Category: personal

my amazing wife said the other day that she thought my interest in digital photography had reached the point that she would agree with me shelling out the money necessary for me to purchase a digital slr camera (i lean towards a nikon d70 or a canon eos d20). she says i should use the pastor appreciation love offering all the pastors in the church get each october but i don’t feel comfortable with that because i would rather than continue to go to family things. so this means that i am free to buy a camera that i don’t have the money for.

thus i need to figure out a way to raise $1,000 or just keep dreaming about a great camera. if any of you want to send a few hundred my way i would greatly appreciate it. 🙂

i’m bone dead dog tired (whatever that means) right now. it’s been a long but fun week.

earlier this week i had the privilege of eating lunch with j.t., the youth minister at jefferson baptist church here in baton rouge. we ate some rather large cheeseburgers at cheeburger, cheeburger and had a great conversation concerning exploring the possibility of together developing and setting up some alternative worship experiences. neither of us know what will come out of the dialogue but we’re open to continuing it and maybe bringing some other people into it. if nothing else it was very refreshing.

BTW – to the right is a rather ticked off looking j.t. oooooohhhhh! scary!

tonight at the view we are commissioning one of our own to go to nicaragua for a month and work with our friends there in spreading the good news of the kingdom of GOD.

here’s the flash file that i’m using to open our discussion on acts 13:1-3

i really wish that there was a group in baton rouge like worship freehouse or grace. there may be one but i’m unable to locate it. it would be nice to regularly get together with some people who are dealing with the same mental struggles that my wife and i are. it would be nice to hang out with some people who are struggling through what it means to be the bride of CHRIST.

it’s strange how GOD answers prayer. for at least the past year and a half i have been praying, and wanting, and desiring to split our student ministry into a middle school and a high school group. we average 70 to 100 kids on wednesday night and it’s not the usual mix. instead of being about 55 to 60% middle school and 45 to 40% high school we are always more like 60% high school. each year we loose middle school students and gain high school students as the year goes on. it has been obvious to me that we are doing something right for high school students, but something that doesn’t connect as well for the middle schoolers.

but here’s the issues. our church has this butt kickingly large private school that uses ever other part of the church on wednesdays till 6:00 p.m. and we start our worship services at 6:00 p.m. so for the past year and a half i’ve been talking about the need to split our group but unable to figure out a place to have a second group. that was what was going on until yesterday. this week is our v.b.s. and the student center is being used by one of the groups. in the past i have taken down all the v.b.s. decorations and then put them up after we were through. i wanted to do something different this year so we moved to the stage that is in the new gym area. we closed the curtain on the stage and it became another room. in fact, it became a very cool room. it had a real “beatnic” feel to it. on the stage we had the following:

• directable par64 stage lights & colored floods.
• a projection screen that covered the entire back end of the stage.
• room for 70 to 80 chairs.
• drapes all over the place.
• a thick sound dampening curtain on the front end of the stage (which we used as the back of our room).
• a pace that is actually acoustically better than our present student center.

on top of now having a room that would be great for an additional service that room is located right next to a full gymnasium which gives us a great place to do some games and expend the energy that is coursing through the veins of our middle schoolers. it’s perfect for doing a separate middle school service. in fact, i got so excited about the whole thing that i have already asked our adult leadership to begin praying about the possibility of the whole thing and i’ve called 5 out of the 7 people that i will probably need to talk to in order to make it happen. after a few weeks of prayer if things still look good we’ll move to doing a test run sometime in august or september. we’ll try the whole thing out for 4 to 6 weeks and then get everyone together to see how it went. then we’ll either test the whole thing again, scrap it, or put it into action.

so here’s the plan as of now:

• pray and pray some more – prayer has led to this option (an option i thought was impossible a mere month ago) and prayer will lead to it’s answer.
• gather the leadership necessary for this to work and get them caught up in the vision of reaching our middle school students in a way that is new to us.
• gather the resources needed (sound system, video system, computer, game supplies, etc.) we have allot of this already.
• organize the whole thing – this service would need to run like clock work and have everyone involved in the leadership of it on the same page.

of course, i have some strong fears about this thing too:

• i fear the group growing. i know i’m supposed to want the group to grow but truthfully growth means that i don’t get to be involved in each kid’s life and i hate that. a wednesday night that becomes more attractive to our middle schoolers and really meets their needs probably means that we will draw more youth. this is a good thing but also means i head even more down the path of being an administrator. i don’t like that path.
• while two groups will eventual lead to two more connected groups it does initially mean that there will be a feeling of disconnectedness. we’ll go from being all together to being separate. a group that used to be one will become two. that’s got to feel weird.
• i’m scared of organizing this whole thing. because of the time crunch of using the stage everything at the beginning will have to be mapped out to perfection. there are allot of details that have to be mapped out and that scares me.

i guess that’s all for now. i’ll write more on the move to a middle school service if GOD leads and the whole thing develops.

bbc news | technology | micro$oft censors chinese blogs
i have mixed feelings on the story behind this article. basically the article says that in order to do business with china micro$oft has given in and agreed to block blogs that have “banned expression” within them. micro$oft says this is not a statement of the company’s politics, rather they follow the laws of whatever company they operate in and this censorship it is just the price of doing business in china. so micro$oft has banned blog entries that use words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human rights.” yahoo has done the same thing.

my mixed feelings come from the fact that i do want companies to operate within the law. yet, my heart cries out that microsoft (and yahoo) should say that if this is the cost of doing business in china then they won’t do business in china. the money simply can’t be worth the cost.

one of the reader comments on the article says:

As all companies, Microsoft is at making money and in the modern world, ethics is not good for business, which is sad but you can see it almost anywhere if you have a look at the world.

i simply can’t agree. companies are not amoral entities. they are composed of people, people who have ethical standards, and thus those companies have to operate within the ethical standards of those who compose their numbers. even in their pursuit of “the almighty dollar” our businesses still have to operate within the ethics of their people. otherwise we are all doomed.

our pastor was sick yesterday and i was one of the individuals called to fill in for the morning message. after preaching i made a new discovery concerning preaching to groups that are primarily adult. in the past i said that i didn’t like preaching to mainly adult church services, rather i would like to stick with youth and those who love youth. yesterday i realized that this isn’t quite true. there is one thing that i do like about preaching to primarily adult groups – the positive feedback at the end of the message.

yesterday i preached at two of our worship services and then spent 15 to 20 minutes after each service listening to members of the congregation tell me how they liked the sermon. truthfully, it was a nice bit of ego stroking and i have to admit that it was enjoyable. i love teens but i can go months without hearing a positive or negative word from a teen concerning any messages i’ve done. of course, i dod “cheat” and read the blogs of so of my kids looking for what they say about each week’s message. still, yesterday i received more compliments from the too church services that i preached than i have received from our youth worship service in a year’s worth of services (maybe two year’s worth).

now don’t get me wrong – i still prefer delivering messages to people involved in youth ministry and specifically my teens. teenagers let you know if you are connecting or not. if my youth get bored they go to sleep, start talking to the person beside them, or begin passing notes. i can tell if i’m connecting with my kids or not. most of our church adults on the other hand, simply stare straight ahead – i can’t read them at all. with nice, passive, polite, “let’s pretend that we’re listening when i’m really not” adults i can’t figure out if things are tracking or if i’m losing everyone. i really don’t like that feeling.

so basically me desired plan is to speak to our adults once every six months or so and get the ego stroking that i need every now and then. the rest of the time i’ll spend on my kids – the ones that i really like doing messages for.

everyone else seems to be doing this quiz now and thus i will be a good little mindless sheep and follow the crowd. so here are my results:

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God’s most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth. Emergent/Postmodern 75% Neo orthodox 75% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 61% Reformed Evangelical 50% Charismatic/Pentecostal 46% Classical Liberal 46% Modern Liberal 39% Roman Catholic 29% Fundamentalist 25% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

the cool thing is that i’m not emergent (i’m neo-orthodox) and yet i am emergent. 😉

i feel so much better about myself having settle once and for all what i am. at least i think i feel better.

i’m scum! plain and simple. there is no other way to put it – i’m pure, unadulterated scum.

now you must be asking yourself “how is robert scum?” so i’ll tell you. i forgot my mother’s and my father’s birthday. my parents’ birthdays were this past week. the big thing is not the gift because my parents are at the age that they go out and buy whatever they want. no the gifts are not the thing that i feel really bad about. nope i feel bad because i didn’t call on their birthdays. that’s the terrible thing about all this.

actually it wasn’t really my fault. you see i desperately wanted to call my parents and say “happy birthday” on their perspective birthdays but i wasn’t able to. the reason for this is because i was threatened with bodily harm concerning calling them. my kids, adam and noah, told me that they would beat me senseless if i called my parents and wished them happy birthday. you wouldn’t really think that an 8 and 11 year old could be so threatening but you would be wrong. they’re like mafia don’s and they know how exert a little muscle in order to accomplish what they want. i really wanted to call my parents on their birthdays but i was simply to scared to go against the threats of my kids. so i guess my parents should blame the whole thing on their grandkids. let me make sure my parents understand this perfectly – it was the grandkids fault and not mine. 🙂