How To Spot a Church Movement – Tall Skinny Kiwi

Andrew Jones passes on some wisdom that he gained from Fuller prof. Dr Paul Pierson.

Key ideas that stuck out to me:

They always begin on the periphery of the institutional church

The result is the desire for a more authentic Christian life that often leads to concern for the church and world.

The movement is countercultural in some ways, often because it reaches out to those who have not been valued by their society.

Consequently there will be opposition by many in the dominant culture and church.

Make Plans, Not Resolutions: Reflections on Proverbs 16 – Jeremy Carr

The night before seeing this blog post I had a significant conversation with my wife about our plans for the future. I’m not sure how to take these words, because I’ve always been uncomfortable with planning. It seems so contradictory to faith and trust in God’s sovereign plan. It seems this post makes things rather simplistic, rather than speaking to the complexity and the aspect of faithful obedience while blind to an understanding of future events. On one hand we are to plan. I see this closely tied to Genesis 2, where we are called to be God’s stewards of the Earth. Conversely though, we often times—seen most strongly in the Bible—we are called to blindly step forward without much of a, or any, plan. The pin which holds it together I would argue is obedience. If you aren’t living in obedience then the call of faith won’t come. That life of obedience requires planning, but that won’t get you all the way when it comes living faithfully. Many times you will be called to do things that aren’t planned for and can’t be explained logically.

So this is the place I am. Trying to understand how to continue moving forward in faith when you don’t have much of a idea of where you are being lead.

The Revolutionary Table (aka living la vida local) – Mark Van Steenwyk

Mark describes himself as a ‘foodie’. He is not the only one; there has been a resurgence of food-conscious persons within the U.S. recently. Mark as many others also have realized the implications of their food choices beyond the organic/fast food dichotomy. Mark’s post speak of the economic implications that purchasing foods shipped around the world, cheaply priced by being subsidized by the backs of the farmers in already poor and marginalized countries.

What is most helpful, is that he finishes his post by giving a list of different web resources for living a sustainable lifestyle through locally-seasonally grown & preserved products.

Augmented Reality used to Fix Cars – Slashdot

Here’s a story via slashdot. I have never been good at fixing any car I’ve owned. Maybe this is what I need.

Pack a Gun to Protect Valuables from Airline Theft or Loss [Air Travel Tip] – Life Hacker

Never time you travel, just pack a gun in your check-on luggage. TSA will make sure that it doesn’t get lost.

the difference between “cultivating communities” and “building churches” – Kathy Escobar

A thoughtful post about the personal struggles of a community being a community instead of building a church. The interesting point that she makes is that she found that they needed to separate the two. Having them mixed caused a lack of commitment within the group. Having strong doses of music, teaching, & programs caused people to disengage from the messier {though essential} parts of community building.

If I reflect I can see a lot of her experiences within my own experiences. My community, while making up some families of our church, isn’t really tied to the church much at all. We could drop one or the other without much noticeable impact on the other.

It seemed that in previous centuries the church building was a cultural center for the community; today though, it has a periphery place. It may be a place of teaching or worship but not community. What are the implications for that? Is that good? Is it something I/we should be trying to counter-act?

She also recommends Jean Vanier’s Community and Growth a great read on communal living. He is the founder of the l’arche community in canada where henri nouwen lived and was deeply inspired.

Haiti | To Hell With Altruistic Capitalism – Kester Brewin

Here is my last link for the day. With all the blog post about Haiti or Pat Robertson’s comments on Haiti, here is Marxian analysis. I can deeply sympathize with his outlook. It is amazing that we can ignore the horrible conditions of a nation for decades, and it isn’t until a natural disaster that we come to help. Kester Brewin rightly points to many of the problems originating from economic relations, where we have dealt extremely unjustly with them. I pray that this incident will shed enough light upon the people of this nation for long enough for some substantial change.

My question, is twitter like a lot of the Church? Studies by Harvard & Nielsen suggest that Twitter has been better at signing up users than keeping them. It seems the church, especially evangelical circles, has done well in years past to draw ‘converts’ in. Things like Billy Graham crusades were highly effective in drawing in the masses.

The question is: what are we doing in the church to keep those people in the church, helping them become disciples of Christ? The Billy Graham bubble has busted, the mega-program centered church peaked in the nineties & is on the quick decline. Their is worry among some that the emergent ‘conversation’ is fizzling out? So what is left when all the lust is lost and there isn’t any new thing to dazzle the masses with?

Furthermore there is a recognition that Twitter is becoming a service for onlookers instead of a diverse multi-faceted conversation. Isn’t this just like the church, 20% of the members doing all the work, while the other 80% just show up to be served.

I’m a fan of both, Twitter and the Church. I’m interested to see what either does to offset this trend.

It seems that one of the biggest battle grounds of this war is over speed. I tried the beta 2 of FF and didn’t really notice any speed differences. Though this is from my eeepc (with the old celeron, not even the newer atom processor) so that could be the biggest bottleneck right there.

I’m a sucker for shiny new things, so I have already downloaded the FF 3.1b3. I hear development on chrome for linux is moving quickly, that will be nice to try out too. If I’m impressed with the new beta, I might write some more about it.

I was able to save about 30px just between the search box and the content below on gmail. Gmail is a very complex site, so many different divs; it was very hard to figure out what to change, even with the enormous aid of firebug.

Here is the CSS code to gain the desired results:

/*take out google logo on google docs*/
#logo-section {display:none;}
/*gain space on gmail around search box & logo*/
.IY0d9c {height: 44px;}
.zYsCRb {height: 44px !important;}

I should probably figure out how to limit the css only to certain websites, or I could end up with some weird outcomes.

At my previous employer I used google images a lot. It was a good place to quickly grab product images. Though it was never perfect. Google’s indexing grabs images from everywhere, which is nice but also not nice when you are looking for quality.

Thank God for my wife, she suggested I use flickr recently. It isn’t as though I didn’t know about the site. Everyone has a flickr account, you can upload your images to share with all your friends. I even had seen it used by artists. But for some reason, probably out of habit, I never thought of using it a resource for searching for certain types of images.

I have been trying to put an image in with every post, over on FUMCclass.com. I have quickly learned the power of using flickr instead of google for this type of work. What is most satisfying is the use of the creative commons licensing on flickr. I like to see that people are sharing images openly.

One day, when I get the time and energy I will love to start uploading a lot of my photography which just sits on my hard drive not being used.

Well I spent a majority of yesterday working out a syllabus for my Romans class. I had been putting it off for few weeks now. Partly the reason was I needed to finish working through the text so as to get a big picture of what is going on, but that was mainly an excuse for my procrastation.

I’ve got most of it done, but I have a little bit more formatting stuff that I want to do.

I haven’t messed with making a word doc in a while, I forgot how frustrating that program is. That is whenever you want to do anything even mildly creative, it seems to laugh in your face. When I used to work the computer store, I used InDesign a lot; I got used to being able to infinitely tweak the formatting.

It seems in the process of dumbing everything down for the average user, they {Microsoft programmers} have made advancing formatting virtually impossible.

Maybe I am expecting too much from the program, but when I {a fairly advanced user} can’t figure out how to move a table around on the page, then something seems very wrong.

</rant>

Whenever I get the finished product posted on FUMCclass.com, I’ll post a link.

{update: I have finished the syllabus, here it is.}

Who Would Jesus Smack Down? written by Molly Worthen for the NewYorkTimes.

Ms. Worthen gives an interesting view into the world of Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll. I haven’t read much about the Seattle based pastor, but the one word I know to describe him is “contraversial”. Some know him as the ‘cussing pastor’ others demonize him for his neo-calvinistic views.

However you want to think about him—I will keep a position of non-judgment since, I’m not a part of his community and don’t really know him besides the sound bites and articles—he is definitely an interesting character for his unique blend of old hard-line reformation theology and hip hard edge contemporary style.

Gaza Debate Goes Virtual posted on Slashdot.

I didn’t really look into the details of this story, but the abstract which you can find at the above link is very interesting. Among other things “- ‘mapping the war in Gaza’ – was launched by Al Jazeera and takes user-submitted reports, tweets, and Microsoft Virtual Earth to track the number of casualties and other developments.” Also there was some kind of demonstration on Second Life, as well as all kinds of twitter & facebook debates.

Jesus Is Not a Brand written by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson for ChristianityToday.

This is the “plus one” since I actually didn’t read it this evening. I read the print issue of Christianity Today whenever I go up to the library. I really don’t like navigating their website, but the magazine usually has at least one article of interest to me. I happened to read the current print issue before it showed up on the web, so I’ve had to wait to post a link. I was really excited about the cover story, it deals exactly with what I’ve been thinking through for the past few months.

What place does marketing have within the church? Is Jesus another product or the church a service to be bought or consumed? These are some of the questions that the article discusses.

The topic that he discusses is a dilemma that is unavoidable for every Christian community in the U.S. I recommend this to everyone who cares at all about Jesus. I say that tongue-n-cheek, but also with absolute seriousness. This is a huge problem, it hits at some of the roots of the idoltry of our nation which have found there way into the church. As a related read, there is the story of Jesus clearing the merchants from the temple (Mark 11).

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which is a type of encryption software which uses public-key cryptography. The open source version GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) seems to be the most widely used version, at least from what I found.
Basically how it works is that it creates a private & a public key. You keep your private key hidden from anyone else. The public key is what you give out to everyone so they can unlock your encrypted emails. There are many different public servers which will house the public keys, that you can search for other people’s public keys–so you can receive encrypted emails from them. Other standard ways for sharing your public keys are to place you public key on your website/blog (which seems kind of silly to me) and also to digitally sign your unencrypted emails with your public key included.

I’m using Thunderbird at work (which I’ve found to be a fairly well made email client, speaking for myself coming from Outlook), which I found a nice plugin, Enigmail, which is a very nice streamlined interface for the GnuPG application.
The process for installing and setting up Enigmail is as easy as setting up an email account. Enigmail has great guide on their website, which should make it easy enough for your mother to set it up.

For those using Gmail, there is also encryption via greasemonkey–read here for more info.

Here are couple more links:
http://lifehacker.com/software/top/how-to-encrypt-your-email-180878.php
http://lifehacker.com/software/email/add-encryption-to-gmail-177061.php

update:
A friend came across a site in relation to this post. It is http://www.google-watch.org/
It is a watch-dog for google. I haven’t really looked at it much, so i can’t verify the validity of its claims, but it at least seems interesting. You know you’re big time when you have people looking over your shoulder.