What happens when you bake a credit card

A. It turns black
B. It shrinks up
C. It thickens
D. It releases a thin smoke that doesn't smell really good
E. It actually retains the numbers on its surface

So much for hoping it would melt into a pretty little puddle on the tinfoil.

Ministry with the cognitively disabled

Today i ran across a link for a ministry i'd never seen before, and am really excited about. It's called Friendship Ministries, and it's a nonprofit that helps churches create a program for teens and adults with mental disabilities. I've been keeping my eye out for this kind of thing for a while, and until this morning i had found very little. Probably many of you, like me, know of someone in or connected to your church who you wish you could minister to better but who just doesn't fit well into your existing programs. Not to mention the fact that if most families with special needs children are unchurched (as i heard a while back), probably most teens and adults with special needs are unchurched too. They, their families, and their caregivers would probably be very excited to find a church that had such a ministry.

I have to admit that I may never become involved with this ministry myself (although right now i really wish i could), and so it feels a little hypocritical to be plugging for them, but I know this or something like it could help a lot of churches and I had to pass it on.

It's gone

For any of you who might notice, my other blog with my old sermons on it is gone. Traffic to it was dismally low, indicating that it probably wasn't doing anyone much good. Realistically, would a person in need of spiritual guidance really take the time to read one of my long sermons? And i posted to it so rarely that probably most of the people who would have benefitted from it would have lost interest between posts. And, after reading an article about the perils of sermon plagiarism, the thought of having my old sermons out there seemed even more needless.

So yeah, it's gone, in case you noticed.

More Content

I've finally made the leap! I've been thinking for a while about adding a third collumn and RSS-ing some of my favorite blogs in it so that visitors here can quickly see what's new there. I figured something that could make my site more usefull and make people aware of some other good blogs couldn't be bad. So check out the feeds on the right, and if you have a suggestion for a good blog to add to the list feel free to tell me about it in a comment. I'm sure i'll get about three zillion suggestions but i figure it can't hurt to ask, right? Anyway, i hope this site helps connect you to what at least a few thoughtful people are saying out here on the web about life and ministry.

Good post at "Out of Ur"

Just thought i'd mention that the most recent post at the Out of Ur blog is really good - it's titled "Success Covers a Multitude of Sins" It talks about how character formation is slow, so a lot of pastors avoid it because it slows them down in the pursuit of tangible outcomes from their ministries. It made a lot of sense, but my question as i read was whether inner character development and external, tangible results can or should be separated. I've thought for a long time that some "results" can be generated by human effort, but that true character transformation will always result in visible, noticeable transformation of the person, the church, and the community. So, will a focus on character transformation really slow us down in seeing results in our ministries, or will it just slow us down temporarily before resulting in even more dramatic "results"? Or are we really meaning "attendance numbers" when whe say "results"? In that case, of course "results" will come slower, but it seems to me that there'll be more fruit in the orchard, even if it's a smaller grove.