There is a fairly decent article in this issue of FaithWorks magazine on preaching.
While not everything in it is is what those of us interviewed meant to say, it is pretty darn close.

Perhaps you have had one of these kind of days, where you, for a split second, have to ask yourself what year it is. At the turn of a new year this is often the case. “Oh yeah, it is 2004” might not be that uncommon.
Well today I had one of those moments wondering if it was 1983. My 12 year-old son, Ruben, was moon-walking across the floor to “Billy Jean” and “Thriller”. All this with a big smile on his face, saying, "eeww-waaa"
May the God of the Mullet save me.

I just heard today that my book will be released January 23.

I am excited but feel like there is a bunch of work to do to get the word out.

It can be ordered now on Amazon and delivered when it comes out. And if one were so inlcined they could write a review and rank the book highly when it does release.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book.


Perhaps you are among the many wonderful people—pastors, teachers, lay leaders, new Christians, lifelong Christians—who are not interested in a model program or approach to spirituality, but are searching the stories of others to find permission to pursue their own deeply held, unspoken intuitions about how faith and church could be. In some ways this book is an act of poetry; it is an attempt to put words around our experiences and desires to allow others to step inside. – Page 19

Will we do the hard and costly work of hand-crafting faith in our day, or will we be content living off the antiques of previous generations and fill in with cheap imitations of our own to “freshen up” the old stuff? Are we willing to become artisans of new expressions of faith so that our grandchildren will see as their legacy the quality that came before them, so they will be stirred thereby to craft newer, more beautiful, more meaningful expressions in their own day? This book is primarily about one community and the practices of spiritual formation in it. But the creativity required to live an imaginative, experimental faith is not limited to what we do during our worship gatherings or Wednesday night dinners. Central to the types of spiritual formation discussed in this book is the need for us—not only our Solomon’s Porch community but the church as a whole—to become theological communities. The work of theology must happen in full community. Of course it must include the ideas of those who have come before us, but to simply accept the work of our forebears in the faith as the end of the conversation is to outsource the real work of thinking, and that turns theology into a stagnant philosophy rather than an active pursuit of how we are to live God’s story in our time. The communities that are best equipped for the task of spiritual formation in the post-industrial age are those who make the practice of theology an essential element of their lives together. This is in no way a call to be less theological, but a call to our communities to be more involved in the work of theology as a necessary part of the spiritual formation process. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the task of both the new convert to Christianity and the experienced Christian was understood as not only believing the things of Christianity, but also as contextualizing, creating, articulating, and living the expressions of faith in their world? Page 159



At Solomon’s Porch we are seeking a spiritual formation that, in its essence, is not about individual effort but communal action involving a spirituality of physicality, centered on the way we lead our lives, allowing us to be Christian in and with our bodies and not in our minds and hearts only; a spirituality of dialog within communities where the goal is not acquiring knowledge, but spurring one another on to new ways of imagining and learning; a spirituality of hospitality that is not limited to food before or after meetings, but is intended to create an environment of love and connectedness where people are formed and shaped as they serve and are served by one another; a spirituality of the knowledge of God where the Bible is not reduced to a book from which we extract truth, but the Bible is a full, living, and active member of our community that is listened to on all topics of which it speaks; a spirituality of creativity where creative gifts are not used as content support but rather as an invitation for those so inclined to participate in the generative processes of God; a spirituality of service, which is the natural response of all seeking to live in the way of Jesus and is not reserved for the elite of the faith. Our hope is that this will be evident in a community not limited to supplemental small-group programs but valued as the cultivating force in which lives with God are the claim and invitation to Kingdom life. Page 32

Shelley and I are thinking of getting a digital camera.

Here is what we are thinking. Any advice is welcome.

Nikon 4300

I am in Nashville this week doing some work for the emergent/YS line of books. We are having a great time.

Tony Jones told me today that Christianity Today (for those who don’t know it is an evangelical magazine, which I do not receive so the following is still a rumor) listed this blog as something people should read. Can you imagine that?

So, I have once again decided to write more regularly, and perhaps more thoughtfully. Or maybe I will just talk about my kitchen and the need for wearing a scarf.

Is it too embarrassing to admit that I just had to confirm with Dan Kimball how to spell scarf? Well I did. He told me that Scarfe is the artist who did the art for Pink Floyd, an English guy. But that was not even my question. There is that Dan always giving more than he needs to.
Yet another reason why people ought to buy Dan Kimball’s book Emerging Church, and his forthcoming book – Emerging Worship.