Check out the new website from Rainn Wilson: www.soulpancake.com.

Hi-

I’m not going to blog again until the recession is over.

-Eric

On Tuesday night sometime between 8pm and midnight, the major news organizations will begin to call the most anticipated Presidential election in a generation for either Barack Obama or John McCain. We know this will happen, but what we don’t know, is what Wednesday morning will be like. 

I’m not talking about whether the world will instantly be a better place if Obama is elected, as many of his supporters seem to think, or if the world will be safe from liberals and their tendencies toward socialism if McCain is elected, as many of his supporters are hoping. I’m talking about where we go next, as a country, as a divided electorate, with whichever guy wins. 

Everybody seems to want a change. Democrats, many independents, and even a few “Obamacans” want an ideological change. Republicans, many other independents, and any “McCainocrats” that may be out there, want a new guy sitting in the Oval Office (preferably one with less baggage). We’re going to get change for sure. It may not be the change each of us wants, but politics always disappoints us, doesn’t it?

If Obama wins, he won’t be able to do everything he said he would. He won’t be as liberal in his governance as many of his supporters hoped he’d be and he might be more liberal than others anticipated. If McCain wins, his White House will be run as poorly as his campaign and he too will frustrate his base by looking more like the John McCain who met with John Kerry about being his running mate in 2004 than the John McCain who met with John Haggee about an endorsement in 2008. 

I believe the last eight years have been a disaster. I know I’ll lose some of you here, that’s fine, but President Bush blew it. With the exception of his funding of AIDS relief and debt forgiveness for many nations in Africa and southeast Asia, he has been a bull in a china shop. The only thing small about his administration has been his world-view. This election, like most elections, is ultimately a referendum on the guy leaving office. Bush’s approval rating is down to about 20% because that is how many people either don’t watch the news, only read the paper for the ads, or are unwilling to call a foul when they see one because the guy who committed it is on their team. We all want a change and on Wednesday morning that change will begin. Sure, President Bush has until January 20th to pack up his things and do the best he can to improve his legacy in the process, but on Wednesday morning, he’s done.

So whoever wins, they’ve got a tall order. Two wars, a dwindling economy, an outdated national infrastructure and an immediate need to address carbon emissions and energy independence. Not to mention a congress that hasn’t passed meaningful legislation in two years and an american people in need of better government but bitterly divided on how to achieve it. My hope is that whoever wins will wake up on Wednesday morning and seek to unite the country knowing full well that roughly half of us voted for the other guy. If there’s ever a time to reach across the aisle, it’s wednesday morning. 

If McCain wins, he can learn from the candidacy of Barack Obama that people want and need to be inspired, that they really are tired of divisive politics and want to end the wars as quickly and effectively as possible. He can learn that people are serious about universal healthcare (not socialized medicine) and that they don’t want bigger government, but smarter government. He can learn that American’s want our image to be restored in the world. We don’t want a president who apologizes for America, but one who’s governance makes us proud.

If Obama wins, he must remember that he is governing a center-right nation and that the ideas of Nancy Pelosi don’t fly with 65% of the country. He must also be careful not to let a democratic majority (if that happens) in the house and senate run wild and take Americans to a place they don’t want to go. He must continually reach out to the part of the country that is afraid of him and always remember that he was elected with a mandate to change the partisan politics in our nation. 

Right now it’s Saturday night but on Wednesday morning, we will have a new President-elect and a fresh start at addressing the issues we face. Whether you’re happy or sad, hopeful or scared or even indifferent on Wednesday morning, the next President is going to need you. 

Lastly, I am a Christian, and so my hope is ultimately in a different Wednesday morning. I believe in a King and a Kingdom. The Bible says that my citizenship is in Heaven and while I do eagerly await a Savior from there, it is my commission, on Wednesday morning and every morning,  to campaign for the Kingdom of God regardless of who wins the campaign for the Presidency of the United States.

Heard while watching The West Wing tonight:

You know If our job teaches us anything, it’s that we don’t know what the next president is going to face. If we choose someone with vision, someone with guts, someone with gravitas who’s connected to other people’s lives and cares about making them better, if we choose someone to inspire us, then we’ll be able to face what comes our way and achieve things we can’t imagine yet.

-Toby talking to Josh and Donna during the episode “20 Hours in America: Part 2″

Hey there, I’m back. I had to shut it down for a few months, the political race was getting crazy and I was too worked up to post. Even my limited presence on Facebook this past month has reminded me that many of my friends vehemently disagree with me when it comes to politics and it’s a full time job keeping up with responses to even the tamest of my political remarks. On a side note, I don’t want my web-presence to adversely affect real relationships, a goal we should all strive toward I think! 

Anyway, just wanted to remind you all to vote.

More on the Democratic National Convention later, but this was a highlight for me on Monday.

My brother Chris just told me about this new website/service called Noise Trade. It features a growing collection of independent artists whose albums can be downloaded in exchange for telling three friends about it or any amount of money you want to pay. It’s really that easy. You get music for what you want to pay for it and they get an invitation into you and your friend’s music libraries. Check it out!

Most of you aren’t going to care about this, but I think about stuff like this all the time. The church Lacey and I are a part of is growing fast, so fast that we had outgrown our new building before a service even took place there. As a result, the need to add services at different times, in different venues, and in different formats is apparent every sunday. More and more, churches in this situation are starting video venues. Some have live worship followed by a video of a previous service’s sermon and some are just a live feed of a whole service piped in from next door or even another city altogether. Technology has made services like this an attractive choice over the traditional church plant, but there is much to consider about video venues beyond the convenience of them. 

To that end, the following article, posted at www.outofur.com by Pastor Bob Hyatt makes the case against video venues:

Evergreen, our small church here in Portland, Oregon, has just gone multi-site. But not video venue.

We started in a pub in southwest Portland, outgrew that space, and moved to another pub across town. Outgrowing that one, we moved up to yet another pub in northwest Portland. Yes, we are the church on a pub crawl. When things got crowded there, we knew we had some decisions to make.

Our goal has always been multi-faceted. First and foremost, we want to see people come to and come back to Jesus. That implies growth. Second, our worship gatherings are highly interactive. We never want to lose the dialogical vibe in our teaching. Third, knowing that, according to statistics, people are reached best by newer (under 10 years old) and smaller congregations (as they grow from 100 to 200), our ultimate goal has been planting.

For various reasons, we’re not quite ready to plant another separate community. So what to do? Consistent with the greatest number of our values, we invited some Evergreeners to start another worship gathering in one of our previous pub spaces. We’re now one church in two locations. One or two more gatherings like that, and I think we’ll have reached a size at which we’ll have the people and resources to start planting churches around Portland.

So why didn’t we do what many growing, multi-site communities are doing and pipe my teaching all around town and beyond? Here are a few reasons:

1. We believe good things happen when worship is kept small and interactive. We want people to be able to talk to one another and to the one who is teaching them. We also want things kept at a size where people can know one another and be known by those teaching them.

Some say that video venues are no different from a large service where parishioner number 3254 has to sit in the 50th row and watch the whole thing on the big screen anyway. It’s not like she can raise her hand and ask a question. It’s not like the one teaching knows who she is anyway…Exactly. To me, video venues simply magnify what’s already a problem of megachurches.

2. Many advocates of video venues say there simply aren’t enough church planters and talented teachers to go around. And my response is that in a video venue world, there never will be. Pursued as a large scale strategy, video venues will inevitably lead to fewer and fewer gifted and experienced lay and vocational preachers. The gift of preaching— already suffering from over-professionalization—will become ever more the work of the celebrity.

At Evergreen, our seven elders rotate teaching responsibilities at both sites, though there’s a primary teaching elder at each. As a result, the church isn’t driven by a single personality, and several people are developing preaching experience at once.

3. Though many video venue churches also do traditional church planting, I worry for congregants who may see a campus pastor but are lead in large part by elders who live miles, and sometimes even towns, away.

Ultimately, I believe what’s best is not to come up with new and creative ways to put space between the people teaching and those being taught. What’s best is to shrink that space as much as is humanly possible. If the problem is a lack of qualified teachers, do whatever you can to find, call, equip, and send teachers. Don’t install a screen and beam teaching from 200 miles away. If you must install that video venue, call it what it is—a necessary and temporary compromise until your prayers for more workers are answered.

Some churches grow faster than they can find, train, and send church planters who have the same teaching talent as the “main guy.” But what if instead of asking “Can he preach as well as me?” you ask, “Can he or she, with a team of others, lead a Christ-centered community that starts small and grows, reproducing itself before becoming unmanageable and outgrowing the gifting of its leadership?” You might find more gifted/qualified people than you dreamed.

I know, a lot of people love your preaching and want to hear it. Let them get saved and discipled at your community, or spend a season there, and then point them to your pod/vodcast, sending them as missionaries to reach their local communities. But don’t say, “Well, people just want to hear me, so we must make a way for everyone to either sit in one room and watch me or my video representation.” That simply makes no sense when we’re talking about maturing Christ followers who will live self-sacrificially in communities centered on Jesus, not a preaching personality.

One of the main justifications for video venues is that upwards of 70 percent of church plants fail. Giving people a “brand name,” proven communicator makes more sense. But do church plants fail because of the planter? Or is it because of unreasonable expectations, unsustainable “big launch” methods in which thousands of dollars are pumped into new churches in an effort to make them big, fast… because of the consumer mindset of many who look at the big churches down the street with not a small amount of envy?

Ultimately, video venues strike me as a poor compromise. They may be necessary at times, but are certainly not a strategy to be pursued, even alongside traditional church plants. They focus entirely too much on the preaching gifts of one person, a trend even we small “emerging” types need to counter.

The celebrity church must die. And doing anything—like video venues—that prolongs its life, even in the name of the lost, runs counter to the best interests of the Church in all its expressions, big and small, and its mandate to see more people not only reached, but gifted, trained, and sent.

What do you think?

I’ve been waiting for a way to blog from my iPhone and it’s finally here! Thanks for the heads up Paul. I know I’m a need, but the prospect of being able to post wherever, whenever is awesome. For example, right now I’m sitting in my lazyboy, at home, and my computer with a real keyboard is sitting right next to me!