N.T. Wright on the Church

What is your Walkscore?

Jeremy Jernigan — July 21, 2008 — 8 Comments

Thanks to my friend Steve, I’ve been exposed to a great website called walkscore.com. It is a website that calculates your address based on what is within walking distance. It shows you where the closest coffee shops, restaurants, schools, parks, movie theaters and the like are. Your score is based on how many of these are available within reasonable walking distance from where you live.

This is very intriguing to me for many reasons. One, gas is ridiculously expensive. But more importantly, I would guess that the higher your home scores the more opportunity you have for community with others. People would be more likely to get out from behind their vehicles and would slow down enough to walk places. Sadly, my house scored a 28 out of 100. Walkscore determined that a car-dependent location.

So what if we factored this into where we chose to live? Could this change our view of community? Test it out yourself and share your walkscore as a comment on this post. I’d love to compare and see where everyone is on this scale.

In Community Community

I’m Sorry

Jeremy Jernigan — April 16, 2008 — 4 Comments

My Mom saw this sign in downtown Phoenix recently and sent it to me. I think this is absolutely beautiful and it encourages me about the church.

In Church, Community, Spirituality Church, Community, Spirituality

Into the Wild

Jeremy Jernigan — September 2, 2007 — 2 Comments

I just read this book by Jon Krakauer and I found it absolutely fascinating. It is soon to be made into a movie so I’d read it before then if you have the chance.

It tells the story of a guy named Chris McCandless whose body is found dead in an abandoned bus in a remote part of Alaska (I’m not giving anything away here, it says this on the cover of the book.) It is the story of the last few years of his life as he hitchhikes across the US and Mexico and eventually into Alaska. What is so great about the book is that it’s a collection of people’s first hand experiences with him, exerpts from his own diary, and quotes from books that he highlighted that were found with his body. It speaks volumes into the idea of adventure and community, or lack thereof.

I don’t agree with his stance on everything, but I’ve learned a lot of insights from his perspective. Here is part of a letter that he wrote to someone:

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiaitive to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

In Community, Movies, Reading Community, Movies, Reading

My wife and I have had an ongoing irony in our marriage from day one. She has a passion for coffee and loves Starbucks and has even worked at at least three different stores in two states. But I never really “acquired the taste.” This has been much to the frustration of my wife and many others. Still, I have sat on the sidelines intrigued by the success of Starbucks even though it was never my thing. Recently, I read a book by Howard Shultz, CEO and Chairman of Starbucks, called Pour Your Heart Into It. It has changed my tune.

Like many other critics of Starbucks I always viewed it as a viral infection taking over the world one store at a time. Every time I sneezed I looked up to see another store even closer to me than before. But after reading Shultz’s book I realize that many people don’t know the true Starbucks story or just how great a leader Howard Shultz really is. The book tells all about the many oppositions that he has faced in the life of the company. The thing that stood out to me the most was just how passionate he was for what he was doing. And I started to reflect on what this would look like in the church. For example, read a few of these exerpts and then apply the thinking to church.

“I had never heard anyone talk about the product the way Jerry talked about coffee. He wasn’t calculating how to maximize sales, he was providing people with something he believed they ought to enjoy. It was an approach to business, and to selling, that was as fresh and novel to me as the Starbucks coffee we were drinking.”

“What we proposed to do at [Starbucks], I told them, was to reinvent a commodity. We would take something old and tired and common–coffee–and weave a sense of romance and community around it. We would rediscover the mystique and charm that had swirled around coffee throughout the centuries.”

The last passage is especially intriguing to me. Imagine reading something like this about the church. “We will take something old and tired and common–the local church–and weave a sense of romance and community around it. We will rediscover the mystique and charm that has swirled around the church throughout the centuries.” It sounds like the church in Acts 2. I wish half of the Christians today had the same amount of passion for seeing people meet Jesus and experience Him in community that Starbucks has for something as trivial and fleeting as coffee. Keep it brewing Howard.