_awakening

The Kingdom of God.

With the advent of a new year, Adam Walker Cleaveland over at Pomomusings is launching into a new series on the Kingdom of God utilizing guest bloggers. [To see a full listing of guests, go here.] The issue of the Kingdom is something that has captured many people's imagination lately - as a much needed corrective to the gospel of personal salvation that seems to be propagated today. Judging from the list of guest bloggers, the posts and comments will be quite interesting and well worth following.

First guest up? Tony Jones, who begins his post this way:

Maybe you’ve seen this before: some well-meaning evangelist spray-paints “jesus is the answer” on the side of a railroad bridge. Then some smart aleck comes by later and adds “so what’s the question?”

You can read the rest here.

Soularize Bloggers.

Soularize finished last night and now that I've finally had a good night sleep, I thought it was better late than never to pass along a few others who are here that have been sharing their thoughts about the conference. So if you're looking to live the conference vicariously, here's your chance. Here are a few of the nice folks who have been sharing their thoughts over the past few days...

Ed Alvarado
Steffan Boeskov
David Brown
Jordon Cooper [everyone's favorite Canadian and the newly crowned Lord Nassau III]
John Creasy
Michael Dowd
Nicholas Fiedler
Alan Hartung
Adam Klein [condo mate and poetic genius]
Lori Lenz
Todd Littleton [our illustrious, doctoral condo mate]
Kyle Martin
Mike Morrell
Jim Palmer [yet another fellow condo mate and temporary Rockies fan - "They've got them right where they want them!"]
Nathan Pederson
David Phillips
Graham Ripple
JR Rozko
Tammy Schoch
Caleb Seeling
Rustin Smith
Mike Stavlund
BJ Woodworth

If anyone else has been blogging about the event and you're not on the list, let me know. In the meantime, back to paradise...

Hi-larious.

Props to Marko for the heads up on The [Fake] Secret Diary of Rick Warren. Whoever is writing this, my hats off to you. Absolutely genius stuff...

Soularize Podcast.

The Soularize Podcast is up and running. Here's the upcoming festivities...

Andrew Jones, blogger extraordinaire, is on tomorrow - Wednesday, June 13th at 11am PST.

Margaret Feinberg, author of the recently released The Organic God, will be on Wednesday, June 20th at 11am PST.

If you'd like to be on the live conference call, the phone number is 218.486.1300 and the bridge number is 900438. Enjoy.

Lackey Now Blogging.

John Lackey, starting pitcher for the Angels, is now blogging here. He recently posted about tonight's start against the Royals and his pre-game routine - a strange ritual involving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a couple Red Bulls. [Sounds like a recipe for disaster.]

Next Week...

Our blog study through Dallas Willard's The Great Omission begins next week. If you're interested in jumping into the conversation, you can follow the journey at The Great Omission blog. Better yet, jump in as a contributor to the blog. For more info go here... there's always room for one more!

The Great Omission.

It's one thing to read a book, but it's another thing to be able to have the opportunity to dive into a conversation with others about a book. Starting in early August there's a group of us who are going to journey together in reading and discussing Dallas Willard's new book, The Great Omission. We will be reading the book, posting our thoughts and interacting over at The Great Omission Blog. If you're interested in jumping into the discussion, you can find out more here. Our plan is to read a few chapters a week and then discuss our thoughts via the blog. You can see the reading schedule here. At this point we have about 12 people involved, but would love to have more voices involved [especially some more female voices, as it has already been pointed out that we are a little too "testosterone-esque"].

Willard has always been a favorite writer/thinker of many of us, and this book looks pretty amazing [much like his others have been]. So if you're interested in journeying with us, the invitation is open. What do you have to lose? Order the book and jump in already!

Inbreaking.

Okay, let's admit it. There's a ton of blogs out there. So here's the big question... Is there a way can you sift through the mounds of words to find the jems? Yes, yes there is.

John Chandler has put together Inbreaking.com - a social bookmarking website where you can find links to noteworthy posts pertaining to the emerging and missional church. Here's how it works. Anyone can register and submit a link to noteworthy piece of posting. Once a link is submitted it is voted upon by other registered users. If it receives enough "votes" it is published on the front page. [If you want a more indepth look at how to use Inbreaking, you can check out What can you do on Inbreaking.com?]

Things like Inbreaking get better and better when more users register and decide to use it. More users = more submissions = more noteworthy leads = blogging happiness! So take a moment and register... right now... and submit away!

Ouch.

Just got this from my good friend, Robin Dugall...

Truth is often stranger than fiction, is it not?

Some Sweet Reads.

Now with the book accomplished and marked off the list, I've turned my attention to some much needed blog readings. Here are a few things worthy of your attention.

Brian McLaren mixes it up a little on Out of Ur with his interview on the nature of heaven and hell. The interview is refreshing and challenging, and the comments posted are just as entertaining. It's in three parts which you can read here and here and here.

McLaren was also interviewed by Lisa Ann Cockrel and Sojourners on his thoughts on the release of The Da Vinci Code. You can check out the full interview here. The most brilliant part of the interview [among many] was this...

I think a lot of people have read the book, not just as a popular page-turner but also as an experience in shared frustration with status-quo, male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone organized Christian religion. We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church. Why would so many people be disappointed to find that Brown's version of Jesus has been largely discredited as fanciful and inaccurate, leaving only the church's conventional version? Is it possible that, even though Brown's fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?

Perhaps we do need to re-imagine the kind of Jesus we are putting on display for the world.

My good friend Spencer Burke did an interview with Christianity Today for a future issue of Leadership Journal on consumerism in the church and why he fled the dream church job. It's going to be a great read when it comes out in full, but you can check out an excerpt here. Coming from a mega-church in the past, much like Spencer, I really resonated with what he had to say about consumerism in the church.

Bob Robinson has a thoughtful response to Mark Dever's article in Christianity Today regarding the absolute necessity of seeing the atonement through the lens of penal substitution. I don't think I can look at roses ever the same again. Dever's rhetoric in the original article was, well, a little disturbing. Bob response is balanced and insightful.

If you take a little gander over at the current readings you'll see The Da Vinci Code listed. Yes, it's true. I must be one of only a few handful of people on the face of the planet who have never read the book, so I decided that I better read it before the movie comes out.