"How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built"

What a great  book tip Scott Singer gave me: "How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built" by Stewart Brand.
Can't wait.
 Here's some links, and the BBC special based on the book:

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built ...

www.amazon.com 

How Buildings Learn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"You Have to Pay for Public Life"

Hmm, why didn't I know abut this imagined Treble Cleft Freeway leading into the Hollywood Bowl..or

Musical roads ?

Anyway,  on to the catch of the day..

Here (page 111-141)  in a PDF of a  book of selected essays of Charles W Moore, is Moore's seminal, prescient  1965 essay  "You Have to Pay for Public Life"(from Perspecta, the architectural journal of Yale)..




If that goes offline,  the complete essay, minus a few sentences, is  here  :pp 93-103.
Also: 112-141 here  some pages missing, including the first (part of which is here).  


--
Excerpt:

This issue of Perspecta considers monumental architecture as part of the urban scene. I was asked to ferret out some on the West Coast, especially in California. Perspecta’s editors suspected, I presume, that I would discover that in California there is no contemporary monumental architecture, or that there is no urban scene (except in a sector of San Francisco), or more probably, that both monumental architecture and the urban scene are missing. Their suspicions were well founded; any discussion from California in 1964 about monumental urban architecture (as it is coming to exist, for instance, in New Haven) is bound to be less about what we have than about what we have instead. 

Any discussion of monumental architecture in its urban setting should proceed from a definition of (or, if you prefer, an airing of prejudice about) what constitutes “monumental,” and what “urban” means to us. The two adjectives are closely related: both of them involve the individual’s giving up something, space or money or prominence or concern, to the public realm. Monumentality, I take it, has to do with monuments. And a monument is an object whose function is to mark a place, either at that place’s boundary or at its heart. There are, of course, private monuments, over such places as the graves of the obscure, but to merit our attention here, and to be of any interest to most of the people who view it, a monument must mark a place of more than private importance or interest. The act of marking is then a public act, and the act of recognition an expectable public act among the members of the society which possesses the place. Monumentality, considered this way, is not a product of compositional techniques (such as symmetry about several axes), of flamboyance of form, or even of conspicuous consumption of space, time, or money. It is, rather, a function of the society’s taking possession of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the earth’s surface, and of the society’s celebrating their pre-eminence.

A version of this agreement and this celebration was developed by Jose Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, into a definition of urbanity itself. “The urbs or polis,” he says, “starts by being an empty space, the forum, the agora, and all the rest is just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its outlines. The square, thanks to the walls that enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest, and sets up in opposition to it.

Ortega y Gasset’s product is the city, the urban unit based upon the Mediterranean open square, a politically as well as physically comprehensible unit that people used to be willing to die for. The process of achieving an urban focus is the same as that of achieving monumentality: it starts with the selection, by some inhabitants, of a place which is to be of particular importance, and continues when they invest that place with attributes of importance, such as edges or some kind of marker. This process, the establishing of cities and the marking of important places, constitutes most of the physical part of establishing civilization. Charles Eames has made the point that the crux of this civilizing process is the giving up by individuals of something in order that the public realm may be enhanced. In the city, that is to say, urban and monumental places, indeed urbanity and monumentality themselves, can occur only when something is given over by people to the public.

Planners have a way of starting every speech by articulating their (private) discovery that the public body’s chief concern is people. The speech then says unrelatedly that it’s too bad the sprawling metropolis is so formless. It might well be that if the shibboleth about people were turned inside out, if planning efforts went toward enlarging people’s concerns—and sacrifices— for the public realm, that the urban scene would more closely approach the planners’ vision, and that the pleasures of the people would be better served.

The most evident thing about Los Angeles, especially, and the other new cities of the West is that in the terms of any of the traditions we have  inherited, hardly anybody gives anything to the public realm. Instead, it is not at all clear what the public realm consists of, or even, for the time being, who needs it. What is clear is that civic amenities of the sort architects think of as “monumental,” which were highly regarded earlier in the century, are of much less concern today. A frivolous but pointed example is the small city of Atascadero, which lies in a particularly handsome coastal valley between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was first developed in the ‘20s as a realestate venture with heavy cultural overtones and extensive architectural amplification. Extraordinarily ambitious “monumental” architecture popped up all over the townsite. Buildings of a vague Italian Romanesque persuasion with a classic revival touch, symmetrical about several axes, faced onto wide malls punctuated or terminated by Canovesque sculpture groups. The effect was undeniably grand, if a bit surreal, exploiting wide grassy vistas among the dense California oaks. But there wasn’t much of a town until the ‘40s. Then, on the major mall, an elaborately sunken panel of irrigated green, there cropped up a peninsula of fill surmounted by a gas station. Later, there came another, and more recently an elevated freeway has continued the destruction of the grand design. All this has happened during the very period in which Philadelphians, with staggering energy and expense, have been achieving in their Center City long malls north from Independence Hall and west from a point just off their City Hall, grand vistas at every scale, an architectural expression overwhelmingly serene, all urban desiderata which the Atascaderans did not especially want or need, and have been blithely liquidating. Doesn’t this liquidation constitute some sort of crime against the public? Before we start proceedings, we should consider what the public realm is, or rather, what it might be in California now and during the decades ahead, so that the “monumentality” and the “urbanity” that we seek may be appropriate as functions of our own society and not of some other one. 

In California cities, as in new cities all over the country (and in California just about all cities are new cities), the pattern of buildings on the land is as standard as it is explosive. Everywhere near population centers, new little houses surrounded by incipient lawns appear. They could be said to be at the edge of the city, except that there is no real edge, thanks to the speed of growth, the leapfrogging of rural areas, and the long commercial fingers thatfollow the highways out farther than the houses have yet reached. Meanwhile, in areas not much older, houses are pulled down as soon as zoning regulations allow, to be replaced with apartments whose only amenity is a location handily near a garage in the basement. 

The new houses are separate and private, it has been pointed out: islands, alongside which are moored the automobiles that take the inhabitants off to other places. It might be more useful and more accurate to note that the houses and the automobiles are very much alike, and that each is very like the mobile homes which share both their characteristics. All are fairly new, and their future is short; all are quite standard, but have allowed their buyers the agonies of choice, demonstrating enough differences so that they can readily be identified during the period of ownership, and so that the sense of privacy is complete, in the car as well as in the house. This is privacy with at least psychic mobility. The houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. They are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached. They are less islands alongside which the cars are moored than little yachts, dwarfed by the great chrome-trimmed dinghys that seek their lee.

 This is, after all, a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity; one need almost never go ashore. There are the drive-in banks, the drive-in movies, the drive-in shoe repair. There is even, in Marin County, Frank Lloyd Wright’s drive-in Civic Center, a structure of major biographical and perhaps historical importance, about whose forms a great deal of surprisingly respectful comment has already appeared in the press. Here, for a county filling up with adjacent and increasingly indistinguishable suburban communities, quite without a major center, was going to be the center for civic activities, the public realm, one would have supposed, for which a number of public-spirited leaders in the community had fought long and hard. It might have been, to continue our figure, a sort of dock to which our floating populace might come, monumental in that it marked a special place which was somewhere and which, for its importance, was civic if not urban. But instead of a dock for floating suburbanites, it is just another ship, much larger than most, to be sure, and presently beached (wedged, in fact) between two hills. It demands little of the people who float by, and gives them little back.  allows them to penetrate its interior from a point on its underside next to the delivery entrance, but further relations are discouraged, and lingering is most often the result of inability to find the exit.

A monster of equivalent rootlessness hoves into view from the freeway entrance to California's one established anchored city, San Francisco. The immense new Federal Building just being completed by John Carl Warnecke and a host of associated architects, stands aloof from the city's skyline, out of scale with it, unrelated to anything in the topography, no part even of the grandiose civic center nearby. 


Slick details, giant fountains, and all, it draws back from the street and just stands there. It is one of the West's largest filing cabinets, and it is unfair, of course, to expect from  it any attributes of the public realm for it, some distant bureaucrats would spitefully have removed it to Oakland.  So much for the Federal Heart of the City.



...It is interesting, if not useful, to consider where one would go in Los Angeles to have an effective revolution of the Latin American sort: presumably, that place would be the heart of the city. If one took over some public square, some urban open space in Los Angeles, who would know? A march on City Hall would be equally inconclusive. The heart of the city would have to be sought elsewhere. The only hope would seem to be to take over the freeways, or to emplane for New York to organize sedition on Madison Avenue; word would quickly enough get back..

...More recent years have their monuments as well. Indeed, by almost any conceivable method of evaluation that does not exclude the public, Disneyland must be regarded as the most important single piece of construction in the West in the past several decades. The assumption inevitably made by people who have not yet been there—that it is some sort of physical extension of Mickey Mouse—is wildly inaccurate. Instead, singlehanded, it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable (unless by our revolution test it turns out to be on Manhattan Island). Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is not free. You buy tickets at the gate. But then, Versailles cost someone a great deal of money, too. Now, as then, you have to pay for the public life.

Disneyland, it appears, is enormously important and successful just because it recreates all the chances to respond to a public environment, which Los Angeles particularly does not any longer have. It allows play-acting, both to be watched and to be participated in, in a public sphere. In as unlikely a place as could be conceived, just off the Santa Ana Freeway, a little over an hour from the Los Angeles City Hall, in an unchartable sea of suburbia, Disney has created a place, indeed a whole public world, full of sequential occurrences, of big and little drama, of hierarchies of importance and excitement, with opportunities to respond at the speed of rocketing bobsleds (or rocketing rockets, for all that) or of horse-drawn street cars. An American Main Street of about 1910 is the principal theme, against which play fairy-tale fantasies, frontier adventure situations, jungles, and the world of tomorrow. And all this diversity, with unerring sensitivity, is keyed to the kind of participation without embarrassment which apparently at this point in our history we crave. (This is not the point, nor am I the appropriate critic, to analyze our society’s notions of entertainment, but certainly a civilization whose clearest recent image of feminine desirability involves scantily dressed and extravagantly formed young ladies—occasionally with fur ears—who disport themselves with wildest abandon in gaudily make-believe bordellos, while they perforce maintain the deportment of vestal virgins—certainly a civilization which seeks this sort of image is in need of pretty special entertainment.) No raw edges spoil the  picture at Disneyland; everything is as immaculate as in the musical comedy villages that Hollywood has provided for our viewing pleasure for the last three generations. Nice-looking, handsomely costumed young people sweep away the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement. Everything works, the way it doesn’t seem to any more in the world outside. As I write this, Berkeley, which was the proud recipient not long ago of a set of fountains in the middle of its main street, where interurbans once had run and cars since had parked, has announced that the fountains are soon being turned off for good, since the chief public use developed for them so far as been to put detergent in them, and the city cannot afford constantly to clean the pipes. Life is not like that in Disneyland; it is much more real: fountains play, waterfalls splash, tiny bulbs light the trees at night, and everything is clean....

 Of course Disneyland, in spite of the skill and variety of its enchantments, does not offer the full range of public experience. The political experience, for instance, is not manifested here, and the place would not pass our revolution test. Yet there is a variety of forms and activities great enough to ensure an excellent chance that the individual visitor will find something to identify with. A strong contrast is the poverty or absurdity of single images offered up by architects, presumably as part of an elaborate (and expensive) ingroup professional joke. The brown-derby-shaped Brown Derbies of an earlier generation, which at least were recognizable by the general public, have given way to such phenomena as the new Coachella Valley Savings and Loan in Palm Springs which rises out of vacant lots to repeat Niemeyer’s Palace of the Dawn, in Brasilia. Across the street from this, a similar institution pays similar in-group tribute to Ronchamp. The most conspicuous entry in this category of searches after monumentality, though, is architect Edward Durrell Stone’s revisitation of Mussolini’s Third Rome in Beverly Hills. This one has plants growing out of each aerial arch. Apparently there was a plethora of these arches, for they crop up again along Wilshire Boulevard, as far away as Westwood Village without, however, contributing much continuity to that thoroughfare...

...A chain of Disneylands would have a disquieting effect not unlike that of the new transcontinental chains of identical motels that weigh the tired traveler with the hopelessness of driving all day to arrive at a place just like the one he started from. One can hope, too, for the day when the gradual loss of differentiated place, the gradual merging of the gray no-places and the inundation of the places of special significance, will cause the slumbering citizenry to awaken, to demand to spend its money to have a public life. But it seems unwise to wait for that.

 Right now the largest single patron available to be pressed into the service of the public realm is the State Highway Department. Freeways until now have been one of the most serious generalizers of place in the state, ruthlessly and thoughtlessly severing some communities, congesting others, and obliterating still others, marring, gouging, and wiping out whole landscapes. Yet, for all that, they loom large in the public eye as one of the biggest, strongest, most exciting, and most characteristic elements of the new California. If one had to name the center of southern California, it would surely be the place not far from the Los Angeles City Hall where the area’s major freeways wrap together in a graceful, strong, and much photographed three-level interchange (in the photographs, the tower of the City Hall rises through the distant smog). Much of the public excitement about San Francisco’s small dramatic skyline is a function of the capacity to see it, a capacity which is greatly enhanced by the bridges (themselves major California monuments), by the freeways that lead to them, and now by the freeway that comes up from the south and breaks through the hills in the nick of time for a magnificent view of San Francisco. Indeed, in San Francisco as in few places, the view which gives a sense of the whole city is one of the most valuable parts of the public realm, one of the parts that is most frequently attacked and must be most zealously defended. One of the public views’ most effective defenders could be the freeway builders, though admittedly, they have more often acted as  saboteurs, as when they tried and partly succeeded, in San Francisco, in building a freeway wall between the city and the bay.

I am writing this in Guanajuato, a middle-sized town in the middle of Mexico, crammed into a narrow canyon, with just two narrow streets (one up and one down) in the bottom of the canyon, and with a maze of stepped pedestrian ways climbing up the canyon’s slopes through the most remorselessly picturesque townscape this side of Greece. Under this runs a river, which used to inundate the city from time to time. Ten years ago a suburban portion of the river was still further depressed, and its former bed was lined with a handsome pink stone to serve as a canyon for cars, moving downhill above the river. Now, in a bold project happily called “the urbanization of the river,” this development is being continued through the center of the town to let the river run with cars as well as water, sometimes behind buildings, sometimes under the ancient vaults over which the buildings of the town center spanned the river bed. None of the picturesque eighteenth-century delights is being threatened; a whole new twentieth-century layer of visual delights, at the scale of the automobile, is being added instead. The urbanity that results from this enlargement of the public realm is even more striking than the visual charm. The pedestrian spaces remain undefiled, even unattacked, while cars grind below, as in a miniature of a Hugh Ferris City of the Future that loses, miraculously, none of the delights of the past.

 Guanajuato should offer us some lessons. The cities of California are much bigger, broader, and grayer, but then their budgets are larger, too (especially the items for freeway construction). They urgently need attention, before the characteristics that distinguish them at all are obliterated. There is no need and no time to wait for a not-yet-existent Establishment to build us the traditional kind of monuments or for a disaster gripping enough to wake the public conscience to the vanishing Places of the public realm we got for free. Most effectively, we might, as architects, first seek to develop a vocabulary of forms responsive to the marvelously complex and varied functions of our society, instead of continuing to impose the vague generalizations with which we presently add to the grayness of the suburban sea. Then, we might start sorting out for our special attention those things for which the public has to  pay, from which might derive the public life. These things would not be the city halls and equestrian statues of another place and time, but had better be something far bigger and better, and of far more public use. They might, for instance, be freeways: freeways are not for individual people, like living rooms are and like confused planners would have you believe the whole city ought to be; they are for the public use, a part of the public realm; and if the fidgety structures beside them and the deserts for parking—or for nothing—under them don’t yet make sense, it is surely because there has so far been too little provision for and contribution to and understanding of the public realm, not too much. The freeways could be the real monuments of the future, the places set aside for special celebration by people able to experience space and light and motion and relationships to other people and things at a speed that so far only this century has allowed. Here are structures big enough and strong enough, once they are regarded as a part of the city, to re-excite the public imagination about the city. This is no shame to be covered by suburban bushes or quarantined behind cyclone fences. It is the marker for a place set in motion, transforming itself to another place. The exciting prospects, not surprisingly, show up best at Disneyland. There, on the inside of the Matterhorn from the aerial tramway over the bobsled run on the inside of the plastic mountain, is a vision of a place marked out for the public life, of a kind of rocketing monumentality, more dynamic, bigger, and, who knows? even more useful to people and the public than any the world has seen yet.
Link, p 111-141

"American public space is theistic and moral, but not Christian or spiritual."

"American public space 
is theistic and moral,
                            but not Christian or spiritual..

Many Christians founded America, 
but the public space
                            is not Christian, and it's not spiritual"
-H. Spees, p 218, 222 in "Street Saints:Renewing America's Cities"

Many implications here.  Start by reading the quoues in context here

laundromat as third place

Check out the NPR story: laundromat as third places

A Growing Movement To Spread Faith, Love — And Clean Laundry 

For more, talk to our awesome friend Kathleen Bergon Green

NY Times Travel article on thin places

NY Times Travel article on thin places:

TRAVEL, like life, is best understood backward but must be experienced forward, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. After decades of wandering, only now does a pattern emerge. I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places.

Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

It’s not clear who first uttered the term “thin places,” but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.

So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.

Thin places are often sacred ones ... 

but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. I love airports. I love their self-contained, hermetic quality, and the way they make me feel that I am floating, suspended between coming and going. One of my favorites is Hong Kong International, a marvel of aesthetics and efficiency. I could spend hours — days! — perched on its mezzanine deck, watching life unfold below. Kennedy Airport, on the other hand, is, for the most part, a thick place. Spread out over eight terminals,  there is no center of gravity, nothing to hold on to. (Nor is there anything the least bit transcendent about a T.S.A. security line.) 

....A bar can be a thin place, too...

....Bookstores are thin places, too..

To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one...
 

...If God (however defined) is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin?
Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked.  link

Mia Cuppa Cafe: moving Kim Kardashian to the back room

As you can see by the pics, our brilliant  friends Mark  and Weendy DeRaud (see posts tagged "Mark" below for posts on his art and his cultural commentary) have bought The Revue, a local coffee shop..Great article in the local paper..I can't believe they left the Kim Kardashian quote in! (:  Several reminders in this article about "ecclesiology as it should be":

Eating Out: Tower District's Revue Cafe becomes Mia Cuppa Cafe

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/10/21/3565512/new-owners-take-over-tower-district.html#storylink=cpy

Longtime coffee shop Revue Cafe has new ownership and a new name — but it's still the same old Tower District hangout.

The business was renamed the Mia Cuppa Caffe after local artist Mark DeRaud and his wife, Wendy, purchased it in September.

DeRaud originally thought they'd make some big changes, "paint everything and make everything bright and shiny." But the more he learned about "the Revue community" and the coffee shop's history, the more he wanted to keep the things that give the 16-year-old cafe its personality.

"There aren't too many places like this in Fresno," he says. "We're more like stewards of what the Revue already was."

DeRaud likes to use the term community because there's a bit of a blurred line between customers and workers here. Take the guy who puts out the tables and hoses off the patio every morning. He's not an employee. He's a customer who's just there at that time every morning and does it.

Once DeRaud pulled up with a load of stuff in his truck and three guys jumped up to help him without asking. He asked them why they were so quick to help.
"They just look at me and go, 'It's the Revue.'"

The gaggle of smokers on the patio who are die-hard regulars act as consultants, weighing in on what DeRaud should change and what he shouldn't.

Coffee is at the top of the list of changes. DeRaud says Revue used to serve Costco coffee. Now it's serving locally made coffee from several places, including Fresno-based Fabiano's Coffee, which you may have had at the Vineyard Farmers Market. Their "black magic" coffee — strong, but not bitter — is proving popular at Mia Cuppa.

It also carries coffee from Mariposa Coffee Co. and Fresno's Lanna Coffee, which donates a portion of its sales to community development efforts with "hill tribes" in northern Thailand.

It may seem counterintuitive to change the coffee shop's name when you want to retain the essence of the place. But DeRaud says he hopes the name change is a signal to people to come back and try out the coffee again.

The cold, noncoffee drinks remain and they'll soon add bottled drinks for people on the go. The light lunches and pastries continue, though the croissants and mini danishes are now from La Boulangerie.

DeRaud will add a little breakfast sandwich that he invented: a poached egg, ham and cheese cooked in a cup and then served on a bagel or English muffin.
DeRaud looks every bit like you'd imagine an artist/coffee shop owner would: gray newsboy cap, cardigan, soft-spoken. He did the murals inside Irene's restaurant and Me-N-Ed's around Fresno.

So it's no surprise that one of the first changes he made was to put up some local art. The big paintings now hanging on the wall are by local boy Dan Vanderhoof, who is in school in Kansas City to become a professional illustrator.

He hopes Mia Cuppa will become a regular ArtHop stop. And they'll probably get more use out of the performance space in back, too, swapping out the theater chairs for tables.

Another noticeable change? Kim Kardashian is going away. That's what DeRaud calls the large bar and counter.

"It has great curves, but it's kind of useless and in the way," he says.
Kim will be moved to the back room and a new bar made from solid oak doors will replace it. LINK

  LInk

Placehacking: Woodward Avenue Church

photo credit and story

More info on placehacking

magazine office/tutoring center/pirate supply store

Dave Eggers at TED:

"#@!!^ing Church!!"

(buy the shirt here)

Well, this is a first...my last three posts all included a word like #$%^!
Well. mom, I am just quoting other people's %#@@ing posts, OK? (:

This one, from wonderful Wade Hodges, is hugely helpful, as our church community may well be taking the exact same leap as Wade's (meeting in a coffee shop), and facing the same problem/opportunity of people wandering/wondering in, thinking it's a coffee shop, an being partly right.

Great post, read it all at this click. How could you not after reading the last line:

By the way, I’ve heard people curse as they walk out of church before, but it’s usually after they hear my sermon, not before.

Uncle Ernie at Uncle Harry's

I don't want to come off as an
Uncle Ernie (my generation will pick up the reference)
at Uncle Harry's..

But when the young female employee of Uncle Harry's leaned back in the couch-chair uncomfortably next to me
and cascaded her hair to within inches of my arm..

(don't worry, this is NOT a photo I took of her, but a pic I googled up for this post so you can imagine the scene with me!)

a few thoughts hit me.

One, "what's up with this...she is breaking so many rules about personal-private space."


Or was she?

I was at Uncle Harry's... local bagelry/coffee shop; waiting on Keltic Ken from our ekklesia-thing. So I sat down in the corner in one of two overstuffed chairs around a small round table; obviously a table for two.

I set my water bottle and a book on the table stategically in front of the other chair;
and noted there was also a newspaper on the chair.

It was obvious to me I was saving the seat.

But not to Charity (not her real name).

To my surprise, without even acknowledging me (I was reading...of course), she simply moved the newspaper and sprawled out to relax a bit.

I didn't bother to tell her the seat was saved;

..But in a few minutes I was almost wondering if I was.

I had been praying about opportunities to talk to people in the marketplace and coffee shops;
truly wanting to meet and accept people where they are...

..but not often taking the initiative to actually do it.



I simply prayed and wondered what was up.

When I told this story to our Thursday afternoon group, a sister was convinced the young lady was flirting with me.

I don't believe it..and besides, I am old guy!

Another sister in her twenties agreed with me...a bit too readily(:

But she got the point that Creps has made well about the younger/postmodern natives:

They have completely different culture and worldview about private/public space.

Especially regarding cell phones, which is what she pulled out next..

And left a message with her name, number, and personal details about her life for the voicemail she got.

I felt a little embarrassed.

She did not.

I do not even know that she knew I was there..

..even though her hair was now almost in my face, and I felt like a stalker.

In my day, that would have definitely have been a come-on.
Even in the zero percent chance that it was (see "Sexual energy drives the engines at church")...

I was praying that if I was called to say something to her before this was all over:

"Hi, The Lord told me your name is _____, and your phone number is ______, and...."

(:

More likely something inocuous and pre-evangelistic like:

"How do you enjoy working here?"

or

"You pagan dork, can't you tell I am saving that seat? Besides, I now know your phone number and will crank-call you!"

(:

But I also


realized that she was taking a break from work in her workspace instead of the back room.
That, too, is typical of the new generations..especially if they work in a Third Place.
We would have never done that at Sambo's back in the day; huge separation of work and break.



She even called out help to customers who were looking for cups while she was on the cell phone talking about..

Anyway..

the vignette was a reminder to me that I really was called to bless and minister in this type of setting, not just blog about it.



I might have said something to her, but just then my bud came in, and she got up to get back to work..

And i am back to work, knowing I must press on in "planting my bench outside the box," living missiomally, making myself missionally available with a ready compassion to real people and real places..

Even if "all I do" is pray..
(and talk to strange people at Jack in the Box)

I have been praying for you, Charity.


..or praying to pray for you.

Maybe Ken and I will just set up a bench outside my house and offer free coffee..

There is good biblical precedent for going after sheep/goats and not waiting for them to come to us, so we can get their butts in a pew.

Bullets in the Bethlehem Bible College Sign

I finally grabbed a photo of the Bethlehem Bible College sign...with bullet holes in it.
It is a stunning site and sign; it provokes a holy hush in me.
It teaches me to pray.

It is tied with this photo and this one for the pictures that
mess me up the most, and catapult me back to the Kingdom and reality (which E. Stanley Jones surprisingly says are the same thing!). If I keep looking, I might even grieve that I don't grieve; and thus start grieving!!

The picture is worth a thousand words; but if you want my thousand word commentary on it, click:

Sweaters and Third Places with Bullet Holes

Then get off your knees, and become an answer to God's prayer.
Let's be lovers in this dangerous time;
and bleed daylight
in Bethlehem.

I will post video of our amazing time at the Bible College soon.

Pax out.

--

• PS: Later addition: video interview with Bishara Awad, president of the college, here
• P.S. Later addition: Oops, I forgot my last life-changing/rearranging photo to look at..here.

Capon and Bruggemann: Missionally Marginal/Post Temple Tantrum

Take a moment to process, and go ahead and mentally fill in the blank with your best answer:
"The most effective structure for the communication of the gospel in today's society is ____________."



Thank you~ We will return to that intriguing blank; and compare notes with how Howard Snyder fills in the blank, at the end of this post. Don't peek yet, I am watching! I would love to know if anyone completes it the way Snyder does; or of the way he completes it is the logical conclusion to everything I am about to say.

Today's post is a follow-up to my Tuesday's post (found here).
Because I love the way his brain works (and especially his heart); I was glad Len responded (here)

tomy challenge to him to respond regarding whether Freeman and Grieg's statement (in bold below) assumes far too much, and at worst could become a deadly self-fulfilling prophecy:

"There are (at least) three major expressions of Christian community down through the ages: congregational,apostolic, and monastic....We are most comfortable, Johnstone says, with the congregational model that (by definition) gathers people in certain places and times and therefore tends toward an emphasis on building and programs. Congregations will probably always be the predominant expression of church, funtioning effectively as a wineskin for many of God's blessings and as an agency for the advanvement of the kingdom of heaven."

I am concerned about trusting and blindly assuming the clause in bold print; though thankfully the second clause of the sentence qualifies "congregation" as a wineskin for many of God's blessings, not wineskin for all of God's blessings.

But does church=congregation? And what qualifies as "congregation"?

I can settle for the primacy of congregation, as long as such does not equate the concept with all that post-Constantinian and modernity-centered USAmerica has made it, and as long as it its DNA resounds missional and and reverberates Missio Dei.

Len brings into the conversation two of my favorite provocatuers: Capon and Brueggeman.
Processing Len's thoughts on these two thinkers is hugely helpful in discerning where our particular community (uh, congregation) is in the adventure of becoming even more of what we already are:

• missionally marginal (not to be confused with its evil counterfeit, "marginally missional")
  

and

• post-temple tantrum

Capon stirs us up to consider the first; Bruggeman imaginners and midwifes teh second.

Capon's chapter that Len quotes...on possible models for church, concluding with the preferred "marginal model"... has been so formative and foundational to us that we read it (and let it read us) in our gatherings at crucial and critical junctures (liminal seasons) in our congregational journey: times when we are about to move from one temporary "home" for our corporate gatherings to another place and space.
We have part of it posted on our "Risky Reading" website here.
Suffice to say we have read it often; even last month.

Somehow reading it afresh through Len's lenses has kickstarted some questions about how this inevitably connects our

marginality/inutility/freeformfreelancing

to our

Third Place missional desires.

A marginal church doesn't sound like it would be very attractive to outsiders (But whoever said we were called to do that? Not Jesus). But being marginal/liminal AND being/BY being missional, that may be accidentally and outragreously attractive.

In "The Forgotten Ways" Hirsch details "Third Place Communities" in Tasmania , Australia:

This group of Jesus's people refuse to gather as God's people in sacred isolated space Rather they exist to incarnate and do misson in "third places", where people hang out in their spare time. So they gather in pubs, sports clubs, play groups, interest groups, subcultures, etc... and people look in on what they're doing. By deliberately choosing to hang out in'be church' in public spaces. the group has to be constantly attentive to its missional context. (239)

This is where we are headed.

But I need to remember that no matter how transparent an inviting our literal window to Olive Ave looks to me; it is thick and might as well be brick to the passerby...unless we are actually attractive by being mostly missional.

And I dare not think or communicate that we have "arrived" simply because we no longer have pulpits or pews...or a building . Everyone knows that couches are the new pews; a stool is the new pulpit. And weigh this:

"Their Bibles are more underlined than other people's. They showboat their way up to the stage where the pulpit used to be....And they like being called doctor...they love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call them 'Rabbi.'

But you are not to be called 'Rabbi,' for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'teacher,' for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Matt 23:7-12

In the old days, this had to be accomplished by means of respectful titles like "Rev." But nowadays, in these egalitarian times, the attitude of spiritual conceit has had to be a a little more creative,a nd a pastor shows his prowess in humility by asking people to call him "Joe". Behind the scenes, he is a fierce, hard-driving CEO,and reads those CEO magazines, and acts like a CEO on airplanes, right down to ogling the flight attendant in first class. But out in front of the congregation, sitting on that stool, fitted out in a Mr. Rogers cardigan, he is open, transparent,and shares the
s truggles of his heart--the struggles of a simple guy...named Joe. He is about as deep as a wet spot on the pavement.

-Douglas Wilson,
A Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking...p. 36

Capon notes there is "just too much corporate baggage" with all the other models he surveys...except the marginal model.

But even in our lowkey model can be latchkey; nothing necessarily changes because we have traded our pews for couches and pulpits for stools. The system is decidedly not the solution; but even our more systemic model can court systemic evil at its most insidious.
And unless we cotstantly, intuitively re-member everything that Bono knows, and we don't("No 'them,' only 'us'");

marginal and missional churches can catch koinonitis as well:

Recently a couple whose culture and race are not Anglo/Nordic but who speak only English visited a Mennonite Brethren Church. They were attracted to it, but were politely informed that there was a church of their own culture nearby where they would feel more at home.

“Thank you very much,” was the gracious reply, “but we don’t speak the language of the people there.”

This incident could have been a sincere desire to help, but when it was repeated for three consecutive Sundays, the couple concluded that that church believed that ethnic purity was a Christian value and a requirement for membership. Of course they did not return...

...It is a difficult thing to distinguish culture from Christianity. Unless it is done, however, churches are bound to exclude some peoples whom God has accepted. Exclusivism and discrimination is an integral element of the believers’ church, but how exclusive should this be?...

Attitudes and practices of inclusivism within the church are from God. All exclusivism based on racial, language, or cultural differences is from the Adversary.

The Role of the Church in a Pluralistic Society, Leslie E. Mark,
DIRECTION, pril 1983 · Vol. 12 No. 2 · 7-14

Then Len moves onto Bruggeman, drawing from Chapter 7 of " Cadences of Home." Bruggeman also surveys models, before recommending to our day and age a shift from temple to text; parallel to postexilic Israel. I quote below from his Theology Today article on this theme:

"There is no one single or normative model of church life. It is dangerous and distorting for the church to opt for an absolutist model that it insists upon in every circumstance. Moreover, we are more prone to engage in such reductionism, if we do not keep alive a conversation concerning competing and conflicting models. Or to put it positively, models of the church must not be dictated by cultural reality, but they must be voiced and practiced in ways that take careful account of the particular time and circumstance into which God's people are called. Every model of the church must be critically contextual....

....(Post-exilic) circumstance, therefore, required a shift from a temple-royal-prophetic community to a textual community, which struggled with the text in all its truth and in all its dangerous subversiveness, continually witnessing to another mode of reality.

...we (too) are in a time when our alliance with the dominant culture is being broken, whether the power of the temple is broken, whether the empire is indifferent or hostile, whether the prophets lack a partner in confrontation. This
argument receives support from three sources at least:

(1) The collapse of modernity is a crucial theme in much contemporary social analysis. We have to face the fact that our dominant models of church have been fashioned for modernity and depend on its presuppositions, presuppositions that no longer prevail.

(2) It is clear that conventional kinds of theological speech are no longer accepted as "public speech." That is, civic leadership is not in any serious way any longer formally committed to established church rhetoric, so that appeals from our tradition are less and less significant politically.

(3) Many of our young (particularly the young of good liberals, but not only the children of liberals) have only the vaguest idea of what we intend in our faith.

A move from temple to text, requires a reconsideration of our social location, of the resources on which we can and must count, and of the work we have to do about the infrastructure that has largely collapsed. While we may find "wilderness-exile" models less congenial, there is no biblical evidence that the God of the Bible cringes at the prospect of this community being one of wilderness and exile, Indeed, this God resisted the temple in any case (cf. IISam. 7:4-7). In the end, it is God and not the Babylonians who terminated the temple project. In the face of that possible eventuality in our own time and circumstance, the ways for the survival of an alternative imagination in an alternative community call for new strategies.

If God "doesn't cringe" at our wilderness-marginality; and as God himself backed the temple tantrum; I feel better. And I love the though of moving from temple to text. I love all the talk about new strategies and imagination.

But to be found both "engaged to Jesus and engaging culture," I now fear that we must pray and work harder and more creatively at rebuilding alterative community with a radically empire-exorcising ethic.

And I know that starts with me.

And with the most revolutionary/counter-revolutionary force that God Almighty has on the face of the earth; which is....

obviously...

Well, which brings us full circle to our fill in the blank exercise.

Get ready to compare notes.

"The most effective structure for the communication of the gospel in today's society is.."

Hold your breathe, tap a drum roll, and scroll down..

"....a small group of eight to twelve people meeting informally in homes."

(Howard Snyder, "Radical Renewal:The Problem of Wineskins Today," (p. 149)