Ministry in Contemporary Culture Seminar Series

I’ve been attending a seminar series at George Fox Evangelical Seminary for the past two years and will be attending the next seminar in the series on Tuesday, February 16. It’s sure to be an interesting event as we engage the topic of mapping our way in an unbounded world. Here’s some of the details from the web:

A new era has quietly swept away everything we’ve taken for granted, powered by innovative adventurers of all ages who value possibilities over limits, relationships over geographical proximity, stewardship over ownership, and collaboration over control. Business as usual no longer seems to be working. The cultural ideals we’ve taken for granted no longer apply.

Join us as we explore the following:

• SESSION I – Technomadic landscape: Locating ourselves in the human story
• SESSION II – Preparing ourselves for the new relationship era
• SESSION III – Spiritual wisdom for the technomadic age

Joseph R. Myers is an entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and owner of FrontPorch, a consulting firm that helps churches, businesses and other organizations promote and develop community. Author of The Search to Belong, and Organic Community, Myers is also a founding partner of the communications arts group settingPace, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Jospeh Myers is also my professor for the Culture and System Change course I am taking this semester for my Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership degree. I’ll probably be tweeting at the event, but if you are in the Pacific NW, I encourage you to join us for this engaging conversation. If you want to follow the conversation on twitter or other social media services, check out the tags we will be using.

New Year, New Opportunities

I am now officially half way through my degree program at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. I have been enrolled in the Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership Cohort program and enjoying it very much. It is a Virtual Learning Community where we do most of our work in an online Moodle Teaching and Learning Environment with face-to-face gatherings for eight days once each semester. I have colleagues in my classes from Alaska, Colorado, Ohio (Go Buckeyes!), Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and elsewhere. It is a great group of people to learn with.

Along with my learning, I have continued to do contract work in various forms – from manuscript editing to website creation and the job opportunities for this year look even more promising. This year is looking like a fun year so far with contracts to do website content management, social media strategies and editing a children’s book. Some weeks I put in full-time hours on my contract jobs, other weeks it’s only a few hours – that’s the nature of contract work.

Anna and Andy (a guy reading Seventeen Magazine??) from Shoreline Vineyard

In the volunteer realm, I have been helping with the Youth at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline since last fall and have taken on some new responsibilities this fall. VCC in Shoreline has been a great place for me to experience missional community and learn what it’s like to be a part of a smaller community church than what I experienced most of my adult life.

Personal Branding

I attended a workshop on social media yesterday and we talked about personal branding and web presence. I’m thinking of moving my web presence to chapinchick.com, but know that the term “chick” is problematic for some. Many authors are using their full name, but mine is already taken by an artist. We already own chapin.com and have since 1992, primarily using it for our personal email. For those who follow me on twitter – it’s been ChapinChick since I first signed up.

One of the reasons ChapinChick came about is because we have four daughters and started referring to them as the Chapin Chicks a while back. So, chapinchicks@(whatevermail).com was useful when they were young and didn’t have their own email addresses. After they started creating their own email accounts, I switched to chapinchick@(whatevermail).com – and it’s kind of stuck with me.

I’m planning to update this blog site for the New Year and wondering if chicks really are cool.

Whatever I do, I hope to blog more often in 2010.

House Church, Anglican, Vineyard, Non-Denominational, …

“What is ordination?” my oldest daughter asked a few months ago as we attended my friend’s ordination celebration. My friend has been on staff at my family’s non-denominational mega-church for something like seven years. I think she was called pastor at her prior church, but I’m not sure. She acts like a pastor and has basically functioned on the church staff as a pastor for a long time. But, historically, my mega-church has held the view that women should not be pastors and only recently have they amended their view and begun ordaining women. My friend was the second woman to be ordained there. The lead pastor was wandering by as my daughter posed her question, so we asked him to help us understand. Artfully, he described ordination as a recognition of God’s calling on a person’s life and mentioned some passage in one of the books of Timothy, I think, about the laying on of hands. (I should have written it down.)

Atheism and Creative Love Theism

“Killing God?!” I received many warnings from concerned Christians about the movie The Golden Compass. I was warned to avoid the movie because the author of the books it was based on was an atheist and the goal of his books was killing God. I rarely take these type of forwarded emails seriously but decided to investigate this claim for myself. I googled the author and discovered indeed, he is an atheist. And indeed, the books do culminate in the killing of the “God” character called “The Authority”. But, I wondered, was this an assault on the God of the Bible? Was there really any danger to Christians if we watched such a film and allowed our children to watch it? Since I am not one who is easily motivated by fear, I took my kids to see the movie and we even bought the DVD. I have since bought the trilogy it was based on and read it from cover to cover. “The Authority” portrayed in Pullman’s trilogy is nothing like the God I have come to know and love. If the “God” portrayed by Pullman were real, I would want to kill him too! Where did Pullman get this idea of God from? Why are so many Christians afraid of Pullman’s view of God? Pinnock and Clark seem to have wondered something similar inspiring them to write Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century.