It’s Monday morning and time for an easy to start to the week. Check out a lovely bit of media for you viewing pleasure…

I love this as an example of what the church should be like. The way that it draws people in and connects people. Passers by don’t like incredibly uncomfortable or out of place instead they become involved and enjoy the creativity of the moment.

Let me know what you think…

It’s Monday morning and time for an easy to start to the week. Check out a lovely bit of media for you viewing pleasure…

I wonder if McDonald’s realise how spiritual this ad actually is. I love it. I find myself being drawn in to emphasise with the young guy. It is quite an ad for an American company. For McDonald’s to be drawn into the hot topic is quite a statement.

I truly believe that this whole ad campaign has a massive effect on the way people will view the homosexual debate. Will it become publicly cool to be gay. Will ‘the boys’ stop the gay playground mocking? I do wonder if the church is going to be challenged to shape up and analyse the phrase ‘all are welcome’.

I was reading over at Mashable a great article by Brian Solis the author Engage. He was giving 21 rules for Social Media Engagement. I spent sometime this morning reflecting on them. Me and my friend Huw Tyler over at ShareCreative have been considering and discussing Social Media and the pros and cons of it for a while now. Mainly because we feel the church has a massive opportunity to engage creatively in a medium that is spreading content like wild fire throughout the world (remind you of anything).

Social Media has become seen by organizations as a rich channel for them to connect with their markets. As I ready this article ’21 Rules for Social Media Engagement’ by Brian Solis I was struck by a few things.

1. Social media engagement is the ‘in’ thing to do be doing at the moment. Churches and Christian organizations are flocking to Twitter and Facebook in there droves, to engage better with there people.

2. Brian points a few key things that Church could consider before it engages with this medium. Firstly he says its ‘the intentions that motivate engagement’, if we motivated to engage just because everyone else is then social media becomes pointless and we won’t grasp the rich value that this engagement can have. Secondly he says ‘It’s a simple investment in visibility or presence’, this has been the issue in the church for way too long. We have not invested in getting out there and being involved in the great life that takes place in our communities. Social media doesn’t give complete this part of our calling it

only enbables to have a platform to being a deeper engagment with the culture and communities we all seek to bring the good news too.

more thoughts to come…

I don’t know what you are like, but sometimes I just need to read a little bit of exciting news about what God is up to somewhere else in His creation and it re-ignites my spark. This happened to me when I re-read ViralHope. ViralHope was a serious of blog post over at JR Woodward’s blog. The post went for 50 days up to Pentecost. As I avidly followed the post I was overwhelmed by how much we become self focused in our ministry, when sometimes we need to take a step back and remember that we live a big world and God is alive and well. ViralHope is the compiling of these post into a beautiful book that yells of the diversity and beauty of God. Viral Hope is published on the Ecclesia Press which is the publication arm of the Ecclesia Network, a church planting network started by JR, Chris Backert, Jim Pace and a few sundry other friends who love Jesus. If you are interested in learning more about planting churches, or getting networked in a group that is highly thoughtful in it’s practice and execution of church, I highly recommend Ecclesia.

I also highly recommend ViraHope to you. Its a really simple and yet incredibly challenging book. You can read it in one sitting or over a few weeks with a bunch of mates and really grapple with how the gospel is good news to your community. I love the title of the book too I think it captures a very central part of the kingdom of God. The book is full of ragamuffins who are asking great questions about the gospel brings hope to there communities and how it can spread like wild fire throughout the world.

It is available on Amazon and over at Ecclesia Press.

Pieter Hugo was born in 1976 and grew up in Cape Town, where he continues to live. He underwent a two-year residency in 2002-3 at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy.

Let me know what you think it says…

Stories are as old as humankind. Cave paintings going back 25,000 years or more dramatically portray the story of the great Paleolithic hunts undertaken by our earliest ancestors. Glyphs recovered from Mayan pyramids and tombs of the Pharaohs tell a symbolic story of how the view of our place in the cosmos evolved over time. Throughout Celtic Europe, the bards held a place of the highest esteem for their disciplined talent of maintaining and passing on the stories of tribes and clans. The scriptures of our great religions take the form of parable and story, instructing and inspiring us to a higher good. Each of these is an example of how the very foundation of our human existence—the essence of who we are—is reliant on story.

We can safely surmise that without story, there could be no culture and without culture, our species would surely not have survived. How would we have learned to hunt, to gather, to plant, to create the first cities, if it were not for stories? Many so-called ‘primitive’ myths are often no more than stories that teach when to plant and when to harvest. In pre-literate times—the 99.99% of our human existence before the advent of the written word—stories were the primary means of transmitting everyday, practical knowledge from one generation to another. They are how we’ve accumulated and shared our “intellectual capital” for hundreds of generations.

Stories are a priceless culture-shaping tool. They help us to understand how we “fit in” to the larger social order. They are the principal means for transmitting what’s really important to the tribe, the clan, and the community. From stories we learn the very relative notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, what is expected and how we must behave. And we learn—vicariously—the consequences of failure. Fairy Tales are really morality stories that graphically demonstrate to children the consequences of their behavior.

At their best, stories are incredibly persuasive because they ‘speak to us’ at a very meaningful, emotional, and often-unconscious level. When a story makes the hair on the back of our necks tingle it is because that particular story has touched a very deep nerve in our personal or collective psyches.

The ‘storied’ brands and companies know this and they harness the energy of story to their competitive advantage. Nike isn’t just selling sports gear, anymore than Harley-Davidson is just selling motorcycles. Instead they are selling a story, a compelling story that touches us at a very deep and meaningful—and often unconscious—level. It is a story that makes us want to actively participate, to behave in ways that enable us to integrate it into our personal life stories. It is no coincidence that the most popular tattoos in the US feature, in some way, Harley Davidson.

Take Nike as another example. This is not merley a story about athletic gear. Imagine the scene as the 7237th finisher crosses the line at the Boston Marathon. Although spent and exhausted, she smiles weakly at the powerful emotions surrounding her accomplishment. In her own way she knows she is every bit as good as the first place finisher. Nike has not just provided her with shoes; it has facilitated her participation in an age-old story. This is a story of hard work and focused effort, perseverance in the face of pain and the ever-present possibility of defeat. Ultimately it is a story of triumph, however that is personally defined. This is a powerful story and Nike has harnessed it to its obvious competitive advantage.

Stories influence every facet of our lives. They are as ubiquitous as the air we breathe…and as important. Their power is there to harness, if we know the way.