Thursday, March 8, 2007
Liberty, Justice, and Reconciliation
"You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven." If the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and its effects is the sun of the gospel of the kingdom, then the radiance of the glory of the gospel is good works. Enter our key words of liberty, justice, and reconciliation. If this is the center of our function we must seek to do works that promote liberty, justice, and reconciliation. The issue... "is this the best way to accomplish our function?" This is what I will say on this matter... I am not sure. I am not convinced that whatever we do will be the most effecient means to divert funds to works of liberty, justice, and reconciliation. Here is what I am convinced of, that we are doing something. Instead of wasting our lives, we are talking about, thinking deeply about "what can we do to fulfill our calling as believers?" I am convinced that we are a fellowship of burning hearts who care deeply about the message that has saved us and given us life. I am convinced that, despite our unbelievable capacity to be complete and total fools, God desires His Spirit to energize our bodies to accomplish His will here "on earth as it is in heaven." And with that in mind I am less concerned about what is "best" or "most effecient," because I am nearly convinced that it is not. I do not at all want to demean thinking about efficiency, because efficiency is a very important issue. But here is what I am excited about and what I believe excites all of us... That we are doing something. Doing something in faith is far better than doing nothing. With this being said I wonder what everyone's thoughts are, considering who we are (our gifts, talents, and passions), what then can we do that is consistent with who we are as a "fellowship of burning hearts." What kinds of works can we do that are consistent with our hearts and that can be "exercised in proportion to our faith (Romans 12:3)." I think here is where we might discover what is "best" or "most effecient" because we can do it with passion and joy, believing in what we are doing. And we all know we do things best and most efficiently when we believe in them, are convinced of their intrinsic goodness, and are passionate about how it is accomplished. These are my thoughts, what about you....
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This reminds me of the discussion that Indiana Jones had with his dad (Sean Connery) in The Last Crusade. Indiana confronts his dad about how his dad was always buried in his work and that they never got to "talk." So Connery looks at him and says "I'm here, what do you want to talk about?" Indiana sat there stammering because he didn't know what to say. He was mad about not talking but when he was pressed to it there was nothing that he wanted to talk about.
It's as if TJP founding members are all saying to God, "I want to do something important with my life." But when we are pressed to answer what that might be we don't quite have an answer. That's fine though, I don't think that the answers come until we're ready for them. We just need to trust the Lord that He will uncover the desires of our heart in such a way that we can have an impact in His Kingdom.
Ok, I thought I would be misunderstood here. I am not against efficiency. I am for it. But I am more for doing what is the "desires of our hearts." Central to this is the idea of the "benevolent mafia." I feel this is "best" primarily because it is what I desire to do, why I wanted to get the ball rolling on this. Now it may not be the "best" objectively speaking, but to me it seems to fit pretty well. Therefore I propose a good next step, if everyone agrees, is to decide who is part of the 'family.' Who is on the council. Determining this will help a great deal in deciding what's next. That's what I think.
Samwise,
I wasn't trying to criticize that point at all, I was just saying we are having a hard time zeroing in on something. I am with you about deciding who is on the board, and who has input on what it should be. I do think this should be a unreserved discussion amongst men (and women) where we can come to an effective starting point. I do think we should plan on a meeting where we can all be in the same room and plan the discussion.
After reviewing my last post I realize that it may have come up sounding like an untrained soldier who rushed off into the fray but did not know how to hold a sword. I don't want to be Indy (except for the fact that he had a killer hat and could use a bull whip). What I am convinced about is TJP is about "liberty, justice, and reconciliation," and it (as originally concieved) is this sort of benevolent mafia that kind of does "reverse laundering" through front companies. I did not intend to argue against being efficient (I am actually very much in favor of it), but I did mean to say that what excites me is that we are in this small way attempting to do something and I am not sure if how we are thinking about it is best, but I am excited that we are thinking about it. And not only that, but if we do this small little thing by faith, that is better than burying our talent. Now to the issue of generating funds... I don't think we are ready to answer this question just yet. I think before we answer this question we must answer "who" TJP is. Then TJP must as a council decide come up with an agreed upon business plan including a development of phases with a well thought out concept of what the first step should be and how that will move us toward fulfilling our plan and our purpose. I hope I am being clear, because I can see how it is difficult sometimes to interpret what is said at times, if not let me know some things to clarify
I agree with Sam. That's basically where my thought process has been.
But Jed, I totally know what your point is and I think it is an issue that we must define.
Basically, we can come up with all the best ideas in the world for TJP. But what are we realistically going to be able to do? Ideas and out-of-the-box thinking are all great, but to execute them is a very different thing. In all of this talk we need to keep on the forefront of our minds that this must not be of ourselves.
When I get back from OZ, find a home, settle down and when Sam and Anjuli finally have that baby, we should all meet up and really discuss and pray about this whole thing.
Seriously, I love you guys. You both make me proud. This discussion alone has been more fun than humans should have with their clothes on.
With that said I am going to be a bit bold (as if that is any surprise) here and let you guys know exactly what I am thinking about TJP. I am 1 million percent on board with the purpose of "promoting liberty, justice, and recociliation within the Kingdom." But I am apprehensive about the "benevolent mafia". There are a couple of reasons behind this and I really want you guys to shoot as many holes in my rationale because I think it is a critical component of the discussion. Here they are so pull out your AK-47's and have at 'em boys:
1. An organization that diverts funds of any kind needs a source
2.We are all creative and I dont see ourselves as financiers but content creators at this stage
3. I think that we lack financial credibility without someone present who has a background in due dilligence and fiduciary responsibility (in the formal investment firm sense)
4. The beauty of a Web 2.0 model (look up web 2.0 in wikipedia) is it is open source, cheap, and can be highly effective with minimal investments. I know these examples aren't what we want to do but they are good for analogies:
- MySpace
- Flickr
- EBay
- Wikipedia
I think we should be thinking in the most frugal terms: How can we take what little we have and make it abundant? The whole board/funds disbursement idea needs to be a stage 2-3 concept after we have established credibility.
Now, I am not saying I am right here. I am saying I am not sold on the benevolent mafia model. I am more in favor of a low-budget Zine, or a blog network, or something to get the ball rolling as we build some professional chops. If we have good content we can turn that over into book deals (justin - your screenplay would be awesome), I am going to try to get Steve the Christmas Dragon online with Shaun. A good Zine would be an awesome resource that could begin to generate advertizing $$$ as we begin to build a readership, but this is not easy to build and there are plenty of quality materials out there that we would have to find our own unique voice among.
I know you guys were at one point connected in the Crusade ministry at SLO. This is a HUGE resource of potential readers/viewers because the kind of stuff they want is the kind of stuff we want to put out (to a degree). Same with moody and biola, and a lot of other potential places. This is the kind of stuff we need to be contemplating as we get ready to get together.
I think you are onto something Jed. I think there are ample amounts of avenues we can pursue. What ever we do we do it right the first time and do it very very well is the motif I am picking up. I just have this to add. The inventors of myspace, metacafe, google and youtube had lots of brainstorming before their idea became reality. I just watched a documentary about how the youtube guys came up with and implemented their idea. It was ridiculous. So are we talking' about coming up with a forum, using an existing idea, inventing our own, having an online magazine, etc....there is just to many possibilities. Is our first and initial step just getting the cloud of ideas out there and building a reputation for us. Is that stage one?
I was also thinking tangentially today, just sort of relating thoughts that were whirling around in my head. In post-enlightenment Deutschland, college students would go from school to school, not staying at one university, but professor hopping to what ever school had the latest and greatest prof with the latest and greatest ideas. There was no consistency, no uniform university but what it created was a cesspool of students who would become some of the most prominent and influential thinkers for the next few generations. what does this have to do with TJP. Well, think about what we do online, we get our news from the drudge report (tangent: there was an article about a guy from yale who built a fridge that would launch beers to his couch with a press of a button on his tv controller) we review music from sites like pitchfork, we google everything, we use bloggs, we have friends who have websites, we buy music, we buy books, we buy airline tickets, listen to sermons, watch tv shows, watch surf competitions, we chat with friends and can order fresh coffee too. Everything is immediate, everything is fragmented. Everything is short quick to the point. Everything under the sun is out there and you can buy it at a click of a button from amazon. Not only that but you have people absorbing ample amounts of information, nay, ample amounts of bits of information with out something to actually sit down to, sit down and discuss, sit down and relate over. Just big douche bag sized sponges of narcissistic heaps of individualism. Its like farinhight 451, people don’t think, don’t anaylize. so here is a list of ideas.
Ideas:
• Have an online zine but make it both a stationary and interactive format. e.g.
• As tv merges with the internet (in a couple of years you won’t go to channel 7 to watch American idol but go to fox’s website and watch the show) it is important to think of the future possibilities of having something that is interactive- kind of like the idea of the never-ending story- it changes and molds and grows and splits changes and divides.
• Have a venue that promotes discussion- like a website that a café can project on a wall that has discussion topics, group games, like trivia pursuit, or something like malarkey, something that is fun or something serious, but people can use the medium for group interaction both present and online.
• With both of the ideas above, have a interactive part of a site that can be used as kind of like screensaver acts on a computer, e.g. in a café, new music gets played through the site and the content is projected onto a screen, it fuses pictures and poetry, video and quotes, it cycles through a collection of thoughts and experiences. people could look at it, read it, listen to it, or have it be white noise.
• have it be a place where critcal minds meet, talk and discuss-have leading thinkers post questions for debate, have online lectures/readings/ forums/ debates and discussions/---like the Post-enlightenment germany, people can pop in and see who is saying what, what questions are floating out there.
• an online data bank of bibliography of the leading thinkers. influential books and must reads.
we need to:
• define our target audience/s.
• which format goes where.
just some cud I’ve been chewing on.
also as a income generator, write commercials, for the materialistic masses, i think it is a perfect form for our function.
I think Jed's comment about tapping into the SLO Crusade, Biola, etc crowd is huge. There are so so so many people who would be challenged by TJP ideas, would be able to find other people who think like they do, get exposed to good art, etc etc. I guess I just see that as a pretty good peripheral outcome of the Zine/Board type idea.
Also, as a side note, I think it would be really easy to do a sweet podcast. Think about it.
Jason
(I need to get a sweet blog account like you guys... anonymous is weak)
I know this might be way down the line, but i really think that there needs to be something set-up for the faithful servants of the word, for when they get old and don't have much and when an unexpected calamity happens there is would be a resource to help them out. I was talking to a former pastor and his wife had been falling a lot lately. They don't have the funds to go to the doctor to see what's wrong. I asked about their church and they don't have enough funds to barely exist. It wrenched my heart, here is a man who gave is life and mind you he wasn't complaining, but he just needed some help. I think it would be great to get well to do pastors to contribute to the disenfranchised pastors/missionaries. i think this would be freakin' cool.
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