GraceWorks.ca

Jana Bishop tells her story of leadership in a church that has bought in to Covering Theology. 

I am loving my Google Nexus One running the latest version of Android.  To be honest I’m running everything on it but the phone, I’ll have to wait until Sasktel launches its new 3G+ network in August before I can hook it up.  Well I could go with Rogers (shudder). 

Sadly Google stopped selling this phone directly.  In Canada you will be able to pick up the Nexus One’s cousin, the HTC Desire.  Telus should be carrying it soon. 

I’m half way through my summer vacation.  I like to think it is the pinnacle of my existence during the year.  It is the time I enjoy the most anyway.  This summer has definitely been better than the previous two.  Last summer I didn’t get a real holiday.  We tried to staycation but I ended up working almost every day.  The year before that we tried a road trip to through BC.  After that little adventure we made a mental note.  If one of your kids has three diagnosed mental health conditions, perhaps it is best not to push things too much.

At the cabin the boys are starving for their lack of Internet and computer entertainment but for all their complaining about being bored, it has been a much more enjoyable experience than previous trips.  I can tell their minds are resting as well.

Anyways, I’ve found myself sleeping.  Naps in the morning, afternoon, and night.  It feels like my body and mind have been catching up on sleep it has been missing for years.  It might mean a bit more blogging in the future.

Yesterday I gave someone a ride home from the bar.  The bar up here is the only place I can get high speed internet.  Most days I go in and order a coke and try not too look too out of place.  Yesterday one of the patrons asked my wife and I if he could join us.  He was quite obviously inebriated.  He said something about being ditched by his friends and needing a ride home.  I offered him a ride.  The First Nation borders the resort village so it wasn’t a long drive.  We got to talking and it didn’t take much to connect.  I sensed a sadness in his heart and a lot of insecurity.  When he asked why I was being so nice to him I said that the Creator made everything good, and that He was worth something because the Creator made him. 

My words of encouragement stayed within the realm of overlap between my faith and my new friend’s traditional faith.  I didn’t go beyond that and I didn’t feel I needed to. 

Was I being missional?  Well I was sitting in place of a different culture.  It certainly isn’t my natural habitat.  I listened, and I helped, and I very genuinely cared. 

In some ways I think this stuff is a lot easier than we realize.  We are just scared and we don’t know where to start.  It is funny how it takes my daily addiction to the Internet to tempt me to in to go to some place that makes me uncomfortable. 

Check it out here. Don’t it just make you want to forget about the 80s.

I just spend a couple of days at an annual denominational conference.  I spoke in two workshops and spent plenty of time chatting with new people and making new friends.  Without a doubt I have been warmly welcomed by this new tribe.  The people are very nice and supportive.  They seem to genuinely like each other.  In the past I’ve been at meetings where the pleasantries displayed on the conference floor sharply contrasted the conversations occurring in back rooms and hallways.  

I believe in being part of a broader community but this journey towards finding one hasn’t been easy.  The sad reality is there is kind of a huge cultural gap between many of us on the margins and those in the center.  It came out in the questions I fielded.  At times I felt like quoting the architect from the Matrix.

Me: “I am the architect. I helped start this house church. I’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although this workshop has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably conventional. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.”

Interested Person: “How many people are in your church?”

I know of some denominations that split over Sunday School…I’d have to say there is a bigger gap between house church people and conventional church people. 

I’m staring at the screens in the cafeteria area of Ambrose University College trumpeting all the great green initiatives.

I just read “There is a green thread connecting everything we do.”  Later on we see “We don’t just talk about sustainability.”

If you were like me you might see the irony in using a computer and 5 40” monitors to display a menu and to trumpet green initiatives.  I looked up the specs on this monitor, it uses 240 watts of power.  Lump in the computer and we are looking at 1.25Kw.  Depending on how often they have these things are on (3 seem to be on only when the cafeteria is open, 2 seem to be on all the time) they could easily be using more than 1/2 the power of my entire household.  They are using a ton of energy to do something that was once accomplished with a whiteboard and dry erase marker. 

The meals here have been really good.  They have also been served on paper plates with plastic cups and cutlery.  The juice is in aluminum cans.  The paper and plastic are thrown in the garbage. 

This stuff makes me really mad.  More and more I run in to people who tell me “being green” is just a gimmick for people to gain some status and feel better about themselves.  There is a lot of truth to that right now but not everyone who believes in sustainable living is like that.  I am not like that, I’ve worked really hard to insulate my house, start a garden, drive less miles in smaller vehicles and reduce water consumption.

I’m feeling kind of grumpy…perhaps sleeping in a campground wasn’t the best option for me emotionally.  It gets cold in Calgary at night.

There is a cycle of life on this planet.  A simple cycle might be the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants an animals.  Animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.  Planets take in carbon dioxide and give back oxygen.  If you put a bunch of animals and planets in a sealed room everything will be ok as long as these to sides of the equation stay in balance.  If there are too many plants the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide would get out of whack and the plants would suffer until equilibrium is restored.  If in this sealed room something else upset the cycle and leaked out one or two of our necessary gasses.  Eventually both the plants and animals would suffer because there is a limit to the amount of resources available to sustain the cycle of life. If both plants and animals continue to multiply eventually they will hit a limit where they can no longer sustainably grow. 

The whole earth ecosystem is much like this room, except that it is much more complicated and much larger but the same rules apply.  Humanity takes a lot of things out of the lifecycle, or at the very least we misallocate it.  In the wilderness animals eat plants, animals take some of those nutrients and grow and leave the rest behind as waste.  The waste goes in to the soil replenishing it.  Other plants can grow.  In some cases insects eat the plants and animals eat the insects and some animals eat other animals but all the essential resources keep cycling through the whole system.  If the conditions change so that one type of animal becomes too dominate eventually the life cycle will curb its growth and things return to a natural equilibrium. 

Humanity takes resources and builds a lot of things don’t break down well and thus aren’t returned in this life cycle.  Sometimes we poison it, sometimes we just stick in big pile where it doesn’t do any good, sometimes it just finds its way to a great big floating garbage dump in the middle of the pacific ocean.  The more we misallocate these resources the less efficient the system works and the less able the system is to support life.

Everything is recycled and nothing comes without a cost except for the energy from the sun.  While it too is a finite source of energy, there is so much energy in the sun that it in our limited  life span it is essentially free.  Up until the industrial revolution humanity lived off the energy the sun gave us each year.  The energy of the sun would spur the growth of food, and animals, some which provided us concentrated sources of energy like oils and wood.  We used this oil and wood to create heat and light.

Then we discovered massive repositories of solar energy in the form of coal, oil and natural gas.  We harnessed this energy to create complicated energy intensive systems.  They made our lives so much easier that most of us could shift from chopping wood and growing food to things as specialized as fixing computers and brokering mortgages.  As we used this stored energy our population exploded.  We became worried in the 60’s and 70’s that we would quickly get out of equilibrium with the ecosystem.  However we found ways to use that massive storehouse of energy in the production of food.  We took these finite storehouses of natural gas and other fertilizers to increase the yield of our farms. 

Eventually there will come a time when we hit the maximum amount of energy we can extract from these fine stores of energy at a given time.  After this point the amount of energy we can extract from our resources of oil, natural gas and coal will begin an unyielding decline.  It appears we are getting very close to this point.  Currently we have a  few viable options we should have one main goal.  We must restructure our lives and our systems so they we can live within the allotment of energy we receive each year from the sun.  It would be best if we used our “bonus energy” to help us transition to that state.  What happens if we wait until our “bonus energy” has so completely run down to begin the transition?  Things will be very very tough.

The hard reality is, our way of life is too energy intensive to sustain if all we had was the energy the sun gave us each year.  We are out of equilibrium in terms of our relationship with the environment, the economy and energy.   The only way we can get back to equilibrium, to live within our means, is downsize, simplify and localize.

I believe the biblical imperatives of working towards justice and following the principles of stewardship compel us to change, and to lead change in our communities.  The voracious consumerism that marks our generation is sin, and a sin that impacts more than just ourselves.  For every resource that we waste it needlessly decreases the supply and makes it that much less accessible to the poor. 

These issues have weighed on me heavily.  They have compelled me to insulate my house, recycle what we can, move closer to potential work, plant a garden, and operate small vehicles.  While I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress it still have a long way to go.  This spring we expanded our garden and added a greenhouse.  We are looking at more home upgrades including solar air heating and a wood stove.  Moving steadily towards a sustainable life is hard but rewarding.

60 minutes interviews a survivor of the rig that started it all. I find his story a little dramatic, but if what he says is accurate there should be criminal charges against BP. 

I’m not a culture warrior.  I’m not sitting in my chair fretting about how gay marriage is going to undermine society.  I don’t support the rallies or the organizations that are trying to inject Judeo-Christian values in to our government.  I do however see the impact of an ever increasing culture of greed, selfishness, deceit and dishonesty.  I’ve been consuming a steady diet of commentators point out very plainly how corrupt our finance industry is.  Right now I don’t trust the markets at all, that game is rigged hard.

I read something of of a curve ball today.  Apparently there is quite the culture of corruption the American agency charged with regulating the offshore oil industry. 

The Department of the Interior’s Office of the Inspector General released a report this morning indicating as much. At one Gulf Coast office of MMS, agency officials attended sporting events on the dime of oil companies, stored porn on company computers, used cocaine and crystal meth, and falsified inspection reports. (The above links go directly to the relevant pages in the report, thanks to our ever-handy document viewer.)

Read whole article here

When I think about this and then I think about the environmental and economic devastation wrought by the the current oil leak I get mad.  The decoupling of our society from traditional morals and ethics has been disastrous.  Dishonesty and corruption siphon off the productivity of our economy and destroy our inheritance of resources. 

I’m not arguing that increasing the influence of the church would fix things.  The church is just as much as this as anything else in society.  We are part of the corruption.  We have taken the values of consumerism and individualism and spiritualized them.  When the hollow shell of all this unsustainable living and ponzi finance collapses it will take  much of churchianity with it. 

We need the golden rule…treat others in the same way you want to be treated.  At the very least we need to stop screwing each other over and lying to ourselves.  Karl Denninger at Market Ticker often makes the point that the math doesn’t lie.  The math is America is broke, and Europe is even more broke.  We have very elaborate systems that convince us that we can get something for nothing but in our great circle of life the only thing free in this world is the energy from the sun.  The adjustment to this reality is going to be very difficult.  We have built up programs, institutions, facilities and systems on the assumption that we will have ever expanding resources of energy, finance and labour.  While math doesn’t lie, neither does geology. 

The first crunch will likely be economic.  Europe is teetering, and while it is has been a fascinated ride watching our politicians levitate the economy on borrowed money, it will eventually run out.  When it does things are going to get tough.  All borrowing does is pull forward consumer demand.  Everything I borrow now I have to payback later, and because I’m paying it back later I’m not buying anything later.  So the people who produced something for me to buy won’t get any business from me in the future.  What happens when I can’t borrow anymore?  I can’t buy anything now or later, or I declare bankruptcy and someone else eats the loss and can’t buy anything either. 

The next crunch will be in energy.  Increasingly it takes more and more energy to pull energy from the ground.  That means less energy to go around.  No one knows for sure, but by around 2012-2014 no amount of “drill baby drill” will be able to pull out enough energy to meet demand.  At that point the world has to relocalize as our society cleanses itself of SUVs, California strawberries in winter and short term mission trips.  If the economic crunch hasn’t happened yet, it will happen at this point.

Mixed in with that will be the impact of climate change.  Over the last little while we’ve enjoyed a lull in solar irradiance.  That means the heat we get from the sun has dipped for a little bit and muted the impact of all those green house gasses.  Now it looks like the sun has shifted back in to higher gear and El Nino has belched up a mess load of stored heat in the pacific.  It looks like 2010 is going to be the hottest year on record.  So much for the climate skeptics “global cooling theory.”  Our traditional climate patterns will be upset.  Some places will benefit while more will not. 

We live in interesting times.