andi's perspective

NORWAY MEMORIES

Memories from an enjoyable and encouraging DAWN team meeting up there in Kristiansand, Norway, two weeks ago (yes, i am late..)
We learned a lot about the essential ingredients for a great meeting: Take a boat, get lots of shrimps, make the sun shine and invite excellent people to talk kingdom strategy. End with having a pizza at home. I could get accustomed to this :)

Read more at Marc's, Andrew's or Reinhold's.

KILLING HOLY? COWS

While on my way to talk business with Marcus & Marcus, out of-the-box kingdom pioneers in Meiningen, my train ran over a whole herd (!) of cows nicely processing in single file exactly in the same track that my train wanted to use...

Guess who won... !!!

After a series of small bumps our train stood and firefighters counted 12 dead cows (not all of them in one piece.)

The poor dudes and us made made it into the news: here and here.)

GOING KANGAROO

Memories from down-under:

After a week of research Dave and me went petting Kangaroos for a change.
Enjoy the fotos finally uploaded :)

LAUSANNE RESEARCH

Hugely enjoying the 5th Lausanne Researchers Conference here downunder in Melbourne, Australia!

We've done the Great Ocean Road today and with perfect sunset we arrived at the spectactular Twelve Apostles. Koalas included. Fotos pending.

Great and resourceful people to meet here. I also got nice 5 minutes to shortly present where we are at with emRG. This was very well received.

In a word. I am completely enjoying it even while my sleep rhythm got totally screwed..

By chance i learnt about Alan's and Andrew's Forge weekend conference just about the street. Guess i will rather flock to the flocks of cangaroos and wombats, however.

Greetings from downunder

INTO THE WORLD

These days find me much more involved with what (in the former days) we called "world" than with what we called "church" (being perceived the opposite of the former).

Being occupied with

• founding an international consultancy business,
• transferring insights from business to missions research,
• running various projects and
• pursuing a degree in sociology

keeps posing some challenges to my time management and reduces my blogging frequency.

It is, however, greatly rewarding in terms of providing ample opportunities to follow my master in "going world". When asked about "my local church", these days my answer centers around being a friend to our neighbors and my fellow students.

God so loved the world.

Going into the world, we might be able to understand better what kind of good news has the potential to gain relevance and credibility these days.

VERY WONDERFUL

First time to America and looking for the culture shock. Finally found: Sunday morning Don and I went mega-churching.

The First Baptist Church Woodstock seating 7500 butts in "Johnny Dome" with its super conservative look'n & feel seemed just right. Over the last 20 years FBCW has experienced remarkable growth from a membership of 200 to 13.000, with all success entirely attributed to the authenticity and ingenuity of charismatic pastor Johnny whom his people are eager to confess "is our shepherd and we are his sheep" (quoting, not joking).

Now, against my own expectations my first emotional reactions were nearly entirely positive! Nice people and a neat organisation with lots of invaluable social service functions, an elaborate missions centre with a solid adopt-a-people-group scheme, and a building that stands in reasonable relation to the general property dimensions here. From a purely sociological perspective the social functions of this massive religious firm can hardly be other than considered valuable and market-appropriate.

My second impression had to cope (hard) with the all too highly acclaimed super pastor Johnny and the hard-core tract-style evangelistic sermon he preached that day: "Do you know you have eternal life and go to heaven when you die?" (not joking either). After some deep breaths i managed to settle my emotions, enjoy the communication expertise of "Mr. Genuine" and reflect on this "grand" narrative of evangelicalism that was so elaborately presented to me. A dualistic and heavily reductionist worldview like that built on the "belonging to the community of the saved" concept - how should that ever encourage an incarnational world-embracing lifestyle modelled after the One who is  so wordily confessed here??

The really hard part however came when after Service we joined Sunday School (= adult bible teaching). Afer some debate the ushers picked a (again not joking, but quoting) "very wonderful" small group for us and helpfully guided us through the maze of break-out rooms. With "small groups" here counting up to 120 people we were lucky to be in a group of 20 total. A promising announcement of interactive and facilitated Bible conversation followed 45 minutes of uninterrupted monologue (of neither communicative nor theological excellence). My emotional mildness starting leaving me slowly. A gender-separated prayer circle followed and hope resurfaced that finally the interactive part was to come - soon to learn that while everybody was expected to share some decent personal problem or praise, the group leader handled the prayer requests full circle. A side glance told me that this was the very pattern for the womens' group as well.

If you set a pattern, you multiply a pattern. If Johnny is your pattern, you mutliply many small-scale (but inevitably far from excellent) Johnny's doing the one-man thing, preaching reductionist theology, enjoying their rich social environment and feeling dangerously safe in their beliefs.
Keeping the near supernatural mildness i enjoyed in my emotions during this exposure to churchianity, i would conclude that if you seek social services, go to Woodstock; if you want to follow Jesus, go a (large) step further.
About mega-churches an ambiguity remains.

GOING SOUTHERN

Over to Atlanta, Georgia, to talk research. Besides hanging at Washington airport for 6 hours after missing my connection down to Atlanta by 10 minutes all worked out great.
It's a huge pleasure to stay with Scott and Dena and lay out emRG strategy and priority with the team. Meetings went well and we'll blog on this soon over at emRG.
For all the work, food and fun i've not seen much of the city so far - other than restaurants and shopping centres. Meetings are over however and Paul and me plan to do the tourist thing tomorrow.

Greetings from the "southern" world and its very enjoyable 20°C. !

NORDIC HOLIDAYS II

Second part of our holidays brought us to Fanø - a lovely Danish North-Sea island with wide beaches, lots of dunes and heathlands and even more wind. Great place if the sun is stronger than the wind (which sadly was not always the case).
It was good anyway. Some impressions below and more here.

NORDIC HOLIDAYS I

Back from good Nordic holidays.
Our first 10 days brought us to SE Norway where we enjoyed a friends lake-side cabin (thanks Oivind!). Very rural, very natural, very Norwegian! No electricity, no laptop, no water (other than that fetched manually from the lake and to be drunk right away), but lots of blueberries, mosquitoes and beautiful sunsets - Norway at its best :)
Some impressions below and more fotos here.
Thanks for all prayers - all went well with Stefan, our foster guy. He turned out as a great car voyager over all the 14 hours trip (not talking about the 2h ferry time which saw daddy  a very busy bodyguard...)

OFFLINE

Not only do i feel like anything that should have been said has been said (and now,  rather than words, works need to show the way..) but also as a family we are about heading off into complete offline-holidays.

The next three weeks will find us first in off-civilisation Norway and on the Danish touri island Fanö after that. If we return successfully we will have mastered the challenge of family holidays in small Lupo enhanced by an equally small auto-rucksack ;)

Wishing all of you good holidays as well!