Who does God think he is?

Tony spoke on a series entitled "Who does God think he is?" This past week was on being "honest with God" and it sparked a lot of debate amoungst the group.

Part of the philosophy at Eikon is: no spoon-feeding the Word, rather, engage people by asking questions that make you think what we read and come to believe.

Christ asked over 300 questions in the Gospels and only answered 3 of them directly. He didn't give them 3-point sermons and break things down through logic and reason. He captivated his audience by engaging them through pondering questions and brilliant storytelling.

He was, if you think about it, communicating to a first century, right-brain (imaginative, sensational, relational, experiential) culture. Coincidentally, the current culture has shifted from 300 years of left-brain (logic, rational, "I think there for I am") into right-brain. Tony does a great job at making people think in different ways. You should see it in action; by the end of the message, our team spends another 2 hours in conversation over the scripture. It's incredibly engaging.

The central story behind this weeks message was in Genesis 22, when Abraham ultimately makes the decision that he will go through with sacrificing Isaac, his son.

Check out a very different take on the story.


It'll make you think.


WATCH MESSAGE

a great week

It's been really nice to have mom and dad over here for the past week. We've been very active.

We had the opportunity to get out to Rosslyn Chapel, notorious for it's connection with the knights templar in the Davinci Code.
Beyond that, it's an incredible structure: built in the 14th century by a wealthy family that took 40 years to do the stone-work inside the chapel.



Thanksgiving was a great day: the ladies slaved away in the kitchen and made an amazing meal. Tony and Yvonne joined us in the evening for a nice meal. Tony didn't understand the concept of marshmallows and sweet potatoes and we made him dress up like a pilgrim (I wish, we talked about it though)


We then made our way to the gardens overlooking the castle where the annual german village and displaying the christmas lights throughout the city was held.

It was great, all sorts of tiny venues that had german chocolates and crafts for sale, as well as ice skating, a massive ferris wheel and plenty of games for kids and adults. The weather was cold and rainy, but it was still a great time.


We hiked the mountain that overlooked the city today following our gathering this morning (I'll write about this and show a video shortly), and had a great time.



Here were a few shots I grabbed.

the old course

We went up to St. Andrews to catch a soccer game that Kate played in (she scored by the way) and they won 4-0, and we flew over to the "Old Course" before the game for a few minutes.

This is where golf originated back in 1400 and has literally remained unchanged since the 19th century. It lies right on the North Sea and cuddled next to the town of St. Andrews. It plays host to the British Open every 5 years, of which Tiger Woods has won the past two.
Tiger Woods and Jack Nickalaus, the two greatest golfers are quoted in the brochure as saying it's their favorite place to golf in the world by far.
Check out the quick video of the Old Course, it really was an amazing feeling being at a site of where golfers come from every corner of the globe to play and pay their respects.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Parents

My parents arrived Monday afternoon, full of their typical traveling stories: first, livin' it up in a transatlantic business-class experience to London, then getting off and living the life of a backpacker by taking about 4 trains through London, then a few buses to fly to another airport that required another 2 trains to get to Edinburgh (a trip from London that usually takes about 1.5 hours by plane took about 8 hours...I love it! You wonder why they have so many stories to tell. They're the most flexible travelers I know).
We've been having a blast, they love this city. I actually think they're going to become members of our board of elders:) We're trying to get them to stay:)
It's refreshing having them over here to see what's happening in our lives and in the life of the ministry being planted here. They joined the leadership team last night for a lively, I mean lively 5-hour discussion of evaluating where we're all at. It was a wonderful time of prayer, debating, arguing, laughing and an overall sense of connectedness about the direction of Eikon.

It's great to have mom and dad here!

dressings of life

Just had to feel like I was sittin in my living room in naperville for a few hours watching college football. Scots love their soccer, as do I, but sometimes you gotta get some taste of home, you feelin me?

We've got the projector for Eikon at our pad, so I threw it up on our wall, made spaghetti and ordered the #1 Ohio State v. #2 Michigan game. The game was amazing for those who saw it.

Sometimes you just miss the little things: having to pay for katchup at fast-food joints (grrr), no ranch dressing in any god-forsaken grocer store in this country, butter without table-spoon markings, a freezer larger than 3 inches x .5 inches, ice cubes (actually, I'm getting used to this whole room-temp. liquids. I'm beginning to understand why Europeans are so annoyed by how much ice americans use in their drinks:), that pesky celcius/fahrenheit conversion (can anyone tell me this), the driver seat on the right side and driving stick-shift with your left hand (think about it, that's just tough). I'll stop now, but it really is the small dressings of life that you miss when unavailable. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder: so true, I'm going to roll around in some ranch dressing the next time I see it!

We also set up the projector and watched the West Wing, it was beautiful. It's amazing, we have a built-in theater in our flat.....the things we do when we're craving free entertainment!

commercial

We decided that we could design commercials for out website for people to check out as they enter the Eikon site. For churches these days in Scotland, the "trust" capital is in the black, so more and more people have been interested in checking out a website before going to a sunday service. Denise, a phD student confirmed these trends when he commented to me that as a non-churchgoer, she'd prefer to check out our site and see what we're all about. This is becoming the norm, particuarly for younger generations.
We're designing the site to be very video-driven, so check out one of the commercials,

Click HERE

honesty

Met this morning for our final installment of our values: creativity, change, acceptance, hope and honesty.

To catch anyone up, we've began meeting as a core group in the past month, spending each week on the values of the church. The phillsophy has been to establish a practical, life-enhancing ethos built around areas Eikon can offer to seekers.

We had a new couple join us this week named Sifiso and Zoro, who are from Zimbabwe but working and studying in Edinburgh. Our leadership team is ethnically consisting of people from Ireland, Scotland, US, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Finland! We're loving the diversity, it truly is a 21st century missional team.

Today we ended up having great discussion for over three hours and didn't even realize it. Our conversations are so multi-layered because of so many cultural insights.

I met a guy named Joe a few days ago while Kate and I were at some cafe meeting some of her friends. He's over here from Canada with his girlfriend who's studying at the University. Turns out he studied film in college and has been looking for work over here. He's worked on a number of indie film projects and just beginning to get into photography. Anyways, I shared with him about Eikon and he was fascinated with our emphasis on video and the overall visual experience we're trying to create. He's interested in getting involved in eikon film!!!! That would be incredible to have someone like Joe who's bored here and looking for ways to tap into his passion.

Interesting Interviews

Going along with the article I posted about a day or two ago, The Guardian also sent its writers to interview numerous interesting people, like Jimmy Wales (founded Wikipedia), Evan Williams (Blogger), Kevin Rose (Digg), Craig Newmark (Craig's List), Caterina fake and Stewart Butterfield (Flickr)...and MORE! ;)

I haven't listened to them all, but take a gander and enjoy!

LIST OF INTERVIEWS

random

sorry, this is just funny.
thanks jeff.

Web 2.0

Below is a quote from a very interesting, well-written article featured lately in The Guardian (a UK newspaper). Among other things, it discusses various internet trends in terms of culture, business and relational paradigms. Did you know that if all the users of MySpace were a country, it'd be the 10th largest country in the world (just after Mexico)?? Yah...read on...

"People are growing up with the internet, and the internet is growing up with them. It is evolving. Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, "email's main function is as an instrument of torture". In civilian life, I increasingly notice that people don't actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past. No one could have predicted that, just as no one could have predicted the extraordinary, dizzying multiplying of the number of blogs being written. (I don't say read.)

That number has been doubling every six months for the past three years: there are now, as of July 31, more than 50m blogs on the internet; 175,000 new blogs are created every day - that's two every second. The dominant languages (they jockey from month to month) are Chinese, Japanese and English. There are 1.6m blog posts a day.

The shorthand term for what is happening now is "Web 2.0", a designation coined at a conference in 2004 by the web-business booster Tim O'Reilly, as describing "an attitude rather than a technology". The phrase is a shorthand for the second internet goldrush, to follow the one that ended in 2000 with arguably the biggest destruction of investors' capital in history. From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users.

Thus we have Murdoch's buy of MySpace in July 2005, Yahoo's of Flickr in March 2005 and its rumoured to be imminent buy of Facebook for around $1bn, and - in money terms the biggest of them all - Google's $1.6bn acquisition of YouTube on October 9. That's a great deal of money raining down on some happy, happy nerds. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen only founded YouTube in February 2005. Their creation has grown in value at a rate of more than $100m a month - which must surely be a world record. That's a hell of a lot of money to be earned by the founders of a company with no earnings."

CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

Calvary Missions

Calvary Church is having their missions conference this coming weekend, and I threw together an update video for the services.

Let me know what you think:

Click HERE

Sayid

I've said it before, but it's still fun to mention that there is over 18 countries represented in one of my courses at University.

Kate and I have both met so many graduate and PhD students with such fascinating backgrounds. I continue to reflect on the Lord's blessing and Pastor Keith (from Calvary Church) for encouraging us to be students over here, it's frowned upon by the Assemblies (in many ways, for good reason; i.e. cost and time). However, it's been vital for making instant connections. Plus, to our surprise, most Scots we encounter have such "respect" for international students choosing Scotland to study.

There is a student in one of my courses who is getting his PhD in educational philosophy. He's in his late 30s, Pakistani and a university professor at the capital city called Islamabad (Pakistan is 97% muslim and one of the most democratic countries in the middle east), and a devout Muslim. His calm, soft-spoken demeaner is disarming and we've sat next to one another on a number of occasions. We've decided to get together to talk about Pakistani politics, and you guessed it, our faiths we both feel so strongly about.

I've sensed no attitude against me cause I'm the standard white-western-christian. Quite the contrary, he's shown great interest in why I'm hear to start a church and what it means to be a Christian.

Meeting Muslims like Sayid is a constant reminder that we need to check our stereotypes against people who practice Islam. It's easy to compare Christianity's best, against Islam's worst. The reality is, less than .1% of the over 2 billion Muslims are extemists in what we see in the news everyday.

Be praying for Sayid and his studies, and for a fruitful connection.

Halloween Classic

Jerry Seinfeld has one of the greatest stand-up cd's out there, and for the most part, it's clean.

Check out this downloadable clip on "Halloween", it's so funny!


Click HERE

Halloween is HUGE over here, seemed like the entire city had a costume party to attend. The "City of the Dead" and "Dark side of the City" tours which begin a 100 yards from our flat were jammed all week late at night with people.

Just out of curiosity, what were some of the costumes you wore when you trick-or-treated......or attended Halleluja Night:)