emergent books, including An Emergent Manifesto of Hope and The Justice Project.

Anthony and his wife Toni are lead organizers of the Mission House community in Salisbury, NC, and I’m grateful to Anthony for his ongoing role on the Leadership Team for TransFORM Network.

I’m excited to focus our #missionalchat tonight on what the missional church must learn from the teaching and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Please join us on Twitter tonight from 9-10pm!

Have thoughts to share on Dr. King and the missional church? Have questions for Anthony Smith (@postmodernegro)? Please tweet using hashtag #missionalchat!

cross-posted from Emergent Village Voice