Return On Ministry

Satan has has strategies in place to disrupt the effectiveness of efficient ministry management. Here's how to make sure that doesn't happen...

Power Mad

"My argument with so much psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering. That the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness. There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age which is power mad."

~Arthur Miller (from documentary footage appearing in "Century of the Self. Episode 2: The Engineering of Consent")

iPhone Liturgy: Letting Go To Live

Conversation with Aaron after lunch...chatting about love, surrender, Haiti, hope, lent, dying and rebirth...

Declare Vs Decorate No. 3

In regards to visual media in the church, we tend to "decorate" the church services rather than "declaring"new possibilities this side of the New Jerusalem. More on declaration vs. decoration, standing aside & staying"wild" from TWOTP's Steve Frost. (Go HERE for No. 1. Click HERE for No. 2)

Matt Davis' Hallelujah Cover

Sonday's Matt Davis Hallelujah Cover from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Matt Davis does Cohen & Buckley proud with this offering during a gathering at Sondays.

Can You See Us?

"Can You See Us" is a TWOTP film produced with/for the Bahamas Human Rights Network to help facilitate the dialogue around one of the greatest social issues facing the Bahamas, the influx of Haitian Nationals. View the film in three streaming YouTube clips below. If you're interested in download of entire film for free Contact Travis at travis@theworkofthepeople.com.

This Is How the World Will End

Brian Mclaren on The Ooze.Tv

Brian and Spencer chat it up about Brian's upcoming book...Go HERE to check out Mclaren films on TWOTP.

Hope For Haiti Concert

If you're in the Houston Area tomorrow or Friday come by Taft Street for the Hope For Haiti concert series with Derek Webb, David Gamboa, Galin Elms and others. All proceeds with benefit Real Hope For Haiti & Hydrate Hope. For more info visit www.iamchange.org. Check out video TWOTP made for Hydrate Hope below.

The Hydrate Hope Project from IAmChange on Vimeo.

Declaration Vs. Decoration No. 2

In regards to visual media in the church, we tend to "decorate" the church services rather than "declaring"new possibilities this side of the New Jerusalem. More on declaration vs. decoration from TWOTP's Steve Frost. (Go HERE for No. 1)

Kingdom Community Soul Juice

"At 3 years old with 29 years of experience," as his father likes to say, Robert Ingalls - better know as Bobi Nini - leads our community in worship this past Sunday. Rumor has it God asked Bobi if he'd give up some of his brain functions on his way into this world in order to reflect God's glory and to help show others that God's love is not a commodity. So far…mission accomplished. Bobi Nini gives our community better eyes and better ears. Community Jesus glue. Not a bad singer either, although he did sound a little pitchy on a few notes. Just sayin'

No Fear In Love

From King's last speech...

HAITI: PRAY...LISTEN...RESPOND WITH LOVE

Avatar: Too Good to be True?

After having already raked in more than 1.4 billion at the box office, it’s safe to say that James Cameron’s latest visual masterpiece, Avatar, is touching a nerve with the audience. It seems that for some, it only makes the “real world” that much more dull and lifeless. CNN recently released an article called Audiences Experience ‘Avatar’ Blues (HERE) which tells of a similar effect among thousands of people who have seen the film.

There are now chat rooms dedicated solely to the hopelessness that moviegoers have experienced after leaving their local theater. One was quoted as saying, "When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

As a pastor and lover of films, I am fascinated by this phenomenon. I saw the film the day it was released and, like everyone else, was swept away into the visual imagery of Pandora, a planet that has very little similarities with the industrial world that I see all around me. The entire film was chocked full of spiritual metaphor, showing the clash and overall separation between the kingdom of this world and the Kingdom of God, I don’t know James Cameron, or should I say he doesn’t know me, so I haven’t been able to ask him personally if he had this metaphor in mind whenever he made this film.

But the hopeless effect that this is having on Americans only validates the metaphor. Every soul in creation longs for a Kingdom that is not of this world, individuals long to connect with each other on a spiritual level, like the Na’vi race of Pandora. That desire has been implanted inside of all of us whether we believe in the quenching of that desire or not. C.S. Lewis, who also created metaphorical fantasy worlds, often referred to that same desire. He would point out that there are no inherent thirsts that cannot be quenched. Whenever a duckling is born with a desire to swim, that is because water exists and he instinctively already knows how to swim. And if we humans have a desire for something that nothing in this world can satisfy or quench, that can only mean that we were not designed only for this world.

But there is a Kingdom that will quench all of our deepest thirsts, and I can only imagine how depressing it would be to think that the closest we will ever get to it would be a 2 1/2 hour three dimensional escape from reality. The most exciting part is that this other world that we long for isn’t on some other planet like the film or even some Christians may suggest. In the Gospel of Luke 15 it says that:

“Now having been questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God was coming, He answered them and said, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or, 'There it is!' For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst."

We have access to a kingdom that is in great contrast with this kingdom. It’s what happens when we completely surrender. We see through different eyes, we are illuminated, we are connected to everything and everyone, beauty is all around, we are truly born again, seeing everything for the first time. It actually feels somewhat like what the Avatar imagery looks like. And just like the avatars in the film, I don’t actually live in that kingdom…yet. But I get glimpses of it, sometimes in the form of my church community, sometimes when I look deep into my children’s eyes, sometimes when I’m all alone with the windows down and the radio up. It’s pretty much anytime that I decide to truly be present to the Spirit of Christ. My prayer is that we will radiate God’s love enough to be able to show a hopeless world glimpses of our glimpses.


Aaron Edwards
The Work Of The People

Leonard Cohen on the State of Christianity

From an online chat with Leonard Cohen...

Seth: You have such vivid Christian imagery in many of your songs, and much of it is contrasted with the selfishness of the "modern" individual. I was wondering what's your take on the state of Christianity today?

Leonard Cohen: Dear Seth, I don't really have a 'take on the state
of Christianity.' But when I read your question, this answer came to
mind: As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ
comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.

And, as he relates to his faith and his experience with human beings as he walks it:

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a very remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is because it is beyond our imagination. I think it has something to do with the energy of boundless love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise and experience of a strange kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man even attempting to set the universe in order by himself. It is a kind of tortured balance that is his glory. He rides the snow drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world (because he was instructed to do so) that he gives himself completely to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is totally at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of their hearts. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

- Leonard Cohen, in the intro to the novel, Beautiful Losers (1966)

Talking Jesus & Peace On Recent Road Trip...

Artisan Vs. Expert

TWOTP's Steve Frost talks about, in regards to visual media in the church, the "artisan" creating from a community vs. the "expert" creating "for" a community.

Living With Death w/Hauerwas

New film series Living With Death with Stanley Hauerwas available on TWOTP site HERE.

Here's one of the films, "Learning How To Die."

Hauerwas On Leadership

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas discusses the term “leadership” and how he prepares his students to provide it. Go HERE to watch leadership series form Duke University.