You know this is one thing I think is kinda kewl about America. It's not considered offensive to ask people to give money to a cause. In some places, as I understand it, you gotta be a bit more careful about this.
So Helen and Off the Map blogs are asking people to help get John Smulo to off the map live. He's kind of a kewl guy, IMNSHO. So I thought I'd put a link up here.
Rachel has posted a book review of brian mclaren's new book over at JaC (er .. Jacques). Among other things, she says:
McLaren critiques the “incredible shrinking gospel” of popular Western
Christianity which promises peace, forgiveness, and eternal bliss for the
individual, but fails to also address our most pressing global and societal
problems.
This year's conference from Off the Map is going to take place November 1 through 3 in Seattle. I highly recommend it. The conference is called Hear Listen Connect,
From CatE:
Hear·Listen·Connect: enter the powerful world of connecting...
- Our presenters, musicians and artists will teach, provoke and prod us toward
the spiritual practice of dialog.- They’ll move us to protect the sacred relational space even more than
beliefs or opinions- Connect the dots on your spiritual mental maps
- Connect your private beliefs with your public ones
- Connect with new ideas and idea makers
- Hundreds of students from nearby campuses will join us this year
- Other organizations/ministries are “bolting” their mini conferences onto Off The Map Live so they can share in the excitement
- You will meet old and new friends AND old and new ideas.
- Come and travel with us to new places in your spiritual thought life
And Brian Mclaren and Diana Butler Bass are two of the speakers! Very kewl. Click here to learn more and buy tickets.
Jim, April, Helen, and company at Off-the-Map run a website called Ordinary Attempts, in which they tell stories of otherliness. They are thinking "evangelism", but some of us who aren't christians still like the idea of doing free attention giveaways. From their explanation page:
Our culture’s equivalent of a cup of cold water is attention. OAs are free attention giveaways.So I got published over there last week with a story of my OA'ing an evangelist. Here it is:
God counts, notices and works with our smallest efforts (including praying behind peoples back or even noticing them) to carry people along toward himself.
OA s have been borrowed by others who don’t care about the evangelism but simply want to participate in free attention giveaways and intentional acts of kindness in order to make the world a better place or someone’s day a bit brighter. We welcome this practice as well and don’t see any conflict of interest regardless of what motivates people to OA – it is better than not OAing.
So today I got to OA a fairly strange character named Brother Jed. He was sitting in a chair in red square on the UW campus, or standing near his chair, and in a well projected, well carrying voice he was … preaching, for lack of a better word. Some of the things he was saying sounded kind of nice, like maybe god cared about the smallish groups of students who would stop to listen a while. Other things he was saying were completely off, IMNSHO, like god is gonna send homosexuals and perverts and sinners to hell, and the point of sex within marriage must mainly be procreation, etc. etc.
I sat and listened to students mocking him, or haranguing him, or asking him pointed questions, and him responding in his loudish voice, often with what seemed to me rather outrageous responses. And I wrote him off fairly quickly. “What a quack,” I thought. But after I left, I thought to myself “That must get tiring, and he probably has lots of fascinating stories, and I wonder if he can speak at a normal volume level?” so I went back and sat down to take some notes for a little while with the idea of blogging about it and maybe connecting with him. And then he wrapped up.
So I said “Hey, can I buy you a drink?” and he said “sure”. so I got him a soft drink and we sat down and talked for 20 minutes, at normal volume levels. He preaches like that 5 hours a day on collge and university campuses all over the country all year round, and has been doing thus for 32 years. And he has a wife, and 5 daughters, and one is in the army as a chaplain’s assistant, but not in Iraq. And he used to be a history prof at a university, and then he left to go study under a guru in India, but along the way he got distracted into living in a hippie commune in Morroco.
And one day at the Hippie Commune in Morocco, in the evening, they were watching the sunset and chanting, and he looked behind him and saw the full moon rising as the sun was setting. And he thought “Wow! Someone must have created that”. Which led him to start reading the Bible, become a Christian, give up on India, return to the U.S., and start his 32 year old preaching career.
All that for a simple soft drink and a brief invitation. I was stoked. He seems like a fairly nice guy when he’s not doing the preaching thing.
From this interview. I love this. He nails several things perfectly in one beautifully succinct statement.
Here’s how people feel whenever they enter a new experience—alone and stupid. Churches need to “attack” those feelings by training Christians (the non-professional and non-highly motivated kinds) to simply say “hi” to someone who they have not noticed before.
Yesterday I attended a really kewl event put on by the secular student alliance (the atheists) at UW in conjunction with the Intervarsity Christian group there. They invited Jim Henderson (a 25 year pastor, evangelism ... guru (sorry Jim), promoter of dialogue between christians and normal people, and the guy who bought Hemant's (an atheist) soul on ebay 15 months ago, to come and speak to them about that experience, and about Hemant's Book I Sold My Soul on Ebay, and about Jim's new book in which he and Matt Caspar, another athest, visited and dialogued about 20 different churches across the U.S., called Jim and Caspar go to Church. (long breath. sorry about the run on sentence. Don't feel like fixing it, and don't have an editor (yet), so deal with it =)). I really enjoyed the event--here's a little report on it.
I got there quite late, so I missed a good bit of what was said. It was really kewl to hear Jim kind of saying what he really thought right out, because it was such an open environment. A couple things I really liked:
Jim talked about how no matter what we think, it’s important to not compare “our best” to “their worst”
A young man talked about growing up in a really conservative baptist church, and how hard it was to get out of his head the thought that he, and/or others, would go to hell if they didn’t maintain a correct belief. He asked Jim how Jim would respond to someone saying he was going to burn in hell for failing to believe “correctly”? Jim empathized with the young man and went on to say that if such a god exists, who sends people to hell for incorrect belief, then he, Jim, wasn’t super interested and would probably end up burning in hell with all the other unbelieving or incorrectly believing people. I’m quoting from memory here so it’s not exact, but I think I got the gist of it right.
Jim was talking a bit about how there’s certainly plenty of ammo for anyone who wants to critique the church, and a young man, I think perhaps the atheist who helped organize the meeting, said “Well, you’ve talked a lot about how there’s plenty of ammo for critizing the church–that the church has lots of bad sides and has done and continues to just not get it in a lot of ways. So what about athiests? What are we doing wrong–what ammo are we providing as fodder for legitimate critique?” Jim seemed very pleased by this question, and talked about how he couldn’t even get Christians to ask him questions like that if he paid them. He went on to talk about how there are fundamentalists everywhere–by which he meant, he said, people who get afraid and then become mean and bigoted–christian fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists and fundamentalists in any other camp you care to name.
Jim was saying he really like Habitat for Humanity, because it’s about what you *do* rather than what you believe, and that they don’t have any orthodoxy except the orthodoxy of the hammmer–if you can hit a nail with a hammer, you’re in. But they do have follower of Jesus roots, so they do this one thing which is that they pray over the house together after they’ve built it. So one young man pointed out that he knew of some atheists who actually wouldn’t work with habitat because they do have the … very gentle connection with following jesus, and why didn’t they just give that up so they could include even more people. Jim talked about how habitat gets criticized by lots of people in the christian community for not talking enough, and that a lot of their financial backing comes from non religioius non christian sources, and that maybe the fundamentalist atheists who are against it from one end should get together with the fundamentalist christians who are against it from the other end and form an organization called “Why Habitat for Humanity Sucks”, which drew a laugh from the audience.
He talked about the macro business of religions and of christianity, and how it’s come to be all about beliefs, and beliefism. He talked about how this business has latched onto the phrase which Jesus used one time in a secret meeting with one other person at night: “Born again”, but maybe it would make more sense to use wording which he used thirty times: “Follow me–be my disciple (that is, apprentice–do what I do, and say what I say)”
He talked about how 95% of the time when Jesus talked about hell, it was to religious people, and that he never talked about hell to … non religious, normal, hurting people.
He talked about “non manipulative intentionality”, which he defined as living intentionally, or on purprose, without trying to control the process or the outcomes. He gave credit to Buddhist thought in this idea. I found this very appealing, and would love to hear more about it.
Eliza was there, and he got her to come up front and introduce herself, to say that she was on facutly at the hospital, and to talk a little about how she came to find out about off the map and about her experience with the Lutheran class.
I had a really great conversation with a guy who has a similar background to me in a really conservative baptist church, and who is also a UW student, and I am hoping to reconnect with him ongoingly in the future.
Overall, I’m really glad to have gone to this event. It was very enjoyable. It felt like Jim could be more open and honest about his thoughts and ideas and feelings and goals than it seems like he can normally be in the more … churchish settings where I’ve seem him speak before. That was really … refreshing.
Jim Henderson, founder of Off the Map and co author of Jim and Capsar go to Church, will be speaking at UW Monday night from 6-8 PM at Thomson Hall Room 101. The event is being sponsored by the Secular Student Union and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, with the idea in mind of promoting dialogue between Christians and atheists/agnostics (*not* evangelism--*dialogue*!).
I recommend the event highly, if you happen to be in Seattle Monday Night.
So last summer Jim Henderson, co founder of Off the Map, hired Caspar, an atheist, to go on a road trip with him to visit 20 churches across America, and they wrote a book about the experience--"Jim and Caspar Go to Church", which will be out later this year.
And Dr. Gary Gilley, pastor of southern view chapel, got hold of one of the galleys for the book, and wrote a review--the first review of the book.
And Caspar responded to the review here.
I had a bit of a hard time not just writing off "Dr." Gilley. The university where he got his doctorate has a flat rate of $4500 for a doctorate, and their accrediting agency is referenced *nowhere* on the web except on their own web page (according to google)! That sounded a bit iffy to me. Plus he attacks the 12 steps and psychology (the discipline) as being unchristian and unbiblical and scary, and finds Dr. James Dobson, of all things, too ... liberal.
But I am learning this brilliant lesson from Jim and Helen, who both help run Off the Map's five blogs. The lesson is that it's more important to be kind than right, and part of that is being willing to engage people as human beings with innate dignity, no matter how off the wall they seem. So Jim and Caspar totally engage with Dr. Gilley, based on what he says in his review of their book. They warmly and curiously and genuinely invite him into dialogue. I think that's awesome. I want to be more like that.
I've been tagged in a game of blog tag by Helen Middenhall of Love is the Most Excellent Way (although I know her from conversation at the edge, which is closed for a week for the holidays). The way the game works is if you get tagged, you have to post five things about yourself that people probably don't know. Here's my five.
1. I used to spend time playing the guitar and singing, and even wrote some songs quite a while ago.
2. I was the acting associate manager of a domino's pizza store for a little over a year back in the 90's, and we were held up at gun point and all bound with duct tape. Fortunately, no one got hurt. They never found the bad guys or the money.
3. I have a 4.0 grade point average over my most recent 60 credits (I can hardly believe it). I'm expanding my undergrad degree from bachelor of arts in psychology to bachelor of arts in psychology and international studies.
4. My favorite type of schoolwork is mathematics--I find it beautiful and orderly and it just works really well for me.
5. I've travelled to 25 countries in my (still relatively short) lifetime.
(I'm tagging Jim at Doable Evangelism, Jonathan at The Nautical File, Paul at People Against Fundamentalism, Banzai at The Banzai Chronicles, R at Dragons Fly and Monkey Tea, Megan at Bag End and Justin at Ramblin' Again)
So I have been hanging out lately over at the blogs of Off the Map, a non profit founded in 2000 to try to help Christians do evangelism. This week, I got "published" twice on their blogs. Firstly was on churchrater.com, where off the map encourages churches to download their church review form and pay a non attender $25 to come and fill out the review about their church--kind of like a secret shopper. I did a review of the church where I used to attend, Grace Seattle (but I didn't get paid for it =)
Secondly, an "interview" with me got published on Conversation at the Edge, another Off the Map blog which is a dialog for christians, atheists, and people in between.
