The UmBlog

some serious aspersion casting at Barna in this letter to Students and friends, from Indiana Wesleyan University.

This statement is very thought provoking to me, "To the emerging pastor, the key is to put your worst foot forward as opposed to your best foot. To show weakness and to use yourself as an example of weakness and spiritual neediness is central to the meta-message of the emerging pastor's approach to his place as a role model." I think, a pastor, a believer shows both feet. One foot is the dirty one, the one that demonstrates that I'm saved by grace. The other foot is the clean one that proves God in his grace is saving me. This blogger claims that the emerging wine won't fit in the old wineskin. I'll agree, if he views the Christian life as an either/or set of propositions. But the Holy Spirit is the wine in the universal church. Enlightened elitism bothers me. We are one church. We are manna distributors. Some serve in high flying suits and ties establishments, some serve fast food with lots of grease and salt, some only offer it home cooked without professio...

Duncan Bouwer's story is honest enough that even an ex-ex-gay blog i read likes him.

i attend work/church. it's a weekly, lunch time bible study at my job. we have different member's pastors come and lead the group for a couple months at a time. today we wondered if there was a way to make it safe for us to bring our pre-Christian co-workers. i'm thinking that perhaps there are a few steps for some of my co-workers before coming to bible study. after friendship, after personal testimony, after life lived in accordance with testimony in front of the friends, the next step may be prayer group. it seems people are cool with you praying for them. prayer doesn't involve new language to learn, and prayer lets someone taste and see that the Lord is good. 13 years ago i started praying with a couple guys, who were gifted with evangelism. they weren't scholars or saints but they had alot of friends and wanted those friends to check out God. alot of people came after awhile. it was a smoking and swearing and cruising for dates prayer group. it was nightclub c...

This extremely short history by Larry McMurtry turned up in the new books section of my library and intrigued me. After reading the atrocities of Stalin and Mao and the US Civil War I'm in a rut of man's inhumanity to man. The title comes from Private Thomas Coleman's account of Custer's last stand . McMurtry's conclusion is heart wrenching... A final point about these homely little massacres and the even more terrible ones that keep occurring throughout the world: women and children are almost never exempted. A small anthology could be assembled just of quotations about the desirability of killing the women and children while one is killing undesirables. Inescapable in American slaughters are the involvement of religious men. Methodist Rev. John Chivington who fought for the Union and against the expansion of slavery as a free soil proponent considered his duty after the war to free the West of Indians. Consequently he had no difficulty massacring at Sand Creek a...

AgentQ7 is my friend Ethan's comic strip.

There's a reason laws were written to discourage alcohol consumption for those under 21 years of age. Young adults grow into the concept of subtlety. Usually life is lived in extremes. There are many positives to this, but when it comes to drinking, having a beer is a difficult concept. Getting drunk is a simple concept. Since the youth culture esteems extremes, heavy drinkers achieve a high social status. Because my higher value on being a cheapskate overrode high social status via drunkenness I didn't imbibe as much as my friends. I was limited to free or really cheap beer. But when I came across it, I imbibed with abandon. Perhaps having German and Irish genetics saved me from of the typical reactions to drunkenness that my friends suffered, vomiting and black outs, but also left me, perhaps, with a predilection to alcoholism. After 2 years in the UConn party world, I found myself drunk the night before a test. I realized, by the grace of God, that I had lost control to alco...

in the Muslim area of West Java Indonesia. This is astounding in how threatened the world is by Jesus. May our homes be such bright beacons of hope and love in our neighborhoods that the world is scared of us.

Why date? I dated women inside and outside of the kingdom. If you aren't ready to marry anytime soon, just make friends with people. You will get to know women so much better if you aren't focused on the making a move on them. Whenever I jumped out of the dating pool, either by conviction from the Lord or from another broken heart and membership in the "He-man Woman Haters Club" I had friendships with women that were so normal. Raging hormones bring on a form of psychosis anyway so you never date the normal version of a person that you didn't know until a few months after you marry. I met my wife on an IVCF missions trip to Jackson Mississippi where we served under John Perkins and his ministry, Voice of Calvary . We both thought each other attractive and made a casual friendship. I didn't see her again until our schools did joint meetings sporadically. When I did a Co-op 2 years later by her school I got to know her and all her friends. Yet attraction never b...

I really enjoyed this insight in Appendix 1 of Bill Jackson's history of the Vineyard, The Quest for the Radical Middle , which is a reprint from the Vineyard's magazine Cutting Edge Fall 1999 issue containing excerpts from Todd Hunter's address to the AVC USA after John Wimber died. There are a few paragraphs in the middle that jumped out at me. He is talking about building the 21st century church. On Being a Missional Church What I mean to say here is that we’re not just “a people.” We’re a people for the sake of the world. I love the phrase that George Hunsberger and others use, that we are a sent people. Unfortunately, we have a tendency as evangelicals to understand what we are saved from, and less of an understanding of what we’re saved for. In God’s design, the Church exists for God’s mission in the world. God is himself missional. The Trinity is well understood in its calling and sending activities. The Church understands its missional purpose by observing and i...

I spent my freshman year at a Christian college on the North Shore of Cape Cod. I wanted to pursue my biology studies under Christian professors and experience dorm life with Christians. Unfortunately for me, I was expecting Christian camp, not Christian college. I was disillusioned that the kids drank and smoke and swore and fooled around with their girlfriends. I didn’t drink or smoke there, but I was guilty of the other two. I expected an environment of exhortation and encouragement where people like me could stay on the higher path. The words were spoken, but for the most part, this Christian college had also abandoned for all intents and purposes the role of parent, technically called in loco parentis, see this article for an expansion of the concept especially in relation to sex in the dorms. To make matters worse, my excellent Ecology professor taught us about human evolution. I wouldn’t say he advocated it, but it wasn’t his job to discuss biblical interpretation. On top of t...

The top 10 predictions for 2006 1. The Bible will still have the answers. 2. Prayer will still work. 3. The Holy Spirit will still move. 4. God will still inhabit the praises of His people. 5. There will still be God-anointed preaching. 6. There will still be singing of praise. 7. God will still pour out blessings upon His people. 8. There will still be room at the Cross. 9. Jesus will still love you. 10. Jesus will still save the lost.

"It seems there are two main methods of multiplication in use around us, the farm method and the factory method. One is concerned with multiplying living things, the other with effectively producing an inert product. One is engaged in organic multiplication, the other in synthetic multiplication." from Organic Multiplication

i dropped the bad link in the first MLK post. may i suggest this one ?

the second link i posted regarding MLK is an anti-MLK site. sorry. blogger is weighed down too. i will delete as soon as possible.

Inform yourself The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute Biography , encyclopedia of MLK's life, sermons, speeches, writings, and other materials from the Stanford University project to compile and publish MLK's ... The King Center The OFFICIAL WEBSITE of The King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The King Center educates the world about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's philosophy and methods of ...

Read Part 1 and Part 2 . from part 1 Bro Ren(Chinese): Let us take prayer first. The leaders of the church in China try to pray three to four hours a day. That is normal. But then there are some brethren who are totally committed to pray. Almost every minute they are awake, they are praying. They have two kinds of leaders in the church. They have spiritual leaders, who fast and pray; then they have practical operational leaders, who are active in everyday affairs of the church. The praying leaders are praying for the whole church, and especially for the practical leaders. They are not in a preaching ministry. The operational leaders go to them for direction and wisdom. Very few Westerners have ever met these elders. These men are older men who cannot travel anymore, so they are mainly in that ministry. It literally keeps the church on track. They hear from the Lord and give answers to the practical leaders. from part 2 Bro Denny: Could you comment on the name given to these Chinese Ch...

you need a good title to drive traffic to your blog, something controversial...in my blog feeds 2 articles came up with similar titles. John Morehead writes on Church as gay bar and the Ooze has an article by Peter Walker called CULTURAL REFUGEES IN GAY NIGHTCLUBS . Morehead cites someone who cites someone else who says, "that people don't visit churches as spiritual seekers any more than an evangelical would visit a gay bar." Walker's article is about his visit to a gay bar with some friends, gay and straight and observes, "maybe it wasn’t appropriate for me. But right or wrong, I’d rather take chances to discover these refugees in hiding than stay so safe that I never meet the people I once called 'lost.'" I also will admit to visiting a gay bar. A friend of mine brought me to a gay bar or two in Manhattan several years ago. I was in a bit of culture shock. Perhaps if I thought I wanted to pursue a gay lifestyle I'd risk returning. And this is...

Just finished a biography of Mao Tse-Tung called Mao:The Unknown Story . It caught my eye after reading The Heavenly Man . I wanted to learn some more about China. It was interesting to read the amazon reviews after the fact. People seem upset that the author left out some info on Mao that might not be as condemning. However, no one is saying she needs to shave off a few million deaths here or there. Has anyone in history been responsible for more than 70 million deaths? Last spring, related to my WW2 reading, I picked up a biography on Stalin, Stalin and His Hangmen : The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him . At least he could try to blame 20 million deaths of his people on fighting the Nazi army. Mao's and Stalin's strength was the ability to manage people without conscience. The ends always justified the means. They blackmailed their cronies. They terrorized their legions. They turned on their "friends" in a heartbeat. They took selfishness all the way down its sli...

No kidding, someone at work was telling me the same thing.

This isn't a place I visit but a reader pointed me to this article. another friend offered me Barna's book Revolution, mentioned inthe article. I guess I'll need to get my hands on it.

I got free movie tickets this month and spent them on two movies. I liked Harry Potter and The Sorcer's Stone, but it wasn't as good as the book. I thought I really liked the movie until I saw the new Narnia movie. I loved it. How could I love it if the acting and cinematography and special effects weren't as good as HP? Because the computer generated Aslan voiced by Liam Neeson walked alone to his self sacrifice and I almost couldn't contain the sobs trying to erupt from deep within. I experienced Christ's sacrifice in a way much deeper than in Gibson's Passion. HP offers himself up without quite knowing who he is or what he can do, weakness moving to greatness, Aslan is the king who knows everything, the king who becomes slave. Jesus, loved me when I was still a sinner, a traitor. He endured physical torture, spiritual torment and death for me. And there was something I understood anew in that 5 second scene where Aslan turns to Lucy and Susan and tells them t...

There are two basic modes in our Capitalistic society that goods are bough and sold. On the one hand, you have the “come hither” model, Wal-Mart, on the other, the “door to door” model, Tupper Ware parties. Both are extremely successful. Our Western church model is predominately, “Come hither.” But its not the only model that’s available. Jesus sent out the 12 disciples to spread the good news, 2 by 2. If a household accepted them they would stay and share the good news and a lot of wonderful things happened. Mark 6:7-13 (NLT) And he called his twelve disciples together and sent them out two by two, with authority to cast out evil spirits. He told them to take nothing with them except a walking stick-- no food, no traveler's bag, no money. He told them to wear sandals but not to take even an extra coat. "When you enter each village, be a guest in only one home," he said. "And if a village won't welcome you or listen to you, shake off its dust from your feet as y...