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jordon
cooper
friend,
pastor, thinker and all around fellow mutant for christ
founder
jordoncooper
1)
what do you see as the most important issue facing
this generation?
Security on several different levels.
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Financial:
Student loans are
severely limiting options once you leave school and
burden you down for several years afterwards.
We are looking at a future where we will have less
wealth than the boomers. We also have to plan
for longer retirements with higher bills and lower
income. I have friends of mine who are 30 and
are panicking at the prospect of not being able to
retire comfortably.
-
Physical:
A friend of mine has
done workshops in the past year dealing with
violence to teachers. More and more of the
women I know have been sexually abused in some form.
We live in more violent world today.
-
Family:
My son's godparents
are looked up to by numerous people including the
friends of their kids. There are numerous
reasons but one that leaps out to a bunch of us is
that they have maintained a stable family over the
years. No divorce, no trial separation, no
affairs. A generation ago, that kind of
marriage was the norm, now it is the exception.
-
Job
security: It is
easy to say, "there is no for life jobs in the
new economy" but it still is scary when you get
"rightsized"."
2)
what do you think the church can do to help us face
this issue?
The church has a tremendous opportunity. The
evangelical church is sitting on a lot of money.
The church still has not clicked in to the fact that
we are to be a community of believers and not an
individual collection. Tom Sine in Mustard Seed
vs. McWorld does and excellent job describing the
changed church community if we would only invest in
today's generation instead of ourselves. I know
of a small group that actually cashed out some RRSP's
to help out a person in debt. Those kind of acts
on a large scale would free so many people. At
Lakeview we are in a middle of building campaign.
We call people to sacrificially give to build a
building but how many times have you heard give the
call to sacrificially give to help our single parents
or put some kids through school? We need to
click into the long term impact of
"liberating" our youth for service and from
debt.
We can
also make our churches into a safer place. I had
lunch with Lakeview's youth pastor the other day and
said instead of
Gear (our youth event) being once a week, start
thinking of Gear being 24/7. /maybe it is a 24/7 drop
in centre. During the week there may be big
outreach things but the church is a safe sanctuary all
week long and not just for youth but for people
looking at getting a better job (a computer lab
and night classes for learning new skills?), for
people looking to escape the rat race, or for people
just wanting to be with a normal family.
The
church needs to think outside the box. Maybe it
is buying an apartment complex to help out low income
families or providing safe afterschool programs or
offering help to people suffering abuse. Look
around you, the government is not doing the job,
someone has to and if I remember right, God has said
that it needs to be us.
3) how do you see the internet and the church
interacting in the future?
The church has such an amazing chance to make an
influence on the net. While not to downplay the
excellence that is shown on sites like ginkworld, it
isn't that hard to get a site online and is within the
abilities of every single church in North America.
At Lakeview we have a team of four of us who keep us
online. The biggest obstacle that we need to
realize is that "command & control"
doesn't translate to the net. The net is
chaordic, always changing, always in flux, and always
improving. You don't have to be perfect to be
online, just get online.
In the
future, I hope to see the church realize its
potential. Online video is here now.
If you doubt me, go to BMW Films (www.bmwfilms.com)
and check out the amazing short films that they have
posted online. Lakeview is planning to put
online a half dozen of our favorite in-house creations
this summer. It costs us $30 for Quick Time Pro
or we can also export some to Windows Media for free.
As we buy a second digital video camera this year, we
will be adding videos of sermons and teaching online
as well. A much higher percentage of urban
Canadians (no, that isn't an oxymoron) have broadband
access than Americans so we are a little further ahead
of the curve but as DSL and cable enters your
neighborhood, you need to be ready.
Online
community is real. People
crave relationships and community but are
scared. We all scream we that the postmodern
generation desires community but we forget that we are
scared by it at the same time. The same
brokeness that makes us crave community, makes us
scared of it. A lot of postmoderns have found
community online. It is safe there. The
online church understands
it. It allows Joe with his Hotmail account to
log-in to your newsletter, join an online discussion,
to read your sermons, and take a look at a 360 degree
virtual tour of your church before he thinks of coming
into your doors. Sites like ginkworld and The
Ooze are showing the church what the web of today can
look like.
The
Net makes us glocal. jordoncooper.com
is visited by hundreds of people everyday from all
over the world. Lakeview Church's online e-mail
newsletter goes out to Africa to Asia, from Cuba to
Iqualuit, Canada (capital of Nunavut - a long way
north). We minister to missionaries and American
Marines. The web also extends your global reach.
There are people who drive up to an hour to go to
Lakeview on a Sunday and if you have survived our
winters, that isn't always possible. They read
the sermons and devotions online. In an age of
telecomuting to work, people may commute the same way
to church with live feeds and interactive sermons. The
church has to stop thinking of itself as a group of
people that meet in a sanctuary.
Sites
like The Ooze and ginkworld do another great
task. They connect and resource us. I
think one of the worst trends on the net is the move
to church portals that charge other churches for their
old sermons and electronic resources for profit.
One of the things that I have fought for at Lakeview
is that we will give away everything. We have a
sharing section on our site that we give away our
media graphics, sermons, teaching materials, and video
ideas. This summer we plan to add
about 100 new media backgrounds and slides -
all for free. I hope the church as a whole bucks
the trend and stays free. We are all on the same
team. The upcoming years are going to be hard
ones to lead through. Instead of trying to make
a buck off of each other, lets see what we can do
together.
My one
bit of warning to the church is that you risk being
left out of the discussion that is happening.
Already there are more and more postmoderns that are
thinking of places like ginkworld and Beliefnet as
their true church. Barna tells us that the
cyberchurch is coming and if the local church doesn't
want to help the conversation, then it will happen
elsewhere.
4) how do you as a pastor, deal with the issue
of "absolute truth" in a "non-absolute
age?"
My
Wesleyan background comes out in this question but as
Wesley points out in his Order Salutis, we are all on
a journey and are all on various points on that
journey. It isn't about logical argument that
prove beyond a doubt that God exists, that Jesus
arose, and that Paul was short and ugly looking
(according to church tradition...). On that
journey, some will choose to seek out and follow
Christ. It is a process that is not as cut and
dried as we like it and it takes a church community,
grace and time to disciple but in time, people
discover there is absolute truth and it is in God.
The
church is really counter cultural in this. Us
and Dr. Laura. I have some contact with some
people where there is a lot of sin that has destroyed
a relationship. Again and again I have brought
up what the Bible says (they are professing
Christians) to have it replaced with what they were
feeling. When I say something that doesn't jive
with Dr. Phil (Oprah's guru), I hear about it. Some
see this as being negative but it disagreement leads
us to a place of dialogue. While we can't rely
on the "Bible says so!" argument anymore, if
we believe we have the truth, we should not be afraid
of dialoguing in our pluralistic world. We got
to move from being afraid of living in an non-absolute
world to seeing it as an incredible opportunity.
5) many claim music is a key to the postmodern
church, how do you see the role of music in the
church?
Music is
one of the most dominant communication tools in the
world today. According to the search engines,
people want mp3's more than they want sex or Anna
Kornikova. Why does everyone have a CD-R today?
It isn't to do backups, it is to burn music CD's.
What really rips me when my internet connection is
down is that I can't get to my 3 gigabyte MP3 locker
on Myplay.com. We keep hearing that the church
needs to listen to its poets and the prophets.
They can both be found in today's music. I think
that is one of the reasons that churches need to
encourage and invest in their own song writers.
6) the same can be said about tech, what role
do you believe tech should have in the church?
Technology is changing churches, even if it doesn't
exist in the church. On 40 weekends a year, I
drive 2 hours into northern Saskatchewan and
preach/pastor at a small aging rural church. In
the last two years they have gotten mini-satellite
dishes on the farm and cabin and have gotten online.
I think that the mini-dish is now the provincial flower
of Saskatchewan. This has changed their
worldview. No longer do they two channels but
500 and no longer is information only in the
"city" but it is in their homes.
I shake
my heads at churches that fight over technology and
computers. No one today goes without a TV in
their home but it is inappropriate for one to be used
to enhance worship. It kind of makes you wonder
what they are watching at home.
The other
churches that I shake my head at are those who want to
control how the technology is used. I know of
one church who literally bolted down the computer in
the sanctuary so the youth couldn't use it during the
week. Another church's network administrators
made the staff sign such a form that when questioned
about it, they said that they couldn't even check
sport scores on the church internet. It was for
church use only (to this day no one can figure out
what is church use and what isn't so they all ignore
it).
Technology
isn't the show, it complements the message or
teaching. If it doesn't help what you are
saying, it is a distraction. Media for media
sake or a special effect for special effects sake is
an ugly thing. We just got Adobe After Affects
Production bundle at Lakeview. Just because we
can make lightening bolts jump out of coffee now and
give the congregation light sabers doesn't mean we
need to.
Video is
the language of 21-C. If you can't speak that
language, people are going to find something that can.
If you aren't technologically competent, people aren't
taking you seriously.
7) it's the stanley cup - who's playing, and
who wins?
I
replayed the Stanley Cup a thousand times as a kid.
The Calgary Flames were playing the hated Edmonton
Oilers (a grimy hole of a town in northern Alberta).
I was in net and it was overtime. Not only did I
stone Wayne Gretzky on a breakaway, I set up the
winning goal to win the Cup. In real life, it
was Edmonton that won all the Cup's and I developed
into a goalie that let in soft goals when the game was
on the line. Growing up in Calgary, I think I
threw away enough Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier
rookie cards to have paid for my house.
closing
thoughts: you can share what ever is on your heart.
Enjoy
these years of serving and following God. We
live in an age of tremendous change and discerning the
voice of God is never easy. At the same time we
are lucky enough to be called to lead and serve during
one of the crucial times in the history of the church.
I believe that God is raising a generation of leaders
and will continue to do great things through them.
I don't know what they may be yet but I am humbled and
honored to serve Him and his church.
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