From Dan: In case you haven't transitioned to our new Facebook page yet, I wanted to give you the heads up that registration has just opened for this year's Blue Ocean Summit! It's been a while for most of us here in Cambridge and we're getting excited to see you all again! Many of you on this blog have been long term Summiteers (how's that for a title?) forming the backbone of our ever growing Blue Ocean community. As you veterans know, these Summits are always chock-full of great content and interesting topics, but the best part is connecting with the community--reuniting with old friends, making new friends, and passionately sharing your adventures and experiences in the Blue Ocean. I know some of you have formed lifelong friends from these conferences and you look forward to coming back each year. And for those of you who are new, we hope you can join us!
Since we've already made the transition away from this blog, I'll just give you an excerpt from the website and you can read the rest there if you'd like:
"...This is our 5th annual Blue Ocean Summit and we look forward to exploring, in a number of surprising, fresh ways, what the substance of this faith is. As always, this will be a content rich summit, with a deeper focus on Blue Ocean theology, including Blue Ocean approaches to healing, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit. In addition to heavy content, we have an entire night set aside for prayer and ministry time kicked off by a talk addressing the question "How can I help others experience the Holy Spirit?" Other sessions will include a surprise guest speaker, and a live 'Meaning in a Pub' style conversation with outside participants from different faith backgrounds..."
Hope to see you in August!
So I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention that this blog has been pretty dormant (if something can be "pretty" dormant) since the fall and silent over the last couple of months. I've had a great experience over the last several years with this blog, but I've wondered if a blog is in fact the best setting for the conversations happening in the Blue Ocean world to happen.
Lots is going on in the Blue Ocean world. We had a new type of conference experience in Minneapolis in January which seemed, to my eyes, to be a solid success (or at least it encouraged me). We'll have more on that front in Ann Arbor in the fall, which I'm very much looking forward to. Our own summit in Boston (mark your calendars now!) will be August 6-8. We have lots of new churches joining our cohorts. So the folks I'm talking with are very encouraged with the steps we're taking. But we've wondered if a different forum might serve better for conversations. Blog posts have to be little essays and it began to seem to many of us that the essays, by nature, after awhile had to orbit around similar topics. Perhaps, it was suggested, a Facebook page would better serve us? People could certainly post essays there, but could also share resources and ask questions. And so that's the plan.
We've set up a new Blue Ocean Faith facebook page that can be found by clicking the link or searching for "Blue Ocean Faith" in the facebook search bar. Our hope is to continue this conversation there to unite the ever growing Blue Ocean community and make it easier for everyone to share their thoughts and experiences. (Speaking of which, there you can find the video of Tanya Lurhmann's talk from BOS2011, and Dave's first talk from the Midwest Blue Ocean Conference.) So, might I encourage you to "like" us on facebook and start sharing your thoughts and experiences of the Blue Ocean?
On a related note, I also enjoyed putting our toes in the water of podcasting. I'm really hoping to revisit that, if with a few tweaks in terms of its focus. So here's hoping that things fall into place to make that possible.
Thanks for your participation on the blog! I'll look forward to seeing you in Facebook-land (and perhaps in person at a summit!).
From Dave: Chip has fun further reflections on stage theory. We've been on kind of a stage-theory binge recently, so I think we'll make this our last post on the topic for at least a little while. But I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts!
My wife Laura and I were discussing stage theory the other day and she was expressing concern that stage theory itself may be too simplistic, and that it could also be employed to label and judge others. "Wow, my friend Margaret is so stage 2!" "Can you believe how stage 3 Frank is?" These seemed like good concerns to me as I myself am no fan of simplistic thinking (or judging others for that matter).
Finally she asked me directly: "Well what stage do you think you are primarily in?"
Remembering how Peck says we usually have a hand or foot in each of the stages, that none of us are purely in only one, I began thinking about how this might play out within me in real life. (Plus this line of thinking was a good stalling tactic to help avoid answering the question with the ever-humble "I'm obviously and squarely stage 4 all-the-way sweetheart.")
So if we really do have different "stages" at work within us at any given time how does that play out in our actual daily lives? Do we perhaps respond to different situations in ways that could be identified? Is my thinking in regard to my work stage 2, my church stage 3, while my thinking toward my family is mostly stage 1?
Or let's take for example any situation I am faced with during my day, perhaps something that elicits a response of some kind from me. Here is a rough draft of different possible responses aligned with the possible stage they may be closely identified with:
We've applied stage theory recently to as broad a topic as entire centuries of human history, is it time we brought it back in to how it works out within each of us in our daily lives?