Finished reading: The Strategically Small Church by Brandon J. O’Brien 📚
Really helpful book that encourages small churches to embrace their “smallness” and leverage the unique strengths that come with not being huge. Some really useful insights that I’ll be thinking on for a while. This book probably put the nail in the coffin for me; I don’t think I believe in big churches any more. (Though I’m content to leave “big” undefined.)
What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world? What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience?
The human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and databased and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits—even after death, when, as several new technologies promise, our digital remnants can be gathered and engineered into posthumous chatbots to comfort our grieving family members.
Currently reading: The Extinction of Experience Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen 📚
Watched: Little Miss Sunshine 🍿
Still great
Watched this the other night with Kristyn: Blood Diamond 🍿
Like most preachers, I grossly overestimated the importance of my part in the sermon. When I thought of preaching, I did not consider it to be a congregation’s reception of the word of God, but a speaker’s command of the Bible’s hidden meanings and applications, which were served up in a way to showcase the authority and skill of the preacher. In those days the gospel lived or died by my personal performance. My preaching was a small cloud of glory that followed me around and hung like a canopy over the pulpit whenever I occupied it. How ludicrous I must have appeared to my congregation.
Replace “story” with “sermon” and this pretty much sums up my weekly process (HT: The Brothers Zahl)
Among Lutherans, ecstasy may take the form of a slight twitch of the eyebrow or the pursing of lips in order to suppress a smile. Sometimes a knowing glance between farmers must pass for the “Hallelujah! Preach, brother!” that is in there all right, but will never come out in this life.
