End of year accounting

As we end the year, the big credit crunch of 2009 has brought megachurch leader Rick Warren into the news again.  He’s had a very up-and-down year, starting with the inauguration of a new US president and ending with this impassioned appeal for $900,000 before the clock strikes midnight today.  The more you have to start with, the more you have to lose, but most of the world’s Christians won’t be shedding too many tears, and the idea that (as the article in today’s Orange County Register suggests) the faithful of Saddleback will come up with that kind of cash by the deadline maybe just suggests that they’re not as hard up as they seem.  Or is it all a publicity stunt to get themselves noticed?

More interesting to the church mice is this sign we saw recently in Hong Kong:

Of course, that metropolis is a bit of a consumerist paradise itself – but don’t you just love this as a statement about life, love, community, gospel,  God. This one picture expresses our own prayerful aspirations for 2010  better than any number of words (or dollars, euros, pounds …).  May all our readers experience the same sense of simple yet deep connections in the coming year.

Apostolic and episcopal

An interesting statement of intention from the new bishop of Shrewsbury here about local clergy needing to be more episcopal, and bishops needing to be more apostolic.  Of course, there will always be the McDonaldized systems to struggle with, but we’ll not be the only ones watching to see if he manages to put it into practice.

Holy Week themed

 

Holy week prompted the church mice to play around with Google even more than they usually do.  We discovered this place where you can go to see Jesus crucified twice a day (12.45pm and 5.10pm) in an experience that is variously described as inspirational, educational, life-changing, and a few other superlatives.  Some of it is a bit hard to take seriously  – not least because it seems from the daily schedule that the resurrection happens at 11.25am!  The cost per adult, booked online is 30 – dollars, that is, just in case you might be tempted to think in some other currency.

By way of a contrast, we’ve also been watching again the DVD from this Easter production from the Crystal Cathedral in southern California, which would rank pretty highly on our scale of  theological integrity and spiritual purpose.  Mind you, before we’d ever visited there, we were just a little bit skeptical  … so maybe we should head off to Florida before saying any more.  Maybe, though it’s not going to be this week.

Computers

The first full working day after the holidays – so why did we have to start by wrestling with one of our computers?  We’re not looking for an answer to that, so don’t send one.  It started with something simple (anti-virus program subscription renewal), and one thing led to another to take up the biggest part of two hours.  Still, we survived, and we’re still talking to each other at the end of it!

Today is actually a big computer-based day for us, as it’s the first day of Fuller Seminary’s winter quarter classes and therefore the first day of a new online course that John is teaching on Theology and Culture.  It’s been taught in class in Pasadena quite a few times now, and the last time around was filmed so that the online students can have the benefit of all the lectures and powerpoints that were used in the classroom.  The Fuller online technical folks have done a great job in making all this user friendly, and the course website is looking great.  There are 25 eager students who will introduce themselves to each other in the next 24 hours or so, and then begin their exploration of contemporary culture through a theological lens.

Online teaching has turned out to be one of life’s big surprises for us.  It must be three or four years since Fuller first asked us to do it, and it would be fair to say that we were a bit cynical, wondering how a subject like practical theology, that is intrinsically relational, could possibly work online.  The very first course we offered was one that we teach together (Theological and Pastoral Perspectives on the contemporary family), which regularly raises big issues for students in relation to their own personal history and family experience.  So we were ready for a few pastorally complicated situations online, and probably thought they would be much harder to handle than face-to-face.  What we discovered was that they are just handled differently.  Certainly, the level of interaction and personal openness in the online context is no less than it would be in a classroom.  In fact, one of the big advantages is that in an online course every student has a voice, and their voice is heard – which doesn’t often happen in a classroom, where the noisiest, most confident (and often most self-opinionated) voices crowd out the others.  Watch this space to see if these expectations are fulfilled over the next few weeks for this new course.

For more information about Fuller’s online courses, go here.

McDonald on McDonald’s

This newspaper article is one of the first we read in 2009: the UK marketing director of McDonald’s (who is actually called McDonald!) says that if fast food wasn’t full of salt and fat nobody would buy it.  Those who’ve followed our lives and thinking in the last few years will not be surprised to know that it generated some interesting conversations around the holiday table.  And not about restaurants, but (what else?) about McDonaldization and the church.

Only time will tell if Jill McDonald is right in claiming that if they changed the recipe too much they would never attract people to her restaurants.  But there can be little doubt that churches certainly don’t have the luxury of doing nothing in order to ensure their future flourishing.  When you think about it, sticking to the old recipes is actually the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus, which is all about change and new life, looking to the future rather than to the past.  He was so attractive to people precisely because he offered them a vision of who they could become, and never left anyone feeling they had to be trapped by their past, however negative it might have been. 

Mind you, we would not want to rubbish the past, because we recognize that our forebears in faith created the sort of churches that were able to faithfully embody the good news within their own cultural context.  But slavishly sticking to their recipe is not only strategically unhelpful in today’s rapidly changing world, but can actually be seen as a denial of the very things they stood for.  Both of us love tradition, not as ancient history but as living reality.  Seeing the past through the challenges of the present not only opens up fresh angles on ancient wisdom, but can equip us to be agents in creating a new future.   Aiming to explore that for ourselves, and empowering others in their own quest for personal wholeness, seems like quite a reasonable aspiration for a new year.