Category: Of Random Interest

Good News/Bad News

When I’m not out preaching, our family attends Pathway Church in Palo Alto. Pathway is an 8‑month old church plant. Good things are happening there–a Mormon lady converted last week, for instance.

But anyone who’s ever started a ministry from scratch knows that some days are just painful to be a part of. Things go wrong that you would never imagine could go wrong.

This was one such day.

  • Good News: guest shows up based entirely on our internet ads.
    Bad News: while chatting with the pastor before the service she is struck solidly in the neck by a frisbee and has to go home, take some medicine, and lie down. 
  • Good News: I brought five students from Stanford to check out the church.
    Bad News: every single one of our regulars who wasn’t helping missed church today. Every. Single. One. During worship it was me and the students in the congregation.
  • Good News: the songs were really cool songs.
    Bad News: two of the microphones stopped working between the sound check and the start of service and somehow the keyboard became possessed by a demon. At least, that’s my best guess. It sure moaned as though possessed.
  • Good News: Scott’s sermon was thoughtful and well-presented.
    Bad News: the translation that was shown on the screen was different from the translation Scott was reading despite being purportedly the same (further investigation reveals there are two editions of the New Living Translation–our pew Bibles are the first and our computer Bible is the second–who knew?). The effect was disconcerting and distracted from an otherwise excellent message.

I’m not one to hyperspiritualize things, but I see a correlation between the success our church has been enjoying lately and all the “nobody’s fault” glitches that popped up today. The Bible teaches us that we have an enemy, and sometimes he leaves scat behind.

This is clearly going to be one of those services we spend a lot of time laughing about in a few years… especially the frisbee in the neck bit. How random is that?

Python Eats Alligator, Pops

This just in from National Geographic: pythons eat alligators and get really bad indigestion xxx movie . “Clashes between alligators and pythons have been on the rise in the Everglades for the past 20 years. Unwanted pet snakes dumped in the swamp have thrived, and the Asian reptile is now a major competitor in the alligator’s native ecosystem.”

Lay Leadership Summit

Every year our district sponsors an event called The Lay Leadership Summit. It’s a big conference designed to help church volunteers do their jobs better. There are about 50 learning tracks (each with four workshops) ranging from children’s ministry to using the internet effectively to using lighting and sound systems. We, of course, sponsor a college ministry track.

I mention all this by way of introduction to mention two people I interacted with this weekend: Dan Betzer and John Abela.

Dan Betzer is a legend in the Assemblies of God–he’s an incredible speaker, a missions fanatic, and an extremely successful pastor. He’s also a bit of a hero of mine (his wife, incidentally, blogs).

Anyway, I learned two things about him this weekend:
1) he once lost his ministerial credentials for seven years for flouting the hierarchy’s rules
2) he’s such an introvert that he keeps his office at 60 degrees so that people feel too chilly to hang around and chit-chat

For the record, he and I have never had a conversation. I gleaned one tidbit from his sermon and another from a friend of his.

The second person I met was John Abela. John is a former core member of the phpBB2 team and runs the most popular conglomeration of Assemblies of God websites in the world. I am told that his total bandwidth exceeds that of all the national Assembly of God websites in every nation combined.

That tickles me. Many of our leaders attempt to lead by limiting information and don’t seem to realize that’s no longer possible. John has effectively done an end run on a ton of stupid rules in the Assemblies of God and because he’s a layperson no one can stop him–he’s got no credentials for them to revoke. I love it.

He mentioned that he gets a phone call from some AG official or another about once a week asking him to stop doing what he’s doing. Even allowing for conversational hyperbole, that sounds about right. He’s making people nervous enough that we’ve even had resolutions at General Council prompted by one of his sites.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I think John’s a cool guy and that he’s making our movement better by using the web to help people. Kudos to him.

What All Religions Have In Common

At a three-hour Stanford Associated Religions meeting last Friday I finally discovered what all religions have in common: an aversion to meetings, particulary the long and bureaucratic sort. Especially meetings in which the rules fall like manna from heaven. For instance, the Office For Religious Life (an office I generally and genuinely enjoy working with), decided that last year’s “Unified Christian Gathering” was deceptively titled because the Mormons (and a few other groups) were not invited to help plan the event and so now we have new rules governing event titles. And for a few minutes there I thought we were about to be required to clear all guest speakers with the student activitities staff. Yeesh!

Serenity

I went to go see Serenity with two students tonight.

It was really, really, really good. The audience burst into applause when it was over.

It was funny. The humor was MUCH more amusing than most comedies manage.

It was suspenseful. One girl in the audience screamed at one particular tense moment.

It was well-written. Very well-written. Every character was unique, made sense, and needed to be there.

I loved this movie.

A Dartmouth Double Standard?

Noah Riner, the student body president of Dartmouth, told incoming students that they should focus on developing morally as much as academically and that Jesus can bring moral transformation. A ruckus ensued, with the apparent justification being that student presidents shouldn’t use such occasions to promote their own idiosyncratic views of the world. 

Oddly enough, a similar ruckus does not seem to have followed the then student body president’s call for the legalization of pot two years earlier.

Perhaps the issue isn’t that Mr. Riner propagated his own views, but that the message of Jesus still makes people uncomfortable after two millenia.

Just a theory, mind you.

T‑Shirts On Campus Today

While tabling on campus today I saw two t‑shirts that tickled me. The first was a Che Reagan t‑shirt. The shirt is delightfully ambiguous. Side note: the Che Jesus t‑shirts just don’t have that same vibe–the beret is just too much. The other was a Kerry/Gore t‑shirt. Kerry/Gore? What? They were never even running mates. It was Gore/Lieberman in 2000 and then Kerry/Edwards in 2004. I’m sure the shirt was supposed to be some sort of statement, but I can’t for the life of me figure it out.