Category: Of Random Interest

The Bathrooms at the Barefoot Cafe

I’m meet­ing a friend at a sweet lit­tle cof­fee shop called the Bare­foot Cafe in San­ta Clara.

I sup­pose if I liked cof­fee I’d think this place was beyond words — but even with a dis­dain for the bev­er­age I admire the ambiance. For my Spring­field friends, it’s like the Mud­house of the Bay Area.

Any­way, I had to com­ment on their fab­u­lous bath­room dec­o­rat­ing idea. They paint­ed the whole bath­room with that black­board paint. There’s a big box of chalk next to the sink — doo­dling is encour­aged.

How awe­some is that?

I have to say that if I ever man­age a piece of prop­er­ty (a Chi Alpha house or a church or some­thing) that I’m going to give seri­ous thought to rip­ping off their idea.

8 Random Facts About Me

Will Phillips asked me to make 8 quirky com­ments about myself, so here goes:

  1. When I reheat foods, I like to set the microwave for a prime num­ber of sec­onds (i.e., 17, 23, 37, etc).
  2. I tend to dis­dain “lit­er­ary fic­tion” — I find that the typ­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion or fan­ta­sy nov­el is just as insight­ful and vast­ly more enter­tain­ing.
  3. I write PHP pro­grams to relax.
  4. I hard­ly ever watch TV any­more — I’m pret­ty much exclu­sive­ly devot­ed to watch­ing pro­grams on Net­flix. My wife and I are cur­rent­ly on a Veron­i­ca Mars kick.
  5. I used to hate talk radio, but now I love lis­ten­ing to Den­nis Prager. I find him very stim­u­lat­ing.
  6. I don’t like the New York Times most­ly because it does­n’t car­ry comics. Seri­ous­ly. I want my Get Fuzzy and my Pearls Before Swine!
  7. I don’t eat the meal before I preach. Maybe it’s psy­cho­log­i­cal, but I feel that the food in my bel­ly makes me slow-wit­ted.
  8. The main rea­son I haven’t writ­ten a book is that I feel that there are too many books out there already — the great stuff is get­ting lost in the flood.

So there. 8 things about me you prob­a­bly did­n’t know.

Advice From A Design Expert

Last night at Chi Alpha we inter­viewed George Kem­bel, co-founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Stan­ford d.school about his faith and how it inte­grates with his pro­fes­sion­al life.

It was lots of fun. Dur­ing the inter­view he shared a help­ful metaphor about his cri­sis of faith as a young adult. “It’s like my baby teeth. They had to go so my per­ma­nent teeth could come in. Some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened with my faith. I need­ed to move from a child’s faith to an adult faith, but what I got in the end was some­thing bet­ter and more endur­ing.”

Any­way, after­wards we were able to talk briefly and I asked him about apply­ing the prin­ci­ples of his pro­fes­sion­al life to min­istry. How would a d.school per­son approach improv­ing the expe­ri­ence of a reg­u­lar or a guest at a min­istry func­tion?

We only talked briefly, but one tid­bit he shared real­ly struck me. “When we’re doing feed­back we find it help­ful to have peo­ple restrict them­selves to three types of state­ments: ‘I like…’, ‘I wish…’, and ‘We should try…’. For exam­ple, ‘I liked it when you talked about x, I wish you had spent more time on that and less on this oth­er point.’ It forces feed­back to be more per­son­al and also push­es it in a con­struc­tive direc­tion.”

I think we’ll exper­i­ment with that and see how it works out for us. It sounds promis­ing.

Any­way, I hope you find his com­ments as inter­est­ing and help­ful as I did.

Kudos Where Kudos Are Due

My pas­tor just got an arti­cle pub­lished in Rick War­ren’s Min­istry Tool­box. Way to go, Scott!

Visualizing the Authorship of the New Testament

Inspired by the folks over at the ESV and at Blo­gos, I sub­mit­ted a data set to the Many Eyes repos­i­to­ry show­ing the per­cent­age of the New Tes­ta­ment writ­ten by each author.

I got my data from Tis­chen­dor­f’s 8th edi­tion Greek New Tes­ta­ment because it was free and pub­licly avail­able — big kudos to them for mak­ing all their work so eas­i­ly usable.







It occurred to me to do this because count­ing the Greek words has always seemed to me to be a bet­ter mea­sure­ment of the New Tes­ta­ment doc­u­ment lengths than count­ing vers­es or chap­ters, which are less pre­cise mea­sure­ments and are con­tin­gent on the whim­sy of church his­to­ry rather than being an intrin­sic part of the text.

Plus I vivid­ly remem­ber the day in sem­i­nary when I real­ized that Luke had writ­ten more of the New Tes­ta­ment than Paul had. It was an epiphany for me.

Revamped Website — RSS funkiness ensued

I just reworked the way this web­site is struc­tured pret­ty rad­i­cal­ly.

I’ve been using Word­Press as my blog­ging tool for quite a while, and I love it. But it was get­ting hard­er and hard­er to do all that I want­ed to through it. I’ve got lots of dif­fer­ent things hap­pen­ing on this site and try­ing to show them all through Word­Press using var­i­ous plu­g­ins and hacks just was­n’t work­ing well.

So I need­ed to change, but I did­n’t want to give up Word­Press.

So instead I decid­ed to use Plan­et as the cen­tral engine for this web­site — it inte­grates all the dif­fer­ent sub-appli­ca­tions I use (Word­Press, Gallery, my quotes data­base, deli­cious).

The big down­side is that my RSS feeds just got changed (and there­by became funky). If you’re a read­er by syn­di­ca­tion (this includes all of you in Face­book land) I apol­o­gize for the sud­den influx of old con­tent marked new.

I’ll be tweak­ing with the site for the next few days, but there should­n’t be a big change in the feeds like that again.

Humility Smackdown

Curt Har­low just found out that I have pub­licly called myself the world’s #1 speak­er on the sub­ject of humil­i­ty.

In case you were unaware, that’s Curt’s tagline. He prob­a­bly even has it tat­tooed in an indel­i­cate place.

So he called me up, “Glen, you are not the world’s num­ber one speak­er on the sub­ject of humil­i­ty and you know it. That’s my schtick.”

I believe my reply can best be sum­ma­rized as “neen­er-neen­er.”

So we have four options:
1) We can each humbly agree that the oth­er per­son is right. This option is appeal­ing, but I just can’t see Curt going for it.
2) I can apol­o­gize for steal­ing his joke and print up busi­ness cards for him pro­claim­ing his hum­ble sta­tus. I’m sure Curt would pre­fer this solu­tion, but he real­ly set him­self up to be knocked when he start­ed the joke. Jokes are made to be expand­ed, refract­ed, and revised.
3) We can rum­ble. Curt’s big­ger than me, so I don’t plan to pur­sue this course of action.
4) I can call myself the world’s num­ber two speak­er on the sub­ject of humil­i­ty in a tone of voice that implies I know that makes me more hum­ble than the num­ber one guy.

And so I choose option num­ber 4. I am clear­ly the world’s num­ber TWO speak­er on the sub­ject of humil­i­ty and I am hum­ble enough to be con­tent with that rank­ing.

Successful Seminarians

Some­where I heard that most of today’s best-known pas­tors did­n’t go to sem­i­nary. As I recall, this obser­va­tion was brought up in the con­text of crit­i­ciz­ing the very con­cept of grad­u­ate-lev­el min­is­te­r­i­al train­ing. The impli­ca­tion was that the time spent learn­ing about the Bible would have been bet­ter spent learn­ing about mar­ket­ing (or the inter­net or psy­chol­o­gy or some­thing prac­ti­cal).

This crit­i­cism did­n’t have a lot of weight for me — I just knew sem­i­nary had been good for me and I con­tin­ued to rec­om­mend it to any min­is­ter who loved learn­ing.

But I real­ized this morn­ing that the alle­ga­tion was untrue. Not only have lots of the big-name pas­tors gone to sem­i­nary, I would say that the major­i­ty of those that we first think of are sem­i­nar­i­ans.

  • Andy Stan­ley — Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
  • Craig Groeschel — Phillips The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
  • Rob Bell — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
  • John Ort­berg — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
  • John Piper — Fuller and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich (Ph.D.)
  • Tim Keller — Gor­don Con­well and West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary (Ph.D.)
  • Rick War­ren — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary

There are sev­er­al who haven’t. Bill Hybels has­n’t gone to sem­i­nary, for exam­ple. I don’t think Ed Young, Jr. has, either. Joel Osteen has­n’t. Mark Driscoll is, I believe, fin­ish­ing up a sem­i­nary degree right now.

But from what I can tell the major­i­ty of nation­al­ly-known Chris­t­ian pas­tors have gone to sem­i­nary.

I’m not say­ing that going to sem­i­nary will guar­an­tee you a numer­i­cal­ly fruit­ful min­istry — but I can guar­an­tee you that it won’t pre­vent you from build­ing a numer­i­cal­ly fruit­ful min­istry, either. And you’ll be a bet­ter per­son for hav­ing gone.

In an age when sem­i­nary gets a lot of knocks, I thought that was worth shar­ing.

Research On Glossolalia

I just read about some cut­ting-edge research about speak­ing in tongues (you may have also seen this referred to as “glos­so­lalia”).

Sum­ma­ry quote:

“We noticed a num­ber of changes that occurred func­tion­al­ly in the brain,” com­ments Prin­ci­pal Inves­ti­ga­tor Andrew New­berg, MD, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Radi­ol­o­gy, Psy­chi­a­try, and Reli­gious Stud­ies, and Direc­tor for the Cen­ter for Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and the Mind, at Penn. “Our find­ing of decreased activ­i­ty in the frontal lobes dur­ing the prac­tice of speak­ing in tongues is fas­ci­nat­ing because these sub­jects tru­ly believe that the spir­it of God is mov­ing through them and con­trol­ling them to speak. Our brain imag­ing research shows us that these sub­jects are not in con­trol of the usu­al lan­guage cen­ters dur­ing this activ­i­ty, which is con­sis­tent with their descrip­tion of a lack of inten­tion­al con­trol while speak­ing in tongues.”

I pass this along because we so often focus on research find­ings which seem to chal­lenge the faith (or more fre­quent­ly on research find­ings which chal­lenge our inter­pre­ta­tion of the faith), it’s always inter­est­ing to spot those that cor­re­spond to exact­ly what we would expect based upon a straight­for­ward read­ing of the Bible.

Thoughts on Worship

A few weeks ago I was dis­cussing wor­ship with David Jones, the leader of Reformed Uni­ver­si­ty Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford, and he put some­thing into words that I’ve been try­ing to artic­u­late for a while, “Wor­ship is both expres­sive and for­ma­tive.”

In oth­er words, wor­ship does­n’t only show what we feel and believe, it also shapes what we feel and believe.

My stu­dents will only hear me preach a giv­en ser­mon once — but they may sing a wor­ship song dozens of times. And if we’ve cho­sen catchy yet super­fi­cial junk for them to sing we’ve done them a real dis­ser­vice.

And that’s why we don’t just sing any old song in our Chi Alpha meet­ings. They have to be catchy while also being pro­found and ennobling. In oth­er words, they have to both sound good and be good.

For what it’s worth, I think that Chris Tom­lin and Ben Pasley (of Enter the Wor­ship Cir­cle) stand out for real­ly hit­ting the mark con­sis­tent­ly. Of the old hymn writ­ers, Isaac Watts real­ly had it going on.