Over the last 10 years, animated websites have been the epitome of kitsch, bombastic and annoying.
But I'm getting little hints that they are coming back in vogue, at least among some designers.
An intersting thought, eh? Do you have any favourite animated websites?
Thanks to my colleague and friend Luke for writing some articles for Christian Reflections. Luke will be talking about his ministry at FOCUS UTAS:
Don't do cold contact evangelism
When we contact the students on campus we don’t seek to evangelise. Im not convinced it would work with our students. They’re always busy going somewhere (never sitting around). Their English is not strong enough for the conversation. It would be unhelpfully uncomfortable and confrontational (they’ll feel pressured to listen to you- showing respect- but not to really listen to you).
Friday Night FOCUS
Now because we try to get as many as possible to our meeting this means:
The meeting needs to be excellent; better run than most of the events they’ve been a part of; better advertising; better public speaking; really good music. And so a pleasure to be a part of and well worth returning for. We want the only thing that offends to be our Gospel:
Matthias Media were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Wisdom In Leadership by Craig Hamilton and I'm really happy to say it's a great book. I'm relcutant to give commendations for books unless I actually think they are not only true, but also well written, worthwhile reading and a needed contribution. Craig's book is all three. It's kinda the book on leadership I'd want to write if I were to write one. So he's saved me the trouble.
It's the book we needed.
It's an Australian, Reformed evangelical book on leadership with all the little cultural quirks of tone and emphasis and theological focus and clarity that makes it stand out from similar good and good (with lots of theological qualifications) books on leadership out there.
I think a lot of Reformed evangelical stuff on things like leadership can be so so careful to be theologically precise that we spend the bulk of our books and articles laying the theological foundations and then scribble out a few scatty bric-a-brac hints and tips in the final page. This book actually treats the distinct subject of wisdom in leadership with the attentiveness it deserves in its own right.
It's a really big book - about 500 pages - but it's broken down into about a 100 really really short, punchy chapters. It offers meaty theological underpinnings without being so bogged down in being theologically precise that it doesn't give detail practicals. Craig is clearly a leadership and productivity geek who has read widely, thought deeply and synthesised theologically.
You can track my Twitter (look for @ministrymatrix or 'Wisdom in Leadership' or 'Wisdom for Leadership' - #sorrynohashtag) for other reflections on the content.
You can go here to get Matthias Media to send you 7 chapters for free here.
Or you can come and hear Craig speak at my National Pop-Up Blog Tour events in Brisbane, Melbourne or Launceston - and get a discount code to buy your own copy.
There's been a lot of discussion about how using 'worship' to talk specifically about the church meeting, or singing in church is unbiblical, and potentially unhelpful. It gives the church gathering and the singing more theological weight, and so more emotional weight and rhetorical weight, than they actually have.
Well the same is true of 'pastoral care'. In everyday usage 'pastoring' and 'pastoral care' refers to counselling, caring for people, responding skillfully and tactfully to problems that arise in the lives of people. It is relational practicality. Interpersonal skillfulness.
But when we use the biblical word pastoring/pastoral/pastor... then it sounds more spiritual and valuable, as if it is the higher ground.
So when we say of a minister 'he's not a great preacher but he's a great pastor', or 'he's not good at leadership but he's very pastoral', 'Im not into all this how-to, strategic stuff, I'm more into pastoral care', or 'let's consider this issue pastorally' it sounds pretty deep.
Why not rephrase these and see how they sound:
Still all very good things. But no longer the superspiritual higher ground! :-)
We had Steve Timmis, from Crowded House and Acts 29 at the recent Geneva Multiply conference. One evening Steve spoke on the topic of 'reaching the unreached' and had an extended rant about how far too many church planters are going for trendy, inner-city, latte-sipping hipster church plants. Who is reaching the new immigrants? The rural areas? The housing estates?
There was a good point here. We need to go beyond the familiar and the comfortable and the convenient. We need to be reaching out beyond those who are just like us, to reach those who are different than us, beyond those who are close to those who are far off. I like that very much.
There are some clarifications:
Thanks to my colleague and friend Luke for writing some articles for Christian Reflections. Luke will be talking about his ministry at FOCUS UTAS:
At a time when many people are concerned about the changing nature of university of life with students spending very little time on campus, doing external studies and working part time jobs. International student workers such as myself experience no such worry. We busy ourselves making the most of this strange and wonderful season of life where the nations come to us. I don’t know how long its going to last for; I can imagine waking up one morning and getting a text from a mate who is actually on top of current events saying ‘Man, what will this do to your international student ministry?’ and my googling whatever’s gone on and finding that its all over; the students won’t be coming (or wont be coming much) to Tasmania anymore. But that day is not today and so while this strange phenomenon is occurring I want to make the most of it.
We have about 3 years to make contact with International students through our fliering at uni. Then we get them to Friday Night FOCUS. We help them to realise they’re now free of their childhood, culture and country and so should be asking big questions and thinking big thoughts; who is God? how can I know? who is this Jesus that 1/3 of the world say they follow?
At FOCUS UTAS we want to get as many non Christian International students into our big Friday night meeting as possible. So we offer:
My mate Karl is the pastor of The Branch Evangelical Reformed Church, an independent church in Launceston, Tasmania.
The church is growing and he needs help to care for the church and train up leaders so that the church can continue to reach more and more people.
I'm doing a session on preaching for the upcoming Christian Reflections Pop-Up Blog Tour 2.0 in Hobart.
I'd love your input to help round out my contributions:
1. Preaching preparation challenges
2. Preaching preparation hacks
I was asked by someone in the Church Community Builder office to provide thoughts on how CCB could better help non-church ministries.
Here was my reply, as a result of brief reflection. Anyone else got thoughts? Any Elvanto fanbois wanna explain why Elvanto solves these problems better?
1. Cost is more prohibitive in a college ministry - so a cheaper price scale to enable us to move to Deluxe Version would be wonderful.
2. Group Promotion would be great if we could leave people in a group based on GRADUATING DATE (a custom date field we create) rather than age.
3. Small groups are more likely to be a 'front door' for campus ministries, and so being able display:
4. We have to track precise volunteer roles of lots of student leaders, and be able to provide easy reports on this:
5. Campus ministries are built by networks of 1:1 mentoring relationships, and there is currently no easy way to pair people not based on department-coach-group leader hierarchy, but based on who is in charge of mentoring whom:
6. A non-HTML email option would be great, as college students can tend to interpret html-rich emails as spam/advertising.
7. I suspect there are features around Process Queues would help the support-raising process, but haven't played around with this enough to know if Process Queues are already.
8. We track relationships not just to individuals but also to churches andother organisations. It would be great to have clearer guidance on how to treat organisations as 'people' in the CCB system.
Wanted to find out more about how they actually do things at EV Church on the Central Coast of NSW? Want to think more about the '5 Ms' model of structuring church? Want to have a time to brainstorm these issues with a bunch of other pastors?
EV is hosting an event called 'Team Pastoring' on Friday 22nd to Saturday 23rd May that might be just the thing for you!
The program includes:
As a part of our 'Universe Next Door' series, just this week I spoke twice on the topic of atheism:
Thanks to Laura Roberts, from Louisville, KY, for giving me permission to repost her Facebook Statue Update as a guest blog post:
You know, it's funny: those who study church history are often pretty philosophical about how long it took the church to settle disputes about this or that -- we say things like "only a generation" or "within the lifetime of" and things like that, which indicate 40, 50, 60 years. But so many of us are incredibly impatient about the disputes of the modern church, and so much more pessimistic, as though the disagreements we've had in the last 60 or so years spell disaster and doom.
Friends, let's try to remember: the earliest Christians were debating whether or not Jesus was God, surely a more fundamental issue than what some of our quarrels land on today, and they made it through, because GOD IS FAITHFUL and the preservation of his church is HIS JOB. If the folks in those first-century churches were kept, it was by God's power. He holds his own, and keeps them even when they are confused or in doubt -- praise God! We can contend for the gospel without being contentious, trusting that God will preserve his own people in the truth, and approaching all disagreements with a gospel philosophy, believing that God has saved and kept us in spite of our own blind spots.
A God who can save and keep both Philemon AND Onesimus, both Peter AND Paul, both Elizabeth AND the woman at the well, is a God who is able to save and keep the law-breaker and the law-truster, the conservative and the liberal, the traditionalist and the progressive -- perhaps even by making them more like one another, drawing them towards each other in life-giving love, crafting one new man out of the old, dead, divided one.
Julia Baird has published a couple of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald over the last few weeks, that suggest a link between the biblical doctrine of a husband's headship in marriage and domestic violence. The first piece, struck me as a bit unfair, seemingly without context, and making allegations about links without any justification from a 'growing number of theologians'.:
Submission is a Fraught Mixed Message for the Church
She has recently published a more measure piece that spells out ways in which Christians have sought to prevent abusive misapplication of the headship doctrine, while also sharing some actual stories of cases where the doctrine has been horribly misapplied:
Doctine of Headship a Distortion of the Gospel Message of Mutual Love and Respect.
Pity about the article headline which utterly perverts the message of the piece itself.
Domestic abuse is a horrible business. To hear people hijiack scriptural teaching to justify controlling, bullying, abusive behaviour is heartbreaking and provokes outrage in me. And to hear of women who feel scriptural obedience requires surrender to such destructive behaviours is awful. And then to know that church leaders and Christian communities have not treated this with great seriousness, is very very troubling.
Why would they do that? Rarely out of a thoughtful application of the Bible's teaching on marriage, I would think, honestly. Maybe well-intentioned, or uninformed, or highly-educated pastors with low emotional intelligence just not knowing the right advice to give? Maybe overly busy or even burnt out pastors who are disinclined to properly investigate - knowing that there's often more than two sides to any story? Maybe cultural factors of 'not wanting to get involved' and 'wanting people to work things out'? Whatever the reason, it's awful to think the church did not defend those in need of protection. I hope and pray that more churches are doing the right thing here than not!
1. A Couple of Related Pieces
In various Facebook threads I came across links to these two articles which were published 3 years prior:
By Amelia Schwarze on the Bible Society Website
By Phillip Jensen on The Briefing Website
2. How should we respond?
A couple of random bullet point questions - but I'd love your feedback:
3. Some comments on defensiveness, repentance and reactions to media pieces
Love to hear your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, reactions and resources.
What denominations and movements are doing good stuff in this area?
What resources and organisations are out there that can help us?
A few random bits and pieces, from a preacher and a congregation member, not a sound engineer:
Without a doubt there are all sorts of abuses unique to big churches, or easier to commit in big churches. And without a doubt some abuses become worse as the scale of the church grows.
So some people say that we should restrict the size of the church, to curb these abuses.
I wonder how this suggestion maps onto other things that get big? Because after all, one of the things that seems to mark the astonishing capcity of humanity (a part of our image bearing?) is about ability to build large organisations.
So should we limit the size of our denominations? Our cities? Our extended families? Our nations?