Archive for the 'Religion' Category

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Arena ChMS: A Container for Nuts

Published on December 29, 2006 in Arena, Religion and Techie. 0 Comments

We had a presentation from Arena several weeks ago and I never got around to posting about it. Since I need to clean out my queue and their official release is just a few short days away I thought I should post what I have.

Have you wondered just what Arena ChMS is? As far as I can tell, it is really a container for nuts. Well, at least that is what they sent us. They were some very large cashews, and my daughter thought they were yummy. I took a picture to commemorate the nearly empty container.
arenanuts.jpg

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The Lord Believes the Opposite

Published on December 22, 2006 in Religion. 0 Comments

This is a good viral video. It is creative, inventive, surprising, and uplifting.

You can see it at the GCCWired site: The Truth Upside Down.

It isn’t original, I believe this was done originally by Lopez Murphy down in Argentina: The Truth.

Still, this is a great meme if you get it out to your community before they are exposed to it from somewhere else. Once everyone starts doing it.

  • This is the truth
  • If we turn things upside down
  • We can’t have the best operating system in the world
  • I would be lying to you if I said that
  • Windows Vista has a great future ahead
  • That your business will improve
  • That your computer will be free of viruses and malware
  • Before anything you should know
  • You do not deserve such things
  • And I am convinced of this because I know the code
  • Bad design and weak security are inherent problems
  • I refuse to believe under any circumstances that
  • We will have the best operating system in the coming years
  • Thanks to the work of the Developers Developers Developers Developers
  • We have sunk to horrible levels of integrity but
  • There are even more surprises to come
  • Microsoft has only one destiny
  • and whether you like it or not
  • this is what is real
  • I’m Bill Gates
  • and you should know I believe exactly the opposite.

;-)

GCCwired video found via Arron Chamber’s My Lord and My Blog.

Religious Commodity

Published on December 21, 2006 in Religion. 0 Comments

celebratecommodity.jpg

We have a Celebrate Recovery program at Christ’s Church, and I know it does a lot of good for a lot of people. I am the person in charge of “Babysitting the Building” on Saturday nights during the main CR gathering and locking the building up as the last custodian heads out. I am also the lucky person who buys the food for their weekly meal. I care a lot personally for many of the individuals in the program so this is in no way making fun of them or the program.

However, today while driving down the road I saw signs nearly identical to the ones we use at CC. Several churches advertising the exact program. Our Non-Denominational Christian Church / Church of Christ congregation is doing the same thing as the Methodists, Baptists, and others.

One of the reasons we stopped doing VBS at the small church I used to work with was that no matter how much work we put into our program it was always going to be outdone by the congregation with 60 times as many people down the road which did the exact same program 1 week before ours. I know they did it better because all the kids who were sent around on the yearly VBS tours by their parents told us so.

I was thinking “How in the world can a church distinguish themselves when they are doing the same genericized program created by a church in another state as everyone else is doing?” Then I realized, “Hey, we all use the same Bible (more or less) and yet churches still distinguish themselves.”

The point is that no matter what programs we buy from other people, or the technology we use, the church and its success come down to the people there in the room with you and the personal connection to God you develop together with them.

Now for the reason I wrote this off-track post. I finally had my camera with me and had an opportunity to stop and take the following picture.

churchopentopublic.jpg

This is an old church building that was bought by an antique furniture store. I don’t know the history of the congregation that was formerly there, but the banner out front is hilarious to me. It seems like the ultimate in surrendering to secularized marketing tactics. We are now open to the public and salvation is going at 50% off!

Rick Warren’s Blog is Gone?

Published on November 18, 2006 in Religion and Techie. 1 Comment

I was searching for something in a previous blog post (it really does serve as a memory extention), and I saw my post about Rick Warren’s Blog about 4 months ago. I’m not sure when this happened, but http://www.rickwarren.com/ is now just a press release published by A. Larry Ross & Friends.

Kigali, Rwanda, November 16 – Dr. Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life and founding pastor of Southern California’s Saddleback Church, concluded a four-day pastoral visit to Syria earlier this week as part of a three-nation pastoral training and PEACE Plan tour. The trip began last week in Germany, where more than 5,000 church leaders gathered to hear Dr. Warren give an overview of a plan to mobilize local churches to attack the global problems of poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption and spiritual emptiness. Similar training with church leaders in Rwanda continues this week.

I looked in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and found they stopped paying attention to it in April so I cannt see when it left. It was dificult to navigate since the site was done using nothing but imagemaps that don’t appear anymore. The Google cache (which will probably change again soon) has a copy of his “Facing the world’s five giants!” article, and then the only other page on the domain known to Google is “About“.

What happened to Dr. Warren? I was hoping he could stick with it.

Now, for the part of the post where we get to conjecture (cue theme song). Why did he stop?

  • Did people tell him they weren’t interested? . . . I doubt it.
  • Maybe he figured regular writing about himself and his work wasn’t for him? . . . A book writing attention seeker out to change the world not interested about writing about himself and his work regularly? You do the math, judge.
  • Could it have been the open nature required for good primary source blog writing? . . . I am guessing that anyone who would even consider having a press release (written by an agency) posted as their web site could ever be a real blogger.

This, I believe, is going to be the primary deterrent to blogging by ministers. Ministers don’t like to be vulnerable and open. They are sometimes afraid to be truly human in the eyes of the people around them. This self-centered pride has led to the sinful downfall of many Godly servants. He can now go back to hiding behind the marketing rather than opening his heart.

Used Car Salesmen and Your Church

Published on October 12, 2006 in Religion. 0 Comments

One of my security hosts told me about his first visit to the church many years ago. He had grown up in the Catholic church and had been with it most of his life. One Sunday he and his wife decided to check out Mandarin Christian Church and they liked it. However, his reasoning seemed a bit odd to me. He said that the preacher reminded him of a car salesman.

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The Christian Side of Go Daddy

Published on September 8, 2006 in Misc Othr Stuf and Religion. 0 Comments

I no longer use Go Daddy for any of my domain names. I was one of those who went to them because of the low cost domains and the name recognition of Bob Parsons from when he was associated with Parsons Technology and Quickverse. I still have my Quickverse 4 Deluxe CD from many years back.

I was also one of those who saw the Go Daddy commercials during the Super Bowl and found them offensive. My opinion changed when I started reading Bob Parson’s blog and realized he was even more offensive.

If you have not seen the commercials you can check them out here: GoDaddy Commercials. You may find it interesting that among the commercials listed is one focused on the web site JesusChristIsLord.com. As a web geek I couldn’t help thinking about how much Kevin needs to get a good web designer. He does have a lot of interesting sites on all sorts of topics ( http://www.projectcare.com/project-care-websites.html ), so I think he is a bit of a domain addict (says the guy with 20 or so current domain names) always looking for new projects.

I am just bothered that this commercial was thrown in with the rest of them. So, Jesus is proclaimed as Lord and carnal impropriety is glorified all right there on the same page. What Will Jesus Market Next?

Online Death

Published on September 4, 2006 in Misc Othr Stuf and Religion. 0 Comments

People have long talked to the final resting places of friends or written notes to those who have passed away. Technology has unexpectedly given us another way to speak to the memories of loved ones.

After 9-11-01 I heard of a lot of people calling the cell phones of victims and listening to the voicemail greeting before leaving a message of their own as though the person would be checking their messages at any moment.

It is an odd feeling to have someone you know online pass away, especially if your only contact with them was through text. You have often written them messages not knowing if you would receive them. With the mainstreaming of blogs there are many people with an online presence separate from their physical influence so that it continues to exist long after they themselves have gone.

http://mydeathspace.com/ lists myspce members who have passed away and links to their pages where people who are mourning the loss have continued to post messages to the person they miss. Reading a few of them can really catch you. There is no real death notice. Instead, you see the settings as they left them and then look at the messages from friends to see the stark change at the date of death.

UPDATE:

I just found out that Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, died instantly from a stingray barb in his chest a few hours ago. He was one of those people that in a way you expect them to die unexpectedly, but you have this odd feeling that they are really immortal.

I Plagiarized the Sermon on the Mount!

Published on August 5, 2006 in Religion. 1 Comment

Out Of Ur has a post on Preachers Plagiarizing Sermons. I don’t think this is new, or necessarily wrong.

During my graduation, the speaker gave a nod to the preacher of the church where the service was being held (I graduated through a Christian school) and then proceded to use a wonderful illustration that preacher had used in a sermon. The funny thing was that the illustration was a key part from one of my dad’s regular sermons (he was often called as a guest preacher so he culled his sermons down to just his favorite few). The preacher then leaned over to my dad and said, “by the way, thanks for the semon.”

As a preacher myself I had some rules for “sermon stealing”

  • Make it your own. Don’t just use a sermon, understand it and get behind it with your heart. Care about what you are preaching. Otherwise you have that resounding gong / clanging cymbals thing going on and nobody like to listen to that.
  • Check for accuracy. (see post on Rick Warren)
  • Don’t use it verbatim. If you talk about your childhood in West Virginia and the congregation knows you grew up in Indiana (I’m a Hoosier), then you are not only busted but you just distracted people from the point.
  • Stick the original preacher’s name into the sermon where you use their content. They will probably figure you got it from someone else anyway, this at least makes you sound well read.
  • Remember that the point of a sermon is not to make yourself look better, but to bring people closer to God than they were before the opening prayer.

I spent a lot of time digging through SermonCentral.com and SermonIllustrations.com and got a lot of great inspiration, indeed Google was my friend as well. I cannot remember actually taking someone else’s sermon and presenting it word for word as my own. I usually disagreed too much with how they did it to do that. I did stick pretty close to the 40 Days of Purpose sample sermons, but only because they were to be presented as one part of the full package for the week. I preached on the 5 purposes a couple years before 40 DoP came out and actually preferred those sermons to Rick Warrens, but I might be biased.

Rick Warren’s New Blog!!!

Published on July 26, 2006 in Religion. 0 Comments

I have seen a dozen blogs posting about Rick Warren’s new blog. However, few are actually saying anything about it.

Bonuses:

  • A well known mega-church minister is blogging. Perhaps more ministers will go online.
  • People interested in the missions work of Saddleback can get quickly updated.
  • People interested in Rick Warren can get quickly updated.

Negatives:

  • So far he has been very stiff in his writing. It may take a while for him to get accustomed to it, but hopefully it won’t continue to read like a press release.
  • I’m not a fan of Rick Warren.

You don’t need to read the rest of this post.
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When “love thy neighbor” gets personal.

Published on July 17, 2006 in Religion. 0 Comments

Back in March I posted a video about the Ashram Project being done in India by Christ’s Church. You can see the post here. Watche the video at the bottom. It is 15MB, but you can watch a lower quality 1.7MB version here. After watching the low quality one again I do recommend the big one if you are on a high speed connection.
It just takes about 5 minutes to watch (depending on your connection).

This video really caught my heart. Especially to see the change that had happened to those children. The mission trip several years ago that led to the creation of this project was eye opening for several people. While Christ’s Church had always been active in missions, this was the first trip that our senior minister had ever taken. He saw poverty he had never seen before, and as he pointed things out to the local missionary (Vivek) (someone I have known for nearly 18 years now and long supported by the church) he began to see the poverty differently from before. Vivek had grown up there and it was common life for him to see the throw away people.

When you are accustomed to the problem you can become blind to it. That is why the child beggar campaign mentioned in the second half of this post is important. It calls attention once again to people who have been overlooked.

This post is not about people in India overlooking the crippled and destitute around them, it is about people in America turning their backs on them for selfish reasons.

Soon after that video was shown in church, I overheard a conversation between two church members. I didn’t want to post this too close to the time I heard it so that it would be more difficult for people to figure out who I was talking about. The man I heard talking is middle aged, he works in the tech industry, and is a committed Christian and long time member. That is why this shocked me.

He said something like the following:

“I know Dennis and the church leadership has a bee in their bonnet over this project in India, but I don’t like it. With how those Indians are stealing our jobs they should be taking care of their own people. This is their problem and I can’t care about it as long as our jobs are going over to their country.”

I have discussed outsourcing with lots of people online. Some Christian, some not. This is not pointed at any of them, but at all of us. Why is it that we let petty issues come between us and our real purpose here in God’s Kingdom.

Those are God’s children, and even if I was losing my job to an overseas labor force I don’t think I could look at children that deep in poverty and say I don’t care. You know the story of the Good Samaritan, you know that Paul celebrated those who had nothing yet gave more than anyone else so that their poverty welled up in rich generosity, you know that we are to care for the poor and bring them the good news. Why do we hate others who may need a little bit of money more than we can imagine needing anything?