The U.S. population surpased 300 million yesterday and is on track to reach 400 million by the year 2043. Officials were undecided as to whether the 300 millionth person was a new-born baby, or a foreigner.

Check out the real time population count here.

Bet you didn’t know:

NSync has the fastest-selling album of all time with their 2000 release of No Strings Attached. 1.1 million copies the first day and almost 2.5 within the first week and ultimately going on to sell over 10 million copies.

Bet you also didn’t know:

Over half of the 100 best-selling albums were released in that decade (1990 - 2000). It was the music industry’s fastest growth period ever.

Hmmm…. Interesting. Tell me more.

In the six years since, only 4 albums have made it into the top 100 list: Eminem’s The Eminem Show (#100), Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me (#96), OutKast’s Speakerboxx (#65) and the top seller is Shania Twain’s Up (#64). Overall, U.S. album sales fell 20% from their 1999 peak.

One thing’s for sure: our hits are disappearing.

The question is are they being stolen or just held as hostage? Maybe it’s some giant, evil, super-vilian of sorts. Maybe it’s some nerdy little adolescent reject in his basement with his comptuer. Is there a ransom involved? Could this be a practical joke?

Who could be responsible for this atrocity? I’ll do some investigative work.

I don’t watch a ton of tv, but there is some really good stuff on this fall season.

Monday night is the best. PRISON BREAK (8.00 PM FOX) just continues to bring it every week.

I’m also kind of into HEROS (9.00 PM NBC).

STUDIO 60 (10.00 PM NBC) is very well written and gives me a lot of vision for the whole production end of church services.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (Tuesday, 8.00 PM NBC) is probably my favorite new show. Great camera work, well written and an accurate look into youth culture… if you’re into that sort of thing.

Check out the fermiproject.com. It’s a project led by one of Catalyst’s creators, Gabe Lyons as an effort to re-brand Christianity on a national and international level.

It’s a joint effort by leading voices in the church to create seismic change in how the church views its role in shaping mainstream culture.

This type of stuff gets my adrenaline pumping.

Also check out their Q experience scheduled for next April. I’m going to do whatever I can to get there.

All I can say about the “Everything Is Spiritual” tour is that Rob Bell is insane. I don’t know of anyone that thinks like that and I definitely don’t know anyone who can keep your attention fixed for 2 hours with just a whiteboard and black marker.

He walked onto the stage and started. “In the beginning….” No introduction. No lights. No video. Minimal and to the point. He started in Genesis 1.1, got into all kinds of macro and micro physics and in the end brought it all together in one of those “ah-ha” moments where you somehow understood everything he had just said. But don’t ask me to repeat it.

The best line of the night: “Dude, you can’t smoke a rectangle.” You had to be there.

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

-Henry Ford

I don’t think we always know what it is we want. Especially when exploring the future church. We have a lot of ideas, but chances are it will look pretty different 10 years from now.

I’ve been fascinated with this project ever since I heard about it on a podcast from IT Conversations over a year ago.  The goal of OLPC is to produce a laptop for $100 and then get them into the hands of children in developing nations.  They say, “Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think.” I think the long term global results from a project like this will be unbelievable.  I wonder what would be more significant in the lives of children in developing nations:  formal education or a laptop?

Here is a picture of the first working model and an earlier proposed model with a hand crank to generate electricity.

I came across this quote in Tom Peters book, “Design.” It was really good…. it made me put down the tortilla chips and salsa I had been slamming. It goes right along with all this “experience” stuff I’ve been talking about lately. Here’s a guy who gets it:

“A dream is a complete moment in the life of a client. Important experiences that tempt the client to commit substantial resources. The essence of the desires of the consumer. The opportunity to help clients become what they want to be.”

-Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni, former North American CEO of Ferrari

He’s talking about touching the dreams of others; The art of telling stories; Promoting the dream, not the product. Something that Ferrari has been doing for years.

Churches have missed it!

We thought is was about the pastor’s dream for a new building or to have his own television show.

…It’s never been about God’s dream for “the church”…

We must hold high the dreams of others. Champion the passions of their hearts. Resource what makes them come alive. Discover the uniqueness at the core of who they were created to be… (okay, slow down and breathe…)

That’s what the local church is designed for.

Mr. Longinotti-Buitoni goes on with some measurements of choice:

“Love at first sight.”
“Design for the five senses.”
“Development to expand the Main Dream.”
“Design so as to seduce through the peripheral senses.”

When have we ever measured the church by these? Yet Ferrari has built a company on them. They have built a business around the fulfillment of huge, obnoxious, outlandish dreams. What boy didn’t grow up fantasizing about a Ferrari or some other exotic car?

I believe every person is built with a huge, obnoxious, outlandish dream inside of them to make a difference in the world.

The role of the church is to (look out!) unleash that.

After Rex left his comments, I emailed back to him some of my thoughts about his last point on friendships:

Rex,

Josh

I recently posted on a comment author Rex Miller made during a podcast with Blogging Church. He saw my post and left some comments about the future church that I thought were worth reposting (with his permission). Rex is the author of the book The Millennium Matrix. I haven’t read it yet, but it is in my Amazon cart. I will pick it up soon.


“We’re coming to a time (5 years +) where infrastructure (buildings etc) will put many at a disadvantage. The cause of the shift:

3. Networked models will gain and put vertical models at a disadvantage.
Cohesion will come from relational structures (one growing alternative is the rise of social networks). It still gets down to F2F relationships, serving and community.”

Rex

Rex Miller made a great statement during his interview with BloggingChurch.com.

I think it’s a statement that will help the church navigate the post-modern era.

He said,

“The issue is not spiritual content - it’s everywhere.  The issue is engagement, community.”

I think the church will become less and less about the sermon prepared and the content presented on Sunday morning and more about engagement.  What are we doing to engage and connect people right away?  What are the opportunities we are presenting for service?  Where is the community within a large group?

The demand on leadership will be for experience, engagement, community, opportunity.  Not television shows, video illustrations, and the books we’ve written. 

I found out about this site through Bryan Davidson’s blog, a free lance writer I met in Atlanta. Bryan worked for INJOY for awhile and now does some writing for Josh McDowell and others. His wife works for EQUIP. His blog has some great thoughts on it about the church and culture and leadership.

Lowercase people is an online collective of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers put together by Jon Foreman of Switchfoot. Their goal is to revolutionize the way we see truth. A sort of rebranding of Christianity. They are also raising some cash for humanitarian projects.

I think churches need to remember one of the basic phenomena of human attraction: the least likable kid on the playground was always the one trying the hardest to be liked.

The cool kids, on the other hand, were popular partly because they didn’t seem to care if they were liked; they were doing their thing whether or not you were watching. Those were the kids the rest of us openly (or secretly) admired (or envied).

This grade school truism translates very well. The Church will be the most provocative and alluring when it is itself. The Church will be least relevant and attractive and influencing when it is caught in the act of being someone different to gain more friends.

I remember as a teenager in youth group that the easiest way to get me to avoid a Christian event was to promise “cool music and awesome teaching.” That meant that the music definitely wouldn’t be cool and the speaker wouldn’t be awesome.

It’s like Margaret Thatcher said:

“Being a leader is a lot like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you probably aren’t.”

Why does the Church have to tell people that it is “cool” and “relevant” and “awesome?” The Church needs to be strong enough to be itself and be confident that it is “relevant” and “cool” because of the Spirit of God?

In churches across the nation on Sunday the average person is asked through as act of his or her will to mentally subscribe to four or five truths that we believe about salvation and how the process of salvation works.

Believe those propositions, raise you hand, ask for forgiveness, pray this prayer, and voila, you’re in. You may claim that’s a bit cavalier for how the process really happens. I disagree. I speak as an insider on this.

The whole model of the “appeal” is extra-biblical. You don’t find a system for it anywhere in the Bible.

I hear the question every now and then, “Do you present the gospel at Christ the King?” Subtext? “Do you go through the gospel presentation as we understand it so people can get saved?”

The model proposed by Jesus was much different. - He simply invited the disciples to hang out. He said, “Follow Me.” Not, “Now, let’s bow our head and close our eyes and if you believe in me, raise your hand. No one’s looking around.”

It was process-oriented. He knew that these relationships over time would equal change.

Way too relational for most churches. Where was the doctrinal and expositional message from the Old Testament? Where was the clarification on the God they were really following?

Jesus knew that if he hung out with these guys, over time their lives would change. Jesus would slowly raise the stakes, and they would either continue deeper in their relationship with him or abandon it altogether.

Watch this: Experience preceded explanation. Relationship preceded doctrinal training.

A bit crazy?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines entertainment as “the action of occupying a person’s attention agreeably.”

Under this definition, we want to entertain.

We want to hold peoples attention agreeably.

I think too many get concerned that entertainment implies superficial or glitzy. A watering down of the Gospel.

In our postmodern culture, people are looking for experiences to bring them closer to God. The church in large has been so unimaginative. Most worship services have become a standard “one-size fits all” environment. Life change that worked for one person is duplicated and expected to work for all.

Postmoderns aren’t looking for principles to die for; they’re looking for practices to live by. We need a whole new brand of creatives that dream up life-giving patterns and practices for spiritual erogonomy. People need real ways to connect with God and put themselves in a position to be imprinted by Him.

Nothing short of this will reach a culture tired of what appears to them to be rules and regulations leading to dull, monchromatic lives.

While the process of life change is hard and full of challenge, the process in not difficult to understand. The leaders of the church must lead. Not with formulas and not with a map and compass, but through a journey together. We must take people to where we have been.

Ergonomics is the study of how customizing our environment can increase our overall wholeness, performance, and effectiveness. Having a keyboard on top of a desk isn’t very comfortable, and in the long term, it hurts your hands and wrists. A more ergonomic arrangement is to have the keyboard in a sliding keyboard tray directly under the desktop. Y’all know what I’m talking about.

At the very core of ergonomics is customization. The reason Herman-Miller desk chairs have as many buttons, levers, and switches as a stealth fighter is so all different shapes and sizes of bodies can customize the chair for the greatest comfort and ease of work.

So the question today is:

“How do we put ourselves in a position to be impacted by God?”

Spiritual ergonomics is positioning ourselves for the greatest imprint of God’s life and power.

The very core of all leadership and personal development is spiritual sculpting by God. He is the potter and we are the clay. But how do we keep ourselves from jumping off the potter’s wheel? How do we keep the canvas on the easel? How do we keep the pages of our book open for Him to write the story?

Paul calls us God’s workmanship created in Christ to do good works which he has prepared for us in advance (Ep 2.10). We must unpack this and discover what it means for our spiritual formation. We’re a piece in progress; the canvas is still being painted on, the marble chiseled with finesse, the clay imprinted. This is what it means to be His workmanship. We are all unique pieces. Each one of us customized for His plan.

How do you put yourself in a position to be imprinted by God?

Woa. Don’t know about this.

Last night, we had a Spoken concert at our church (by the way, Chris and Todd did a fantastic job organizing this whole event - thanks guys) and I had a moment to chat with another local area pastor. He shared a few of the transitions his church is going through and I told him that I am hearing that kind of stuff more and more. They are trends of the 21st Century Church.

First, he told me that 6 local churches are merging together their assets and leadership to form a new identity. They will continue at their present locations, but they are going to develop one creative team that writes the messages. They will have one lead communicator that will present live, by video feed or by DVD. They will have different worship bands and styles of music based on their demographic. They will have one new name. The offerings will go to one place.

These churches are creating a shared, networked environment where they believe they can be better and reach more together than they can separately.

The other trend is that this opportunity gives all their pastors a chance to specialize. For so long pastors had to be generalists; be somewhat good at a lot of stuff. But now, they can be on the creative team, or the business team, or the pastoral care team… they can do the stuff that they feel they are uniquely gifted to do. These pastors then become site pastors and the pressure of communicating every week has been lifted. They are free to care for the body and be good pastors.

You see a lot of this even more in large churches. They are staffing with specialists. Often the guys up front communicating are not the ones running the business affairs of the church. There are executive teams and there are pastoral teams.

I told him that we are living in exciting times and they are living on the edge of what the 21st Century Church will look like.

This is from Ron Martoia’s book “Morph!” He’s a Lead Pastor in Michigan.

“The “space-feel” of a church may be the most undisccussed, critical indicator of a church’s health. The space-feel in a church - that intangible, tough to put your finger on ambience - is the dominant attraction or repellant of people walking into your church for the first time.”

I think essentially, leaders are architects. We don’t build buildings, but we do design space, atmosphere and environments. These are invisible, but they are felt.

If people entering our churches can instantly “feel” the flavor , temperature, and tenor of the space, then how do we attempt to shape and sculpt that into something that is inviting, expectant and thick with the compelling presence of God? The feel of our churches has always been critical, but our current postmodern location in history makes it even more so.

I’ve heard it said over and over that people decide within the first two to five minutes whether or not to attend a church again. The point? It isn’t message, music or media. It’s atmosphere … It’s space…. It’s environment… pure and simple.