Personal Branding.

So I made this about.me page today: about.me/kemplyons

We live in a world where it's so easy to push your ideas and image out there.  My thoughts wouldn't be worth the paper they're printed on if this was thirty years ago, but, thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone can read my blather any time of day!

We have Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Instagram, Wordpress, and I know I'm missing some.  About.me claims to be able to be a one-stop shop for your online identity.

But why do we need an online identity?  Since when did Personal Branding become a thing?  What happened to buckling down and working hard at doing something - not just marketing yourself until someone hires you?

Sound off in the comments.  I genuinely want to hear some thoughts here.  Personal Branding: necessary evil in an information economy or penultimate egotism that takes away from our ability to create anything outside of our own image?

Twilight.

Tonight, I did the unthinkable.  I watched the Twilight movie.

Hold the lynch mob.  It was a purely academic exercise, I promise.  As a student of culture, I realized that it was terribly ignorant of me to judge the film without even seeing it.  It seems that people either love it or hate it, so I wanted to know just what it was that was so divisive.

Going into it, I knew the sparkle thing was a big deal.  Vampires have never, ever sparkled before.  But they also don’t read minds.  Or behave so… stupidly.  So I just went in understanding that the mythology was not going to be what I traditionally understood as vampires or werewolves or anything else.  I knew that the lead actress, Kirsten Stewart, was criticized for a complete lack of emotion.  Got it.  I also knew that the love story was, at best, juvenile.  So I didn’t go in thinking I was about to witness something pure and beautiful.

And boy was I wrong.  It was the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.

Not really.  Scared you for a minute, though, didn’t I?

If you’re only interested in my final verdict, I’ll save you reading the rest of this and say this: it’s no worse than many other mediocre movies.  It has many, significant problems, but we gloss over these all the time in adventure, sci-fi, and action movies all the time.  So I guess I’m not going to be a straight hater of this film, but I will never say that it’s a good movie. 

Now the details.

Let’s start with what was decent.  For one, it was a pretty film.  The cinematography, while not jaw-dropping, was not bad.  Several shots had great lighting and composure.  They used their environment well.   Second, I didn’t mind Robert Pattinson’s acting.  Though his accent faltered on a number of occasions, I at least believed him most of the time.  Looking through the IMDB trivia, I respect the investment he put into the role, as well (he didn’t talk to anyone for 5 weeks before filming trying to get into the isolation of Edward’s character).  For what it’s worth, I thought the last act of the movie was pretty good.  At least, it was good enough that I stopped taking notes and actually started caring about how the characters would survive.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t until then that I cared at all.

The first two thirds of this movie were pretty awful.  The narration was monotone and useless.  The music was cheesy.  The more I think about it, the less I respect the character of Bella.  She doesn’t really do anything, does she?  I mean, I guess she goes to school and stuff, but everything happens to her, not because of her.  The one time she influences the story is where she insists that they find a way to ensure her father’s safety.  So for over an hour, I’d say, we are just waiting for something interesting to happen.  Nothing does.

The biggest thing that bothered me was a lack of believability.  I mean, I know we’re dealing with fantasy here, but still.  There are rules. 

Take Edward Cullen.  He’s really bad at being a vampire.  You’d think that, for a guy that had graduated high school somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 times, he sure sucked at being secretive.  Bella asks him about why his eye color changes, “Uh…  Um…  Ya see…  It’s, uh, the fluorescent lights.  Yeah.  The lights.  That’s what it is.”  She tells him that she saw him stop the car with his hand and, instead of making something sensible up (“You’ve been through a lot, you might not remember what happened….  I was walking toward you and…”), he says, “No one will believe you.”  That’s not indicting, there, fella.  No one’s going to see that you’re hiding something weird.  You don’t have to worry about keeping your identity a secret for any reason.

Speaking of secrets, don’t you think Bella jumped a little too quickly to the vampire idea?  All it took was an incident whose remembrance could be heavily affected by the trauma, the fact that he was cold, and some other small detail that I can’t remember right now.  All of a sudden, this film that has thus far been fairly reasonable takes a dive into crazy town.

(But then again, Bella lives in crazy town.  Ladies, If a guy tells you “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore,” your answer should not be, “Then don’t.”  That’s a sign you need lots of counseling.)

So why did the last act work so well?  Stakes.  Not wooden ones.  But something at risk.  Nothing was at stake through the whole first two thirds of the movie.  Edward doesn’t lose anything by telling his secret to Bella.  Bella doesn’t lose anything by being (or not being) with Edward.  No one’s in danger.  Not even her happiness seems to be at risk. 

One last note and I’ll let this rant come to a close.  I think Kristen Stewart is a better actor than we’ve been led to believe by this film.  There are several scenes (most of which are with her schoolmates) that she actually bursts to life.  She’s a believable 17 year old girl with interest in what’s going on around her.  I think the director purposely pulled her performance back when she’s with Edward.  When she’s with him, she reverts to this lifeless, monotone girl with no smile.  But whenever Jacob walks into the scene, she smiles and comes to life, pulling more attention as an actor with a vastly more interesting performance.

Honestly, the seeming purposefulness of this shocked me.  If I didn’t know that Team Edward wins, I’d say that this was the setup for the second (or third?) film’s love triangle and that Bella should end up with Team Jacob.  But that’s not what happens.  As I’ve been informed, Bella ends up marrying Edward.  To me, it seems like the director is being surprisingly subversive by controlling Kristen Stewart’s performance like that.  Isn’t the point of the books and movies that she ends up with Edward?  That he’s the right choice that makes her happy?  And yet, at least in this film, she bears more resemblance to a vampire when she’s with him than a happy, in love human.  In fact, her love for him seems more akin to a traditional vampire’s ability to charm someone than anything else.

Just an interesting note on the director and her lead actress. 

The spirit of the law.

As I continued to reflect on the letter of the law/spirit of the law distinction that I talked about the other day, my thoughts slowly became a little more personal.

As an oldest sibling and follower of Jesus, I fall definitively into the spirit of the law camp.  When I play poker, I avoid looking at other peoples' hands, even if they're open in plain sight.  When I played Super Smash Bros: Melee in high school, I would purposely avoid using fighting tactics deemed "cheap" by my friends in favor of having a good fight. I do this because I apply the behavior I choose in life (follow the law of God) to my behavior in games.  I feel like, in some way, my integrity takes a hit if I behave in a way that is clearly against the intent of the rules. 

This seems to be some confusion on my part, though.  Maybe I'm just really bad at moving into the magic circle.  The contract that we adhere to as players of a game is completely different than my contract with God (though I still believe there should be clear boundaries regarding behavior for the Christian, even within the magic circle).  Perhaps a little bit of rebellion is exactly what I need.  Rebellion is too strong of a word.  Perhaps, in the world of the game, our job is to find new expressions of the game's goals within the constraints of the rules.

In that way, maybe games are a lot more similar to life.  There are rules, but our job as humans is to find creative ways of bending them toward a certain purpose.  In life, there are some immutable truths.  Gravity, for example.  We can't just fly anytime we want.  Within that constraint, though, we made airplanes!  If the designer's intent in creating the law of gravity was to prevent humans from flying, we have broken the spirit of the law but maintained the letter of the law.  So, too, in games, perhaps the designer of Mafia (if there was one...) wanted us to experiment with different behaviors.  There are few behaviors explicitly outlawed by the rules because we are meant to play.  Find out what works and doesn't work.

So maybe I need to be more of a letter of the law gamer.  Maybe I need to push the envelope of what's acceptable within a game system rather than just passively accepting my role as hero of the world or solver of puzzles.  I think it's ideas like this that caused Jane McGonigal to suggest that playing video games will make the world a better place.  She's hooked on the idea that, by entering a safe place to push boundaries, we will learn to push boundaries in real life. 

Maybe she's right.

Gamers as Artists.

Read this.  Right now:

http://kotaku.com/5857873/games-are-art-only-when-youre-playing-them

A couple of brief observations tonight:

1. A quote from the article: "...is a symphony meant to be played or listened to?"  
2. I notice that the author of this article seems to be a believer.  Well, he's working on a Masters in Systematic Theology, so that's something.  This is one of the more original posts I've seen on Kotaku in a while and a believer wrote it.
3. His last thought is wondering how gamers would respond to a call to artistry.  How can gamers be artists?  And guess what?  All the comments have nothing to do with the article.  They're all about trolling.  That's telling.

 As you play games, how can you consider yourself a co-creator in the art of the game?  Does it require research?  Playing along with the story instead of seeking to break the game and stretch the rules (a la last night's post)?  What do you think?

The last death-knell of childhood.

Kind of a dramatic title, eh?

I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 tonight.  (In the cheap seats, on film, and not in 3D, I might add.)  Toward the magnificently climactic ending, it struck me just how much of my adolescence was spent with that series.

I remember the first time I saw a Harry Potter book.  I had just turned twelve.  We had just moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan from Hackettstown, New Jersey.  We were in the Borders downtown (the one that just closed...) and I saw "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

Now, I'm a big nerd.  It was worse when I was a kid.  Anything with wizards or sorcerers or spells or anything had to be awesome, so I asked for it for Christmas.  From the opening page, I was hooked.  I identified with the feeling of being an outsider.  I, like Harry, longed to be special, to be different.  Like so many young nerds, I was just waiting for the day that my X-gene became active or some blue aliens from a distant planet made me an intergalactic cop.  A half-giant riding a motorcycle telling me I was a wizard sounded just as good. 

I quickly read all three of the books of the time, struggling with how to pronounce Hermione, hating Draco Malfoy, and getting inspired by the themes of courage, self-sacrifice, and dependence on a close circle of friends.  As I grew up, so too, did Harry Potter.  The decidedly darker turn of Order of the Phoenix resonated with my deeper adolescent desire to struggle against something oppressive and evil.  The higher stakes only increased the emotional engagement that I had with the characters.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I spent most of the last third of Deathly Hallows with a lump in my throat.  I had spent almost ten years with these characters.  And now, as the last Harry Potter movie has been released, it's been twelve years.  So, in many ways, watching those last credits roll to the top of the screen was like watching the last bit of my adolescence and childhood go away.  Sure, there will always be a new Zelda release to bring me back.  I'll stay involved in youth ministry and always have ridiculous fun with middle school boys.  But Harry Potter will remain a mainstay of my memories of growing up.

Digital Citizenship.

I watched V for Vendetta again this evening (a belated 5th of November viewing with friends) and it got me thinking about a few different things.  Most prominently, what is the role of the citizen in the modern society?  Surely voting, paying taxes, and staying informed of politics belong on that list, but these could also be in the same list as the role of the citizen in the modern government.  (I would argue, possibly, that those are different things.)

Now, I’m not going to go off ranting about something I know nothing about – namely, political philosophy – but regardless of who you talk to, being a good citizen requires activity.  It requires action and engagement and choice.  To some degree, it requires risk.  It requires intellectual fortitude and the willingness to create your own opinion, independently from what others say.  In many cases, it requires overcoming great obstacles.

Sort of sounds like what we require of a player.

I am consistently impressed by the players of video games.  The endurance, the mental acuity, the curiosity and insatiable desire to create.  People have spent hours upon hours crafting Minecraft worlds as complicated as a scale model of the Enterprise.  Players have cracked every code, found every secret, discovered every bug imaginable in any game ever released.  We have been amazing citizens of the virtual world.  But what about our own? 

Essentially, what I’m getting at is this: does our playing video games enhance our ability to engage or does it give us a false sense that we have, in fact, contributed to something.  I suppose it’s an age-old question.  This fantasy that we experiment with, does it inspire us or delude us? 

I once watched a documentary called Monster Camp about live action role playing.  Some of these people were legitimately inspired by their time spent as Gregor Elfkin, Slayer of Demonath.  Their ability to act brave or self-sacrificing or clever as Gregor empowered them to be more brave, self-sacrificing, and clever as themselves.  Others, though, were clearly living in a fantasy, spending more time developing and being another human being rather than developing themselves.

So which is it?  What is an increasingly player-made culture doing to us?  Are we practicing the skills of engagement we need to handle this world?  Did World of Warcraft help inspire the Arab Spring?  Is Angry Birds, in some small way, an antecedent to Occupy Wall Street? 

Or are we having our inner need to be a citizen satisfied by something that does not, in fact, contribute to anything?

Marriage is broken. How do we fix it?

We had a very interesting small group meeting tonight.  I'm very tired and have to get up in five hours, so I'll sum it up by this: Marriage is broken.  What does it take to fix it?

Clearly, marriage in America has taken a hit in the past four or five decades.  With divorce rates near 50%, many people in my generation have begun to wonder if it's worth it.  For some reason, marriages have just been failing.

Why is that?  We can blame all kinds of things.  A rebellious culture before us that made the formerly taboo divorce okay.  Media that inundates us with messages that certainly don't strengthen marriage.  An entitlement attitude among the 20 and 30 somethings that demands a me-focused reality.  It could be lots of things.

But how do we fix it?  How can I be part of the solution to marriage?

So, really, I would love to hear some responses to this short post.  If you're married, how can other people help you have a good, strong, close, fulfilling marriage?  Seriously.  Ideas.  Go.

Why I killed the internet.

I got rid of the internet on Sunday.  A couple weeks ago, I called up AT&T and said, “Can I cancel my home internet?”  My former roommate and I had secured a yearlong “introductory price” of $20 a month which I suspected was about to expire.  That would double the price to $40 a month.  You know what?  I just don’t think home internet access is worth that to me.

So I call AT&T and tell them this and the lady says, “Sir, did you know that, here in the retention department, we can apply other discounts to your service if price is the only factor.”  I didn’t know that.  I ask her when the discount is set to expire.  “December.”  When I get a new roommate anyway, so there’s no difference in price to me. 

Well, dang.  Just like that, this nice lady at AT&T took away my only economic reasons for canceling my internet service.  But I still told her to cancel it.

I don’t think that’s a terribly common decision for a modern 20something to make, so I thought I’d briefly explain my counter cultural actions.

A while back, I wrote a post about ways to be creative.  Inspired by another blogger, I made my own list of ways that Kemp is creative; tangible things I can do to make myself more creative.  Briefly, here is the list:

Read.
Cultivate and pay attention to fun.
Listen to music intentionally.
Write 250 words a day.
Be impulsive.
Be bored.


Having the internet kills every single item on that list.  Especially number six.

Facebook, marvelous though it has been in connecting us to people, has destroyed our free time with worthless gossip and “catching up.”  YouTube, while revolutionary to the distribution of media in the 1st world, means that we never have to be bored again.  Though Google Reader allows me to follow way more blogs than I ever could before, how many of those posts do I actually think about anymore and how many do I just read so I can check them off my list?  On the internet, there is always something to do, but you never actually get anything done.

So I killed it.  If I thrive on boredom, I need to make sure I’m more bored.  And guess what?  Already I’ve written more, thought more, and engaged more with what I do.  I no longer peruse Hulu for new shows just because I have nothing better to do.  (But seriously, check out Spy.  It’s a Hulu exclusive and it’s hilarious.)

I mean, sure it’s inconvenient.  I can’t follow my shows.  Writing emails on my phone is tedious at best.  Maintaining my blog-a-day challenge has been… irritating.  (I didn’t really think that one out, did I?) But if I had easy internet access, would I still be writing this post?  Or would I have checked the new item in my feed, added someone as a friend, and clicked links until 1am? 

This has been a worthy endeavor so far (I write on day two…).  I’m sure there will be further updates about life without internet, but for now, how could you survive with less internet access?  Could you survive?  Do you think you could be more productive/creative/relational/etc…?  Think about giving it up for a day or two and see how you change.

What do women want?

That is all.





Okay.  Not really.

I started watching Mad Men today.  I figure, hey, it's a thing.  I should know about things. 

One of the questions asked by the very dapper Don Draper in episode two is "What do women want?"  Being a curious person, I asked my woman friend next to me the same question.  Instead of answering it (how like a woman, amiright?), she turned it on me.

"What do men want?"

I thought for about 10 seconds.  "To matter." 

Not bad for a 10 second response, I think. 

I look at myself and my friends and see a bunch of men striving to matter.  We want to change the world.  We want to be the world to someone.  We want to advance our fields.  We want to make a difference in the lives of those around us. 

Even on the dark side of modern "manhood", I think my answer holds some water.  Pornography lies to us by saying that we matter.  The mindless pursuit of stuff is only a symptom of assigning "matter"-ful significance to material possessions.  We get angry, prideful, jealous, and depressed when we think we don't matter as much as we want to. 

Mattering is not just a achievement, either.  I think we want to matter to someone.  Many men's drive toward intimacy (false or true) is a cry that we want someone to depend on us, to love us, to think that we are significant and important.

But my original question still stands.  What do women want?  Is it the same thing that men want, or a slight variation or twist?  Maybe something completely different? 

Anyone out there have any thoughts on men or women and what we want?  (Psst...  This is where you can comment and we can discuss things.)

The Death of Post-Modernism.

(This post is a long time coming.  Since the National Religious Broadcaster's convention, my brain has buzzed with thoughts of modernism and post-modernism, cyncism and localism, and many other great -isms.  Here are my armchair philosopher thoughts.  They might be scattered or difficult to understand.  A friendly comment saying so would be helpful as I refine both my writing style and my thoughts...)

Let's start with a definition of post-modernism.  The term itself is shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding (it's sort of ironic, really).  The Oxford English Dictionary calls it, "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."  One of Merriam-Webster's defintions is "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culutre, identity, history, or language."  The definition that I have been working from since hearing it in my undergraduate philosophy class is attributed to a French philosopher called Jean-Francois Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives."

I mean, think about it.  The 20th century wasn't that great in many ways.  We had recently(ish) come off the enlightenment, a time when all promise lay before man.  Indeed, I think most of the 20th century was spent pursuing the promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism.  Radio took off, closely followed by telephones, television, cable, computers, and, by the end, the internet.  People trusted the power structures of the world to deliver them out of their problems.  Technology will make me lose weight, keep the peace, do the chores, feed me, entertain me, connect me to others, anything.  Our lives would get easier and easier.  Or, at least, that was what the metanarrative of modernism offered.

But what did it deliver?  More war (perhaps) than ever before in history.  A fundamental rift between people and government as leaders fell to corruption and greed.  The disintegration of family life as central to human experience as divorce rates skyrocketted.  Corporations rising and falling, crushing the wallets and souls of people who no longer had the self-discipline to spend less than they earned.  Is it any wonder people began to be skeptical about grand visions of universal truth-claims?

I think at its heart, post-modernism is this fundamental distrust of anything.  You can't trust the government's claims that through big/small government, you will be helped/free to do whatever you want.  You can't trust the advertiser's claims that this product actually works.  You can't trust your parents to know what is good for you.  Twentieth century psychoanlytic theory even undermined the trust in self that people could fall back on.  When you are a teeming cauldron of subconscious, evolutionary urges conditioned by a lifetime of experiences, how can you know that you truly believe what you believe?

This has produced a very tolerant culture.  What works for me is great.  What works for you is great.  If those are completely opposite, that's fine.  Ultimately, I'm forced to trust myself and my experience.  And I expect the same of you.  So that's fine.  We can get along with our completely opposite worldviews because both of us accept that we can't tell anyone else that what I've experienced is more true that what you've experienced.

Deconstruction, the first tool the post-modern reaches for, can only go so far by itself.  We have taken apart everything from science to government to religion to social structures, but what has it left us with?  Nothing but a pile of broken pieces.  We finally figured out that modernism was a lie, but we never found the truth to replace it.

I think we're starting to figure something else out, too.  We're all into sustainablity, right?  (Those nasty moderns in their imperialistic, dogmatic, self-centered, earth-destorying ways made us a little bit... not those things.)  Post-modernism - this incredulity toward metanarrative - is unsustainable.  We can't do it much longer.  It's killing our spirits and we know it.  So we're reaching out.

At first, it's small.  It's our friends.  In my generation, there was a turn towards peer tribes among adolescents.  Instead of caring for and listening to our families, we allied ourselves with our friends - the people closest to our daily experience.  We trust our tribes.  We love our tribes.  To sin against the tribe (through breaking whatever internal rules it has) is worse than Judas' betrayal of Jesus or Brutus' betrayal of Caesar.  The millenials are growing up now and taking their tribes with them.  Most of them are going online.  Social networking, I think, is a direct result of our desire to connect with the only people in the world who we can trust.  We can't trust advertisers to tell us what products work (despite the inundation of custom-made advertisements... thanks Google...).  We can trust our friends.  If they say a product works, then we flock to it and buy it en masse (You're welcome, Steve Jobs.).

So where is all this going?  What am I rambling towards?

I think everything is going to keep going local.  There are apps that tell you who is tweeting near you.  Farmer's markets are rising in popularity and use.  There is a general distaste for all things mass-produced in the mouths (literal and metaphorical) of millenials.

With each step outside of the self, with each snarky comment held in, with each belief firmly and lovingly stated as true, we build trust.  And with that trust, I think comes hope.  I have little hope in the super-structures of society that have been so poisoned with greed and self-interest, but I do have hope that local communities will rise again and people will love their neighbors a little better than they used to.  Now that everything has been deconstructed, we can start constructing again.

The Jetsons and Post-modernism.

My biggest concern about American life as we know it is not gay marriage, the economy, our dependence on foreign oil, or the apathy that has spread across our political institutions.

It's our imagination.

Look at the products our imagination has produced in the past 20 years, especially with regards to our future. There's Blade Runner, the father of modern cyberpunk (and hardly a happy look into what will be...), the Mad Max movies, Terminator, Children of Men, Babylon A.D... The list could go on.

What about our video games? Video games have thrived on sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Post-apocalypse is what we do. From Fallout to the Metal Gear Solid series, video games hardly have a positive vision of the future. It almost seems as though humanity knows and/or fears that we are nearing the end, that we're not going to make it without some serious cataclysm.

What happened to the Jetsons, cheesy as they were? Or Star Trek? These shows captured our imaginations and showed us that the future, despite what the present seemed to indicate, will be bright.

Which brings me to my fear: if we cannot even imagine a solution to the multitude of problems our generation faces, how will we overcome them? Without even an unrealistic solution, how can we begin to work towards anything?

In part, I think the problem lies with post-modernism. (No, I am not a post-modernism hater. Actually, I am sort of post-modern to post-modernity.) Post-modernism has (justifiably) rejected the hope that modernism had in the progress of man. But at what cost? When will we allow ourselves to have hope in anything again?

This thought has become somewhat of a conviction. I've mostly stopped working on one of my favorite story ideas because it is more post-apocalyptic than I'd like it to be. I believe it is the task of the storytellers and artists to craft a more positive vision of the future, giving us, if nothing else, the hope that we can go on.

Christian Culture != Following Jesus.

Going to a Christian university is a unique experience. Never before have I been so fully immersed in the Christian Protestant subculture. Like any subculture, it comes with its own rules and expectations, taboos and holidays, media and attitudes about that media.

For example, as a 20something year old college student, here are a smattering of beliefs that are (sort of) expected of me:

• I must read my Bible every day, at least a chapter. If I read more, I am more spiritual.
• Pray every day, usually in the morning.
  
• I should probably go into ministry. Full time would be preferable.
• Play the guitar.
• Talk about God a lot. Relate everything I experience to God. Tell everyone I know what I experienced and how it relates to God.
  
• More recently, I must strive to "greenify" my life (after all, God is green), listen to high quality, not-so-obviously-Christian music, and study the traditions of other denominations to gain insight into my own.
  

These are some of the more obvious ones, at least. I'm sure you can think of more, whether you belong to this particular subculture or not.

The question, of course, is where do these expectations come from? Do I have to read my Bible to be a follower of Jesus? Do I have to subscribe to the philosophy that God is Green? If I don't do these things, am I a terrible Christian?

I think that oftentimes in the church, we confuse conforming to these expectations with following Jesus. We think that by learning to play guitar, by listening to the right music, by using the right words at the right time, we can grow closer to God.

But God didn't create me to conform to the culture of the church (contrary to what my IDS 200 professor thought...). He didn't necessarily create me to be the worship leader. He didn't create me to listen to trendy Christian bands and take care of the earth and be an advocate for every cause ever.

He created me to follow Jesus. He created me to follow Jesus.

It's a freeing thought to realize that he did not create me to be the pinnacle of Christian culture. He created me to be me. I'm supposed to be an agent of change, a lover of people, a creative person, and the scores of other things that I feel called to be.

But I am not called to be the trendy pastor with thick rimmed glasses. I am called to follow Jesus. Not the new trendy worship leader. Not the new trendy cause. Not the new trendy band or lingo or interpretation of Scripture. Jesus.

I want to be the guy that is outside of Christian culture, but totally into Jesus. I want to follow him in and out of it as he leads, but I do not want to keep him (or me) trapped in the entirely cultural and temporary expectations of our modern Christendom.

(P.S. About the title... In programming languages, an exclamation point means "the opposite of," therefore it reads "Christian Culture does not equal following Jesus." The end.)