When I was an undergrad at UC San Diego, I was also a full-time employee of the university. I had an extremely low stress, low responsibility swing-shift job, which gave me freedom to go to class during the day and a lot of time to get my reading and writing done at work. Faithful, young, fired-up evangelical that I was, I also used the quiet night-time hours at work for spiritual self-care. I did my Bible reading and prayer nightly, as well as books and books worth of journaling. I kept up this rhythm up long enough that every year, around my birthday, I’d go back to the previous years’ journal entries on that day. I remember these times of review as moments of red-faced embarrassment, because I would inevitably think, “Man, I can’t believe I wrote and thought and believed that stuff. I’ve come a long way since then. [...]

A couple days ago, I wrote a blog post about Mark Driscoll. No big deal. In nearly ten years of blogging, I’ve written something like 1,200 posts, and a handful of them have mentioned Mark – some in a positive way, and others not so much. But this one was different. It hit a nerve with some people. Well over ten percent of the page views that I’ve gotten in the past 28 months have come in the past three days since that post went live.* I feel a bit dirty right now. Like I need a shower. I just got out of the shower, though, and I still feel dirty. I don’t regret anything I wrote – I stand by all of it. Mark Driscoll is a very gifted communicator. He’s funny, he’s culturally savvy, he has a quick mind, he takes theology very seriously. Though this may shock [...]

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen what many many many people have seen on Facebook news feeds – way too much of Mark Driscoll. First the hype about his new book about sex, marriage, and sex (which I have not read). Then about his insults toward the maybe-godly-but-definitely-wimpy preachers of the UK for not being famous enough. Then about the church discipline process enacted upon some members who weren’t willing to repent enough to be accepted back into fellowship after voluntarily confessing sin. Just moments ago, I finally read something that I, and many others have eagerly been waiting for . . . a sincere word of repentance from Mark Driscoll, as delivered from the pulpit at Mars Hill Church. Yes, really. Read it yourself: I believe that humility is the great omission and failure in my eleven years of preaching. I believe that this is my greatest oversight [...]

Among the many things I’ve been learning about thus far in my PhD program is how the fields of theology and social sciences interact. One area that I’m particularly interested in, and will be using in my research, is Ethnography. There’s a growing field that discusses the interaction of Ethnography with Ecclesiology. A network of scholars has developed around this theme.  I was able to attend a terrific conference on this in September 2011, at St. John’s College in Durham. It was extremely helpful to me as a new researcher. I was pleased to receive notice of some upcoming events related to the network. There’s a new book, edited by Pete Ward, called Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, a symposium at King’s College London, another symposium at Luther Seminary in St. Paul,MN and a day conference in Oxford on Critical Realism and Practical Theology. This fall, there will also be another [...]

I wasn’t planning to jump on the bandwagon of those who have watched the viral video about loving Jesus, but hating religion (which got 15 million views in its first 10 days). Not only are lots of people watching it, they’re blogging about it, from a number of angles. I’ve cynically smirked at several emerging church bloggers, because of the conundrum the video puts them (us?) in. On the one hand, they’ve been deconstructing and sniping at the religion side of Jesus-following for the past ten+ years.  On the other hand, two things are happening – first, many emerging church folks have been at the deconstruction/reimagining thing long enough to have learned that the institutions of religion aren’t all bad all the time after all; and second, even if they agree with the sentiments of the video, the viral “success” of the video means they’re not on the hipster fringe [...]

My friend Jim Henderson has posted the news that Off the Map, a project he started with some friends a dozen years ago, is going to walk off into the sunset. OTM hosted a number of events that were gathering places for a wide range of people over the years. The conferences were a great mix of the usual emerging church celebrities, and people I had never heard of before. One thing I’ve admired about Jim since the time I met him is his ability to identify people who are good thinkers and practitioners, but who have gone unnoticed by others. He “finds” these people, and just sticks a microphone in their hands . . . sometimes without asking permission! For all the conferences and events I’ve attended over the past ten years, Off the Map was far and away my favorite place to just hang out with people. There [...]

I don’t spend nearly as much time on blogs as I used to. I’ve greatly trimmed the number of blogs I follow, too. I’ve noted before how Twitter and Facebook have changed my own blogging, and I know I’m not alone in this. So many of the conversations that I used to watch taking place on blog comment boards are now taking place on Facebook walls. Reading blogs through feedreaders has also changed things significantly. At least 80% of the blog reading I do is from within my feedreader . . . so I don’t usually even see the conversations taking place in the comment sections. But I’ve noticed a trend in the past couple of weeks. Call it a widespread case of a New Years Resolution meme if you like, but I’ve seen a lot of my friends – both “real” and virtual – posting to their blogs for [...]

I’m not sure how I missed this hilarious headline: “Susan Boyle Covers Depeche Mode Classic,” but apparently a couple months back, I did. Ms. Boyle, who became one of the viral-est viral video stars after her TV talent show thing, would certainly not be the kind of ‘artist’ I’d expect to cover Depeche Mode. And yet, that happened. So, was she able to do with “Enjoy the Silence” what she did with “I Dreamed A Dream”? As a big DM fan from my high school/college days, I couldn’t resist the trainwreck. I’ve often been a fan of artistic juxtaposition, but cover songs are so rarely done well. So how did she do? Stunned. She nailed it. Well sung, well produced. She actually captured the spirit of the lyrics, and added some artistry. It’s not quite as good as Johnny Cash’s cover of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, but you’d expect Johnny to [...]

Last year, on Christmas Eve, my lovely wife-to-be and I flew from Seattle to Maui. We got married a few days later. With the exception of a tiny group of family and friends, we didn’t tell anyone. 51 weeks later, and a few things have changed. New vocations, new city, new country. Flying to Maui to celebrate is a little out of the way from London. Fortunately, the rest of Europe is at our doorstep. So, we are headed out to a different island – Mallorca, Spain. It’s a major summer tourist destination for Brits and Germans. It looks beautiful in pictures, so we’re excited to see it for ourselves. It’ll be a week too early to celebrate our official anniversary, but it’s close enough. Since we’ll probably have limited Internet access, let me cheat the Advent calendar just a little and wish you a Merry Christmas. While we are [...]

This post is part 2 of my thoughts on Why The Emerging Church Still Matters. I won’t recap part 1 here, other than to say that despite the fading prominence of the emerging church in conference topics, blog posts, and common church conversations, I still think it’s worth talking about. Growing up in USAmerican evangelicalism, one of the running jokes in churches was that ‘the church’ was also 10-20 years behind cultural trends. Music, fashion, politics, and other topics would pop up in church circles well after they’d gone stale everywhere else. I’d like to suggest that the emerging church actually represents not just a “catching up with culture,” but a bit of a reversal of the game. Without attempting a full history of the movement, let me just suggest some of the hallmarks of the emerging church thus far: It’s a movement made up primarily of no-name people, who [...]