The Story of Today
November 7, 2011 may be remembered as the day the new Nook Color was announced by Barnes and Noble. It will go down; however, as the fulfillment of a dream for me, and as a testimony to the faithfulness of God my Father.
Here is where it all began:
I was a new dad, a young youth director in a mid-sized United Methodist church, and I had just gotten a new job at Lexmark to help supplement our income, and to put to work my MS in Chemistry.
Duffy Robbins was the speaker at a denominational youth even in Frankfort, and other than enjoying him I can’t remember what he had to say. Sorry Duffy.
What I do remember is walking past a table with a bunch of kids pictures on it. One of the first ministries I implemented as a youth director was sponsoring a kid through World Vision as a Youth Group. The youth would send her letters. We’d take up offerings to help cover the monthly support. I’d post her report card on the bulletin board. She eventually married at the tender age of 14 and she was from Africa.
This ministry was another child sponsorship organization called Compassion. I remember just thumbing through the packets, and eventually it hit me to see if by chance there might be a child with the same birthday as Shelbi Lynn. I felt like I was supposed to do this, but this time it was for us as a family. I made a deal with God that if there was a packet of a child with the same birthday as Shelbi, then I’d do it.
Now as the weekend went along I passed the table several times. I never found a packet with Shelbi’s birthday. On the last day the person at the booth finally asked me if I was looking for something in particular. I explained the desire for the birthday match and that there weren’t any on the table thinking she would just sigh and say, “Sorry, we can’t help you.”
Instead she pulled out a box full of other kids.
In about two minutes, there she was, Dennis (pronounced Daneese) Rafael Campos from Peru. A beautiful child, with a beautiful family, who needed Jesus, and a sponsor and I had made a deal with the LORD…
Outside of the Box Thinking Results in…a Box
I once thought about being an architect. I love creating living spaces. I can still remember designing my first house in seventh grade shop class taught by an incredible teacher, Mr. Vincent. Since then I have had the privilege of designing and building all three of the houses in which Kristi and I have lived, but I never thought of doing something like this… 
It’s not just any box, but a box of glass that also happens to be a house. That’s right, a house. The story is that a family bought property on which there was a very old house in Lithuania, but the house was not considered large enough for the family. Traditional thinking would be to some how fabricate an addition to the house that imitated the original architecture.
The result; however, is anything but traditional. It is stunning! Instead the architect designs a glass enclosure of the house and makes some living space very public, like eating and kitchen and even hallways and entryways. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and other private living space is contained in the original house. I still wonder what they did with the original fireplace and chimney. It is still there but did they exhaust it through the roof and is it still useful? There is a lot about this structure that boldly allows the residents to live their lives in public, while making space for some mystery. For instance, I love the fact that the people at www.coolhunter.com don’t show us what the builders did inside to the traditional house.
Transition to traditional thinking about being the Church. While the Internet’s impact on our culture is relatively new and at the same time rapidly evolving I wonder how traditional ways of being the Church will need to change. Can the cultural norms for communication like email, texting, Facebook, and Twitter replace good old fashion face-to-face, or might it just need to encapsulate the personal? While some struggle to answer the Either-Or questions I think we need to start figuring out better ways to do Both-And. When it comes to being the Church what old structures do we need to keep within a modern architecture? How might we encapsulate traditions in a modern way that make our living out the Gospel of Jesus public and mysterious at the same time?
More than personally transforming…
We live in an exciting era in the American Church. An era that will very likely see a tremendous amount of change as leaders discover what Richard Stearns writes in his introduction of The Hole In Our Gospel, that “…being a Christian, or follower of Jesus Christ, requires much more than having a personal and transforming relationship with God. It also entails a public and transforming relationship with the world.” (p.2)
This is an age where we begin to see a new fleshing out of what it means to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ. With the invention of beta testing and continuous app updates we have been given an opportunity to investigate and experiment with what it means to be the Church while maintaining much of the doctrine to which we already ascribe. We are being given permission to refuse to arrive, and to always alter and adapt how we participate in our faith. Many are already beginning that experimentation, like Shaun King in Atlanta, and while that may look like a failed experiment I believe his audacious experiment to have done much to move a community toward Redemption. I don’t necessarily think everyone should go try what Shaun tried because I think a different leader does something different, but the fact that the Church must involve people penetrating the community is being understood once again on a scale unseen in my lifetime.
This public penetration is necessary to see all people of all nations come to an understanding of who Jesus is, and it will be necessary in order to maintain the authenticity and authority of the Church with those who follow us. The knowledge of, and belief in Jesus is not just for us, but our neighbor should also benefit, and benefit from us not the preacher or the worship service or the Bible class, but us, personally.