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:

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.)

This gorgeous left/right brain artwork has been floating around the Web for several months now. It’s apparently from an ad campaign by Mercedes-Benz, but the Benz logo has been creatively cropped out to just leave this sort of colorful infographic. Lately I’ve been thinking about creativity and intuition — left brain, right brain, and … gut.

Left
I love what Seth Barnes says, “Life is complicated and busy and needs more parties. I think God loves them. I think heaven is a party. Parties let you switch off the left brain and open up your spirit.”

Right
Daniel Pink has written provocatively about “Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future“:

“If the Industrial Age was built on people’s backs, and the Information Age on people’s left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people’s right hemispheres. We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we are progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern-recognizers, and meaning-makers.”

Gut
I was recently reminded of this hilarious exchange between Stephen Colbert and President George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Jump to 3:09 when Colbert explains how he and Bush are not “members of the Factinista” but rather go with their guts:

Ironically, there is research — in a book and in Scientific American — that seems to support Mr. Colbert’s comedic claim:

“An often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts … is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our ‘second brain.’ … The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system.”

What I find fascinating is that Michael Gershon, an expert in the nascent field of neurogastroenterology, says this: “The second brain doesn’t help with the great thought processes … religion, philosophy and poetry is left to the brain in the head.”

Why isn’t religion more intuitive? Why don’t we go with our gut more often than our head? Is it simply just another consequence of The Enlightenment? What is your gut telling you?

Bonus Points
One of the most creative people I’ve ever met, former Disney imagineer McNair Wilson, posted a great list of descriptions for both left and right brains — along with two more beautiful left/right brain images to go with the one posted above.

Here’s more right/left brain stuff from ChurchCrunch.

Alternate title: Should We Collaborate or Should We Not Now? (to the tune of The Clash)

There’s been some interesting online conversation lately about the subject of collaboration — both pro and con, interestingly enough.

Pro
Joe Boyd points to this video as an example of what one can accomplish together, rather than alone:

While it’s a clever idea for performing a song, I’m not sure this is indicative of the kind of collaboration most of us will be doing in our lifetimes.

Con
From his creative enclave in Singapore, Fernando Gros points to a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, entitled “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” In it, Cain makes this statement:

“Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.”

To this, Fernando adds his own thoughts:

“The hard slog of creating, innovating and thinking is something we largely do alone. … It worries me that in many parts of society, including schools, we are not encouraging people to develop the skills required to work alone, for extended periods of time, on complex problems.

“In fact, I do believe there is something like a cult of collaboration, especially in tech and startup circles; the notion that no good idea can come from one person alone.

“It’s important not to get sucked into this. We do need other people in order to amplify our ideas at some point. But, if you are a creative person, an artist, musician, photographer or writer, you do not have to wait for a collaborator to show up before you start work on a project, or strive to perfect your craft.

“You can just go for it. Moreover, you can go a long, long way alone. In fact, if you can go it alone, you’ll have far more to offer your collaborators when you finally start working with them.”

I think Fernando’s advice is right on, and even though he (and Joe Boyd) self-identify as introverts and I’m an extreme (off the charts) extrovert, I too have found that working alone — from my home office here in Charlotte, when I’m not on the road — has given me space to do some deeper and more creative thinking. I can’t say that I’ve solved any of the huge, complex problems facing the Church (yet), but I am deeply grateful to have the kind of space I have in order to do the kind of work I’m doing — and for the great colleagues around the country that I then get to collaborate with.

What about you? Do you agree that having quiet space to create is essential? Or do you prefer to work closely with others? What are you working on that you just need to “go for it” and collaborate with others later?

Doug invited me on to discuss a new report released last week from the Johns Hopkins Non-Profit Economic Data Project that shows how non-profit organizations have outpaced for-profit companies over the past decade (2000-2010) in terms of job creation. Here’s how the conversation went:

I was particularly interested in how this new data shows the success that the non-profit sector has had over the past 10 years, even during the three main years of recession (2007-2009), adding jobs at a rate of 1.9% per year while the for-profit world shrank by 3.7% year over year during the same period. Today, the non-profit sector is the third largest employer in the U.S., with 10.7 million workers.

As someone who has worked in the non-profit world for the past 15 years, I am not surprised to see the data reveal that non-profits are creating more jobs than for-profits. Recently a reliable source confirmed for me that more than 500 new U.S. non-profit (501c3) organizations focused (in some way, shape or form) on addressing sex trafficking were created in just one year alone (2010). Those new non-profits no doubt employ people, in order to do the good work they are setting out to do (locally, nationally, or internationally).

It’s worth noting that this kind of “cause d’jour” proliferation of non-profit work is actually leading some leaders to suggest we need fewer non-profit organizations rather than more — fewer organizations that collaborate more/better with each other.

Churches vs. Non-Profits
Related to this whole conversation is the parallel story that the most common organizational form/financial structure for Christian churches in the U.S. has become increasingly unsustainable. Going the way of the dinosaur are churches of 50-100 people with full-time paid staff and large, inefficient buildings to maintain.

At the upcoming Funding the Missional Church conference in Minneapolis, speakers such as Bob Carlton will be discussing what churches can learn from successful non-profits about telling a compelling story, casting an inspiring vision, and engaging people in participation in the work of the ministry.

Where Are the Church Jobs?
A third conversation related to all this is being generated by people like Ryan Kemp-Pappan around holding denominational systems accountable for convincing women and men (especially young adults) to rack up enormous financial debt for going through seminary, doing unpaid internships, etc. — in order to attain the prize of a full-time paid ministry job at the end of the rainbow.

The argument is that the institutional church has made a promise to these folks and that promise includes gainful employment that will allow them to get out of debt, if not right away at least eventually. But the reality is the cost of higher education is putting everyone deeper and deeper into the hole, and the church ministry jobs that were supposed to be there when they got out of seminary (and through all the hoops) simply aren’t there.

My Presbyterian Church (USA) friends Landon Whitsitt and Carol Howard Merritt have already addressed this question to some degree already. I was slightly encouraged to hear Craig Van Gelder from Luther Seminary in the Twin Cities confess last week: “We’ve done a lot to address student debt, mostly by blaming the student. The problem is not the student, the problem is us.”

Much more has been said and will need to be said about this. Seminaries are an industry in the midst of deep change too.

At the risk of being accused of promoting a “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” philosophy, I will say that seminary graduates (and others) will need to become a lot more entrepreneurial and create opportunities for themselves, rather than wait for opportunities to be handed to them. My advice: Create a position for yourself rather than waiting for someone else to hire you. Or, to put it another way: Spend less time searching the employment listings and more time creating your own business ministry plan.

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