Here and Now

So, I just posted (below) something I found about poverty in Warren County. That there are 118 families living below the poverty level is pretty disturbing. This is one of the primary mission fields of the church - always has been. And it really needs to be a focus for every Christian... I was looking over some notes that I used for a staff devotion a while ago and I had noted this verse from Isaiah 49:6 : he says: "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." How I'm reading that today is "It's too small a thing for the church to only be worried about church people and church things. It is too small a thing to only think of yourself. Turn your head to the right and the left and you'll see people all around you that need salvation." James 1:27 says: Religion that God ou...

I pulled some demographics info for the the county that I'm moving to (Warren County) and came across this little piece of information: So, almost half (45%) of the households within 1 mile of the church I'm going to that are below the poverty line are single mom with kids households. We need to pay attention to that...

Link Roundup: Here’s a loop to a Phil Wickham song “True Love” that could be background music for a video clip. Grab it soon before it disappears from the web: http://www.ourrisingsound.com/2009/04/08/loop-available-true-love-by-phil-wickham/ Here’s the homepage – I might link it to the right here… http://www.ourrisingsound.com/ Just because I couldn’t believe it, this is the most time wasting page I’ve been to all week (and I read just about the whole thing…um, what does that say about me?)… http://theoffice.wikia.com/wiki/Party_Planning_Committee David Crowder*Band joke video that people took too seriously… From the official DC*B site: http://emprise34.xanga.com/698443050/bwack-be-creepin/

Sally pointed me to Adam Hamilton's blog post from yesterday in which he compared GM (huge company that once had a major market share in the industry) to the United Methodist Church (huge denomination that once had a major share of Americans as members - can I say "market share" in church?) The hope at GM is that the current moves will help the company emerge stronger and more viable, able to make great cars that people want to drive at a price that represents great value. The hope in whatever changes we might make in the UMC is that our denomination would emerge stronger, healthier and making a better use of our resources to further the work of Christ. But both GM and the UMC will have to work at ensuring that the “products” we offer are excellent and connect with the “consumer” we hope to reach. The alternative for GM, and for the UMC, is to keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing and to hope for different results. One of the problems that GM had was that they were ...

Monday update the weekend that was: My mom came down to help us pack. Friday night mom stayed home with the girls and Lori and I went to see The Soloist which is a great movie. Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx are outstanding (in fact, the only one I couldn’t stand in the movie was the ex-wife who broke my suspension of disbelief a few times – not sure what it was about her performance…ah, but maybe that’s a post for another day). Anyway, Saturday morning was packing boxes and doing laundry, trimmed and mowed the grass, then I got to preach Saturday night here. It went really well. Sunday was lots of church stuff, of course. The band at both services was, again, great. I got to take Elie to Build-a-Bear with some cash grandma gave her… where i am at the moment: sitting at my desk in my office. on my to-do list this week: putting a couple videos together for this week and next. Sermon and Bible Study, of course. Wednesday night I’m on for our service of Prayer and Heal...

...in Bethel Park. But I probably do have the blue and purplest. Mower blades vs. Sidewalk chalk. Boo-yeah! Meh, the picture doesn't really do it. Purple dust everywhere :)

Lori and I just got home from seeing the movie The Soloist (on opening night, no less! Thanks mom!). I don't want to spoil the movie for anybody who's going to watch it, so I won't give anything away here. Let me just say, really great movie - based on a true story, a book by a LA Times reporter. Here's what I will say about the whole thing, though. Where do you draw the line between "reporting" and "exploiting". Let's face it, the reporter needs to write something that sells, right? What happens when what sells is someone else's story? We seem to always want to read about other peoples' lives - especially when they're broken lives - tabloids are full of that stuff - well, about famous people. And that fascination is ancient - read about King David's life (or watch the show Kings . But there's a fascination about the brokneness of "normal" people, too. And that's part of the appeal of the movie - a sort-of ord...

My friend Michael instituted Theological Thoughts for Thursday over on Barneyisfat a while back and I read it every week. Thought that would be a good second regular feature for this blog (sorry, Aaron - I can only steal one idea from any one person - otherwise I become a stalker - plus just about every post I post is random, so Random Thursdays is kind of redunant...) So... Last night Lori and I finally got to watch the movie Doubt . I admit that I really wasn't in the mood to watch it last night - but it was due back tonight and our evening is full tonight... Oh, also, might be some minor spoilers below if you're really chomping at the bit to see the movie, well, you might want to skip this until you've seen it. Okay, warning out of the way. The movie was okay - the acting was excellent, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis - Amy Adams was okay and the rest of the cast did a fine job for their parts - but the pacing and the story itself was just meh ...

Right outside my office some guys are jackhammering the sidewalk - we have a couple slabs of sidewalk that need replaced and today's the day. Reminds me of the sidewalk we replaced like a year and a half ago in Warren. Anyway, I watched them for just a minute.*** Here's the process. First they used a cutting tool to cut the concrete. Then, it's the same thing over and over. Jackhammer for maybe 30 second bursts a couple times. Dig. Repeat. Pick up pieces of concrete. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It's a slow process. But the concrete didn't deteriorate quickly, either. You know, I'm thinking that's true about a lot of the stuff we need to get rid of in our lives. The "bad stuff". David Crowder (yeah, that's his picture) wrote a book called Praise Habit which talks (in part) about how to make our praise of God a habit. A habit is an act acquired by experience and performed regularly and automatically.... Years ago a friend told me that an action re...

Sunday I made a passing reference to the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven and my friend Jan sent me this in an email. This is just too funny: And so many people thought this was real that snopes even has an article on it. http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/dogheaven.asp Actually, maybe that’s funnier to me than the joke signs. You know, I kind of wish churches would have dialogues like this - okay, maybe on more important subjects - but...could we? *** Here's my original Church Sign Smackdown

My friend Aaron stole an idea from a guy at Youth Specialties for Monday Updates - kind of a weekend that was, and a week that is to be thing. Since I'm not above stealing good ideas (especially if they're stolen already), I'm going to institute not one but TWO regular features into my blog. The next one will wait for Thursday (note that it's a stolen idea too...which will give at least one of the readers of this blog a clue as to what's coming). So, without further ado: Monday Update the weekend that was: Lori and I rented a couple of movies – we watched Changeling which was better than I thought it would be. We tried to rent Doubt twice but Family Video and Blockbuster didn’t have any copies in stock. Lori’s mom and sister came over to drop off some Rubbermaid bins we had in storage at their house. We’re officially getting ready to move (ugh). We took the girls to Steak ‘N Shake (not my favorite restaurant by a long shot) for lunch, picked up my new glasses ...

Ah - a week off and so many things to post. Well, yesterday Duane (Sr. Pastor here at Christ Church) asked me if I had seen the new Steelers schedule. I guess it was posted in the Post Gazette - I missed it... Anyway, here it is: So what? Well, take a look at the entries that I highlighted. Those are weeks that Sunday Night worship is likely to be decimated (by which I mean as low as 35 people in the congregation on playoff Sundays...holy cow!!). The 4:15 games aren't over in time for people to get to worship and, for whatever reason, some people stay away even when there's an 8:20 game (though not nearly as many). Here's what last season looked like: Oh, yeah, and in the last seven weeks they had "flexible scheduling" or something like that - so two of those 1:00 games became 4:15 games - and nevermind the playoffs... So, wow, what a difference a year makes. Anyway, here's a random NFL comic from one of my favorite online comicstrips - Dork Tower:

Happy Easter everybody. May the resurrection of Christ touch your lives in amazing and unexpected ways this week. Today is my friend Al's birthday - how cool to have your birthday on Easter Sunday. Today is also a hard day for some friends of mine - difficult lives, hard memories of loved ones who have died, uncertainty about tomorrow. So I pray for them - that God will resurrect their faith today, tomorrow, this week - every day. That everyday can be Easter in their hearts and in their lives. Know that I'm praying for you. God what an amazing thing you did on this day - 2000 years ago - and today. You truly are an amazing God.

A couple posts ago I mentioned that the Gospel of Mark has three different endings. There I talked a bit about truth and stuff... Well, since I'm going to be mentioning the earlier and later endings in the Gospel of Mark tomorrow morning in my sermon, but I'm really not goint to unpack in it in real detail, so I thought I'd do just a bit of exploring of the subject here. The earliest Gospel (that would be the one from the author's hand) may or may not have ended at 16:8. It is possible that a longer ending was planned, but the author never finished it. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but the page was lost from the rest of the manuscript. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but it was intentionally excised by someone early because it disagreed in some ways with the other three canonical Gospels. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but it contained something heretical so it was cut. It is possible that there was no longer e...

This is the coolest new product - I can't wait until it's released and at a reasonable price point (though I might be willing to jump in early on this thing - think about not having the hundreds of novels on the shelves in my house - AND not having to give any of them up because of lack of space...hmmmm....). http://www.plasticlogic.com/product.html I read a lot of pdfs that are magazine sized and wouldn't reformat easily to, say, the Amazon Kindle format. This thing is about that size (so I'd be reading them at a slightly smaller resolution, I'm okay with that). I really have to get this in...man...a year + when it comes out...sigh... Of course this is what I hoped the Kindle would be, so I might be disappointed, too...sigh...

...but he's got a point. I was just on Brian McLaren's website and he has a couple-three posts on major Crises in the world: Congo, Darfur, and Palestine. Here's a link to what's going on in the Congo and a video about what this organization is trying to do:

I was reading about the different endings to the Gospel of Mark today – getting ready for Easter Sunday. A quick recap for those who don’t know: The 2 oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8 “…and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And a lot of ancient manuscripts don't have anything beyond verse 8. Now a lot of ancient manuscripts have the so-called “longer ending” of Mark (16:9-20) but many indicate somehow that they are not original. One website calls these other endings forgeries… Others try to harmonize things. So what is true in this? How should the Gospel of Mark end? If the last 12 verses are not actually from Mark’s hand, does that make them any less fitting an ending for the Gospel? (If you read through Hosea, for example, it seems likely that at least part of it was assembled by an editor who wrote some of it – being sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first person). Heh – I guess the Gospel of Mark was the first candidate fo...

...but he never makes we wear LED suits. Check this out:

I have a couple posts already written, but I thought I'd share something else before I pop those in here... I forgot I had staff devotions this morning. I came into the office, checked the calendar and, bam, there it was. I had about 50 minutes to pull it together. Now, understand, I usually spend a bit more time than that trying to come up with something meaningful for the staff - so, first, of course, I prayed - maybe a little more fervently than some other weeks... I pulled out a Max Lucado book, And the Angels Were Silent , and read through a few chapters of it and hit one that really spoke to me (it was chapter 24 "The Greatest Miracle", for those keeping track). First, though, let me start with a quick note in the Gospel of Matthew. If you read chapter 21 you get the Triumphal entry and the cleansing of the temple - you get a pretty busy Sunday, all in all - and we celebrated that this week as Palm Sunday. And the day ends like this: And he left them and went out o...

I read this article by John Stackhouse. Basically, he says if churches have worship with drums and guitars then the music is always too loud and needs to be turned down. His five reasons for turning it down are: 1) “…cranking up the volume is just a cheap trick to add energy to a room.” 2) “…when your intonation is not very good—and let's face it, most singers and instrumentalists are not anywhere close to being in perfect tune—turning it up only makes it hurt worse.” 3) “…the speakers in most church PA systems cannot take that much energy through their small, old magnets and cones…” 4) “…consider that you might be marginalizing older people, most of whom probably do not like Guns N' Roses volumes at church.” 5) “…a church service isn't a concert at which an audience sings along with the real performers. Musicians—every one of them, including the singers—are accompanists to the congregation's praise. They should be mixed loudly enough only to do their job of leading an...

I got an email with a powerpoint slideshow in it - you know, those kind of inspirational things that people send. It was nice, a little cliche (like most of them) but I appreciate the setiment from the person who sent it. But this picture was in it and I just think it's funny:

Finishing...something I don't do very well. I started a model railroad when I was in my early twenties. Never got it along to the point where trains actually ran on the rails. I have started to write at least a dozen books. Never finished one of them (although it must be pointed out that most of them died of natural causes - that is, they just plain weren't any good...). I feel like most everything I do that involves any creative expression - even my sermons, these blog posts, and the like - I feel like they're just not quite finished. Always. I guess I'm a tweaker. I think that's probably a derrogatory term for some kind of drug abuser or something - but, of course, I don't mean that. I just need to adjust this and fix that and redo this and... Things are never quite done. John Lennon, it was reported in the Beatles Anthology , never considered a song "done" until it was recorded - and then, not always (note the two versions of Revolution, for exam...

So, today the internet is supposed to implode or something, right? Yeah, okay. So, where's this big virus? What's the date? Oh, yeah... So, April Fool on us, right? Dunno. Maybe there was some big doings going on, but warnings got people to head it off in time. Yeah, maybe... And Gmail ran this today that I missed but Lori pointed out for me: Remember this bit of April Fool's Genius? I started to wonder where April Fool's day comes from and I found this: From the Manila Bulletin???? The origin of April Fools’ Day is not clear. There are varying accounts as to how it began. One version has it that it was first celebrated soon after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar and the term "April Fool" referred to someone who still adhered to the Julian Calendar that it replaced. Another account has it that in pre-Christian cultures, May Day (May 1) was celebrated as the first day of summer that signaled the beginning of the spring planting season, and an April Fool w...