Every now and then I wander over to
Steve McCoy's photographs, and I just love this one:
Kris and I are in New Orleans at my annual academic meetings, but we found some links this week before we left ...
iMonk -- back at it, this time with someone else's words.
Michael Patton -- maybe the most substantive post in the blog world I've seen this year.
This online church stuff isn't going away: "
In doing so, รก Lava joined growing numbers of Christians worldwide who are migrating from the chapel to the computer. A map on the Church Online site showed users from 22 countries logged into a recent service."
Meanderings in the News
3.
Jars of Clay likes coffee... hey, by the way, what songs of theirs are well-known? I've heard of them but I've never listened to them. (HT: BK)
4. Will
Google be our next major phone company?
6.
This guy gets distracted by a pelican, drops his cell phone, and off the road he goes ... but his car is ... well, way too valuable.
9.
New York, the possible trials, and unease.
Thomas Sowell, never one to soften the sound of his steps, lands hard on the trial in NYC.
Sports
Who has some advice for Bears fans? We are in need of some winter wonder. We can't cheer for the Packers because ... well, they're the Packers. And we can't cheer for the Vikings because they've got a Packer QB. No one cheers for the Lions. Tough sledding. C'mon Spring Training. Hurry.
How in the world did New England lose that football game to the Colts?
In this series on a Third Way approach to preaching and the teaching ministry of the local church, I have suggested that we need to de-focus from the sermon being the be-all and end-all of education, and I have also argued that we need to develop an outcome based model. That is, all teaching in a church can be subsumed under some overall general "outcomes," and outcomes are measurable behaviors, attitudes and habits.
One of the issues that arises in an outcome based model is constructing the outcomes, and a huge, huge issue is that they must be organic and owned. Top-down approaches rarely work; guidance and mentoring are the desired approach. So, here's some suggestions on how to construct outcomes in a local church.
First, and I'm not violating the previous point, the pastoral staff need to spend time in prayer, with the Bible, and contemplating -- first individually and then as a group -- the big idea outcomes of the local church. The key is to discern and discuss, and then temporarily put to the side what they learn.
Second, the elders (or deacons or leaders) of a local church need to do the above: first individually and then together discovering and discussing what they find. Always the question is: "What do we want our church, together and individually, to be able to do as a result of the educational ministries of the church?"
Nightline's series on the Ten Commandments moves to the 8th Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal."
The commandment, or more properly prohibition, is general enough in Exodus 20:15 to include both kidnapping and swiping what belongs to others. According to the experts, the 8th Commandment included the notion of stealth.
Clearly, there is a sense of the integrity and security of personal property in the 8th Commandment. But property is not enough: property involves the person. Not to steal is not only to respect ownership and to live within the rights of ownership, but it is to respect the person who owns something.
Jesus, I would argue, ups the ante here. In Matthew 19:18-19 ("19:18 "Which ones?" he asked. Jesus replied, "Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, 19:19 honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.") Jesus shows that the second half of the Ten Commandments are connected to loving your neighbor as yourself.
Paul now gets a vision to enter into Greece for missional work, and this means he enters into what we today call Europe. While it is popular to make a big deal of this, it was all the Roman Empire...
Over the next couple of weeks or so I would like to look at two books, not new but fairly recent, that think through some ideas on body and soul. The first is by Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature:...
Here are our big questions in this series of posts: How do we move beyond the Bible? Should we? Better yet: Since we have to, how do we move beyond the Bible into our world but do this biblically? This...
All is well, but Kris recently went through her annual mammogram, the discovery of a change from last year with development of a cluster of microcalcifications, another mammogram and a consultation, and then a biopsy and a consultation with...
What a fascinating set of issues arise in Derbe and Lystra. Jerusalem looms large on the horizon of church building in the Diaspora.16:1 He also came to Derbe and to Lystra. A disciple named Timothy was there, the son of...
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, Steve Wilkens and Mark Sanford examine cultural scripts that work against the gospel work in the Church. 
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