Posts by Earl

My Aunt Mabel was old when she was young. At least that’s how it seemed to me. As the youngest of twelve children, my mother was raised mainly by her older sister. So Mabel was a frequent visitor in our home from my elementary to my high school years. Perhaps my earliest recollection of her took is the scratchy “beard” she seemed to tub against my pre-schooler face when greeting me with a hug after one of the long trips that became her life. I never suspected that decades later trips like that would become my life too. Aunt Mae usually came to see us after returning from exotic places like Hong Kong, Myanmar, or Taiwan. Fifty years ago these locales seemed as far away as the back side of the moon. We had no Google imagery, no YouTube videos, no low-cost air...

Groupthink, the wisdom of crowds, all-of-us-are-smarter-than-any-of-us. You’ve heard it called by a lot of names: something happens to ideas when processed by a group of people. The 360church leadership team took advantage of this principle recently when working on the launch of our new small group initiative. Among other issues, we had to decide what to call the groups. So I proposed a collaborative game to our leaders: come up with the worst possible name for our small groups. If we flushed all the bad names out of our system, perhaps a residual good name would emerge!   Here are the nominees for worst name: 1. Koinonoinia Groups – No part of the alphabet says “incomprehensible” like the letter K, especially when it begins a word in...

On April 6th, 360church in Berkeley will hold our first Good Friday Service. Beginning at 5:30PM, we call it a Drive-Time Good Friday. The idea is why spend time sitting in traffic on a holiday weekend when you could be refreshing your soul. Of course, a few of us did share in an outdoor Good Friday prayer meeting at Cal’s Kroeber Fountain (across the street from the Cafe Strada) in 2009, but 4/6/12 will be our first full-on service commemorating the day. So in the middle of planning the event today I was struck by a question: what does the expression “Good Friday” even mean? I know it’s two days before Easter and that followers of Jesus use it to remember his death on the cross. But how does that make it “good”? What’s so...

I have spent my entire adult life studying and practicing the communication arts. If Malcolm Gladwell is right about the investment required to form a life’s work, this field certainly has absorbed my 10,000 hours I have loved every minute of it: from narrating my 8th grade class musical to studying  Aristotle as an undergraduate to meditating on Plato as a graduate student to speaking about Jesus on Sundays at 360church in Berkeley. That is except for the days when I despair over whether communication will ever actually take place. Recently I attended several public events in our city,  some of which gave me hope and others of which did the opposite. Taken together, I see a pattern in them that may help to explain why connecting with groups seems almost...

I enjoyed the Academy Award broadcast last Sunday night. The program had better pace, shorter speeches and more laughs than previous installments. Then I read a review by Amanda. From her perspective as a Canadian Millennial serving on the yPulse Youth Advisory Board, she offered the following thoughts: “Staying relevant to youth has always been a challenge for awards shows. What’s even worse are the desperate attempts that awards shows make to attract youth. From inviting random tween/teen celebrities as guests and presenters or having them appear in montages, to even having young adult celebrities hosting, these attempts usually end up being disastrous.   I wish the Academy knew that the problem for the declining young viewers is not rooted within the...

Ever thought about a career as a big-time Hollywood producer or director? Maybe action films are your starting point. Here’s all you need to know: Title: Die Harder (Alternative: The Bourne Symposium) Hero: Former Special Forces operator betrayed by the CIA and left in the jungle to die at the hands of a vicious extra-terrestrial that works for the NSA because it was betrayed by the CIA as well. Sidekick: An optional character who is a younger, incompetent version of the Hero providing a person to be captured by the Villain and later rescued in a way that involves prolonged car chases featuring multiple collisions, none of which disable the Hero’s vehicle. Female Lead: Can be a hapless victim, a straight-up girlfriend or a hapless victim who becomes a...

  Public Policy Polling’s third annual TV news trust survey finds “Fox News tops the list for both the source Americans trust the most and the one they trust the least.” About one-third (34%) of voters find Fox to be the most trustworthy, with the next highest rating going to PBS at 17%. An identical percentage of voters report that Fox news coverage is the least reliable, with the Comedy Channel as the closest competitor at 16%. Numbers like these are consistent with something I’ve suspected for a long time: the notion of American politics as a two-party system is too simple. Oh sure we’ve always had lots of not-Republican, not-Democrat political parties including Socialists and Nazis, Greens and Libertarians, America First...

I have been a Pittsburgh Steeler fan for 50 years. Good times. Bad times. Good teams. Bad teams. I’ve been a fan. In my home town football is not sport, it is religion. Our service begins on Friday night at the local high school field, continues on Saturday when Pitt plays, and culminates in the holiest moment of all: the Steeler game on Sunday. Welcome to the First Church of the Black and Gold. The Steelers have no mascot, no cheerleaders and the smallest payroll in the NFL–a perfect fit for the city’s hard working, two-fisted ethos. With all that in place, we lost tragically to Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos in this year’s AFC wildcard game in overtime. (The same Tebow/Denver team that had a tragedy inflicted by the New England Patriots...