disciple, husband, father, college minister
I just learned a cool word: orant
download eagle eye online (on Wikipedia
and Brittanica
).
It means to worship or pray with your hands raised. That’s something I do a lot, but I didn’t know it had a name beyond “raising your hands”.
I don’t expect that I’ll ever have a chance to use this word in casual conversation (and I really don’t think it would be good while leading worship — “I said assume the orant position. Do it now!”), but it’s a cool word to have bouncing around in my head.
Even the opera is getting in on the multi-site movement
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If you don’t know what I’m referring to, the multi-site movement pathology dvdrip download is a trend among churches to use technology to meet in multiple locations at once.
And now the opera is doing it too.
So what do opera and the church have in common that make them both ideal for a multi-site experience?
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and I had an email conversation about a worship team meeting tomorrow. The following is an excerpt.
“Where’s the tamborouine?”
“In the snake bag.”
As I wrote that, I felt like a stereotypical Appalachian Pentecostal. Of COURSE we keep the musical instruments in the snake bag. If our musicians don’t have enough faith to retrieve their instruments, then clearly they’re not worthy.
Alas, the real explanation is a lot more mundane.
The snake is a special type of cable frequently used by bands (such as a worship team). We keep ours in a bag. With our tambourine, since it fits so nicely.
But wouldn’t that be awesome to overhear when you’re visiting a church for the first time?
Dr. Collins, a geneticist who strongly believes in Christ, lectured on “God and the Genome” earlier this week. As a geneticist, he strongly believes in evolution. Watching the Christians on campus respond to his presentation has been fascinating.
A few thoughts:
1) I really wish Christians on all sides of this debate would realize that others are doing the best that they can with the knowledge that they have. As they update their knowledge, they update their views. For the most part, people on all sides really do love God and truth. In Philippians 1:18 Paul makes the point that he even gives thanks for false teachers: “But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.” In like manner, learn to rejoice in those who differ from you on this issue.
2) On the Bible side of things, I wish more Christians knew just how many different options there are for interpreting Genesis 1 — google for “Framework Interpretation”, “Gap Theory”, “Day-Age View”, and “Theistic Evolution” to get started. In the end you’ll likely conclude that some of the options are fairly implausible, but they are all worth considering. For the record, I’m fond of the Framework Interpretation. The idea that Genesis 1 might not be a chronology of creation isn’t some sort of knee-jerk reaction to Darwinian ideas. Way back in the 4th century Augustine was looking at the text and saying, “Something complex is going on here.” For a good summary of Augustine’s perspective, read The Contemporary Relevance of Augustine.
3) On the science side of things, I wish more Christians were open to the idea that scientists have good reasons for the things that they say. There is no vast anti-Bible conspiracy. Scientists are looking at reams of data and trying to synthesize it reasonably. That doesn’t imply that every single claim science makes is proven true in the long run, but it does mean that we should take scientists very seriously when they tell us there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is billions of years old and when we discover that there has been consensus within the scientific community about this for a while now. If you’d like to do a little more digging on the science side, these three websites are pretty good places to start: SciBel
is a fun little website with engaging articles, the Faraday Institute
has some short but stimulating papers on essential topics, and the American Scientific Affiliation has a huge collection of articles from a variety of perspectives.
I’ll wind this down by quoting from an email I sent to my students last night.
1) There are two sources of data for Christians — the Word and the world.
2) Facts from the two realms don’t contradict one another, but the interpretations we use to arrange those facts often do.
3) We’ve almost always got more interpretative options than we realize (this is true of both sources of data).
And while I’m talking about science and faith, I’d like to recommend an article about Galileo’s dispute with the church. The full story is something you’ve likely not heard before: The Myth of Galileo download diamond dogs dvd .
Kevin Kelly, an influential thinker about all things digital, just posted an essay called Better than Free.
It’s quite good.
The gist is that technology is making copies easier and easier to create. In fact, copies of most things are so cheap that they’re essentially free.
In his words:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable…
Well, what can’t be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.
Kelly identifies 8 similar difficult-to-copy qualities which add value to products and services:
Kelly is mostly speaking about business in his essay, but it occurs to me that this is a pretty good checklist for ministry.
A sea of ministry copies is floating around your community. There’s Christian radio (carrying copies of some the best worship music and preaching to be found), there’s Christian television (carrying copies), there are Christian books and magazines (carrying copies of wise people’s opinions and Bible interpretations), and there are blogs that give everyone the opportunity to interact with any number of other esteemed Christian leaders. On top of that, there’s the multi-site church movement which at its heart is about copying ministry.
And this is to say nothing of the ministry clones that abound in every community. You know the ones I speak of. They are the Starbucks of churches, the McDonald’s of ministry. Each of them looks and feels the same no matter what community they nominally inhabit. They could care less whether they are in El Paso or Austin. They will treat Boston and Springfield, MO alike.
In this copy-laden context, what true value does your ministry offer?
There are certainly other things we need to consider than Kelly’s list. Some of them are of exceeding importance, such as whether we’re proclaiming the gospel clearly and faithfully.
But his list still nags at me. It seems to me to be a helpful way to examine ourselves from a purely pragmatic perspective.
I think ministries do well by these standards. For example, most ministries I know are strong at
I think a lot of ministries could use work on the other parts of the list, however.
So to my ministerial friends, I pose this simple question: in a world of copies, what makes your ministry valuable? Is it something that can’t be copied out from under you?
The things I find myself obsessing over are all too often the things that are the most copyable. Did my sermon sound like one of Rick Warren’s/John Ortberg’s/John Piper’s/etc? Does my worship team sound like they just rolled off the Passion Tour/IHOP Prayer Room/etc?
What I should be asking is: if Rick Warren set up on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives? If Dave Crowder decided to lead worship for another ministry on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives?
What’s not copyable about what I’m doing?
Anyway, just some off-the-cuff thoughts inspired by his essay. Read the article ladykillers the download free .
A friend of mine is working at Yahoo and he mentioned that I should really give the special Yahoo program for cell phones a try (just browse to mobile.yahoo.com with your cell phone and you should be prompted to install it). So I downloaded it and he’s right — it’s awesome!
One of its niftier features is that it’s super-easy to upload pictures directly to Flickr from my cell phone. So I’ve just uploaded some stuff I’ve been sitting on for ages.
Anyway, expect to see some more random pictures from my cell phone now and then in addition to the photos Paula uploads to our family gallery
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Last night at Chi Alpha’s weekly meeting we had a guest speaker — missionary Mark Orfila. He’s been serving for over a decade in eastern Europe and has been thinking very deeply about American cultural values and how they relate to the Kingdom of God.
He said a lot of very helpful things last night, but I think the most helpful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):
If I had to choose between tolerance and hatred, I’d choose tolerance hands-down.
But we’re not facing a binary choice — we have a whole range of options available to us. And tolerance can’t be the ultimate good in a society for two reasons: one philosophical and one practical. There must be something higher of which tolerance is a special case, because if tolerance is the highest good then you have a real problem — how do you handle the intolerant members of your own society? If you tolerate them, then you allow intolerance to flourish. If you don’t tolerate them, then you promote intolerance yourself. Either way intolerance sneaks into your society. That’s the philosophical approach. But there’s an even bigger practical problem. Who wants to be tolerated? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tolerance is a negative virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to people. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stigmatize you. It’s a peculiar inverse of the golden rule — tolerance tells us not to do to others what we don’t want done to us. It creates a distance between us and never forces us to cross it.
The problem with tolerance for a Christian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one another; in fact, we are even called to love our enemies. And rather than merely respecting the distance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tolerance is a poor substitute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most situations we should demand more (especially of ourselves).
Thanks for the clear thinking on a crucial subject, Mark.
My fellow web geeks might find this script, php-check download home on the range movie , useful. It recursively scans a directory checking PHP files for syntax errors.
Just copy it somewhere in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and chmod it to 755.
I wrote the script because I edit PHP using Notepad++, so it’s easy for small typos to enter my scripts. I needed a quick way to scan a directory after uploading revised files.
I wrote it in PHP so that those who need it will also know how to customize it.
[php]
#!/usr/bin/php
?php
// php-check version 1.0
// recursively scans a directory for .php files and runs php ‑l on
// them (php ‑l checks for PHP syntax errors)
// revisions at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/2007/10/31/scanning-a-directory-for-php-errors/
if (php_sapi_name()!=‘cli’) {
die(“This utility can only be run from the command line.\n”);
}
$counter=0;
$errors=false;
function scan_dir($dir) {
$counter=0;
$dh=opendir($dir);
while ($file=readdir($dh)) {
if ($file==’.’ || $file==’..’) continue;
if (is_dir($dir.’/’.$file)) {
$counter+=scan_dir($dir.’/’.$file);
} else {
if (substr($file, strlen($file) — 4) == ‘.php’) {
$counter++;
$output=shell_exec(“/usr/bin/php ‑l $dir/$file 2>&1”);
if (substr($output,0,2)!=‘No’) { // skips the “No syntax errors in …” message
$errors=true;
echo $output;
}
}
}
}
return $counter;
}
if ($argc!=2) {
die(“Usage: php-check dirname (usually php-check .)\n”);
}
if (!is_dir($argv[1])) {
die(“Argument must be a directory. The most common usage is php-check .\n”);
}
$counter=scan_dir($argv[1]);
echo “$counter files checked\n”;
exit($errors);
?>
[/php]
This is a quick and dirty script — there are probably some bugs in it. User beware.
If you find it helpful, you might also want to check out scripts like PHP CodeSniffer
I recently submitted a question to the Freakonomics guys for an interview with the MythBusters.
They picked my question as the first one!
Here’s my question and their answer:
Me: Could you describe the brainstorming process that goes into an episode? How far in advance do you begin planning? Who sits in during those meetings?
ADAM: The usual crowd at a brainstorming session is me, Jamie, Alice Dallow (our producer), and whichever researcher is doing the segment we’re working on — either Dennis Kwon or Eric Haven. We also have an on-the-ground executive producer during an official “story meeting.” We usually have one or maybe two of them before shooting a myth, but discussions about stories can happen all over the place, and at any time.
Often, we’ll ask for certain parameters as far as locations or materials, and as we discover what’s possible or not possible, we’ll hone it down to what we’re actually going to do. The show’s researchers are fantastic about finding the weirdest of things and experts, and Alice is brilliant at keeping us on track. The discussions can be like herding cats — there’s a ribald, funny atmosphere, and we’ll range very far from the topic at hand.
Planning can take anywhere from a month to a day or two, depending on the schedule. We’ve had critical locations fall through at the last minute, and needed to turn 180 degrees on a few hours’ notice. We’ll also flag difficult stories as far in advance as we think necessary. Some things, like getting permission to film at Giants Stadium for the Jimmy Hoffa story, have taken the better part of a year to work out.
Then there’s the discussions that Jamie and I have. We’ll often take a difficult problem home, think about it overnight, and maybe discuss the problems we see in it while driving to a location. We also play devil’s advocate with each other — if one of us has a good idea, the other will poke as many holes in it as possible, and in this way we try our best to shake out any problems before we hit them.
JAMIE: This is, believe it or not, the most fun we have on the show. There is no underestimating the thrill of a big catastrophe or explosion; but if you really want to know what gets us going, it’s the brainstorming. Once a topic has passed muster, some basic research has been done by our research team, and we are down to nutting it out, Adam and I swing into action — sort of. Usually we go home first and think about it overnight, and then come in bursting with ideas. We set up in front of a dry erase board, and lay out any solutions we came up with by ourselves.
Amazingly, as much as we are of different temperaments, we quickly spot the best solutions and chip in to flesh the approach out. It becomes like playing Ping-Pong with ideas. Sometimes it gets so intense that there is no time to complete sentences; it becomes a bunch of gesticulations, some pieces of words or phrases, and then, when we come out on the other end, the approach is fleshed out. We call it the “MythBusters Mindmeld.” To anyone listening, it is gibberish, but it allows us to plow through a huge amount of designing in no time (which is what we have a lot of on the show).
At a Chi Alpha conference in St. Louis I just heard Dick Schroeder use an interesting phrase to compliment someone — “he puts ‘us’ before ‘me’.” Here are some off-the-cuff and unpolished thoughts inspired by that phrase:
“Us before me.” What a beautiful phrase to describe servant leadership.
“Us” puts the leadership into servanthood: “us before me” leads to the overall good of the group whereas “you before me” can lead to the detriment of the group.
To be clear, the Bible does command us to “in humility consider others better than ourselves” (Philippians 2:3). Doesn’t this lead directly to “you before me”?
Yes. It does. But the practical question for me as a leader is how to be self-sacrificial in a way that honors my obligations to those I am serving. And I have learned that there is a healthy way to prioritize others and a destructive way to prioritize others.
To serve as fully as possible there is a certain amount of self-maintenance that must take place. Boundaries must be established and maintained. Recreation and sabbaticals must be incorporated. Growth and learning have to take place.
All of these things are self-serving. They require us to say no to others and yes to ourselves. At times, we wind up saying “me before you today because I want to be able to serve you tomorrow”.
But at the same time, all of these things flow from a mature understanding of “you before me” — putting our followers’ long-term good above their short-term desires. For an organization, a leader who says “us before me” builds strength. A leader who naively/hyperspiritually says “you before me” leads the organization to implosion (and likely to high leadership turnover).
Clearly, there is the potential for “us before me” to become a pretext for putting “me before you.” The antidote is to keep expanding our definition of “us”. Whenever we begin to suspect that our “us” is too comfortable, we need to redefine the group we are serving in a larger way, and continue to put “us before me.”
And so a big thanks to Dick Schroeder for giving me my new favorite phrase: “us before me”. It will probably be my favorite for at least a week. 😉