Fuzzy Thinking

Well, this is pretty cool. I just signed up for AudioBlogging (Podcasting). I’m not sure if this is the same as a podcast or not. I know it could easily become podcast. Well, anyway, the link is here. For my audio blog.

Basically, I can call in from any phone and leave an entry. Since I have free long distance on my cell phone, I can call on my cell, leave an entry and it doesn’t cost me a thing…pretty cool. Of course, now I will have to have something to say.

Well, it was a pretty good week for our VBS. We allow kids from age 3 through grade 5 to participate. We had no idea we would have about 18 preschoolers there…man…do they have energy.

Last year we decided to do VBS a bit differently. We decided to begin it on Sunday instead of Monday and to have a celebration night on Thursday night. What we discovered is that it seems VBS goes quickly. Sunday works well because people don’t have to rush home from work (we do the VBS at night).

What happened on Thursday was simply amazing. We decided last year to have a full blown celebration rather than a “VBS Program.” This means, we call the kids up and have them sing songs (with a live band consisting of my wife and me, some of our praise band members and some high school students). The music is ‘edgy’ and the kids love it.

I do the story time. Instead of just telling the story I brought some kids up and had them help me act it out. That worked out well.

Each day we took up an offering. We made it a competition between the girls and the boys. We were giving the money to Hefer International so we were trying to connect the kids with the animals and how they would help families. The kids raised $175!

We had planned on challenging the congregation to match that, but someone from the congregation matched it on Wednesday, so we were up to $350.

Then the amazing happened. After the celebration night one of the grandparents came up and matched it! That brought us up to $525. Also, someone came up and handed on of the helpers some money for the offering (we didn’t take one up). They said that they just wanted some part of the “joy in this place.”

Of course the workers were amazed…to say the least. There was joy that night and many were probably surprised. My prayer is that same joy will spill over into the congregation. The emerging church folks keep saying that we (as the church) need to move from propositional truth, to experience. During the VBS celebration, I did not preach a 3 point sermon on joy, yet, there was joy. People didn’t leave with new knowledge about joy, they experienced it. Perhaps we need more experience of God’s truth on Sunday mornings…

Well, last night as I was editing the DVD for our VBS, the administrator of the computer I host UMSource off of emailed me to say my website had been hacked. In situations like this, those hacking (or rather craking) don’t do it to deface the website, but rather to get access to the host machine. The Admin took my site offline

So, some of you are coming here because of that. I’m working to get UMSource back online, but I don’t have as much time as I once did. Security issues are found all the time and I don’t always have the time to update the site.

For example, the software I run on UMSource is PHPNuke. I’m running version 6.0 and the current version is 7.7. I’ve updated the 6.0 software with all the security fixes, but the real solution is to update to version 7.7. That _usually_means the database tables have to be updated, etc, etc…long story short, most of the time it is a time consuming process.

So, for the time being, enjoy my blog. It is a bit more personal than my UMSource site, but I will try to post some UMSource style articles here.

- Dave.

Perhaps this should be subtitled as “for those who care…”

I find that since I only have dialup at home, I get behind the technology curve quite easily. That is certainly true of podcasting. Even though I’ve figured out how to capture shows such as Prairie Home Companion with Total Recorder podcasting is a bit easier because the feeds are easy to find through iTunes or other podcasting directories.

However, trying to download 6 - 13 meg files over dialup is a real pain. So, for others who are trying to do the same thing, here is my solution.

I use Omea Reader 2.0 (currently beta) to keep current with the podcast feed. Once I find the feed, I can choose to download the enclosure. Since I only have one phone line in which to download files, I use a download manager called Free Download Manager (it’s free!) to queue the download and then set FDM (Free download manager) to download the file later at night when the phone probably won’t be used.

If everything works well, then I’ll have some new podcasts to move to my Tunsten Palm to listen to on the road or other places.

I realize this has nothing to do with Christianity, but many of the podcasts do. Alan Hartung is one who has a podcast on emerging church issues.

There it is….if you are on dialup, I wish you luck. If you are on broadband, I guess this is a document on why you don’t want to go back

A Christian bookstore nearby just went out of business. Each week they would increase the discount price by 5%. So, I was buying books anywhere between 30% - 50% off the cover price. So, now I have many books to read…perhaps too many. I also frequent the library and find books that I want to read there. Right now, here is my list:

Your God is Too Small - J. B. Phillips (I’m rereading this for a sermon series)
Mistaken Identity - Gaultiere (I’ve read it, but re-reading for a sermon series)
Uprising - McManus
Shaped by God’s Heart - Minatrea
On Loving God -
Madam Guyon
Shaped by the Word - Mulholland (Have read once, but wanted to read again)
Revelation - Mulholland (Been on my shelf way too long without reading)
The New Testament and the People of God - N. T. Wright (working my way through)
Rethinking the Church (Pastor friend of mine loaned me this)
Stories of Emergence (Same Pastor friend loaned me this)
The Last Word and the Word After That (McLaren)
Birth of the Living God - Rizo (??) (Again, for a sermon series)

Well, I believe that is about it…like I said, too many books, not enough time. I have other books I want to read, but the above is my “short” list.

Logos is doing a survey of pastors and their books for an upcoming website. You can help by taking a survey. Just click the link.

“…by loving God, who is the sum of all good, for Himself alone, we cannot help loving ourselves, our neighbor, and everything else in heir proper place and degree.” T. C. Upham (from a biography of Francios Fenelon.

Well, I kept hearing about podcasting so I’d thought I’d check it out. I understand the concept, yet, on dialup it isn’t as easy. To make a long story shorter, I was finally able to figure out a way to automatically dial the internet (after midnight) to download a 15 meg podcast. The dialing up was automatic, but I had to manually tell the program what file to download…

Anyway, my first podcast was by Alan Hartung. One of the comments I found interesting was his discussion on church structure. Basically (and I hope I am doing him justice), he said that if your church is still structured around a weekly meeting, you might have some emeregent style changes, but basically your structure remains the same as most churches.

It is easy to say, “We are radical”, but if most of your resources are used by the one weekly meeting, then you are functioning like most other churches (emergent and non-emergent). He had some other comments about this, but you will have to listen yourself.

This topic is one thing with which I struggle. I believe that the church needs to re-evaluate itself, but it seems like the weekly meeting is off limits. After all, the weekly meeting is our life blood. It is where we believe people ‘become’ followers of Christ, it is where we ‘believe’ we disciple others, it is where we believe people should come after our evangelistic efforts. However, it could be that our focus on the weekly meeting is creating followers whose lives focus on that weekly meeting and not the daily days they are living.

As I struggle with this, I have no idea what should take place of that weekly meeting, or what kind of model would work in its place.

He also had some comments about the sermon’s place in this new world, but that is a topic for another time….

I was talking with a pastor friend the other day. He is one of those who seems to be able to do just about anything. He started an orphange in Uganda and now is in my area (his home town) starting a church). He still goes to Uganda a couple of times a year.

To help support his church planting he operates a couple of businesses (I don’t think he has turned 40 yet).

Since I pastor a traditional UM church, my world and his are vastly different. However, he shared with me that he lost his Children’s director and Youth director because he asked them if they had vision for the area or were just doing it out of obligation. Of course, he said, they told him they wanted the meeting so they could resign from their positions.

At that point he said, “I have a lot of people willing to be helpers, as long as I’m the one giving them the vision.” Now I understand as pastors we do have responsibility for vision setting, but I tend to fall on the side that God can (and will) share his dreams with His people.

Churches need the helpers, but they also need those who are willing to step up and help make God’s dream a reality. If it is only the pastor with the dream or the vision, it is easy for the ‘helpers’ to one day decide they don’t want to help any more.

How do helpers become visionaries? Good question. My answer, so far, has been helping people be “open” to God’s will in their lives. Plans can be imitated, passion can not. Passion comes when people encounter a living God. People encounter that God when they make space in their lives for God. My quesiton is, how does one convince people to make space in their lives for God?

Phil Goodacre saw Andrew Jones do a teaching in the UK. He has posted his notes on the talk. There’s quite a bit to think about in his post. Some of my favorite things are:

We then moved on to look at Luke 10, from which I noted down a number of things that grabbed me.

We are told to enter other people’s houses, rather than us dragging them into ours. What does this say about the way we do mission, and the way we do church???

God HAS prepared a harvest. The harvest IS out there. We must learn to find where God’s favour is.

The 72 were told to go out, eat, drink, heal etc etc. THEN tell people about the Kingdom of God. Is this the way we do it? Or are we often in a hurry to get all the ‘God stuff’ in right at the beginning. People need to experience the Kingdom of God before we start banging on about it verbally.

A definition of ministry was presented that seems so simple, but is really quite profound:
1. giving gifts
2. telling stories
3. throwing parties
4. making friends
[philgoodacre.blogspot]

I just love the definition of ministry. However, I realize I only do one of those things well! I do have some work to do.

What is odd, is that even though I resonate with the emerging church and such, I’m a product of a modern church institution. I’m finding I want to learn some ‘new’ lessons while feeling some ‘pangs’ of guilt of moving away from the established way of doing things. I figure at some time the church I serve will figure this out too (I think some of them already have).

A case in point: My wife and I were discussing our VBS which is coming up. She asked the question, “Why do we do VBS?” It was a good question because I realized I really didn’t have a good answer for it. The ‘real’ answer was, “Well, VBS is what churches do in the summer time. It is what we must do as a church to be considered to be a legitimate church.” Hmm…I’m finding that I’m driven to do a lot so I can feel like I am a legitimate pastor and serve a legitimate church. I want to stop it….being legitimate that is…..

Here’s a link about a teaching by Andrew Jones. It looked pretty interesting but I don’t have time to read through all of it now. Perhaps I will reflect later

Now…back to vacation.

I have no idea how others are able to post to their blogs while on vacation.
Right now, I finally have a few moments and thought I’d try a post during
my vacation. It seems like a geeky thing to do. Also, if all works well, I’ll
have wireless access my last day of vacation and I can do a post via my
Tunsten handheld.

After reading some blogs this week (I’ve been able to keep up with some of
the blogs I read because of my wireless Tunsten), I’ve begin to think of
‘culture’ as it relates to established traditional churches. There are some
who are diving deep into various cultures to try to understand the mindset
so they can be missional. What if, the establish traditional (or even not so
traditional) churches need the same missional reach. After all, many
established churches have been around for a long time and they have their
own culture; a culture that has become ingrown. The question for me is,
how does one infiltrate and effect this culture? It is a culture that has
taken decades to create. It isn’t going to disappear over night.

One of my fears is, those who are more missional in nature, will choose to
leave these churches because the culture is so quasi-christian, that those
within the culture can convince themselves they are doing the work of God
and so they have no motivation to change.

My hope and prayer is that various missional minded pastors will begin to
see the churches they serve in a new light and begin the difficult task of
reaching the established traditional church so that they might become a
missional community doing the Kingdom work of God.