I think it was Coop who linked to this a long time ago. The world-famous Massachusets Institute of Technology has open-sourced every course they offer, and it’s all available here. You can do the same work and learn the same material as real MIT students (though the offer “Does not provide access to MIT faculty”). Not bad. I’m planning to bulk up my computer science background.

Kary Oberbrunner, who has written for RELEVANT, has a new book on the way called Journey Towards Relevance. From an early chapter:

I guess I saw how the ?Christian subculture? was making me more and more irrelevant with the people I was trying to interface with. I felt like I was becoming more and more withdrawn from the world. I was convinced I needed to be more relevant, but what did that mean? Was it as simple as getting a couple tattoos (one in Greek and one in Hebrew), a new wardrobe, some edgier music, and some books on philosophy, poetry, and saving the planet? Is this what being relevant means?

After all, the argument on being relevant begs the question. What does it mean to be relevant? If our generation is going to draw a line in the sand against dead orthodoxy and heartless religion, then we better know not only what we are turning from, but also what we are turning to in its place.

…it s not the earrings we wear or the music we listen to that makes us relevant. It s not how close we can come to the line of ?mainstream? before we fall into sin. Being relevant is not about the fashion of our vocabulary, the packaging of our philosophical bent, or the level at which we detest the traditional Evangelical church. These things all breathe of the external.

Relevance is fundamentally internal. It s conceived through an internal relationship with God. Not only is it birthed internally, but it s maintained and sustained from an internal soul directed and connected to the Person of Jesus Christ. All of life can and should be the outflow of that relationship. Simply, what makes us relevant is our love for God and people.

Kary has developed a paradigm of conformist / separatist / transformist to describe different options in relating to culture. I’ve enjoyed his writings in the past, as well as other books published by RELEVANT. You can order Journey Towards Relevance from Redeem the Day Ministries here.

Update: I previously called the book Redeem the Day, but that’s the name of the ministry itself. Oops.

A flash mob church idea:

Take a laptop and a wifi card to a city park that happens to receive a wifi signal. Go to grouphug.us/confess and set up a sign welcoming people to confess and get things off their chest. Don’t read what they write, but talk with them and offer to pray with them if they want.

From Fred Peatross‘ GraceAwakening newsletter this week:

The whole landscape (and all our questions) change if the ever present dangers of terrorism and the Middle East evolve to a place where Christianity finds itself on a collision course with Islam. Though the 21st century there will continue to be more Christians in the world than Muslims, yet both will be jostling for converts, and often in the same places. Some foresee several countries “being brought to ruin by the clash of jihad and crusade.” If this happens, our questions die and new ones arise.

Fred’s newsletter wasn’t primarily about this topic, but this was the part that connected most with my thinking as of late, and it’s on a hot topic in the postmodern world: power.

Since Constantine, Christianity has been a religion of power. Islam emerged and gained power, and the two powers fought jihads/crusades over the Holy Land, Europe, and beyond. It was ugly, to say the least. We are now, increasingly, living in a post-Constantinian age, where the church recognizes that it is not the dominant force in culture. Some churches react to this fact by attempting to gain the kinds of power that our culture expects - by producing Christian media as an alternative. Some react by continuing to fight the “culture wars” that have already been lost on many fronts.

Islam is emerging on the world scene again as a religion of power, because it is no longer staying out of Western sight. It is here, and we all know about it, and there are lots of Muslims around. Some of them are peacable and kind people who want to advance the reign of righteousness and peace on earth in God’s name. Some of them want to blow up as many Christians or Jews as possible. I will not lump all of them together, but it is clear that there is a power-hungry and violent faction within Islam that would like nothing more than a full-on violent engagement with the Christian world, which it expects to win.

I don’t know what Western governments will do in response to this threat. It will likely continue to be a difficult course to navigate. But I know what we must not do. We must not use the rhetoric of the US as a “Christian nation” to justify eye-for-an-eye warfare between the world’s major religions. The politicians who do this must be told that they do not speak for God or Christians, and their statements must be responded to by influential Christians in a way that does not imply the “Christian nation” myth. I’m not speaking of politics here, though. I’m talking about the attitude of Christians and the Church toward hegemony and military might.

Christianity must again become what it once was - a movement of people who seek to live in the way of Jesus, whatever the cost. Not an empire, not a nation, not a worldview, but a people - a called-out-to-be-God’s people, who do not play by the rules of power and violence. This will be increasingly hard as Islam asserts its growing power.

Moreover, this is not easy in the West, at least for caucasian Christians, because we have been an imperialistic people for centuries, who relished their ability to whack native cultures on the head with our “guns, germs, and steel” to gain profit and control. Many of these white power-abusers were Christians, and did it in the name of Christianity. This is the baggage we are born with as white American Christians.

Many who share the above demographic characteristics with me are still playing the power game. It may be primarily about church budgets and money; it may be about Hollywood movies or the specific swear words that are allowed on primetime TV; it may be about helping the Republican party achieve its agenda. But if it is about power, it is not enough about Christ.

He could have called ten thousand angels
To destroy the world and set him free
He could have called ten thousand angels
But he died alone
For you and me.

Jesus had his reasons for allowing himself to be crucified, of course. I think it’s significant, though, that after his resurrection he did not round up his followers for a revenge campaign. Instead, he encouraged them to wait for his power, the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit came on Pentecost, they did not begin the aforementioned butt-whoopin’ campaign. They started to live in community, to care for each other, and to embody and share the news about the Kingdom of God that Jesus talked so much about. This is what we must do again, and leave the assertion of power to the One who will not abuse it.

I’ve just started Doug Pagitt’s new book Reimagining Spiritual Formation. It’s written by a number of people from Pagitt’s church, Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

The first bit that struck me hard was Doug’s thoughts on Christian “accountability”:

The people of Solomon’s Porch seek to make community mean something in our Christian context, so we look for ways to make our community of faith a place where we become involved in one another’s lives in intimate, meaningful, tranformative ways.

This kind of intimacy requires us to move beyond mere accountability. Accountability is built on the notion that a person will do her own work as she seeks to live a Chrsitian life while others do what they can to keep her on track. This may seem like the best our local community can offer us, but we are striving for more. We feel called to vulnerability. We are seeking to move into relationships where we don’t merely ask others to hold us to living in the way of Jesus, but where we invite them to participate in our efforts to do so. We are trying to open our lives up in such a way that others do not simply keep us on track, but become actual agents of redemption and change. p28

Some friends and I were talking about forming an accountability group a few months ago, like we had in college. Someone said, “Why would you want an accountability group? How about an encouragement group? That’s more what we all seem to need.”

I think we were all a little more open to each other in college. Now we’re real live adults and it’s hard to invite others - even our closest friends - into that personal space. But we need to. We need to become vulnerable to each other’s input, sensitive to each others’ struggles, and humble before the God who is forming us.

I just finished Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life. This is not a book for Gen-Xers. I’ve already mentioned the cutesy alliteration and nineteen different ways of restating the 5 purposes.

So here’s my alternative: The Angst-Driven Life.

This reflects the way I find myself actually working as an adult and as a human being. I find that I will not do something until the situation makes me angry enough to do something about it. I won’t clean up until I’m sick of it being messy. I won’t plan well for school until I’m sick of being unprepared. I won’t call parents until I’m sick of having a certain kid misbehave in class. I won’t get serious about time with God until I see that I’m slipping without it.

I’m not saying this is the way humans should intend to operate, but rather that it is the way we do operate in a lot of areas, especially those that we are not passionate about. I don’t have to be driven by angst to tinker with my websites; it’s something I love to do, so I do it all the time whether there’s a reason to or not.

The problem is that an angst-driven life may arrive on the scene too late to deal effectively with life’s problems. By failing to be proactive, I may miss out on the satisfaction of getting something accomplished ahead of time, before it’s absolutely critical.

God, we are a people who experience a great deal of anger. Help us not to use it as fuel for evil and despair, but as fuel for action, discipline, and persistence. Forgive us when we sin in our anger, and drive us to do your will out of love and desire rather than frustration and anger. Give us peace in Christ, and help us to be agents of peace in our angry and frustrated world.

Apparently the US government has produced a website that helps people prepare for terrorist attacks at www.ready.gov. In true government form, they’ve produced pictoral forms of the instructions, which are much, much harder to interpret than, say, a foreign language, much less English. ValleySoapBox has put a new spin on the illustrations. (Warning - a few are a bit crude.) It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in months - had me crying with laughter for 5 minutes.

A sample:

Do not drive a station wagon if a power pole is protruding from the hood.

Go feds!

Rachelle is getting comment spam. I’m getting comment spam. You know the links to Propecia and Viagra and online casino sites, accompanied by some dumb generic comment? That’s comment spam. We all hate it. Some people have done something about it, something quite sophisticated. It’s called mt-blacklist, and it’s pretty awesome.

Here’s what you do:
1. Go to Jay Allen’s site and download it (file).
2. Get a tar/gz unzipper. TAR is a Unix/Linux format that only nerds like Jay Allen understand. It’s like WinZip, only different - that’s all you need to know. I use WinRAR, which is free.
3. Extract the files, and follow the instructions here.
4. Use your FTP program (I use SmartFTP, which is also free) to do the file uploading and CHMOD stuff mentioned in the instructions.
5. Follow all of Jay’s instructions, including the part where you copy the master list of blacklisted entries.
6. You’re done. Consider yourself heavily armed against comment spam.

UPDATE:
I’ve done a ton of tinkering tonight. You’ll notice that the navigation links are back; the Epistlepalooza and DailyTexts blogs are functional again; I’ve simplified everything using my new CMS scheme. Enjoy. Let me know if you see any problems.