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it’s the name now

my mom found this (i’m not sure how she finds this stuff and i’m a little scared by all that she finds – if my mom was ever a stalker she would be an incredibly scary stalker – i love you mom 🙂 ). it’s a church planting prayer list for the minnesota / wisconsin baptist convention and we’re on it (look down and we’re the sixth prayer request). apparently i placed the name we were considering for the church somewhere on some form and it has been added to the prayer list. so it looks like we have a name now – it’s tapestry (actuall it will be stevens point tapestry church but just called tapestry for the fun of it).

here’s the rationale behind calling it tapestry.

  • a tapestry is woven together. to separate it is to destroy it – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.
  • a tapestry is beautiful whe seen from above but a mess of tangles when seen from below – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.
  • karl barth described the imago dei (another name that i for one would have liked but noone probably would have been able to pronounce) as coming from the fact that humanity is male and female (i.e. we are the image of GOD in community and to separate us is to deny that image). as a tapestry we best display GOD’s image together – kind of like what i hope the community of faith we’ll be a part of will be.

i like the name “tapestry” but it probably doesn’t matter anymore because it’s on the prayer list. so “jar” is now “tapestry.” hopefully it will live out its name.

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v.b.s.

it’s vacation bible school time at parkview.

i’m not the biggest fan of vacation bible school. actually that’s not correct. i’m not the biggest fan of v.b.s. the way it is done now. originally v.b.s. was a means for the church to go “out” and reach people where they were – one of the first v.b.s.’s was held in a beer parlor in order to reach the kids who lived in the slum around it. it seems to me that now most v.b.s’s are more about doing something for our “church kids” and hoping they will bring a friend or two with them (i.e. another “come join us” program). many of our churches (my own included) spend a decent chunk of change putting on this program within the church walls. i know and love many people who think v.b.s. is one of the greatest things ever. we have within our church some volunteers who put tons of effort into v.b.s. and do an amazing job with it. i’m amazed at some of the creativity involved in what they do. for example of this just walk into the student center – it’s been turned into a bedouin tent community.

i just wish we were doing something that involved going out into the community. the one v.b.s that i have seen that has done this actually involved moving the v.b.s from the church building into a local city park. the whole program was staged at a city park so that it would draw kids from the neighborhood. they spent just as much money on the program but had a very different goal. their goal was to move into the community and impact it. it was great. heck the pastor even drove a harley into the v.b.s. worship service one day. imagine 400 six to ten year olds in a worship service and a motorcycle driving into it. the place went crazy.

my point in this semi-rant is how interesting it is that great ideas for reaching out into the community slowly turn into programs for staying within our churches and out of the community. sunday school is another example of this. sunday school was originally an amazing movement of social justice to educate kids who would never be able to receive an adequate education during the industrial revolution. like v.b.s it slowly went from revolutionary to programaic. to continue being relevant and reaching out the bride of CHRIST has to constantly be reforming and questioning what it does. i’m not sure we do this very often.

when we start jar (which is slowly becoming “tapestry”) it would be real easy to just do church things – but that’s not what i feel called to do. the problem will be once we get the whole thing started, we’ll we continue questioning things? i hope so because i believe we must.

my run for the day
distance – 2.5 miles
time – 23:28
pace – 9:23/mile

[tags]vbs, church, sunday school, questioning[/tags]

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what it means to be a pastor

in parkview’s worship over the past two week’s chuck quarles has preached about the role of the pastor. i read this article on the ooze today and i thought it was interesting and good.

[Listening to: Gotta Serve Somebody – Nichole Nordeman – Brave (3:59)]
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the work for the day

for those of you following the house selling preparation of the terrell home here’s the work we finished on our house today.

  • painted adam’s accent wall
  • added four more bags of cedar mulch to the landscaping in the front yard
  • added two bags of river rock to the walkway in the backyard
  • installed curtain hold backs on the living room window
  • removed the doogie door enabled storm door from our back door
  • straighten up our boxes and worked on moving them into a self storage unit

since we had college bible study at our house last night we weren’t able to do anymore. i know this is boring for most of y’all but i figure this will be an interesting way to keep track of what we do over the two weeks before we place our house on the market.

the work continues over the next week.

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the work continues

i’m getting ready to go to bed and i’ve been too busy to really write anything but i thought i would keep my parents updated on the work that is taking place around the house. today we did the following:

  • weeded the front flower beds and planted new plants – thanks to the help of the walters family who showed up with swamp lilies and various other plants that they had around their house.
  • mulched the front flower beds.
  • removed four old shutters and replaced them with new cranberry ones.
  • kilzed the accent wall in adam’s room so it can be painted the same color as the rest of his room.
  • packed and trashed most of the non-essential stuff in adam and noah’s rooms.
  • took more trips to lowe’s than i wanted too.

we’ll probably be able to start painting the outside of the house towards the end of this week. anyone who is interested in painting, receiving some pizza, and being bossed around by my dogs is welcome to come and join us.

other than having a bee chase me while i ran this afternoon there wasn’t anything real exciting that happened. thanks to the bee i now definitely know where i stand with my oldest son. adam told me that there was a bee chasing me and then he quickly ran over to the other side of the road and continued his run. he pretty much continued to laugh and run while the bee chased me for two blocks. thanks for the help son. i’m so glad i helped bring you into the world.

my run for the day
distance – 1.5 miles
time – 16:03
pace – 10:30/mile

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hitched, fixing, pirates

for those who know him and might be interested joe causey was married to nicole tonight. it was a wonderful ceremony and they make a great couple.

otherwise my day was spent meeting with our realtor, blake fowler, figuring out what needs to be done to the house before we put it on the market and the working on that list, which is:

  • painting the exterior
  • painting the accent wall in adam’s room
  • touch up painting in several spots
  • cleaning and stretching the carpet in three rooms
  • replacing the baseboards
  • replacing the front shutters
  • and a few other piddly things

adam and i saw “pirates of the caribbean: at world’s end” today. we both thought it was merely okay. a few days ago grant asked on his blog if there would be any good sequels this summer. i’m beginning to think the answer will be “no.”

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searched

two days ago some hit my blog from yahoo by typing in the following search

irs sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions every year, laid end to end these forms would stretch around the earth 28 times

i doesn’t seem that funny now that i have typed it out but it made me laugh pretty hard when i first saw it on the site’s statistical report.

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it takes a licking

4 till

my left wrist hate watches.

i like watches. i enjoy having one around for purposes of knowing what time it is and timing things. it’s a good thing to be able to time how long it takes a waiter to bring our food or to be able to bother people who are stuck up about time, because i make sure my watch is set to the time on the atomic clock.

yet my wrist hates watches.

i know this because ever since i first started wearing a watch (which is another story about a fascinating, humid august day when i was 16 but this isn’t the place for that story) my wrist has been slowly destroying them. i’m convinced that my wrist is able to release some watch dissolving acid that was developed through the genetic combinations of my dad drinking cheap beer, my mother reading too many cooking books, and my inherent dna-linked love for pork rinds. of course, modern science doesn’t have a test for “watching dissolving acids” yet so i will have to wait to prove this theory.

all i know for sure is that up until recently i have never been able to keep a watch working for more than six months. it doesn’t seem to matter of what quality the watch is. my wrist is an equal opportunity watch destroyer. it has killed watches ranging from seiko’s to dime store digitals. it doesn’t matter if the watch is gold or plastic my wrist hates it and will destroy it. the expensive, cheap, pretty, ugly, sturdy, and fragile all end up as trophies of destruction to my left wrist’s hatred of time devices.

this was all true until i acquired my present watch. it’s a timex expedition and it has lasted for one and a half years. this is remarkable. i was so please because tuesday i actually had to go and get another battery placed in the watch. that’s never happened before. my wrist always kills the watch before it ever makes it to needing a battery replacement. i don’t know what is so special about this timex because my wrist has demolished many other timex’s before this one. all i do know is that i am very thankful to have found a superhero watch that can stand up to the watch destroying acid that my wrist releases and put my wrist in it’s place. long live the timex expedition watch!

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you’ve got to be kidding

today was a fun day for youth ministry. i was paid to setup and play halo and risk in the student center for 8 hours. not a bad life.

since, i was hanging out with teens most of the day i wasn’t in my study that often. i checked in every now and then just to make sure that i hadn’t missed anything important. during one of those check in’s i found a message from from someone i didn’t recognized. it was a long distance number so i thought i probably should call it back soon. i took a few minutes away form the youth and placed the long distance call. the second the guy answered the phone and i mentioned my name, he kicked into a sales routine for a video casting program that is geared towards ministries. i was dumbfounded. i could not believe that this guy had asked me to call him back on my church’s dime do that he could make a sales call. i had to make sure that he had actually done this so i asked him “let me get this straight. you asked me to call you back long distance so you could try and sell me something?” he said “yes” but then told me that if it was a problem he could call me right back on their line. “nope,” i answered “you pretty much just told me all i ever need to hear about your company. please don’t ever call here again. good bye.”

i don’t know what it is like in the real world but in the church world this crap goes on all the time. i probably get a message each week with a saleperson getting me to call them back so they can give me their sales pitch. it would be one thing if this was a salesperson that i had a relationship with – those phone calls are a good thing. i know who they are and they have built up my trust by following through on what they say and actually carrying on conversations with me passed just selling me something. but these messages are from “cold calls.” why should i use my time to do your job for you?

i was raised by a salesman. i know how hard “cold calls” are. yet i also know that if you build up enough relationships after awhile you don’t have to make that many “cold calls.” i wish more ministry-based businesses care more about relationships than just making sales.

i leave by bragging on one company that i love – uthstuph. i love them because not only do they do things right but we actually know who they are. we weren’t friends before we started buying t-shirts from them but from our first phone call we could tell that they were concerned with more than just making a one time sell to us. jessica, my assistant, and i both know several of the people at uthstuph and it is not uncommon for our “order” calls to go on for quite awhile talking about allot of things that don’t seem related to the sell. it’s because of the fact that they care about our relationship that we have ordered everything we need printed from them over the past 5 years. in fact, sometimes we look for other things we can send their way. those of you who know me know that it is no small thing when i give a business (rather than individuals) glowing reviews in public. i wish more companies were like uthstuph.

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i’m finished – maybe

i'm a stevens pointer

the past week i have been basically writing a grant for income in stevens point. the north american mission board wants to help church plants and i have gone through everything they asked over the past 5 months. this week we reached the point of writing out what was actually needed. in order to do that i had to present a ton of demographic information showing whether there is a reason to plant a new church in stevens point or not. the above image is part of what i finished. it doesn’t look like much but i spent many a late night researching to be able to say the little that is on the photo and the ton that is in the 25 pages of supporting information. at one time in my life i actually thought that late night studying would stop after i finished school. HA!

on the movie front i was able to watch “north by northwest” last night when i couldn’t sleep and i was finished with my demographic research. it is amazing film. i love alfred hitchcock.