So it continues. As I keep windows open for reading, reflecting, and interacting I sometimes end up with several windows on a related theme that I want to blog about, or else I begin to leave a link for this list and in starting to compose a brief comment, I end up with something that deserves a post of its own. And once again this week, I’ve had a browser crash that lost me a slough of open tabs and windows of stuff I’d considered important enough to keep open and ponder… but I can’t recall what they all were, and I don’t keep a very long tail on my browser history. Sigh.

I’ve not said much this week toward my missional series (at least not directly), but will be filling in the last few blanks shortly, I think. Hopefully everyone’s caught their breath! ;^) In the meantime, I had a nice email this week suggesting the series has been fruitful, and other conversations are cropping up elsewhere which relate fairly directly to the material I’ve put forward… which was encouraging to me. Not all of them refer back here, of course, but Grace does a survey and summary of some of the recent missional posts elsewhere… further contributions to the collective thought on the subject. Are many people trying to answer the question, “Am I Missional?

Well, shall we hit the links?

1. Mark-O is thinking highly of Rick Warren. I love the “think different” theme, but I’m not that warm to Rick W, though Mark leaves some food for thought there.
2. Karen Spears Zacharias has written a beautiful memorial that doesn’t require you to have known the man about whom she writes… she introduces him well enough.
3. Some people are already starting to think about eulogizing Billy Graham… the main point is, it won’t be easy — there’s too much to tell.
4. It’s a bit older now, but Joy has been blogging through David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen’s Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, The, repack: Recognizing and Escaping Spiritual Manipulation and False Spiritual Authority Within the Church. Thorough, good stuff on a subject that’s probably more common and less understood than one would think.
5. The Joy of Mini-Church: [a] [series] [in] [five] [parts] by John Frye. Amen.
6. Quote:
   

   Here’s a strong statement: most evangelicals… are addicted to church culture. Take away their Sunday service, their bible studies, prayer meetings, and five-song worship teams and they start having withdrawals quickly. I would suggest a time of at least a year of not doing the ‘normal’ church stuff. For us, during that time of detachment we only did a few things together � ask hard questions and eat. Those were our corporate disciplines.

   Can’t you just taste that fresh air? Len Hjalmarson quotes from Jason Zahariades, and procedes into a good post on detox and liminality. “[S]ome people leave the church on the corner because it has begun to limit their growth in Christ.” More detoxing. If you don’t know whether or not you should be entering a detox season or even moving on from a difficult church situation, perhaps you should consider Premeditated Quitting, a Seth Godin business idea applicable to this situation as well; the link is to a quote of marathoner Dick Collins, via Seth’s book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).

7. ‘Dressing up’ new stories: “Andrew Jones was inspired to ‘day dream’ and imagine new and unusual forms of sharing Jesus by the stories he heard at a recent cell-church conference.” He quotes Phil Potter on being “A New Kind of Leader,” moving from being
   • lighthouses to rafts (from attracting to attaching);
   • diving-boards to surfboards (from restructuring to re-imagining);
   • orchestras to jazz bands (from orchestrating to improvising);
   • generals to gardeners (from controlling to cultivating);
   • spiders to starfish (from retaining to releasing).

   Well put, and with good images.

8. Have you been following Jarrod McKenna‘s Wednesday series on Ghandi? It’s appearing on his own blog and on Hamo’s. Gandhi and ‘prosperity gospel’ (alternate) “go yeâ€? and Gandhi (alternate) Jesus bigger than Christianity?
9. Seriously cool: after mentions on the Today show last week, Bill Clinton appeared on Oprah Winfrey talking about his new book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (I was examining a copy in a bookstore the other day). Kiva got a lot of attention, and largely due to the appearance on Oprah, they funded every loan on the site over a 3-day period. Clinton was still promoting on NPR on Friday (Press Links). They’re actually out looking for new loans to fund. (HT)
10. Now that Fake Steve’s cover is blown, Mark-O points out there’s now a Fake Rick Blog which is not written by Rick Warren. Probably. Real Steve admits having read Fake Steve… I wonder if Real Rick will read Fake Rick?
11. It’s been 50 years since the release of Jack Kerouac’s famous novel, the signature work of the Beat Generation, On the Road. It’d be cool to get a closer look at the original scroll… and for those who didn’t know, by “scroll” I mean scroll.
12. Ben Witherington on his new book, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord’s Supper.