Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

“O God, we are in a battle that is raging for the soul of this nation. You, O God, have raised up Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for such a time as this. Help them, O God, to strengthen our economy, to keep our taxes and spending low…and grant them the privilege of being elected the next president and vice president.”
— from the opening prayer of a McCain/Palin rally at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA

This isn’t about the candidates as much as it is American theology. You can replace “Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin” with “Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joe Biden” and switch the policies to reflect the respective party line. It’s still just as disgusting.

“Please, Lord, keep my taxes low and the economy strong so I can continue being in the top 1% of money earners worldwide while not caring about the other 99%.”

Quote, “I don’t see [One Day as a Lion's first single Wild International] as an anti-religious song. I see it as the West has been using Christianity as a way to justify its actions when in reality, those figures, Christ and Muhammad, were rebels. These two religious figures have been co-opted to justify power, although they fought against the abuses of power and the expansion of empire.” — Zach de la Rocha, excerpted from this L.A. Times interview

NewSpring Church sponsors a benefit concert (and fireworks display) every year called LiveFreeLiveLoud. All the donations and proceeds from vendors go directly to a few local non-profits: Anderson Interfaith Ministries, Haven of Rest and the Anderson Care Pregnancy Clinic.

This year, we raised $20,900 and NewSpring matched that dollar-for-dollar for a total donation of $41,800 to support these ministries that are on the ground-level of helping marginalized, poor, underprivileged and in-need people in our community. We also rocked out, had a lot of fun, watched some pretty fireworks and ate a snowcone and a hotdog (or two.) I’ve got a few concert and fireworks photos on Flickr for your perusal.

I rolled across the following quote via Opus:

In the scriptures, I’m commanded to love a lot of things: my God, my neighbor, my wife, my enemy…I’m never commanded to love my country. In fact, if “loving my country” means that I demonstrate preference to someone based on their ethnicity, their nationality or, for instance, their loyalty to America’s foreign policies, I think I’ve pretty much undermined a very important aspect of Jesus’ mission on this earth — to make his temple a “house of prayer for all nations” and ours, to “make disciples of all nations.” And when I’m willing to value American lives over, say, Iranian lives or when I’m willing to promote America’s economic interests over the interests of the world’s poor simply because I’m American I may actually demonstrate my infidelity to the only Kingdom worthy of my allegiance. — John McCollum, To Love One’s Country

McCollum makes a number of great points in that article, and asks some tough questions (Quote, “Is patriotism a good thing? A bad thing? Both? Neither?”). These are questions I feel like are rarely, if ever, in the public discourse within the context of American Christians, where patriotism is such a hot button topic in the current Presidential campaign.

How unfortunate. If we’re to “…love the Lord your God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind…” I wish more Americans who profess Christianity would actually start using their minds and wrestling with some of these types of questions out loud.

The fine folks from New Attitude are live blogging and posting audio from the main sessions at their site. I especially enjoyed last night’s The Troubled Soul: God’s Word and Our Feelings from C.J. Mahaney and this morning’s What’s the Point?: Growing in Vision for Diligent Study from Eric Simmons.

I’d be posting more frequently, but the entire city of Louisville has conspired against internet-loving people on a travel budget, and I refuse to pay anyone $10 a day just to browse the internets. You can catch occasional conference insights and random ephemera via twitter.com/blankenship. (Most of which, thus far, has been ranting about the first sentence in this paragraph. Maybe don’t catch all that.)

It’s just past the time I’m normally waking up and I’ve been somewhat coherent for at least fours hours now. Mrs. Blankenship and I are currently sitting in the C Concourse of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport awaiting our delayed connection flight to Louisville, KY. She’s reading the National Geographic issue about China and I’m wondering if it would be weird to eat Qdoba before 9:00am.

We’re on our way to the New Attitude conference for a few days to soak up some teaching from a few pastors/teachers (John Piper, Mark Dever, C.J. Mahaney and others) and meet a few dotcomrades in person for the first time.

I’m also excited to see the Louisville Slugger Museum, The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft (do you see a theme?), and all the tasty typographical treats Matthew Wahl has cooked up for the conference, eat some good local food, meet lots of new people, and generally enjoy some vacation with my wife in a city neither of us have visited before.

I also hear that the Kentucky Reggae Festival is this weekend. I bet that would be a riot.

Job postings are tricky things. You want to be succinct. You want to be engaging. You want to rise above the noise and reach out in the right way to find the just-right candidate. Being truthful helps. So does being funny. You want to let potential applicants know what kind of culture your organization has. You want to communicate exactly what you want, and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t want. There is a job to be done and you want the role filled, preferably with a minimal amount of false leads and wasted time in between posting and hiring.

I probably did a decent job of the above in the Art Director/Designer job posting. Most people chuckled a bit. And in the context of this blog, I think most of you know my general demeanor and writing tone, so it read funny. When it was posted outside the context of this blog, I wonder if it just read smug.

You see, a friend called me out on it. I think she actually used the phrase “totally harsh” when we talked about it. I also think she was probably right.

“Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious…”
— Colossians 4:5-6a

All of the things I listed in that original job posting are true. I intensely mean them. This role is for a highly-skilled professional designer that knows their stuff and has a portfolio of client work to prove it. I don’t want to come across as compromising on that. But in my attempt to filter the applicants on the front-end of the process, I used a tone and attitude that stands in stark opposition to the fact that above all, I’m a follower of the way of Jesus Christ and I am responsible for acting, thinking, and speaking in a way that best represents who I am in light of who I believe Jesus to be. This isn’t so much about it being a job posting for a church — that’s secondary to it being a job posting written by me.

“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.”
— Titus 2:7-8

Elitism, the pride it stems from, and the smug swagger it takes on in action have no place in the Kingdom of God. They ruffle my proverbial feathers, so I’m a hypocrite for hating them, and then engaging in a bit of my own oratory elitism for the sake of a good read and a laugh. So for that, I apologize. I want the right person for this role to join our team, but I don’t want to compromise the attitude I should walk in and speak from in order to take some short cuts in filtering applicants. The easy way is rarely the best way.

In light of all those thoughts, I’ve edited the job description on this site. Before anyone thinks this was in any way motivated by someone from NewSpring Church, I assure you this is something that I’ve been wrestling with by myself tonight and felt a personal need to talk openly about and to change. For those of you that read my blog who don’t really “get” the whole Jesus thing, I’m sure all this is difficult to understand, but it’s a part of the refining process I’m in and the journey I’m on, trying to walk with some semblance of integrity and goodness.

Thanks for bearing with me and my myriad of faults. You’re good readers.

The short: Are you a Photoshop-wielding, bezier-curve-drawing, typography-knowing, web-culture-loving, detail-sweating, direction-taking Art Director/Designer?

The long: You do jaw-dropping, killer print work. You have more than one good comp in you for any given idea/assignment. You work fast, handling everything from idea to implementation. You work well in the lead owning a project. You work well on a highly-collaborative team. You take creative direction with a smile, and then you make it better because you’re that good. You have an extraordinary mastery of typography, layout, and minimizing clutter. You know when to use Photoshop, when to use Illustrator, and when to use InDesign. You read. A lot.

Bonus point gold star cookies if you know some CSS/XHTML/PHP, can write more than your grocery list, and you throw down a mighty iTunes Library gauntlet.

Let’s see that portfolio URL via email. If you don’t have an online portfolio, this job is most likely not a good fit for you. No phone calls please.

P.S. We’re a church, so that obviously presents the proviso that you have to be a Christian. This is also an on-site job at our Anderson Campus; so no remote workers. We want you to be a part of the culture everyday.

CreativeMYK, “a place for… free shared Christian graphics from artists around the world”, has launched what amounts to another social network (and a sort of potential job board) called Creative Space(s).

Specific to the web, I don’t understand why everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel by creating their own proprietary social network; my online life gets more and more fragmented with every new account. We’re getting one foot deep and a thousand miles wide (so to speak) every time we try to recreate a digital representation of ourselves with a new profile on a new site. For that reason, I don’t think I’ll be signing up for an account.

Specific to the theological ramifications of it, I’m torn. On one hand, it feels like yet another way for Christians to remove themselves from any kind of global conversation about creative endeavors. One more ghetto for us to hide in. (What the heck are “Christian graphics” anyway? How do you define that? “These stock photos have, in fact, been redeemed by the blood of Jesus the Nazarene. Those over there, not so much. They’re like… goat photos.” I fail to see the logic in that.) The more we huddle away from what’s happening in the industries we try to artistically emulate, the less in touch with the pulse of the culture we’ll be. The more our work will start to look like everyone else.

It is very probable that the very best ways of visually communicating the Gospel haven’t been discovered yet; they exist in non-Christians, in non-predominantly-white cultures, and in other countries (have you seen the art in China right now? It’s INCREDIBLE what’s happening artistically in the wake of communism unraveling.) Our art and design will suffer from a cultural disconnect and it will repeatedly fail to connect in the ways that it should as long as we perpetuate a cycle of looking to the same sources for inspiration and ideas.

On the other hand, I’m currently looking for an Art Director to add to our team here at NewSpring Church, and it’s difficult to gauge whether a designer would be a good fit for our team based solely on their work. There are, obviously, other factors of faith and lifestyle that play into the decision. Perhaps these Creative Spaces can be a good initial filter. Perhaps.

Plus, Mike Cina’s profile picture is hysterical.

I just launched a minisite for NewSpring Church’s Unleash Conference featuring the video content of the two main sessions from this year (and last year), some photography (from myself and anyone tagging their conference photos with unleash08), and a few other goodies.

In leu of a typical blog, I thought we’d try using Twitter as a way to relay information for Unleash 09 and updates. We’ll see how that works out. Obviously, everyone doesn’t have a Twitter account, but I’d wager enough do (or will) to make it a viable experiment.

I’m constantly running into roadblocks, both small and large, while we’re hosted/CMSed by our current provider. Their templates are fairly worthless, so I’m just building pages from scratch, but their core technologies are all Microsoft-based (no PHP, no .htaccess, no anything fun) and they have control of our DNS right now, which makes it absurdly difficult to get anything done quickly or easily. They will go away soon. I will rejoice. All that to say, sorry about the lack of clean URLs; I know nothing about ASP other than I don’t want to use it.

For the typography lovers, I’m using Mike Cina’s quirky tall Jute for most of the display text. I’ve been wanting to use it on a project for (literally) years, but nothing really clicked until this site.