Here’s a short video clip of Brian McLaren asking me a question about God’s EPIC Adventure. Enjoy.

Two important events have occurred this week. My first book, God’s EPIC Adventure, is in print and I’ve been Simpsonized!

It has been and interesting process starting a publishing company HarmonPress and publishing my first book, God’s EPIC Adventure through that imprint. It’s an interesting feeling to hold a book in your hand and seeing your name on the front cover. For years I have researched and written lots of material. I was used to writing things like, Sweet says, or McLaren says, or Wright says, but when I saw my name appear in that context in the ForeWord which is written by Len Sweet, Griffin says, it seemed a little strange. Brian McLaren wrote the Afterword. You can read all about it at HarmonPress.

Secondly, I received an email from someone who had been Simponized and followed the link to see how that happened. It was kind of fun and you can see the results to the above.

According to Len Sweet there are about as many strip joints in USAmerica as there are healthy churches. Hear his reflections below.

I just listened to Len’s Sweet’s Napkin Scribbles (see below) about leaving his Bible behind on a recent trip to West Virginia. It reminded me of the time that I was leaving for a church service years ago and put my Bible on the trunk of the car while helping the kids inside. When I arrived at the church facility, my Bible was gone. I remembered what I had done and retraced my journey but did not find it. It was an interesting loss. It was the Bible that I had used all the way through seminary, with its notes and all. I looked for it along the journey route for several weeks, even looking on occasion, a year of so later. I called all the churches in the neighborhood, thinking some Good Samaritan may have found it and turned it to the church’s lost and found.

Like Len, I have wondered over the years if the church has left behind its use of the Bible which has casued the culture to leave the Bible out of its reading. I hear conversations from time to time about the Bible, usually a small discourse on a verse (versitis) or two or a tip of the hat by a small reading. The story of Scripture should impregnate our lives but that is difficult when the churches we attend leave out this important ingredient of being a Christ-follower. When a church leaves the Bible behind, it is not long before its congregants will also leave it behind. When the congregants leave the Bible behind they won’t be able to learn its Story and the sure results is that they won’t live its Story. Well, at least that’s my opinion.

Recently, I was listening to Len Sweet talk about addressing the NRB and talking about “futuring.” He shared that he talked about five substantial areas. The one that caught my attention was “The Well Curve not the Bell Curve.”

You remember getting grades in school based on the “Bell Curve.” A few got an “A,” a few got and “F,” but most grades were in the center. This idea was based on normal statistical distribution. About a 150 years ago those working with math noticed that when different things were measured in a large sample, the results was clustered around an average. Plotted on a chart, it looked like a bell. The “Bell Curve” became normal in statistical distribution. It became a fundamental law of natural science, a foundation of statistics.

However, in the culture shift that is in process the “Bell Curve” has completely changed and is being replaced by a concept called the “Well Curve,” which suggests that the things at the edges, which were small in the “Bell Curve” are now large, while what was large in the “Bell Curve” is not smaller. Opposites are happing at the same time, but are not contradictory as may have been perceived in the “Bell Curve.”

As one example, in the consumer culture screens are getting smaller and larger at the same time, i.e., cell phones, PDAs, wrist PDAs / large screen TVs. It seems that the mid-sized is going out of style.

This reminded me of part of a course that I teach from time to time in which I deal with worldview and a concept I call: Thinking Like A Hebrew. The Hebrews of the Old and New Testament seems to have had the knack of taking things that were opposite and holding them together in tension. What was opposite was held in tension without trying to solve the tension.

Our Western worldview, however, wants to solve the tension. It is driven to get an answer, to come down on one side or another. In theology this can be seen in the arguments between the sovereignty of God and the free will of humankind. John Calvin came down on one side and Jacobus Arminius came down on the other. The debate still rages in some circles to this day. It is strange to say but both Calvin and Arminius were wrong when standing alone in their beliefs but in a Hebraic way of thinking, their seemingly opposites are correct when held together in the tension they produce.

In a world traveling at the speed of sound, where signs of change are all around us we need to hold the opposites in tension and build bridges from the sides to the middle, other wise we will have a bridge to nowhere, and that would just be useless.

Napkin Scribbles are thoughtful sketches of God and life from thinker and author, Leonard Sweet. Len’s verbal imagery is being shared with you through the generous support of George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Oregon. On the first selection, Len is in Ashville commenting on our culture’s need for “little” things that make life bigger.

On the second selection below, Len is in Kansas City noting the cultural differences of two very distinct Church environments. Hear his encouragement to embrace the very best of of Christ’s character when it comes to living as a Body.