A week ago I had the opportunity to gather with a group of folks who are working to provide resources to preachers. These are the people who put together websites, conferences, study materials, and more. At one point, we had a conversation about what we’ve all learned about what makes a good website. The comments were fascinating: It needs to be interactive. People want to be participants, not just an audience. People want to find resources that help them in their daily lives. Variety is everything. It can’t just be information, or resources, or entertainment, but a little bit of all. It’s about making connections – where people can...

Part 1. Think Differently Moneyball, in case you haven’t seen it, is about baseball. But it’s also not about baseball. It’s about culture change. About how hard it is to change a culture, and about how it important it is to do just that, when the world around you has already changed. And it’s just that mixture of hardboiled pragmatism about a changed world – in this case the world of baseball – and creative ingenuity to defy tradition in order to change that makes me think that the secret to the church’s future may lie in this very good movie based on an even better book. In brief, here’s the setup: Oakland A’s general...

If you’re at all familiar with Peter Rollins’ work, you know that he is one of the church’s more provocative writers and thinkers. Author of How (Not) to Speak of God and Insurrection: To Believe Is Human To Doubt, Divine, Pete is particularly gifted at shocking us into looking at our lives and the gospel – and especially our lives in light of the gospel! – in a new way. In this video from the great folks at Work of the People, Pete says the church reminds him a little too much of a crack house. That is, people take drugs to escape their pain – they’ve ended a relationship, didn’t get the job...

The Church is not Apple. I know that. I wasn’t trying to suggest it was with last week’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s post about learning from the Apple store. There are plenty of things about Apple that I don’t want to emulate (and, truth be told, plenty of stuff in the church – historically and presently – that I’m not proud of, either, but that’s for another post.) And there are lots of places where even a metaphorical comparison between Apple and the Church breaks down. So, let me say again: The Church is not Apple…. But…. And of course here’s where it gets interesting. Because while the Church is not Apple, and our...