Category: personal

for anyone interested dr. cornel west will be in baton rouge thursday, february 9th @ 6:00 p.m. speaking at the baton rouge community college. i don’t agree with much of what he sayd but it’s still interesting enough to me that i’m going to go.

now for the good church news – today i saw the light at the end of the tunnel. as i have posted before my church has gone through some rough times recently. it has not been fun. today we had dr. stan norman preach to possibly be our interim pastor. for those who do not understand the baptist manner of finding a pastor i’ll explain. baptist to not have a higher organization to assign or help find a pastor. every baptist church is completely autonomous. so when a baptist church needs to find a pastor it has to do it on its own. this usually takes awhile and therefore most baptist churches find an interim pastor to fill the pulpit until they can find their real pastor. the interim helps give a consistent voice to the pulpit. consistency is key. “preaching by committee” never seems to work – no matter how good your “committee” is. so getting an interim pastor is a big step to our church recovering it’s zest. dr. norman is a systematic theology prof at new oreleans baptist theological seminary. he knows his stuff. i thought he did a very good job today. his preaching style is definitely more modern in its nature and while i would prefer a more post-modern style you still aren’t going to hear me complain. it was the best sermon we’ve had from the pulpit in awhile. the church still has a long way to go but at least a faint light has begun to appear.

i found “splinter cell – pandora tomorrow” today for $14 and decided to buy it for me and the kids. thus far it involves a ton of sneaking around. i personally tend to go for a game with lots of gun play. i fear that i may be disappointed here. sneaking around is just not my thing. i hope not.

the photo above is composed of a few of my favorite playdough sculptures from our worship service last night. i asked the kids and adults to stay seated and work on sculptures while we all sang together. the tables were full of playdough and i wanted them to make a sculpture of how they felt when they knew beyond a shadow of doubt that they had sinned. the sculpture didn’t have to be anything that anyone else would understand. it merely needed to have meaning for them. we used these sculptures later in the evening as a means of representing the forgiveness that we receive from CHRIST through the love HE showed on the cross. the kids left these sculptures behind them at the end of the evening. though we never discussed specific meanings of each one (after all they were supposed to leave it behind them) some of them spoke volumes to me.

awhile back i read where improv everywhere did an improv completely from mp3’s that interested people downloaded. the people who downloaded the improv mp3 came to a local venue and then were taken through the improv experience via the mp3 they had dowloaded. here’s their description of it. i thought it sounded great and then began to think that it might be an interesting worship experience. it be a cool way of discovering being individually and coporately involved within faith at the same time (i.e. you are individually listening to the mp3 but listening to it at the same time as others and thus doing the same things). i don’t work well on vague timelines so i finally decided that i would just go ahead and schedule it. so it’s setup for the wednesday, march 1st. this means i have to write everything out and get the whole thing mapped out word for word and then recorded. i just wish i knew someone with a cool british accent to record it.

do any ideas of what i can do within the mp3 to convey individuals working within community?

pam and i are part of the less than one percent of the world that owns two vehicles. pam’s ’98 mazada 626 (with 140,000 miles) resides at night inside our garage while my ’98 ford explorer (with 118,000 miles) sits in our driveway most nights. i say “most nights” because when either of my boys want to play basketball i have to move the truck to the side of the street. yesterday was such a day.

i pulled the truck in front of my house and let the boys play a little bball. i left “fred”, my truck, on the side of the street over night. when i woke up this morning and went out to the truck i discovered that i had apprently left the doors unlocked during the evening. the way i know this is because someone had gone through my glovebox and console storage and thrown everything out. i’m assuming this was in an attempt to find some money or something of value. of course, the theif that broke into my car was an idiot and therefore nothing was missing. i can safely safe that he/she was an idiot because i had left my $1,000 guitar in the back of the truck and it was still there this morning. he/she didn’t even steal noah’s fossil watch in the change consol which would have at least netted the perp a few bucks. all the idiot was able to do was throw a few papers around the truck. this is one of the reasons why they say “crime doesn’t pay” because most of the people breaking into vehicles and homes are too stupid to make anything from it.

tonight as i was listening to a podcast and i heard tony jones say the phrase “my dream church.”it got me to thinking about what my dream church would look like. since judge marilyn says i rule i figured i should write down a few things on what my dream church would look like so that you, my loyal subjects, would know these things. so here goes:

• my dream church would be concerned about the kingdom of GOD – i would want the overriding focus of the church to be on living out and expanding the kingdom of GOD (e.g. living life the way it is supposed to be) – not just missions, evangelism, social justice, discipleship, worship, community or any other single element. we would need to be a group of people that were not only spreading the good news of JESUS CHRIST but also fighting to see that kingdom lived out in this world – fighting with and for the marginalized of the world. basically i would like to see the best of liberal protestantism and conservative evangelicalism brought together.
• a group of people passionately in love with each other – for me this means lots of pot lucks and constant eating together.
• a diverse group of messed up people – i want a church that is full of people that admit how much they don’t get and how much they don’t live out concerning the gospel. a group that is trying to walk closer and closer in the way of CHRIST but in the end realize that we are all screwed up and entirely dependent upon GOD’s grace. i would want a place where the perfect middle class family and the drug addict are both in the same room, in love with each other, and realize they both stand before GOD in need of HIS grace.
• a great mix of people – i dream of a church that is made up of different ethnic groups, socioeconomic groups, sub-cultures, etc. e pluribus unum, baby. the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the packers and the bears fans all living life together.
• a church that has chili dogs once a week – okay it’s a selfish thing but i really love chili dogs. this is not a make or break point but i am talking about my dream church so i figured i should dream a little.
• a church that seeks to live as simply as possible – i’m not doing a very good job of this personally but i’m trying and i would love to be a part of a group of people who are always struggling to do this.
• a hospitable church – i want to be a part of a group of people who are always “inviting the stranger into their midst.”
• a body of believers that are growing in CHRIST’s love together – i want a church where GOD is sought after, HIS word is delved into, prayer is practiced in a variety of manners, and devotion is encouraged as ways of experiencing GOD’s love to greater extents. part of this means a church that is not afraid to mess up. part of growing is sometimes getting it wrong. i want to be a part of a body of believers that is struggling with GOD and HIS word. it wouldn’t be a place where someone had all the answers, rather it would be a group of people who are constantly struggling with figuring out what the questions are and trying to accept the love of the ONE WHO is the ANSWER.
• a group of people who are committed to being between 200 and 300 in size – this doesn’t mean a lack of growth or excluding new people. instead it means that church plants would have to happen all the time.
• i want a church that is constantly experimenting – i want to be a part of a body that is trying new things all the time. new forms of ministry, new room set ups, new teaching methods, new issues jumped into, new chili dogs … you name it. i want to be with a group of people who are not afraid to fail and therefore will try anything.
• i want to be with a church body that is embracing its heritage – i want to be a part of a group of people who truly know what is important to them. not the programs, rooms, etc. rather then ideals that all those things came from. i want to be with a group of people who have those ideals in their minds and honor them even while they are trying new things.

that’s what comes to mind off the top of my head. i’ll probably read it tomorrow and decided to change some of it – i’m tired and i never really trust what i write when i am tired.

Currently playing in iTunes: City Of Blinding Lights by U2

for the past 9 years i have been writing my own small group material for the discipleNOW of the youth ministries i have been involved with. for those who don’t know what a discipleNOW is i will briefly explain – it’s a weekend retreat where you group kids and adults in small groups of 8 to 12 for in home bible studies – we use 4 small group bible studies and three large group worship times. anyway i started writing my own material because i didn’t really like any of the other material i could get at the time (except for student discipleship’s back to the basics curriculum which i do really enjoy). i had looked at several other youth minister’s self-published material and pam, my cute and intelligent wife, said “you can do that.” so i decided to try and suddenly found out that i enjoyed doing it. so i started writing my own material.

of course, this means that i have to finish it in time for my leqaders to have a few weeks with it. this means that i have about 4 weeks to finish it. right now i would say that i am about a third of the way through. that’s not as far as i would like. so i need to really start churning the stuff out.

here’s the shockwave flash file we are using as an announcement during our announcement slide loop.

with pam gone to nicaragua for the week things can get very quiet at night. i like quite but 5 days of very quiet nights has pushed me to the point that i am a little bored. so before going to bed i decided that i would design the perfect vw van. you can design your own at http://www.busselecta.com/bus/. okay now that i have designed the perfect vw van i will go to bed and read.

awhile back i saw something talking about getting free autographed photos from the people’s court. it sounded like something fun to do so i did it. the other day my autographed judge marilyn photo arrived and she said i rule. read it and weep. i rule! since i rule it is safe to say that i must therefore be king. as you king i command each of you to send me $100. do it now. remember according to judge marilyn … I RULE