Over July and August, on the blog I’ll be going through a series looking at our definition of mission, and particularly some specific keywords that inform our understanding.

With university work finally out of the way after the final push to get everything finished, and with The Lab beginning to quieten down for the summer, I thought it was about time to get back into blogging. So, in order to become more focused, and to get myself “back into shape” in terms of blogging, I thought it’d be good to work through a fairly simple, but quite interesting summer series.

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Just put the finishing touches on my sermon for tomorrow morning. Here’s a Wordle of my script:

1. Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith – Shane Hipps
2. How (Not) To Speak of God – Pete Rollins
3. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative – Christopher Wright
4. ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church – Hirsch and Frost
5. Preaching Re-imagined – Doug Pagitt

What books are others working their way through at the moment?

My housemate Cat has done a great job of designing the new St Paul’s website which she’s been putting together over the last couple of weeks. St Paul’s is the church I’m part of in Newport city centre, and is closely connected to The Lab.

Go check it out.

I’ve been thinking recently, inspired by some stuff from a recent lecture at CYM, about the whole biblical meta-narrative – and in particular this idea of the story beginning with the garden and ending in the city. Beginning with Eden and ending with the new Jerusalem. I think I’ve read a few authors who have pointed this out and tried to draw observations from it – in particular recently Rob Bell’s new book and NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

It’s really interesting to see how we can play around with the interaction between this little bit of theology and all kinds of ideas about the way society and culture develops.

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Found some really interesting thoughts from marketing guru, Seth Godin, on superbowl weekend:

Marketing is telling a story that sticks, that spreads and that changes the way people act. The story you tell is far more important than the way you tell it. Don’t worry so much about being cool, and worry a lot more about resonating your story with my worldview. If you don’t have a story, then a great show isn’t going to help much.

His thoughts have a really interesting application to mission – in putting on a great show have we forgotten the story? Or turned the story into a series of teaching points?

Here’s my notes and audio from my sermonizing at St Paul’s last Sunday. Found the topic pretty difficult, especially coming from a place of becoming more and more suspicious of the “worship” word – especially when it isn’t together with other words like life and mission. So I definitely took the more tame route of appealing to spirituality (essentially the Rob Bell route). Bit of a shaky start to this one as well just warn you.

Feel free to listen (hope you find some of it interesting at least) and comment.

Download the mp3 (21.9mb)
Download my script/notes – pdf

One of my big personal struggles has always been to juggle future plans with being content and satisfied in the present. From being very young, I’ve always wanted to make dreams and plans way ahead of myself – so it wasn’t surprising to me really that I was a Dreamer on the Myers-Briggs test. And constantly being about two or three steps ahead of myself has proved a great advantage in terms of leadership and long term planning.

But the struggle that this means I’ve always faced is being able to execute my plans, and to deal with it when they ultimately work less than perfectly – which is life. And I’m not suicidal or anything, but this gap in my mind between the present and the future has always left me feeling a bit unsatisfied. It’s not that I’m trying to live up to being more than I can be (although I am) so much as that I’m impatient for the future to come now. I want to skip the hard stuff and get onto to the point where everything has come together.

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With the new year well under way I thought it was about time I threw out a bit of a life update. As I’m writing its a beautiful sunny, Spring-esque day outside the Lab house – an awesome day for my housemate Dan’s birthday. We had a party on Wednesday and are having a bit of a dinner party tonight to celebrate.

As always there’s so much going on at the moment – so many experiments and little projects, as well as developing ones – and that’s what I love about pioneering and working for The Lab: everything’s changing and growing and developing all the time.

So I thought I’d try and through out some quick bullet points of the different things that are going on for me.

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Last Saturday, we managed to get to an advance screening of Frost/Nixon – out in the UK on January 23rd (I think it’s already out in the states). It’s written by Peter Morgan who wrote “The Queen” and directed by the incredible Ron Howard (director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind among others).

This film was incredible – very simple and yet incredibly powerful. The story was brought together really well, and Frank Langella was brilliant as Nixon. I think already this is going to be one of the best films of the year.

Get a look at the trailer here.