Today's Speedlinking brought to you by: Mark's Snow Removal Service..."If you wait long enough, it goes away...except in Alaska."
- Here is our church's "temporary website." It's actually a blog that we'll be using as a website. What are your thoughts on this? Is this good? Will it work? What's missing? My one frustration: Google Search crawls to it reluctantly...that's bad...really bad.
- How can procrastinators and people who wait until the end to get stuff done excel at what they do? Seth Godin says it's the art of Sprinting...a GREAT read! It really helped me understand that good planning along with a late surge can produce great results.
- Someone else who's mind works like mine..."What does God hate more...line cutting or people who get angry about line cutters?" A great tongue in cheek question about how we respond to rudeness and being sinned against.
- United Methodist House Churches!?! Oo, oo, oo, appoint me! Appoint me! OK, not really, we LOVE Winchester and don't want to move, but how exciting is this! What's your take?
- I hate arial font, but how can I argue with science? CommonCraft explains that easy directions reading makes easy tasks.
Have a great day!
8 comments:
i'm a big fan of house churches. they're kind of a grassroots return to the church in Acts 2. i'm not sure how youth ministry ties into house churches. i know a lot of churches are turning towards treating students like adults- including them in adult small groups, challenging them the same way they challenge adults- rather than having them be a seperate entity. i guess that's how it would play out in a house church? i don't know. but i do like them.
Mark - Thanks for the link and your interest in house churches. I would love to hear more specifically what you think might be helpful in thinking about this area. Feel free to send me an email.
Andrew Conard
Hmmm, house churches? From the description I'd call that a small group. The Church is the people not the building so where it takes place and how many people is just semantics. But really - does it matter? How we do churches is not really that important is it? It's about the quality of our personal relationships with Christ.
I love the book of Acts, I love the way the people are described, how they shared everything, cared genuinely about each other, converted and baptized new believers constantly and loved God so intensely. If shutting down our church buildings or our Willowcreeks would restore that passion, I'd be all for it. But I suspect the real issue is our hearts not our buildings.
Sorry - I guess I must enjoy playing the contrarian. Please fire back! I'll also defend "Arial" while we're at it =)
PS - I like the temporary site. It's free, easy to maintain. The only issue I see is having to monitor it for mean spirited posts. Since anyone can post anything as a comment... I know you can delete them, but it's energy. Anyway, it looks nice and it's clean and simple, perfect until you need something bigger.
Sorry if I misspelled anything, I had to “sprint” to write this before bed.
Kara, great post about the intergenerational nature of house churches. Not being a full-time youth pastor, I hadn't thought much about that...even though I've read it before. Thanks for bringing that up!
Todd,
I agree. The problem is many churches are so broken that there are seemingly few ways to "heal" them.
I think some are trying new models in an attempt to break the habit of traditional church "heart habits." I.e. non-intimacy with others, going to be entertained, coming only on Sundays, and self-righteousness.
And just like you said, that can happen or not happen anywhere...It's just that many christians feel absolutely defeated and burnt after trying to address these issues.
Sometimes a clean cut helps the body see there is a problem? And, yes, that was a psuedo-statment/question.
Also, thanks for the website comments! I did some updating, too, so it should be a little more useable.
Andrew, I emailed you a dissertation...sorry :)
Thanks for the reply Mark, I think I came off a bit wrong. Ultimately I love the idea of house churches, especially in areas where no excellent church or church body can be found. No harm in starting over with the basics. I do applaud large denominations like UMC for accepting and innovating and not rejecting these outright.
For some reason when I read it I was just thinking more about the bigger need for our country to turn back to God. We're just so ... complacent and distracted.
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