Tag Archives: church

Calling Creative Risks ‘Good’

I read, today, an excerpt from a book called Nur­tur­ing Artists in your Local Church by a guy named Joshua Ban­ner. This line stuck out to me: We sim­ply need to be curi­ous and demon­strate that we believe what artists are doing is important—to call their cre­ative risks “good” just as the Cre­ator blessed his own hand­i­work in [...]
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Open Worship and Trust

I read this arti­cle last night about the Quaker prac­tice of open wor­ship, which as far as I can tell is mostly sit­ting around with­out hav­ing any­thing planned and let­ting the con­gre­ga­tion speak/lead/sing at will. I like this idea a lot, mostly because I feel like the times I’ve had the best wor­ship expe­ri­ences (and by “best,” [...]
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Thinking About Simplicity

Wick has been blog­ging about Into the Silence, a movie about life in a silent monastery. At the same time, after a rec­om­men­da­tion by Jonathan, I’ve started read­ing Eric Brende’s Bet­ter Off: Flip­ping the Switch on Tech­nol­ogy, about liv­ing for a year in an Amish community. This life of sim­plic­ity is pretty dang appeal­ing, honestly–I’ve felt [...]
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Goofballs Become Prom Kings

Not too long after I posted about author­ity on my blog, my brother emailed me about it. He sug­gested that it had more to do with poor exam­ples of author­ity we had grow­ing up. Not so much our par­ents (who did a good), but in the church and at school. Most of THOSE author­ity fig­ures [...]
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More on Church and Intellectual Property

Here’s a story about the NFL say­ing a church can’t have a Super­Bowl party. I’m torn as to what to think about this. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily think that churches should get a free pass just because they’re churches. But here’s the NFL’s rea­son­ing (from the arti­cle, McCarthy being an NFL spokesper­son): “Large Super Bowl gath­er­ings around big-screen [...]
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Why Men Hate Church (or not)

My dad loves this book, Why Men Hate Church, almost as much as I love A New Kind of Chris­t­ian. He said that the guy has a pretty good cri­tique of the way we do church, and that he thinks I ought to be part of fix­ing the problem. I’m defi­nately inter­ested in [...]
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Contemporary Worship

I work with a lady named Carol. She’s at least my mom’s age. Prob­a­bly older, because she has a son who’s sub­stan­tially older than me. In fact, he’s a mod­er­ately sucess­ful stu­dio engi­neer in Nashville. She goes to the big Dis­ci­ples of Christ church in town. The other day we were [...]
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Mustard Seed vs. McWorld

I just started a book rec­om­mended to me by a friend here in town: Mus­tard Seed vs. McWorld. It’s by a guy named Tom Sine who calls him­self a futur­ist. It was writ­ten in 1999. He’s only got two years for his pre­dic­tion about vir­tual real­ity to come true–I think he missed [...]
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Slaughterhouse 5 and the Gospel

I men­tioned before that Von­negut takes on the gospel in Slaugh­ter­house 5. He says that part of the prob­lem with the gospel is ‘its shoddy story-telling,’ that the les­son we learn after they cru­cify Jesus (because we know he’s God’s son the whole time and not just some reg­u­lar bum) is they shouldn’t have [...]
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Racism and The Church

Brent, of Col­losians Three Six­teen fame, really hits the nail on the head with his lat­est post about racism in the church. This is a prob­lem that I’m just as much a part of as any­body, but it’s one that I’m pretty frus­trated that I don’t feel like there’s much move­ment in the church as a [...]
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