CBF Resource List

Here are a few suggestions for continued reading. If you can't find what you are looking for, please drop me a line. I can send you a more complete list.

Web Resources
Next Wave
The Ooze
Jacob's Well
Ecclesia

Cultural Analysis
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
By Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Trendwatching Newsletter (Free)
Fast Company

Emerging Church
Live to Tell: Evangelism in a Postmodern Age
By Brad Kallenberg
The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
By Joseph R. Myers
New Theology/Thinking
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
By Rob Bell
A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
By Brian D. McLaren

Worship Tools
Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations
By Dan Kimball, David Crowder, Sally Morgenthaler
Preaching Re-Imagined
By Doug Pagitt

Labyrinth Reloads

Years ago I discovered Group Publishing's Prayer Path kit (we call it the labyrinth in a can). A friend named Keith Peeler and I used to set it up and and run it for youth groups, retreats, etc. It is a great resource and we witnessed God touching many lives through it.

After a while I started writing "reloads" for the prayer path. Reloads are new themes and stations for the prayer path labyrinth. However, you don't have to own Group's version in order to use the reloads (Click here for how to build your own labyrinth). You can use them in a your own labyrinth design, for a retreat, a prayer walk, worship service, etc.

The photo links to the right show reloads I've written for several different groups. If you are interested in using a reload that's already been written or in having one created for your church or group, drop me an email.

Building a Chartres Style Labyrinth

Labyrinths are truly one my most favorite spiritual exercises to both create and participate in. There are many websites out there that will teach you how to build a traditional prayer path that is a simple pathway to a center point and back.

However, I needed a labyrinth design that allowed room for interactive stations to be placed along the path. Group Publishing has a design that allows for this, but it was often too big for the rooms I used. So I created a new design based on the 800 year old labyrinth found in the Chartres Cathedral in France.

I designed this labyrinth as a square instead of a circle so that it would be easier to construct and built in space for nine stations. Click here for for instructions on how to make it.

The Aging Rock Star

There's a band that I have been following for a few years. They are a Christian act who've done a handful of albums and had pretty good success. The front man is great about giving his testimony at each concert. He lived hard, did a lot of drugs, and then came face to face with Jesus who then rescued this singer from the misery that was his life before Christ. It's a great story. Each and every time I hear it. And there in lies the rub.

This band has a cool ministry that touches many lives. However, the singer's testimony stays the same night after night, tour after tour, album after album, year after year. It is a powerful story, but the events that transpired in the testimony happened long, long ago. The singer is way past his twenty's now with a wife, kids, and a house. Though his life has changed significantly over the years, the way he chooses to define himself hasn't. There's is mostly silence from the stage about all that God has done in his life since the bad old days.

Don't we often do the same thing as a church? Don't we go through periods of being stuck in a testimony from the past? Don't we sometimes define ourselves by who we used to be instead of who God has led us to become? I'm not saying that the past is bad. Remembering your past and letting it inform your present is a good thing. Yet, constantly re-living and getting stuck in your past as the world morphs and changes around you is not such a good thing.

What a different landscape the church would be if she had the courage to be fully present here in today's world. Imagine the lives that would be transformed by a church flexible enough to embrace people for who they are today instead of forcing them to fit into what we used to be.

Station: Hard Heart

Idea: At the beginning of a worship service, I find that I am usually still distracted by outside thoughts or worries. I often need a focusing activity that helps me consciously choose to start the surrendering process of worship. This station is designed to aid in that process. Click here for more.

Emerging Church Reality TV Show...

I just stumbled across this on emergingchurch.info. "TV broadcasters in the UK and Australia are joining forces to feature the emerging church in a 'big brother' style virtual reality show."

'The Generation X Game' will focus on 12 members auditioned from emerging church communities across Britain. They will be invited to spend three weeks together in a specially converted disused church wired with cameras and microphones to watch and and record their every move as they struggle to create an authentic expression of Christianity for 21st Century culture. Click here to see the entire article.

Stations of the Cross

Here's another great Easter resource. It is a liturgy called Stations of the Cross. It recreates the journey Christ took in his last hours of life. The stations take you from the trial to the tomb through a series of prayers and reflections. I have used this liturgy in a number of ways (Click here for the liturgy).

I have reproduced it as a booklet complete with artwork of the stations so that individuals or small groups could meditate on the liturgy at their convenience.

It can also be used as a prayer walk on retreats by setting up symbolic replicas of the stations on a path through the woods. The liturgy can be on CD so that people listen to it on headphones instead of havimg to read it.

The liturgy can also be adapted to corporate worship setting as more of a visual lectio divina experience. We wrote music to sing the trisagion prayer, pictures of the stations were projected on a screen, and the readings were presented in a variety of mediums.

Since we are such a visual culture, I believe that pictures/graphics are essential to the liturgy. I'd grab a digital camera and start making the rounds of your local Catholic and Episcopalian churches. Some of them will have sculpture or art pieces of the Stations set up in the church.

Tenebrae Service

Lindsey and I go to a little house church called The Story. We only meet on Sunday nights, so we had to adjust the church calendar a bit to fit all the differenct Easter sevices in. Last Sunday we celebrated Palm Sunday and tonight we celbrated a Tenebrae Liturgy for Good Friday.

We took the Tenebrae litugry from the Anglican Book of Occasional Services and then shortened it to about an hour. We also added some more interactive elements to the service (it is a pretty passive experience in the original form). Tenebrae means darkness or shadows and is focused upon the death of Jesus.

So here it is. If you need a Tenebrae Service liturgy, help yourself.