(Thought I’d give you a few updates)

The Tea Shop

If any of you read my last book, Apparent Faith: What Fatherhood Taught Me About the Father’s Heart, you might have read the chapter called “The Tea Shop.” It’s about a chance encounter with a Buddhist man in Taiwan when we went to buy a tea pot. The encounter affected me greatly and taught me over a dozen lessons about various issues in my life. I wrote them all down hoping to remember them in a series of blogs.

The Tea Shop will most likely be published by Quoir in late Spring / Early Summer

2. Into the Desert: Thriving Outside the Organized Church (book)

Hang onto your hats, folks! Laura and I are writing this book together! It began kind organically. Several months ago, we stopped attending an organized church. I started writing online (as I tend to do) to try to think about my issues with the organizational church. There was quite a bit of spirited conversation, and then I just started writing about what I was doing to cope out in the “desert.” Laura decided to join me, somewhat reluctantly, and then we changed the name of the web page and group to The Desert Sanctuary.

We have been podcasting, talking, writing all the way through this process to hopefully help others make sense of this journey. It’s not a prescription or an antidote, but maybe rather an encouragement to other people that have wandered out into the desert or wonder what it would be like. I hope this book sparks conversation about real change in the brick-and-mortar church organizations.

The book may have kind of three parts:

Observations about the organizational Church
What we are finding out in the desert
A fressh look at a few of the beatitudes in the desert light

A couple of recent blogs might shed some light on what we’ve been thinking about.

Shame and Organized Religion

Our Year in Review

3. Too Many Podcasters

The last two months we have been trying a little experiment. We’ve been gathering some of our podcast friends and going LIVE to talk about some of the issues we’ve been thinking about. Tune into our wall or one of the participants. Here’s a list of some of them that have been on:

Eric Nevins – Christian Podcasters,

Keith Giles – Heretic Happy Hour

Karl and Laura Forehand – The Desert Sanctuary

Cody Johnston – Nomad / Reckless Pursuit

Elaine Johnston – The Prodigal Daughter

Jason Elam – Messy Spirituality

Dallas Verity – SOS

Seth Showalter – Fade to Gray

Kyle Butler

Michelle Collins

Derrick Day (coming soon)

The New Job

Don’t want to say much right now, but I start training for a better paying job in two weeks (January 28th. Wish me well! I’m headed to Aiken, SC for some training if anyone is near there, I’d like to say hello while I’m here!

What’s Next?

The Tea Shop

The Tea Shop will most likely be published by Quoir in late Spring / Early Summer

2. Into the Desert: Thriving Outside the Organized Church (book)

Shame and Organized Religion

Our Year in Review