Experience would dictate, having seen 99 white swans, that all swans are white. Experience is of course a ridiculous guide for making future predictions: One event can change your experience in a way that the preceding events could not possibly have foretold. The 100th swan, the black swan, gives lie to the statement that all swans are white; suddenly only most swans are white, or at the very least most swans in the observed sample are white.

Ubuntu is our Free Software black swan. How do we explain its sudden, rapid rise to international Linux stardom? How do we explain its overwhelming success in that domain?

Well, we don’t. You can attempt to apply narrative to Ubuntu’s sudden critical mass, but it doesn’t work. Ubuntu was there at the right time (whatever that means) with the right feature set (not much different from others) and the right community (a little less technical than others, perhaps, but not much) and the right backing from Canonical (though other Linux distros have their own sugar daddies).

All of those statements don’t really explain how Ubuntu came to dominate Linux mindshare. In fact, I don’t think there’s any real way to make a narrative out of it. The reality is probably more like the Linux community tinkered and hacked and scratched the itch and tried things until one of those things really worked. This is a signal, to me at least, that the Linux community is growing up: We now have, like any other domain, a winner-takes-almost-all distribution. For good or for bad, this is how these things seem to go.

I think sometimes that the world is like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course there seems to be some correlation between hard work and success: Those people who work harder are likely to try more things. But you can work and work and work and work (look at Debian and Fedora and Gentoo and Linspire and a hundred others) and not have someone else steal and eat your cake.

You draw your own lesson. Does Ubuntu deserve to be where it is right now? Sure. Maybe if you’re working on another distro it seems a bit unfair. But even the words “deserve” and “fair” imply you believe there’s some kind of narrative going on. I disagree. There’s no narrative. There’s a metanarrative, and that’s what matters.

Today in church we had the news passed down to us that Freshwater Christian Church of Mississauga is going to be merging with Churchill Meadows Christian Church, also of Mississauga. I say “merging with” in lieu of the probably more apt phrase, “absorbed by”, considering that they’re the much larger church.

From a purely financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense (though this is not the only point of view from which it makes sense, I hasten to point out). Churchill Meadows is about five times or so the size of Freshwater, and has reached a point of fiscal maturity and sustainability, it would seem, so much so that they’ve been raising money for the last three years for and developing the plans for a building in which to meet. Freshwater — at least from what I saw today in the budget — has not reached a point of financial sustainability, such that the church is still gobbling up its initial setup fund. Solvent as far as I can tell only because of that fund. Freshwater gains financial stability in that they no longer have to worry about going into the red all the time. Churchill Meadows gains that extra 150 or so people that will frankly enable them to reach their building goal that much quicker. From a surface view of this all these seem to be the primary organisational benefits, without considering the obvious missional opportunities that a building and a less spread out staff entail.

I footnote that paragraph with my own experience of churches going broke: The Bridge, a wonderful place while it was still up and running, before it lost most of its congregation minus of course the core that started it. The Bridge was in the process of merging with 247 (if I recall the name correctly), when pastoral and leadership concerns put the kibosh on the whole deal, leading inevitably to The Bridge’s slow decline and finally its insolvency. When The Bridge finally closed down shop it left quite a few people with nowhere else to go, including some new converts who were very fresh to Christianity. It was, on the whole, a bad deal all around. Had The Bridge simply merged with 247 or some other like-minded church, I feel they would have been able to keep their ministry alive, give the people they sheltered a place to go, and especially provided the pastoral care for those new Christians. The Bridge closing its doors was, like I said, just a bad deal. I don’t fault anyone for this, but it was hasty, with the announcement coming a mere week before the organisation folded.

This merger is a little different, of course. We’re not closing down shop, Joel isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to disperse into the cold night never to see eachother again. It in fact prevents those things from happening. Which is a good thing in my view. The merger is also taking place with plenty of time in the interim: the churches are separate until October, when they’ll join at Freshwater’s current location. This gives us a lot of time to work out all those nasty little human problems that seem to occur whenever two organisations of any kind merge. For instance, I’m part of the worship team right now, playing keyboards every other week, and it occurs to me that Churchill Meadows also has a worship team. We’re really good (if I do say so myself; it’s not me, really, as much as Candace and Tim), but you have to expect that a church of 500 or so people has a better base from which to draw talented people. I raise this as an issue in particular because musicians, yes even Christian musicians, are generally a little more sensitive in the ego area than your average Joe off the street. When you try to merge two groups of people who both have separate synergies, you may end up finding that they don’t work as well together as they do apart. Or at least that the time it takes for two groups of musicians to get used to eachother can exceed your expectations. This might not even be a problem of course. I myself don’t have to play. I’ve gone to churches for a long time that didn’t need another pianist. Thankfully there’s a lot of time to work through this in people’s heads: I think the time-frame the leadership teams have chosen is a wise one. If there are any bruised egos, hopefully this will give them time to heal.

I’m writing this mostly to process it for myself. It’s going to be weird, seeing how every time I start attending a church something big changes. For instance, Living Waters got a new building and became an entirely different church almost overnight, it seemed. The Bridge shut down out of nowhere. Now Freshwater is merging, sort of losing its identity. This is fine; unless Jim (I think his name is) turns out to be some sort of heretic, or the church is just downright unfriendly and doesn’t have the missional heart I love so much about Freshwater, we’ll stick around. It’s not any further out of our way than Freshwater is. A different highway.

The losing identity does sort of bother me, though. I like Freshwater the way it is, relaxed, full of great people, and with absolutely amazing music. And when Churchill Meadows comes along, it does follow that the smaller church will lose its identity to the larger one. What that identity will end up being is left to the hands of God, I suppose. I guess I also have a certain amount of apprehension about what this new church will feel like: It’s so very hard to find a God-honouring, God-glorifying church that isn’t too backwards and isn’t too cool-whoring. When you do find such a place, seeing it being subsumed in another church that may or may not operate along the same lines is a bit like gambling, it would seem. I don’t know these people. I don’t know their modus operandi.

Now, those are just my feelings after hearing about it for the first time. I’m sure I’ll read this in a few weeks and months and wonder what the fuss was about. In the meantime, there are lots of good thing about this that I feel like I’ve accidentally de-emphasised.

Have a building is a great thing, or can be a great thing. I’ve know churches to build a nice, modern place to operate out of and then squander it trying to keep it safe and pristine and comfortable. If you have a building, use the sucker! And I have every confidence that Freshwater, with a building, a bunch of extra people, and a Joel with some time on his hands, will do great things with the building. Joel mentioned a few ideas he had, all of which sounded exactly like what a church is supposed to be doing in the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus, as he says. Give Joel a building, and I’m sure he can whip something up in a hurry. (By the way, Joel, if you ever read this, I’d suggest credit counseling for the community at large; debt is a whore who won’t wake up and leave.)

The new church, whatever its name is, will also have a greater opportunity to contribute on the modern mission field by planting another church to replace the one being lost to mergers and acquisitions. And this time, they have an opportunity to get rid of this half-assed toss-the-hatchling-out-of-the-nest trust fund approach that inevitably leads to fiscal, spiritual, and physical burnout. They — or we, I guess — have an opportunity to be a real mother church, to be there in terms of money and people power, so that those labouring in the word and in the community don’t have to constantly feel like a shyster shaking down the congregation for money, a juggler with too many balls in the air, and a prayer warrior with no time to pray. Can I suggest a radically under-churched area? Okay, how about at about Bloor and Dixie? There are tens of religions and thousands of people in that area alone, and the churches in the neighborhood are old and dying out with no new blood to replace the septuagenarian blood that has long ago grown thin. That’d be a great area, only 15 minutes away, that simply begs for a minor revival. Just an idea.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m liking what I see so far, and Laura and I will keep the two churches and their imminent merger in prayer. The way I see it, the human interactions are like gears, and prayer is like grease. Or something like that. It’s not a very good metaphor.

I wrote a whole long post two days ago, saved it, and am returning. I kept approximately 5% of it, and if you had read it you’d thank me for my slash-and-burn editorial skills. Still, I think the post bears writing. It’s an important topic and one that is lightly addressed in scripture. Or to put it another way, there’s lots of room for opinion, pretty much the inverse of me. With these introductory comments in mind, let’s blaze on, machetes and chainsaws in hand.

Every time I get near a book on church building I feel an irrational urge to break its spine and repurpose the pages as a certain toiletry item. It’s just who I am. Sometimes I have a hard time accepting that you can do this and do that and suddenly have a successful church. The idea that you can simply follow a formula and arrive at anything but a formulaic church seems irrational.

But there have to be guidelines, right? There are a lot of wacky things going on in North American churches, mostly due to this idea that everyone can have church they way they like. I’d like to sketch out a few thoughts and see what happens.

First, church needs to be organic. Don’t be relevant, don’t be topical, don’t be with the times, don’t be postmodern, don’t be a counter-cultural ghetto. Like that awkward kid everybody’s known, the one who’s always trying to be cool but ends up a huge loser, churches that chase culture look stupid. They look like they need attention or something. Let your church be a reflection of and a reflection on the community it comes from.

Second, some churches will play hymns on a piano, some will have elaborate bands, and some will have no instruments at all. I’ve been blessed by all three. It’s not really a big deal. It’s something we have to get over collectively. Music is an important part of the human experience, and an important part of the Christian experience. Some people will simply not be comfortable with an organ. I can’t stand pipe organs; with the amount of noise they make you may as well have a rock band playing, but that’s just me. If your community happens to include a lot of people who like pipe organs, why not?

Third, an effective church does a bunch of things. It provides people a place to gather in community, it provides a clear path to God, it provides for its own members, it provides help for those in need, and it provides a bunch of different opportunities in different areas. You could write entire books — and trust me, people have — on just those statements. This means that a church needs to be scriptural and Spirit-filled. Everything that a church does flows from scripture and from the workings of the Holy Ghost. Without either of those things, none of us would go to church. There wouldn’t be a church. That means that you need scriptural community, etc. You need the Spirit because, well, these things are pretty hard to do.

Fourth… that’s it. I think I lied, though; none of these things is easy. But they are pretty simple, right?

Just a moment ago, I was vacuuming the carpet in front of her whilst she ate Wendy’s fries and a junior burger combo. Does a woman’s life get any better than that? I don’t think so!

I don’t mean to perpetuate any stereotypes with this post, by the way. I may be stuck in the past when I say that a mother place is, in most circumstances, in the home with her child(ren), but a woman’s place is wherever she chooses.

When the founders of the United States first envisioned their country, it seemed they saw a country where religion would inform government, but government wouldn’t impose strictures on religion. Obviously, this sort of pragmatic stance resulted from the obsession old world’s states had with organised religion, as if without a state-mandated faith, their societies would crumble. It probably also had a lot to do with economics, but that’s a whole other topic.

We’ve come far from that point. In Canada, I’m pretty sure we never even were at that point. Now, separation of church and state means more that both government and religion should not inform eachother as much as is possible. This is what we call the secular state.

Christians of all stripes can view this a bunch of ways, I think. There are some that think that a secular state is an impossibility, and that trying to create one is a mistake. Others view the secular state as a sort of unfortunate necessity, a goal that can’t really be reached, but must be, under the circumstances.

I think both are fair positions to take. They both take a different kind of nation with different kinds of goals, sure. Yet they’re both reasonable.

I’m in the second camp, mostly. I say mostly because those categories are a reduction, a sort of boiling down of a whole range of though. I’m not expecting anyone reading this to fall exactly into either category. Life isn’t that binary. I’m mostly in the second on the list. Mostly.

Here’s what I think. The Christian faith has a bunch of goals, right? There’s an overarching purpose to it all, that God glorified himself, as he should. Yet there are smaller goals as well. Jesus restoring his creation to himself. His followers living like him and practicing true religion. Christians loving their neighbors, whoever that may be. Praise. Loving God. The pursuit of holiness. These are some of the goals of the Christian faith.

Nations-states, however, have a radically different agenda. Their overarching purpose, though it may unwittingly glorify God, is self-preservation. Like any other organisation, a nation-state takes on the agenda of its constituents, and exists simply to exist. There are smaller goals beneath that, like expressing ethnic identity, gathering around a shared value, or simply protecting a bunch of land. At the end of the day, though, nations are about self-preservation, whether offensively or defensively or both.

These goals clash. Christians simply don’t spread the faith through violence and force. Nations preserve themselves through force: it’s not a perfect world.

When these two entities co-mingle, the resulting monster is hard to put down. The state intrudes into the faith and suddenly there is tyranny and persecution. The faith intrudes into the state and suddenly there is fanatical nationalism and oppression.

Christians can be politicians, and politicians can be Christians, no problem. But the domain of the state is not conducive to the practice of true religion: you do not wage a “Christian” war, and you should not crouch a war in religious terminology. While the state must use force, the Christian absolutely must not.

On the other hand, though the government must not be a respecter of religions, religions are not bound by such strictures. Religions are about opposing truth claims. Christianity makes truth claims that say, among other things, that all the other religions of the world are counterfeits. And while governments must not make these sorts of claims, Christianity must be free to do so, whether it irks the tolerant soul of every civil servant labouring towards an equal commons.

This is essentially what I believe on this matter. Freedom of religion is essential, a secular state is essential, and the separation of the two is the guiding essential that keep both from collapsing into and ruining eachother.

A short point, here. Churches are called to be a light and salt in this world. This is not an ambiguous suggestion; it’s a clear command. There’s no fancy theological hand-waving that can conceal the facts as they stand.

Bring to bear the parable of the minas (or talents, or cash deposits, or whatever you like to call it) on the issue and you have a pretty damning condemnation of inwardly-focused churches.

Like a selfish person, an inwardly-focused church is more concerned with itself than with the world at large, when the world at large is the very thing Jesus came to redeem.

Every now and again I do online surveys for money (quite extensive surveys, I might add). I try to actually make it worth the survey’s while in that my opinions are rather precise: I’m not just clicking the first thing I see.

Yesterday, however, the survey I was taking dealt mostly with advertising. Had I seen such and such an advert? How about this one? Or that one?

I was mildly surprised; I hadn’t seen most of the adverts they set in front of my eyes, at least the recent ones. Then it struck me. I don’t see much advertising at all any more. With Adblock Plus installed on Firefox, I don’t see many internet ads, except Google’s, which are generally easy to ignore. What little television I watch is ad-free (and on a tangential note, it a pleasure to watch and not have narrative interruptions every ten minutes) thanks to the magic of various devices designed to do this. When I listen to the radio, I invariably tune in to 99.1 FM, which happens to be CBC Radio 1, and happens to contain no blatant advertising.

If I could figure out a way to block billboards and bus-side adverts and whatever arrives in my tech magazines, I would do that too.

Not that I don’t want creators of works to get paid for what they create. Far from it. Radiohead released In Rainbows for a choose-your-own-price and I paid about $8 for that. I would pay for commercial-free television, if I could receive only the shows I want, in the format I want, to watch when I want, on whatever machine I want. I’d micro-pay to view websites I enjoy (after all, I have about five sites I regularly visit, that’s all) without advertising present.

There’s something magnificently wrong with Total Advertising Awareness. You know, when you can recite off the top of your head ten different company slogans, can sing a bunch of different jingles, and talk to your friends about such and such a funny/insightful/pretty commercial advertisement. Ever wonder what that does to you? I do. I wonder if, now that I don’t see as many advertisements, I’ll watch my desire to constantly buy things go down. And I wonder if I’ll be able to opt out of other things as well, like Halloween and the rabid consumer frenzy that Christmas has become.

You could experiment on yourself, too. You don’t have to. But you could. You could try ridding your mind-space of as much advertising as possible, and then try to read the results. At the very least you’ll have more room in your head.

I’ve stopped trying to make people speak and write properly. Or at least I’ve stopped expending the effort with strangers. I still annoy my friends with the difference between “well” and “good”, between “number” and “amount”, even though I think continual exposure has brought about in them a special immunity.

For one thing, it’s not worth the amount of time and effort. I’m not an educator. No-one is paying me to increase literacy. I haven’t, that I can remember, volunteered to do so.

For another, there needs to be a divide between the people who can speak well, and the people who cannot. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Badly educated people generally speak badly educated language, and vice versa. Only some sort of misguided egalitarianism would try to force stupid people to speak smart English: you have to understand that these people don’t want to speak good English. They don’t care about speaking well.

I’m not saying that these people are worthless. Far from it. Everyone has his place in society. But let’s not pretend that all people are the same; there are smart people and stupid people, rich people and poor people, well-spoken people and the almost-illiterate.

When I speak and when I write like I know the English language, I display something about myself. Is it a bad thing to say that I’m in a different class from rednecks, hillbillies, gang members, street people, and the sorts of people that r1t3 <3 71k3 tHiS u n0? I don’t think so.

They really do. Let me ask you a question:

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?

Here’s a link on how to save money on petrol.

I found it via Lifehacker. Which reminds me that the next time I purchase a vehicle, I am definitely going to buy smaller and more efficient. My Focus isn’t horrible, of course, but it sure wasn’t built with economy in mind; I want one that is.

The problem with that is this: if everyone cuts their fuel consumption in half, the price of gas will go down to the point where cutting consumption will no longer be economically viable. A free market, problem if you will. A tragedy of the commons. I hate to say it, but the only way to curb fuel dependency seems to be keeping prices high, even if that has be achieved artificially.