January 2010

January 25, 2010

Religious strife in Jos, Nigeria

This information comes via the World Evangelical Alliance. From: Gideon Para-Mallam Date: Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 12:43 AM Subject: Fw: UPDATE ON THE JOS CRISIS AND CALL FOR HELP Dear Friends This is an urgent call to prayer and action from us to the international Christian community. Please find attached a write-up from certain ECWA leaders providing a situation analysis of of the ongoing attack on the lives and property of indigenous peoples and other Christians in Jos and environs. As I write men dressed in army uniforms, whose true identity is yet to be fully ascertained, are going [...]

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January 25, 2010

New day, new job, same work, same passion

So here is the latest update. We have accepted a position with Leadersource, which goes to places where the church is growing fastest and trains leadrs to design their own contextualized leadership development program to grow healthy leaders. Their leadership material seems to fit perfectly with our swarming methods. We are looking forward to what the future holds! I will continue to blog here and post items to Twitter. Keep following swarming here!

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January 14, 2010

January 2010: What’s in your Kindle?

What I’m reading this month: Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel H. Pink. This is an older book, but it has received great reviews, and one blog poster commented that it was one of the books (along with Gladwell & others) that defined the ’00 decade. It isn’t disappointing to me. It’s timely for me right now, but more than that, it reveals a lot of trends–which I haven’t seen this well described elsewhere–impacting swarming. Swarms, after all, are often volunteers or “free agents.” He talks about “microproeneurs” (very small businesses) and makes a lot [...]

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January 13, 2010

Swarm: Anarchists in Berlin burn cars

The Guardian reports on a swarm in Berlin: a band of leftwing car arsonists that burned 216 luxury cars in 2009 and 135 in 2008. This swarm has in turned sparked a swarmish “past time” (with an obscure website, “Burning Cars”) spotting the attacks. “No single group is believed to be behind the attacks” – which means multiple groups share the same basic goals and values and are copying behaviors and processes. “Police say they are at a loss as to how to deal with the problem” – which illustrates the resilience of a swarm that gets through its initial [...]

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January 13, 2010

Missionaries killed in Haiti disaster are not martyrs.

Lest anyone think they are, the general definition of a martyr that I use – and probably most would agree with this – is: A believer in Christ killed prematurely as a result of human hostility in a situation of witness {and some here add, “as a result of their faith.”} The bit in brackets is important because the original word “martyr” was the word used for “witness.” We only came to associate “martyr” with “one killed for their faith” because so many in the Early Church were. So if a believer in Iraq is killed as a result of [...]

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January 13, 2010

Haiti vs. Aceh: an instructive illustration of “hiddenness.”

Today, there is an enormous amount of Twitter traffic representing the enormous amount happening on behalf of Haiti. This small, poor island country suffered a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake with thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – killed. I am all for work on behalf of Haiti. Yes, we should bless this little nation. Jesus loves Haiti just as much as He loves Aceh. In fact I could make an argument that my first short-term trip, with my family to Haiti when I was I think about 12, was probably very formative in my missionary thinking. For all that, however, I [...]

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January 13, 2010

A new day, a new view, and an old purpose.

It is, in the words of a Michael Buble’ song that my wife loves, a new day. It is not an easy day, nor one without certain uncertainties and even fears. But it is a new day. The path to this particular day has been a long and winding one, taking over 15 years, and it seems only fair to (briefly) recount the steps that led me here: In, oh, the very early 1990s – perhaps even the late 1980s? I forget the exact year – I worked for an organization called AIMS. It was there, one night, that I [...]

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