In those days John the Baptist appeared. ... They had been waiting for him, in fact, for 400 years they had been waiting for him and suddenly there he stood in the wilderness of Judea and his message was like taking fingernails and running them across a chalkboard. Every Advent, we still find him standing there and we are told to listen to what he is saying, for after all this is the one preparing the way!
My Advent by Michael Nelms ... and on earth peace among those whom He favors! And those He doesn't?..
Come into the darkness
and sit quietly
with the dreams of this season.
Dreams of the Hebrew people ~
of lions and lambs laying together,
of justice rolling down like full streams of water,
of lands flowing with milk and honey,
of joy that comes in the morning.
Dreams of a carpenter ~
of being faithful to his betrothed in the midst of public scorn,
of taking the road less traveled
and journeying on the back roads.
Dreams of your own heart and mind ~ of the searching for and
claiming the masculine within and beside the feminine,
embracing the mystical and the logical,
the creative and the protective,
the carpenter and the birthmother.
Text: Matthew 24:36-44
A church musician first threw down the gauntlet for me concerning Advent. She had grown up as a Lutheran and came to the Presbyterian Church in her late twenties, able to direct a choir with expertise but also filled with boundaries about what should and shouldn't be sung during the days preceding Christmas. It made great sense to me theologically.
Ever since, I have had to deal with the inquiry of complaint, meant more as an allegation against my Christmas spirit, "Why aren't we singing carols, everyone else is?" There is no question that once you have been to Bethlehem it is hard to get back on the road again and do it all over. But here it is Advent and the texts we are asked to read and to proclaim put us on the winding road upon which we have walked before. How do we get there, again?
We know you worry. We wish you wouldn't but since you do, we thought we'd send you something that offers another person's assurance that life continues normally here. This article was published last week but rings true yet today. (see article below) We thought it might be helpful for putting perspective into what you see on the news. And here's a bit more...
So what happens when John Stuart posts his daily devotions on his blog, "Heaven's Highway"?
People write to him from India, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Folks from his congregation say things like, "That's not what I believe," or "I never thought about that," and conversations begin.
And, as an added bonus, a teacher from a local high school is having students download his sermon podcasts. The students are preparing for an upcoming production of the musical "Brigadoon," and their teacher wants them to get it right.
"They're copying my accent," Stuart, pastor of Erin Church in Knoxville and a native of Scotland, said with pleasure.
There is no blueprint to Web 2.0, but the simple truth is this. Presbyterians -- like lots of other folks -- are using Web-based technology more and more. They find it freeing, a doorway to discipleship, a way to creatively meld words and music and images and ideas.
In the beginning, there was Gutenberg. Those privileged few who owned the printing presses printed the text, while everyone else merely read it. To be sure, copies of a text might be circulated among friends, discussed around the dinner table, or used to prop up a short table leg, but the text itself remained static. Any underlined passages or notes in the margin remained isolated from the general public, existing solely in that copy of the text.
The beginning of the Internet (what we'll call "Web 1.0") was much the same. A limited few who had the technical or financial resources to do so created Web sites. The World Wide Web quickly developed into a great source of information, but not really a means of self-expression or conversation for the masses.
(RNS) Leith Anderson, the Minnesota megachurch pastor who has twice served as interim president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was formally named president on Oct. 11.
In a unanimous vote, the association board approved Anderson's selection during a meeting in Arlington, Va.
For those who can deny the malls,
and flying footballs on the screen,
there lies, tucked in between the feasting
and those first December days,
a blessed intermission, several hours,
at least, when nothing must be done,
My name is Bruce and I am a blogger!
Group response: "Hi, Bruce!"
There I said it, I am an unapologetic blogger. And not just any blogger, but I am a blogger that also happens to be a quickly aging Presbyterian pastor who is probably not as cool or hip as I once thought I was ;-) Please don't hold any of this against me.
As one of those folks whose age allows me to bridge the gap between knowing a time without the Internet -- gasp! - and experiencing online social networking as a natural part of my life, I feel like I not only have lived the great technological transition of the world, but have been transformed in the midst of it all. THANK YOU, JESUS!
Staying on top of the technological curve in ministry can eventually drive one crazy, but it is also one of the most effective tools in communicating with and connecting those in your congregation. With this in mind, one of the very first tasks that I set about in the summer of 2002 when I became the college director at Bel Air Church in Los Angeles, Calif., was to hire a professional Web designer to create a very attractive and interactive Web site. I was expecting this new Web site to bridge the gap for us in communication and connection within our community. We created pages for them to upload their artwork and photography, and we created a forums section where various issues could be raised and discussed for anyone who desired to enter the conversation. Since both my students and I were controlling this content, users weren't returning to the same static site that they had grown used to in the past. But having an attractive and interactive Web site in hopes to communicate and connect people was just not enough, and it is certainly not enough today.
I was driving home on Interstate 84 just outside of Wendell, Idaho, where I was serving as a director of youth ministries. I was talking with a friend on my cell phone and he told me I needed to get a blog. "A what?" I asked. "A blog -- you know, a Weblog?" Although I was very computer-savvy at the time, I hadn't gotten involved in blogging. My friend eventually convinced me that I needed to get one, and so I went home and started my first blog and called it Pomomusings ("Pomo," at the time, was the trendy version of "postmodern," so it was going to be my musings about issues of church, culture, and postmodernism).
A blog, or Weblog, is basically a Web site that has constantly changing content. The Oxford American Dictionary defines a blog as "a Web site on which an individual or group of users produce on ongoing narrative." Instead of the more traditional, static Web sites we are used to (where the content remains the same), people constantly add new posts to their blogs and often update them daily -- producing an ongoing story or narrative of their lives or thoughts. On most blogs, not only can you go and read the posts, but you can also leave comments and get involved in conversations on the blog.
I used to think blogging was stupid. Who would want to read some random person's thoughts? Why would I want to read what is essentially an online journal?
This was my opinion about blogging until I created a blog for our church's "Theology on Tap" group and wrote my first post. Last October, I returned home to see the sun setting on the row houses behind our own. The trees and the rooftops looked as if they were on fire. I was so struck by the beauty that I grabbed my camera and found myself writing about the experience on the newly created blog. I wrote about a moment that stopped me short and pulled me out of my busy life. I wrote what I was thinking and feeling and pushed "publish." From that moment on, I was hooked on this crazy thing called blogging. I soon created a personal blog and celebrated my first blogiversary on October 26.
What brought about this change of heart? For me, blogging is about two things. It is about community and the discipline of taking notice.
Do we really meet people where they are, even if it is on Facebook?
Seems that over the past months I have heard a couple of interesting comments from some pastor-type colleagues in regards to the www.facebook.com hysteria:
"What's Facebook?"
"Are People REALLY using Facebook?"
"I had no idea how cool Facebook is."
So, is Facebook just the latest Internet fad? Could be. Does it really matter in the whole scheme of the cause of Christ? Probably not. Should all pastor-types at least look at it? Probably.
The days of families meeting at church -- the husband coming from work, the wife coming from home and bearing a casserole -- shaped church hospitality for many years. Those days have ended.
One thing is ongoing -- the need for hospitality. Jesus ate with people. Table fellowship was a primary venue for his teaching and touching.
How, then, does a congregation provide hospitality?
For those few congregations that have cooking staffs and ample budgets, the answer is easy; for everyone else, not so easy. Some order food to be delivered -- portable food such as pizza or salads. Some heat up large lasagnas purchased in bulk. Some tell people to bring a sandwich with them. For an upcoming class on a Wednesday night, I plan to put out bread, peanut butter and jelly, and to say clearly, "This isn't fine dining, it's taking off the edge of hunger so we can learn together." Some shift their gatherings to restaurants.
"Jesus is not just a Christ principle, not just a moral influence, but the living reigning Lord. He has not shut up; he is a noisy Lord. Loquacious. And he is here now."
-- Andrew Purves
Jesus is at work in the convergence of the emerging church conversation and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Andrew Purves told those at the Presbymergent's "Always Reforming" conference*, which was held October 12-13 in Pittsburgh, Pa. Purves holds the Hugh Thomson Kerr Chair in Pastoral Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
The meeting was co-sponsored by Emergent Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary's Presbyterian Student Fellowship and Continuing Education department. Seminarians, authors, professors, and pastors discussed the intersection of these two segments of the Church and themes such as the relevance of theology from a plurality of perspectives for the post-modern church.
The world has changed. The old rules are out.
It was bad enough when the World Wide Web made it possible for the voices of peoples long silenced to broadcast their ideas -- crazy and eccentric as many of them are -- without having to raise thousands of dollars to self-publish or to convince an editor-publisher to invest the capital to do so. Standards of grammar and communication ethics went out the window.
Now it's worse. Web 2.0, the second generation of Web development, has turned every computer into a publishing house, an editorial department, a photography studio, and a movement rabble-rouser.
The world really is flat, as Thomas Friedman proclaimed in his book by that title.
For those of us who have held the privileged role of "editor" (the person who decides what news is "fit to print"), that privilege has disappeared.
For those of us who have held the privileged role of "preacher," (the person who tells the people what God's Word says and means), that privilege has disappeared, too.
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad -- The World Alliance of Reformed Churches has agreed to unite with the Reformed Ecumenical Council to create a new "global entity" that will group 80 million Reformed Christians.
"This is a truly, truly important moment," said WARC President Clifton Kirkpatrick -- who is also General Assembly stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) -- after the alliance's executive committee voted unanimously at its meeting here on Oct. 22 to unite with the REC, whose executive committee had agreed to the proposal in March.
Nairobi, 9 November (ENI)--Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic leaders attending a world Christian forum in Kenya that has brought together many of Christianity's diverse strands, say it offers new opportunities, but they also warn of possible difficulties ahead.
'When you share your journey and discover how others people have travelled and find similarities in the journey, that helps you to travel together,' commented the Rev. Richard Howell of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.
About 240 leaders from Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, Pentecostal and other churches and international organizations attended the forum in Limuru near Nairobi.
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Nairobi, 6 November (ENI)--A global gathering aimed at bringing together representatives of all the world's main Christian traditions has opened in Kenya with leaders saying they want to find new ways of working together.
'I don't think it is going to be easy, but I hope we will find a meeting space,' the Rev. Setri Nyomi, general secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches told Ecumenical News International on the opening day of the 6-9 November meeting, called the Global Christian Forum, at Limuru, near Nairobi.
"The Ten Commandments": Talk about unanswered prayer: the Hebrews cried to the Lord for 430 years before God decided to send deliverance. This animated version of the life of Moses is quite serious and literal about the capricious Pharaoh, the slaughter of the innocents, the baby in the basket in the bull rushes, and Moses being brought up as a youngster in the Pharaoh's house, raised as a stepbrother to the "real" Prince.
Believers behaving badly. How many news items must we read to get the point that believers can behave really badly? From ministers' deviancies to treasurers' embezzlements; from denominations' internecine skirmishes to nations' religious persecutions; from cult groups' mass suicides for God to zealots' suicide bombings for Allah; the portrayal of faith on screen and in print has become ugly.
No wonder "Christianity's image [is] taking a turn for the worse," according to the Barna Group and a story in the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 13, 2007). "A decade ago, an overwhelming majority of non-Christians, including people between the ages 16 and 29, were 'favorably' disposed toward Christianity's role in society. But today, just 16% of non-Christians in that age group had a 'good impression' of the religion ... "
No wonder that outspoken atheism is growing in popularity again.
The Necessity of Reforming the Church, in Calvin: Theological Treatises, edited by J. K. S. Reid. WJKP, 2000 (Reprint, The Westminster Press, 1954), pp. 183-216. ISBN 9780664223670. Pb., 356 pp. $39.95.
There is a haunting, enigmatic characteristic to Calvin's writing. You rarely catch this at first. It all seems to be so didactic and straightforward. But as you spend more time with him, you begin to sense that there is more than meets the eye. And as this occurs, you cannot help but wonder why you assumed at first that you understood what he said.
Tight lipped when it came to self-disclosure, expository of the text in a pre-critical way, deeply layered from the earlier theologians he had absorbed, and, above all, persistent in his analysis of the human will, Calvin's own style seemed to wall off further penetration. Over the course of the years, however, I came to find that the structure of his texts, the choice of his themes, and the syntax of his writing began to yield more. Like many human fathers, our father in the Reformed faith was more complex than I had thought.
In February, the Presbyterian Publishing Corp. plans to roll out a new series of studies from The Thoughtful Christian -- with these intended for use with teens (www.thethoughtfulchristian.com/main/home1.asp ).
The launch of this new line, at the annual meeting of the Association of Presbyterian Christian Educators in San Diego Feb. 13-16, signals the hunger among Presbyterians for study materials on contemporary issues, according to David Maxwell, editor for The Thoughtful Christian.
In focus groups conducted last summer with leaders at the Youth Triennium, the publishers were encouraged to prepare materials for juniors and seniors in high school who are getting ready to leave home and will have to decide, once they're on their own, what role faith will play in their lives. So the new lessons will hit on subjects such as consumerism or cheating, and "the pressure on kids now with all these pre-college classes," Maxwell said.
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