Yesterday I asked my three year old son what he wanted to listen to while we were driving, Coldplay or U2? He replied, “Wallflowers!”
Month: September 2008
Obama and the Closing of the American Dream
In this article, n+1 writer Aziz Rana discusses several variations of the American Dream including the promise of professionalism, the strength of the agrarian, and boom of the industrialist small business owner. He notes that all of these have failed. Regarding small business he writes: “The quantity of small businesses begun each year suggests that the aspiration of having one’s own shop persists. Yet for the past half-century bankruptcy has been more likely than success.” As for the promise of professionalism, “we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution.” What then is the solution to the American Dream? He closes the article by saying: “If Obama hopes to save his party and to address the interests and experiences of working-class citizens, he will have to challenge the hegemony of the professional and with it the closing of the American dream.”
Can our presidential candidates sufficiently address the closing of the American Dream?
To Start or Not to Start a 2nd Service?
We are wrestling through whether or not to start a second service. For most people it’s a no brainer. If you have enough people, start a second service! Or, follow the 80/20 rule–if 80% of the seats filled, then start a second service because the other 20% will be intimidated by the lack of space. I don’t like either line of reasoning. Here’s why…
- Just because you max out seating capacity doesn’t mean your church is ready for more people. How many of the people in our services really get church the way we are trying to be the church? How many understand and embrace that we are trying to raise the problem of mission, solve it with the solution of the gospel, in the context of community? If they get it conceptually, how many of them are actually living this way practically? If there is a gap between concept and practice, is this a product of consumerism, poor leadership, or brevity of time? If there is a significant gap between our theoretical and functional ecclesiologies, then why add more people ignorant of your ecclesiology into a service that isn’t church to begin with?
- To start a second service is to commit more resources to an event, not a gospel-centered missional community. Will the demands of a second service so tax our spiritual, emotional, and physical resources that we end up reinforcing church-as-service, instead of church-as-gospel, missional community? Will a second service propagate discipleship anonymity, not missional church tenacity?
- Who cares about the 80/20 rule; it just reinforces individualistic comforts. I say “squeeze in”; meet your neighbor; love the church, swallow your individualism and take a bite out of community. Sit on the floor, just don’t fall out of a window.