Godgrown

Updates from May, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Mark 10:49 am on May 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Foursquare, Pray4Chicago ( 2 ), Starbucks   

  Foursquare and People of Peace 

  Tried out Foursquare yet?

  Foursquare is a fusion of online social media and real world engagement.  It allows users to “check in” through their phone when they arrive at a specific location, like a coffee shop or concert.  It is location-based social media – meaning that each and every place has a “social network” embedded in it – you can find the regulars of a bar simply by looking them up in Foursquare, and get special deals if you are the most frequent visitor of a certain restaurant or other social destination.

  Habitue — –noun [huh-bich-oo-eyz, -bich-oo-eyz; Fr.]   a frequent or habitual visitor to a place

  Our Pray4Chicago event (twitter: #pray4chicago) is all about “praying with your eyes open.”  Our goal is to send folks out to discover the “community wells” of a specific part of the city, meet the “habitues” of a barbershop or park, and begin to imagine what a community of faith would look like in that context.  We might use Foursquare to learn who “the regulars” are – or to create prayer walks for future P4C participants.  Could the Foursquare “mayor” of a certain location (the person who is recorded as having visited a specific place the most often) be a clue as to who the person of peace is in that place?

  Can Foursquare help you in your effort to discover your city?  Most Americans, Christians included, are stuck on the treadmill of daily life.  Wake up, go to work, come home, rinse, repeat.  Maybe, just maybe – we can discover our neighbors by stepping off the treadmill and into where the people are.

  Maybe it will transform our zombie-like Starbucks runs…you know, the ones where you duck in and duck out only murmuring your wildly complex coffee order to the barista before hopping back in your car to head off to work?  Could Foursquare…and more importantly, an intentionality on our part, bring us one step closer to meeting the lonely people living all around us?

  Of course, Foursquare is in my mind a crutch for those of us just learning to meet our ACTUAL social circle.  Much better than “checking-in” with the mash of a phone button, is to gird up your loins, walk over to a stranger in a coffee shop and strike up a conversation.  Its amazing how easy it is.  Its even more amazing how ready people are to talk if you can inspire them to step off the treadmill.

  Our default is to live with blinders on.  It is in our nature to filter out the periphery, and to autopilot. Live locally – live  with your eyes open.

  Check out how Paul Watson and others are using this tool already.

  

  priest, and Mark are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    priest 8:46 pm on May 15, 2010 Permalink

    thanks for the call to engage the local.

    as for the person of peace, right now it probably just means they’re as addicted to their iphone as me!

    t

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    Mark 9:29 am on May 16, 2010 Permalink

    well said T. maybe a great way to set up incarnational engagement would be to set up iPhone Anonymous meetups…only done online through the mobile web.

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    priest 6:23 pm on May 16, 2010 Permalink

    i’m in.

    sent from my iPhone

    seriously though, i’ve begun to explore the world of Foursquare and I appreciate how it calls us to ‘step off the treadmill’ and enter into new arenas. i honestly agree that it could facilitate new relationships that otherwise wouldn’t happen. that’s what interests me–it has an element of incarnation that often other social media lack. interested to see how this new social media unfolds.

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  Mark 1:31 pm on September 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  What Happened at Yesterday’s Gathering 

  Yesterday Katrina and I went to the Rogers Park house church that has been meeting for the last few months at Charmer’s Cafe coffee house, a funky little corner shop that holds down one of the corners of the artsy community on Chicago’s far north side.

  One of the guys that normally meets with us was already there.  He was reading Richard Foster’s The Challenge of the Disciplined Life, one of my favorite books I’ve never read.  In fact, I may decide not to read it until I find a copy of the book under its old title, Money, Sex and Power. Much better title don’t you think?  Our friend is on his way to pursuing Christ and the Christian life after years of slowly neglecting God.  Only a few weeks ago, he had begun to read Simply Christian by N.T. Wright.  I’m super thankful and excited for the spiritual progress he’s made, and for the tangible changes I can see in his life.  It’s another proof of Christ’s power.  He, like all of us, are trying to discover how to follow Jesus in Chicago, 2009.

  Anyway, we got our drinks and sat down together outside under a canopy and enjoyed the sunshine.  We chatted and caught up on life, then we dove into our text for the week.  Each week we’ll read through a section of Scripture, usually two or three times, then we’ll have another person try to retell the story in his or her own words.  Afterwords, we’ll focus on listening to God, trying to discern what we’ll do in response to what we’ve read and discussed.  Learning to incorporate obedience to God and his Word is an essential value of our house church network.

  So we read Luke 4: 18-30 this week.  The passage describes Jesus, after returning from his desert experience, is seated in the synagogue in his home town.  As part of the gathering, he stands up and reads from Isaiah 61:

  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

  because he has anointed me

  to preach good news to the poor.

  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

  and recovery of sight for the blind,

  to release the oppressed,

  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

  Right at about this point in the text,  an overweight man with stained clothes and greasy hair approaches us and asks us if he can have some money to get something to eat.  I’ve learned that this is a fairly common thing in Chicago, and I’ve come to a place where I make as few contingency plans regarding helping or not helping beggars  as I can.  It keeps me listening to the Spirit.  We all stopped reading and focused on him.  His speech was slurred and hard to understand.  We took up a collection to get him some food inside the coffee shop and invited him to sit down with us for the rest of our gathering.

  The rest of the story takes Jesus from a place of great favor with the crowds to almost being thrown off the cliff.

  We each went around the circle and mentioned what stood out to us in the passage.  Each of us had something meaningful and insightful to add to the discussion.  One of the things that stood out for me was the turning point; when Jesus made it clear that the passage in Isaiah and the focus of Jesus’ ministry was not focused on rescuing the Jews from their oppressors, but rather in pursuit of being a light to the world.

  But it was Chris who turned the conversation sideways.  He didn’t wax eloquent on the meaning of the Scripture, or divulge deep secrets, he simply said how thankful he was for being able to eat today, and how he planned to give one of his blankets to someone else who needed one – like Jesus would.  He smiled and squinted his eyes into the sun, with veggie hummus on the corner of his lips.  With nothing more to say, I was stunned at how softened my heart was to Chris, a mentally handicapped homeless man who seemed to have the simplest and yet most tangible, obedient response to the love of Christ.  I found myself as part of the angry crowd that dismissed Christ’s pursuit of the poor and the oppressed as being something related to me, a Gentile.  Certainly with my skills, wit, training, heritage and more I am the focus of Christ’s mission.  But then someone like Chris shows up – with a gentle spirit and a willing heart, and turns my paradigm and self-centered spirituality upside down.

  With Chris sitting right there, we talked openly about how God saw it fit to introduce us to Chris, a homeless, poor man, who is exactly the person Isaiah writes about and Christ proclaims Good News to.

  As I left the gathering, I concluded: If we want to hear the Good News of Christ, we have to listen to Chris.

  

  Alan, Chadd, and Sean are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Sean 12:08 am on September 14, 2009 Permalink

    Man this post makes my heart smile. I remember you telling me the story of your experience of Breakfast at Beach street. I thought to myself oh man I hope Mark doesn’t give up on the poor. As I read this post I noticed two things; one despite what you may have felt you still provided for Chris. Also your heart was touched by the experience. Praise God!

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    Chadd 7:43 am on September 14, 2009 Permalink

    Mark – thanks for telling this story. I like that you tell about a typical simple gathering of Jesus followers and what that looked like yesterday in your life. I think the place you give to reading and discussing scripture in this type of gathering is immportant–and especially with an eye to an encounter with God.

    I also really identify with the way gathering around Jesus in the presence of the poor has the possibility of being deeply transformative–causes us to read Jesus and hear Jesus in ways we might not have been able to do on our own.

    I thank God for the expression of Jesus that I see in you all.

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    Alan 11:35 am on September 17, 2009 Permalink

    sweet story

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  Mark 9:00 am on November 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Church Venture Interview 

  About 2 weeks ago I was contacted by Matt Sweetman, an intern in a church planters training organization in St. Louis and asked if he could interview me to get a sense of what church planting looks like in our context.  He has uploaded the conversation and transcribed it on his blog.  Check out the source here. Or you can listen to our conversation here.

  Matt is a great guy and I hope to stay in touch with him in the months to come!