Integrating Missionally

Joshua Harris' new book

Dug Down Deep: Unearthing What I Believe and Why It Matters is the new book by Joshua Harris. Joshua Harris is senior pastor of Covenant Life in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which belongs to the Sovereign Grace network of local churches. A passionate speaker with a gift for making theological truth easy to understand, Joshua is perhaps best known for his runaway bestseller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which he wrote at the age of twenty-one. His later books include Boy Meets Girl, Sex Is Not the Problem (Lust Is), and Stop Dating the Church. The founder of the NEXT conferences for young adults, Joshua is committed to seeing the gospel transferred to a new generation of Christians. He and his wife, Shannon, have three children.

Content
In Dug Down Deep, Harris sets out to tell his journey toward orthodox theology. He also describes why it matters. In the book, Harris discusses the major doctrines of the church. He looks at the Bible, Jesus, Sin and the crucifixion. He looks at who God is, who the Holy Spirit is, and the second coming of Christ. The first part of the book tells his journey from a teenager in a seeker-oriented church in Oregon to his role as senior pastor of Covenant Life Church in Maryland. The second part deals with the doctrines and his theological underpinning.

Thoughts
I really enjoyed the first part of the book. I appreciated how he told with great transparency the journey from a consumeristic, attractional youth ministry in Oregon to a theology-soaked heart in Maryland. I also appreciated the story of how his soul longed for the depth of a relationship with the Godhead. The background of his life was revealing and mirrors many folks today who grew up in an attractional youth group. However, after I got past the autobiographical piece, the book just became a bit ho-hum. While it didn’t read like a systematic theology, it really was just an espousal of reformed theology along the lines of more readable, though not so hefty Wayne Grudem.

I do appreciate that he called on his readers to bypass the attitude that theology doesn’t matter or that it is only for those in ivory towers or in the ministry. In addition, I also appreciate how he made the doctrines a bit more accessible. For a younger audience, or for those who have little exposure to theology, I’m sure it might be an interesting reading. However, for me, it was not motivating or engaging.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would give it a 2.75.

The book retails for 19.99 and is available at all major online retailers and local Christian bookstores.

Watermark Press provided this book for review free of charge.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Take a read

With a little help from OT Scholar John Walton, I look at creation from a functional perspective, not a material. In other words, does Genesis 1 describe the physical, material nature of creation or the purpose of creation. The issue is how the author would have written it and the people understood it, not our attempt to read modern science back into Gen. 1.

Take a listen and make some comments. I would love to interact with you on this topic.

Here’s a link to the book I reference in case your interested: The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate

Popularity: 6% [?]

Find your Passion

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, U.S.S.R. (today Belarus) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. He graduated from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA. After taking over his father’s local liquor store, Shopper’s Discount Liquors, and building it from a $4 million business to a $50 million one, he created the wine-tasting blog Wine Library TV and discovered the power of the Internet for driving sales. This book shares his experience and step-by-step advice for using Twitter, Facebook, etc., and suggestions for monetizing an online persona, reiterating that the Internet makes it possible for anyone to make serious cash by turning what they love most into their personal brand.

Crush It! encourages people to determine what truly makes them happy and pursue monetizing around it on the internet. It argues that because of recent social and technological trends the cost of producing content has been driven low enough that passion, knowledge, and effort, which the book calls “sweat equity”, are now all one needs to build a brand and business.

Content
As I began to read the book I thought it was going to be another one of the “You Can Do It!” (a la Tony Little) motivational books. It does that in the beginning, inspiring you to move past the passionless work we often engage in to discover what you truly love to do. However, it goes past this to provide you the internet tools to help you develop your own personal brand and begin to monetize it.

In it, the author seeks to help you learn:

1. Why social media has evened the playing field, destroying the “gate-keepers” who had previously dictated the distribution of content.
2. How to beat unemployment and create wealth-building opportunities by building and maintaining a personal brand.
3. Why storytelling is the most important business concept in the current marketplace.
4. How you can build an online business around your passion without quitting your day job.
5. Why Twitter and Facebook are just tools and not a social media strategy.
6. How to take advantage of the half-billion dollars in advertising that are moving to the internet.
7. Why transparency and being true to yourself are now winning marketing formulas.
8. How to build and maintain an online community around your passion and brand.
9. Strategies for turning attention into money.
10. Why the legacy element of the internet era is so underrated.

Thoughts
First, let me speak to the readability of the book. It was very easy to read. I read 140 pages in the course of 2-3 hours. Part of that short read time was my familiarity with the internet and with social media. Yet, in general, it was a very easy read.

Next, let me speak to the content. The author speaks to three areas that I think are crucial if a person is going to be able to Crush It! First, he talks about self-awareness. Most of us do not really know who we are. We are who we have been socialized to be, but most of us (I believe) don’t really who we are and where our passion lies. We have to uncover those to be crushers. The next thing he notes is the necessity of great content. People will flock to those with great content. This doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of the content, but content that people are interested in and talking about. That is not to say that your content doesn’t need to be good. It means that the quality of your content is secondary to your passion about the content and your ability to convey it as well as it being content that people are interested in. Finally, he speaks to the necessity of hard work. He says over and over that this will be hard work and take time. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This process requires patience, persistence, and hard work.

The author also provides good information on many of the social media tools available. He talks about Twitter, Facebook, and blogging tools. He shows how to use them to build a brand, develop content, and build a community.

This is not so much a “how to” book as it is an idea generation book. Everything is a reflection of his journey toward brand development. But it does not provide a step by step methodology. It really is the story of the American Dream, of someone who worked hard, took advantage of the tools available to us all, and built a brand. The author says anyone can do it, and I believe they can if they want to.

However, I also believe that while anyone can do it, most people won’t. They will not because of two reasons: they don’t want to work hard enough, or they don’t want to take the entrepreneurial risks. I believe God created us all with a creativity and entrepreneurial mindset just like His. However, I don’t think people really want to put in the work to uncover it in their own lives, they don’t want to work to become self-aware and whole, and as a result, they don’t want to take the risks or make the investments to see their dream and passion lived out.

To Crush It! you have to Change It! If you are willing to Change It!, you can Crush It!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Some of my light reading for the first of the year:

Hermeneutics by Anthony Thiselton

Hermeneutics

Anthony Thiselton here brings together his encyclopedic knowledge of hermeneutics and his nearly four decades of teaching on the subject to provide a splendid interdisciplinary textbook. After a thorough historical overview of hermeneutics, Thiselton moves into modern times with extensive analysis of scholarship from the mid-twentieth century, including liberation and feminist theologies, reader-response and reception theory, and postmodernism. No other text on hermeneutics covers the range of writers and subjects discussed in Thiselton’s Hermeneutics.

Anthony Thiselton is professor of Christian theology at the University of Nottingham. His other books include The Promise of Hermeneutics and The Hermeneutics of Doctrine.

Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology With the Help of the Church Fathers

Life in the Trinity

Although introductions to Christian theology often refer to its biblical foundations, seldom is much attention paid to the key insights the early church had into the nature of Christian faith and life. Donald Fairbairn takes us back to those biblical roots and to the central convictions of the early church, showing us what we have tended to overlook, especially in our understanding of God as Trinity, the person of Christ and the nature of our salvation as sharing in the Son’s relationship to the Father. This book will prove useful to beginning theology students as well as advanced theologians who want to get at the heart of the Christian gospel.

Donald Fairbairn is professor of historical theology at Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, South Carolina and a part-time professor at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D in patristics from University of Cambridge in England and is the author of Grace and Christology in the Early Church and Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes.

Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy)

Audi's Epistemology

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is concerned with how we know what we do, what justifies us in believing what we do, and what standards of evidence we should use in seeking truths about the world and human experience. This comprehensive book introduces the concepts and theories central for understanding knowledge. The revised edition of this hugely successful book builds on the topics covered in the first edition and includes new material on subjects such as virtue epistemology, feminist epistemology and social epistemology. The chapter on moral, scientific and religious knowledge has also been expanded and revised.

Robert Audi is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics—especially on ethical intuitionism, and the theory of action. He is Professor of Philosophy and David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Crush It!

Everything has changed. The social media revolution has irreversibly changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. There are billions of dollars in advertising moving online, waiting to be claimed by whoever can build the best content and communities. Despite this change, most people keep working at jobs that don’t make them happy and businesses continue to ignore the major marketing and public relations benefits that can be found online.

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Babruysk, U.S.S.R. (today Belarus) and emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. He graduated from Mount Ida College in Newton, MA. From a platform as co-owner and Director of Operations of Wine Library, a wine retail shop in Springfield, New Jersey, Vaynerchuk gained fame as the host of Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast on the subject of wine.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Community...Really?

While considering some more implications of the previous post about how liberalism has destroyed our sense of belonging, I considered what I might say to a mega or large multi-site church pastor about community, belonging and their church. I began to ponder if it would be possible for a church to say they want to be a church of small groups – an attempt at belonging and community – and still be mega. I have come to the conclusion that it would be extremely hard, if not impossible for a mega or large multi-site church to legitimately say they want to create community and belonging. In fact, despite their words, I would go so far to say that what they do demonstrates that small groups are not that important.

Before we get to the basis of my conclusion, however, let’s talk community.

In a Leadership Journal article, Len Sweet, hints that community is a place where people have similar interests, that is organized around a single purpose, where people can they tell the stories most central to who they are and find people eager to hear them, and where people participate so fully and have their lives changed by the experience. With these characteristics, Sweet includes the aspects of commonality and purpose, which are important to relationship development. Many with no common interests will come together simply for a common purpose, such as building a Habitat home. It is in that purpose community is formed and expressed. (1)

A Spirit-created community where people have a place to be embraced for who they are and how they all struggle would be refreshing. The normative way of considering spiritual community is through small groups within a church. Almost all churches have them and they are organized around many different factors. Some are organized around age, while some are organized around felt needs. Other small groups are organized around a common purpose. Some take place on Sunday mornings, others on Sunday evenings, and still others take place in peoples homes during the week. Yet, according to Joe Myers, “Small groups deliver only on one or two specific kinds of connection. A person’s search for community is more complex than this. The truth is that people can experience belonging in groups ranging in size from two to 2,000 or more. People have the competencies to pursue many different paths in their search for community.”

For Myers, community and belonging can happen in four spatial areas: public, social, personal, and intimate. Public space is where significant numbers of relationships are needed to experience a sense of belonging and community. It is about shared experiences, such as a football game or a concert. It is not about anonymity, but about connection and when people feel connected they can be open to participating in the experience. Within that connection and experience, community is formed, even for a moment.

Social belonging is “the small talk of our relationships.” It is the place where people connect by sharing pieces of their lives. This is where people try to make a good first impression. Personal space is where we connect through sharing private experiences. These are close friends, more than an acquaintance, but not yet completely and totally transparent. Intimate belonging is the place where people have complete transparency, where they are naked and not ashamed. Very few of a person’s relationships are intimate.

It is the personal space, Myers believes, where most people believe that the level of connectedness occurs and where actual community happens. Yet healthy community is achieved when there is harmonious connections in all four spaces, meaning that there are more public belongings than social, more social than intimate, and very few intimate. Therefore, community can occur in a large gathering where a person does not know many people, in a luncheon, at a meeting, in a small group, or in one-on-one conversation. Community is not about size; it is about a divinely created connection where people can interact and engage in each other’s stories. (2)

There is something that connects Myers’ and Sweet’s definition of community: shared stories. If community’s major characteristic is the sharing of life and life’s stories, then one has to question whether a mega or large multi-site church can actually create community and belonging.

Here is the basis of my conclusion:

1. Their buildings do not create room for community or belonging.
Very few church facilities, large or small, are created for community. They are designed for storing and herding large groups of people. Very few spaces are created so that community can take place. Even churches with “Sunday School” classes suffer from this. These rooms, class rooms they are often called, are set up in a traditional teacher-student lecture format where chairs are in rows and all face one direction with a singular focus – the stage, platform, black (or white) board, or teacher.

If churches were really concerned about being a church of small groups, the question needs to be asked: Why build large buildings?

2. Their worship does not create environments for community or belonging
Worship is a production. It’s a show. People come and are emotionally aroused and entertained. The audience (congregation) is passive in regards to those around them. There is no communication or interaction. They passively sit and listen to someone give a talk. But they are not sharing in the life-stories of those around them. They are spectators in a show.

3. Their budgets do not reflect an emphasis on community or belonging
Look at a typical large church budget and what do you notice? Most of their budget is spent on buildings, gatherings, and salaries. Why does a church of small groups need so much overhead? Does that overhead aid in the development of community?

What their buildings, gathering, and budgets demonstrate is that what they want to do is be a large organization with a good show, hoping the show will draw a crowd and help some people become Christ-followers. They may even emphasize small groups and try to organize small groups. Some may join small groups and community may take place in some of those communities. But does the church in general really want to be a church of small groups with a strong sense of community and belonging? No. They are either ignorant or are deceiving themselves if they think otherwise.

In reality, they are simply a reflection of our segregated and lonely culture searching for a place to belong. More community takes place in the marketplace than in  most churches, especially large churches.

(1) Leonard Sweet, “The Quest for Community,” Leadership Journal XX, no. 4 (1999).

(2) Joseph R. Myers, The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Youth Specialties, 2003), 18, 41-51.

Popularity: 8% [?]