I enjoy reading enough that even grad school wasn’t able to take the joy out of it. It just exposed me to a lot more material that I haven’t read yet. Being a few months removed from all that required reading, I’m starting to develop some patterns for what I’m reading.

I’m usually in the middle of five or so books at a time. This means I have something available that I might be in the mood for at any given time. Sometimes you get tired of a book and you don’t want to go on, so it is nice to have a book available that grabs your interest. (Note: I have a sickness and I have to finish a book if I start it. It’s a bad, bad thing. Don’t be like me. There are plenty of books out there that aren’t worth finishing. (Note about the note: But, there are also some books that are hard to read, but worth the effort, so my illness does have some upside.))

To make sure I’m working with a decent selection of books, I usually have a book going in each of these broad categories:

• Knowledge/learning: I try to always have one book going that is mostly information…usually leaning toward an academic kind of book. These are the ones that require me to set aside some undistracted time and discipline myself to work through. These are usually theology or history books.
• Church/leadership: This is the category that I can almost always be excited to read from…books about how the church should work, or what it means to function in the leadership role of a church.
• Personal growth/interest: This category is wide open. This might be anything from a book on creativity or culture or food. Anything that I see on Amazon or in a bookstore that catches my fancy. I also subscribe to Fast Company and Wired which are representative of this category.
• Fiction/narrative: At the beginning of this year, I committed to always be reading a story, whether that be fiction, or some other form of narrative like a biography. No regrets. I’ve read, and been stirred, by some fantastic stories.
• Bible study: Alongside fiction, this is the category that I try to read in daily, if possible. I like to read something alongside a Scripture. For the past few years, I’ve been reading through NT Wright’s For Everyone series which I find to be a good mixture of practical and scholarship.

You might think these categories are very broad, and they are. There is a lot of crossover between all of them. Each category informs the other, which is why I think it is so helpful to have several books going at once. Reading one book through the lens of another often leads to some interesting insights.

I used to have my current reads in my sidebar, but I have moved them to my readings page. I’m annoyingly obsessive about keeping it up to date, so take a peek any time you like.

I spent much of the last week putting together the website for Austin Mustard Seed, the new church community we are part of in Austin. I love this creative part of the process — taking ideas that have been developing for years and shaping them into words within a layout.

There is a part of me that wants to think twice before making the website public…wondering if something might not be said well enough. Or maybe something’s missing. But that’s the beauty of web over printed materials. A website is never finished…it is able to shape and evolve even as the church does. This is just the beginning and I love being able to peer forward into an unknown future.

If you know anyone in Austin who might be interested in connecting with us, please send them our way.

Last night, while watching Michael Clayton, I started playing around with a new template for this blog. That might not have been the best idea, because I missed about three, or fifteen, important developments in the plot. But at least I have a new template to show for it.

My sidebar had built up about four years of clutter which I have scraped away. Some of the sidebar content was moved to subpages, thanks to the miracle of WordPress page templates. The rest of it is just gone.

Enjoy.

I’m cool enough to have read most of Dave Eggers’ books, but not cool enough to know if it is still cool or not to like Dave Eggers. But I do. And all the more after listening to his TED talk from earlier this year:

(Here’s a direct link if the embedded video didn’t work for you.)

This is a fantastic story of a group of people creatively putting their passions and experience to work for the greater good.

Yesterday, I was working on the layout for our new church website and I got to reminiscing about my web designing back in the good old days. The Wayback Machine reminded me of some of the webpages I did back when Prince was still formerly known as.

Here’s the old website from my part-time graphic design gig. Too bad the archive didn’t preserve my stylish and sleek Chandler-Design logo or the uber cool background image I had.

…you paste your face in a 1978 yearbook picture, and the only thing that looks different is your hair color.

This photo brought to you during time spent entertaining my son, courtesy of YearbookYourself.

“Ah yeah, clusters … … … What are those?”

That was my response to my friend Doug’s email earlier this summer. He had read the strategy document I was developing for our church start up. After reading it, he thought that it was similar to a movement of churches in the UK that are shaping themselves around mid-sized groups called Clusters. Doug recommended that I read Clusters: Creative Mid-sized Missional Communities, by Mike Breen and Bob Hopkins. I did.

The ideas they offer could be helpful for many American church leaders. In the conversations I’ve been in with other church leaders, there is wide recognition that there is a gap in churches between small groups and larger worship gatherings. But it needs to be understood that Clusters are more than just medium sized groups to fit in the gap. In the examples they offer throughout the book, Clusters are becoming the primary expression of mission and community for the churches that have structured around them. Clusters are not a new program to launch, but a reimagined ecclesiology. Most helpful, I think, is the fact that these clusters can be adapted by new churches and large established churches alike.

The USA is a few decades behind the post-Christian shift that is happening elsewhere in the world — in places like Europe and Australia — but it is happening here too. We need to learn what we can from church leaders in these parts of the world and I am intrigued by the ways these churches are finding new life in missional expression.

On Saturday, I introduced The Artist’s Way Collective over on Creativityist. This will be a shared online experience of working through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, together.

I first went through this book three years ago. You can read my impressions at the time here. As I’m leaning into a new season of life, I decided to work through the book again, and thought it would be good to invite others along for the ride. I hope you’ll consider joining us.

Earlier this year, I became an Ooze Select Blogger. Now I’m sure that sounds quite glamorous, but its pretty simple. Publishers partner with the Ooze to send me free books, and I tell you what I think about them on my blog. How can I turn down free books?

Here are some of the books I’ve had a chance to read the past few months:

We the Purple: Faith, Politics, and the Independent Voter, by Marcia Ford - I struggle to care about politics…there is too much to keep up with and I often wonder whether I can make a difference. That made this book difficult for me to stick with, though it was easy to read and informative enough to be interesting to even me. The very name independent makes for a hard group to define, and Ford undertakes the task of doing just that. In an election year where there is more and more press about how Evangelicals aren’t confined to the right, this will be timely and worthwhile read for many.

Holy Fools: Following Jesus With Reckless Abandon, by Mathew Woodley - I pretty much wrote this book off when I pulled it out of the package. That was a mistake. The front cover proclaims: “A spiritual jolt for when your respectable faith becomes deadly dull.” How many book covers have made a similar promise? I anticipated another trite and shallow book on Christian living that tries to tie up the messy Christian life into simplistic tips. What I’ve found instead is that it is a thoughtful book filled with the depth of study and life experience of the author. I can tell this is the kind of book that cost Woodley something in the writing process. This is one I will consider for some kind of a book reading group in the future.

Hokey Pokey: Curious People Finding Out What Life is All About, by Matthew Paul Turner - Turner has been publishing books like crazy. He seems to have found a writing groove because the narrative style of his writing is pretty easy to stick with. That was about the only thing I found appealing about this book, because it didn’t connect with me. It might just be that the general theme of the book — finding God’s call on your life — is one that I’ve spent a lot of time with in recent years. For me, the book just didn’t have anything new to say to pull me from page to page.
August 3rd, 2008 | 3 Comment
Category: reading | Tags: books, ooze select blogger, reading, reviews