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Blogging 101

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.

The one-year blogiversary of a RevGalBlogPal

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.

The case for Facebook and other social networks

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.

Hospitality Counts

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.

Finding truth on the page and on the stage

c. 2007 Religion News Service

Before I was a journalist, I was an actor.

Briefly, a semester or so ahead of my debut in the pages of the Wheaton College student newspaper, I became a member of its theater company, a group known simply as "Workout."

The company performed in the Arena Theater, a simple black box that was transformed miraculously into imaginative sets for various productions. Long since I walked its stage, that theater remains a sacred space for me. I was transformed inside its walls, touched by grace and the hand of God in a way I've rarely felt elsewhere.

What happened in Workout was wonderfully creative and deeply spiritual, no matter what material we were working with. I learned as much about faith and doubt, forgiveness and trust, holiness and wounded wholeness from a raucous production of "The Man Who Came to Dinner" as I did from a magical adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel "A Wrinkle in Time."

Uncovering the origins of Christianity in Ethiopia

Ethiopia shall stretch forth

its hands to God.

Psalm 68:31

Why does this Ethiopian come among us?

Ethiopian Moses, 3

References about Ethiopia and Ethiopians, like the ones above, are sprinkled throughout biblical and extra-biblical writings. Most of us are familiar with Luke's story of the Ethiopian eunuch (a treasurer of a queen of Meroë) who confessed his faith and was baptized after his encounter with the evangelist Philip (Acts 8:26-40). New Testament interpreters generally view this passage as a fulfillment of Acts 1:8, which declares Christianity is to extend to the ends of the world. Yet after the dramatic conversion experience of the Ethiopian, we hear nothing more from him, the Queen whom he represented, or the other people who may have witnessed this encounter. And though the biblical text says Christianity is to extend to the ends of the world, we who teach and research the New Testament have no readily available (or accessible) path to the world of the Ethiopians.