Author: Glen

Fore!

I don’t nor­mal­ly par­tic­i­pate in these meme things, but Scott Aught­mon tagged me pub­licly at lunch yes­ter­day and so I feel oblig­ed to throw my four cents in.

Four Jobs I’ve Had:
* Life­guard
* Police Offi­cer
* Com­put­er Ser­vices (in a hos­pi­tal)
* Min­is­ter

Four movies I can watch over and over:
* Mon­ty Python & the Holy Grail
* Rat Race
* The Princess Bride
* Arsenic and Old Lace

Four places I have lived:
* Lafayette, LA
* Natchi­toches, LA
* Spring­field, MO
* Palo Alto, CA

Four shows I like to watch:
* Myth­busters
* Inside the Actor’s Stu­dio
* Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca
* Whose Line Is It, Any­way?

Four foods that I like:
* Choco­late Chip Cook­ies
* Fried Rice
* BBQ Chick­en Piz­za
* Ham­burg­ers

Four web­sites I vis­it dai­ly:
* reddit.com
* getreligion.org
* Cool Tools
* The Web Com­ic List

Four things I want to do before I die:
* earn a doc­tor­ate
* learn a liv­ing lan­guage
* write a book
* see Dana suc­ceed in life

Four peo­ple I’m tag­ging: (Paula has been implic­it­ly tagged since this is GlenAnd­Paula.com)
* Lind­sey Haw­ley
* Earl Creps (he has­n’t ppst­ed late­ly and needs a kick to get him start­ed again)
* Will Phillips (dit­to)
* Greg Davis

Ringing The Church Bells Via SMS

We’re putting togeth­er a text-mes­sag­ing reminder ser­vice for our meet­ings. Every Wednes­day night at 7pm our web­site will send out a SMS mes­sage to the cell phones of every­one who signs up remind­ing them to get ready for Chi Alpha’s week­ly wor­ship meet­ing. It’s a sim­ple mes­sage to help out those stu­dents who always mean to come but get busy doing some­thing else and for­get until the meet­ing is part­way over:

Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300–300.

I’ve just test­ed the sys­tem and it works pret­ty smooth­ly. It’s the mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent of ring­ing the church bells!

The script was real­ly sim­ple to write. If you use a unix-based sys­tem with PHP & PEAR installed you could eas­i­ly adapt it for your min­istry:

#!/usr/bin/php
 ?php
//sends SMS announcments to each person in Chi Alpha who wants them

require_once('Mail.php');
$parameters['sendmail_args']='';
$mailer=&Mail::factory('sendmail',$parameters);

$cells['Ferdinand Frosh']='5555555555';
$cells['Suzie Sophomore']='5555555555';
$cells['Jing Junior']='5555555555';
$cells['Sheila Senior']='5555555555';

$headers['From']='you@example.com';
$headers['Reply-To']='you@example.com';
$headers['Subject']='XA @ 8pm';
$body='Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300-300';

foreach ($cells as $cell) {
        if (empty($cell)) continue;
        $email=$cell.'@teleflip.com';
        //echo $email;
        $mailer->send($email,$headers,$body);
}
?>

All you have to do is cus­tomize the script (add cell phone num­bers and the right “From” and “Reply-To” emails) and then add it to your crontab file with an entry like so:

0 19 * * 4 /path/to/announce.php

(Hint: type crontab ‑e to edit your crontab file).

By the way, it should go with­out say­ing that you nev­er add some­one to an SMS announce­ment sys­tem with­out their express per­mis­sion! If you think email spam hacks peo­ple off, then just wait until some­one has to pay a text-mes­sag­ing fee for some­thing they’re not inter­est­ed in. The depths of their rage would aston­ish the Hulk.

Geek­s­peak: the rea­son I used the PEAR::Mail library was to make sure that the reply-to address was the one I want­ed. I just could­n’t make it hap­pen using the PHP mail() func­tion alone. Every­thing was from “root@my web­serv­er.” Very annoy­ing.

Hymnody

I sent this email to our wor­ship lead­ers and I thought oth­ers might be inter­est­ed in it.

Why do we try to incor­po­rate a hymn each week into wor­ship?

The short­est answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: “Every age has its own out­look. It is spe­cial­ly good at see­ing cer­tain truths and spe­cial­ly liable to make cer­tain mis­takes. We all, there­fore, need the books that will cor­rect the char­ac­ter­is­tic mis­takes of our own peri­od. And that means the old books. All con­tem­po­rary writ­ers share to some extent the con­tem­po­rary outlook–even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. None of us can escape this blind­ness, but we shall cer­tain­ly increase it, and weak­en our guard against it, if we read only mod­ern books. The only pal­lia­tive is to keep the clean sea breeze of the cen­turies blow­ing through our minds, and this can be done only by read­ing old books. Not, of course, that there is any mag­ic about the past. Peo­ple were no clev­er­er then than they are now; they made as many mis­takes as we. But not the same mis­takes.” (from his intro­duc­tion to Athana­sius’ On The Incar­na­tion).

The same thing is true of songs. There are some great wor­ship songs out today and I want the major­i­ty of our wor­ship to fea­ture them. But I don’t want us to just fea­ture them. They have notable weak­ness­es (pdf link) and so I want the “sea breeze of the cen­turies” to blow through our wor­ship and keep us root­ed.

Hav­ing said that, tra­di­tion­al hymn music does­n’t real­ly con­nect with today’s stu­dents. That’s why I urge you to seek out or make up (yes, you are allowed to do that) con­tem­po­rary arrange­ments for the hymns that we do sing.

I’ve found a few that illus­trate what I’m talk­ing about. Check out http://igracemusic.com/igracemusic/hymnbook/hymns.html

Each one has a sam­ple mp3, lead sheets, tab sheets, and oth­er resources avail­able for wor­ship teams.

Anoth­er excel­lent exam­ple is the Dave Crow­der band’s record­ing of “All Crea­tures Of Our God And King.”

Any­way, I’ve been mean­ing to explain myself on that for a while but I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly got­ten around to it.

So there.

Look, I’m On TV! Sort Of. Not Really.

Inspired by Mark Driscol­l’s exam­ple, I video­taped last week’s Chi Alpha meet­ing and put it online using Google Video. So now you can just go to google video and search for some­thing like “Jesus at Stan­ford” and the video will appear.

Or you can just go to the xastanford.org web­site and see it there. Google lets you embed the videos wher­ev­er you want. Pret­ty amaz­ing, huh?

Not bad for our first try. Now I need to brain­storm about mak­ing it more attractive–the black­board is pret­ty unap­peal­ing. For that mat­ter, I’m not all that appealing–I need a fash­ion makeover or some­thing. And I need to talk slow­er. Still, not too bad for our first try.

So why do we record these meet­ings? I can imag­ine some­one alleg­ing that it’s some sort of ego­ma­ni­a­cal thing. As a rebut­tal, I can only offer my poor groom­ing skills. Ego­ma­ni­acs exfo­li­ate.

So why do we record our meet­ings? 3 rea­sons:

1) We want to make it easy for our stu­dents to invite their friends to come.

Chi Alphan: “Come check out this meet­ing. It’s the best thing since sleep. And the wheel. And fire.”
Col­lege Pagan: “Wow. What’s it like?”
Chi Alphan: “Your com­put­er on?”
Col­lege Pagan: “Yeah.”
Chi Alphan: “Go to google video and search for ‘Jesus at Stan­ford’ — that’s one of our meet­ings.”

2) So our stu­dents still be part of our com­mu­ni­ty when they’re doing a study abroad. We’ve been lis­tened to on at least three con­ti­nents. I’m gun­ning for the whole globe!

3) I some­times refer back to pre­vi­ous mes­sages and it’s easy to say, “You know, I talked about that a few quar­ters ago. I don’t have time to explain all my thoughts on that right now–go get it off our web­site and ask me any fol­low-up ques­tions you have.”

Since we were already record­ing in MP3, video was a no-brain­er. We can do both eas­i­ly, so why not?

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I book­marked last week on del.icio.us.

Dis­claimer: these links are post­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly using the excel­lent yawd hack and are mere­ly things that were inter­est­ing enough to book­mark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Footnotes Are Infinitely Superior To Endnotes

I hate end­notes. In fact, I loathe them. They force me to read with two book­marks and for no good rea­son. Foot­notes are a fun­da­men­tal­ly supe­ri­or way to attribute infor­ma­tion and are even bet­ter for digress­ing with­out inter­rupt­ing an argu­ment.

Yet more books use end­notes than foot­notes. Why?

Jesus Is Quantum

There is no obser­va­tion with­out par­tic­i­pa­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly: there is no inves­ti­ga­tion with inter­ac­tion, there is no analy­sis with­out alter­ation, and there is no look­ing with­out chang­ing.

Turning A Phrase

Our neigh­bor is apply­ing for a job as a pro­fes­sor and part of her job inter­view will involve lec­tur­ing to a class, so last night a bunch of us got togeth­er and lis­tened to her prac­tice her Salem Witch Hunt lec­ture (her exper­tise is in colo­nial his­to­ry). It was quite good. She’s got a lot of knowl­edge and presents it well.

At one point she men­tioned how the con­fess­ing witch­es described in lurid detail their covenant with the Dev­il which, along with sev­er­al oth­er intrigu­ing details, involved kiss­ing his butt. Lit­er­al­ly. To make a deal with the Evil One they believed you had to apply your lips to his pos­te­ri­or.

And they described this in lurid detail. Lurid.

Being a lover of words, I imme­di­ate­ly began to think of ways to allude to the act of kiss­ing demon tush that would fall short of lurid but would nonethe­less be evoca­tive. I came up with three:

  • giv­ing the Ene­my of All Flesh a hiney hick­ey
  • kiss­ing the heinous anus
  • smooching the sul­furous sphinc­ter (alter­nate end­ing: Satan­ic sphinc­ter)

Com­ing soon to a ser­mon near you…

update: my neigh­bor has blogged about the evening as well. With a pho­to. And yes, I am the one who remains name­less. Also, I edit­ed one of my word­plays because I felt a verb that I had cho­sen for vari­ety was stronger than I had intend­ed to be. There’s a dis­tinc­tion between humor and vul­gar­i­ty, and I think my orig­i­nal verb was too crass.

Neologisms

Two new words have bounced into my head recent­ly, and I have gra­cious­ly decid­ed to bestow them upon the world.

  1. Gloth: glut­tony plus sloth. Exam­ple: “Over the Christ­mas break many stu­dents are afflict­ed with a strong case of gloth.”
  2. Proc­to­log­i­cal: the adjec­ti­val form of proc­tol­o­gist. Exam­ple: “Q: How does this pup­pet work, any­way? A: You have to get proc­to­log­i­cal with it.”

Be the first on your block to use them–impress your neigh­bors!

Students Drive Me Crazy

Today I met with a frosh who is try­ing to choose between Chi Alpha and anoth­er ministry–we’ll call them Min­istry X. A sum­ma­ry ensues:

“What I like best about Chi Alpha is the mes­sages. Min­istry X’s mes­sages aren’t very good. And it isn’t clear what they believe. And I real­ly don’t like their Bible study. Chi Alpha’s Bible study is much bet­ter. And I’ve found a place to serve at Chi Alpha–it would be much hard­er for me to find some­thing to do at Min­istry X because they’re so large. But I think I should choose Min­istry X.”

That sound you hear is me slam­ming the door shut on my head repeat­ed­ly.