Hydrogen (H) burns, and oxygen (O) sustains burning.

But put the two together and H2O extinguishes burning!

Crazy Velocities: The velocity of change takes the breath away.

Crazy Vortices: Old centers of power are being undermined and old systems of authority are being challenged.

Crazy Versimo: What does it mean that gender is socially constructed, even provisional, almost daily redefined (e.g., plastic surgery, prosthetics, the body recombinant)?

Crazy Vertigo: Change in the world leaves us dizzy and heady.

I was born into a blue-laws, 9-to-5, 5-day-a-week, work-day world. I now live in a 24-7-365, all-the-time world. People expect to be able to do anything 24-7-365, and we are moving into a world where 24-hour employment will become the norm. Consumers are taught to expect anything, anytime, anyplace. In a 24-7-365 world, how many churches are still 1-1 (1 hour-1 day-a-week)?

It seems as if the cynics and critics are inheriting the church, if not the earth.

True postmodern media are suspicious, ironic, cynical, gruesome.

What the "work ethic" was to the modern world, "play" is to postmodern culture. In fact, some say the days of work are over. We don’t need better "work habits." We need better "play habits." Life is playing. Play will be the #1 learning experience of postmodern culture.

People are living their lives in chapters now, not in one lifetime chunk.

The whole notion of "career" is outmoded. There is no such thing. It went the way of "job security" or "lifetime employment." Everything is temporary. 50% of the jobs in the classified ads won’t even be around 10 years from now.

The church holds the keys to saving the world’s troubled cities. What if the church were to deploy its own version of the "Peace Corps" – a "Shalom Corps" of young Christian urban missionaries who would take a bite out of the white suburban doughnut that encircles the urban "black hole" by "reneighboring" our cities.

We are living in a world which is trying not just to find out what it’s like to live under conditions of zero gravity, but under conditions of zero morality. What were once seen as stone tablets coming down from the mountain are now seen as sand castles built along the seashore.

Even if the poor stand still, given the immense improvement in the ability of the rich to reach their goals, in relative terms they are falling exponentially behind.

One of C.S. Lewis’ greatest insights was that the Devil has no sense of humor. One of the great signs of evil is the absence of humor.

What is the difference between a leader who is a catalyst, and a leader who is a controller? Which do you tend to be?

What would you say to the thesis that every age is equidistant from eternity? Is any age really privileged? Or might every age be a "progress" from the one preceding it, but every age brings with it, introduces, unique challenges that make it at the same time better and worse than the one preceding it.

"We are all tomorrow’s food." Ken Wilber

Move art in your church building from the margins to the mainstream by creating a church art gallery. Showcase artists in your church as well as local artists. Feature a "discovery" of the month, including children whose artistic skills deserve cheerleading.

How can your church give permission for adults to be kids again? How about a Sunday where the adults come forward for the children’s sermon and the kids stay in the pew? What about singing Christmas carols in June and July? What if we were to give everyone a children’s bulletin an_ a few crayons in the church? What makes us afraid to have fun in church?

A middle-aged schoolteacher with a known heart condition has been having increased arrhythmia and other heart symptoms. She visits her doctor for help. After an alarming exam, the doctor decides to use the drug digitalis without delay, but he first consults a knowledge-based computer program on digitalis that is available in the Baylor University Medical Information Marketplace. With a single pointing gesture on his computer screen, he sends the patient’s history, residing on his own computer, to the distant automated expert. He keys in the dosage he is about to administer and pauses for confirmation.

The program startles him by warning that the intended dosage represents a severe, possibly lethal, overdose. The doctor, now indignant, asks the program to explain its reasoning. After three progressively more detailed explanations driven by his questions, the doctor whispers an embarrassed, "Aha!" Because of an old kidney ailment detailed in the patient’s history, which he overlooked, the digitalis excretion by the patient’s kidneys would be considerably slower than normal, leaving too much of the toxic substance in the body for too long. The otherwise routine dosage could have put the patient into cardiac arrest. The doctor, no longer resentful, revises the dosage downward but settles at an amount a bit greater than that prescribed by the machine because the patient is a big woman -- a fact that the computer program did not take into account.

How far in the future is this scenario? Actually, the digitalis advisor" was developed in the mid-1970s at MIT, with collaborating doctors at New England Medical Center.

Now What? Net Notes

1. Here is a discussion starter about how people and machines will be working together and checking one another in the future. The story goes like this:

A middle-aged schoolteacher with a known heart condition has been having increased arrhythmia and other heart symptoms. She visits her doctor for help. After an alarming exam, the doctor decides to use the drug digitalis without delay, but he first consults a knowledge-based computer program on digitalis that is available in the Baylor University Medical Information Marketplace. With a single pointing gesture on his computer screen, he sends the patient’s history, residing on his own computer, to the distant automated expert. He keys in the dosage he is about to administer and pauses for confirmation.

The program startles him by warning that the intended dosage represents a severe, possibly lethal, overdose. The doctor, now indignant, asks the program to explain its reasoning. After three progressively more detailed explanations driven by his questions, the doctor whispers an embarrassed, "Aha!" Because of an old kidney ailment detailed in the patient’s history, which he overlooked, the digitalis excretion by the patient’s kidneys would be considerably slower than normal, leaving too much of the toxic substance in the body for too long. The otherwise routine dosage could have put the patient into cardiac arrest. The doctor, no longer resentful, revises the dosage downward but settles at an amount a bit greater than that prescribed by the machine because the patient is a big woman—a fact that the computer program did not take into account. Oh, how human for the human to have the last word! Meanwhile, the patient who could have died under purely human care is saved.

How far in the future is this scenario? Actually, the "digitalis advisor" was developed in the mid-1970s by Professor Szolovits’s research group at MIT, with collaborating doctors at New England Medical Center under physician Steve Pauker. Patient experiments took place in Boston and at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A single computer was used. Analysis of 50 cases showed that the dosages recommended by the computer and the doctors were close in all but one case—the woman who could have died.

The digitalis advisor never made headlines, and it was not pursued further primarily because of liability concerns. If you guessed that this example was set in the future, you are like most people who hear this story for the first time. After all, it sounds like something you’d hear in the popular press today about the "future" of information technology. This reminds us how uninformed and out-of-date the hype surrounding the new world of information can be. It also tells us that the incorporation of narrowly focused medical expertise in future systems like Guardian Angel is predictable because it has precursors in earlier research.

2. Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, has a Web site devoted to the "Global Consciousness Change" that is being generated by this postmodern renaissance. See his as-yet-unpublished report at http://www.awakeningearth.org.

3. To explore more fully the generational divide splitting those who are "connected" and those who aren’t, see Wired magazine’s coverage of the Digital Citizen survey on its Web site: http://www.hotwired.com/special/citizen. Microsoft and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) are partnering to host technology seminars in 30 cities for people aged 50 or older. What might your church do to promote online connectivity among its older members? Is the real issue getting Americans 55 and older "wired"? Or "connected"? Is the survey’s definition of "connected Americans"—those who use e-mail at least three times a week and who own at least three of the following four technologies—a home computer, a laptop computer, a beeper or pager, and a cellular telephone—a good one?

4. Discuss the thesis that "shock talk" broadcasts are really postmodern forms of an electronic fix—a digital drug, in other words. For more of this, visit http://www.BreSpace.com.

How serious is this problem of electronic addictions?

5. You doubt that our kids can get good "information" online. Check out the History Net at http://www.thehistorynet.com.

6. For the way the Net brings people with the same interests together, visit www.amazon.com (books), www.filmfinder.com (movies), www.mylaunch.com (music).

7. The Ginghamsburg Church CyberMinistry Team now offers a CyberMinistry Mail List Server for everyone involved in a church Internet ministry. To learn from each other and share experiences of online ministry, go to http://www.ginghamsburg.org/cybermin and click on "New CyberMinistry Mail List Server."