Month: March 2009

Create a Facebook Friend List for Chi Alpha

I just sent this email to the stu­dents in my min­istry. If you find it help­ful, feel free to adapt it for your own church/ministry.

Hope you’re doing well in the after­math of finals.

Quick sug­ges­tion: take a bit of your free time over spring break to do a very sim­ple task that will help strength­en our com­mu­ni­ty.

If you use Face­book, make a friend list for Chi Alpha.

  1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn
  2. Click the blue “Make A New List” but­ton on the left side of the screen and call the new list “Chi Alpha”.
  3. On the next screen, add every­one in Chi Alpha. Use the phone list as a guide (I’ve enclosed the list of names below — just cut and paste them one at a time into the “add to list” box).
  4. Now every time you log in, you’ve got a sim­ple way to quick­ly check in with our com­mu­ni­ty. There will be a “Chi Alpha” link on the left side­bar of the main Face­book page that will show you the most recent sta­tus updates/shared links/whatever from the peo­ple in our group.
  5. Now add two or three peo­ple you are shar­ing your faith with to the list. When­ev­er you see their sta­tus updates pop up on the XA list you just made, remem­ber to pray for them and invite them to join us the next time you see them.

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It’s hard­ly going to rev­o­lu­tion­ize your life, but if all or even a lot of us do it then it will make our com­mu­ni­ty that much tighter. Face­book is a great tool for enhanc­ing real life friend­ships — max­i­mize it for the King­dom!

Hope it helps. We’re all in this togeth­er. car acci­dent lawyers ny down­load basic instinct 2 free

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College Ministry and Global Transformation

One of my favorite sub­jects to talk about is the strate­gic nature of cam­pus min­istry. As I was read­ing the most recent issue of Books & Cul­ture scar divx

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, one pas­sage from a book review popped out at me:

I saw a strik­ing pat­tern in these books [Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty and Democ­ra­cy in the Glob­al South: Africa chil­dren shouldn t play with dead things down­load /Latin Amer­i­ca/Asia] that the edi­tors and authors did not men­tion: a dis­tinct source for much of the more prin­ci­pled evan­gel­i­cal social and polit­i­cal engage­ment across the regions. Repeat­ed­ly, the lead­ers of para­church min­istries and reform-mind­ed NGOs that worked on behalf of the poor and the vul­ner­a­ble, who spoke up for human rights and elec­toral reform and against cor­rup­tion and auto­crat­ic rule came from two sources: stu­dent Chris­t­ian move­ments and the world­wide net­work of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers affil­i­at­ed with the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee for World Evan­ge­liza­tion. Inter-Var­si­ty Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship joined the Peo­ple Pow­er move­ment in the Philip­pines, while Cam­pus Cru­sade played a cen­tral role in the for­ma­tion of the Cit­i­zens Com­mit­tee for Eco­nom­ic Jus­tice in South Korea. Like­wise in South Africa, it was the mem­bers of Youth Alive, the evan­gel­i­cal stu­dent fel­low­ship start­ed in Sowe­to by Cae­sar Mole­bat­si, who drove the Con­cerned Evan­gel­i­cals move­ment to resist apartheid in the 1980s. The Latin Amer­i­can The­o­log­i­cal Fra­ter­ni­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal net­work with strong ties to both the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee and the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Stu­dents, fig­ures promi­nent­ly in pro-demo­c­ra­t­ic evan­gel­i­cal work across Latin Amer­i­ca.

INFEMIT [the Inter­na­tion­al Fel­low­ship of Evan­gel­i­cal Mis­sion The­olo­gians] itself is a prod­uct of this net­work, which might help explain these authors’ inter­est in high­light­ing this strain of evan­gel­i­cal social thought and action. But it is indeed sig­nif­i­cant. Lit­tle could the Anglo-Amer­i­can founders of the Lau­sanne and cam­pus min­istry move­ments have imag­ined that their empha­sis on thought­ful Bible study and a “whole gospel for the whole world” would help ani­mate demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments around the globe.

source: “Now What? Revival­ist Chris­tian­i­ty and Glob­al South Pol­i­tics” by Joel Car­pen­ter. Books & Cul­ture March/April 2009, page 36.

If you want to change a cul­ture, change its cam­pus­es. They are the steer­ing wheels of soci­ety.

How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

  1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
  2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
  3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
  4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load

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    had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

  5. Improve the ser­mon.

    This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂