Jordan Rippy

On the way home from New York I read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Inspiring. For those of you who don’t know, Randy Pausch is a college professor who recently found out that he only has three to six months of good health due to pancreatic cancer. This book recaps his last lecture on “How to Achieve Childhood Dreams”. I highly recommend this book. It’s an extremely read. If you’re not a big reader, at least check out the video of Randy’s lecture.

• “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”
• “The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”
• “Sometimes the most impenetrable brick walls are made of flesh.”
• “I know you’re smart. But everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here.”
• “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”
• “Complaining does not work as a strategy.”
• “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
• “When you go into the wilderness, the only thing you can count on is what you take with you.”

While I was in New York I finished reading The Shack by William Young. This book is amazing. It’s a fictional exploration of forgiveness and God’s love. I love how the author describes the relationship of the trinity. Even though I usually wouldn’t include quotes from fiction, a few lines really stood out to me:

• “I suppose that since most of hurts come through relationships so will our healing.”
• “Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book.”
• “I told you for later.”
• “To force my will on you,” Jesus replied, “is exactly what love does not do. Genuine relationships are marked by submission even when your choices are not helpful or healthy.”
• “Judgment is not about destruction, but about setting things right.”
• Learn to live loved.
• “It is not the nature of love to force a relationship but it is the nature of love to open the way.”
• Live in expectancy not expectation.
• If anything matters, than everything matters.

I just finished An Unstoppable Force by Erwin McManus. Probably the most influential book on church leadership and Christian living that I have ever read. I highly recommend it. Allow me to overwhelm you with quotes:

• “Whenever the church is seem through the template of an organization, we begin creating an institution. When we relate to the church as an organism, we begin to awaken an apostolic ethos, which unleashes the movement of God.”
• “The church can only thrive in the context of healthy relationships.”
• Change must not be seen as a necessary evil, but as a God-given tool.
• “The more one focuses on one;s own living, the less one is concerned about giving life to others.”
• “If churches wait to long to die to themselves, then they ensure that they will die by themselves.”
• “One survival has become our supreme goal, we have lost our way.”
• “All too many times we kept our traditions and lost our children.”
• “It is one thing to have a preference; it is another to demand that one’s preferences be honored above the needs of those without Christ.”
• “All the change in the world, minus the heart of God, equal zero movement.”
• “Today the call to cross-culture ministry doesn’t even require going; it just requires staying with a purpose.”
• “We have superficially attributed to generational trends what are in fact worldview shifts.”
• “We are to pitch tents, not build cathedrals.”
• Don’t build monuments, create movements.
• “God calls us to take memories with us, but leave the memorabilia behind.”
• “Many times, we would rather have Godless security than spirit-lead change.”
• “God is continually inviting us to believe that his future is better than any past we have experienced with him.”
• “The reality of change is the promise of miracle.”
• “We must leave the past, engage the present, and create the future.”
• “Values are transferred through relational environments.”
• “it is far more important to shape the values of a community than to set the rules.”
• “The church’s brithright is to be the fountainhead of creativity and human potential.”
• “The danger is going beyond an order of worship to a worship of order!”
• “It’s hard to believe that a movement born of visionaries and dreamers would become dominantly known for its traditions and rituals.”
• “In an organization, leaders must be brought in from the outside. In a movement, leaders emerge from within.”
• “Could we consider that even our death would be an act of faith if the direction of our bodies pointed to the way of God’s future?”
• “What took faith yesterday is sight today.”
• “Faith, love, and hope are not foundations or pillars; they are wellsprings.”
• “Jesus doesn;t call us to love God and tolerate our neighbor.”
• “Serving others with others is the surest path to having your own needs met.”
• “We tend to love the altar so much that we refuse to set it on fire. Yet God comes in the flames.”
• “The incarnation of Jesus Christ is God’s undeniable evidence that relevance to culture is not optional.”
• “After you expound on the purpose, then you expose the problems.”
• “Spiritual leadership in the change process is not so much about being the primary advocate of change but being the primary example of change.”
• “The Ten Commandments are the lowest possible standard of humane living.”
• “Grace has been seen as the liberty to live beneath the law rather than the capacity to soar beyond the law.”
• “When evangelism is not reserved for the elite, kingdom relationships become everyone’s responsibility.”
• “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”
  - Basho

I just finished Emerging Worship by Dan Kimball. Really enjoyed it. I was required to read it a couple of years ago for school, but I didn’t finish it. Anyway, this post is not about the emerging church, it’s about a great book on worship. I really like Kimball’s focus on holistic ministry and multi-sensory worship. I love books that challenge me to think more creatively about worship and leadership. Kimball also has a lot of great things to say about intergenerational relationships and consumer Christianity.

• “Church is the people of God on a mission. (1 Corinthians 12:27; Acts 1:8)”
• “It is dangerous to elevate the [worship] gatherings over true spiritual formation.”
• “We only dishonor the people in a local church and risk creating backlash when we blindly use someone else’s model’.”
• “Biblically, it is important to cultivate intergenerational relationships among believers (Psalm 145:4).”
• “Never mistake motion for action.” - Ernest Hemingway
• “A core value of Vintage Faith church is that we can’t explain what happens with the church by the methodology we use. It can be explained only by the Holy Spirit’s involvement.”
• “Being organic is not being unorganized and chaotic. Anything organic and living is the opposite of random.”
• “Emerging worship expresses love and adoration for God through creativity mixed with theology and artistic expression.”
• “The desire is to avoid developing a dependency upon a person in the worship gathering (or a dependency on a certain personality or style of teaching).”
• “We need time to allow the Spirit to convict or encourage our hearts after the message-rather than rush out the door. We need times where we can intercede for others or get on our knees to confess our sins.”
• “May we never allow the creative design of worship gatherings to push Jesus to the sidelines.”
• “We have lost intergenerational relationships in church by keeping everyone in segmented into programmatic departments.”
• “A sign of unity in a church isn’t if they know the senior pastor, but if they have the same DNA. It isn’t about a person; it is about Jesus Christ.”
• “We have a holy responsibility to decide how money is spent as an act of worship.”

I recently finished reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. The book is Bell’s attempt at articulating what a Christian worldview should look like. I really liked it. I appreciate his historical approach to the life of Jesus, as well as his emphasis on life here on earth, rather than just eternity. Here are some take-aways from the book:

• “For a Christian, Jesus’ teachings aren’t to be followed because they are a nice way to live a moral life. They are to be followed because they are the best possible insight into how the world really works.”
• “Christian = Noun. A person. A person who follows Jesus. A person living in tune with ultimate reality, God. A way of life centered around a person who lives.”
• “A church is a community of people who are learning how to be certain kinds of people wherever they find themselves, so they can do whatever it is they do “in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
• “Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there.”
• “Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.”
• “Your job is relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
• “Sabbath is taking a day a week to remind myself that I did not make the world and that it will continue to exist without my efforts.”
• “We cannot earn what we always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.”
• “For Jesus, this new kind of life in him is not about escaping this world but about making it a better place, here and now.”
• “The goal isn’t escaping this world but making this world the kind of place God can come to.”
• “We cannot live independently of the world God has placed us in.”

Read it. It’ll be good for you. If you’ve already read it I’d love to hear what you thought.

I know most of you out there in the blogosphere marvel in constant wonder of my ability to entertain you via the internet while focusing on my studies and maintaining a healthy marriage. The answer is simple. I do a lot of reading. Also, I don’t focus on my studies. But seriously, you should read. A lot. Here are the next ten book son my reading list:

1. Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell
2. Freakonomics - Levitt and Dubner
3. Divine Conspiracy - Dallas Willard
4. The Leadership Engine - Noel Tichy
5. No Compromise: The Life Story of Keith Green - Green and Hazard
6. The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstin
7. Praise Habit - David Crowder
8. Mindfulness - Ellen Langer
9. The Practice of the Presence of God - Brother Lawrence
10. Spy - Ted Bell

As you may have noticed, I try to cover a wide range of topics and genres. For every ten book I read I try to include spiritual, leadership, history, biography, fiction, and some randomness. If you haven’t already, you should think about creating a reading list for yourself and becoming very intentional about what you’re reading. John Wooden says, “Ten years from now you will be the same person you are today except for the people you’ve met and the books you’ve read.”

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the small, seemingly unimportant details that caused major movements such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues to “Tip”. It’s a great read that highlights the importance of the small details in any major cultural, economic, or behavioral shift. This is a great book for anyone. It sheds light on some aspects of communication and marketing that cause an idea or product to “stick”. Some take-aways from my reading:

• “[John] Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an exampl to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

• “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

• “Persuasion often works in ways we do not appreciate.”

• “The lesson of stickiness is that there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

• “The power of context says that what really matters is little things.”

• “If you add up the meaning of the Stanford prison experiment and the New York subway experiment, they suggest that it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.”

• “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”

• “When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable.”

• “If anyone wants to start an epidemic…he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the innovators into something the rest of us can understand.”

I have a test in Hymnology today at 8am. Yes, this class is as bad as the text title would suggest. It is a class surveying hymnody. Rest assured, these are not the cute, inspiring stories you hear of Johan so-and-so writing “Tis So Sweet” under the harshest of circumstances while curled up in the hull of a ship during an unsurvivable storm. The questions I will be answering today will be more along the lines of, “What was the pattern and metrical structure of the Geneva songs?” My motivation for actually attending this class tomorrow is that I know it will allow me to become a better person graduate.