disciple, husband, father, college minister
Living in the California Bay Area, my thoughts turn periodically to the Big One.
Recently I was wondering where the worst places to be in an earthquake would be (other than in open-heart surgery or something else that is already life-or-death).
Quick thoughts that I had:
I’m sure there are lots of more horrible places to be in an earthquake, but these are the ones that strike particular fear into my heart.
Duane Chapman, aka Dog the Bounty Hunter, was arrested earlier today for violating Mexican law while tracking down a wealthy serial rapist.
I have to confess that I’m bummed. Bounty hunting is a noble profession that helps our legal system function more effectively, and Dog was always entertaining. Plus I just learned that he’s the kid of an Assemblies of God missionary (Barbara Chapman, whom I never met and who is now deceased) which gives me a certain kindred affection for him.
I understand that he broke Mexican law, but surely there are higher priorities for the Mexican legal system than arresting someone who helps catch fugitives. Almost anything rather than devoting effort to extraditing an American bounty hunter for catching a vile man who had done despicable things.
The one thing about the reports so far that really puzzles me is that the Chapmans evidently broke bail themselves. Maybe they know something about the Mexican legal system that I don’t, but given their line of work that seems pretty stupid.
I’ve been thinking about LifeChurch.tv lately (check the Wikipedia article on them).
In case you’re not familiar with the church, it’s one of the best-known examples of the multi-site church movement. At present, Life Church uses live video feeds to simultaneously have the same service in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee. They also stream the service over the internet.
They both start new churches and acquire existing churches (that’s their language, not mine. They are very clear that they are not proposing mergers — they are proposing acquisitions — listen to Kevin Penry). If you’d like to be acquired you can sign up online ask the dust divx movie online .
One thing I want to praise them for: they make their resources available online for free. They’re clearly very Kingdom-minded.
But something about LifeChurch’s approach worries me.
I’ll explain what it is after some necessary disclaimers:
Here’s my concern: if LifeChurch’s philosophy becomes the norm (an excellent test of the soundness of a philosophy) then we lose something vital to the health of the church.
Let’s say LifeChurch continues to grow and spreads into 10 or 15 states. They reach 100,000 in aggregate attendance. 200,000. 500,000. 1,000,000. These numbers are not unreasonable — multi-site churches seem to be scale-free networks and thus will exhibit the winner-take-all phenomenon. The largest multi-site will be about twice as large as its next-greatest neighbor and so on down the line.
In effect, LifeChurch (or someone like it) will become the Wal-Mart of churches soon, and just like Wal-Mart the overwhelming nature of their dominance will be surprising and will take a while to sink in. And just like Wal-Mart, that will bring some good and some bad along with it.
What happens when the primary leader of the American gigachurch lapses into stupidity, heresy, or moral failure? How does that affect Christianity in America?
This isn’t an unrealistic concern — evangelicalism has a history of each of these blunders. And the higher-profile a person is the more prone they seem to be to falling into one or more of these.
As things stand now, when Joe Preacher on television has a moral blowout that church is destroyed but the rest of us rock on, saddened but unaffected.
Imagine a single church which contains 35% of all evangelicals in America (and a handful in England and Australia) having the same blowout. It’s a completely different story.
That’s bad enough, but what I really worry about is the lack of ideological diversity such an arrangement would bring about. Evangelicals are already prone to sheep-like behavior, but at least we currently hang out in different flocks.
When we create an evangelical pope who has far more direct influence over his organization than the Pope has over the Catholic church, we will lose something vibrant and vital about evangelicalism. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose a vital part of the gains of the Reformation.
LifeChurch (and the entire multi-site movement) have a lot to offer and are doing some wonderful things. On the whole, I have high praise for them.
But it is not unqualified praise.
Yesterday I mentioned some of my least-favorite entertainment, today is the opposite-entertainment I adore.
Radio: Dennis Prager is the man. He’s smart, reasonable, and thinks out loud in an interesting way. If your local radio doesn’t carry him then it’s your loss. Honorable mentions: Ira Flatow and Hugh Hewitt.
Television: Mythbusters is clearly the best show in the history of something. I just can’t decide whether it’s the best show in the history of the universe or the best show in the history of television. Honorable mentions: Dog the Bounty Hunter, 24.
Books: Steven Brust is one of the greatest authors of our generation. If you like novels about assassins with sarcastic lizards, that is. Honorable mentions: Terry Pratchett, C. S. Friedman
Music: Rich Mullins rocks the free world. Or rocked the free world. Or whatever. He’s dead but his music continues to inspire me. Honorable mentions: U2, Men Without Hats
Social networking sites like the Facebook often ask you to list your favorite books, movies, and music. I understand the reasoning they’re using, but sometimes I wonder about what people really dislike.
Lest ye wonder the same about me, here’s my list of entertainment I could do without:
So that’s my anti-profile. You may now judge me by the things I don’t like.
I just learned that one of my friends is being recruited by the Facebook.
I really hope this works out, because then I’d be the coolest person in campus ministry by dint of that association.
Picture me at the next Chi Alpha conference: “Pardon me, I need to take this call — my caller ID says it’s from Facebook.com Headquarters. I’ve been urging them to rethink the way they handle groups and I think the conversation we had at a BBQ last week is finally bearing fruit.”
Now all I need to do is get an alumnus into Google…
Georgetown University just kicked six campus ministries off campus.
Campus Ministry Removes Affiliates — The Hoya (campus paper)
Georgetown Rejects Evangelical Groups — Inside Higher Ed (college news blog)
Chi Alpha was among the groups banned. Pray for God’s peace and wisdom to attend the leaders of the group as they decide what to do next.
At Stanford we are fortunate to have a very strong relationship with the Deans for Religious Life. However, the news from Georgetown is a reminder that this isn’t the only possible state of affairs.
Paul was very wise when he reminded Timothy to pray for his imperial overlords.
“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”
1 Tim 2:1–2, NIV
I often tell students that this is the foundation of a separation of church and state. We want the government (and any other bureaucratic bodies) to leave us free to worship without onerous oversight or regulation — because external involvement never works out to our advantage in the long run.
In any event, my prayers are with those just booted from Georgetown (and with the Chi Alpha folks in particular as several of them are close friends).
A friend recently asked me what the internet was. Evidently there are some strange theories floating around out there, such as the one Jon Stewart mocks in this clip:
So I gave her an explanation and she said she thought some other non-technical friends might appreciate it, so here it is.
Your computer has a few key components — a CPU, a hard drive, RAM, and an Operating System. Everything on your computer is completely obedient to your Operating System.
If you have two or more computers in your house, you can set up a network between them. When you set up a network, you’re basically adding additional components to your computer. But these additional components are obedient to different Operating Systems than your own.
So your Operating System has to ask the other computer’s Operating System for permission before it does anything like read a file from the other computer’s hard drive.
To set up a network, you need to tell the computers two ground rules: what “language” to speak with one another and how to find other computers on the network.
The Internet is the largest network of computers ever created. There is a standard language (TCP/IP) and a standard way to find other computers (the unique IP address that every computer on the internet is assigned).
Whenever you log in to a wireless network, for example, you are assigned a temporary IP address that any computer on the internet could use to talk to you. Permanently-connected computers such as webservers get permanent IP addresses.
So when we talk about the internet, we’re really talking about every computer in the world that has a legimitate IP address and knows how to talk to other computers using TCP/IP.
As a language, TCP/IP is too generic to be useful for most of the tasks we are interested in. So there are additional dialacts called “protocols” which computers can use to do things like view web pages.
To view web pages, computers talk using HTTP — Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That’s what the http:// in front of a web address is all about. To upload or download files computers use FTP — File Transfer Protocol.
There are a lot of different protocols.
So when you type http://news.google.com/index.html into your browser address bar, what’s really happening is that your Operating System connects to the Internet using TCP/IP and asks a more significant computer what the IP address of news.google.com is.
Then it uses HTTP to talk to the Operating System of the computer at that IP address and asks for permission to read the file index.html. The remote Operating System uses HTTP to answer “Sure” and then passes the file along. Your computer then displays the file in your browser.
And that’s essentially what the internet is and how it works.
A clever Chi Alphan noticed that the Facebook now supports global groups. So they set up one titled: XA- CHI ALPHA WORLDWIDE ‑XA (I don’t know if that link will work or not — I took out the school prefix)
So Chi Alphans worldwide, unite!
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.