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This week, Ambata launched their site aiming to connect communities of consumers here with global communties of producers. In one sense, it is an online store for the globally conscious consumer. However, the ideas behind it run deeper. Nathan and Tony are looking to create a social network of individuals interested in fair trade, sustainable, and enviornmentally responsible products which promote and sell these products through personal relationships and local communities. In fact, they care very little if products are bought through their site, and in fact have programs to sell products through other web front doors or even local community retailers, including church or school forums. They have no plans for marketing other than word of mouth and person-to-person networking, not only because they believe it to be very effective, but because it is also at the heart of how they want to live and commerce. It plays in concert with the tune of how intential communities are reshaping our world.

Ambata has a lot of similarities to Kiva, not the least of which are their names. Kiva is Swahili for unity, while ambata is a part of the same language meaning stick together. Sounds synonymic enough. Both organizations target helping people in developing nations, and to do so, both aim at connecting people in the US with people at the poverty level through their finances. But just as the words are more complimentary or co-dependent than similar, so are both institutions, and that’s the beauty of what is happening. Kiva finances new business growth which leads to new products to be sold, and Ambata stimulates that growth by giving those businesses new or healthy outlets to sell their products – thus creating revenue by which to repay the loan and thus allowing new opportunities. Though I haven’t seen many situations like this, new loan requests could pop up simply because global export channels like those promoted by Amabata are created.

One thing I’ve often noticed about Kiva is that it currently has no significant domestic impact on poverty; that’s not a bad thing, it is just the nature of the organizational model. Mostly, it would seem that Ambata is similar in this nature, but due to the need to actually warehouse and distribute hard goods that means there is work for Ambata to hire out locally. For this, they’ve chosen utilize CityTeam of San Jose to manage their warehouse operations – a huge win for a fantastic program that works to rebuild the lives of homeless throughout the country and has had an amazing impact here on San Francisco.

So since Ambata is all about the word of mouth, take this post as a prompt to both educate you and for you to share it with all of your friends. Congrats to Tony, Nathan, Chelsea and all on the launch. We look forward to seeing the catalogs fill up with tons of new choices over the coming year!

Last night I adventured over to the launch party for Good Magazine, a new publication launching in the US in September for people who want to do well by doing good. I had wanted to post information about the party and the magazine after meeting the editor, Max, the day before but the RSVP list was closed soon after Friday started. Nonetheless, it was a great scene – closer than any other party this year to the Kiva fundraiser just a few months back. Though we weren’t expecting it, we might have guessed – Al Gore was on hand to celebrate with us and support the magazine (probably through his son as the magazine seems to have tight connections to some Yalies). In any case, Meredith, Audrey and I fought our way in to say hello and offer each our own thanks for things important to us he’s fought for. Of course, I thanked him for creating the Internet (kidding).

Most curious from all this though is the target of this audience, how it continues to connect worlds in my life, and that a such a publication is launching now. It all seems to confirm so many of my observations about current cultural trends. It’s inevitable success in the marketplace will undoubtedly solidify these suspicions as well as work to bring these trends into a more mainstream view.

Good describes itself as a cross between the Do-Gooder Press (Mother Jones, Ode, Plenty), The Establishment (Wired, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone), and Cool Magazines (Swindle, i-D, Tokion, BlackBook). It is an interest bet that social consciousness, environmentalism, and activism are going mainstream — that people are realizing need to start concerning themselves with things that matter and that this is fueled by the freest exchange of ideas and creativity in history. (read, World 2.0) The promotional literature introduces the magazine like this:

From the pop status of hybrid cars to the future of energy, from the mass appeal of sweatshop-free clothing to the near-obsession with organic everything, from the blurred line between celebrity and activism to the merger of capitalism and idealism, the world is just waking up to a new kind of good. Welcome to the early edition.

While large communities in San Francisco and Boston have already come well into this space, this magazine promises to mix the right dose of popular appeal to bring this sense of balanced responsibility to rest of America. Max says they plan to roll out to most major stands including your local grocery store; just don’t look for them at WalMart – while such a move seems trendy given the target market, the decision to avoid that market is evidently based more in distributor responsibility: they don’t plan to see much uptake in such locations don’t want to be wasteful.

I could go on about the facinating, almost ironic, target audience; the promising advertisers are among Tom’s, American Apparel, Burt’s Bees, Trader Joes, Advil, and Canon. More interesting though is to see what will become of this trend – Bobby thinks it’s all a fad and will blow up a couple years. There are certainly enough people jumping on the bandwagon to tip it. Is the concept of “motivated moneymakers driven by ethical ambition” or “conscious consumers driving progressive materialism” sustainable? Does it hijack the ideas on which the trends are based just to subtlely subvert them? There are too many angles on subject to capture it now.

For now Good seems good. I’m sure they’ll be enough critics among the edge of the movement. Matt and Jessica are in the first issue – their photographic debut as poster children of Microfinance 2.0 – and it’s a beautiful portrait. The subscription policy is both genius marketing and commendable charity – subscribe and all $20 of the fee goes to one of 12 do-gooder chairties of your choice. No skin off your consumer conscience. Go for it. See you in September, Good, and thanks for a fantastic party in SOMA.

Postings here have been scarce the past few weeks as I’ve been focusing on an experiment my cell group engaged in over our recent time apart entitled 2weeks. Our goal was to listen intently to the voice of God in a regular and distributed communal fashion. That is, we strove to focus our times of prayer for this committment to the times of noon or 8pm each day, and were conscious of each others’ times in that space of listening. Some folks chose to blog about their experiences. It was a cool way to keep in touch with each other and dialog about what we were hearing even though we didn’t see each other regularly during that time. Though the writings are mostly personal to the group, they are not privately so. If you care to observe, you can visit the temporary site.

Tonight I’m attempting to explain how several recent experiences have converged around a few central connected themes now occupying most of my thought. The glory of weblogs is that I can write it once and save myself the mental turmoil of trying get it correct verbally fifty times.

The recent process began on May 4 in watching Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence. I was drawn to this movie in an attempt to relate more deeply to a friend’s recent dream containing a vision of monastic journey to which he recognizes he is being called. Philip’s film attempts to create a cinematic experience which draws the viewer into the Grande Chartreuse, shaping three hours of their lives to that of this order of Chartreusian monks in the French Alps. For the most part, it was successful – I came out of the movie with a greater understanding and respect of the life rhythms and passions of these men, without really being told the details or documented facts of their practice. I also left with, as expected, a welcome and immediate peace about me, and a decent amount of evening energy given the length, silence, and repition of the film. And that was it.

The following night, a group of friends had committed to going to Taizé worship at the Mercy Center with Derek and Julia, something many of us had wanted to do for a while. Immediately, things began to change.

As soon as I entered the sanctuary and took my place, a complete patience overtook me. I thought of the monks in the film and how they had dedicated their complete purpose to the worship and pursuit of Christ in a radically uncompromising way. Though not directly, the words of the eldest monk paced through my head reminding me the raw truth that I was made for worshipping God, and nothing else. The rhythms and silence of the room began to fall in step with those of the monastary and I realized that my body had been longing for hours what it had seen the day before. I fell into prayer, recitation, and silence with hundreds of people I didn’t know but loved, and for one of the few times in my life I didn’t care how long the worship would last.

What has followed might be explained best as a simple listening to of noises that have been surrounding me for nearly exactly the last year. Unwittingly I started piecing together and devouring musings ranging from the definition of faith truths and authority, to the value of intentional community and its vows. The weaving of threads between these themes starts with an understanding of the emergent church movement and its imact and embrace of community.

For me this concept is most easily conceptualized from its origins to its purpose by comparing it to Web 2.0, and related positive trends in globalization. The church, during most of my lifetime and those of anyone I’ve ever met, has been dominated by congregations seeking a palatable or sufficient interpretation of spiritual truth, subscribing to that with minor though often “understandably naive” doubts, and perhaps convincing others to do the same to the end of knowing Christ and his will for their life. The emergent church attempts to give name to the evolving rabble of Christians who, being faced daily with knowledge of new injustices, incongrencies, beauties and needs, look at the faith they have grown up with (or around or against) and find it insufficent to cope with the challenges they are now burdened. It recognizes that the modern church (though its manifestation as a relative handful of subtly different organized denominations) represents a collage of many imperfect and incomplete understandings of God, and while many might not be any less correct that what might be attained before the rapture, they aren’t any worse that what might be the products of new and collaborative discourse on theology, ministry, worship, service, and biblical life in general amongst both intentional and global communities – much in the same way that Wikipedia does not stray much farther from the truth than Encyclopedia Brintannica. What is required is a constructive question of the traditional authority, earnest and prayerful passion for the truth, and in the recent words of Tom Wright an “intellectual humility” that admits “I know I’ve got one third of it wrong, but I don’t know which third it is.” The emergent church believes that through communities of believers we come to a more complete understanding of Christ and what his death and resurrection means for us, that we have the facilities to do this on a global scale, and that the impact of this collective creative church in action may very well be a healing of the world that brings about the “kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven” that most of us pray for every Sunday.

So aside from the specific label, the “emergent church” isn’t anything new to anyone who has been reading the papers, listening to public radio, or perhaps watching Oprah. What is especially interesting to me however, is how this connects to monastic lifestyles – like those I’ve experienced in the past week and those that friends have committed to in a modern urban interpretation.

The monastic life, in its simpliest and most traditional interpretation, is that characterized by a community committed to a common set of religious vows often living in a common or collective space. We typically think of celibate and solitary individuals in a remote castle of some sort. The Chartreuse monks live a life even more austere than most, taking a vow of nearly lifelong silence and rigid ritual. Today their practices seem hardly relevant to those outside themselves, but those orders were established hundreds of years ago during the Dark Ages for very deliberate and successful goals of preserving the holy word and propogating it according to the Great Commission. Today we might imagine a different sort of principles by which we form a monastic community. They may be vows of service, prayer, or other ritual but we choose them based on a goals we want to accomplish for both one’s life as a seeker of truth and a servant to a dying earth. In the urban jungle, this might mean living in the same 5 block square or even a set of connected houses. The commitments are those that bring the committed to greater communion with Christ, leverage the dynamics of community to reveal to one another deeper truth about Christ, and enable them to better serve the community in which they live. In the sprit of the emergent chruch, it creates an environment where the truth is discovered and discussed, not preached (or at the least, not only so), and a community that is empowered to serve in a way more impacting than the sum of its parts. As this cohort (to use a deliberate label) connects with the larger global community, the vision of the Church 2.0 becomes realized.

The monastic life is most likely not intended for everyone. Certainly one can live life apart from such deliberate commitment with others and still carry out a radical faith that has worldwide impact. I doubt anyone would disagree that Paul lived such a life. But, there is a more general concept – intentional community – which is crucial for anyone in the pursuit of a life with understanding, beauty, and truth. The simple point is that our lives are defined heavily by those from whom we receive widsom and affirmation, and we must form our closest relationships with those holding the same values and assumptions nagging at our hearts. Mark explains this well in answering the first of three questions about his ministry – while we certainly are blessed from interacting with and befriending all types of people, our capacity to form deep relationships (and regular rhythms) with others is limited and one should be cautious not to compromise such opportunity with breadth or carelessness. Through these deliberate relationships we join one another in search of the deepest truths and to the greatest ends – as was with the Trandentalists, the Abolishonists, or the creators of Narnia and Middle Earth. The core Mozilla community is an excellent such modern day example, and as the chruch of today we should seek such communities so as to accomplish the work set out for us by the truth of the resurrection.

So I’ve made an attempt to both make personal sense of recent influences, and relate them together coherently, and looking back over my words, I feel that I might barely have succeeded. But more important that bringing these thoughts under a single umbrella of thinking is how they relate to my present situation. In explaining that I realize that the process began much earlier than the start of the month.

Without going into much detail, I must stop short and simply say that the larger process started when I moved to the Mission over a year ago with the specific goal of setting roots in San Francisco. I had no idea at the time why (other than circumstance) I settled on a specific area, but it is clear now that this neighborhood is my community and, with each passing day, my ministry. This new outlook and response also extends beyond my recent surroundings to the global and Internet community, and manifests itself, yes through this blog but also, through powerful ideas like Standpoint and Kiva. The learning is just beginning, but the connections are forming quickly. For many of you this may be recycled air, but this is what the world around me sounds like now that I am able to listen. Let the dialog begin.

Jesus, with Thy Church abide,
Be her Savior, Lord, and Guide,
While on earth her faith is tried:
We beseech Thee, hear us.

Keep her life and doctrine pure,
Help her, patient, to endure,
Trusting in Thy promise sure:
We beseech Thee, hear us.

May she guide the poor and blind,
Seek the lost until she find,
And the broken hearted bind:
We beseech Thee, hear us.

(Thomas Pollock, 1871)