From Rural Living to Urban Living
According to the Population Reference Bureau, through most of history, human beings have engaged in rural living.  As recent as 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas.  By 1900, almost 14 percent were urbanites.  But it is within this past decade that the world reached a symbolic point where more than half the world’s population moved from rural living to urban living.  According the to the U.N., by 2025, 61 percent of the people on the planet will live in urban areas (Davey 2002:5).

As Andrew Davey reminds us in his book Urban Christianity and the Global Order, “The world is now an urban place.  The resources and concerns of the church need to acknowledge this.  This new situation means that, more than ever, theological reflection is needed on cities and the future of urban life” (Davey 2002:7).

So what are some of the issues that arise due to this monumental shift?  There is the impact that cities have on depopulated rural areas that help to feed and care for people in the cities.  Cities’ ecological footprints are growing much larger than their political areas, to the point of affecting the whole planet. As Davey writes, “The extent of a footprint is global as for example, resources are drawn from the rain forest of Southeast Asia, the copper mines of Africa, or the vineyards of Chile and Argentina, vast areas of plant life are required to consume the carbon dioxide output often in a different country, just as a city’s pollutants may eventually fall as acid rain on the communities and forests hundreds of miles away.  Wackernagel and Ress calculate that the hectare footprint per citizen is 4.27 in Canada, 5.1 in the US but only 0.38 in India” (Davey 2002:18).

While the Canadian and U.S. footprint is huge, the footprint of the poorest 20 percent of the population of North America is less than a quarter of the wealthiest 20 percent.  Just thinking about our ecological footprint raises all kinds of issues, from social justice both within and outside of the city, to the issue of globalization.  Globalization is an amalgamation of new technology, new transportation, and new communication networks that have created a global village where time and space have been redefined and old boundaries like nation-state have been blurred.  This new world has given rise to new international and transnational entities that are shaping the future with increasing pervasiveness.  The accumulative forces of globalization continues to widen the resource gap and this creates new questions in regard to social justice, identity, and a sense of belonging.

Urbanization and globalization are huge shaping forces in which the church needs to grow more literate, because we build our environment and then our environment shapes us.  In 1996, Habitat II, the U.N.’s commission on human settlements, converged in Istanbul to pose important questions about urban living.  The introduction to the preparatory report, “An Urbanizing World” warns against complacency: “One of the greatest ironies here is that the signs of urbanization are now so evident, so much part of our daily lives, that we have come to take them for granted as part of the “normal” urban scene: the slums and ghettos, the homeless, the paralyzing traffic, the poisoning of our urban air and water, drugs, crime, the alienation of our youth, the resurgence of old diseases, such as tuberculosis, and the spread of new ones such as AIDS.  Every city knows the signs; every city must fight them” (Davey 2002:43).

Gorringe in his book A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment and Redemption, argues that a Trinitarian theology ought to be concerned about space, architecture, design, public policy, ecological sustainability, and city planning, because all of life expresses our theology and even buildings make statements.  He proposes a Trinitarian mapping of spatiality. God the Holy Spirit, the Redeemer, is “the author and inspirer of all those visions of a better human environment” (Gorringe 2002:48), and God the Father is the Creator who “brings order out of chaos, the structuring of space by form” (Gorringe 2002:48), and God the Song, the Reconciler “takes flesh in order to teach peace to the nations and make justice concrete (Gorringe 2002:49).

Davey commends Leonie Sandercocks’s approach to planning and justice in the cosmopolis saying, “The new paradigm for planning that Sanderock advocates is mediated and sustained in what liberation theologians have taught us in the praxis where theory, reflection, and action combine, subject to the critique of marginal communities for whom change is a matter of life or death” (Davey 2002:53).   How will the church live out her faith in this context?  Who will she depend on?  This brings us to the final shift I would like to address, the religious shift from the Christendom era to the Post-Christendom context.

Thomas À Kempis HT Sonja Bokhorst

1.  A Primer on Today’s Missional Church
2.  Is Conversion a Four-Letter Word Series
3.  Developing a Rhythm of Life Series
4.  Pints and Saints - The Series
5.  Remembering My Grandma 1924-2008
6.  A Working Definition of the Missional Church
7.  Finding Truth in a Sound Bite Society
8. Church Planting - Models and Approaches
9. Faith and Politics Part I
10. Psalm 139 and Art

If you have a top ten posts of 2008, please let me know. I would love to read your top ten entries of the year!

While there is a lot that could be said of each of my favorite blogs for 2008, I will just mention the blogs and bloggers and encourage you to visit their sites, if you are not already familiar with them.  I have not put them in any particular order.  They are all rich reading.

Jesus Creed - Scot McKnight

Faith and Theology - Ben Myers

Reclaiming the Mission - David Fitch

Sets ‘n’ Service - Tony Stiff

Missional Church Network - Brad Brisco

Godspace - Christine Sine

The Forgotten Ways - Alan Hirsch

Church Planting Novice/Creation Project - Jonathan Dodson

Decompressing Faith - Erin Word

Next Reformation -Len Hjalmarson

If you check my blog roll, you will find other blogs that I enjoy reading regularly.  If you know of a blog that I should be reading that I don’t have listed on my blog roll, please comment and let me know.  I know there are a lot more amazing bloggers out there that I have yet to discover, so help me discover.  Tomorrow I will share my top 10 posts of 2008, actually it will be about the top posts that you read the most, commented the most and linked the most to this past year.

I Love Books

Originally uploaded by Weeping-Willow

I was able to read a number of books this past year, so as we are ending the year, I thought I would pass on the top 20 books that I read in 2008. Because I read them in 2008 does not mean that these books came out in 2008. Some did, but most didn’t. There are a number of recent books as well as some older books. This list is not in any particular order. I didn’t really want to take the time to rank each of them, because I enjoyed each one of them quite a bit. I have written a review on many of them. If you want to see if I wrote a review, just type in the title over in my search box and see if it comes up. Then you can read the review.

If you have read any of these, let me know which ones were one of your favorites. If you have created a top 10 or top 20 list of reads this past year, let me know about it. I would love to check your list. So now on to the top 20 reads of 2008, in no particular order.

TOP 20 READS OF 2008
Urban Christianity and Global Order by Andrew Davey
The Church Between Gospel and Culture by Hunsberger and Van Gelder
Who’s Afraid of Postmoderism? by James K.A. Smith
Simply Christian by N.T. Wright
Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein

A Theology of the Built Environment by Timothy Gorringe
The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch
Leading with a Limp by Dan Allendar
Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel
Signs of Emergence by Kester Brewin

The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman and Beckstorm
The Great Giveaway by David Fitch
Organic Community by Joseph Myers
The Selfless Way of Christ by Henri Nouwen
Managing Corporate Lifecylces by Ischak Adizes

Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth by Lesslie Newbigin
For the Nations by John Howard Yoder
Lifesigns – Intimacy, Fecundity and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective by Henri Nouwen
Pilgrim Heart by Darryl Tippens
Body Politics by John Howard Yoder

Rose Center For Earth And Space

Originally uploaded by smokeghost

If you are just starting the series, you might find it helpful to read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V, first. Now let’s look at another major shift taking place today.

From Classic Science to New Systems Science
The media shift and the philosophical shift are both compounded and inter-related with the science shift - from classic science to new systems science. In a research paper, Kurt Fredrickson examines our current postmodern context, especially as it relates to this science shift and notes that this change is from a mechanical approach to life to an organic one. He states, “This new way of viewing and structuring the world offers a non-mechanistic, more fluid understanding of structures. This new understanding of structures permeates culture and philosophy, organizational theory, natural and social sciences” (Fredrickson 2007:9). He then shares this chart from Ervin Laszlo book The Systems View of the World.  Click on the charts to get a larger picture.

In the following chart, we see how the shift from classic science to new systems science develops in organizations, from a mechanistic model to an organic model.

So how should this shift of our understanding of structures shape the church?  Kester Brewin in his book Signs of Emergence: A Vision for Church That is Organic/Networked/Decentralized/Bottom-up/Communal/Flexible{Always Evolving} contends that the current demise of the church in the West is not due to a lack of personal holiness, as much as on old wineskins, and that the church must empower people (herself) to honestly face change and evolve, or become extinct.

Brewin looks to Fowler’s model of psychological change, urban theory, and the science of emergence as well as the story of scripture to help us consider how to evolve, so that “rather than trying to import culture into church and make it ‘cool,’ we need instead to become ‘wombs of the divine’ and completely rebirth the church into a host culture.” (Brewin 2007:92).

He points out that studies of self-organizing, emergent systems in areas such as computing, biology, and economics demonstrate the necessity for organizations to move from the top-down, flabby institutional approach to a bottom-up, adaptable network approach that can meet the challenges of our fast-changing culture.  He mentions six characteristics of emergent systems we discover in new science that he suggests are the helpful genes to have in the DNA of the church.

1.    Emergent systems are open systems
2.    Emergent systems are adaptable systems
3.    Emergent systems are learning systems
4.    Emergent systems have distributed knowledge
5.    Emergent systems model servant leadership
6.    Emergent systems only evolve in places between anarchy and rigidity  (Brewin 2007: 97-117)

Not only are we experiencing the media shift from print and broadcast to the digital age; the philosophical shift from modernity to postmodernity and the science shift from classic science to new systems science;, we are also experiencing a spatiality shift from rural living to urban living.  I will talk about that in the next post in this series.

Sign of Life II

Originally uploaded by Jeremy-G

A grain of seed, Lord.
Tiny. Inert.
The tight-turned, curled embryo
held hard within.
Straightjacketed by winter waiting.
Yet in your purposes
destined for life and growth.
Ready to reach for light,
expand, spread branches.
Leaf, bud, and fruit.

The kingdom of heaven,
like a grain of seed.
The kingdom of heaven, in me.
Its seed tight-packed.
Restricted in the shell of my inertia.
The warmth of your Spirit
prompts it to life.
But when it stirs,
sets root, and starts to grow,
I hold it back.
I feel its movement apprehensively.
I can’t see your purposes.
My horizon is too small and limited
because I keep my head too low,
look down too much.
I prune and chop
and starve your kingdom’s tree,
hoping to hold it,
controlled and tidy,
in a little pot of my own choosing.

But still it grows.
Pushing its gentle way irresistibly
between the hard stones of my life.

Lord, help me to sweep away
the sand of fear
blown, hard and persistently,
heaping unbelief in drifts across my life.
Help me to feel
in the prompting of new growth,
the excitement, the hope and tension,
of your Spirit’s purposes.
And when I don’t understand
just where its leading to,
help me to welcome it.

Eddie Askew Facing the Storm

A Complete List of Nominees for the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards
Living in Hollywood, I need to keep up with the latest films. I’ve only seen a few this year, because life has been so full, but I always enjoy seeing the films nominated for best picture. This year in Drama, the nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. This year in Musical or Comedy are: Burn After Reading, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges, Mamma Mia, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Washington Post/Newsweek On Faith
The conversation continues about Obama picking Rick Warren to deliver the Inaugural Invocation. The questions they pose to different religious leaders are: What do you think of Barack Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the Inaugural Invocation? Who would have been your choice? Some of the responses come from Brian McLaren, Richard Mouw, Leith Anderson, Cal Thomas and Deepak Chopra.