There is no easy way to explain this story without it sounding weird.  Yesterday I took a group of 7 down to Mexico where we partnered with Spectrum Ministries.  The whole goal of the day was to provide showers, clean clothes and food for a village of people in Tijuana.  We eneded up giving showers to 149 Mexican boys.  Mark Gomez (one of my students) washed every single one of those kids feet.  I helped get them in and out of the showers.  It was a cool trip because we were meeting a very specific need that these children had.  Another cool part was we weren’t preaching,  doing dramas,  singing songs or any of that.  We were just meeting a very specific physical need.  The pastor who ran the whole thing said that the majority of those kids have no male role models in their lives and us splashing them with water and helping them get clean was a huge deal.  I liked it. 

I read the other day that the Christmas story is the most understood Christian event by the non-Christian world.  Most people see some variation of Jesus birth at Christmas time.  TV, Movies and print media all have the Christmas story on at some point.  I think this is very interesting when you compare it to the Easter story and Jesus death and resurrection. Although there are a lot of people who come to church at both holidays most people know a lot less about Easter.  Perhaps a baby being born is just better television than a 33 year old man being crucified. 

Here’s an idea.  Everyone has heard the Luke passage at church preached every year.  What if we flipped it this year and preached the resurrection instead.  I think most people today like to know the "end of the story"  so lets give it to them at Christmas.  Would it work?  Who knows but I’d like to try.

H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book 50 years ago called Christ and Culture.  In this book he identified 5 different ways that the Church could/should interact with the culture of the day.  Here’s the 5 ways:

1. Christ Against Culture
2. Christ of Culture
3. Christ above Culture
4. Christ and culture in Paradox
5. Christ the Transformer of Culture

The most interesting thing about these 5 different ways fo interacting with culture is that all of them have been tried and found wanting.   Even today 50 years after the book was written the Church still struggles to understand how to interface Theology and Culture.  On the side of this website are lists of books that I have read to try and make some sense out of it.  I am by no means an expert but I do have a passion for dialoging about it.   If you want to know my complete thoughts about this you’ll have to e-mail me and I’ll send you a copy of a 17 page paper I just wrote about it.  You can read it in the bathroom (its that good)

Just got home from a 16 hour drive. That’s how long it takes to get from Western Colorado to San Diego. We drove there in two days. Got up and left at 5am this morning and just kept driving. I will never do that again. Too hard on my role as a dad and husband. When Lars gets focused he sometimes gets a little too focused. On a positive note though I’m home and sitting on my couch and its 9pm.

I ran across an interesting quote today.  Peter Drucker wrote the book Post-Capitalist Society.  In it he states "Every organization of today has to build into its very structure the management of change."  "has to build in organized abandonment of everything it does.  It has to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: ‘If we did not do this already, would we go into it now, knowing what we now know?" 

I’m happy that my brain thinks like his.  I tend to question everything that I am doing in ministry and often think about what should be abandoned.  I’ve been a part of some amazing churches and have seen great programs come and go.  Sometimes we tend to hold onto things though much longer than we should.  It gets very difficult in the church to end programs sometimes because we care so much about the people who came up with the ideas and are running them.  I heard someone call it "Strategic Planned Abandonment" and I think that fits with what we should do.   Just so noone thinks that I am saying that everything old is bad please know that I think a lot of young hip youth ministry ideas I’ve come up with have been in need of being put out to pasture. 

Anyways, its something to think about.  How many of the things we are passionate about would we be willing to have someone tell us its time to do away with.

Colorado…..made it……too many hours in the car………tired……cold…….going to some hotsprings tomorrow……..snowboard on Friday……….not such a bad life. I love my kids and am enjoying my vacation so far…………..houses here cost $200,000.00 with land……..Still I miss the beach its 13 degrees.

All done with my paper and ready for a family vacation. Driving to Colorado for a week. Funny thing I’m sitting here at the table surrounded by Tech gear. I’ve got my Treo 650 charging, my Ipod 4th edition 40 gig (for music) my ipod 5th edition (for video) the kids dvd player, my camera and my laptop. I wonder how much money is sitting on this table. Or, a better question is how much technostruggle (new word) is here. I think I’m addicted to new techno crap.

I’m in the process of writing my first D.Min paper and I’m struggling a bit. I realized this week that its pretty difficult to synthesize this much material into a succinct 3,500 words. I’m not sure how the final paper is going to end up but my goal is to get most of it on paper on Saturday, proof it on Sunday and be in my car driving to Colorado and a much needed vacation on Monday. So here it goes….

If I could work for anycompany (and still be a pastor) I’d work for Google.  I’ve been watching them for a number of years and I think they have got it figured out.  Their business model is to go after the best people, pay them well, cater to their whims and let them create. Newsweek just posted an article on Googles  10-Golden Rules which states that "knowledge workers" will be the key to success in the next 25 years.  I’m into that because I have recently been discussing the idea of "information locating" now being as important as everything else you learn in school. 

You would think after two degrees and too many years in school that I would have figured out by now how to organize my time so I’m not scrambling at the end. Alas that has not happened. I have a big paper due on the 12th so I’ll be absent from the web for a while.