Creative Graphics of Art & Design

I have posted a new site to my links, to the Creative Graphics of Art & Design website. This particular page highlights some of the most amazing and innovative designs in video and commercial advertising. It's basically like YouTube for the best commercials, music videos, and video shorts out there. Seriously...you should check it out, and then leave a comment about something cool you found there.

A (slight) distraction from blogging...

Though I plan to continue using my blog as a medium for communicating my ongoing cultural observations, research (which, admittedly, I haven't done much of up to this point), and other random quips, I have begun writing a screenplay, which will inevitably demand more of my time and creative energies than regular, consistent blogging would allow. I may provide details about my screenplay sometime later on, but at this point the narrative is really just a sketch, and I'm mostly concerned right now with profiling the major characters in the story. I would love to dialogue with some of you about the possibilities for the characters, themes, and overarching narrative...let me know if you're interested! Burke has already helped immensely in sparking some thoughts and inspiration for characters, setting, and story. Who knows, maybe you'll get "Written By" credits when it is made into a Hollywood blockbuster...

Hirsch is preaching to me once again

"...We need to ask ourselves [the question]...What is the irreducible minimum of the faith? What can be done away with? What is too complex and heavy to carry into a new missional situation and an adaptive challenge? We, too, need to eliminate the things that don't matter."
"Take for instance the predominant idea of attractional church in the church growth mode. If we wished to start a church plant on the assumption that need to look like the local megachurch, with all its polished professionalism, great worship bands, exceptional communication, fully staffed children and youth ministry, effective cell programs, and all around attractive appeal, then for the most part, it is simply not reproducible - at least not by the vast majority of average Christians. Whether we intend it or not, the implicit message of this medium says that if you want to start a church, then you will need all of these things if you wish to be effective. Well, the fact is that most people can't put together a show like that - and it is a fact that we have had church growth and megachurch for well over thirty years now and the overwhelming majority of the 485,000 church in the United States remain under eighty per congregation, while laboring under the guilt of failure to perform like the bigger churches. Let's face it squarely: it is darn hard to reproduce a Saddleback or a Willow Creek, as remarkeable as those churches are. A church like that, with all its professional departments, charismatic leaders, large staffing, and financial resources, simply cannot be easily reproduced. If we put this up as the sole model of effective church, the net effect will be to marginalize most people from ministry and church planting, and it will effectively put a contraceptive on the reproductive mechanism of the church. It will certainly stifle genuine people movements, because it necessitates a professional concept of ministry with massive buildings and resources."

Hirsch continues to smash my head through the wall of my own preconceived notions...

The Implications for Church Planting seem pretty significant...

From Seth Godin's blog:

Not so grand

Grand openings are severely overrated. So are product launches and galas of all sorts.

Make a list of successful products in your industry. Most of them didn't start big. Not the Honda Accord or Facebook, not Aetna Insurance, not JetBlue or that church down the street. Most overnight successes take a decade (okay, four years online).

The grand opening is a symptom of the real problem... the limited attention span of marketers. Marketers get focused (briefly) on the grand opening and then move on to the next thing (quickly). Grand opening syndrome forces marketers to spend their time and money at exactly the wrong time, and worse, it leads to a lack of patience that damages the prospects of the product and service being launched.

Non-profits do the same thing when they spend months planning an elaborate gala that takes all the time and enriches the hotel and the caterer. Far better to spend the time and money building actual relationships than going for the big 'grand' hit.

The best time to promote something is after it has raving fans, after you've discovered that it works, after it has a groundswell of support. And more important, the best way to promote something is consistently and persistently and for a long time. Save the bunting for Flag Day.

Comfort=Joy?

I am becoming more and more convinced that the extremely high premium our culture (and, subsequently, I, myself) places on comfort, as an end in and of itself, flies directly in the face of a following-of -Jesus-way-of-life. It doesn't take much searching to see how pervasive the pursuit of comfort as an end in and of itself is in our society. So many products and services are marketed, seemingly with great success, purely on the merit that they will provide the consumer a greater amount of comfort, and I'm sure anyone reading this can fill in here with an appropriate example. Consumers themselves invest great amounts of time, energy, money, and searching into increasing the amount of comfort in their lives, once again, as an end in and of itself. But is this a worthy pursuit? Is comfort something that should be placed so high within our values systems?

C.S. Lewis said this:

"Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

While Lewis was talking specifically about a "false gospel" that appeals to one's desire for comfort without confronting them with the harsh truths of sin, law, and condemnation, I think that the principle he presents reveals a broader truth that applies here: that the pursuit of comfort is detrimental and contradictory to any number of other, far more worthy values: truth, integrity, love for your neighbor, stewardship, and, above all, Christ-likeness.

Jesus himself said, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head..." (Matthew 8:20). Pursuing comfort as an end doesn't exactly seem to fit into Jesus' value system when he didn't even have a bed to sleep in. And he wasn't just saying this as a statement of his current situation. Instead, he was saying it to make it clear to a would-be disciple that following Him is not an easy way, nor a comfortable life. Instead, you can expect that at times you will find yourself without any of the trappings or comforts that so characterize and consume the lives of others...

This is definitely an issue that we must wrestle with, because if comfort is too high in our personal priorities, it will undoubtedly prevent us from "stepping out of the boat," so to speak, and really following Jesus. Jesus, after all, doesn't just live in your own personal comfort zone.

So, as his followers, how do we integrate this truth into our lives, despite our culture's coaxing much to the contrary? Does it demand a complete renouncement of earthly comfort, in favor of pain, restlessness, or insecurity? The individual's conscience will ultimately have to dictate how they live out their Christ-followership, but I think that pursuing the opposite-of-comfort is as much off-base as is pursuing comfort itself. None of these hold much value in and of themselves, neither comfort, nor pain, restlessness, or insecurity. Perhaps the pursuit of higher values, namely "justice, mercy, and faithfulness" (Matthew 23:23), which may or may not result in comfort (or pain), will yield far greater results in terms of personal satisfaction and joy, and, ultimately, lead to greater Christ-likeness.

Like a locomotive engine plowing over an unsuspecting pedestrian (but in a good way)

Still gathering my thoughts after getting blindsided by this book...

A quick thought (quote) about the church

A quote from Alan Hirsch's book The Forgotten Ways:

"A combination of recent research in Australia [where Hirsch is from] indicates that about 10-15 percent of that population is attracted to what we can call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant 'market appeal' to about 12 percent of our population. The more successful forms of this model tend to be large, highly professionalized, and overwhelmingly middle-class, and express themselves culturally using contemporary, 'seeker-friendly' language and middle-of-the-road music forms. They structure themselves around 'family ministry' and therefore offer multigenerational services. Demographically speaking, they tend to cater largely to what might be called the 'family-values segment' - good, solid, well-educated citizens who don't abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live, largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle."

He goes on to say this:

"Thus, in Australia we have the somewhat farcical situation of 95 percent of evangelical churches tussling with each other to reach 12 percent of the population. And this becomes a significant missional problem because it raises the question, 'What about the vast majority of the population (in Australia's case, 85 percent; in the United States, about 65 percent) that report alienation from precisely that form of church?' How do they access the gospel if they reject this form of church? And what would church be like for them in their various settings? Because what is clear from the research in Australia, at least, is that when surveyed about what they think about the contemporary church growth expression of Christianity, the 85 perfect range from being blasé ('good for them, but not for me') to total repulsion ('I would never go there'). At best, we can make inroads on the blasé; we can't hope to reach the rest of the population with this model - they are simply alienated from it and don't like it for a whole host of reasons.'

Does this describe us? Is that who we are as a church? Are we catering to and consisting of mainly the "...solid, well-educated citizens who don't abuse their kids, pay their taxes and who live, largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle"? Hirsch's solutions are yet to come...

Wall and Peace

Anyone who's never seen graffiti artist Banksy's work before, you need to run, not walk (or whatever the web-surfing equivalent of running is) to his website here. He is a genius. I've never been anything like a graffiti enthusiast, but he really makes me believe in the medium. He snuck his work into the Louvre in Paris, and glued it onto the wall; it was an altered painting of an old duke or baron or something, holding a can of spray paint, painting peace signs on a brick wall. It stayed up for 2 days - that's awesome. He took a trip to Palestine and painted some amazing works on the segregation wall right in the middle of Palestine. The wall has armed lookout posts every 300 ft. or so, and is very well protected, yet he somehow managed to paint these huge pictures on the wall. One of them made it look like there was a hole in the wall, and on the other side was revealed a beautiful, idyllic looking beach. Genius! There was this hilarious quote underneath that went something like "Onlooker: You make the wall beautiful; Banksy: Thanks; Onlooker: We don't want it to be beautiful. We hate this wall. Go away." One of his particularly poignant pictures (not in Palestine, but somewhere in London, where he lives and primarily works) was a faux-street sign that had apache helicopters chasing a crowd of men, women, and children, and said "Americans Working Overhead" at the bottom. It's an interesting look at global perception of America right now. Anyways...he's an amazing artist, and you should definitely check out his work. One of the most amazing things about this enigma known as Banksy is that no one knows who he is! He's done thousands of pictures (I'm sure there's a slang term for graffiti pictures that I'm just not hip enough to know about...) all over the world, hung his work in museums in Paris, New York, and London, and really has a huge cult following, and yet only a small handful of people really even know who he is. I don't know about you, but I'm intrigued...

Cars are fun (aka "No more Brad Turner, I'm playing Michael Knight now")

Wow, what a godsend friends can be! After scouring Craigslist nearly incessantly for the past 2 weeks, looking at car after car, junker after junker, and scam after scam, I finally decided to send out an email to everyone we know here in Georgia, to see if any of them were selling or knew someone who was selling a car at a decent (sub-3000) price. Some good friends of ours, Brad and Lanie Beth, work with a guy who just happened to be selling his car. Better yet, his in-laws were buying him a new car, so he didn't need to make any money off his old car, so he was willing to give us a sweet deal on it! So after all our searching, driving, praying, frustrating (can I use that as a verb?), and despairing, I'm driving off in my own 97 Honda Accord, with only 125,000 miles on it! Woo-hoo!! No more driving my motorcycle at 50 miles an hour on a 32 degree morning! No more mooching a car off Bart, Seth, or Debbie to go pick up lunch!! No more helmet hair!

Perhaps the day will come that I will lament being able to drive a motorcycle to work everyday, but that is certainly not this day. Amen.

A grey and rainy day...

Today's weather is a perfect metaphor for this brief yet all-too-drawn-out season I find myself in: grey, overcast, on-again off-again drizzle and downpour, and an overall sullen demeanor across the landscape outside our window. No doubt there are a number of things contributing to this morose and somewhat dismal state Maria and I have been in for the past few weeks: the let-down and stress after the purchase of our first house, the frustration of trying to buy a decent yet affordable used car, the counseling I am currently undergoing, which is stirring up a lot of pain and shame from my past, and a hard-hitting series at Momentum that the enemy seems determined to undermine...I swear I hear Simple Minds playing somewhere in the distance..."rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling down...down...down...down"

Congratulations, Idol, you win

It's funny to look back at all the things that I have at one time boycotted and said "I will never...", and then eventually succumbed to. Cell phones. Guitars. DVRs. And now American Idol. The first 5 seasons of American Idol's existence I couldn't have cared less about the show, and probably did everything I could to defame the show and its viewers (conveniently, I can't really remember just how much I used to dislike the show, though). Last year I started to soften, as I watched the first few shows just simply for the gag-or-laugh factor of all the terrible vocalists that shamelessly subject themselves to the chuckling of Randy, the pitifully sympathetic waffling of Paula, and the wrath of Simon. Once it really got into the show, though, I started to lose interest, especially once my favorite contestant, the chubby curly-haired worship leader dude from Charlotte named Chris got eliminated. This season, however...I'm afraid I may have become a full-fledged Idol fan, painful as it is to admit.

I actually lost sleep last night because I couldn't turn my brain off after watching the first round of Hollywood auditions. I literally broke out in a sweat as my heart pounded on behalf of the contestants! I know how tough auditions can be, but I've obviously never experienced an audition with the pressure and weight that rides on an audition like that. So I sweat and shake on their behalf. I found myself shouting at the judges for their patronization of the 17-year-old who lives in his car and, though he was awfully likeable, has no business on Idol. I nearly cried in joy along with Brooke White when the judges finally announced that she was through, after the usual painful drawn-out speech about how tough it is to be a judge and to say "no" to people...Yikes! What has become of me...alas that these days should be mine, that I would foresake the last vestige of sanity and dignity within my soul...God help me.

From among the myriad, The Myriad emerges

I am really digging this band "The Myriad" that I read about in Relevant. They combine the electric guitars and electronics of Radiohead, the pianos of The Fray, the vocals of Keane (only way better), and some of the rhythmic complexity of Mute Math; basically, they could be one of the best bands in recent memory! And yet, they do not sound like a rip-off or a cheap substitute. Their sound is distinct and unique, at least to my ears. I've only listened to their 5-track EP, appropriately called Prelude to Arrows (Arrows is their full-length release coming out in a few months), thus far, but it's really really good.

I'm really loving the keys with the abstract guitars and ethereal vocals; it's a great sound. They sound so polished, too, it's hard to believe they haven't had a major label release until now. Their melodies are soaring but palatable, the lyrics are abstract but not completely ambiguous, and the production quality is impeccable. I implore you to listen to the infectious "We Will be Disappointed Together" and not walk away singing the repetitive chorus for the next hour. Maria and I have already succumbed...

Working out like the Holy Man of Nazareth (I'm quoting Charles Spurgeon, so I must be super spiritual)

I have this Charles Spurgeon daily devotional as part of a Bible suite program on my computer, and it's chock full of savory morsels of spiritual insight. It must have been written about 120 years ago (which I can confirm after a quick check at wikipedia), and the olden language reflects that. Nonetheless, I begin to see why Spurgeon is held up as one of the "heroes of the faith," so to speak; not only is he eloquent and verbose, his thoughts just teem with passion and zeal for Christ, and a sincere desire to invoke the same in his readers.

Anyways, the reason I mention it is that the entry for today is all about how even though the Gospels present a clear and intriguing picture of Christ, Christ's followers themselves should display the most striking resemblance to Christ that anyone could ever see. This is obviously not a new idea, or even one that I haven't heard in the last month. However, it's when Spurgeon says "but they [should], when they once beheld us, exclaim, 'He has been with Jesus; he has been taught of him; he is like him; he has caught the very idea of the holy Man of Nazareth, and he works it out in his life and every day actions'" that he really gets me. Now, obviously for someone to exclaim that presupposes that they know all about the person and character of Christ already, which somewhat misses the point. But, I wonder if I could honestly say the same about myself. Do I "work out the very idea of the Holy Man of Nazareth in my life and every day actions?" I hope that that could be said of me. I hope that more and more my life reflects the One I claim to follow. That's my hope for THIS day, as a start.