I’m working on an article entitled “Moving Beyond the Worship Service.” The outline so far:
-Almost all churches, traditional, seeker, and postmodern, focus heavily on the worship service
-When we focus exclusively on the worship service, we ignore many other possibilities for our time together, from ancient spiritual practices to modern educational methods
-The worship service only allows a few people to exercise their spiritual gifts
-The worship service is not biblical, either in example or instruction.
-The worship service is expensive and time-consuming to produce.
-The sermon, the didactic portion of a worship service, is a terrible way to teach
-Worship services are mostly about music, which tends to divide people along the lines of their musical preferences rather than unite them in Christ.

Comments?

Amy and I went to the FranklinCovey store today to get her a smaller planner that will fit in her purse. I started with a Classic Franklin when Coach Glenn gave me one in 1998. I later upgraded to a zip-around leather binder (very nice, but kind of big), which Amy adopted some time after I abandoned it for my Handspring Visor’s predecessor (a now-dead Palm III). She used it for a while, but found it too bulky, so we got her a smaller version today.

The FranklinCovey store is amazing. You walk in and instantly, you want to be professional and organized and scheduled to the max. You can do it. If you don’t believe you can, you can buy books or tapes or attend seminars to convince you that you can. Thousands of products, from Palm Zires to little flip notebooks to giant Monarch binders, scream “FILL ME WITH YOUR LIFE!” We are urged to be reliable, dependable, highly organized users of every minute of every day.

Instantly I sense that this is a modernist hangout. No one who is in any way postmodern could stand this place. It made me briefly loathe myself for all my wasted time this summer. Well, maybe my life was not intended to be full of appointments and tasks. Maybe my life was designed to be lived by priorities, by values, by meaningful accomplishments (all of which are rightly emphasized in Covey doctrine). But I like to think I will be more than a list of completed prioritized tasks when it is over.

I am led again to the conclusion that character is what endures. Covey is right that the tasks (and habits they form in us) do matter, because they influence the kind of people we become over time. I’m still not completely comfortable, though, with the drivenness and task-oriented paradigm of the Franklin. What would a purposeful life look like from a postmodern mindset?

UPDATE: I realized today (Wednesday) that during the school year, I never scheduled in time to unwind. Basically, I never wrote out a schedule for my off-work hours, because I felt like it was constraining. I guess that’s the point - to keep us only doing things we want to do. I don’t value relaxation enough to schedule it in - but I need it, so I end up wasting an hour and not really feeling relaxed afterward. For example, I want to get right to work, so I sit down at the computer and waste the next hour with some new downloaded piece of software. And it doesn’t work. I neither accomplish anything nor relax, because I don’t plan to relax. Hmm.

We’re doing a Wednesday night bible study on the classical “vices and virtues,” and it’s my turn this week. I’m teaching on sloth. The timing is appropriate because yesterday, Amy and I realized that we’ve become used to using the “I’m a teacher - I’m busy” excuse. Granted, we needed a year to get used to our new post-college lifestyle, with all its demands and stressors. We built that into the church planting plan - no church stuff for a year, so we can get used to the transition. But perhaps it was a bad way to adjust to bivocational ministry. Now that we’re about ready to get started, we find that we’ve become accustomed to having all our time to ourselves. No time for serving others, meeting new people, developing relationships. These things cannot wait any longer (not that we should have been avoiding them before, though).

Sloth, for me, is not the temptation to do nothing. I am always doing something; the question is one of value. Am I spending my time on something that’s worth doing? Am I doing it well? Am I taking adequate time for the business of life and for relaxation? This is personal question; it would not work to judge someone else on these questions (except in a relationship of trust, when you know each others’ habits and heart).

UPDATE: I think it went well. After a good discussion, we came to the conclusion that it takes a deep relationship for accountability in time management to work. We need to ask others to hold us up to our standards, even though everyone’s standards for time usage are different, and we can’t really judge others by our own. The best way to influence others in this regard is by example, as Paul did in the Corinthian letters. He didn’t tell them they had to be like him, but he set the example they needed.

I found this on a fundy CofC site. This is pretty much what it’s all about, huh? Ugh.

After playing around with Post-Nuke and deciding that it’s too complicated for our church site, I’ve installed a blog at www.seattlemetrochurch.com, our church planting team’s website. We will hopefully be able to keep it updated better this way.

It’s not exactly a drug, but PHP, the programming language used by my comment system, Movable Type, PostNuke (which RELEVANT and DeeperDevotion use) and lots of other cool web stuff, has been something of an addiction for me lately. I don’t understand enough of it to really do anything, but I can get some PHP-based stuff to work (e.g. my comments) if someone else writes it.

I struggle with the desire to constantly improve my blog template. I need to be satisfied and move on.

I’m not exactly sure what format to use in summarizing what I got out of Robert Webber’s latest book, The Younger Evangelicals. To start, I’ll list the chapter titles and briefly comment on them:

1. A century of evangelicals - summarizes the history of evangelicalism in the 20th century
2. A new kind of evangelical - chronicles the emergence of the younger evangelicals, contrasting them to the “traditional evangelicals” of the 50’s-style church and the “pragmatic evangelicals” of the seeker-sensitive/Willow Creek/Saddleback movement.
3. Communication: from print to cultural transmission
4. History: from ahistorical to tradition - shows how younger evangelicals have come to value ancient Christian spirituality, as well as the history of the church, even during periods usually considered ugly.
5. Theology: from propositionalism to narrative - books could be written on this one. Oh wait, they have been.
6. Apologetics: from rationalism to embodiment - explains how Christian community and an authentic lifestyle are better representations of the reasonableness of the Christian faith than rational arguments.
7. Ecclesiology: from invisible to visible - recognizes that the Orthodox and Catholic traditions are part of the church, and that the true church is not some spiritual entity with no outward expression, but that all Christians everywhere are literally and fully the church.
8. Being church: from market to mission - no more consumer-oriented marketing strategies for church growth.
9. Pastors: from power to servanthood - no more CEO model.
10. Youth ministers: from parties to prayer - no more ski-trip spirituality.
11. Educators: from information to formation - less didactic; more discipling.
12: Spiritual formation: from legalism to freedom
13. Worship leaders: from program to narrative - yet incorporating liturgical elements like never before.
14. Artists: from constraint to expression - discusses how artists had virtually no place in traditionalist or pragmatic churches. Traditionalists view art as idolatrous, and pragmatics view it as useful only for advertising. Many good points about how Indirectly suggests that it’s OK to pray to saints and worship God using their icons.
15. Evangelists: from rallies to relationships - the obvious points are made here, but he also proposes a “process evangelism” paradigm of “Seeker, healer, kneeler, and faithful” that did not resonate with me at all. It seemed like a catechetical approach to conversion that I don’t think anyone would stick with today.
16. Activists: from theory to action - explains the shift from trying to exert political muscle to firsthand efforts to help the needy.
17. A new kind of leadership for the 21st century - closing remarks.

If you’re a 20something em-church blogger, chances are you don’t need to read this book. But you probably will, since it’s important and describes well what we’ve all been feeling for a long time. Give this book to your grandma, your home church, your parents, if they don’t understand you. This is Robert Webber’s gift from you to your loved ones who think you’ve gone crazy.

Today (ok, late at night) I ran across the Wikipedia, a completely open-source and user-editable encyclopedia. You can read an article and, if you want, change it. No one approves your work, it just gets published instantly. Anyone else can change it, and it’s all open-source.

What implications might this have for church web sites? If anyone can edit articles? What implications might this have for a communitarian approach to theology? Open-source Theology is a solid concept, less radical and probably more practical. Interesting to give any user the power to alter any text, though…