Urban Vancouver

"My dear people, we are already the Children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him." (1 John 3:2)

Our faith should lead us in that direction, toward the ultimate (and promised) goal. Not just lead us in circles or keep us static in one place, waiting for some magic moment to instantly transport us to another place and state of being. Following Jesus orients us to action.

We must try.

Just a quick word to you local types...

Tonight in the downtown eastside we're having a fundraiser for our new Great Room. If you're in the area and curious about what we're up to, drop in. More info here.

The good folks at Sojourners have given me a heads-up on the Sojourner Filmmaker Challenge. I love the medium of film, and I've got some very talented friends, so I thought I'd pass the information along.

Sojourners and World Vision are partnering together on a new initiative called the Filmmaker Challenge where we are asking aspiring filmmakers to create a short video (less than 4-minutes) that demonstrates what everyday people can do to help end poverty.

The winner gets an all expense paid trip to Africa and a flight to Washington, D.C. to have their video premiered at The Mobilization to End Poverty, a historic gathering of thousands of activists on April 26-29, 2009 where we expect President-elect Obama to give the keynote. Filmmakers should register at www.sojo.net/filmmaker by Dec. 17.

Lots of creative potential there, so get to it.

Our incredibly creative friend Jen Lemen is at it again:

Trust Notes, just in time for Christmas. Go grab a set. Come on... you know you want to.

For those of you not familiar with the saga of Conrad Black, I'll spare you the details. However, here's a piece from this morning's Globe about Black's attempts to wring a get out of jail free card out of GWB before he vacates the big chair.

And accompanying the article was this poll. Note: We Canadians might be polite and passive, but don't cross us.

I just had a thought:

We need a new plan, not to rebuild the economy, but to recreate it.

This morning I was reading through Peterson's introduction to the Prophets in The Message. Incredible. Here's a taste:

The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived and what counts in life. Over and over again. God the Holy Spirit uses these prophets to separate his people from the cultures in which they live, putting them back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. Prophets train us in discerning the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the gospel, keeping us present to the Presence of God.

...

The hard-rock reality is that prophets don’t fit into our way of life.

For a people who are accustomed to “fitting God” into their lives, or, as we like to say, “making room for God,” the prophets are hard to take and easy to dismiss. The God of which the prophets speak is far too large to fit into our lives. If we want anything to do with God, we have to fit into him.

The prophets are not “reasonable,” accommodating themselves to what makes sense to us. They are not diplomatic, tactfully negotiating an agreement that allows us a “say” in the outcome. What they do is haul us unceremoniously into a reality far too large to be accounted for by our explanations and expectations. They plunge us into mystery, immense and staggering.

Their words and visions penetrate the illusions with which we cocoon ourselves from reality. We humans have an enormous capacity for denial and for self-deceit. We incapacitate ourselves from dealing with the consequences of sin, for facing judgment, for embracing truth. Then the prophets step in and help us to first recognize and then enter the new life God has for us, the life that hope in God opens up.

They don’t explain God. They shake us out of old conventional habits of small-mindedness, of trivializing god-gossip, and set us on our feet in wonder and obedience and worship. If we insist on understanding them before we live into them, we will never get it.

As part of my writing I spent a little time today scrolling through the archives from my old blog. I found all sorts of stuff that I had completely forgotten about.

Apparently I recently missed my 6th blogging anniversary, but this is nothing new, as I also missed my first. I also found out that it was Bob Carlton who introduced me to Lore Brand Comics lo these 5 years ago. I also rediscovered the series of posts I called The Purge, which came on the heals of Grief. It appears I had writers block even back then. I even found what I think is a fairly witty post about comments. (I may have to repost that one some day.) I even found my old Fotopage!

I'm on a dawn-to-dusk social media fast while I work on my writing for a few days. However, while I was researching a quote this afternoon, I came across this insightful interview of Gordon & Mary Crosby, the visionaries behind The Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. (But I waited until after dusk to post it, so I'm still good.) The interview was conducted by Jim Wallis for Sojourners in November 1997.

Here's a taste:

Temperamentally, most people are either given to the inward journey but don't want to be bothered with the outward work and getting their hands dirty with the poor; or they want to get out there with the poor and they don't have time for the inward life-they're just going to get the world fixed. We said both. To me that is one of the most important things we've done.

Anybody can have a prayer group, a group to study scriptures, therapy groups, anything they want to. We've had hundreds of them through the years. That's all right. We welcome it. But the membership structure is based on a person being called to the inward life and the outward journey in the same group. These are not groups just to strengthen each person in his or her individual mission, but in a corporate mission.

I would say that's the most crucial structure we discovered, but it took us two or three years to find out that the cell groups did not know how to make the transition to mission. We prayed until we got tired of praying, until I'm sure God got tired of hearing us. Finally, we just cancelled all of our groups as of a certain date. We started again around this new understanding.

So since the early '50s, we've focused on this business of call, which is to say, "This is God's call. I've got to do this." We're totally committed to the inner life, the life of prayer and worship, of deepening our capacity to love, working with the blockages of love, journaling, and retreats. All of that goes under the heading of the inward life. And with that comes a real, worthy, challenging mission in the world.

I'm on a dawn-to-dusk social media fast while I work on my writing for a few days. However, while I was researching a quote this afternoon, I came across this insightful interview of Gordon & Mary Crosby, the visionaries behind The Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. (But I waited until after dusk to post it, so I'm still good.) The interview was conducted by Jim Wallis for Sojourners in November 1997.

Here's a taste:

Temperamentally, most people are either given to the inward journey but don't want to be bothered with the outward work and getting their hands dirty with the poor; or they want to get out there with the poor and they don't have time for the inward life-they're just going to get the world fixed. We said both. To me that is one of the most important things we've done.

Anybody can have a prayer group, a group to study scriptures, therapy groups, anything they want to. We've had hundreds of them through the years. That's all right. We welcome it. But the membership structure is based on a person being called to the inward life and the outward journey in the same group. These are not groups just to strengthen each person in his or her individual mission, but in a corporate mission.

I would say that's the most crucial structure we discovered, but it took us two or three years to find out that the cell groups did not know how to make the transition to mission. We prayed until we got tired of praying, until I'm sure God got tired of hearing us. Finally, we just cancelled all of our groups as of a certain date. We started again around this new understanding.

So since the early '50s, we've focused on this business of call, which is to say, "This is God's call. I've got to do this." We're totally committed to the inner life, the life of prayer and worship, of deepening our capacity to love, working with the blockages of love, journaling, and retreats. All of that goes under the heading of the inward life. And with that comes a real, worthy, challenging mission in the world.

I passed the time on the ferry tonight (I'm up at Linwood House now) reading a few more pages from the sample chapters from Frost & Hirsch's forthcoming book, Rejesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, which I first mentioned here.

This line in particular jumped out at me:

It is true that Jesus is like God, but the greater truth, one closer to the revelation of God that Jesus ushers in, is that God is like Christ.

Speaking as one who is rediscovering Jesus, the implications of this truth for our view of God are astounding.

I put this up on Twitter a couple days ago, but for the rest of you...

Seth Godin is about the only marketer I read anymore. A few days ago he wrote a great post on organizing that ended with a sentence that really knocked my socks off. I think it translates. What about you?

The system doesn't know what to do with a movement.

Powerful, no?

(Of course, on a lighter note, that line also brought to mind this. I post the link at the risk of destroying any impact the above line might have...)

This is a few days old now, but I think Cornel West is a genius. I need to read more of him. Any suggestions?

h/t to Sivin Kit

“Blessed are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God” (Matthew 5:9)

This is the only time the word peacemakers is ever used in the whole Bible. A peacemaker literally is the “one who reconciles quarrels.” Clearly you can see Jesus is not on the side of the violent but on the side of the nonviolent.

Jesus is saying there must be a connection, a clear consistency, a constant unity between means and ends.

There is no way to peace other than peacemaking itself.

(Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Plan for the New World)

A Children's HopeChest function in Colorado Springs last night marked the premiere of a video from our trip to Ethiopia last month. I've had a hi-res copy for a week or so, and it is stunning. Tom Davis has posted it as well. It get's me every time I watch it. Wes and Judy were there last night, and Wes shares his thoughts here. This incredible project was the work of Simon Scionka (Twitter, Facebook) who, oddly enough, landed in Kigali to work with another client a couple of hours ago.

I suppose if I was a journalist this would be irresponsible journalism. But, I'm a blogger, so we just call it a post...

[Click image for larger map] To understand what is going on in central Africa you need a PhD in political science, an intensive knowledge of the area's history, and a detailed understanding of the various cultural and tribal tensions in the region (including Rwanda, Burundi and Congo). I have none of those. I've been there a couple of times, I've tried to acquire some knowledge of the above, and I've got some friends who either live there, have lived there, or have much better connections there than I do. In short, I have just enough knowledge to know that I don't know enough.

That being said, I spent some time yesterday reading through various articles and reflecting on what I do know, and I ended up with a bad feeling in my gut.

Here's just a little background info for you:

What does Congo's Gen. Nkunda want?
An ordained preacher and rebel group commander, Gen. Laurent Nkunda is threatening to draw other nations into a war in eastern Congo.

Feeding thousands behind Congo rebel lines

Rwandan aide to be sent to France
A senior aide to Rwandan President Paul Kagame is to be transferred from detention in Germany to French custody next week, officials say.

Congo to help fight Rwanda rebels
Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have agreed to co-operate to deal with forces along their common border blamed for the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It was this last article that really put voice to my growing concerns. Here's a quote:

...Both countries' foreign ministers said Rwandan intelligence teams would go into DR Congo to help eradicate them.

The Hutu fighters have lived in eastern DR Congo since 1994 and have been a key factor in destabilising the region.

Anyone familiar with the details of the 1994 Rwandan genocide will have their attention caught by the word "eradicate." I combine these bits of information with input from friends, two of whom have said to me in separate conversations that "It could happen again very easily" in relation to Rwanda. Finally, I mix in my own feelings after attending a conference on Reconciliation in Rwanda earlier this year. It's true - so much progress has been made, and there is incredible work being done. That being said I still came away with a sense that for some reconciliation meant the proper apportioning of blame. I heard more than one Christian pastor preach that "there can be no reconciliation without justice." The words reconciliation and forgiveness were often confused and used interchangeably. In some cases it seemed the preacher was saying there can be no forgiveness without justice. I don't believe that is a biblical concept. I came away from that trip feeling that things were not as calm as they appeared.

All this to say I ended the day yesterday with the fear that the current problems in Congo could be the trigger to reigniting violence in the whole region.

I pray I'm wrong. I also share these rambling thoughts with you so that the pray-ers among you can apply some of that energy to this region. There are more details here.

In the midst of numerous global problems its good to know that some things are still right with the world:

From the Globe and Mail. Do you agree or disagree with these results. I agree.

In 1990 Michael Lewis wrote a book called Liar's Poker. It was a book about his four years at Salomon Brothers that came to an end in 1988, and I loved it. Loved it. I must have read it six times, and my dog-eared copy is still in a cardboard box in somebody's basement, an artifact from a previous life. My friends and I all read it. We memorized certain sections of it. (This was nothing new of course, as we had also memorized dialogue from 1987's Wall Street. One friend could rattle off Gordon Gekko's entire "Greed" speech by memory.) In 1990 I was 25 years old and had just started with Templeton Management. Two years later I would move to Fidelity Investments, and Lewis' book would come with me and occupy a place of prominence in whatever desk, cubicle or office I inhabited. Loved it.

Here's what the Library Journal review had to say:

As described by Lewis, liar's poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader. Lewis illustrates how economic decisions made at the national level changed securities markets and made bonds the most lucrative game on the Street. His description of the firm's personalities and of the events from 1984 through the crash of October 1987 are vivid and memorable. Readers of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities are likely to enjoy this personal memoir.

The reviewer is being kind. It's about greed, and ego, and avarice, and a culture where these vices were (and still are, apparently) praised as virtues. And I loved it. It was exciting.

Now, almost twenty years later, Lewis has returned to Wall Street to figure out what went wrong.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

Lewis' take on the current crisis is bathed in his well-earned cynicism. His view may be tainted somewhat, but I don't believe his analysis is. Anyone wanting a better understanding of the inner workings of Wall Street, and about how those characteristics have contributed to the current crisis should read this article. If you are unfamiliar with these workings, be prepared to be shocked. More to the point, this article needs to be read by those followers of Jesus who still believe the market was ordained by God, and will eventually save us. As George Bush said this week, what is needed is not more regulation, but better regulation. Right.

Read The End, by Michael Lewis. (Portfolio.com, by Conde Nast. Photoillustration above by: Ji Lee)
Language warning for the faint of heart. And lots of jargon, for the uninitiated. Let me know if you have questions.

I've seen this image on a few sites today....

AP/Jerome Delay
Protegee, carrying her sibling on her back, cries as she looks for her parents through the village of Kiwanja, north of Goma, eastern Congo on Thursday Nov. 6. A fragile cease-fire in Congo appeared to be unraveling Thursday as the U.N. said battles between warlord Laurent Nkunda’s rebels and the army spread to another town in the volatile country’s east.

Elsewhere, a friend commented that this photo puts a few things into perspective. I'd humbly suggest that it puts everything into perspective.

My friend Rachelle is writing what I think will be an important book. Swing by and take a look. And if you're so inclined, leave a comment. These things are important in the world of publishing... and as I said, I think this book will be important.