Please, stand by me at work

Matt Milam II posted this fantastic video over at his highcallingblogs site. (Matt is also on blogger.) Matt and his folks are spending the summer having church in the Blue Sky Cathedral. I like the sound of that.

The video got me thinking about What Luther Didn’t Say About Vocation, an old article I found from Luther Seminary this week over at Word & World. (Once upon a time, I was Lutheran for a year when I lived in Germany. Good times. I went to the Church of St. Jacob.)

I’ve fallen into a rut here at HighCallingBlogs.com and TheHighCalling.org of simplifying our mission down to “glorifying God in everyday life and work.” But you know what? That’s only half of what we do. Or at least that’s the abstract “churchy” way of talking about what we do.

Which brings me to the video (super cool) and the song, Stand By Me. Consider the lyrics for a minute.

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

We can talk about glorifying God through our work all we want, but if we’re not also serving our neighbor we are completely missing the point. We can’t love God without loving our neighbors. And loving our neighbors means showing mercy to them. After all, that is  the point of the Good Samaritan story.

Before I embed the video, I wanted to include these excerpts from Frederick Gaiser’s article. Read them and see what you think.

• Work, [we might say], is pleasing to God because God likes quality work. This would be the American work-ethic version of vocation, theologically endorsing work as an end in itself. In the hands and mouth of a modern boss, good craftsmanship and clean floors (or a clean desk or a signed contract) to the glory of God could be a potent and tyrannical tool to promote the bottom line.
• …what marks Luther’s doctrine of vocation is the insistence that the work is done in service of the neighbor and of the world. God likes shoes (and good ones!) not for their own sake, but because the neighbor needs shoes…
• What Luther actually said about vocation: The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor….The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor. When a Christian does not serve the other, God is not present; that is not Christian living.
• Wrongly understood, [vocation] enslaves us to the boss, who now has divine authority to press us to produce cleaner floors. God may indeed like good craftsmanship, but Christian vocation is not finally about production (though production will result), just as it is not ultimately about my own satisfaction (though it will surely satisfy)…

Here are two questions for everyone to think about either in the comment section or your head:

What do you consider to be your vocation?

And how do you serve others through your vocation?

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Are you getting your stuff done?

If you don’t know about Inside Work yet, stop reading this post right now and go there.

. . .

Welcome back! Wait a minute. You didn’t you click through to Inside Work yet? You just kept reading? Seriously. Click through. They get it. I’m giving you a second chance to do the right thing here.

. . .

OK. Welcome back again. That was the biggest hat tip I’ve ever given anyone. But I really do love their site.

Now you can watch this video I found while I was there on a Tuesday morning trolling the network for features. We’re slowly getting things back in order around here and returning to our original pattern of featuring people who understand what it means to integrate faith into our daily work.

The folks at Inside Work definitely understand. So watch the video. Then go read Jim Hancock’s thoughts about it. He asks three haunting questions:

• What’s most important to you?
• What distracts you from what’s most important?
• Do you have — or can you get — someone on your team to help you let what’s important be important to you?

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Christian derivative products do not inspire us

We featured the iBible video earlier this week. It’s a good bit of satire, especially because it seems to work on multiple levels. If you didn’t watch it yet, it’s worth your time.

After you take a look, I’d be curious to know–what do you think the video is making fun of exactly? For me, this ultimately became a video about how tacky and wacked a lot of our “derivative Christian products” appear to be. We slap fish on something and expect people to pay up and support their fellow Christians.

That’s no kind of way to do business.

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Finding the Groove: Reflections of a Jazz Theologian

Marcus here. Featured this video today from The Jazz Theologian. And talked about it more at GoodWordEditing.com where I am tired of franchise church.

Anyway, the video is some good stuff and makes me wish I were in Colorado to catch it in two weeks. If any bloggers are up there, it would be cool to hear if you can make it.

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand shows limits of crowd’s wisdom

Marcus here. This morning, I stayed home with Captain Pink Eye (my four year old) and found this odd little video through Mashable while Captain Pink Eye was playing with marbles. If you haven’t watched the video yet, you should. I’ll explain why it’s important in a minute.

Isn’t that just bizarre? I love social media and blog networks because they help us tap into the wisdom of the crowds. I assume most of us at HighCallingBlogs.com believe strongly in the wisdom of crowds.

The Wisdom of Crowds  and Machines

For example, did you vote in an election recently? If so, you believed your vote was part of the wisdom of the crowds. Everyone’s vote gets counted once, and as a society we trust the crowd more than we trust ourselves. At least, that’s how our elections work. PBS explains it really well in this short video.

HighCallingBlogs.com isn’t trying to use the wisdom of crowds like some sort of mathematical formula, though. We don’t have enough people. But we also aren’t looking for that kind of answer.

We’re looking for something more fluid. Like a symphony maybe.

That’s why I featured this video. The HAL 9000 version of Bicycle Built for Two back in the 1960s must have felt like a break through at the time. A singing machine? George Orwell’s versificator from 1984 couldn’t be too far away. Kubric’s 2001 played around with this idea just a few years later. Singing computers could turn psychotic and try to kill us before we reached Jupiter. When we shut them down, like Dave does in this clip, they will say, “Stop, Dave, I’m afraid.”

Hang on, let me dial down the geek factor a bit.

Web 2.0, social media, interactive web, or whatever you want to call it, our latest round of social technology has changed the way we think about machines. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University explained this breakthrough very succinctly in his video The Machine is Us/ing Us. If you haven’t seen it. Watch it.

With all of that in mind, it makes sense for Daniel Massey and Aaron Koblin to return to the old Hal 9000 idea to show us how we’re rethinking machines again. Our machines still sing, but now it is our own voices that we hear.

Let’s Sing with Knowledge of the Task

And we sound really bad (but in a great way) when we sing like this. Here’s why: In Bicycle Built for 2000, the workers recorded their sounds “without knowledge of the overall task.” The meaning was stripped out of what they were doing.

But crowd-sourcing doesn’t have to work like that. We certainly don’t vote that way. Everyone who goes into the voting booth knows the task. He or she is part of an electoral process. We aren’t blind.

Which brings me back to what we’re trying to do here at HighCallingBlogs.com. We are not a blind community. We share a vision. We share values. Everyone should know the overall task.

We’re here to help people understand what it means to glorify God in every day life and work.

We engage culture not to critique it, not to conquer it, but to glorify God. Sometimes that means critique. Sometimes it means we create something new. It always comes back to love and humility.

We spend time with our families, not to glorify our families, but to glorify God. That means discipline. That means fun time. And it comes back to love and humility.

We go to work, not to evangelize and stamp more converts on the side of our gospel tank, but to glorify God. Sometimes that means evangelism. But much more often, it means we simply do our job with integrity. We serve our bosses. We’re kind to our coworkers. It comes down to love and humility.

We go to church not to worship church, but to worship God. Church is important. Gathering together in a physical community is important. But the Kingdom of God is bigger than our institutional churches and the programs of those churches.

It extends into our work and our family and our culture.

Please, no one should record his or her part of this symphony without knowledge of the overall task. That doesn’t make sense. Our community will sound awful if we do that.

Remember the task. Remember the shared values. We glorify God in everyday life and work. That’s the foundation of this community.

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Bringing the Right Attitude to Work

I saw this video of a flight attendant who has brought his very best attitude to work with him. I’ve been noticing this lately, especially with Southwest Airlines flight attendants. They can be rather funny, even silly when they go through their pre-flight spiel.

This guy really brings the best of himself to work. And it’s clearly appreciated by the customers.

Enjoy!

Lost Generation?

The video currently linked on the right will surprise you. It is one of those videos that develop in unexpected ways.

Sometimes I despair about changing the world. What can a few people do when so many are apathetic? But then I remember that the world has changed so many times. Women now vote. Why? Because some people cared. Domestic violence still happens, but it is recognized by our society and victims have options. Why? Because some people cared.

An African American man is now the president of the United States. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, that is still an amazing thing. How did it happen? People cared. They believed they could change the world.

God save us from apathy. Sometimes the result you are looking for is years or generations away. But caring does change the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA

Amazing Grace

The production values on this performance are perhaps a little much for me. I have a tendency to shy away from big productions, particularly when they are for spiritual songs. But there is no doubt that the singing, music, and setting are beautiful.

Still, none of that was what drew me to this video. I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that this is taking place in the Coliseum in Rome. Christians were thrown to the lions in this stadium in the first century by perhaps the most powerful civilization that had ever appeared on the planet. That the faith sparked by Jesus of Nazareth is still here when the Coliseum is in ruins is something that takes my breath away.

The brutal cries that once rang around those walls are long silence, replaced now by the sound of Amazing Grace.

You can watch the video on the front page of our site for a few days, or follow this link to Youtube.

State of the Network Address

That headline may be a BIT of an overstatement. But it’s catchy, right? If you’ve got a few minutes (4 to be exact), watch this little video that Gordon and I made after thinking through the statistics on the site.

Now, don’t panic. We’re still going to feature people and refer traffic out to the network. We’re just going to be asking more of you to help us do that. The network is just getting too big.

Also, we’ve got buddypress on the way. That is going to open up many new possibilities for creating profiles,  manipulating RSS feeds, and generally building community around here.

Note: You can read Marcus’ snarky comments better if you visit the youtube video page and watch it full screen.

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Does your social media honk like a bad oboe player?

Chris Cree and I were discussing the recent changes here at HighCallingBlogs.com, and we decided it was time to change the video. He recommended 25 Things I Hate about Facebook, which made me laugh. So it is the feature for today.

Normally, I’m not a hater. Especially here at HighCallingBlogs.com where we emphasize encouragement and general warm fuzzy stuff. (That doesn’t mean we don’t have standards. We just prefer to moderate through encouragement.)

But I like this video because it points out how strange people get with social media tools. We forget what it means to be social. In fact, we act deliberately anti-social:

• We think a blog is a personal brand for becoming a media empire (thus the cartoon above).
• We think our facebook friends and online friends are potential customers and clients.
• We comment on blogs because we want people to visit our blog.
• We have new tools for listening to others, but instead we use the tools to create a rambling, self-promotional, narcissistic monologue.
• Or we get creepy advertisements to introduce us Hot Christian Singles in Your Area (see the video below, #21)

I’ve been guilty of everything on that list. But HighCallingBlogs.com changed the way I understand social media. What I thought of as a promotional tool (many years ago), I have come to understand as a new way of forming and maintaining relationships. If you want to use church speak, this is a new form of God’s Kingdom. Online communities can’t replace the Sunday morning communities, of course. Christians should not stop assembling together in person just because they can assemble online.

Shane Hipps has come down pretty hard on virtual communities like ours lately. I think he means well, but some of his comments feel a little personal to me. Like this one from a post on Out of Ur, Christianity Today’s pastor/leadership blog:

…virtual community is like playing the guitar with one string. You can make music; it’s just not as interesting or as good as music on a guitar with six strings.

I think comments like come from people who experience the social awkwardness of online communities. And why should they be anything but awkward? We’re all middle schoolers at our first co-ed dance in these communities. There aren’t rules of etiquette, or at least our culture hasn’t internalized them.

Social media isn’t a six-string guitar with only one string. It’s a new instrument altogether. And if our honks and squawks on this new instrument sound awful, it’s because we haven’t had enough time to play together yet.

We still need all the other instruments, of course. We still need real live, having communion together, singing together church communities. We still need families. We still need friends.

But there is a new kind of community developing. And we at HighCallingBlogs.com think the best thing Christians can do write now is practice, practice, practice. Sometimes our efforts do sound a bit like a third grader trying to play the Oboe, but it doesn’t help to kick the third grader or take away her Oboe.

We don’t even need to spend time thinking about the theological dangers of the Oboe versus the six string guitar.

Nope. What we need is practice. Years of it.

So I want to say a special thank you to this community. You are helping us practice. We are learning together. Sometimes that means we have a difficult weekend with lots of technical backend changes that affect your blogs. But I know I can trust you all. You know you can trust us.

And trust is what communities are built on.

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