The Growing Gap Between the Rich and Super-Rich.Video at the Onion. Quotes: “The rich are just unwise with their money.” “They don’t stay in school to get their MBAs, to see it through and get their doctorate.”
Jesus the Logician.According to J.P. Moreland, Jesus was a master of logic in his arguments. In fact, writes Moreland,
To my mind, Jesus was the greatest thinker who ever lived. And while he did not come to develop a theory about logic or to teach logic as a field of study, it is clear that he was adept at employing logical forms and laws in his thinking and reasoning. We who are his followers should go and do likewise.
Inspiring Volunteers.Gary Lamb writes, “You can NEVER cast vision too much. Volunteers do what they do because of the vision, not because they need something else on their schedule.” (Via ChurchRelevance.com.)
Let Guests See the Dress Code Ahead of Time. Above all else, guests to a church don’t want to be embarrassed, according to Pastor Dave Zimmerman of Living Waters Church in Lake Wylie, S.C. He suggests that we can “put pictures on our web sites and brochures to give people an idea as to how they should dress.”
The Moon Will Be So Crowded… Nobody will go there anymore. Lots of nations are planning to go to the moon by 2025, including the U.S., Russia, Japan, and China.
Mormon Parable About How You Get Saved.A parable in an official LDS teaching manual illustrates how Mormons view atonement. In the parable, the character representing Jesus keeps a debtor from going to prison, then turns to him and says, “you will pay the debt to me and I will set the terms. It will not be easy, but it will be possible. I will provide a way. You need not go to prison.” According to the Stand to Reason blog,
The debtor is still a debtor who must still pay. However, Jesus is now the one he must pay back.
Grace is not a gift, but just a new loan with new terms of financing.
Pecha Kucha Night.Pecha Kucha Night is an event where people such as designers and architects can get together to share their work without boredom or ego taking over. Each person who wants to talk about his or her work presents a slide show (a PowerPoint presentation) that is limited to 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds–giving each presenter “6 minutes and 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up.”
It’s interesting to think about applying the Pecha Kucha Night concept to church events. One idea would be “Pecha Kucha Ministry Night”–a ministry fair during which there would be a presentation period that follows the Pecha Kucha rules. In other words, someone from each ministry presents 20 images for 20 seconds each–a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds, and then he or she has to step down. (The presenter is allowed to speak during the 20 slides, of course.) Questions and answers can come at individual tables after the presentation period. The advantages of this format? (1) It would encourage use of images (which can be highly motivating). (2) It would encourage ministries to take photos. (3) It would encourage listeners to come because they would know they wouldn’t be bored. (4) It would be a new format that might spark interest.
Pecha Kucha, by the way, “is Japanese for the sound of conversation.”
Web-Based Who’s Who.SquidWho is a web-based version of Who’s Who in which everyone–famous or not–can have a page all about them. You can create a page for yourself, or you can become a fan editor of a page about someone else (such as Billy Graham, for example, who didn’t have a page as of this writing).
The GetTogether Supper.You have to get together to do stuff together. Temple Terrace United Methodist church is throwing a casual,GetTogether Supper to let people eat, meet, and maybe sing a few songs. The event will be held Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007, at 6:30 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall. $5 for adults, $3 for kids. Guests welcome. Please tell TTUMC you’re attending by signing up on a Sunday or by calling the church office at 813-988-4141.
Baptism Celebration at the Beach! Don’t miss Temple Terrace United Methodist Church’s Baptism Celebration at Honeymoon Island State Recreation Park tomorrow (Saturday, August 25, 2007). The picnic begins at 4. Baptisms will begin at 7:30 and continue until sunset.
Arm Wrestling Machine Recalled for Breaking Arms. A Japanese game maker is recalling 150 arm-wrestling machines from Japanese arcades “after three players broke their arms while wrestling with the machine’s mechanized appendage.” (Via Slashdot.org.)
Cannibals Apologize for Eating Methodists. A cannibal tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologized for eating four Methodist missionaries in the 19th century. Interestingly, the leader of the missionaries, Reverend George Brown, “reluctantly agreed to launch a punitive expedition, ordering his men to burn down villages implicated in the murders and destroy wooden canoes,” and 10 of the accused perpetrators were killed. (Via EvangelicalOutpost.com.)
Attention Grabbing Church Billboards. Granger Community Church, a Methodist church near South Bend, Indiana, has put up billboards advertising their series The Office. According to Pastor Tim Stevens, Granger is using the billboards “to create interest, stimulate conversation, and drive people to a website that will invite them to the series.” You can see photos of the billboards at Tim’s blog. Captions on the billboards include: “I look at naughty web sites at work”; “My nose is really brown”; and “My boss keeps hitting on me.”
Collaborative Online Writing Tool.Writeboard is a tool for collaborative writing online. Or for one person’s writing when he or she wants to keep versions. It’s easy to get started using. I’ve tried it tentatively, and may try it again.
A New Children’s Movie Based on the Claim that God Is Evil. Here’s a “heads up” about an upcoming film that is being marketed to kids called The Golden Compass. The Golden Compass is based on an explicitly anti-Christian trilogy of novels called His Dark Materials.
Regarding the “Golden Compass” volumes, in them God is a central character — but is actively evil, obsessed with causing people to suffer. The plotline of the books is that Christianity is a complete fraud and the source of all that is wrong with society; the final “Golden Compass” volume concerns a desperate attempt by the heroic children to kill God and obliterate every trace of Christianity from several universes. I found Pullman’s arguments against Christianity puerile — like recent anti-Christian books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the “Golden Compass” volumes resort to the cheap subterfuge of cataloging everything bad about religion while pretending belief has no positive qualities. Pullman, Dawkins and Harris are anti-faith jihadis: they don’t just want to argue against the many faults of Christianity, they want faith forbidden.
In other words, His Dark Materials is the “anti-Narnia.”
Baby Vocabulary Dept. A study suggests that it’s better to talk to your babies than show them a video. Who knew? Reuters:
“The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos, and there is some suggestion of harm,” [researcher Frederick Zimmerman] said in a statement.
Every church is a collection of zones, and you’ve got to map them out before you can place a single sign. …[W]alk around, asking yourself with every step: What will visitors be doing here? Where will their eyes be focused when they stand here? And what will they be thinking about over there? Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where visitors spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.
Will Your Faith Get You Through? That depends on what you put your faith in. Melinda at str.org writes, “We want a reliable company to back up our insurance policy, and we need a realiable Person to back up our faith in Him. Faith is only good as what is backing it up.”
Study: Cohabitation Correlates With Depression.Joe Carter points to a recent study on cohabitation before marriage that finds that “compared with peers who had not cohabited prior to marriage, individuals who had cohabited reported higher levels of depression and the level of depression also rose with the length of cohabitation.”
Can You Survive in Space Without a Space Suit?Yes, for a very short time. It would take about 15 seconds to pass out from lack of oxygen (holding your breath in the vacuum of space would be fatal). Then it would take a few minutes to die “from asphyxiation or the effects of the pressure reduction.” (Via Slashdot.)
Brainstorming Virtually. This is the most interesting thing I read this week. Brainstorming works better when people generate their ideas individually than when they brainstorm as a “real group.” From The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson (as reported by blog.pmarca.com):
Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over the world, real groups have never once been shown to be more productive than virtual groups. In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the group’s individuals had [worked] alone.
In addition, in the studies where the quality of ideas was measured, researchers found that the total number of good ideas was much higher in virtual groups than in real groups.
Why do I find this so significant? Getting people together is hard. But if we only need to generate ideas, people can be asked to brainstorm when they have time and forward the ideas to the facilitator–and we’ll get better ideas than if we got together anyway.
ACLU Creates Comic Book to Reach Youth. An ACLU email received by the blogger YPulse announces that a comic book called “Defenders of Freedom” will feature a story about a racist police officer. The ACLU email says,
Part of an ongoing effort to reach a new audience of young people, Defenders of Freedom will be distributed…in digital format…. [It] will also be handed out via “guerilla marketing” street teams in seven U.S. cities (Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Madison, WI, and Columbus, OH) and the ACLU is distributing print copies to its members…to read and share with youth….
2. I’m very observant. I’m picking up both verbal and non-verbal communication. Help me make sure this is a safe place where I won’t have to reveal too much of myself until I am ready. 5. When I sit down in the service I want to be able to sit where I choose, and if at all possible, let me sit near the back and near the aisle. 13. On that note, don’t be afraid to talk about Jesus. I’ve been to churches where they’ve talked around him. 15. While I don’t quite understand how long this talk should be taking, please don’t make it any longer than it has to be. I’ll get used to it after awhile, but initially, I get distracted.
The World Is Different Now. “1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. in 2005 met online,” according to ChurchRelevance.com. “Culture is changing. Does your church know how to handle change?”
Top-Notch Methodist Theologian Praised. Fred Sanders praises William Burt Pope (1822-1903), “a great British Methodist theologian.” “In fact,” Sanders writes, “I am coming to believe that he was the greatest doctrinal theologian ever to take up the task of teaching Christian theology from the point of view of the Wesleyan revival movement.”
Youth Mission Trip. The TTUMC youth leave on their mission trip to West Virginia this morning. Pray that God will bless them in every way.
Platform for Church Video. YouTube is now allowing its video player to be customized. This includes the color scheme, layout, and title. And, as Bobby Gruenewald writes, you can even “choose your own playlist of videos to be displayed in the custom player.” This could make it very easy for a church web site to make sermon message series viewable in a controlled and professional way–as long as you don’t mind uploading your sermon video to YouTube.
Video is Important! Speaking of video, Joshua Cody relays that “75% of Internet users watched online video in May 2007, averaging 158 minutes per viewer. Nearly 8.4 billion videos were streamed online in the month of May” (ComScore). Cody suggests doing video podcasts of messages, video highlights of events, and video interviews with church members. “People want to be able to see what goes on at your church without actually entering the doors,” Cody writes. “[H]ow are you going to help them?”
Facing Facebook. The topic of Facebook, a social networking site, is getting a lot of play on popular pastor’s blogs, including Swerve and LeadingSmart. Bobby Gruenewald, a pastor of LifeChurch.tv, blogs, “[I]f you aren’t paying attention to the online phenomenon of Facebook, you should be.” He writes that to fully understand why, you have to join Facebook and experience it. So I joined. But that’s about it for now. If you want to join and become my “friend,” please do. Maybe then I’ll start to grok what it’s all about.
Counting Weekend Attendance. How does a church with 2500 in each service count attendance? Surprisingly, it’s not that different: mostly, the ushers do it. Only sometimes the ushers find it easier to count the empty seats rather than the filled ones. (That method won’t work with pews, though.)
How do you know when you’ve met Mr./Ms. Right? How do you determine who, among the available range of candidates in your life, is the person you should marry? The best way to increase the chances that you’ve made the right decision is to follow this simple sampling strategy:
You will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about 37 percent of the available candidates in your life and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all the previous ones.
Suppose that during your single years you will date 100 candidates for marriage. If you marry the first one that comes along then your chance of finding the best of the lot is only 1/100. The same probability is applicable if you date 99 of them and marry the last one. The chance that the last candidate is the best choice is only 1 in 100. Following the formula allows you to sample the options and increases the likelihood that you will choose the best of the available choices. (Note: This strategy also works for similar choices, such as buying a house.)
My wife is not too impressed by this advice. To say the least.
The last set of babies answers the question, “What are daddies good for?” (Via Evangelical Outpost.)
Pop Songs Replacing Nursery Rhymes. A new UK survey reports that parents are singing pop songs to their children instead of nursery rhymes. ChurchRelevance.com asks, “If young children are raised on pop songs intended for teenagers, what will they be listening to as they begin to grow older and look for something that is edgier…?”
a reference to an official at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, that proves the historical existence of a figure mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
The tablet was sitting in the British museum when “Michael Jursa, associate professor at the University of Vienna, on a research trip to the museum,” deciphered it. (Via ChurchRelevance.com.)
Update.Greg Peters warns against taking “greater comfort from a cuneiform tablet about God’s providence than…from innumerable answered prayers.”
Consequences of the Disappearing Middle. The conventional view of how people behave is the bell curve–a hump on a graph in which most people occupy the middle. But Christian thinker Len Sweet believes that society is now clustering toward the extremes.
Christianity Today’s Out of Ur blog has noticed some trends that are a result of “[o]ur tastes and choices…shifting away from the middle and toward the extremes”:
“[C]hurchgoers increasingly prefer megachurches and microchurches but not mid-sized congregations.”
People either volunteer a lot or volunteer very little.
There are fewer and fewer “average givers.” People either give a lot or give very little.
Some churches are spending less time helping people occupy the middle depth of involvement with God; instead, they are encouraging people to move from the spiritual shallows to the spiritual depths with a minimal stop in the “living room.”
Customizable Love Songs. Slashdot.com reports, “A new kind of record company, Tailored Music Group, is selling user-customizable songs. Each song is distributed in its ‘default’ (generic) form, and the customer can change any (or all) of the lyrics. For a few hundred bucks, the original indie musician will re-work the song with the custom lyrics.”
Fill ‘er Up! This Sunday our Road Trip series continues at TTUMC. If you’re anywhere near Temple Terrace, Florida, you’ve invited to attend at 9:30 a.m. or 11:00 a.m. We hope to see you there!
“When we’re focused on the destination, life can seem to be all about winning. But to really experience the thrill of victory, we have to put others first. We discover joy when we serve others”
“Multi-Site Works.” Some churches are going “multi-site”: this means they conduct worship in a second location and show a video sermon preached by the pastor at the main campus. The sermon may be shown “live” or recorded. Tony Morgan visited Buckhead Church in Atlanta and reports that, in his opinion, “multi-site works“:
Within [the Buckhead Church] facility, there’s an auditorium that has seating for 3,000 people. Currently, there are about 4,500 people attending the three Sunday services. Did you catch that? This is a campus where the teaching is primarily delivered via video, and there’s 4,500 people showing up. Multi-site works.
The video, by the way, is very cool. I’ve seen Andy [Stanley] preaching live at the Alpharetta campus. I think I actually prefer watching him preach on the video screen.
Everything besides the teaching is like a normal service experience. There’s a band, kid’s programming, host teams, etc. I’m sure it takes several hundred volunteers to pull off everything that happens at that campus.
Sister Church Growing. TTUMC’s sister church in Manzanillo, Cuba, was honored as having more growth than any other church in its district.
“Trapped on Earth”. According to a Space.com article this week, explorers sent to Mars will fight dust. Martian dust is extra fine, and could easily get into lungs, coat equipment, or cause electrostatic charges on space suits in the super-dry atmosphere. The dust may even be toxic. Imagine trying to keep your habitat clean when you come home from a long day of drilling holes and picking up rocks. It won’t be adequate to wipe your space boots on the mat. (Via Slashdot.)
Even more pessimistic is an article in the most recently posted version of Discover Magazine. Amusingly entitled “Are We Trapped on Earth?“, this article addresses whether the human body can “withstand a prolonged journey into deep space.” The biggest obstacle is cosmic rays, which cause brain damage and harm the immune system.
What’s so amusing about the title of this article? Thinking of humans as “trapped” on earth is like thinking of a football fan being “trapped” at the Super Bowl or a teenage girl being “trapped” at the mall.
Not only are the laws of the universe finely tuned to allow humans to exist, Earth itself is in the best possible situation for our survival: just the right distance from the center of the galaxy, just the right distance from the Sun, endowed with an improbably large moon that steadies our rotation so that our seasons don’t wobble out of control. Even the planet Jupiter is positioned to protect us from in-falling comets.
, changing store to church and customer to visitor:
