Missional Museums?
Rising high above the busy Los Angeles landscape is the remarkable $1.2 billion museum and research complex known as the Getty Center. It sits atop the Sepulveda Pass, overlooking the 405 freeway. The museum, home to some of the prized and priceless art pieces in the world, is free to visit six days a week. It does cost $8 to park in their state of the art parking garage after which you will ride a tram up the hillside to the sprawling campus. It’s a remarkable experience to visit this place. My first two visits to the Getty didn’t include one visit to a gallery. Partly due to my two children who would rather run around outside, we spent two entire afternoons walking through the gardens, lounging lazily in the enormous courtyard and sipping coffee on one of dozens of porches around the complex.
Last December, the Getty Center turned 10, which caused so small amount of reflection not only in the art community but in the architectural community as well. An article on the front page of the LA Times by the resident architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, caught my attention. As I read his article I had this impression that I was listening to a conversation I am frequently a part of – that of the relevance of the church as an institution in our communities.
story, memory and missional imagination
M. Knight Shyamalan produces movies. If you have seen Signs, or The Village, or Unbreakable, you know he is a master in his own right.But Lady in the Water, while obviously his production, has a different flavor. The story grew out of an imaginary fable Shyamalan told to his children as a bed-time story. It grew out of his own imagination and then gradually expanded. And the story is about imagination, change, healing, memory, destiny - and Story.
The lady in the water, from the Blue World, is named “Story.” That’s the first clue that this particular tale is a myth about culture, change and transformation.
The movie opens with a little line drawing relating the background - the division of humanity from humanity - into two worlds, one concerned with consumption and competition, the other with life, peace, and spirit. As the two paths diverge, there is loss of memory. Then the clincher: “man has forgotten how to listen.”
Enter Mr. Heep, a doctor whose family was killed by a random act of violence, and who left his life and practice behind in an attempt to hide from the world and from his own grief. And then enter Story, a “Narf” from the Blue World, the forgotten world of water, where the other half of humankind still lives. And from the Blue World these redemptive agents are sent out with messages to the dark world of the land. And once in a long while, a very special trip is made by a special Narf like Story.
New Economic Paradigms & Church Leadership
We are all thinking about it. We are all talking about it. Some of us are dreaming about it at night. The government 
and media in Canada is finally waking up to the reality that this is the issue on our minds. What will be the impact on our families, our churches, our communities and our jobs on the growing economic crisis?
These questions impact the management of our time and resources and call us to examine the ways in which we have been captive to an economic and social reality that is no longer sustainable. This requires some huge adjustments to all facets of our lives and presents us with some significant problems/opportunities: the rising cost of fuel, the rising cost of food, the housing crisis in the US, the loss of jobs in the manufacturing industries in North America, enormous debt, families stretched to the max…. You can probably add more.
Jason wrote a fantastic post that raises some significant challenges and opportunities our local churches and the pastoral “role” as a whole.
Today, Chris said,
Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences?
The Difficulty of Systems Change
A news article by the Associated Press recently reported on remarks made by the United States Defense Secretary, Robert Gates. Gates challenged some of the military’s leaders to promote new thinking. He singled out the use of pilotless surveillance planes, in growing demand by commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, as an example of how the Air Force and other services must act more aggressively.
Gates has been trying for months to get the Air Force to send more unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, like the Predator drone that provides real-time surveillance video, to the battlefield. “Because people are stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth,” Gates said of his prodding. “While we’ve doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough.” His remarks were directed at a large group of officers at Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Noting that they represent the future of Air Force leadership, he urged them to think innovatively and worry less about their careers than about adapting to a changing world. He encouraged young soldiers to “take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent”, and to “defend your integrity as you would your life”.
The Dissonance of Holy Patience
“I waited patiently for the Lord” (Psalm 40:1).
What does it mean to wait patiently? If we look at David’s situation at the time he wrote this psalm (where he pours his heart out to God for all the “troubles” and personal “sins that have overtaken him”), we see a man leading against the backdrop of much anguish and anxiety. He is quick to cry out to God, “O Lord, come quickly to help me” (v. 13), and, “You are my help O my God, do not delay.” (v. 17) David wants and pleads for God’s intervention right now, not at some time off in the distant future.
In composing this psalm and expressing fear, despair, and anxiety (along with urgent prayers for divine intervention), is David no longer waiting patiently for the Lord? Has his posture somehow changed from a state of poised trust to this present state of restless anxiety? Has his patience run out?…Or, could it be that this present behavior is not at all inconsistent with the attitude of holy patience, the kind that is pleasing to God?
Last weekend Paul Fromont noted the distance between the Text and truth. But rather than a movement toward nihilism, solipsism or the dark night of relativism, this post-Derridean read may be hopeful. He wrote,
Imagine if Scripture was filled with “holes” and that these holes make space for God and a hermeneutic of surprise. Imagine if these holes stop us from holding to tightly to what we presently understand as ‘truth’? Holes speak to me of the apophatic tradition and I for one appreciate that our holy texts are full of holy and needful holes, though I can’t explain it..
I hear this as a recognition of our embeddedness in culture (hermeneutic of finitude) and a movement away from our tendency to absolutize today’s reading or the status quo: thus, a renewal of God as King and transcendent Other who stands outside the text. The outcome — both in life and hermeneutics: an invitation to creatively participate with God in revealing His kingdom. The failure of our current maps has the effect of pushing us back to the Scriptures to listen with open ears, and simultaneously to listen with new ears to our culture and to those around us. We listen with two ears: one to heaven and one to earth. I’m remembering the metaphor Earl Creps used in a newsletter:
I think we can safely say there is more theological diversity in the west than has existed for quite some time. Over the weekend there was a discussion on RESONATE mail list on the feeling that emergent has become a brand.
While that ethos seems to prevail south of the border, there is immense resistance to any unidimensionality or centralized control here in Canada. We really are a pluralist society. And we really seem to be more comfortable with networked expressions.
The beauty is that we have more tolerance for difference and exploration, and a willingness to move in these liminal spaces as we learn together. In other words, every new difference doesn’t appear to be resulting in a new denomination 
The real gift of “emergent” is “emergence” .. the ability to generate conversations and not a brand. I understand the risks: that we simply get lost in our words; that we never land anywhere or take action on anything (the curse of intellectualism); or that we think we have arrived somewhere simply because we created a new map. (Reification of our own version of “truth”). And yes, we do have a tendency to cynicism.