Greetings! Mike here again whilst Tim is in the Middle East. Today we’re going to look at some top futurist blogs. What’s a futurist, you ask? Futurism – or strategic foresight – is a social sciences discipline. It’s kind’ve like the mirror-image of history. Like history, which doesn’t determine what ‘actually happened’ (something rather impossible, not to mention undesirable given the rich array of perspectives that exist about any given moment of the past), futures (and its always plural) seeks to educate regarding possibilities thinking, a fully-funded imagination that can look at a range of possible future scenarios and pro-actively created desired futures in an empowering way. The reason that I got involved with the Presence families of ministries is largely because I’m a student of Strategic Foresight; Transmillenial eschatology sees the future as an open book, in which we have the sacred privilege of co-creating with God, one moment at a time. While the foresight field is ‘faith neutral’ (its actually historically a tad hostile to faith, though that is changing as more nuanced and integral views effect the discipline), its view of an open future is quite compatible with this “way of seeing.”

Here are futures blogs that my KedgeForward partner Frank Spencer and I pay closest attention to in the foresight community:

Avant Game – Jane McGonigal

Emergent by Design – Venessa Miemis

Far Other Worlds – Dominique Jaurola

Foresight Culture – John Mahaffie

Open the Future – Jamais Cascio

The Long Now

Once on a trip to Israel I was invited into the home of Fr. Elias Chacour, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He was quick to point out that many of the Christians who come to his land do so with a mindset that says, “let me tell you how it is done; let me show you the way to Jesus and the appropriate expression of the way your life is to reflect his presence.”

Said Chacour, “Nothing returns to the East that is true, that did not first go out from the East to begin with. Americans would do well to remember that.”

In essence he was, in his own way, repeating the principle of my friend; “don’t come over here speaking, come to listen; don’t come to show us the way, come to enter into our ways, our traditions, our understandings – before you say anything, come and walk in our shoes.” Stand under, or risk never understanding much at all.

That, for me, is what the expression of a self-emptying life looks like. It looks like service. It looks like standing under that we might lift up, hearing and entering into a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance with those we most wish to serve.

A missional lifestyle to me looks like foregoing convincing that we might opt for the higher call of deep embrace

Nashville’s own Christian rockers, The Redding Brothers will be performing all 4 days!

More details and an updated list of participants coming soon, stay tuned!