[When] asked if he wanted to do market research, [Jobs] said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” I’ve said this same thing in regards to the structure and style church worship services. If people haven’t been shown or taught a different way, how can they be expected to desire [...]

There is something I’ve noticed for a while. I’ve thought about it quite a bit, without a clear resolve. It is a question of information and human relations. We live in a world where people have huge amounts of information at their disposal. With such immediate and constant access that smartphones and always-on-broadband-internet gives us, [...]

I was listening to someone share their journey through religion recently. Like so many who grew up in the Baptist church, she recalled the many altar calls she responded to as a child. And my thought while listening to her reflect, was of course why not. Anyone who has grown up within such a tradition—where [...]

Beauty. Art. Church. All things I have been thinking about for some years. For a long time I thought about them in very separate terms, then slowly the questions began to overlap and I started allowing them to dialogue with each other. Listening to questions about art and applying them to church or worries about [...]

For those who may not have heard, I am now officially an associate pastor at Vintage Fellowship. Well actually that isn’t my actual title, as we are still working one. ‘spiritual architect’ has been suggested; I like ‘practitioner in residence’ or something like ‘spiritual gardner’ but neither of us are sure about it. Though the whole idea [...]

I think I came across the problem I have with church. I have been frustrated with church for some time now, but couldn’t exactly put my finger on the origin of the frustration. I could name numerous instances of frustration, but there seemed to be an underlying issue which I haven’t been able to nail [...]

I have been watching Art:21 documentaries with the wife & kids lately. If you are not familiar, Art:21 is a PBS documentary series which explores the works & artists of contemporary visual arts; they build each episode upon a theme and pick 4-5 artists to highlight. It has been interesting looking at how these contemporary [...]

There are good designers and then there are the hacks. The hacks, bless their heart are usually secretaries who are called to create the organisation’s newsletter and/or their website among other things. While I don’t like the dark theme of Mars Hill Church’s website, they continue to produce some quality designs. Here’s one of them: [...]

There has been a large blogosphere conversation going on about the state of emergent, specifically Emergent Village. The eruption of comments was started by one blog post which worried about the fizzling out of Emergent, focusing on specific figureheads as proof. As far as a direct response, I’m not going to give anything of the [...]

Going around the twitter-blogosphere recently has been the recognition that the vast majority of twitter accounts are simply those who have signed up, tweeted once, then abandoned the account. This isn’t a new phenomena, it actually happened in the blog world when blogs hit grandma-cool status a few years back. My question, is twitter like [...]