Wednesday Link List

It’s Wednesday again. Did they settle that election thing last night?

• Kicking things off this week with a couple of links to the blog of Brant Hansen, formerly with WAY-FM, and now with AIR-1… First, a piece from mid-September reminding me that it’s been 15 years since singer Rich Mullins left us.
• The next is the second of Brant’s unintended car-accident-victim theme with a great quote from Mike Yaconelli’s book Messy Spirituality.
• First Person Accounts: Gateway Church of Christ is on the ground in Union Beach, NJ, helping out families impacted by Hurricane Sandy.
• Jim Henderson sits down with The Shack author Paul Young whose new title Cross Roads has a one million copy hardcover first printing.
• Yes, there is life after Willow Creek. A former teaching pastor there, Gene Appel, opened a $55M facility in Southern California on Sunday — see photo below — with plans for expansion.
• Dave Ramsey — the finance guy — offers a list of his top ten fave pastor podcasts, and earns some rather heated comments and suggestions.
• Here’s a website I hope nobody needs, but I am sure somebody might: Quivering Daughters: Offering gentle encouragement for women while addressing emotional and spiritual abuse within authoritarian families.
• Spiritual abuse isn’t confined to women. At the website Calvary Chapel Abuse we read about former NBA player Nick VanderLaan, who stood up at a conference and challenged the wisdom of inviting the somewhat controversial Ergun Caner to speak. He was later arrested by Santa Ana police.  (HT: Julie at BGBC Survivors.)
• At the blog A Poor Wretch (love the name) Seth Fuller does a retake on the sometimes burdensome discipline of daily devotions, and is released into a more joy-filled daily discovery in God’s word.
• With the Christian blogosphere ever in mind, Trevin Wax takes a look at six major changes in blogging in the last six years.
• Christianity Today’s Drew Dyck does a double-header interview with Andy Stanley and Timothy Keller on the subject of church. (Allow about 15 minutes for this.)
• Memo to Rachel Held Evans from Doug Wilson: You got the verse wrong, it’s the husband who is supposed to live in the corner of the roof, not you. (Makes a good book cover, though.)
• A professor at Canada’s Redeemer University says that the more a church blends in to the surrounding culture, the less its chances of growth. “…mainline churches that pursue a strategy of accommodating themselves, and either ‘downplayed, loosened, or abandoned’ things which were in conflict with dominant culture tend to lose members.”
• Worship leader Chris Vacher in Canada has compiled a list of what he believes to be the best new modern worship songs of the year, complete with videos.  Part one. Part two. Part three. A few of these songs run nearly eight minutes long. Do you agree with his choices?
• The Christian rock band Pillar is releasing their first new album in four years.
• Faithfully, month after month, Brad Lomenick continues to provide his Young Influencers List, like this one for October.
• About the opening image: If you’re keeping score, this is actually the second time this year that a drum kit has figured into the Wednesday Link List.

Pastor Gene Appel stands in the brand new auditorium at Eastside Christian Church in Anaheim, California; which opened this weekend. (See item 5 above).