Timothy Colin Klinefelter : oodles of pictures

I uploaded 85 photos to SnapFish. I’m not quite sure how to link to the album here (though I think you can try this link, you’ll have to login, but it’s free), but if you send me your email address I’ll send you the album link. Eventually I’ll put pics on Flickr, but presently my account is full and they would like for me to give them some $$$ so I can add more. Anyway, with SnapFish you can view and, if you are so inclined, order prints.

Timothy Colin Klinefelter

He’s here! Timothy Colin Klinefelter

8 lbs 5 ounces, 21 inches

Born at 5:57 this morning.

Babe and Sarah are doing great! Oodles of pictures are coming….

I uploaded a few photos to Facebook (even if you aren’t on Facebook you can see them). You can check them out at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10063&l=3a1b4&id=672056005

Harry Potter, read it.

Well, last week I watched the 4th movie, skimmed books 5 and 6 and at midnight Friday I bought book 7.  I finished reading it this morning (3:00 Am).  And it was good.

I won’t say much as to not give anything away.  But it is a great read, if you are a fan I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

I have thoughts in my head around the ideas of a messiah in contemporary media.  And, more to the point, how those compare to the biblical notion of Jesus the Messiah.  We’ve got very interesting evolutions in the messiah motif in film and text…. Harry Potter, Neo, Frodo/Aragorn, Superman, Spiderman,  etc….

I’ll save a further reflection to another time, but I’ll atleast pose a question or two…  what are the qualities a “messiah” must possess to be considered a legit messiah?  How has messiah-ship changed in literature/film especially in the last 100/50 years?  (and the kicker) How are the contemporary ideas of messiah similar/different than the biblical view of Jesus?

The Dream

A Community of Faith in Pleasant Ridge in Cincinnati, OH purposed to live out the Missio Dei as a Covenant Communitas proclaiming Christ and living as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the Kingdom of God. 

Or, to put it more simply…

A People following Jesus cooperatively in the 45213 zip code

I believe we are standing at the edge of a revolution.  A Kingdom-sized movement of people taking back their faith and making it their own.  Gone are the days of static faith, status quo faith, beauricratic faith.  The hierarchy fell over.  The CEO has lost his groove.  There’s no going back.  We’ve taken the red pill and we’re about to see how far the rabbit hole goes.

I believe we’re about to discover that the rabbit hole goes back to the ancient days.  To the first day, in fact, when the Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos and the cosmos was birthed.  We are in a time of great tension and chaos.  The Spirit of the Living God broods over us and in us with the creative force of life.  I believe God is birthing the very Reign of God in our midst.

I believe that the Kingdom has come on earth – in Cincinnati – as it is in heaven.  And I believe that where the Kingdom breaks in a People of God will form.  Where once there was not a people God will birth a people.  This ecclesia is poised at the outbreak of a Holy Virus that is infecting Cincinnati.  The old are dreaming dreams and the young are prophesying.  Healing and resurrection are happening.

I believe a movement of small communities of faith is bubbling up in the city.  It will literally re-make the spiritual and social landscape of Cincinnati.  It is already happening.  These tiny communities of Jesus-followers love their neighbors, serve the poor, and mend the broken.  They lead from the bottom up.  They move with fluidity and flexibility.  They don’t wait for approval from the Top Dog, the Central Committee, or the Chain of Command.  Instead they wait for the Lord and they wait tables.  They bless and do not curse.  They buy houses (or rent apartments) and settle down in the forgotten places, the old neighborhoods, and the cookie-cutter suburbs.

I believe a new kind of church is forming.  A church not bound by tired categories of traditional, seeker-sensitive, contemporary, or even emerging.  We aren’t working a model, a pre-digested plan, or publisher-approved action steps.  We are improvising, experimenting, and innovating.  We’re not looking to be the biggest, the best, the most excellent or professional.  We aren’t looking to be radical for the sake of being radical.  We aren’t trying to start a movement so that we feel like we’re doing something important.  I believe that any movement that is going on is the moving of the Spirit and we get to participate in that.  I actually don’t even believe in revolution, per se.  I believe in the resurrecting power of God, the redeeming work of Christ… and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with suffering.  I do believe that when those on the outside see it they’ll want in and they’ll call it “revolutionary”.

I believe a network of small churches will change our city.  Imagine communities of faith of 150 or less, deeply and passionately following Jesus and living Kingdom lives in their neighborhoods.  These churches network together and reproduce similar communities.  Sometimes we gather for large scale worship and ministry, most of the time we’re meeting in homes, coffee shops, bars, and lunch rooms.  Some of us live together in Christian intentional communities (houses or co-housing), others live in proximity to each other in neighborhoods or apartment complexes. 

I believe its going to take a lot of work and it is going to start with a few folks who covenant together in community and mission (which is what communitas is, as I understand it).  I believe it has already begun…

Class Notes Redux – Liquid Modernity

I was sorting through some old class notes from Fuller Seminary and found these from a class Sarah and I took called Spiritual Transformation of Postmoderns.  It is hard to believe that that was 4 years ago this month!  One of our assignments was a group project and our group compiled these notes.  I find them just as applicable today as then….

Bauman – Liquid Modernity
Peer Group Jigsaw

What underlying dynamics or factors are driving the collapse of space and time in the past 30-50 years?

The changing means of production, the technology – horse to train to airplanes, face to face communication to radio/telegraph to phones to cellular phones to net

The social structure which the changing technology produces

We have moved from a culture in which space is the most important thing to own, the person with the most space is the most powerful, to a culture that does not need space and because we can be anywhere instantaneously, time is no longer an issue either.

The move from heavy/solid modernity to light/fluid/liquid modernity characterized by shifts in perceptions of time and space.

Space

The spaces in our society have changed. The public spaces in which there might be some community do not promote community.
Community is not about the people, any more, anyway. It is about territory and borders because of a fear of everything that could happen.

Strangers are meeting strangers and therefore the encounters are fairly inconsequential. There are many different kinds of spaces, and in all of them we wear masks to conceal our true identities. Consuming places offer freedom and security, as well as anonymity. However, there is a sense of community in these places. Other places, empty spaces, are built so that a person cannot stay there for long and therefore there is no risk of community. There are also non-places, which allow some time for a person to stay there but acknowledge that the person will not stay for long. These are half-way in between consuming and empty spaces.

Space has become, in liquid modernity, giving no one a privileged position.  Bigger is no longer better in light (as opposed to heavy) modernity.

Time

Time is now the focus of people with power. The person who can get things done the fastest is the most powerful. With the advent of the information age, the time to do things gets shorter and shorter, and we can traverse great amounts of space instantaneously. The focus has shifted from lots of space to short amounts of time. Because of this shift in focus, our culture is now one of disengagement as opposed to engagement.

Time, a construct created by modernity in the form of history, has been disassociated from Space.  In liquid modernity it has taken on the character of being near instantaneous and abhorrent of history or future.

What are 2-3 implications for spirituality and or mission that we can draw from what the theorist wrote about time/space?

- Personal awareness of the use of time/space and its negative effects on spirituality intrusion of personal time/space

- Concept of empty places, non-places we cut people out of our world by these empty places in our map of the city

- Instantaneous society – relevance of our message for today when we talk about eternity.  How do we meet people where they are?

- Loss of community, a replacement of community as defined by borders, rather than the content of community

So, I’m wondering what implications do these hold for church planting, for discipleship, for family, for work in our present context?   Are these just the meandering conjectures of an academic?  Do they have weight (perhaps that is a telling expression?) for our lived experience?

My hunch is that these kind of reflections on our contemporary sociological context matter a great deal.  They especially matter as we are engaged in generative work.  As we undertake the creative process in all spheres of life – educational, familial (we’re having a baby – you can’t get much more generative than that!), and ecclesial (church planting especially!) -  the awareness of our changing social context is immense.  What could it mean, for instance, to establish a community of faith that has a real sense of place in a society that devalues space like ours does?

Church Planting

Earlier I mentioned that a focus for this blog would be the process of planting a church in our neck of the woods.  I thought I’d try to unpack what I mean by that and where we are in said process.

I’ve been journaling (an ever growing Word doc) for a bit, so some of this will come from there.  The short answer to where we are in the process is – the beginning!  We’ve been reflecting, asking questions, praying, dreaming, and conversing with a few folks, etc….  I would say we’re in a trajectory (“Victor, give me a vector”), but we’re intentionally taking it slow.  I might even go so far as to call it contemplative church planting.

Here are some of the questions that roll around in my head regarding church planting:

What would it look like to form a community of people who follow Jesus?  What would it look like to follow Jesus together – not as individuals, but as a community, a people?  How might a community of people follow Jesus together in the Cincinnati, OH neighborhood of Pleasant Ridge?  What might God be calling us to?  What is the prevailing social, physical, emotional, or spiritual need in Pleasant Ridge?  Why start another church in the first place?  How could this new community of faith serve the neighborhood?  What would be the distinctive characteristics of the community’s social and ecclesial life together?

That’ll do for now… I’ll share some of my answers to those questions in further posts.

Life-update

So, it seems that I may actually be using this blog with some frequency.  If so (or until I’m not!) I suspect I should give you a bit of a life-update.  Ok, here goes:

Today is 7/6/07 and as of 3:00 PM I am officially on vacation from work/school.  I officially return to work August 6th, upon which I will be participating in an INTERalliance summer (IT) camp for 10th graders (3 of which from our school). During this month off I hope to clean-out my Inbox, go to the zoo with The Cloe, sleep more, and have a baby.  Sarah is due any day now (officially the 20th).  We’re having a boy and his name will be revealed upon deliver of said package.

I’m on Facebook now, so if you are then let’s hook up.

I’m on LinkedIn too, so let’s do likewise.

I blog about Education Technology here (EduTech), but I don’t update as regularly as I’d like.

Paul and Joe are trying to get me to use StumbleUpon, but I’m just not getting it…

I’m using my del.icio.us again.

And my Flickr is maxed out and it really wants me to give them some $ so I can post more pics, which I probably will do so that I can share pics of The Boy.

I’m not cool enough yet to use Jott, Twitter, or some all-encompassing feed aggregator like Jaiku.  Maybe someday I will be.

Church planting thoughts are still rumbling around in my mind/heart/soul…. and I’m sure I’ll share them as they tumble forth.

That is all.