the city of voices

I rarely do this.

Recently, someone posted a comment in which he wondered how we might balance my “Culture Pub” perspectives with the truths that Jesus and the Church embrace. We would not want to denigrate the church while seeking to call people to faith in Jesus.

So true, I thought. I responded with a comment that was longer than the post.

I suggested that God may in fact be speaking to those outside the church through people who are also outside the church.

He suggested that “It is not the words of poets and songwriters that offer spirit and life, it is the words of Jesus Christ.”

Again, I agreed. But my comment and post, I felt, reached farther than that.

Here’s my reply with enhancements and edits for the purpose of this post. (Click this link to read the complete original post and comments, “Vox Culture Pubs™: Three Essential Questions“.) Below the reply here, I’ve placed some processing questions for you and for your small groups or teams.

[I am truly] sorry. I didn’t mean to denigrate your church (or “the church”). Truly.
Having said that… I differ — in some way — with almost every word in your first comment.

That’s why your thoughts are hugely welcome here.

[As an example], let’s take your comment: “It is not the words of poets and songwriters that offer spirit and life, it is the words of Jesus Christ.”

At first, I just thought you missed the point I was making. But I think it’s more likely that we have a different orientation.

It’s true, Jesus is the poet of poets. But I think you underestimate the “spirit poet” who works at large in the heart of humanity.

We have a difference here. And it is our differences that make things clear.

I think God is actively and fervently at work outside of the church. He is “in,” “with,” and “for” the world. That’s why we can find and hear God out here on the outside.

Listen to the words of Paul to his Athenian audience, “‘For in him we move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17).

Here Paul quotes two poets. The first, ‘For in him we move and have our being’ is attributed to the Cretan poet Epimenedes (c. 600 BC).

The second, ‘We are his offspring,” is from a Cilician poet named Aratus.

Paul quotes the Greek poet Menander in I Co 15.33: “Bad company corrupts character.”

He quotes Epimenedes again in Titus 1.12 (where he calls him — gasp! — a prophet): “Even one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.”

Paul, at least, seems somewhat aware that poets outside Israel and outside of the Christ following movement may grasp truth and point to it with their words. I think it’s because Paul recognizes that God was in the world long before he was in the Bible.

Why does Paul do this? Why doesn’t Paul quote, as you say, “The Word of God?” Doesn’t he know that only the scriptures offer life?

[Three] reasons, I think. First, to connect with his audience. Second, sometimes outsiders say things that help us move the world forward. Third, sometimes outsiders say things better than insiders.

It seems to me, that you see God in the Bible, but if you’ll look up every now and then, you’ll see that He’s not just a character in a work of literature, but actually active in the world and in the hearts of people, even outsiders.

In my opinion, God can speak to us –and truthfully! — through prophets from the outside, as I have written in this post, to point us to humanity.

Outsiders are a resource to utilize and mobilize for the purpose of Making the Future Human. [By which I mean, making the future what God intended. See, Making the World Human Again].

The human words of human poets, songwriters, filmmakers, etc may parallel the words of The Human, Jesus, who leads us towards a more human future. That being the case, our giving that “voice” from the outside a place in the conversation [enhances] the work and the community of God.

That’s the very heart of Voxtropolis (which means “city of voices”) and the Culture Pub. We want to harness the creative energy of the bohemians in our community to move the world towards a more human future.

It’s true, the outside world often offers distorted visions of reality. But, sometimes the church can offer an equally distorted vision of reality. But Culture Pubs exist to call those of us on the outside to draw pictures of the human future that God is in Christ making.

Thanks for your input.
Again, I truly do not wish to denigrate your or anyone’s church.
I have nothing against your church, Christianity or the Christian religion. As far as religions go, I think Christianity is a [great] one.

I just prefer humanity.

Processing Questions
I hope this conversation creates some dialogue on your side of the cyber-divide. I offer to you these questions from the original post as a processing device.

QUESTION #1] Is God at work in the church today? Yes, but what if he was actually far more at work in the world and calling the church to find him out here?

QUESTION #2] Is God speaking today? Yes, but what if he were speaking to the world through those outside the church?

BONUS QUESTION] How would an affirmative answer to the above questions change how you do what you do?

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IMN NEWS
Culture Pub Central at The HUMAN Event
Orlando, Fl
February 6-7, 2009

The IMN’s Signature 7-Day Mentoring Immersion
Orlando, Fl
February 2-8, 2009

IMN Global Network
Alex McManus
Founder, IMN™ and creator of Voxtropolis™
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For the sake of full disclosure, I admit that I’ve had what we today call a “Voxtropolitan” orientation since I was converted to Christ. Some people say we can’t help it because we are born this way. Others say its environmental.

Whatever the case, The Vox Culture Pub™, about which we’re talking today, is a way of thinking, a way of being, an orientation.

In the end, we may discover that there is a “culture pub” gene. But I think that the “culture pub” madness can also be developed through nurture.

So, in order to help you get into the mind and heart of the thing, I’ve formulated three questions to help you. I hope they help you understand the orientation that has set Voxtropolis, the City of Voices, on fire. While you read, I’ll just play a little violin. Enjoy.

QUESTION #1] Is God at work in the church today? Yes, but what if he was actually far more at work in the world and calling the church to find him out here?

I think a lot of religious people have fallen into a trap. They think because they’re the chosen people that they’ve been set aside in a special place, an exclusive place where God lives and works. God hangs in the church with them because the people out here, where the rest of us are, are bestial. That’s not wholly false. But you insiders should remember when you point a finger at others three fingers point back at ya. I think God is out here and he wants you to come out and play.

The apostle Peter discovered that God was in the world at work among the gentiles. In fact, the gentile Cornelius already had God’s attention before Peter brought the gospel to him. When Peter explained the gospel to Cornelius both of them were converted towards Christ.

Angels coordinated this meeting because there was something Peter knew (i.e. the gospel) that Cornelius needed to hear and there was something that Heaven knew that Peter needed to get (i.e. that God is out here with the rest of us too). Peter and the other early Christ followers couldn’t believe it. God was out here partying with the gentiles. Go figure.

No wonder church can be so quiet sometimes.

QUESTION #2] Is God speaking today? Yes, but what if he were speaking to the world through those outside the church?

God speaks to the world today through –dare I say it — non Christians.
He speaks to us through our poets, filmmakers and songwriters. We feel the same way you do about our need for forgiveness and the beauty of justice. We are moved by stories of struggle and redemption. Sure, we have some slackers out here that are all about themselves. But, heck, don’t you?

This is where the Vox Culture Pubs — the ones that become performance venues — have broken some new ground. Our Vox teams become talent scouts looking for local artists to perform or have showings in our venue, The Vox Culture Pub. We do this for so many reasons, it isn’t funny. One, we like to perform. Two, we want to hear others perform. Three, we want to be able to point performers and their fans towards creating and supporting art that shapes the world for better. Four, our Culture Pubs are almost always connected to some humanitarian project out here. Five, we’ll make any excuse to have a party. I’ll stop there.

QUESTION #3] Is God wooing people towards Jesus? Yes, but is there a more amicable platform from which to point out this wooing?

I think that God intends more than to make the world Christian. He intends to make people human again. I just wrote a book about this called (surprise) “Making the World Human Again– the quest to save the future from religion.” Jesus is the ultimate human. To walk on his way is a humanizing activity. Often, when we walk on his way, we suddenly or we softly discover that we do not walk alone. To find ourselves walking with God makes us what we were created to be: human.

Voxtropolis’ message is a call for a human world, a world that works for everyone. In this “call” we are able to point out Jesus as the human leader for the 21st century. I think that’s a message that makes everybody an insider — everybody except those who wish to keep the world inhumane. And, as far as I’m concerned, people who want to keep the world inhuman can stay on the outside.

So, there you have it. Three essential questions that frame the entire enterprise. I don’t claim it’s the only framework. I don’t claim that it is inerrant in any way, shape or form. It’s just where we’re at.

It’s true, we do things at Vox that you would never, could never do in church. If you’re the kind of person who never goes to movies and never listens to secular music and avoids the happy hour at your local pub, Culture Pubs are not for you.

I’m not dismissing you, believe me. I missed the entire decade of the 80’s because I was too busy studying, preaching on the streets of New Orleans’ infamous French Quarter, starting a church with Cajuns and another one with Latins, and trying to figure out why I didn’t fit in the church. I wouldn’t trade that decade for anything. Not that it matters, now that I’m temporarily in Orlando again, it feels like I get to live in the 80’s again. Nothing lost. Much gained.

But Vox is a venue where humans can talk about truth. It’s NOT a no holds barred process. Our Pubs are generally rated “PG 13″ or “R” depending on your take. But it can be raw. It can be sweet. It can be modest. It can be honest. You just never know what is on God’s mind when he brings the world into a party where the goal is to make the world human again.

What do you think?

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Other articles on this topic

What a Vox Culture Pub Won’t do for You

Back to Voxtropolis.com

IMN Global Network
Alex McManus
Founder, IMN and creator of Voxtropolis
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Alex McManus here. I’m writing this post in conjunction with the August 4 Issue of the International Mentoring Network news. We’re calling it the Vox Culture Pub Issue.

This post is designed to neutralize the hype. Anytime people are excited about something there will be an idealization of it. We’re excited. So let’s also be real.

This post outlines a few things the Vox Culture Pub process won’t do for you. Culture Pubs may provide a way of entry into the people group your seeking to reach with the gospel. But it isn’t magic. It only feels like magic. And, like Dr. House says in the episode where they are treating a magician for a mysterious illness and he’s trying to get the performer to reveal how he does a particular trick, “It’s way cooler to know.”

So, here’s to knowing. It is way cooler.

4 things a Culture Pub won’t do for you:

1] Culture Pubs will not build a leadership team for you

That is part of the art of leadership and leaders will do this with or without Culture Pubs. Depending on the structure chosen, leaders discover new leaders and develop them. They sustain the morale of the team. They deploy them on the mission. They numerically grow the leadership team and multiply other leaders. Culture Pubs won’t do that for you.

2] Culture Pubs will not turn people to faith in Christ for you

The art of building relationships with Christ at the center is a genius you’ll still need to cultivate. People will still need guidance and help in coming to faith and Culture Pubs won’t do that for you.

3] Culture Pubs will not meet the needs of people looking for churches

Much church planting today is about competing for Christians. Christians are a huge market and consume much in the way of Christian music, Christian books, Christian schools and Christian churches. The way many church plants are conceived and executed, the economics almost demand that they compete for Christians who may already be disposed to giving money to the church.

That means that you must compete with other churches. That’s why church planters worry so much about the Sunday program. The Christian performances must meet a certain standard if they are to succeed in the Christian market.

4] A corollary to the last point: Culture Pubs won’t build a church budget

It may build a Culture Pub budget but that’s different than a church budget. Having said that, Culture Pubs may fail — depending on how you define failure and success — for the same reasons a church plant fails. The leaders are unable to grow their core leadership teams. The money runs out. People get tired and lose interest. Internal conflicts about the purpose and mission.

So, in other words, culture pubs will not make you a Christian celebrity. Your books will not sell. Your blog will be ignored. You’ll rarely get invited to speak at Christian conferences.

Ok, now that we’ve got you interested, what will the Culture Pub process do for you?

The Culture Pub process is designed to help a motivated Christ following leader start in the world, with the world and for the world

For the Church Planter everything begins in the church. For the Culture Pub promoter everything begins in the world.

The church planting teams begins to recruit Christians and start planning to reach the world by planting a new church in which they can worship. This new church will be more pleasing to them and so, they hope, will be more interesting to their unreached friends. The Culture Pub promoters begin to recruit non Christians to realize a common dream or participate in a common passion. Any Christian who attaches must attach to that mission.

It sounds subtle and it is, but it is of profound importance.


The IMN provides a network for leaders who are stepping out of the ordinary (i.e. cool, innovative church plants, Christian cafes and coffee houses, House or organic churches) into something out of the ordinary

The key difference is that the most innovative church planters today succeed at making church more appealing. They’re still working with and for Christians. Cafes are cafes for Christians. House churches are house churches for Christians. Bible studies are Bible studies for Christians. They hope that since it’s something different, maybe unreached people will come. Sometimes unreached people do come. But all of that has been done. And, it should continue to be done. They are important.

But Culture Pubs are not in the Christian market place competing for Christians. They begin in, with and for the world.

Culture Pubs will allow you to use whatever your passion to reach those who may not yet know Christ

For example, IMN alumni have started

Cigar City, a place where men taste cigars and talk about life
Book clubs at public book stores in which the non-believers choose the books (!)
Strengths Finder events
Tables of twelve — for building relationships through dining experiences
Vox parties and Vox Culture Pubs [Side note: We’ve just started an annual World Music Jam. In 2009 it will take place in Orlando on Feb 6-7.]
Vox Art galleries and displays
House Concerts
Music video productions

[For a more complete list of possibilities]

These activities may or may not be attached to a more typical new church plant.

THE FIRST TWO LETTERS OF “PURE COINCIDENCE” ARE “CP” BACKWARDS!
The fact that “Culture Pub” and “Church Plant” have the same first two letters — CP — is a pure coincidence. It is a pure coincidence.

Coincidence because when I coined the phrase I wasn’t looking for a word that had the same two letters. Pure because my intention was for the Culture Pub process to help church planters. I wanted to help them get normal again.

The one measure, the one outcome that I was looking for this first set of Culture Pubs is, could we create a process that would put the Christ following leader in sustained contact with the very people he was trying to reach? You know, the normal people that live out here outside the church.

The idea — at least parts of it — that was conceived in my mind, was carried first by Niza and our band along with some friends in Europe. It was on that trip that the Culture Pub was born. We called the first iteration of the Culture Pub, the NIZA music strategy. We took what we learned, tweaked it and gave it a name — the Culture Pub — and made additional advances as it was carried in the USA by some of the writers who are featured in the August 4, 2009 Issue of the IMN News, but also by others. In the end the Culture Pubs delivered beyond our expectations.

Sometimes even those of us involved find it hard to believe.

I threw a Vox Party in Orlando and my friend, Dean, who was one of the first guys to get on board in the USA phase of the Culture Pub experiment, turns to me and said, “This really works.”

I found it funny because, at the time he said that, he’d already been successfully growing his Vox Culture Pub for about 18 months!

[Side note: You can find their voices on voxtropolis.com. Search “Culture Pubs.”]

My question was, can we create opportunities for better and sustained relational opportunities with unreached people? We’re approaching a “yes” answer. But there’s so much more than that that we want to accomplish. We have a lot more questions to answer and we’ll tackle them the only way we know how. Create a hypothesis and then test it. That’s what the IMN does.

What do you think?

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Other Articles on this Topic: Vox Culture Pubs: 3 Essential Questions

Back to Voxtropolis.com

Check out my new book, Human Again– the Quest to Save the Future from Religion.

Order today and receive a pre-book release discount.

Enjoy.

I’m listening to Jason Sharp performing at House Blend Cafe.
This performance is part of Voxtropolis that is taking place
in Orlando, Florida this week.

Register to win an “iPod Touch”

Here’s How.

ONE. Chill out to cool music at
VOXTROPOLIS ORLANDO
January 27, 2008
Push Play Cafe

TWO. Register to win the ‘iPod Touch” while there.
THREE. Be present at the drawing.

VOXTROPOLIS
February 8, 2008
7 PM - 10 PM
Downtown Orlando

While there, you’ll experience a very cool and informal ambience, chilling music by local and visiting artists, and get a feel for a new musical and artistic vibe in Central Florida.

*For those of you who will join us at VOXTROPOLIS — the world music jam on February 8-9 — you may register that evening. ** You must be present to win.

Register to win an “iPod Touch”

Here’s How.

ONE. Chill out to cool music at
VOXTROPOLIS ORLANDO
January 27, 2008
Push Play Cafe

TWO. Register to win the ‘iPod Touch” while there.
THREE. Be present at the drawing.

VOXTROPOLIS
February 8, 2008
7 PM - 10 PM
Downtown Orlando

While there, you’ll experience a very cool and informal ambience, chilling music by local and visiting artists, and get a feel for a new musical and artistic vibe in Central Florida.

*For those of you who will join us at VOXTROPOLIS — the world music jam on February 8-9 — you may register that evening. ** You must be present to win.

According Debra Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, 20 million children will be members of some sort of virtual world by 2011. Today there are 8.2 million.

In a recent New York Times article, Web Playgrounds for the Very Young, Club Penguin attracts 7 times more traffic than Second Life, a virtual world for adults. [Even those of us who’ve not memorized the times tables through 99 can see that’s a huge difference. See my post, Future Watch: Education, for back story on this].

The New York Times quotes, Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Group: “There is a massive opportunity here.” In other words, watch out. The big corporations (Movies, toys, etc) are coming after your kids.

What do you think?

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Register Now for HUMANA 2.08. For more info see the Website at http://fight4humanity.com

Do you have your multiplication tables memorized through 99?
How about your children?

This morning’s New York Times had an interesting article about
the Japanese looking to India for educational models. Japan has
dominated their region of the world for the last century or so.
Of course, by now almost everyone is aware of the ascendancy
India and China as economic global giants.

But it is India with it’s powerful surge into the world of software
development, internet businesses and the knowledge economy that
has captured Japan’s attention. The Times reports that Japanese papers
carry stories of Indian Children “memorizing multiplication tables
up to 99 times 99, compared with Japan’s relatively lax elementary-
school requirement of knowing 9 times 9.”

Future economic prosperity lies in the sciences and technology and it
is these areas in which Japan –while still excelling — has fallen
comparatively speaking in the last few years.

The result? Get this- the success of Indian style education in Japan.
[This is in and of itself worthy of a post — the fact that Japan would
look to an Asian country reverses generations of prejudice]. The
philosophy is to teach children more facts at a younger age,
memorization and cramming of info.

For many Americans this will seem slavish. But that’s because we
live in the center of the world where everything is easier. In some ways
this makes us weaker. We push less because we’re the pinnacle. In the
meantime the developing world, like little turtles born on the shore, race
for the seas of math, science, discipline and achievement as if their lives
depended on it.

Here’s a future scenario. The USA replaces China as the mass producer
of cheap imitations and souvenirs (just visit Sunset and Hollywood Blvds
in Los Angeles or International Dr in Orlando to see what this would look like),
India becomes the world leader in Education and the Japanese learn to speak
English and write code from Indians.

God I love this planet.
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Register Now for HUMANA 2.08. For more info see the Website at http://fight4humanity.com

Get ready for some excellent changes here at Voxtropolis in 2008.

The main page will change.
The blog feed will soon appear in the Taboo Lounge where it is illegal to
post on religion and politics. So you can count on the fact that the graffiti
will be all over those walls.
prepare for some guests bloggers of note
this site will also become the main site for VOXTROPOLIS the experience
here comes Culture Pub Central –get in the network

Happy New Years from
Voxtropolis Headquarters