Tired of Tribes?

Too bad. Here are some more thoughts from the book. Some really thought provoking stuff, especially when applied to a church/ministry start up. Not all things apply, but plenty do.

Your Micromovement (Can you envision your church as a micromovement?)

Movements take connected people and make change.

The key elements in creating a micromovement consist of five things to do and six principles:

1. Publish a manifesto – it’s a mantra and a motto and a way of looking at the world. It unites your tribe members and gives them a structure.

2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you.

3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another – great leaders figure out how to make these interactions happen.

4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement.

5. Track your progress – do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to that progress.

Principles:

1. Transparency really is your only option

2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you

3. Movements that grow, thrive – everyday they get better and more powerful.

4. Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction.

5. Exclude outsiders – who isn’t part of your movement matters almost as much as who is.

6. Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.

Random Thoughts

• I have really been into Oasis lately. I have them in concert on my DVR. "Morning Glory" may be in my top ten favorite songs right now.
• Did you know that Stan Musial is third on the all time list of extra base hits? Only Barry Bonds and Henry Aaron have more. He is so underrated. Sports Illustrated did a story on him a few years ago and called him the most underrated player in baseball history. As far as living ball players, only three can claim to have been better.
• I really got into the World Football Challenge. I am leaning on getting a English Premier league team jersey. Toss up between Chelsea and Liverpool. While in Wales recently I saw a bunch of Man U jerseys (or as I believe they are called, "kits" which includes the shorts, I think).
• I love Wilco, but their new release isn't blowing me away (despite the good reviews). But, two of the songs on it are as good as anything they have done: "One Wing" and "Bull Black Nova" are both worthy of immediate downloads. I do like "Wilco (the song)" in spite of its silly title. "You Never Know" is good as well. The rest of the release is kind of blah to me. I hope it grows on me, but it hasn't yet.
• Loved my trip to Wales. While there I had Cornish pasties (rhymes with nasties), a meal in a Somalian restaurant (some kind of lamb stew that was fantastic), Jamaican bar-b-q, authentic Turkish food (Lahmacun, sort of a flat bread pizza) and some sort of Chilean chicken. It was a great trip that took about 4 days for jet lag to catch up with me.
  

One of the Truest Nuggets from Tribes

This little nugget from Seth Godin's book, Tribes, really resonated with me. I have seen this played out over the course of several jobs/ministry opportunities. It is something that I keep in mind whenever I am in a leadership position.

The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.

Reacting is what your body does when you take the wrong kind of medicine. Reacting is intuitive and instinctive and usually dangerous. Managers react.

Responding is much better alternative. You respond to external stimuli with thoughtful action. Response is always better than reaction.

But both pale in comparison to initiative. Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that’s what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it. They cause the events that others have to react to. They make change.
Initiative is such an astonishingly successful tool: because it’s rare.

Simply Christian - Thoughts on Jesus (finale)

Jesus: Rescue and Renewal (part 3)
The First Easter
Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when you die.” It’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after ‘life after death.” If Jesus’ resurrection “proves” anything about what happens to people after they die, it is that. The NT states it this way: “If Jesus has been raised, that means that God’s new world, God’s kingdom, has indeed arrived; and that means we have a job to do. The world must hear what the God of Israel, the creator God, has achieved through his messiah.

Eastern Orthodox churches have always emphasized, when Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introduction a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t leave us as passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet…and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.
If it was the case that Israel’s vocation was to be the people through whom the one God would rescue his beloved creation; if it is the case that Jesus believed himself, as God’s messiah, to be bearing Israel’s vocation in himself; and if it really is true that in going to his death he took upon himself, and in some sense exhausted, the full weight of the world’s evil – then clearly there is indeed a task waiting to be done…Something has happened in and through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and earth have been joined forever. God’s future has arrived in the present.

Jesus and “Divinity”
From the earliest days of Christianity we find an astonishing shift, for which again nothing in Jewish traditions of the time had prepared Jesus’ followers. They remained firmly within Jewish monotheism; and yet they said, from very early on, that Jesus was indeed divine.
Once we remind ourselves that humans were made in God’s image, that this is not a category mistake, but the ultimate fulfillment of the purpose of creation itself.
Somehow, Jesus both prayed to the Father and took upon himself a role which, in the ancient prophecies was reserved for YHWH – that of rescuing Israel and the world. He was obedient to the Father, simultaneously doing what only God can do.

Simply Christian - Thoughts on Jesus (part 2)

Jesus: Rescue and Renewal (part 2)
Temple, Supper and Cross
Jesus chose the Passover for its symbolism of the rescue and deliverance of God. The freedom did not come in the form of an attack on the Roman garrison, but at the temple itself. Declaring it corrupt, he performed one of his greatest symbolic actions, overturning tables and, for a short but potent time, preventing the normal business (the continual offering of sacrifices). This was no mere cleanup operation, but a sign that the Temple itself was under divine judgment. God was going to destroy the city and the temple, and would vindicate not the Jewish nation as a whole, but Jesus himself and his followers.

God was about to act to bring in the kingdom, but in a way that none of Jesus’ followers had anticipated. The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil.
Jesus spoke of the Passover bread as his own body that would be given on behalf of his friends, as he went out to take on himself the weight of evil so that they wouldn’t have to bear it themselves.

His death would do what the Temple, with its sacrificial system, had pointed toward but had never actually accomplished. In meeting the fate which was rushing toward him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God’s future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence. He would act out, finally, his own interpretation of the ancient prophecies which spoke to him of a suffering Messiah. The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.

Simply Christian - Thoughts on Jesus

Jesus: Rescue and Renewal (part 1)
Jesus had gone about Palestine announcing that now, at last, God’s kingdom was arriving. The message that the ancient prophecies were coming true, that Israel’s story was reaching its destination at last, that God himself was on the move once more and was about to rescue his people and put the world to rights.

The messiah was thought to be YHWH’s anointed, the king in waiting. Those who were expecting a messiah were expecting him to fight the battle against Israel’s enemies – specifically, the Romans. He would rebuild, or at least cleanse and restore, the Temple. He would bring Israel’s long history to its climax, reestablishing the monarchy as in the days of David and Solomon. He would be God’s representative to Israel, and Israel’s representative to God. We see someone who tried to mold himself into this exact image in the person of Simeon ben Kosiba. Central to his aim was to rebuild the temple and thereby place himself in the long line: David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah, Judas Maccabeus, Herod…all kings of the Jews, all Temple builders or temple restorers. For that to happen, he would have to fight the ultimate battle against the pagan forces.

So, why did Jesus’ followers hail him as Messiah? He had led no military uprising, nor did it look as though he would do so. He did not always act like this kind of messiah, but did point to various signs that he was some kind of messiah (even pointing out that John was the Elijah to come who would pave the way for the messiah). But nobody in this period supposed that that Messiah would have to suffer, let alone die. Indeed, that was the very opposite of normal expectations. The messiah was supposed to be leading the triumphant fight against Israel’s enemies, not dying at their hands. (This points out the disciples’ disbelief at Jesus’ pronouncements of his suffering and death.)

Jesus seems to have combined the idea of the Servant as messiah but would also be a sufferer. As Jesus’ studied the scripture, he allowed his study to shape his sense of what he had to do. His task, he believed, was to bring the great story of Israel to its decisive climax. The long range plan of God the creator – to rescue the world from evil and to put everything to rights at last – was going to come true in him. His death, which at one level could rightly be seen as an enormous miscarriage of justice, would also be the moment when, as the prophet Isaiah had said, Jesus would be wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities” (Isa. 53.5). God’s plan to rescue the world from evil would be put into effect by evil doing its worst to the Servant – that is, to Jesus himself – and thereby exhausting its power.

Gospel Intentionality

I've seen this a couple of places but I really liked it and hope for this in the campus ministry/mission we are involved in:

Steve Timmis posted a series of Tweets on this: Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means …

… buying from local shops.
… frequenting a local coffee shop or pub.
… playing for a local sports team.
… always tipping generously in local restaurants.
… being the kind of neighbor everyone wants to have as a neighbor.
… volunteering at a local charity shop along with a couple of others from church.
… doing ordinary things in community.
… opening your home to, and sharing your food with others.
… walking the same route to work at the same time or catching the same train each day.
… we do EVERYTHING for the sake of the gospel!