I’m always looking for thought-provoking mp3s to listen to while I walk for exercise. Lately I’ve been listening to Smart City by Carol Coletta, which i gather is an NPR program about issues of urban development. This particular episode happens to feature Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company.
Webber says a lot of stuff worth listening to. One point that’s really grabbed my attention is the importance of iconic projects in moving from a plan to implementation. Since I’m someone who’s much better at devising plans than implementing them, this should be a topic tailor-made for my needs.
Around 20:00 Webber describes an experience working for the mayor of Portland, OR, in the 1970s. As he describes it, PDX back then was nothing like the annoyingly hip place it is now. A key step in its development of a pedestrian friendly, transit-compatible downtown was their success in luring the Seattle department store Nordstrom, which apparently even then had enough cachet to lead the revitalization of downtown.
The point is that one such “iconic project” can be critical to promoting a broader change effort. It’s really something I need to hear. Mind you, on a visceral level I think I’ve realized this before — for example, back in Massachusetts when we talked about getting a place for the Pit kids to hang out, this had the potential to be an iconic project. In more mundane aspects of my daily life, something like getting to where I can beat a live poker game soundly enough to make a modest living at it before I start investing effort to learn how to beat more advanced but potentially more profitable online games would be an example.
I will try to think a bit more about other places I can apply this lesson in my life. Back to the whole underground outreach topic, I think that’s one area where I can apply this principle. I just need to get involved in something local and helping bring it to some modest plateau perceived as “success” (which of course only really comes by the Holy Spirit).
Ha. I too could benefit from useful ways to translate the transcendent into the immanent. Ideas ignite in my brain that are often beyond my capacity to enact, and I have found it incredibly frustrating, particularly throughout the past five years, when I started to wonder if it could be a character flaw (though I recently discovered that it has to do with my INFP-ness, which was actually more wonderful than discouraging, because I finally realized I wasn’t phony or lazy about said ideas; just Joan-of-Arc/Hermit).
I came across your blog through the Stuff Christian Culture Likes comments, and I will return to read more. Your writing is superb (a rare find), and my curiosity is piqued by your interest in subcultures and how they can be permeated and transformed.
For the past eight years my passion (often an angry, Jeremiac passion) has been the contemporary American church and its growing disconnect from American culture-at-large, and the denominations’ severe subcultural schisms (justified by doctrinal disagreements) from each other which prevent the body of Christ from effectuating the practical love of Christ within whole communities. I’m looking for ways to begin my own underground to dissolve the divisions in pragmatic ministry while leaving doctrine strictly alone.
I find it sort of blazingly wonderful when I come across other people of the faith who have similar visions. My task, my impossible calling, becomes a little less daunting when I know I’m not the only one assigned to it.
Comment by Sarah — September 14, 2009 @ 7:33 am