- Kenda Creasy Dean has a new article in The Christian Century titled Faith, nice and easy: The almost-Christian formation of teens. “Young people will not develop consequential faith simply by being absorbed into a so-called Christian culture as an alternative to the culture at large; churches are quite capable of developing deformative cultures of their own, while washing down the gospel with large gulps of rationalization. Consequential faith is the result of doing ministry, and not simply being ministered to.” The article is a distillation of her new book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church which Tony Jones is blogging his way through. 08/10/2010
- This is the best article on an unknown philosopher you’ll read all weekend. I’m almost tempted to quote the whole thing, but I’ll refrain. “In the academic world, custom dictates that you may be considered a legend if there is more than one well-known anecdote about you. Morgenbesser, with his Borscht Belt humor and preternaturally agile mind, was the subject of dozens. In the absence of a written record of his wisdom, this was how people related to him: by knowing the stories and wanting to know more. The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin. During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative. From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, ‘Yeah, yeah.’” Wikipedia has a few more delectable Morgenbesser anecdotes (”Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, ‘Who’s asking?’”). Publishers: I’d drop everything to read his biography. 08/07/2010
Get your free copy of Andy Root’s “Relationships Unfiltered”
July 26th, 2010 | 
A quick message from Andrew Root:
Hello Youth Ministry friends, I’m sorry to interrupt your regularly scheduled blog reading, but I have broken transmission to offer you an opportunity.
I wanted to get before you the chance to get a free copy of my book Relationships Unfiltered. As the new school year approaches and you think about volunteer leader meetings and trainings I would like to suggest you take a look at Relationships Unfiltered. It’s written just for this setting with discussion questions and chapters filled with illustrations and stories–but also promises to get you and your team thinking theologically about your core practice this coming school year: forming relationships with young people.
Here’s what I can do: If you’ll email me I’ll send you a free copy of the book so you can look it over and decide if it would be of help to you and your volunteers. If you’re interested in using it you can then go to Zondervan.com or Zondervan.com/ministry and type in the code 980752 in the “source code” box. Starting August 1 this will give you a 40% discount on as many books as you’d like.
And I’ll also offer this, if you do use the book with your team, I’m willing to do a select number of Skype or iChat conversations with you and your team after getting through the book.
If you’re in youth ministry and don’t already own Relationships Unfiltered, you’d be a fool not to accept this offer.
I’ve written previously about the book here (which includes a nice little video) and had the opportunity to interview Dr. Root, which you can listen to here.
- On Distraction is a short, cogent article by Alain de Botton. “We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Related: The Age of the Informavore 06/08/2010
- I found it nearly impossible to read John Caputo’s latest article in Tikkun Magazine without connecting it to LOST. “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The name of God makes the present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforeseeable future.” HT: Tony Jones and Blake Huggins 05/24/2010
New song: Ghost In A Wedding Dress
It has been quite some time since I posted anything related to my personal music endeavors, so if you’re new here, Hi, I’m Jake and sometimes I write and record some music.
This is a song that has been in the works for well over a year. It’s called “Ghost In A Wedding Dress.” Enjoy.
Ghost In A Wedding Dress (Demo) by jakebouma
What is emerging? Simplicity.
In an attempt to scratch the surface of the question “What is emerging?” I’d like to unabashedly tweak a few words from a recent blog post by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
In his post, Shirky summarizes his consultation to TV executives about the future of their industry in the internet age. Below, I’ve taken the last several paragraphs of his post and altered some phrasing here and there to make it read like he’s answering church leaders about the future of the Church in an internet/postmodern/late-modern world. Any changed I’ve made are italicized (I mostly changed “video” to “church”).
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In the future, at least some methods of being the church will become as complex [think denominational organization], with as many details to attend to, as church has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of church. It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.
Some church organizations still have to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old church ecoystem, where the church had to be complex simply to be the church, is broken. Expensive and expansive things made in complex ways now compete with cheap things made in simple ways. For example, the YouTube video Charlie Bit My Finger was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
JakeBouma.com is a half decade old
I know, it’s been a while.1
Today is a special day, though, because it has now been a half decade since the day I purchased the JakeBouma.com domain name for the purpose of blogging. This post from the third birthday has a fun little history (for serious JakeBouma.comophiles only).
But seriously, why the lack of posting?
Aside from the gravitational pull of sites like Twitter and Posterous (mostly Twitter), there’s the fact that I’ve been slowly working on a book proposal.2 That means two things: 1) Much of my free time is spent reading, researching, and writing stuff that has to do with the proposal, and 2) A great portion of the stuff I would blog about — especially around topics like youth ministry, theology, social theory, and philosophy — I feel the need to keep “secret” until I know whether or not it will ever actually materialize in book form.3
So although I haven’t been around this here blog much, I have doing blog-worthy things. Which kind of sucks for you, I guess. Sorry. But the good news is that I just renewed JakeBouma.com for two more years. Which is kind of awesome for you, I guess.
Hey, while I’ve got you — you should check out a few things.
In late January I was a guest on Tim Schmoyer’s Live YM Talk, discussing “The need for theological questioning in youth ministry”. It’s runs about 50 minutes, and you can check it out here.
And earlier this week I was a guest on Andy Root’s online radio show talking about his new book The Promise of Despair (which I have said should be a top priority read if you’re invested in the future of the church). This one’s only 15 minutes long, and you can listen here. I’ve been told that I may receive a $10 Olive Garden gift card if my episode has the most listens, so…
Long story short: I miss you, and I’m told (some of) you miss me. Hang in there.
In closing, here’s a picture of Philip Clayton.
- For the record, the “someone I’ve never met” was Mitch McGinnis. Mitch — If you’re reading this, sorry for blocking you on Twitter. ↩
- And, no, the title isn’t The Speed of Light: Intergalactic Space Travel in Youth Ministry. ↩
- This doesn’t mean I haven’t dropped a few juicy hints here and there. ↩
Books I read in 2009
My library grows faster than my stack of completed books, a “problem” that I attempted to remedy once with the 30 pages per day project. I doubt I averaged 30 pages per day, but I knocked plenty of books off the list in 2009. Here they are:
I’m currently reading Frederich Buechner’s Godric, which I hope to finish before the year is out. I should also mention that I’m 130 pages into Ched Myers’ momentous Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus for a weekly personal study with @bmick. At ten pages/week, we should finish it before the end of 2010.1
- Pronounced “twenty ten”, FYI. ↩
- The Advent Community and the Emergence of God’s Dream for Creation by Troy Bronsink. “I have observed four theologies that are undergoing reimagination by emergent congregations: ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, and incarnation. From the vantage point of these emergent theologies, I want to illuminate four metaphors from these texts that reimage preaching in Advent: an ecclesiology of the unfinished way, an eschatology of trade in seeds that will find future purchase in God’s coming dreams, a missiology in which language and symbols are reconceived by the Holy Spirit, and an incarnational theology of ordinary watching and witnessing.” (HT: Soupiset) 12/21/2009
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