What knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

A new friend recently read Flickering Pixels and blogged some of the big points here, here, here, and here.

And here’s a short video of Rob Bell interviewing Shane Hipps at the National Pastor’s Convention.

For communicators of the gospel, this means that we need to work very hard at our preaching/teaching and invest what it takes to become very good. I think it is alright to utilize video, but we should exercise a lot of caution and be judicious in our frequency of use. Big, even oversized, props are better I think because of their ability to spur on imagination before, during, and after the message.

Another big take-away from all of this is: READ!

I’m glad I’ve become a reader as an adult (didn’t like it as much as a Jr High/HS student). Reading is better for our brains in lots of ways. One thing I’ve done to decrease my TV time (I still have a few shows I like) is not replace a show after the series finaly wraps it up.

• Favorite baseball team logo on your cap
• College name or logo on your T-shirt/sweatshirt/alumni sticker on your car
• Family Coat of Arms
• National flag
• Water, Wine, Bread, Cross 

What happens when symbols present identities that find themselves at odds with one another? The issue of rank order of our allegiance is an important consideration. This is not so much an issue with my favorite baseball team (Houston Astros) and the kingdom of God. But what about my identity as an American citizen? Typically, it seems, we think simply–Christianity first, nation second. I would argue, however, that the order of allegiance for God’s kingdom and one’s nation is not simply #1, #2. Here’s what I mean.

If citizenship is first determined by baptism, then kingdom citizenship is #1. We are likely  all agreed on that. However, the next step concerns what makes one a good citizen of God’s kingdom. The Scriptures seem clear that love of God and love of neighbor modeled after the love of Christ, whether a sibling in Christ or a fellow human not in Christ, are the marks of a proper practice of kingdom citizenship. This standard is applied regardless of national boundaries, extending the witness of Christ to all peoples. And this doesn’t even get into the way our kingdom citizenship makes us siblings of persons across the borders we’ve claimed and created. 

This, I think introduces a 1, 2, 3 order: 

1. God’s kingdom (and because of that…)
2. All peoples of the world (whether in or beyond one’s national borders, and particularly those most at the margins)
3. One’s nation 

What’s left is to pay attention to our symbols, honoring and enjoying those listed above and more, while being sure their prominence aligns with loyal citizenship in the kingdom of Christ. 

I’ve been thinking a little about the cliche axiom being applied, predictably, to this episode: “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” But I’m not so sure it’s all that helpful here, or in general really. 

Stay with me. With our books, publishers are incredibly careful to pair the cover with the book. The right cover inspires a gut-level connection with the book itself, it enlists our eyes in the task of convincing our minds and hands to reach out, pick it up, peruse it, and consider buying it. Can you judge an actual book by its cover? Well, “judge” might be a clumsy word, but yes, you can. At least that is the aim of every publisher (and I imagine the author too). And they must aim thusly because their book sales have a lot to do with their success at getting people to pick up a book (or click on a link) and check it out. If the consumer can’t judge the book by itself, that book is in some serious trouble in terms of finding an audience. 

With actual books, the aim is to match the cover with the contents, presenting the book as attractively and accurately as possible–a sense of integrity between what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside. No one buys books that don’t look worth picking up and checking out. And, no one who buys a book will respect feeling led astray by “what it looked like it was going to be about” versus “what it actually was about.” 

But here’s where the saying, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” as an axiom breaks down. Why is there an assumption about the correlation between “covers and contents” when it comes to people? We aren’t designed to be marketed and consumed. Yes, we do that with ourselves and one another (and no doubt Susan Boyle is already or soon to be engaged by those powerful forces herself), but we are not made that way. We are good ontologically, that is, in our being—that’s part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Making the point in another way, we are ends, not means. 

Back to the phrase. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Perhaps it applies to some situations. But it does not apply in many more because there isn’t a sense of integrity between exterior and interior in things like intellect, compassion, determination, passion, kindness, and love…or vocal talent.  The danger in applying the phrase, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” to this and so many situations that we routinely do is that we perpetuate in our own minds and in the public consciousness a myth that the qualities named above and more are internals with naturally appropriate matching externals. In other words, there’s no such thing as  human “cover” that suggests appropriate expectations for what contents may be found lurking around on the inside.

Case in point… Funny thing about a voice. No telling what it sounds like until you stop to listen to it. 

Links: 

• The video, of course, though you’ve seen it by now. 
• Dennis Palumbo of HuffPost offers an exceptionally welcome reminder here. 

– SPOILER ALERT – 

A little over a week ago, the episode “Simple Explanation” aired. In addition to the usual medical-mystery-as-dance-floor-for-philosophy, the episode featured the discovery, by two of House’s team of doctors, the body of one of their own–Dr. Kutner, played by Kal Penn (who actually left the show, despite his enjoyment of acting in it, for a job at the White House). Kutner’s death is quickly and accurately ruled a suicide. 

The suicide of the Kutner character comes very much out of the blue. He’s not the member of the team or the doctor among those who we would predict would commit suicide. He seemed much more balanced than most or all of the other doctors, and seemed to be genuinely happy. We’d have never seen this coming. 

Which is exactly the experience and articulated reflection of the characters in the episode itself? 

What I find so fascinating is that the abruptness and total unexpectedness of Kutner as suicidal and troubled inspired roughly the same sort of talk as an actual suicide would. Hear me clearly—obviously there is not the emotional connection. But in terms the sorts of things said, the self-reflection inspired, the language and speech patterns employed, the way the episode presented the story recreated an engagement with the surprise of Kutner’s death that sounded eerily like what one might expect to hear if the event had happened in the real world. 

I bring this up to make a connection and raise a question for communicators—in my case, preaching and teaching Scripture and the Christian faith. The connection concerns the art of storytelling or presentation—how to tell what, when. What to actively engage and what to leave alone.

The question (which I don’t have answers to yet) is: How can we communicate in such a way that the listener/audience/congregation is so engaged that they find themselves mimicing what the next appropriate words will be? How do we introduce a narrative that practically jerks them into the  plot and bids them to participate in the unfolding of the story? This is what happened in the House episode. What teaching/communication instructional value might there be for us in learning how more effectively to create vivid entry points that can introduce or re-introduce persons to faith, and draw persons of faith into a deeper immersion in the Christian Story? 

Thoughts?

——— 

For further exploration of this essay and potential implications for ministry, check out the suburban ministry blog site “sub-text”, which has a post linking and quoting someone who presses back on Richard Florida’s position in this essay. 

——-

In my last post on this subject (yes, it’s been a little while…), I gave an initial look at the author’s “mega-regions” lens on a new economic geography. I’d like to take the next step, with Mr. Florida, which follows very closely behind his assertion about the multi-city geographic centers that he posits will dominate the economy in the future. 

First, however, a factoid about current mega-region trends that I failed to include in my previous post. Having rattled off a few global mega-regions for the sake of broader context, he underscores his point about mega-regions as a growing trend (and his counter-argument against Friedman’s “The World is Flat” argument) thusly: 

 Economic output is ever-more concentrated in these places as well. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population, produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations. (p. 50)

Moving along… Following close on the heels of shifting population trends toward mega-regions, he predicts a similar shift according to education demographics, noting differing abilities among areas to “attract highly educated people” (p. 50). He gets more specific to bring the point into sharp relief: 

Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecendented.” (p. 50) 

We might add to that—not a little disturbing given the element of homogenization in that data despite the reputation for cultural diversity among all the cities named (which seems especially popular the more highly educated one is). I’m not saying that this sort of trend can be pushed in a different direction; the drivers behind and within it seem too complex to manipulate it in that way. 

The shift away from relative uniformity in educational attainment on a national scale recalls a David Brooks column from almost a year ago. Set in the context of the Democratic presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, Brooks observes the difference education makes today within communities or states, after noting the difference it didn’t make in yesteryear: 

In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree. 

But that’s all changed. In the decades since, some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

Retailers, home builders and TV executives identify and reinforce these lifestyle clusters. There are more niche offerings and fewer common experiences.

There’s an innovation (therefore, economic) incentive, Florida tells us, to this “talent-culstering.” In essence, a denser concentration of persons with higher educational attainment translates into both a higher and faster rate of innovation and growth (Perhaps analogous to the way compound interest works? The concept is referred to as urban metabolism). 

Here’s the rubber-meets-the-road piece of this: These factors are good to the good times (metabolism and talent-clustering), “but they’re even more [important] when times get tough” (p. 51). 

It’s not that “fast” cities are immune to the failure of businesses, large or small… It’s that unlike many other places, they can overcome business failure with relative ease, reabsorbing their talented workers, growing nascent businesses, founding new ones. (p. 51) 

Some impressions are coming together in my mind regarding ministry in this context. But for now, I need to mull over those impressions a bit longer, and simply repeat the missional question: What does incarnation look like here? What are the implications of becoming educationally homogenized even while pursuing and valuing cultural diversity of every other sort?

A serious reading of Scripture—all of it really, but in reference to Jesus’life and ministry, the New Testament and Gospels in particular are instructive for us—shows that Christian faith has political implications. “Jesus is Lord” is a political statement, after all, since it was a rejection of the claim that “Caesar is Lord.”

And yet there is much difference of opinion concerning how we Christians should live out the political nature of our faith in the public sphere—I speak of America in particular, since this is where I live.

I’ve got more thoughts on this topic that I’m trying to bring together, but for now, I’d like to share this quiz from Leadership Journal that I came across recently that helps get at the major stances toward the church and politics, regardless of one’s beliefs about particular issues. It maps one on a grid according to two axes: politically engaged or politically disengaged, and the church as prophet or the church as chaplain.

Check it out here.

Enjoy, and leave your results in the comments…if you dare! (I will)

Embarrassingly, given the point of the article, it took me about 3 or 4 different times of picking it up and putting it down to finish it. In my defense, I have young children and they are not refereeing themselves!

I’ll begin with some tension I experience that seem to me related to my being a member of “Generation X.”

1. Idealism vs. Pragmatism. I find that I have these two conflicting ism’s duking it out inside me. On the one hand, I’m fiercely idealistic. I strive for purity of motive and action in the public sphere. I crave idealism in politics, religion, etc. and want to see authenticity in leaders of every arena. On the other hand, I find myself with a pragmatic streak when the chips are down and I want my idealistic vision to be realized. These two strains that live in tension are probably what produces the sense of angst (that quintessential Gen-X feeling) about politics, movements, and activism. I become pragmatic regarding process at the last minute when the idealistic result is on the line, but when part of my idealism includes idealizing the process…doesn’t take much to see the angst welling up on that one.

2. Community vs. Individuality. I desire community. That is an ideal for me (see above!). That said, I’m not terribly good at practicing it in real life. I’m not good at handling vulnerability, which is one of the basic building blocks of community. Better to conceptualitze it in the abstract… but live it? Are you crazy? So, though idealizing and desiring and dabbling in community, I find individuality a more comfortable, natural state. Mind you, I whole-heartedly consider individualism the artificial state and community the natural one, but in practice… ok, you see where this is going, right?

3. Optimism vs. Angst. I can be incredibly optimistic. I see a world of possibilities. Part of that is within my temperament, but I think there is something within my generational experience that also colludes with my personality on this score. I dream. I envision. At one and the same time, however, I wrestle with angst over my own and the world’s lack of inertia in moving meaningfully toward the optimistic dream. Perhaps the pace is too slow.

4. Movement vs. Institution. Typical of Gen-Xers, I have some built-in distrust of large, lumbering, vertical (that is, hierarchical and top-down) bureaucratic institutions. I’m more attracted to the organic and more horizontal (that is, less hierarchical and flatter) nature of a movement. This one relates strongly to my experience as a United Methodist, in particular as a pastor in the UMC. Methodism began as a movement. That is a part of the Wesleyan/Methodist narrative. But at present, the United Methodist Church is not a movement; it is a large, lumbering, vertical bureaucratic institution. But it is my theological and ecclesiological home, so in a sense, I’m stuck with it.

Any other Gen-Xers out there hearing me on this? What about you?