Camping and Framing

We went camping at Lake Degray this past weekend with Mike and Kay AND they started framing the house. Check out the pictures at http://community.webshots.com/user/christopher_ellis

a new Ellis

Well it's happened....we got a dog. Her name is Britian (surprised?) and she's a 6 week old weimariner. She'll get to be about 65lbs. They're smart, loyal, entergetic and fun.

We haven't slept much since we got her because she cries at night when we put her in the cage at night. Oh well. At least it's not a baby.

Life here in LR is going well. Liz is taking 13 hrs for her FNP degree and I'm in the midst of planning outreach and misison events for the church. The house is coming along well - here's the latest picture of it

Here in Little Rock

Sorry it's been a while since I have updated my blog and been around in the "blog world," life has been crazy since we've moved. We're starting our fourth week here and those weeks have seemed like a whirlwind.
We're living in an apartment while our house in the downtown area is being built (hopefully only 6 months). The Apartment is pretty much a hobbit hole, but there aren't;t any hobbits just lot's of cockroaches. I even had one crawl across my face while I was sleeping!! This apartment make The Lair look like the Hilton!
I just got back from a week on the Gulf Coast where we were doing home restoration for homes damaged by Katrina. Trips are always the best way to get to know people, I feel like I have 40 new friends.
I working on several things here at the church.
- The biggest priority is creating a outreach plan and team to visit guests who have visited our church. At first I was a little leery of doing this, but they have given me complete freedom in the creation process. Put it this way, we're not going to show up at doors and bash people over the head with the gospel. I'm looking at this as a way to start a conversation that might take place over weeks, months or years. We just want to stop[ by for a few minutes and thank people for visiting and to welcome them back.
- I've also started planning a trip to South Africa to work with aids orphans in Johannesburg.
- I'm trying to get every person in this church to see Mission as where they are, be it the grocery store, at home or on the Gulf Coast.
- I'm also continuing to facilitate the church's Mission efforts in Helena AR (top 20 poorest counties in the US) , and along the Gulf Coast.

Liz is doing well. She takes the GRE on Friday and she might even get the opportunity to start school this fall!

Grand Canyon

One of the things I wanted to do while i was living in NM was to go to the Grand Canyon. I went when i was in 10th grade, but I;ve wanted to go back. I'm glad I did.

While i was at the GC i couldn't help but think of God creating the world. I really don't care if it was a literal seven days or a couple of million years. The point is: God created out of nothing. Not only did God create, but he continues to create. God is what sustains creation. If he were to take his hand away, we/creation woud cease to exisit. His grace sustains us. Being there also reminds me that creation is Holy. It's not holy in and of itself, but it's holy because God creates it and as the psalmist says, its the footstole of God. You can't help but be reminded of that when you see the GC. For more puctures you can go to http://community.webshots.com/user/christopher_ellis-date

New Job and Home

Liz and i just got back from a whirlwind trip to Little Rock. This was the last of the official hoops for us to jump through before our move to Little Rock, July 1st. We met with both the personnel committee and missions committee and they are both excited about us coming. Liz met with UAMS where she will work on her FNP degree (assuming she gets in, but I'm not worried about that).


Matt (the pastor), created a rather long and ambitious job description for me. Here it is, it's long so you might want to skim,:

1. Plan, coordinate, or direct all church wide local mission efforts in conjunction with the Missions Committee.
2. Plan, coordinate, or direct all church wide distance mission efforts in conjunction with the Mission Committee.
3. Serve as staff liaison to the Missions Committee.
4. Coordinate and resource all individual and small group local mission efforts
5. Work alongside the youth ministry team mission coordinators to create mission opportunities for students at 2bc.
6. Develop, maintain, and communicate to the congregation a comprehensive partnership list for individual and group mission efforts in Little Rock.
7. Develop, maintain, and communicate to the congregation a detailed mission opportunities catalog for individual and group distance mission efforts.
8. Select, develop, and execute an ongoing church wide effort to help individual church members discover and utilize their spiritual giftedness inside and outside the Church.
9. Work with the rest of the pastoral staff to share giftedness profiles for involvement in arenas outside of mission and outreach.
10. In conjunction with the Minister of Senior Adults help maintain and streamline all day to day benevolence efforts at 2bc.
11. Alongside the Pastor, be the lead visionary and source of responsibility/accountability for the church’s calling to join in God’s mission for the world.
12. Serve as staff liaison to Willing Hands and help coordinate their involvement in mission efforts
13. Serve as staff liaison in 2bc’s ongoing disaster relief efforts
14. Work closely with CBF of Arkansas staff as needed to help expand our mission involvement with that organization, and help that organization multiply its mission efforts.

Outreach

15. Plan and coordinate the outreach efforts of the church
1. Coordinate staff efforts in outreach
2. Plan, implement and maintain lay leadership development in the area of community/outreach, etc.
3. Design, implement and manage a comprehensive follow up process for guests
4. Coordinate staff efforts in brainstorming and implementing various outreach events, efforts, etc. throughout the course of each year.
16. Lead staff in the utilization of appropriate software tools for outreach logistics
17. Design, implement, and maintain a new member orientation process
18. Coordinate use of Second Baptist Church facilities as a point of outreach with the Greater Little Rock community
19. Direct a staff team that gives special attention to outreach/ministry targeted at young adults at Second including college, singles, and people in their 20-30’s.
20. Work alongside the coordinator of Second Place Café to utilize this monthly event to promote outreach with a special emphasis upon outreach to the downtown community and the Arts community of Greater Little Rock.
21. Alongside the rest of the Pastoral Staff, be a visionary and source of responsibility/accountability for the church’s calling to provide opportunities for people to connect with God in a faith relationship.

Other

22. Serve in appropriate teaching/discipleship capacities
23. As a member of the pastoral staff, and under the leadership of the pastor, provide general leadership in the three callings of the church not directly under your supervision: worship, discipleship, community.
24. Other duties as assigned by the pastor.

I'm most excited about getting the church involved with what God is doing in the world, in both the local and international contexts, and creating an outreach program for those who are loosely connected with Second. This job is going to stretch me; I'm assuming that if God has called us there, he is going to equip us.

Liz and i are also moving into the downtown community to live with the people we will be ministering among, which includes a relatively diverse socioeconomic population including the very poor and the very rich. The area is in the process of being gentrified, so in order to live there we are having to build (we can't afford an existing home) a home that meets all the physical characteristics of the downtown community . Here's two pictures of what ours will look like

Da Vinci Code

I recently finished reading The Da Vinci Code and thought it was a great fictional novel. However, some of my fellow believers think it's a moral imperative that we rebuke and disassociate ourselves from it because they dislike some of the "facts" Dan Brown Presents. Anyways, here is an interview with Brian Mclaren about what he thinks about the novel, and i think he's right on.

CULTURE WATCH

Brian McLaren on The Da Vinci Code

An interview by Lisa Ann Cockrel

With The Da Vinci Code poised to go from bestseller list to the big screen on May 19, pastor and writer (and Sojourners board member) Brian McLaren talks about why he thinks there's truth in the controversial book's fiction.

What do you think the popularity of The Da Vinci Code reveals about pop culture attitudes toward Christianity and the church?

Brian McLaren: I think a lot of people have read the book, not just as a popular page-turner but also as an experience in shared frustration with status-quo, male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone organized Christian religion. We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church. Why would so many people be disappointed to find that Brown's version of Jesus has been largely discredited as fanciful and inaccurate, leaving only the church's conventional version? Is it possible that, even though Brown's fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?

So you think The Da Vinci Code taps into dissatisfaction with Jesus as we know him?

McLaren: For all the flaws of Brown's book, I think what he's doing is suggesting that the dominant religious institutions have created their own caricature of Jesus. And I think people have a sense that that's true. It's my honest feeling that anyone trying to share their faith in America today has to realize that the Religious Right has polluted the air. The name "Jesus" and the word "Christianity" are associated with something judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, etc. Many of our churches, even though they feel they represent the truth, actually are upholding something that's distorted and false.

I also think that the whole issue of male domination is huge and that Brown's suggestion that the real Jesus was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive. Brown's book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and it is exposing organized religion's grasping for power. Again, there's something in that that people resonate with in the age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. As a follower of Jesus I resonate with their concerns as well.

Do you think the book contains any significantly detrimental distortions of the Christian faith?

McLaren: The book is fiction and it's filled with a lot of fiction about a lot of things that a lot of people have already debunked. But frankly, I don't think it has more harmful ideas in it than the Left Behind novels. And in a certain way, what the Left Behind novels do, the way they twist scripture toward a certain theological and political end, I think Brown is twisting scripture, just to other political ends. But at the end of the day, the difference is I don't think Brown really cares that much about theology. He just wanted to write a page-turner and he was very successful at that.

Many Christians are also reading this book and it's rocking their preconceived notions - or lack of preconceived notions - about Christ's life and the early years of the church. So many people don't know how we got the canon, for example. Should this book be a clarion call to the church to say, "Hey, we need to have a body of believers who are much more literate in church history." Is that something the church needs to be thinking about more strategically?

McLaren: Yes! You're exactly right. One of the problems is that the average Christian in the average church who listens to the average Christian broadcasting has such an oversimplified understanding of both the Bible and of church history - it would be deeply disturbing for them to really learn about church history. I think the disturbing would do them good. But a lot of times education is disturbing for people. And so if The Da Vinci Code causes people to ask questions and Christians have to dig deeper, that's a great thing, a great opportunity for growth. And it does show a weakness in the church giving either no understanding of church history or a very stilted, one-sided, sugarcoated version.

On the other hand, it's important for me to say I don't think anyone can learn good church history from Brown. There's been a lot of debunking of what he calls facts. But again, the guy's writing fiction so nobody should be surprised about that. The sad thing is there's an awful lot of us who claim to be telling objective truth and we actually have our own propaganda and our own versions of history as well.

Let me mention one other thing about Brown's book that I think is appealing to people. The church goes through a pendulum swing at times from overemphasizing the deity of Christ to overemphasizing the humanity of Christ. So a book like Brown's that overemphasizes the humanity of Christ can be a mirror to us saying that we might be underemphasizing the humanity of Christ.

In light of The Da Vinci Code movie that is soon to be released, how do you hope churches will engage this story?

McLaren: I would like to see churches teach their people how to have intelligent dialogue that doesn't degenerate into argument. We have to teach people that the Holy Spirit works in the middle of conversation. We see it time and time again - Jesus enters into dialogue with people; Paul and Peter and the apostles enter into dialogue with people. We tend to think that the Holy Spirit can only work in the middle of a monologue where we are doing the speaking.

So if our churches can encourage people to, if you see someone reading the book or you know someone who's gone to the movie, say, "What do you think about Jesus and what do you think about this or that," and to ask questions instead of getting into arguments, that would be wonderful. The more we can keep conversations open and going the more chances we give the Holy Spirit to work. But too often people want to get into an argument right away. And, you know, Jesus has handled 2,000 years of questions, skepticism, and attacks, and he's gonna come through just fine. So we don't have to be worried.

Ultimately, The Da Vinci Code is telling us important things about the image of Jesus that is being portrayed by the dominant Christian voices. [Readers] don't find that satisfactory, genuine, or authentic, so they're looking for something that seems more real and authentic.

Lisa Ann Cockrel is associate editor at Today's Christian Woman.