As a follow up to the previous post God’s bias for the city, here’s some thoughts on why the cities are strategic to anyone who wants to make a global impact.
Cities are both magnets and magnifiers. People from surrounding areas are drawn in and everything they do is amplified and ripples back out.
Increased density means there’s people like you there. People you can connect with and people you compete with.
Increased diversity means there’s people completely unlike you there that you’ll need to learn to work with and from.
Density and diversity cultivates, if not forces, innovation and change
Cities are where the fringes of culture converge – the poor and the rich, the skater and the geek, etc.
Cities are where people are at. As of 2007 the world reached a demographic tipping point where more people live in urban environments than rural. Nearly all population growth going forward will be in cities.
Cities are educational hubs where new ideas and creativity are highly valued.
Cities are media hubs that broadcast the human story.
Cities shape and create culture for the masses downstream. Where the city goes, the culture goes.
Our family just watched the documentary Flow. Wired magazine declared it ‘the scariest film at the sundance film festival). The growing water crisis has been on my mind for a number of years and it will be an issue that I plan on rallying more resources behind.
We dedicated all the proceeds of one of our solar crash events to living water international, and my faith community takes part in the advent conspiracy (channeling our christmas gift money towards providing clean water), but I still feel like there’s so much more we can do.
Are we too late? Can or will the church make a difference here?
We’re at a unique moment in history, says UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown: we can use today’s interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic — and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy.
What do you think? (Especially you folks in the UK)
According to Global TV: There’s a Christian reformation stirring in Canada’s Christian churches. Forsaking the traditional pew and altar, these Christians are dropping pop culture references, defying the orthodoxy, and creating their own brands of worship. Suddenly, it’s hip to be holy.
To which I say, really? I can’t honestly say I see a ‘reformation’ happening. Inklings of goodness coming out of the cracks absolutely, but the church still has a long way to go in Canada.
My friend Nathan Gerber will be featured in it, which will definitely make it worth watching. (Revealed: Hip 2B Holy on Global TV Monday May 25 10pm EST, 9pm Central, 8pm Western).
See the video below interviewing director Karen Pinker and Kevin Newman about the show. They sound like tourists who’ve read all the brochures, but haven’t quite lived with the natives yet.
I sure hope it’s not lame. Pray that it’s an honest depiction (beauty and ugliness and all), and that it actually helps move conversations across the nation forward.
Update: Some clips from the show laced with post-production reflections.
Your thoughts on the ‘reformation’ of the Church in Canada?
Feeling a bit better and finally catching up on my dose of obama news.
Barack capped his Middle-East / Europe tour with a speech to over 200 thousand people this week in Berlin.
Supposedly people from all over the continent had travelled in to see him in person. Some of Obama’s opposition say that this proves how ‘foreign’ he is, and not suitable for leading America. I think his global appeal says much more about the state of the world than Obama himself.
People are longing for a different America to show up. I know I am.
On the front page of the Huffington Post this morning…
According to the article just about every country surveyed people around the world largely prefer Barack Obama as President. Yet the rare instance he’s tied with John McCain is in the United States.
Why is that?
Are people around the world just less informed? infatuated with terrorist fist jabs? too liberal? He’s no savior, but I like him. C’mon American’s get on board.
Here’s a new video some of you might appreciate – called ‘dumped for obama’
I just finished Anthony Weston’s “How to re-imagine the world”, a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.
Weston’s strengths are definitely in the realm of futuristic/ideation which completely jives with me.
He pitches a few ideas that are aching to be implemented like sports for the homeless, turning military bases into retreat centers, cutting the work week in half, preemptive peace, sun-baked roads that generate electricity, and creating floating cities to name a few.
Some quotes I highlighted from the book
Radical imagination begins with a move beyond complaint and resistance, beyond reactive tinkering or hunkering down or cynical accommodation. The first big move is to an alternative picture of how things could be instead.
Truly generative, inventive, new thinking requires risk-taking and is iteself a discipline. Mental stretching and twisting, conceptual self-provocations, going two steps too far – we need techniques, in short, to shock or seduce our ideas into unexpected and suggestive re-arrangements, freezing up space and generating raw material for the constructive imagination.
How can we make life more ecstatic?
Along with battling poverty we need to ask why we tolerate radical inequality at all. In many African tribal societies, even a single homeless person is felt as a disgrace by all. How did we get where we are?
We know too little of the natural world to come to love it.
This past Saturday a team of us from two churches organized a Global Awareness Banquet.
The banquet is a dramatization of the inequity that perpetuates poverty in the world. Guests are randomly assigned according to the realities that divide us today 15% rich, 30% middle class, and 55% poor on a global level.
The rich were served wine, appetizers, roasts, cake to classical music, while the poor had to line up for a chunk of yam. Some ended stealing from the rich, some of the rich spread the wealth, and some sat there feeling pity for themselves or for others.
We even dumped excess food into the garbage in front of the crowd, as people screamed no.
The discussion was lively, and the anger died down as people understood why we made them pay for a meal with no food.
If you can gather at least 40-50 people in your school, church, workplace, campus, I totally recommend trying to run an event like this.
As a follow up to the previous post God’s bias for the city, here’s some thoughts on why the cities are strategic to anyone who wants to make a global impact.
I just finished Anthony Weston’s “How to re-imagine the world”, a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.
