Category: school

a list of statements that stood out today in the church planting leadership d.min seminar i am presently in. these are not necessarily states that i agreed or disagreed with. they are just statements that stood out as if audiologically highlighted when they were said:

• guys it’s not let’s throw mud on the bride time
• i’m not bipolar or anything like that
• all sbc churches are non-denominational at their core – local church autonomy should mean non-denominationalism.
• we need to learn how to think in ways that help people to do the kingdom things that they do best
• you want to have the right people on the bus and have them in the right seats
• you’re a “pastor of the next thing”
• can you figure me out?
• nobody knows what “missional” means
• sarcasm is a spiritual gift and paul had it … read your bible
• they made fun of him in the rabbit movie
• there are really just two types of people in the world … cat lovers and dog lovers
• you get what you reward – this should affect how we measure progress
• military authority training – don’t stand in front of the guys who have the guns

i today tried to complete some of the pre-reading for my next d.min seminar at nobts. if you watch a couple of seconds of the above video you will instantly know why i wasn’t very successful. emy j’s is normally a great place to study. there’s a constant flow of traffic but the volume level  is very acceptable. today for some reason there was a group there that needed to shout in order to speak. i use the word speak instead of communicate because i pretty sure that none of them were actually listening but all over them we definitely talking. i was sitting at the same table as andy lickel (the iv campus minister) who was trying to study also. we both gave up pretty quickly.

SIDE NOTE – this is for my baton rouge friends – saturday night pam and i ate supper with a couple of other ninth grade parents while adam and their kids ate dinner before their formal dance. one of the dads could be dino rizzo’s separated at birth twin brother. here’s a photo.

for those of you who are wondering, which basically means pam and my parents, the seminar on jeremiah that i have attended this week has been wonderful. i think i have actually gone from thinking that jeremiah was a cry baby to liking jeremiah. it ends today and i’ll be glad to be back home but also a little sorry the classes are over. of course, the joy continues because i have a 20 page exegetical study of a passage from jeremiah due in two weeks,

speaking of papers i thought i would post the two i have written thus far for the course. i’m not posting these because of them being any good, they haven’t been graded yet so they could turn out to be complete crap. instead i’m posting them so someone else will at least have an example to bounce ideas of form off of. when i began prepping for the seminar i tried finding some samples of what others had done for similar seminars so that i would have some idea if i was on target or not. i couldn’t find any. therefore i thought i would post mine so during the next semester when someone googles nobts biblical, exegetical d.min seminar they would at least have an example of what has been done.

here they are

• messianic-thought-in-jeremiah-bsot8302
• the-prophetic-persona-bsot8302

pam has suckered me into being recorded as a test subject for the com. d. department at uwsp. they need subjects with different accents and a southern accent is a rare commodity up here in the land of cheese. therefore, i will go into her department next week so that they can record my voice so their students can then deconstruct the whole thing. as always, i endeavor to persevere in my attempts to help educate the future leaderships of our world. 😉

SIDE NOTE – i’m presently reading jack kerouac’s book “on the road.” i’m only about half way through the book so things may change but at this point i don’t understand why it is considered such a great book. it’s okay. i’m interested in it enough to finish reading it but it doesn’t stand out as a great work of literature. maybe it’s just me.

the beginning of my d.min experience at new orleans seminary was ok. the reason i say ok is because my first workshop was basically just an orientation to the school and what is expected from my research. obviously that not very exciting. of course, it wasn’t meant to be exiting.

the good part is that i got to see a little of what i’ll be a part of. the way the program works is that i’ll have to 9 semester hours of workshops (these are related to prepping my research – 9 semester hours equals 3 workshops), 9 hours of divisional seminars (these are courses within 5 different general divisions – again 9 semesters hours equals 3 courses), 9 hours of specialization seminars (these are courses within my specialization – by now you should know what this equals). these course will probably take me about 2 1/2 years to finish. then i’ll do my project. judging from what the professors and other d.min students told me my project will probably take between 1 to 2 years.

to be honest in the past i’ve been a little down on the d.min degree. yet with that said i am pretty excited about working on the project. i think there are some pretty cool things i can explore concerning using some of the collaborative software on the web. tapestry has used some for a few things (mainly google docs but we’ve also used mind meister) and it has been pretty useful. i don’t know how i would turn that into a hundred page research paper but i’ll figure that out later. of course, i’ll probably change my ideas ten times by the time i finish my seminars.

i also met a few fellow students that i really enjoyed connecting with and a couple of whom are possibility interested in doing something with tapestry.

SIDE NOTE – i took the eee pc 901 with me to nola and i love it. it took me a day to get used to very tiny keyboard of the 901 but after that day everything was fine. it is perfect. it’s just the right size for carrying around (about the size of a hardback book) and has just the right amount of power to handle surfing, word processing, and other basic tasks that i need from a laptop. in fact, at the moment i am in the air between nola and chicago typing this on the 901 while watching a movie at the same time. it’s all good.

SIDE SIDE NOTE – the fletcher family and clint barron were nice enough to come down to new orleans for supper while i was there. it was great seeing them and the food was excellent.

i sent in my tuition for nobts today thus making me official as a student again. woohoo, here come student discounts!

anyway, this means life is back like it should be. of the nearly 18 years that pam and i have been married 12 of those years have involved at least one of us being a student of higher education. the only years where one of us wasn’t a student was our time in carthage, missouri and even then pam ended up working as an part time instructor at missouri southern state college (now missouri southern state university). someone being in college is our default operation.

this is actually one of the reasons that i encourage college students who have been dating a long time and are convinced they will eventually get married to go ahead and take the plunge. i’ve done university life both as a single guy and a married guy. college life is a ton better when you have to pull an all nighter and there’s someone there to catch the load you have to drop.

my run for the day
distance – 5.0 miles
time – 52:42
pace – 10:32/mile