Contexting

How To Be A Good Neighbor

If you've outgrown Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, there probably aren't a lot of people encouraging you to be a good neighbor. In the god ol' days, (so I'm told) people made pies for their neighbors and sat out on their front porches and talked. These days, people don't even say hello.

In order to convince you to be a good neighbor, I could point out that chatting regularly with the creepy single guy next door can be better security than all the closed-circuit security cameras you could install (the military strategy in Iraq is to befriend locals in order to gather information and build goodwill).

I could use the "just in case" argument- what if you need an emergency babysitter, a six-foot ladder, or a cup of sugar? If your smoke-detector goes off, wouldn't it be nice to have a friendly neighbor come check on you (you know, rather than calling the police because of the noise?)

Instead, I'll encourage you with this: your neighbors are watching you. Yes, even the ones who only look at you through the window blinds when you go out to pick up the newspaper in nothing but your robe and cowboy boots. They know more about you that you might think, and they make up stuff to fill in what they don't know. Why not demonstrate who you are (who you are in Christ) by being a good neighbor?

Here are some ideas:

• Give gifts. No, don't spend a lot of money. Don't expect anything in return- not even that they would talk to you. Give something nice and useful and leave a notes saying, "Thanks for being a good neighbor." Even if they're not, in fact, a good neighbor.

• Mow your neighbor's lawn. You're out mowing yours anyway, right? Pull their weeds, water their grass, sweep their drive. Put their garbage cans away after trash pick-up. Don't tell them you're doing it, either.

• Share food. This one's a bit tricky. It doesn't help if it looks like you're dumping your leftovers on them. Next time you're at the Farmer's Market and see ripe tomatoes, buy an extra pound and take them across the street. Explain that they looked really good, so you bought some for your neighbor, too.

• Talk. You'd be surprised how talkative your neighbors can be- especially when you're talking about something they care about. Ask about their family (try to remember their names!), their pets, or the classic car that's parked in their driveway. Talk about neighborhood events, ask for advice. Tell your story. Offer your help if your neighbor should ever need anything.

For more great ideas on how to be a good neighbor, including block parties and building fences, check out this eHow list or this article from your local Kudzu.

Real-Time Scoring

The CNN coverage of Friday evening's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi included something new- real-time audience reaction and analyst scorecard. The cable news giant featured a rolling reaction graph and point charts in the sidebars of its HD broadcast.

Long gone are the days of attempted objectivity on the part of the media. The thing is, subjective reporting actually makes the news more valuable to the American public. Say what you will about the conservative/liberal bias of the different networks, people are eating it up. Nobody watches C-SPAN. There's simply too much information for an individual to collect and process on her own.

In this day of pundit-presented news, the question is this- is anyone asking for you to weigh in on current events?

If so, why? If not, why not?

Food: Cooking Competition

You're looking for new ways to connect with people, and food is a universal fellowship-builder. Why not consider inviting friends to participate in a cooking competition? I know what you're thinking- I can't even make breakfast for dinner. How am I going to compete? But don't worry, you don't have to bring people in to make a three-course meal with fresh sea urchin (á la Iron Chef) in order to have a good time and get to know people. Give this a try:

 Pick your favorite casual dining or fast food dish. Maybe you're a fan of Applebee's Chicken Fajita Roll-up or the Broccoli Cheese Soup you always order at T.G.I.Friday's. You know you love McDonald's french fries or the chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-a.

Find the recipe. You may not know this but most restaurants don't don't give out their secret recipes.  But that hasn't stopped hungry fans (and homesick missionaries!) from working hard to recreate their restaurant favorites at home. The resulting recipes are called "clones" or "copycats." Try a Google search for your dish or check out Copykat Recipes or Top Secret Recipes for some ideas.

Recreate the dish at home. If it's your first time, follow the instructions. Try to improve the recipe on subsequent attempts. There may be different recipes for your dish around the internet. Try a couple, or after some practice, combine them. Try to make your dish look and taste like it would in a restaurant.

Bring home an order of the dish from the restaurant. Re-plate it so that it looks like the version you've made at home. Be sure to take note of which one is yours!

At the party competition, serve your dish alongside a re-plated original from the restaurant. Allow party-goers participants to taste both and vote which is best. Winner gets a gift card to his favorite restaurant, or a trophy or whatever.

If you're not sure which dish to pick, my favorite is this clone of Panda Express' Mandarin Chicken. It's really easy, and people love it.

Bible Park USA

Michael Carpenter pastor of Matthew's Table, recently wrote about his opposition to Bible Park USA, a Bible-based theme park planned for development in his town just outside Nashville, Tennessee.

What is a Bible Park? Well, according to the Bible Park USA website, guests will have the unique opportunity to learn about the Bible while being entertained:

"Bible Park USA…it’s a one-of-a-kind, unlike-anywhere-else-in-the-world “edutainment” experience offering guests of all ages a visualization experience of well-loved, familiar Bible stories and a taste of life in ancient Biblical times."

In other words, it's like a tour of the Holy Land without having to get too close to smelly, Middle-Easterners who speak broken English and might be terrorists.

Where else can you "walk right into a working, active, authentic Galilean village, with costumed re-enactors living and working as they did in those times."? I mean besides the real Galilee.

Michael's opposition centers on the Christian consumerism that would be perpetuated (and exploited) by the Park. He also warns against a "sanitized" experience with the scritpures:

"If we have at our fingertips a theme park that offers a fake experience of the message of the Gospel we will give up the ultimate quest in pursuit of that which can be immediately consumed-a pseudo-religious experience in a biblically themed amusement park."

Remembery

I'm a firstborn. My early childhood is chronicled in hundreds of 4"x6" photographs taken with Mom's trusty Kodak Instamatic. It's all there: my first birthday. Our family vacation to Disneyland. Me at three years old playing naked in the sprinklers in our front yard.

I remember these events not because of my memory, but because I've grown up looking at the pictures. Technically, I shouldn't remember the family reunion when I was three, but the photographs have burned images of it in my mind. My brain has adopted those images as "memory."

I'm amazed at the implications of this phenomenon. How many of my memories are things I actually experienced, and how many are data that has been "uploaded" and assimilated? My first ride on a bicycle? Our family's wood-paneled station wagon?

Of course, technology has developed leaps and bounds since those days. Now Moms carry high-resolution digital cameras and shoot hundreds of gigabytes of photos (and video). Any major (and no-so-major) event in the world is photographed as it happens from multiple angles. We watch those events in our living rooms and on our computer screens. How many of them are becoming "memories" to people who weren't even there?

This is the power of telling stories. With every "retelling," images (mental or photographic) become part of our memory. This is why ancient cultures passed on stories using the first-person-plural, "we." "Remember Abraham" the stories would go. To this day, people "remember" crossing the Red Sea on dry land and wandering in the wilderness.

These days, we don't tell stories. We show pictures. But it's the same thing. You should tell stories, too. The same ones, over and over. Don't just tell them until they're familiar. Tell them until they're memories.

Cultural Tourism

To be a true fan of punk rock, you've got to go all out- spiked mohawk, pierced lip, black tapered-leg jeans, and a leather dog collar.

If you were a real carpenter, you'd use only hand tools that you forged yourself.

If you really cared about the environment, you would live in a commune and make your own clothes out of hemp.

Anything less and you're selling out.

Right?

 No. Not any more. Soccer moms drive their SUVs to shop at Whole Foods (they bring their own grocery bags, by the way.) Cubicle-bound businesswomen listen to the Ramones on their iPods without a hint of irony. Football fans wear sweatshirts from colleges they've never even visited. Suburban kids recite "G-Unit" lyrics in the schoolyard.

The days of modernistic all-or-nothing thinking are over. Purity of culture is a value of the past; this is the age of cultural tourism. The line between devoted fan and casual observer is fading. The cultural tourist takes what's cool (a few souvenirs to remember his visit) without making any real commitment to the movement. 

It's funny- the tourists may not be as devout as the purists, but they do a much better job of taking a movement to the masses.

The Truth Is Out There

You might not realize this, but there has been an ongoing public discussion of faith, religious experience, and the supernatural. All around you, people are talking about spiritual things. It's likely that you're missing it, though. Most Christians have been uninvited for preaching without listening, and insisting on dictating the terms of the conversation.

Maybe it's just because you're looking for church words like "God," "Sin," "Heaven," or "Hell." 

 These days, these themes:

• Redemption (inner struggle, restitution, reparations)
• Forgiveness (making amends, paying one's debts)
• Justice (right and wrong, social morality, causes: Africa, Darfur, drinking water, sweatshops, etc.)
• Validation (parental rejection, high-school hazing, etc. )

Are discussed through these stories:

• Aliens (what's out there, out of our control, beyond our understanding, putting us in our place)
• Ghosts (interaction with the supernatural, spiritual, unknown after death, fear)
• Angels/demons (as above, but focusing on good/evil)
• Advanced Technology (Artificial Intelligence, killer robots)

Your choice is to ridicule the stories as being absurd, or recognize the themes behind the stories and construct a Christian narrative that recognizes the truth into them.

Socialism

Practically speaking, I'm no socialist. Maybe it's my youthful angst, but I prefer small government, and I think that (limited) competition is a great motivator. That said, I've heard a lot about socialism lately. The flailing economy and a close presidential race has everyone posturing on solutions that will allow Americans to spend carelessly once again, and socialism is a recurring theme.

Socialism. Republicans use the term as a "truth-be-told" kind of slur ("Universal health care?' they say, "It's more like 'socialist' health care!") Democrats glorify the many socialisms of Europe as the models to which the U.S. should aspire, but rarely demonstrate an understanding of how different the European and American worldviews are (seriously, unless you've been treated in a European hospital, could you guys quit beginning every statement on the economy with, "You know in Europe..."? Please?).

For the most part, it was our Cold War stand against communism that soured us on socialism (no, the two are not the same thing- "socialism" isn't "communism lite"). We don't respond well to anything that seems to threaten our freedom and independence. But socialism is wildly misunderstood.

My time living in Europe was a learning experience; especially in terms of politics. Where else could one accidentally stumble upon a family-friendly public meeting of the National Anarchist Party? One thing I learned is that socialism isn't a political system, it's a worldview.

For my European friends, socialism means paying half of their income in taxes that fund public health care, schools, infrastructure, and social programs. Most of them aren't the least bit upset by that. They see taxes as their contrinution to society. There are some things, the reasoning goes, that are better left to an institution that doesn't have profit as it's bottom line.

Are there abuses? Sure. But socialist systems can still be democratic. If people don't like a government program, they can vote to stop it. If the system is being abused, controls are put in place.

For the most part, people are happy with national healthcare. The best health care system in the world is the French Social system. (By the way, in socialized medicine, it's doctors, not the government, that make medical decisions. Accountability is handled by a physician's peers.) Same thing with public schools, where both academic standards and test scores are higher than in the U.S.

Consider a complete privatization of every sector of American life: schools, fine. Military? Not so much. We don't mind paying tolls for smooth highways and bridges, but what about the street in front of your house? A private police force would have to either treat some people better than others or cover their uniforms in NASCAR-like sponser logos. In a completely free-market capitalist system, it isn't the majority who decides, it's the rich.

Environmentalists Is What We Are

Skin cancer is more common today than ever, but we spend less time outdoors than ever. Nearly one in four children has Asthma. Temperatures are up (and down). Sheets of ice are breaking off and floating away. Storms are lined up off the east coast like planes on a runway. The Tsunami. Earthquakes. Drinking water is becoming scarce.

 I get that it's the end of the world. Nature has been sick since the Fall. What I don't understand is why Christians would want argue over who is to blame. No matter whose fault it is that we're seeing radical changes to the environment, can't we all agree that we shouldn't do anything to make things worse?

Non-Christians morality isn't always at odds with Christian morality. Issues like the value of the family, the need to stop violence, and the environment are great places to start relating to unbelieving friends. We can work together to stop disease, deliver clean drinking water, and educate the poor.

Social justice and environmental responsibility are causes that we can and should support. I'm not sure what other peoples' motivation might be, but mine is obedience of and respect for my Creator.

Living out our faith alongside environmentalists (or any sort of activist, for that matter), gives us the opportunity to influence people.

Becoming a Coffee Shop Regular

Maybe you've heard people talk about hanging out in a cafe as a way to missionaly engage their community. I think it's a wonderful idea, but it needs to be thought through a little bit in order for it to be effective. Just hanging out in a coffee shop does not make you missional. It does make you a loitering consumer. Ask anyone who's ever been a barista- there are "regulars" and there are "regulars." You want to be the right kind of regular. 

The Annoying Regular- this is the guy (or gal) who comes in every day at the same time, and always orders the same thing. Of course, he complains when his drink isn't made just right, so he's seen as kind of a jerk to begin with. He talks quite a bit with the staff, but it's always about himself and during the really busy times. He hogs a large table, and uses the free wi-fi for hours on end. He's the bad kind of regular- he doesn't do anything wrong, but he doesn't add to the shop's sense of community. This is not missional.

The Refreshing Regular- this is the guy who comes in "all the time," but isn't using the shop as a second office. He's open to trying anything on the menu board, and while he's not afraid to have an opinion about coffee, he's never condescending or demanding. Like is annoying counterpart, he talks with the staff, but his conversation always seems to center on the shop and on the community. He's sensitive to the customer rush, and always sits at a smaller table. He might bring his laptop, he might read, but he's always aware of what's happening around him. He sees himself as a paying partner in the coffee shop rather than a customer. He's the kind of regular that make a cafe a social "third place " that everyone can enjoy.

Guess which one has influence? Guess which regular is going to be allowed to have his small group meet in the back during business hours or even in the front after hours? Guess which one is getting free coffee? Guess which one gets asked to help meet needs and counsel people in crises and help pick out the new t-shirt design?

The same one who isn't doing it in order to have "influence" or for a free meeting place or for free coffee. He's a leading member of his community, and he's trying to put his faith into practice outside the walls of a church building.

p.s.- make an effort to frequent a locally-owned coffee shop!

p.p.s.- ride your bike or walk!