johnnylaird

OK.

Wrapping up the expanded blogroll:

johnnylaird blogroll A to I

johnnylaird blogroll J through R

johnnylaird blogroll S through Z…well, “T” really

• I’ve been following Scott Hodge almost from the beginning of my own online noodlings (Scott gets shout outs on johnnylaird from as far back as ’06), having originally been drawn in by the captivating story of the transitional journey of cultural change experienced by the Church Scott now leads.
• Lon Wong blogs at the recently revamped Solar Crash, a blog I discovered trying to get more info on Erwin McManus & Mosaic in LA. I stumbled across this post, and discovered a lot of common ground as I explored the rest of the blog.
• Stewart Cutler is one third of the presenting team of the Something Beautiful Podcast, and has been a blogging voice I’ve respected for a long time now.
• Andrew Jones is otherwise known as Tall Skinny Kiwi, and is – as far as I know – travelling the world with his family in a giant truck! …as documented in their “Jonesberries” blog. At the time of me writing this post they appear to be in the Rif Mountains in Morocco. TSK lives a life of extraordinary adventure, not just because of this latest escapade, also because he stretches himself intellectually, theologically, missionally and in many other ways beside. He also has to take credit as the dude who’s blog inspired Problogger Darren Rowse to start blogging! Tall Skinny Kiwi – the blog, and the man – has huge traction amongst the Church community, and ranks high on many other Jesus following blogs. I like his bio: “travelling around the world with my family in a 4×4 truck to see the world that god loves, to eat unusual food {but not too unusual} and to help change the world by telling stories, throwing parties, making friends and giving gifts. I am interested in spirituality and religion as it collides with new media and the emerging culture “

Andrew Jones – emerging, missional conspirator from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

• The Rubicon is not a blog per se, but is amongst the very best places where members of my tribe – The Salvation Army – wrestle vigorously and honestly about the issues of what is means today to be a Salvationist. Clearly it’s very niche, and not for everyone, but I find it an invaluable aid as I try and understand what we were and are as a movement. If you’re a Sallie and you don’t know the Rubicon, it’s definitely worth checking out.
• I posted a blog called HT to theWeir earlier this year, and shot him straight into the blogroll. Andrew is one of a whole crew of Tweeters who I maintain a fairly constant dialog with. Catch him at @theWeir
• This Fragile Tent is an exquisite little blog – full of gorgeous pics of Scotland, and wonderful inspiring thoughts from Chris Goan who leads Aoradh (meaning ‘adoration’) – a Christian Arts community in Dunoon on the River Clyde in Scotland. There’s a real kind of Celtic vibe underpinning Chris’ blog – even though Chris is an Englishman!

This is my 500th post.

So…by way of celebration, here’s my first video.

Shaky camera work…done on my iPhone…with my face best suited for radio!

500 Posts from Johnny Laird on Vimeo.

It’s always seemed to me that my blog was principally a hub – a landing place – to let other folks in on some of the good stuff I was discovering along the way as I read about, listened to and observed the world around me.
So, my blogroll was always an important part of johnnylaird for me. I always figured it was the best bit.

I’m hoping it will be helpful if I give a bit of a rundown of who’s on my blogroll, and what it was that inspired me to add their name.

So here’s what’s on the johnnylaird blogroll from A through I.

Please check out the blogs listed. There’s a ton of good stuff that’s worth exploring:

• Danielle Strickland’s Army Barmy Remix is worth watching if you are passionate about Social Justice, especially in the area of Human Trafficking.
• Charles Lee is a hugely creative ideas guy whose many and varied initiatives are hugely inspirational. His own bio puts in succinctly: “Ideation Strategist, Networker, and Compassionary”.
• Chris & Dana Byers are great friends and fearless people of faith, willing to follow the call of God, wherever it takes them and however crazy it seems.
• Deep Church is Jason Clark’s online home. Jason is a Pastor and Academic, and is one of the most informed voices in the UK when it comes to all things Emergent/Emerging Church. (If you don’t know what these terms mean, don’t worry about it too much. Those who do are currently exploring whether these designations still hold water and were ever universally understood by the Church as a whole. Please don’t read this affectionate jibing as anything other than that. I have MUCH LOVE for the E… guys!)
  
• Eliacin Rosario-Cruz is a wholly fascinating dude who has so much to say about culture, faith and life. Anyone who includes the phrase “rabble rouser” in their bio is worth a read in my book! He’s recently given his site a re-jig and it’s looking very good.
• I’ve been following Eric Bryant for a long time, and he’s a top guy, and a key leader at the wonderfully creative community of Mosaic in LA. It was good a couple of years back to hook up with Eric in person. He’s a lovely fellah with a real heart for – and commitment to – ethnically diverse communities.
• Eugene Cho: I heard about the Seattle based Q Cafe initiative he birthed before I found out about Eugene himself, but I’m glad I discovered him. Eugene has been driving a remarkable charity – One Day’s Wages – in recent months, and has been impressive in the way he’s been able to mobilize people behind his vision.

The Movement of One Day’s Wages from One Day’s Wages on Vimeo.

• Existential Punk is a hard hitting exploration of faith, sexuality, political thought…and poetry. Go there – and be challenged!
• If you want to explore an elegant – and intelligent – site coming out of Hong Kong, you could do a lot worse than visit Fernando Gros. The “Sound, Image, Faith and Culture” strapline is great, but may not quite prepare you for how good some of the content really is. Wonderful pics, great deep thoughts..and a man with excellent taste in music.
• Geek-Speak is Chris Hinton – a top & trusted friend who’s been a real help in all kinds of techy areas for me when I recently migrated to WordPress. You’ll find him cropping up on my Blogging Dojo page as well.
• Headphonaught was one of my earliest blogging buddies who has become a fast family friend. He’s a Maven and Connector all rolled into one and my brother from another mother.
• I can’t quite remember how Tobit Emmens of Held in Tension drifted into my radar (can you remember Tobit?), but we’ve got a whole bunch of mutual online buddies and I think we share a similar world view.
• I became aware of Ian Adams’ In the Belly of the Big Fish blog because I used to regularly lurk on the website of the wonderfully named “mayBe” faith community he used to lead in Oxford. Ian wears a few hats around the fuzzy edges of the Church in the UK and describes himself like this: “I’m a writer, mentor and teacher around themes of community, culture, and spirituality.”

More to come soon…

Quite how I became familiar with Sam Radford has been lost in the mists of time. I honestly can’t remember what it was that started a dialog that has been going on for at least a couple of years now, but I’m glad it happened, cause he’s a diamond. Sam describes himself as a “futurist, catalyst, change agent, tech lover, web designer, and human potential maven “, so it’s obvious to me that he’s an interesting guy.

I recently asked Sam a few questions to see if I could find out a little more about what drives him….and whether he can remember how we started talking!

Sam! Can you tell us a little about your story, so we have a little bit of background? Who is Sam Radford?

Hey Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to tackle these questions. And yeah, I too don’t remember the exact details about how we first connected. Regardless, it was obviously meant to be!

To the question! Well, yeah, who am I? Boy do I wish I knew! Whilst I’m figuring that out, here’s a few details:

I’m 32, married to my gorgeous wife, Rachel, and we have a 14 month old baby called Eloise. I live in Sheffield where I’ve been since 1996 when I came to study Business IT.

As to what I do, the question really is where do I start?! My main paid job is as a ‘technical content administrator’ for a government funded website for over 40,000 maths teachers. No, I’m not into maths! I am however into websites and design and, specifically, I work on the video, audio, and animation that goes on the site.

Also, I am the founder and ‘executive producer’ (still figuring out what that means) for Vox Sheffield. Vox is a not-for-profit creative arts community that is focussed on making the world a better place. We’re all about showcasing creativity, building community, and working together for a better world. We run music, arts and spoken word nights, book clubs, improv. comedy workshops, family play days, etc, etc.

Then there is Mosaic . Mosaic is a faith community that me and Rachel started a few years back. We are all about creating an interesting, inclusive, accessible, and diverse community where people can explore, question, and journey together whilst focussing on and seeking to follow the person of Jesus Christ. It’s messy, informal, and a whole lot of fun!

Finally, Mosaic actually employs me for one day a weeks worth of time to serve other groups and organisations. Specifically, I do a lot of work for Oasis South Africa , helping them with their website, technology issues, and I do strengths training with their staff. I also give quite a bit of time to other churches and organisation in Sheffield doing strengths training. And, thirdly, I use some of that time to help with the International Mentoring Network.

I know, I know. That was more of a ‘what do I do’ than a ‘who am I’, but it’s the best I’ve got for now! Oh, and
I promise my next answers will be shorter.

The words you use to describe yourself online seem to put you at the leading edge. Is that a fair assessment, and if so, how did you find yourself arriving in that place?

Haha! They either put me at ‘the leading edge’ as you put it or just as a pretentious git!

But yeah, I am a very future orientated person. Me and Rachel always joke that she gets to know people by asking where they’ve come from, whilst I always am asking them where they’re going. We make a good team that way.

I am fascinated by the future. I think that the message of Jesus and his kingdom is all about the future breaking into the present. I’m the sort of person who enjoys being out on the edge, trying new things, not being afraid to fail. I’m a pioneering personality. I think part of my role is to pave a way so that others can come along afterwards and do a much better job than we did. But, if we hadn’t gone first, they’d never be doing it.

I’m not sure how I became this sort of person. I’ve never been someone who has settled for the status quo. I’ve always asked questions that others felt they perhaps not even meant to ask. And that sometimes gets me into trouble. I was just 17 when I was first effectively asked to leave a church I was part of for asking the ‘wrong’ questions!

You have a number of connections with various communities or tribes, as well as having a number of roles within them. How does it all fit together?

It fits together as a beautiful mess called life! I don’t really separate these things out. I understand integrity to mean having one, integrated life, rather than a life made up of very different, segmented parts. So Mosaic, Vox, work, IMN, family…they just all blend together. We really don’t as a family ‘go to church’. We are simply part of a faith community, it’s integrated into our lives. Essentially, I just do a lot of stuff that I love and do it with people that I love.

My gift, I think, is to help others thrive. I’m not the most talented person in our community at anything really. But I’m great at helping develop the environments where all those far more talented people than me can actually bring their talents to the fore. That’s my talent. And I try and bring that to all the different communities and projects that I’m involved with.

You help lead a faith community in Sheffield called Mosaic. Were you there from the beginning? What kind of journey has it been with the folks there?

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, me and Rachel started Mosaic several years ago. We’d both been on leadership (me: assistant pastor, Rachel: worship director) at a Pentecostal black majority church for around five years and had felt that God was summoning us away from there to do something that’d be more accessible for people who would never even venture close to a mainstream church. And so we started Mosaic.

It’s been an fascinating journey since then. We’ve learnt a lot through a combination of mistakes and accidental success! We’ve grappled with finding the right relationship to things like structure. Structure, as we see it, you see isn’t good or bad necessarily; but it is a wonderful servant and a terrible master.

We’re struggled through the challenges of doing something that doesn’t ‘feel’ like church as we know it. It is amazing how much of our faith is directly attached to so many institutional church structures, systems, programmes, buildings and services. And when they get taken away, it can be pretty exposing and unsettling and leave us craving what we had before! Guiding people through that has been interesting and challenging – and we’re still not there yet.

There’s SO much more to share here, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’m intrigued about how you came to be involved with Alex and Erwin McManus. How did that happen?

That’s pretty random actually. No time to tell the full story but, in short, it’s thanks to Google! I had had the name Mosaic in my head for a while but couldn’t figure out the reason why. When we realised we were to go and start something new, I immediately knew that it should be called Mosaic. Then, when searching around the word Mosaic on Google, I came across Mosaic in LA . I read through their website and ordered Erwin’s book ‘An Unstoppable Force’ (HIGHLY recommended by the way), and it was like reading something that put in to words all the thoughts we’d been having. Even the five values he talked about matched the things we’d been jotting down!

So, we got in touch with Alex who was the international liaison at the time. And, long story short, we ended up being part of his seven day mentoring immersion ran by the IMN in LA and this included, as part of that, attending Mosaic’s annual conference. And we’ve been in relationship ever since.

I work most closely with Alex as part of my role with the IMN, but I try and catch up with Erwin whenever he’s in the UK and we dialogue via email now and then.

Can I ask you about the concept of “mission”. What is it that informs your sense of mission?

Wow. Big question. This interview is already not far off becoming a book and now you ask me that!

I guess ultimately I’d narrow it down to two things: Jesus and people. I’m a totally Jesus focussed and Jesus centred person. Jesus is the filter through which I see and interpret everything. If he turns out to be a fake, I’m scuppered!

Ultimately, I see my life as being about a continuation of what Jesus started through his life and then brought to fruition through his death, resurrection, ascension and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And what was Jesus’ life all about? People. He was for humanity. He stood up for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the sick, the lonely, the sinful. You know, people! Us! And that’s the type of person I want to be and what I want my life to be all about.

I think Jesus is the best hope that our world has. I want my life to represent him well and to point people towards him. I want to be a voice of hope.

Did I forget anything you feel it would be important to share?

I think if anyone has made it this far they deserve a simple ‘no’ to this question!

My next run is now firmly in the diary, after procrastinating for a long time about actually signing up for the Oxford Town & Gown 10kn.

I’m a tortoise, not a hare…

It will be in memory of my old buddy Andy Greig who we very sadly lost to cancer in November last year.

As ever I will run for Andy’s Angels.

Just Giving page is here if you’d like to help

Andy Greig  05.03.1966 – 21.11.2009 Much love

Yesterday I posted a Tweet , which in turn appeared on my Facebook profile:

Where/who are the innovators in The Salvation Army in the UK?

I was almost immediately asked to give my definition of innovators.

So , here it is:

Visionaries, those willing to explore “the new”, the radicals, those working on the margins, those connecting with creativity, the risk takers, the alternative voices.

I guess the seed of my question is largely – and this is only my personal view – based on my perception that much of this Salvationist innovation is going on outside of the UK. I’m seeing great stuff in Australia, Canada, parts of the US, but I’m keen to hear the stories from the UK.

It was interesting to me that Seth Godin was kicking around a similar thought - albeit more generally –  on the same day:

“There is no tribe of normal

People don’t coalesce into active and committed tribes around the status quo.

The only vibrant tribes in our communities are the ones closer the edges, or those trying to make change. The center is large, but it’s not connected.

If you’re trying to build a tribe, a community or a movement, and you want it to be safe and beyond reproach at the same time, you will fail.

Heretical thoughts, delivered in a way that capture the attention of the minority–that’s the path that works.

My Tweet seemed to resonate with some of my buddies on Facebook, as it kicked of a passionate dialog.

Any thoughts?

HT to Fulton Hawk for the image

I’ve wondered whether it was a good idea to get too Party Political on this blog, but this broadcast from Eddie Izzard is too good not to show….and I don’t think you’d have to dig too deep into my online presence over the years to get a notion of where my sympathies lie

I’ve been impressed with Halogen TV lately, and would love to see them finding a way to air their stuff in the UK.

As they say about themselves…

Halogen is a socially conscious television network and website that targets and activates an emerging generation who are willing and ready to give back. Using film, documentary, episodic and other formats, Halogen features a wide variety of lifestyle programming that empowers viewers to leave their mark and make the world a better place to live.

Halogen is Zeitgeisty, stylish, hip…and is out to save the world.

At the beginning of 2010, good friend and constant encourager JD Blundell put together a list of bloggers to watch in 2010. That’s when I first became aware of Kevin Hendricks.

Kevin has just self published a book – Addition by Adoption – a snappy little read that shares the story of his family’s journey through adoption mostly in the form of Tweets he had fired out during those months of family change.

So, it felt like a good time to hook up with Kevin and get some more insight into the back story behind the book. Here’s the interview:

Q: Hey Kevin! First off, we have to give a shout out to our good mutual buddy, JD Blundell of the Something Beautiful Podcast who kinda drew the two of us together. Can you tell me a little of your story – your life – your work – and how it was that you came to know JD?

Yes! Big thanks to Jonathan Blundell for connecting us. To be honest, I don’t even remember how Jonathan and I first got connected. We’ve been online friends for a while now. He’s a great guy with a great heart.

My life story? It seems to be continually evolving. Right now I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, with my wife, two kids and two dogs. Of course that equation is changing, but I’ll get to that later. I’m a writer, editor and web geek. By day I hang out with my kids (Lexi is 4, Milo is 1.5) and by night (and naptime) I do work through my freelance company Monkey Outta Nowhere. I do writing for all kinds of clients, the most well known of which is probably the church communications blog, Church Marketing Sucks.

Q: Now, clearly you’re a guy who loves words, and this is not your first publication. What other subjects have you written on and published?

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, since I was a little kid. I wrote my first book in first grade: Mike, The Cat (which your readers will be please to learn is available as a PDF download on my site: . Unfortunately my next book project didn’t come until nearly 20 years later.

In 2004 I participated in National Novel Writing Month, where you write an entire novel in a month. It was a breakthrough experience for me and showed me that I could actually write a book. Since then I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times and I’m hoping to do it again this year. I’ve self-published two of those novels, Downtown Dandelions back in 2004 and Least of These this year. Though I published them more as experiments than anything—neither of them were fully edited and I consider them “rough drafts.” I am putting a little more work into my third NaNoWriMo novel and I hope to publish that one someday.

I’m also working on a book about homelessness to benefit homeless advocate Mark Horvath and his InvisiblePeople.tv project. I’ve had the help of a lot of great people on that book and we’re hoping to get it out later this year.

Q: OK. On to your latest book - Addition by Adoption . 2 big questions:

1. Why did you think your adoption story was one that was worth telling, and releasing to a wider readership? 2. When you decided you wanted to tell the story, did you know straight away that your Tweets would form the basis of your book?

I’d say any adoption story is worth telling! But this book didn’t actually start as an adoption story. I’d been tweeting about the goofy things my daughter says and does and lots of people kept commenting on those nuggets of silliness and telling me I needed to collect them into a book. The idea grew on me and I thought it’d be the kind of thing my family would enjoy.

But as I started collecting tweets about singing my “Taco Man” song with Lexi or our potty training triumphs, I kept coming across tweets about our adoption story. It kept coming up and I realized this wasn’t about funny things kids say and parenting and all that, it was a much wider story. Even beyond adoption, it was a story of how Milo widened our worldview and helped us to see and embrace other causes.

So I didn’t set out to tell our adoption story, but I realized it was really the thread that tied the book together. Funny things kids say are great, but I like that it has more depth than that. It’s ultimately about something bigger and grander than ourselves.

Q: Talk to us about the process of self publication…

I’m learning the hard way that it’s not easy. One of the reasons that I went this route is because I had an offbeat idea that I thought would be a hard sell. Rather than taking the time that kind of effort would require, I just wanted to get the book out there. If any book is ideal for self-publication, this one seemed like it.

The process itself is pretty easy. I actually took the manuscript for Least of These and a week later I had a bound, printed copy in my hand. Of course I already had the manuscript done and I put minimal effort into design and layout. It’s all those extra details that are truly daunting. For Addition by Adoption I had some incredible help from Brian White of TriLion Studios on the cover and Ronald Cox on the interior design. Those guys really made the book look good, which is something I could never have done on my own.

I think writing the book has been relatively easy, especially because it was already written in tweets. I was more curating and editing, adding chapter introductions and other small bits of text. Right now the real challenge is the marketing. Just because you publish it doesn’t mean anyone is going to buy it (my two self-published novels are good examples). So I’ve really had to pound the pavement to get the word out on this book and I hope it’s enough. That’s the hard thing about marketing—you never know if you’ve done enough until it’s over, and then it’s too late.

Q: Adoption is high on the agenda of many Jesus followers in the blogoshpere. Many will be familiar with the story of Ragamuffin Soul, Carlos Whittaker and his family’s adoption of their son Losiah from South Korea. Another name that springs to my mind is Randy Bohlender of the Zoe Foundation, who is a huge advocate for adoption. Do you feel any sense of community or kinship with others who have adopted?

Oh, absolutely. There’s a sense of kinship and connection with other people. I’m always surprised at how often it comes up, how often I’ll meet someone who has adopted or is adopted themselves. It’s kind of an instant connection because you share something special. Adoption isn’t easy, but it’s good. And I think that ‘goodness’ forges an instant bond with other people. We may have conflicting political or religious views, but we place a similar value on children and people and families—and that’s cool.

Plus you can’t do adoption—or parenting in general—without support. We all need those communities to keep us sane.

Q: What has adoption done to the overall dynamic of your family?

I think it’s opened us up to the world. It’s not like we were oblivious beforehand, but from now on my family has a permanent blood connection to Ethiopia. That changes you. We celebrate and embrace Ethiopian culture, and then means cheering on their victories and mourning their losses. That means caring about Milo’s Ethiopian brothers and sisters who need help. That’s part of why a portion of the proceeds from the book will go to charity: water to build a well in Ethiopia. Seeing Milo’s people—and now I’d say my people—die from a lack of clean water is just ridiculous.

I think we’ve always cared about these kinds of causes, but international adoption has just made it personal for us. I talked about this after the Haiti earthquake , but sometimes I feel like we need to cultivate these kinds of international connections so we care more and respond more to hurting people around the world.

Q: You adopted a baby from Ethiopia. What do you say to those people who would sound a word of caution about bringing up kids in a culture that is different from their own?

We’re now a multiracial family. That’s just a reality and one you have to embrace and deal with. It’s an issue our adoption classes thoroughly covered and we’ve read up on and will continue to learn about. Frankly I’m thrilled that we’re forced to address it. I think racial issues are just hard to talk about and hard to truly understand how deep they go. Having a black child suddenly makes that a reality like nothing else could. Not to say I know all the answers, because I don’t, but I feel like it’s good to be forced down that road. Not that we wouldn’t go there anyway, but now we have no choice. There’s no turning back.

As a family one of the things we’re excited about doing is going back to Ethiopia. That’s part of who Milo is and it’s part of our family now.

Q: What are your immediate hopes for the book, and more importantly your family?

I hope people like the book. Doing a project like this is kind of scary—you never really know how people will respond. In a bigger sense I hope the book helps to further a conversation about adoption. I love adoption. I think it’s incredible. And I wish everyone would consider it.

And that’s the immediate hope for our family—we’re adopting again. We haven’t decided the details, but we’re leaning towards older children. Talk about reshaping that whole life story—welcome a couple teenagers into your family. I really don’t know what that means yet—we literally announced that we were adopting again the same week I announced the book.

Q: Is there anything you want to say about Charity Water?

We hope to raise enough money with the book to build a well in Ethiopia through charity: water. They’re an amazing organization that puts 100% of donations into providing people with clean water. It’s such a simple and basic thing, but so many people don’t have it. And it’s killing them. It’ll take $5,000 to build a well, so that’s a lot of books. We’re also encouraging people to make donations on their own. If you don’t want to buy a book, at least give to charity: water.

Q: Anything else you want to share?

I’ve probably talked enough, but check out the book and say hello on Twitter (@kevinhendricks)….

Massive thanks to Kevin for sharing so freely.

Go buy the book!