This Christmas I’m joining a movement with Christianity called Advent Conspiracy.  Advent Conspiracy is a new way to engage the season of Advent and Christmas itself.  Rather than getting caught up in a consumer-driven mindset for Christmas that is fueled by captialism Christians all over the world are rethinking Christmas and the way we celebrate it.  We are choosing to honor the birth of Jesus by spending less money on gifts (and asking for less in return) and instead of buying motorized tie-racks that will quickly be forgotten we are putting money into clean water projects throughout the world.

Just under 4,000 people die every single day because they do not have access to clean drinking water.  Experts say that it would take 10 billion dollars to solve this crisis and make sure that everyone had access to clean safe drinking water.  And every year Americans spend 450 billion dollars on Christmas.  We feel like there’s something just not right about that.

So I encourage you to spend less on Christmas this year, give more money to clean water projects (like Living Water International), and give more presence to your loved ones this year.  Celebrate the birth of Jesus by saving someone’s life this year.

Kara and I went all out for Halloween this year.  She’s been reading Dracula recently so naturally she went as a vampire princess.  I finally pulled off the zombie costume I’ve been thinking about doing for a few years now.  We spent the night in Allentown, NJ where I pastor.  Allentown is serious about Halloween, they do it right and everyone in town gets involved.  I mostly roamed around the streets, stumbling, falling down, moaning and occasionally groaning BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS.  People loved it.  The combination of the realistic makeup and throwing myself fully into zombie character made it a lot of fun for the people I ran into (sometimes literally).  Thanks to Indy Mogul for the super helpful tutorial on how to do the zombie skin effect right.  Who knew toilet paper was the key!?  For more pictures of tonight check out my set on flickr.

To make the night even more memorable Kara and I decided that we needed to go out to eat in full costume.  So we headed over to the Americana Diner to get some Fried Calamari.  Wow did we turn heads in the restaurant!  One guy sitting behind Kara looking at me stared the entire time we were there.  He didn’t steal glances, he repositioned himself for a good long stare.  As we left I turned onto the road that would take us home to Princeton, only I didn’t realize that it was a No Right On Red light.  So, you guessed it, a cop pulled me over and I got to hand my licence and registration to an officer in full zombie getup.  He laughed and let us go.  Not TWO BLOCKS down the road I got pulled over again, this time because I hadn’t turned my lights back on from being pulled over 30 seconds ago.  Same thing, the cop laughed and let us go on our way.  What a night.

When I was in Seminary back in Kansas City, I used to sneak off to a church called Jacob’s Well on Sunday nights.  I eventually became friends with a few of the pastors on staff and have come to think of it as one of my home churches in many ways.  Even out here on the East Coast I still think about Jacob’s Well and pray for them.  I keep in touch with a few of the people involved there so I feel like I’m still connected in some small way.  Well something happened this week that has really reignited that connection for me.

Last week Kara was in Kansas City for the 2008 Emergent Conversation - “Reclaiming Paul.”  The event was hosted at Jacob’s Well and she brought back a gift for me - the newly released album from the worship band.  Songs From Jacob’s Well by Mike Crawford and his Secret Siblings has brightened by week.  One incredibly powerful song in particular (Words to Build a Life On) that has been a part of my journey the past few years has finally found its way onto a recorded format.  So it’s pretty much been on constant repeat in the car lately.  These songs remind me so much of the time I spent at Jacob’s Well, listening to them half way across the country makes me feel like I’m there again… or at least like I’m still connected with that community.  It doesn’t hurt that the music and lyrics are both works of art.  Not cheesy, cranked through the grinder mush that so much Christian music tends to be these days.

You can get the 2-disc album here.  Coming soon to iTunes.

Last week we adopted a Boston Terrier from a Boston Terrier Rescue agent here in New Jersey.  Our little guy is 3 years old and the family he was living with just didn’t want him anymore, so we were glad to give him a good home.  We’ve named him Hagrid.  Hagrid came to us already housebroken so training him has been pretty easy.  His only vice so far is wanting to get to the table during dinner.  Otherwise he’s amazing.  He doesn’t bark unless there’s reason to, he’s great with other dogs and people and he’d just as soon sleep on your lap while you sit on the couch as he would wrestle with you playing tug-of-war.  He has certinaly made life in our little appartment more interesting.  We now deal with the daily realities of getting “slimed” by Hagrid, but luckily he does all his business outside.

We’ve been compiling quite the photo album on flickr, check it out here.

I’m switching from to WordPress within the week. Be sure to check back at www.chuckp3.com to make sure your feed is still working. I should be able to continue posting to the same feed, so those of you using a reader should be alright… but just in case check back to make sure.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR matey! Avast me hearties, this be a verrry special day indeed. Today is the best holiday of the yearrrr, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So dawn yer fanciest skull and crossbones and go scare some scallywags with yer swarthy pirate talk!

For the storrrrry of how this holiday began, rrread this article.

And here be an instructional video for ye scurvy dogs who know not how to speak like a pirate.

So I’ve been trying to think how to tackle blogging about my trip to Malawi and it keeps feeling way to big. So I’m just going to start blogging about little things that come to mind rather than wait for the “big profound post from the sky.” Because let’s be honest, that would mean I just never post about it.

One thing that struck me when we arrived in Malawi was the dress. Perhaps this just reveals my ignorance, but I had expected clothing much like what the Maasai tribe in Kenya wear. Instead the clothing, in both urban areas and out in the villages, was very western. With the exception of some of the women - they would wear long skirts and then wrap them in a layer of fabric called a cha-ten-gee. These pieces of fabric often had very colorful vibrant patterns that would be rare here in America. But aside from that, the clothing was very western.

In fact it’s not a strech to say that most of their clothes had been worn by Americans at one point. Apparently most of the thrift-stores where we donate clothes pack it up in bulk and ship it off to other countries for dirt cheap. It’s a practice called “clothes dumping” and while some say this offers clothes cheaply to those who are poor I can’t help but wonder how it stifles the chance for local entrepreneurs to build a textile industry. The practice of clothes dumping has been outlawed by some countries like Indonesia and the Phillipines because they see it as a threat to local textie business. There’s a healthy debate about whether or not clothes dumping is helpful or harmful to poor countries. I can’t help but feel a little weird about it though. To think that the clothes I pack up and take to goodwill would end up being sold to someone in Africa is odd to me. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I guess part of me wishes that they had a uniquely African way of dressing and weren’t wearing hand-me-down t-shirts with Denver Broncos logos on them (yes, I saw this). I just wonder if what I meant as generosity was twisted into something that makes it harder and harder for a seamstress in Malawi to feed her kids because she can’t sell the clothes she makes for less than my used clothes are going for.

I’m not sure. I do think that it would go a long way, if I met the people I gave my used clothes to. This stuff seems to happen when there is some third party or institution mediating our generosity. When we give to the poor, but never meet them stuff like this seems to happen more easily. In his book The Irresistable Revolution, Shane Claiborne says that one of the subtle layers of insulation that separates the rich and the poor is charity. He goes on to say that “we can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations and never have to open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables.” He goes on to say that he’s not convinced that when we get to heaven Jesus will say “When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me.”

So Africa isn’t just making me rethink how I love my neighbor all the way across the world, but how I’m called to love my neighbor here in New Jersey.

It’s election year and once again I find myself rethinking what it means to be Christian in the midst of presidential campaign season. But before I get into what I’m currently thinking I’d like to take just a moment to rewind and give you a quick history of me, my faith and presidential elections. I realize it’s a short history but nonetheless…

2000
This was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. In the primary I was rooting for Dan Quayle and in the general election I voted for George W. Bush. And let me tell you, I voted FOR Bush. It wasn’t an ambivalent vote or a “lesser of two evils” vote. I believed in George W. Bush. I thought he was going to be great. I had a big cut out of his head taped down in my CD case along with other pop-culture paraphernalia. While I never saw Al Gore as “unChristian” (he’s Baptist) I definitely understood Bush to be the “Christian candidate.” This was my freshman year in college and I was still deeply influenced by a fundamentalist understanding of Christianity. As I walked through the halls of the Christian ministry department at my college I saw that one professors had a Clinton/Gore bumper sticker on their door. It shocked me. I had never encountered a Christian who was “pro-Clinton.” Another professor had a sign in his office saying “Jesus was a Liberal.” At this point in my faith and in my college carreer such moments were logic-defying for me.

2004
My second go-round found me much less optimistic than before. My views on politics had changed drastically thanks to Christians like John Howard Yoder - a Mennonite pacifist, Stanley Hauerwas - a Methodist theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - an underground Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany… and many others. I no longer had any “hope” in the American government, I was becoming more and more enchanted with God’s kingdom and God’s restoration of creation and at the same time less and less impressed with the American kingdom and it’s attempts at fixing the world by dominating it. During this election the driving issues for me were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I shrugged my shoulders and voted for Kerry. I didn’t expect Kerry to buy into God’s radical plan of change and shalom but he was the “lesser of two evils” from my perspective. So I half-heartedly tossed a vote his way in 2004. Just FYI, Nader wasn’t on the ballot in Missouri.

2008
Here we go again, round three. As I’ve posted before, I don’t plan on voting this time. Partly because I was getting really excited about Obama. I kept finding myself really hoping he would become president and bring some fundamental change to our country. It scared me. It was easy to get caught up in the hoopla of Obamania… and lose sight who I really believe will bring fundamental change in the world. Thanks to Obama’s subtle shift to the right, I’ve become much more skeptical of him and am frustrated with enough that I no longer have such temptations. This kind of detached skepticism is where I would want to be as a Christian in the voting process, but at least this year I’m still planning to give away my vote to someone who is voiceless.

More and more I’m beginning to appreciate the political perspective of people like Dr. Martin Luther King. His idea was, don’t endorse anybody. Endorsing a candidate just makes it easy for them to count you as a part of their base and then move on and ignore you. Instead, King advocated inviting politicians on both sides to endorse your movement, your platform and to do so all through the campaign and on through their time in office. I think this way guards us from the danger of getting yanked around by parties and also guards us against buying into their agenda as a compromise for the influence we think we have.

Shane Claiborne has a great article about this way of engaging politics as a Christian called “Advise Everyone, Endorse No One.“ Check it out here. I think Shane’s take on it is a healthy blend of King’s emphasis on being influential without being co-opted and with a robust skepticism of American politics in light of the Kingdom of God.

Zack Exley over at Revolution in Jesusland recently posted about McLaren and the Matthew 25 Network’s endorsement of Obama. While I’m not one to champion Christian groups endorsing (I like Shane’s approach better), this is the way to do it if they must.

This is a rant I’ve stored up in my heart long enough that it finally had to come out.

What - is - the - deal… with everyone saying “mepersonally?”

We both know you’re not a robot, or a gorilla. It’s redundant and it just sounds dumb. So I’ll confess, if you say it, I’m probably judging you for it.

(The raft in the middle of the lake, with tent readied for the night. above)

Sunday night at 7:30pm I stepped onto land. For the previous three days I had been residing on a 16′x16′ raft with four other friends. Only weeks before our team, who has been praying about and planning for our upcoming trip to Malawi, came up with the idea of doing a big attention-getting fundraiser that would allow our local community to have an impact on and be a blessing to the community of Sakata, Malawi where we will be working.

There are several ways that this money will go directly to the Malawian people to be of assistance. Mosquito nets to help prevent contracting Malaria, building fish ponds for communities to be a sustainable food source as well as a source of income, and building a mission center and repairing a preschool. We were really hoping that we could somehow raise four or five thousand dollars in our efforts. The community’s response was mind-blowing! We were so moved by the generosity of passersby, children and people who drove to Allentown just to donate after finding out about our cause from the media. Three kids came up to the booth and emptied their piggy-banks so that kids in Malawi will have a better chance to live. At the time of this post we have raised over $16,000!!!

Life on the raft was, well it was hot. We were fortunate enough to have a large shade canopy above our heads for the duration of our time on the raft. The sun was out for the majority of our time on the lake and we applied copious ammounts of sunscreen in response. We had many many visitors canoe out to us to talk, bring a meal to us, share a meal with us, play some card games or spend some time fishing. We were a floating hospitality barge for the large part of the three days.

But there was plenty of time to enjoy each others company as well. Of the five of us, four are confirmed for the trip to Africa. Our time on the raft together was an invaluable introduction to each other and how our personalities gel. Spending three uninterrupted days together will really tell you a lot about a person, and back on land I have so much more respect and admiration for my teammates. I am humbled by their passion for serving Christ. I am relieved that we are a group that prides itself on laughing at ourselves. I was also moved by a rather deep and controversial discussion we had on the raft about war and following Jesus where teammates with a radically different position than mine were able to have a friendly debate and never for a moment feel as though it would change our friendship or damage how we view each other.

Before the raft I was excited and anxious about going to Malawi and was looking forward to getting to know my teammates a bit better. Now I feel as though these people are family and I am grateful that we will be going on this mission together.