10 (New Year’s) Resolutions for Responding to Violent Tragedy
Instead of asking Congress to pass or repeal laws, I am setting forth principles I think we should all live by as we use social media after a tragedy. Call them resolutions, if you will, although I hope the last more than a year.
Share these with your friends if you’d like. Post them on your wall. Feel free to add to, take away from, or alter them. Or just critique them. My hope is that they will be part of a better starting ground for all of us.
Dear Worship Pastor: It’s Not About You
I want to tell the worship pastor, and so I’m telling you now: if no one’s following, you ain’t leading.
Today Jim Elliot Was Killed (1956)
In the Epilogue of Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot culls from Jim’s journals some of the quotations I printed above. She notes that after Jim’s death these sentences were all “fraught with new meaning,” and that “to them I can add nothing.” But of course she did add something. She added hundreds of pages that were necessary if the inner meaning of the team’s sacrifice was ever going to be spoken clearly and understood by many.
Killing Becky (On Creating in A ‘Safe’ Church)
Every element in a church worship service; each program or each new area of ministry has to pass the Becky-test. This means milk toast, predictable, and less engaging worship experiences. The depths and riches of Christian experience go ignored because Becky has no framework to understand them and Christian sub-culture is happy to allow her her illusions of faith provided those illusions are accompanied by her patronage.
But the price of her patronage, in my view, is too costly. Many of the people created by God to join God as co-creators on earth, go their entire lives without touching a big part of what God created them for. Instead, we play it safe.
US faith leaders pray for civility in public political debate
“Through daily prayer, we are calling on the ’better angels of our nature’ needed to sustain our nation and solve problems,” said the Rev Peg Chemberlin, immediate past president of the National Council of Churches USA and one of the faith leaders taking part in “18 Days of Prayer for the Nation.”
Prayers began on 3 January 2012, the first day of the new Congress, and will end on 21 January, the day of President Obama’s second inauguration.
Beyond Good Intentions: How to Fix the Broken System of International Aid
A tall Somali boy sitting in the last row slowly rose, cleared his throat, and looked down for an instant with a slight degree of uncertainty, shifting his weight before staring directly into my eyes and boldly saying, “A lot of aid workers come and go, but nothing changes. If the aid projects were effective, we wouldn’t still be living like this after all these years. Do you really think you have the answer to our problems?”
You recognize truth when you hear it. This boy was finally saying what I’d been longing to hear. Something that hadn’t been rehearsed. Something real. He was calling me out in front of the entire class, and he was absolutely right. Who did I think I was? Who did we think we were? Even if I was willing to listen to their various grievances, I didn’t have the magic answer to their problems. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that I was part of the problem.
Toward resilience in communication (the end of cc)
So, here we are in the middle of the communication age, and we’re actually creating a system that’s less engaging, less resilient to change or dropped signals, and less likely to ensure that small teams are actually contributing efficiently. The internet funding structure rewards systems that get big, not always systems that work very well.
A simple trade-off has to be made: You can’t simultaneously have a wide, open system for communication and also have tight connections and resilience.
Microsoft Silicon Valley offices raided with only iPads stolen
Microsoft’s reputation as the “less cool” rival to Apple appears to have been reinforced, after thieves raided its Silicon Valley offices – but only stole a collection of iPads.
The thieves made away with five iPads worth more than $3,000 (£1,865) from Microsoft’s research and development centre in Mountain View, California, over Christmas.
Microsoft’s flagship collection of smartphones and tablet computers remained untouched in the raid…