Environmentaland, Augmented Reality Games & a New Wave of E-Businesses!

The first ‘doozy’ today is Environmentland – where admission is free (if you come by bus or are a student), where there’s an energy playground (see-saw to generate energy), alternative energy golf-carts, planetarium, desert mini-golf and recycled paper plane takeoffs – what more could you ask for?? ….no really, what else could a theme park want?? Wait!! There really is more – bigger picture movie nights every Wednesday night, earth days, art shows and fashion weeks – seriously, Disneyland must be pretty scared right about now!

The second ‘doozy’ is a new game called Cannonballz which is potentially the first of many, many of these new types of games. Facebook games like Bloodlines and Mafia Wars have won the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people, but here’s a game which combines the Nintendo Wii body movement, your webcam, and Facebook friends, to create what looks like a pretty lame and boring game. HOWEVER, this is just the first, so it will be interesting to see how the technology evolves over time…

The third interesting ‘doozy’ with a few examples are what I’m calling the New Wave of E-Businesses - with the global recession gripping the hearts and minds of spenders all across the globe, people want cheap stuff – can you blame us??? Three interesting concepts worth noting: 1) Groupon – which is pretty much just sales coupons which give huge discounts but only become available if enough people buy them, 2) there’s another site (which I can’t actually find at the moment!) where a group of people find each other online wanting to buy a particular goods or service, once they reach critical mass, sellers or service providers compete to offer the best deal to the group, and 3) Swoopo – which is a pretty complicated process, and there is an Austrlalian equivalent which is slightly different called BidRivals, but I’ll let a Fast Company expert explain about Swoopo:

For every bid you make, the price of the auction jumps just one cent, but you, the bidder, are charged $0.60. Additionally, there’s no finite end date to an auction; every time a bid is registered, the auction gets extended for a few seconds, turning the ordeal into an endurance marathon. Sixty cents might not sound like a high price for a bid, but Swoopo auctions only end after thousands of bids, meaning that often times the winning bidder will have sunk several hundred dollars into site fees. Obviously, there are bidders in second, third and fourth place that sunk almost as much, and hence the crack comparison: the more you bid, the more financial imperative you have to win. Swoopo ends up collecting up to five times the MSRP of the MacBook thanks to all those bids, enabling it to give the actual item away for a pittance. Where eSwarm and Groupon harness the combined buying power of you and your fellow users, Swoopo pits you against your peers–but the deals are pretty good, even if antisocially gotten.

Now I’m not sure what you can do with this information – but I at least found it interesting!!!

Emerging Church and Gender…

Sooo….

This is the first of many posts that will explore the topic of either the emerging church or gender. I’m hoping it might stir the pot a little bit because, I don’t know about you, but I learn much more effectively when I have to debate and discuss my point!! These two topics have BIG implications upon the church plant we’re a part of, and so it’s super important that I do some clear thinking on it, and I’d love to have input from Christian theologians and people who aren’t Christians alike!

One of my big projects over the next 9 months is to do a ‘research project’ into the emerging church in Australia, I’ve also got an essay hanging around on the ways in which emerging churches do Christian ‘worship,’ so I’ll be posting random quotes and insights that I find on that journey and I’d be interested in hearing what people think!

The book I started with was “Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures” by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, and I’m also reading Ed Stetzer’s “Planting Missional Churches”. Are there any other books people can recommend as first tier must reads?? I’ve got quite a few others on my shelf on this topic and I’d be keen to hear what the best ones are.

The second major thing I’m thinking about at the moment is gender. I want to explore it from a number of perspectives: 1) Biblical/theological, 2) sociological, 3) missiological, and 4) biological, and all this will culminate in another essay!!

A couple of books I’ve started with are: “Why Men Hate Going to Church” by David Murrow, and “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, along with a number of other random articles, and Rhys Bezzant’s fantastic lecture notes! What are the first tier egalitarian texts??? Anyone know any good sociological ones?

Here’s to the journey and many exciting/exhilarating/in-your-face debates and discussions!!!

It’s Not Rocket Science…Oo

So impressed by this video/church, but seriously, it’s not rocket-science, why aren’t more people doing this kind of stuff???

No it’s not a Man-Crush, it’s a Denominational-Crush!! Or Perhaps a Case of The Grass is Greener?? [The Presbyterians and Me]

Today I had a really, really, really unexpected day.

I was meeting with a contact from Sports Chaplaincy Australia who just happened to be a Presbyterian minister out in Donvale.  There just happens to be a really exciting chaplaincy opportunity with the new Casey Fields sports precinct and the Casey Football Club – very exciting! Before heading out, I pulled up the Victorian Presbyterians website to just get a bit of a grasp on where this guy was coming from.  Two things struck me smack bang in the face.

The first was the Presbyterian governance structure:

The spiritual leaders of the Presbyterian Church are called ‘ministers’ (who are particularly responsible for preaching) and ‘elders’ (who join with the ministers in exercising pastoral care and oversight in the congregations and courts of the church). These words are English equivalents of the Greek word ‘presbyter’. Ministers and elders are elected by members of our congregations from among themselves, being those whom the members believe are spiritually qualified to lead and care for them.

Each congregation looks after its own affairs under the general guidance and oversight of the presbytery, a gathering of ministers and elders from the several congregations in the local area. The General Assembly of each state provides leadership in wider areas of the church’s work such as social services, chaplaincy work in the defence forces, hospitals and other institutions, training of ministers, mission and evangelism, and Christian education. The General Assembly of Australia deals with matters of doctrine, overall standards of training of ministers, receiving ministers from other churches and the church’s mission to the world.

This structure is remarkable on two levels.  The first is because on a local level, it mirrors exactly how we were envisaging setting up ‘Tribe’.  The second is that I cannot conceive of a better way to organise a group of local churches being networked together which would actually help to avoid the ‘institutional’ vs ‘tribe’ dilemma: church plants happen through relationship, leaders are appointed, invited and ordained by the local church to a local context, you don’t have tiers of authority which makes decisions without knowing the people or the context relationally, it has as flat a structure as possible, yet also incorporates lines of authority and accountability without a HUGE central government.  The head of the Presbyterians in Victoria, called the moderator, is also the minister of a local church, in this case, Scots Church in the city.

The Pressies seem like the Anglicans, meeting all the reasons of “Why I am Anglican” without all the pitfalls I talked about in my previous post: “Why In The World Am I Anglican? [Part 2 in the Itchy Feet Series].”

Of course they have their own politics, struggles, frustrations etc., but that’s not the systems fault, that is because of the fact the flawed human beings are involved, and where there are humans, there will be frustrations.  I’m happy to work with those kind of frustrations!!

The second was that their theological convictions really resonated with me.  They base their unity around the Westminster Confession, which just happened to pop up in a book I was reading later on that day, which argued strongly for a theology of worship based around the entirety of our lives being pleasing to God, using this confession as its authority!

I think I have a denominational crush…

Any pressies out there who can fill me in on the ups and downs of the system?

This could just be a serious case of the ‘Grass is Greener’!

I’m Looking for $2.8 Million…Church Planting Through Commercially Viable Community Centres!!

So…

Call me crazy…

Call me a fool…

Call me an idealist without a bone of realism…

Call me whatever you want, but if I had 3 million I know where I’d invest it!!!

Can’t hurt vision casting???

In all honesty I cannot for the life of me see how this could ever happen – but can you imagine it?!!

Check out the case for it here: Tribe Community Centre Dream Floater!!

10 Doozies of the Week!!

Size Does Matter………..With Video Games and Movies – yep, you read it correctly, research has shown that SIZE does matter…when it comes to movies and video games!

Are Gamers More Evolutionarily Advanced? – there is a correlation between gamers, depression and being overweight – I knew it!!! hahaha But which came first – the chicken or the egg??? hmmm

Fancy Doing a Startup? YCombinator Has a Business Plan for You – instead of entrepreneurs taking ideas to others to get venture capital, this time the venture capital and ideas are looking for the entrepreneur!

RockMelt – A Facebook Powered Browser? – this would be interesting!

PS3 Slim “Confirmed”–It’s Real, Coming to GamesCon, Supposedly

Meet the Multi-Touch Interface of the Future! – imagine an iPhone interface on your big PC screen?!!

Stealth Starbucks - imagine a starbucks franchise pretending to be a local coffee shop with really lame branding and giving themselves a ‘local’ feel, without a starbucks name – deceptive or genius?

20 Top Time Tips for Management – don’t tell me you don’t need to implement more effectively at least 10 of these babies!!

Coca Cola’s Fizzy Milk – well, I’ll eat my shorts if this one takes off!!!

Ten Windows Apps That Make Mac Fans Drool - at this stage I’m thinking I’ll be a PC man for life, not that I’m not tempted, not because I don’t think Macs are cool, but just because it seems way more cost effective!!  And so long as there are apps that make Mac fans drool, I can justify my stance!

Organisational User Interfaces, Banks and Anglicans

Banks are some of the most highly complex, big and valuable organisations in the world.

Despite their complexity and bigness, in order for them to achieve their mission in providing great products and effective service to its clientele, they must have a simple, accessible, functional user-interface. The queues, the bank tellers, the signage, the website, the process for banking cheques, all play a pivotal role in how the user connects with the organisation.

Mobile phones rise and fall on their user interfaces.

Operating systems rise and fall on their user interfaces.

Facebook has overtaken MySpace because of its user interface.

The iPhone’s success is largely due to its innovative and functional user interface.

A user-interface reduces the complexity and provides a functional pathway for users to engage with an organisation. The better the user-interface the more effective the organisation.

The Anglican church has a very poor user-interface for those wanting to be an employee. The local Anglican church is a user-interface for the average user, which can be good and also very bad depending on which one you go to. But there is no clearly defined link for those wanting to find a vocation, a career, a calling.

The amount of people I’ve had to talk to, the meetings I’ve had to have, the things I’ve had to search out to read, the difficulty of finding information, the inability to get a direct answer, the conflicting answers I have gotten from people in positions of authority, is just plain confusing and demoralising.

User interfaces take a complex beast and makes it simple, functional and accessible. No matter how good your system and organisation is, if your user interface sucks, your organisation will never maximise its potential.

The User-Interface should be extremely high on an organisation’s priority list – come on Anglicans!

What Would Happen if ‘Worship’ Was Connected With Being Truly Human?

I wonder what would happen if Christians redefined ‘worship’ to mean any truly human experience?

My logic is that: 1) our aim is to live lives pleasing to God; 2) this is done by living as God designed humans to live; 3) these kinds of lives are truly human; 4) a truly human life is comprised of truly human experiences and can be seen in every context of life; and 5) truly human experiences can be experienced by those who don’t even believe in God.

Churches, the gathered people of Jesus-followers, should be the ones having the most, quantitatively and qualitatively, truly human experiences and therefore shining like stars and being cities on hills like the Bible suggests, but we seldom see.

Perhaps this is what it actually means to worship in ‘spirit and in truth’?

In reality our Christian churchy rituals can often be neither spiritual or truthful and we still, for some reason, consider them ‘worship.’ Our content of our words or our songs or our rituals may be ‘correct’ but our posture and our attitude may be far from pure. You can fake a type of religious worship, but you can’t fake a truly human experience!

And when people who aren’t Christians have those truly human experiences, we can use the experiences to point them to God. People would then have glimpses of God in their football wins, in their poetry, in their productive work, in their deep community through online games, in their relationships, in their study etc.

It’s dangerous when people associate ‘worship’ with one singular experience of being truly human – singing at church, for instance. Perhaps it’s dangerous to associate all good things, or truly human experiences, as ‘worship’, but at the very least they are glimpses of what God intended for his world, and so it is at least ‘good’.

I understand that people will argue that God needs to be the focus of our worship if it is to be true worship. But if God is most pleased with us when we are living according to his design, and someone is living according to God’s design without consciously having God as their focus, doesn’t God get some level of joy from that? At the very least, someone God loves is experiencing an aspect of life just as God created them to, and so, I reckon, that would give God a degree of honour that he wouldn’t otherwise have if the person hadn’t engaged in a truly human experience?

Discuss….(haha)!

The Thing You and I Are Looking For

I’ve been thinking lately about a lot of stuff lately, in different realms of thought, with different analogies, for different purposes, and to my utter shock, today I discovered that they are all really the same thing…

I’ve been contrasting the difference between ‘tribes’ and institutions.

I’ve been trying to define what exactly I envisage for our Tribe church start-up.

I’ve heard a story of a friend describing her deep and rich experience of Jesus centred community, which happened outside the church.

I’ve been reading “The Shack” a story describing the reconciliatory process of a horrific evil with the existence of God.

I’ve been wrestling with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of an e-business start-up.

I’ve been thinking through the Anglicans, denominations, and worship.

All of these stories, concepts, analogies, ideas, are motivated by and describing exactly the same thing.

It is the thing that we all long for, that we all search for, that we all agree is inherently ‘good’ and we know we’re missing something when we’re not there.

We all experience it, we all see it, we all want it…

And the thing is [DROM ROLL PLEASE] to be truly human.

We all too often think this comes from one specific thing – from the thrill of the chase, from the bottom of the bottle, from the adrenaline of the race, from the risk of the dice, from the feeling of the ecstatic ‘worship’ experience – in truth, you can find it everywhere and anywhere, and there doesn’t have to be hangovers or destructive consequences. And when you do find it, you are experiencing what it means to be truly human, and getting a taste of what it is that God intended for humanity in the first place.

What I want from church, what I want in business, what I want from fiction, what I want from relationships, what I want from life, is to share in experiences that remind me of my true humanity.

It’s to laugh, to cry, to be at peace, to be content, to be energised, to love and be loved, to be thoughtful, to be deep, to have fun, to be productive and effective. It’s to feel like I’m flying and to do it in community – with other people…

And in being truly human, we experience what God designed for us, and we can most clearly see, know and acknowledge God. It is the church that should provide people with the most ‘truly human’ experiences, and people should associate these experiences with God – it’s a real tragedy the most people associate ‘church experiences’ with the most inhuman and boring experiences of their lives!

4 Entrepreneurial Godin Vids Worth Watching!