Author: Glen

Roku Rocks

Roku Box BackendFor Paula’s birth­day I bought her a lit­tle device called the Roku Dig­i­tal Video Play­er. Basi­cal­ly, it takes Net­flix stream­ing videos and dis­plays them on your tele­vi­sion.

This is very good for us since we don’t have any tele­vi­sion ser­vice. When we moved into our new place a year ago we decid­ed that our cable bill was 90% waste, so we can­celled it and we watch tele­vi­sion series on DVD through Net­flix or on the com­put­er now.

So I bought this Roku device which takes the 12,000 or so stream­ing videos avail­able on Net­flix (and the 40,000 or so avail­able on Ama­zon as pay-per-view) and lets you watch them on your nor­mal tele­vi­sion.

The Roku box is amaz­ing. It only does one thing and it does it well. The images are crisp, the audio is clear, and the inter­face is very easy to use. In my opin­ion, the videos dis­play much bet­ter than they ever did on my lap­top or our desk­top com­put­er.

If you use Net­flix and ever watch stream­ing videos, you should seri­ous­ly con­sid­er the Roku. It rocks.

And it costs less than a few months of cable — even when you com­bine it with your month­ly Net­flix bill.

Tell Us How You Really Feel, Don…

I was just read­ing an essay by D. A. Car­son, “Wor­ship Under The Word”.

Car­son is, in my esti­ma­tion, one of the great­est bib­li­cal schol­ars in the world today. And I don’t just say that because he loves uni­ver­si­ty min­istry. 🙂 Approx­i­mate­ly one gazil­lion (round­ing up from three hun­dred and forty-four) of his writ­ings are avail­able for free online. They’re worth read­ing. Or at least sav­ing to your hard dri­ve so you can find them when you search your com­put­er using Google Desk­top…

Any­way, in foot­note 39 on page 47 of this essay, he makes a rather point­ed obser­va­tion. I have bold­ed my favorite line.

Per­haps this is the place to reflect on the fact that many con­tem­po­rary “wor­ship lead­ers” have train­ing in music but none in Bible, the­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry, or the like. When pressed as to the cri­te­ria by which they choose their music, many of these lead­ers final­ly admit that their cri­te­ria oscil­late between per­son­al pref­er­ence and keep­ing the con­gre­ga­tion rea­son­ably happy—scarcely the most pro­found cri­te­ria in the world. They give lit­tle or no thought to cov­er­ing the great themes of Scrip­ture, or the great events of Scrip­ture, or the range of per­son­al response to God found in the Psalms (as opposed to cov­er­ing the nar­row themes of being upbeat and in the midst of “wor­ship”), or the nature of bib­li­cal locu­tions (in one cho­rus the con­gre­ga­tion man­ages to sing “holy” thir­ty-six times, while three are enough for Isa­iah and John of the Apoc­a­lypse), or the cen­tral his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tions of the church, or any­thing else of weight. If such lead­ers oper­ate on their own with lit­tle guid­ance or train­ing or input from senior pas­tors, the sit­u­a­tion com­mon­ly degen­er­ates from the painful to the piti­ful.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

I would “heh” more, but appar­ent­ly three times is enough. 🙂

Christianity, China, and College Students

I just read an inter­est­ing arti­cle

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about Chris­tian­i­ty in Chi­na. The empha­sis of the piece is on the dom­i­nance of Reformed the­ol­o­gy in Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty, but I was struck by the com­ments on the role of uni­ver­si­ties in the revival.

And in Chi­na, the place where Calvin­ism is spread­ing fastest is the elite uni­ver­si­ties, fuelled by prodi­gies of learn­ing and trans­la­tion. Wang Xiaochao, a philoso­pher at one of the Bei­jing uni­ver­si­ties, has trans­lat­ed the two major works of St Augus­tine, the Con­fes­sions and the City of God, into Chi­nese direct­ly from Latin. Grad­u­al­ly all the major works of the first cen­turies of the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion are being trans­lat­ed direct­ly from the orig­i­nal lan­guages into Chi­nese.

All of this is hap­pen­ing out­side the con­trol of the offi­cial body which is sup­posed to mon­i­tor and super­vise the church­es in Chi­na. Instead, it is the phi­los­o­phy depart­ments at the uni­ver­si­ties, or the lan­guage depart­ments and the depart­ments of lit­er­a­ture and west­ern civil­i­sa­tion that are the chan­nel.

“The [offi­cial­ly recog­nised] church­es are not hap­py with uni­ver­si­ties, because it is not with­in their con­trol. And their sem­i­nar­ies are not at the intel­lec­tu­al lev­el of the uni­ver­si­ties,” says Dr Tan. “Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty using Chi­nese to do Chris­t­ian think­ing has become a very inter­est­ing move­ment.”

And

If [May Tan] goes to preach at an offi­cial church, she says, “There will be per­haps 1000 peo­ple and 95% of them are over 65. So it’s a sun­set church. But if I went to house church – there would be 1000 peo­ple; per­haps 20 of them in their 50s, and all the rest are young­sters. The old­er ones will all be pro­fes­sors at the uni­ver­si­ties. So these are the future of the church­es. They have reg­is­tered pas­tors, and no access to sem­i­nar­ies: But they have youth, and future, and mon­ey.”

And lat­er on

“Very soon”, said Dr Tan, “Chris­tians will become the major­i­ty of uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents… that could hap­pen.”

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College Ministry and Wolfram Alpha

Wol­fram Alpha is unique among search engines. It does­n’t find web­sites — it finds facts.

And I just real­ized that it has unex­pect­ed util­i­ty for those of us who think about col­lege min­istry.

For exam­ple, you can com­pare UC Berke­ley with UC Davis

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(or Har­vard with CBC).

Or you can get a sur­pris­ing amount of infor­ma­tion on UC Berke­ley.

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Read the Bible in a Year

I shared this with my stu­dents last night and thought oth­ers might be inter­est­ed as well. There are a lot of tools avail­able to make read­ing the whole Bible very sim­ple.

  • BiblePlan.org – has the widest vari­ety of plans and will email you the read­ings for the plan you choose every day. If you only go to one site, go to this one.
  • One Year Bible Online has a face­book app and also has a blog that will give you com­men­tary on every day’s read­ings (this is a very handy fea­ture).
  • Bible Gate­way is the stan­dard site for Bible stuff for most Chris­tians I know. They have a vari­ety of read­ing plans

    , but a unique fea­ture of their site is that they will start the Bible in 90 days on June 1st. That’s almost the exact length of sum­mer break for most col­lege stu­dents — and we had about a dozen stu­dents in our min­istry do it last sum­mer. If you’re look­ing for a way to make your sum­mer fruit­ful, this might be the chal­lenge you need.

  • Bible.logos.com – is, in my esti­ma­tion, the best site for read­ing lengthy pas­sages. They also have Bible read­ing plans on their site (reg­is­tra­tion required).

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If you don’t like sort­ing through a ton of options, just go sign up to get dai­ly emails from the M’Cheyne plan in either the NIV or the NLT.

Hope these help you! awak­en hgh

A Special Mother's Day Message From Mr. T

Mr. T pities the fool who does not know how to treat mama right.

Hap­py moth­er’s day, Mom and Mom-In-Law!

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Cool Video From Joel 2/Acts 2

I just saw a cool video of Joel’s prophe­cy (the one quot­ed by Peter in Acts 2) made by The Work of the Peo­ple. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth tak­ing a minute and thir­ty-nine sec­onds to watch.

I just saw a cool video of Joel’s prophe­cy (the one quot­ed by Peter in Acts 2) made by The Work of the Peo­ple

. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth tak­ing a minute and thir­ty-nine sec­onds to watch.

Texts: Joel 2:28–32, Acts 2:16–21 zel­norm recall don t look now divx

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Dorothy Sayers on Work

Around 15 years ago, I heard Eric Treuil quote Dorothy Say­ers to the effect that the car­pen­ter from Nazareth nev­er built any shod­dy tables. It was fab­u­lous. I’ve been think­ing about that obser­va­tion off and on ever since.

I recent­ly stum­bled upon it again, this time in its orig­i­nal form. It’s found in the essay “Why Work?” by Dorothy Say­ers which appeared in her book Creed or Chaos

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Here’s one of my favorite pas­sages:

over her dead body divx The Church’s approach to an intel­li­gent car­pen­ter is usu­al­ly con­fined to exhort­ing him not to be drunk and dis­or­der­ly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sun­days. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his reli­gion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

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Church by all means, and decent forms of amuse­ment, cer­tain­ly – but what use is all that if in the very cen­ter of his life and occu­pa­tion he is insult­ing God with bad car­pen­try? No crooked table legs or ill-fit­ting draw­ers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any­one believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heav­en and earth. No piety in the work­er will com­pen­sate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own tech­nique is a liv­ing lie.

…

[The Church] has lost all sense of the fact that the liv­ing and eter­nal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the stan­dards of its own tech­nique. She has for­got­ten that the sec­u­lar voca­tion is sacred. For­got­ten that a build­ing must be good archi­tec­ture before it can be a good church; that a paint­ing must be well paint­ed before it can be a good sacred pic­ture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work. purse brite

The whole essay is well worth read­ing and I com­mend it to you.

God's Grandeur: One Of My Favorite Poems

While prepar­ing for this week’s ser­mon I was remind­ed of one of my all-time favorite poems. I won’t be able to use it in the mes­sage, so I thought I’d share it here as a bonus.

It’s God’s Grandeur by Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins

. You can find more of his poems at Bartle­by

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THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.  
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil  
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?  
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  
  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil  
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.  
  
And for all this, nature is never spent;  
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went  
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—  
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent  
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Do you have a favorite poem?

Reaching the Campus Tribes

Last year I had the chance to meet a guy named Ben­son Hines. He took a year to trav­el to near­ly 200 col­lege cam­pus­es to see what God was up to, and one of his stops was Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. We met and talked shop for a while and have stayed in touch via Face­book since then.

Ben­son has just writ­ten a free book called Reach­ing The Cam­pus Tribes

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about his obser­va­tions. His cen­tral the­sis: col­lege min­istry is a whole lot more like for­eign mis­sions than it is like youth min­istry

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.

It’s going to be ful­ly avail­able next Mon­day at http://reachingthecampustribes.com/

. For now, there’s a pre­re­lease ver­sion you can down­load (pdf link, 4.2 MB).

Ben­son also has a blog: Explor­ing Col­lege Min­istry. Check it out.

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