The development of Seventh Generation’s global imperatives began with a question: What is Seventh Generation uniquely able to do that the world most needs? It’s a question that lies at the heart of our beliefs about the purpose and possibility of business.

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While that may seem reaching for a new church plant looking to open a coffee shop. But is it?

Read more HERE about the imperatives that drive us. Let us know what you think in the comments.

What are the imperatives that guide you as a follower of Jesus in your vocation?

What if the significant difference is not between those who know the secret of the universe and those who don’t, but rather between those who do not know the secret but who acknowledge this unknowing and those who do not know the secret but who refuse to face up to their unknowing?

Peter Rollins

A roundup of links floating around the interwebs that you may of missed this week.

Syke Jethani interviews Rob Bell

An interview about work, mission, and why some Christians throw crap parties. Agree or disagree with his point of view, Bell knows how to stir conversation. And there is one thing about Love Wins we cannot dismiss- how we think about the future shapes how we live in the present.

Why You Should Postpone College

“Having access to an education is just the entry fee. To really learn something (as opposed to completing homework and navigating the occasional test), you have to be ready to receive that knowledge—to inhale it, with aggression, satisfaction, even glee.”

When is a Mall just a Mall? The Complexity of Reading Cultural Practices

When is a mall just a mall and when does it become an act of idolatry? Recent works by two prominent Christian scholars provide very different accounts of how to understand everyday cultural practices, such as a trip to the mall.

What people talk about before they die

A hospice chaplain writes about what people talk about just before dying.

“What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally.”

Goldfish Salvation

When struggling with artistic vision, Fukahori’s pet goldfish became his inspiration and ever since his passion and lifelong theme. His unique style of painting uses acrylic on clear resin which is poured into containers, resulting in a three-dimensional appearance and lifelike vitality.

This video gives you a glimpse of his amazing painting process.

But I will be a fan for one day for one single purpose which has been pointed out to me as obvious as the nose on my face by Barnabas Piper – People.

He writes:

…go to a Super Bowl party. Or host one. Or crash one. Just be a part of what people are doing! It doesn’t matter that you don’t like football, don’t care about football, or don’t know about football. Share the food, enjoy the commercials, cringe at the halftime show, and give a football fan the opportunity to show off his knowledge of the game.

As Christians, we are called to love people, to know them well, to care about them. We’re also called to be in community.

So I will find a party to crash. Probably at Margo’s Catfish Diner Deli and Grocery. It is next door to my house after all.

What are your Super Bowl plans?

Are you an obsessed fan or indifferent?

Cody C. Lorance offers 3 perverted motives for planting a church.

1. Church-Splitting

Let’s say that you find yourself as something of a de facto leader of a group in an existing church that is for one reason or another antagonistic towards another group (perhaps even the majority) in that same church. Your group wants to “plant a church” essentially in order to get out from under the thumb or away from the conflict with the others. This is called church-splitting and should not be confused with church planting.

2. Christian-Clubbing

No! Not opening a christianized/sanitized version of a club in your city. In this situation, you put forth a vision for starting a certain kind of church (i.e. house church, mega church, postmodern church, cowboy church, or whatever) simply for the sake of having such a church. This however is not really church planting but rather a kind of Christian club-making that is motivated more by the self-interest, curiosity, or angst of the aspiring church planter rather than by Kingdom growth.

3. Just Get Busy For Jesus

Church planting, particularly in North America, has become something of a trendy thing. There is a sense in which it has become the default avenue of Christian service for young, North American Christian leaders. Want to do something for Jesus? Why not plant a church?

Be sure to read the entire article by clicking here.

What else would you add?

RELATED:

Anglican 1000, 10 Ways NOT to Plant a Church
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3

Not places one usually thinks of when they hear “Little Rock.” Yet these are her sister cities.

According to the Little Rock Sister Cities Commission’s web site:

The Little Rock Sister Cities Commission works to foster relationships between Little Rock and its Sister Cities to promote mutual cross-cultural understanding and exchanges. The commission will cultivate this environment by serving as a conduit for potential business and educational collaboration and offering unique experiences in international arts and culture.

Now imagine local churches engaging in this natural rhythm of relationships in order to develop long-term global partnerships.

Marketplace leaders in your church participating in economic development and cultural exchange.

Educators engaging in the marketplace of ideas.

Artists walking with other artists fostering conversation around beauty and the gospel.

Youth traveling to one of these cities to serve as an ambassador.

Billy Mitchell on The Upstream Collective blog puts it this way:

Put practical feet on this great concept by finding those in your city who are passionate about a laser-focused, long-term global partnership with a city for the Kingdom’s sake. This might start with people in your church family, but does not need to be restricted to them; this is about the church of your city advancing the Kingdom in a global city.

All too often, we look at the sea of need in the world and become overwhelmed and do nothing or attempt to do everything and thereby accomplish nothing. Therefore, why not simply participate in the established rhythms of global engagement in your city.

Click HERE for a directory of sister cities organized by state.

A roundup of links floating around the interwebs that you may of missed this week.

Our Problem Is Authoritarianism and Not Legalism

I used to think the problem in modern Christianity was legalism. I was wrong. I now see that some Christians flaunt their freedom and taunt their foes while other Christians consult their legal formulas and insult their libertine friends. One man’s freedom is another man’s sin, but both groups suffer from a much larger problem. The church of Jesus Christ in the 21st century is losing its power because of an infatuation with authority. It is authoritarianism, not legalism, that has become the biggest challenge Christians face.

…Back to (a Theology of) Work We Go!

…the missional approach relies on a young adult’s spare time, extra resources, and expendable energy. It doesn’t capture a core identity issue the way family-based ministries do. When a church helps a 40-year-old mother with her struggling marriage and anxiety-driven parenting, it is applying Christian faith to the center of her life and identity. Missional ministries that try to engage a single 30-year-old don’t accomplish this because they ignore what’s at the center of his life to nibble at the margins. And what is at the center for most young adults? Vocation.

Sister Cities: Fort Bragg & Otsuchi, Japan

Thousand of miles divide Otsuchi, Japan, from Fort Bragg, CA., but they were sister cities. What can we learn from these cities about the Kingdom, global engagement and the practice of giving ourselves away?

The “Ten Commandments” of American Culture

Here are ten very common sayings that will help you understand ten key American cultural values. I call them the “Ten Commandments of American Culture” even though they are not really “commandments.” They have no religious or moral authority like the “Ten Commandments” of the Bible do for Jews and Christians. However, if you break any of these “cultural commandments,” many Americans might think you do not fit very well in America.

2011, The Year in Photos from the IMB

What does God’s heart look like? Perhaps the joy on the face of a newly baptized Japanese believer in the wake of a killer earthquake. His hands? Maybe a worker comforting a starving child in Central Asia. His voice? An Egyptian Christian woman worshipping amid tumultuous political changes. See images of 2011 captured by IMB photographers as they trace a year of God’s presence in places filled with darkness and light.

A Space Oddity

Newt Gingrich takes his South Carolina primary Newt-mentum down to Florida and reveals his plan to build a permanent U.S. moon base by 2020.

The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated…Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

(via JR Briggs)

Time and time again, the American public places its hopes and ideals in the national office of the President of the United States, only to find its hopes disappointed. No solution will be found in a policy targeted at the national level, because the scale is to large.

At the heart of our political malaise are the twin evils of abstraction and distraction. We either try to abstract general principles from particular situations and then apply the abstracted principle to every particular situation. Abstraction is what threatens politics on a national level. Distraction is its local counterpart.

Distraction involves activities that prevent us from engaging in political or civic life. We are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. elliot’s description of a people “distracted from distraction by distraction.” There are a million ways in which our society teaches us and enables us to abstract and distract ourselves – to escape in one way or another from the concrete presence of the here and now.

An example of this kind of distraction is the common occurrence of the commuter spending an hour in his/her private automobile, followed by another hour of eating dinner in front of the TV in the privacy of there fenced in home, and then watching more TV and and clicking around the interwebs before bed.

Public spaces (such as a farmer’s market, coffee shop, park, sidewalks, etc.) are laboratories for citizenship because they teach us to live near and with one another while maintaining a degree of civility. They provide many more opportunities for human contact and relationships. These ordinary contacts and the relationships to which they can lead are the absolutely necessary building blocks for any kind of renewal in our political life.