Mark Scandrette is an author, speaker, activist, and networker among innovative Christian leaders.
His books include FREE: Spending Your Time and Money On What Matters Most (IVP 2013), Practicing the Way of Jesus (InterVarsity Press 2011), Soul Graffiti (Jossey-Bass 2007) and Belonging and Becoming: Creating A Thriving Family Culture (with Lisa Scandrette).
He is a contributing author to other books including The Gospel After Christendom (Baker 2012), An Emergent Manifesto of Hope (Baker 2007) and The Relevant Church (Relevant 2005). Mark is the founding director of ReIMAGINE: A Center for Integral Christian Practice based in San Francisco (www.reimagine.org), where he leads an annual series of retreats, learning labs and projects designed to help participants integrate the teachings of Jesus into all aspects of life through shared practices and intentional community experiments.
He and his wife Lisa and their three children live in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Mark has an extensive background in church leadership and community-based organisations. He graduated from the Bemidji State University with a degree in Applied Psychology (with an emphasis on family and community health), studied theology at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and received training as a spiritual director at Mercy Center, Burlingame, California.
He frequently speaks and guest lectures at universities, churches and seminaries and at conferences nationally and internationally. He has been influenced by teachers and mentors that include Dallas Willard and Fr. Richard Rohr.
————————————————- The 9 Beats Collective has come together to make a soundscape of songs, instrumentals and spoken word that explores the ancient wisdom known as the Beatitudes. These words speak about another world being possible, another way of being human: in these turbulent times, could they actually offer us steps to a new reality? The 9 Beats Collective explores these powerful notions – and presents them back to the culture around us through music and art.
“The arts and theology and spiritual formation are really great conversation partners because…we’re invited to question the assumptions of the systems that we are part of…They point out that the emperor has no clothes on and then invoke the possibility of newness to come…There’s a longing inside of us for another world, something better than what’s here right now…The Beatitudes invite us into that possibility and say there is a new way to be human, another world is possible.” [Mark Scandrette, author and speaker]