Fore!

I don’t normally participate in these meme things, but Scott Aughtmon tagged me publicly at lunch yesterday and so I feel obliged to throw my four cents in.

Four Jobs I’ve Had:
* Lifeguard
* Police Officer
* Computer Services (in a hospital)
* Minister

Four movies I can watch over and over:
* Monty Python & the Holy Grail
* Rat Race
* The Princess Bride
* Arsenic and Old Lace

Four places I have lived:
* Lafayette, LA
* Natchitoches, LA
* Springfield, MO
* Palo Alto, CA

Four shows I like to watch:
* Mythbusters
* Inside the Actor’s Studio
* Battlestar Galactica
* Whose Line Is It, Anyway?

Four foods that I like:
* Chocolate Chip Cookies
* Fried Rice
* BBQ Chicken Pizza
* Hamburgers

Four websites I visit daily:
* reddit.com
* getreligion.org
* Cool Tools
* The Web Comic List

Four things I want to do before I die:
* earn a doctorate
* learn a living language
* write a book
* see Dana succeed in life

Four people I’m tagging: (Paula has been implicitly tagged since this is GlenAndPaula.com)
* Lindsey Hawley
* Earl Creps (he hasn’t ppsted lately and needs a kick to get him started again)
* Will Phillips (ditto)
* Greg Davis

Ringing The Church Bells Via SMS

We’re putting together a text-messaging reminder service for our meetings. Every Wednesday night at 7pm our website will send out a SMS message to the cell phones of everyone who signs up reminding them to get ready for Chi Alpha’s weekly worship meeting. It’s a simple message to help out those students who always mean to come but get busy doing something else and forget until the meeting is partway over:

Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300–300.

I’ve just tested the system and it works pretty smoothly. It’s the modern-day equivalent of ringing the church bells!

The script was really simple to write. If you use a unix-based system with PHP & PEAR installed you could easily adapt it for your ministry:

#!/usr/bin/php
 ?php
//sends SMS announcments to each person in Chi Alpha who wants them

require_once('Mail.php');
$parameters['sendmail_args']='';
$mailer=&Mail::factory('sendmail',$parameters);

$cells['Ferdinand Frosh']='5555555555';
$cells['Suzie Sophomore']='5555555555';
$cells['Jing Junior']='5555555555';
$cells['Sheila Senior']='5555555555';

$headers['From']='you@example.com';
$headers['Reply-To']='you@example.com';
$headers['Subject']='XA @ 8pm';
$body='Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300-300';

foreach ($cells as $cell) {
        if (empty($cell)) continue;
        $email=$cell.'@teleflip.com';
        //echo $email;
        $mailer->send($email,$headers,$body);
}
?>

All you have to do is customize the script (add cell phone numbers and the right “From” and “Reply-To” emails) and then add it to your crontab file with an entry like so:

0 19 * * 4 /path/to/announce.php

(Hint: type crontab ‑e to edit your crontab file).

By the way, it should go without saying that you never add someone to an SMS announcement system without their express permission! If you think email spam hacks people off, then just wait until someone has to pay a text-messaging fee for something they’re not interested in. The depths of their rage would astonish the Hulk.

Geekspeak: the reason I used the PEAR::Mail library was to make sure that the reply-to address was the one I wanted. I just couldn’t make it happen using the PHP mail() function alone. Everything was from “root@my webserver.” Very annoying.

Hymnody

I sent this email to our worship leaders and I thought others might be interested in it. 

Why do we try to incorporate a hymn each week into worship?

The shortest answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook–even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. None of us can escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” (from his introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation).

The same thing is true of songs. There are some great worship songs out today and I want the majority of our worship to feature them. But I don’t want us to just feature them. They have notable weaknesses (pdf link) and so I want the “sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through our worship and keep us rooted.

Having said that, traditional hymn music doesn’t really connect with today’s students. That’s why I urge you to seek out or make up (yes, you are allowed to do that) contemporary arrangements for the hymns that we do sing.

I’ve found a few that illustrate what I’m talking about. Check out http://igracemusic.com/igracemusic/hymnbook/hymns.html

Each one has a sample mp3, lead sheets, tab sheets, and other resources available for worship teams.

Another excellent example is the Dave Crowder band’s recording of “All Creatures Of Our God And King.”

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to explain myself on that for a while but I’ve never actually gotten around to it. 

So there.

Look, I’m On TV! Sort Of. Not Really.

Inspired by Mark Driscoll’s example, I videotaped last week’s Chi Alpha meeting and put it online using Google Video. So now you can just go to google video and search for something like “Jesus at Stanford” and the video will appear.

Or you can just go to the xastanford.org website and see it there. Google lets you embed the videos wherever you want. Pretty amazing, huh?

Not bad for our first try. Now I need to brainstorm about making it more attractive–the blackboard is pretty unappealing. For that matter, I’m not all that appealing–I need a fashion makeover or something. And I need to talk slower. Still, not too bad for our first try.

So why do we record these meetings? I can imagine someone alleging that it’s some sort of egomaniacal thing. As a rebuttal, I can only offer my poor grooming skills. Egomaniacs exfoliate.

So why do we record our meetings? 3 reasons:

1) We want to make it easy for our students to invite their friends to come.

Chi Alphan: “Come check out this meeting. It’s the best thing since sleep. And the wheel. And fire.”
College Pagan: “Wow. What’s it like?”
Chi Alphan: “Your computer on?”
College Pagan: “Yeah.”
Chi Alphan: “Go to google video and search for ‘Jesus at Stanford’ — that’s one of our meetings.” 

2) So our students still be part of our community when they’re doing a study abroad. We’ve been listened to on at least three continents. I’m gunning for the whole globe!

3) I sometimes refer back to previous messages and it’s easy to say, “You know, I talked about that a few quarters ago. I don’t have time to explain all my thoughts on that right now–go get it off our website and ask me any follow-up questions you have.”

Since we were already recording in MP3, video was a no-brainer. We can do both easily, so why not?

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

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.

Footnotes Are Infinitely Superior To Endnotes

I hate endnotes. In fact, I loathe them. They force me to read with two bookmarks and for no good reason. Footnotes are a fundamentally superior way to attribute information and are even better for digressing without interrupting an argument.

Yet more books use endnotes than footnotes. Why?

Jesus Is Quantum

There is no observation without participation. Alternatively: there is no investigation with interaction, there is no analysis without alteration, and there is no looking without changing.

Turning A Phrase

Our neighbor is applying for a job as a professor and part of her job interview will involve lecturing to a class, so last night a bunch of us got together and listened to her practice her Salem Witch Hunt lecture (her expertise is in colonial history). It was quite good. She’s got a lot of knowledge and presents it well.

At one point she mentioned how the confessing witches described in lurid detail their covenant with the Devil which, along with several other intriguing details, involved kissing his butt. Literally. To make a deal with the Evil One they believed you had to apply your lips to his posterior.

And they described this in lurid detail. Lurid.

Being a lover of words, I immediately began to think of ways to allude to the act of kissing demon tush that would fall short of lurid but would nonetheless be evocative. I came up with three:

  • giving the Enemy of All Flesh a hiney hickey
  • kissing the heinous anus
  • smooching the sulfurous sphincter (alternate ending: Satanic sphincter)

Coming soon to a sermon near you…

update: my neighbor has blogged about the evening as well. With a photo. And yes, I am the one who remains nameless. Also, I edited one of my wordplays because I felt a verb that I had chosen for variety was stronger than I had intended to be. There’s a distinction between humor and vulgarity, and I think my original verb was too crass.

Neologisms

Two new words have bounced into my head recently, and I have graciously decided to bestow them upon the world.

  1. Gloth: gluttony plus sloth. Example: “Over the Christmas break many students are afflicted with a strong case of gloth.”
  2. Proctological: the adjectival form of proctologist. Example: “Q: How does this puppet work, anyway? A: You have to get proctological with it.”

Be the first on your block to use them–impress your neighbors!

Students Drive Me Crazy

Today I met with a frosh who is trying to choose between Chi Alpha and another ministry–we’ll call them Ministry X. A summary ensues:

“What I like best about Chi Alpha is the messages. Ministry X’s messages aren’t very good. And it isn’t clear what they believe. And I really don’t like their Bible study. Chi Alpha’s Bible study is much better. And I’ve found a place to serve at Chi Alpha–it would be much harder for me to find something to do at Ministry X because they’re so large. But I think I should choose Ministry X.”

That sound you hear is me slamming the door shut on my head repeatedly.