Tim Keel's Blog

Trade: A Movie about Human Trafficking

I am a member of the Not For Sale campaign. Not For Sale is a movement that seeks to raise awareness about human trafficking in order to stop modern day slavery around the world. Current estimates place the number of victims of modern day slavery at 27 million. The movement has grown out of a book of the same title written by David Batstone: "Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It."

I read this book last spring when our community at Jacob's Well was using the Lenten season to explore issues of slavery in the Old and New Testament scriptures as well as contemporary expressions of human slavery. It was and continues to be a challenging reality that as followers of Jesus Christ and as human beings I believe we are called to face and engage. Batstone's book is one of the more challenging, sobering, and yet hopeful books I read on the topic.

If you go to the Not For Sale website, you can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter. It was through this newsletter that I became aware of a movie that is being released this weekend about human trafficking called Trade. According to the newsletter, the movie was "inspired by Peter Landesman's chilling NY Times Magazine story on the U.S. sex trade, 'The Girls Next Door,' TRADE is a thrilling story of courage and a devastating exposé of modern day slavery and human trafficking."

I watched the trailer a couple of times and immediately had several visceral reactions. First, this movie is well done - it is shot beautifully. While I have not yet seen Babel the visuals seem similar in tone. Kevin Kline, who I always like, is one of the main stars in the film. Second, by the end of the trailer I had tears running down my face. That can be good or bad. Sometimes movies on provocative topics can be heavy-handed and sentimental - rather than letting the material speak for itself and allowing the audience have its own reaction, the director manipulates emotion in order to force a certain kind of affective outcome. Just based on what I saw, I think the material is handled fairly and with integrity.

Unfortunately, this is a limited release and it is not being screened in Kansas City. Click here to find out if it is playing in your city. If it is, go and see it. You can view the trailer from the link to the film above.

Finally, Jacob's Well is hosting the Not For Sale campaign tour as it comes through the midwest. We are partnering with a number of churches and some social service agencies to bring this about. The event is scheduled for the afternoon of Saturday, October 28. More details to follow.

Fascinating Article: Preaching Revolution

A couple of months ago (March 2007) a magazine called In These Times ran a fascinating article titled, "Preaching Revolution: Evangelicals You Need to Know." I discovered the article when a friend and elder in our community, Paul Dewees, stumbled upon it in the public library. As you can see, the cover features an illustration of Jesus that purposefully references the iconic image of revolutionary Che Guevara. The color scheme is a stark red, back, and white. It is very evocative and it arrested Paul when he saw it.

The reason the article is fascinating is because this magazine is not a religious publication but rather a progressive political publication whose founder is a life-long socialist. According to Wikipedia, "In These Times is known for its investigative reporting of corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, its coverage of international affairs, and its cultural criticism. It regularly reports on environmental issues, feminism, grassroots democracy, minority communities and the media."

In the article, author Zack Exley investigates the phenomenon of the emerging church, with particular attention paid to Rob Bell and Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, MI, and how the call to justice in many emerging, post-evangelical communities is outstripping the most strident political activists. Exley gives some context:

Recently, I blogged a series of essays titled “The Revolution Misses You,” in which I called for progressives to revive the forgotten dream of practical yet radical change. Friends and colleagues immediately scolded me for using “extreme” terms such as “revolution” and “radical.” “You’ll only alienate people,” they said. “This will come back to haunt you.” At first, I was surprised by what felt like a dramatic overreaction. But I soon realized why I had fallen out of sync with the progressive mainstream on the use of the “R-words”: I had been spending time listening to and reading evangelical Christians who are preaching revolution.

He goes on to describe this new movement highlighting not only Bell but Shane Claiborne and others as well. It is a great article.

I was thinking about it again this morning when I was preparing the sermon for this weekend from James 2:14-26 - it is the infamous "faith without works is dead" passage. I can't wait to dig into this as a community. Anyway, I think it is encouraging to see attention being given to an aspect of Christian faith and life in God that is often marginalized in many contemporary expressions of church on one hand, or on the other, ignored by the media when it is present in favor of the Pat Robertson/religious right version of the gospel.

Read the whole article from In These Times here. You can also read further commentary from Exley on his blog here.

Heroes Tonight!

Tonight is the premiere of the second season of Heroes. I came late to this party last year and watched most of the episodes from a webcast on NBC.com. It is really a great show, though I have to admit that of all the episodes from season one, the one that was the least satisfying was the finale. It was a bit of let down after such a build-up. Hopefully tonight will get off to a great start.

Here is a good, short article that ran in Wired magazine last year about creator Tim Kring and star Masi Oka, who plays "Hiro." To read it click here.

Living the Law for One Year

I read an interesting review on my phone from mobile.newsweek this weekend. I was sitting in my car at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday waiting for my 11-year-old daughter's soccer game to begin and stumbled on this. Author A.J. Jacobs' has written his second "experimental" book. The first book is titled "The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" and follows Jacobs as he spends one year reading the 32 volume/33,000 page/4 million word 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Apparently it is a really good read and quite funny.

The book I read about chronicles his year-long experiment to live according to all the rules in the Bible (including not shaving, as the photo illustrates - click for more detail). It is called "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." The brief review in Newsweek contains a short interview with Jacobs and in it you are able to pick up on his great tongue-in-cheek sense of humor as well as his sincerity. I think I am going to pick this up.

Read the Newsweek article, Extreme Makeover.

Here's a small sample from the interview:

Q: What rule was the hardest to follow?

A: Two kinds of rules were hard. Avoiding sins we commit every day like lying, gossiping and coveting was hard, and then there were the rules that were hard to do in modern life, like stoning adulterers. But I did manage to fulfill that one. What happened was, I was in the park, dressed in my white garb, and this man in his 70s came over and asked what I was doing. I explained I was trying to follow every rule in the Bible as literally as possible, including growing my beard, not mixing fibers, stoning adulterers, and he said, “I’m an adulterer, are you going to stone me?” I said, “Yeah that would be great.” The Bible doesn’t say what size the stones have to be, so I had been carrying around these pebbles in my pocket for just such an occasion. I took the pebbles out of my pocket, and he instantly picked one up and threw it at me, so I decided, an eye for an eye, and I tossed one at him. It did provide an entry for talking to people about capital punishment and the Bible. How could they stone adulterers, what was life like back then, does it apply today. I tried to say to the guy, you shouldn’t sleep with other women, but I don’t know if it sunk in.

Connecting with Tony Jones

My friend and colleague Tony Jones is on his way to Kansas City right now. He is coming in to keynote a conference on postmodern youth ministry for the Nazarenes. We're going to meet for lunch shortly with Dr. Andy Johnson from Nazarene Theological Seminary where we will discuss an upcoming conference on the new school on Paul. It looks to be a great event and our lunch meeting will hopefully move us down the road on this venture.

For those of you who don't know, Tony has been the national coordinator for Emergent Village for the last year and some. I have known him for a number of years now, but we really connected a couple of years ago when he and I traveled to France with Mike King and some of the YouthFront staff on a pilgrimage to Taize. We had a great time together over a period of a little more than a week.

Tony will be speaking a number of times over the next couple of days. I think you have to be registered to attend the conference, but he is joining the Kansas City Emergent Cohort for dinner and conversation Friday night at 6:00 p.m. This group will meet and eat at the Oklahoma Joe's BBQ in Olathe (where everyone is welcome). Following that there will be a worship service at Mid-American Nazarene University where Mike King will be speaking and the Jacob's Well worship team will be leading. I believe this is open to anyone as well.

Tony was with us at Jacob's Well in April, 2006. Tony surveyed eight emerging churches from around the country on a research trip for his PhD dissertation. His research and the thoughts he culled from it will be published sometime next year in the book, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. I am really looking forward to it.

By the way, when Tony was here he interviewed me about my book for the Emergent Podcast. If you would like to hear it, click here.

Look What I Am Holding in My Greedy Little Fingers...

Chad Allen, my editor at Baker Books, emailed me yesterday to let me know my book is now in the warehouse and that they'd be overnighting one to me...which the UPS guy just dropped off. Now I am totally geeking out walking around with it like it is a newborn baby.

It's hard to believe it is finally real. I started this process in November 2005 and nearly two years later, here it is. In that very limited sense it is a birth of sorts. Pretty great. The folks at Baker did an amazing job and I am really grateful to have worked with them to bring this to life (or print, I guess).

Further Reflections on James

At the 9:00 a.m. worship gathering on Sunday (9/16) the call to worship was given by Ashley Cleveland - who is an elder of the Jacob's Well community and who also preaches periodically. In her call to worship she shared a quote from one of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner. She has been reading from one of Buechner's more recent works, a collection of essays drawn from his preaching called "Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons."

After our conversation last week about joy in the midst of trials, this particular quote stood out as particularly relevant. I couldn't agree more. I love Buechner's facility with language and the way he uses words to describe reality in poetic ways. Here is the quote, shared for the benefit of those who were not at the 9:00 gathering.

"O Israel, hope. Have faith. Above all, love. You shall love the Lord your God. That is the first and greatest. And I suppose the truth of it is somthing like this: that as the farthest reach of our love for each other is loving our enemies, and as the farthest reach of God's love for us is loving us at our most unlovable and unlovely, so the farthest reach of our love for God is loving him when in almost every way that matters we can neither see him nor hear him, and when he himself might as well be our enemy for all he comes to us in the ways we want him to come, and when the worst of the wilderness for us is the fear that he has forsaken us if indeed he exists at all...But to love God is not a goal we have to struggle toward on our own, because what at its heart the gospel is all about is that God himself moves us toward it even when we believe he has forsaken us. The final secret, I think, is this: that the words "You shall love the Lord your God" become in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feet of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love him at last as from the first he has loved us -- loved us even in the wilderness, especially in the wilderness, because he has been in the wilderness with us."

Happy Anniversary to JW

I just realized that today is the actual date of Jacob's Well anniversary...birthday...I'm not sure which, but you get the idea. We held our first public gathering on Sunday, September 12, 1999. Hard to believe that it's already been eight years. Which is understandable because it hasn't been just eight years. In reality that date only marks our "formal launch," whatever such language means. Our core group started gathering informally in June 1998 and while we didn't hold public gatherings, everything that has become the public manifestation of who we are was happening with that small group from the early days. What a blessing to share life with so many wonderful people. Amazing.

"I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Philippians 1:3-6

If You Are Going to Make a Movie...

...based on a comic book, this is how it ought to be done.

I am IRONMAN.

RIP: Madeleine L'Engle

I was saddened to read that author Madeleine L'Engle died last Thursday (September 6). She was 88 years old. I discovered Madeleine L'Engle in fifth or sixth grade through her classic children's novel, "A Wrinkle In Time." That book haunted me as a kid, even before I read it. Just look at the cover art. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time - or at least it was to my 12-year-old imagination. I circled the book at the library for weeks before I finally got up the courage to check it out and read it.

Some books mark you. A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first such books to have this effect on me. The diverse thematic threads that L'Engle interwove in that story (and their respective genres) still captivate me this many years later. Calling this a science fiction book does not do justice to what is happening in the narrative. The blending of physics, horror, theology, mystery, and fantasy were mind framing for me. That the story revolved around an extraordinary family with children facing terrifying realities spoke to me deeply. It told me that the author wasn't writing down to me but that she had immense respect for children and the challenges and traumas they face. Children, too, live in a moral universe where the choices they make for good or evil have powerful consequences and that simple goodness is among the most beautiful (and powerful) virtues. Of course, I would never have said such a thing at the time. I was simply captivated and looking back I think I sensed the respect that she gave her young audience.

Never-mind the fact that she tried to explain hard science to kids. I mean, a tesseract? I spent hours in class trying to conceive a four dimensional cube and represent it visually on a two dimensional surface(!) with page after page of doodles. Check out this NPR tribute to L'Engle that includes a link to video of physicist David Morgan explaining what a tesseract is.

A couple of years ago my son picked up the book. I reread it alongside him loving the fact that he was reading it at the same age I did 25 years earlier. I don't know that it had the same or even a similar impact on him that it did on me. But it didn't matter. It was fun to talk about with him and even more fun to realize that whether or not he liked it (he'll have his own life changing influences), the book held up to me all these years later. I still loved it. For all the same reasons. What a surprise. What wasn't surprising was finding this short and heartfelt tribute by someone else similarly influenced. It demonstrates how her work is still is changing lives. How beautiful and good.

L'Engle spent her life writing. She has written beautifully about faith, art, and creativity in her book, "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art." She has also written compelling adult fiction. "A Live Coal In The Sea" is a novel about a family facing brokenness with the hope of redemption. One main character is a scientist, another a pastor and theologian. The title of the book is drawn from a quote by William Langland and I think it captures the spirit of how L'Engle wrote and the nature of the universe her characters inhabit.

But all the wickedness in the world
which man may do or think is no more
to the mercy of God
than a live coal dropped in the sea.