Wednesday Link List

From Reddit: “Had a lady from church ask me to remove an Ouija board from her home because she was afraid to touch it, but I have enough spiritual power to withstand it. So I did. It’s burning in my fire pit right now. Sometimes my job is awesome and hilarious.”

Welcome to Wednesday Link List #323. Lots of listicles this week.

• Breaking: Urgent prayer request for Nabeel Qureshi. 
• If a certain book about courtship and dating has been weighed in the balance and found to contain great liabilities, this author wants to know why the publisher is still selling it.
  
• Dissecting the Pastor: Testing for the 9 traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. “The higher the number of traits, the more dangerous the church leader can be.”
• Music Memories: If you grew up Evangelical in the 1980s and ’90s, you’ll know these six CCM songs.
• A dissenting voice: Five Reasons Why You Might Want to Kill VBS in Your Church. Sample: “We discovered that more than half of our kids coming were children of the volunteers who were working, and the rest were drop offs from uninterested parents.” (And that’s not even one of the five reasons.)
• Not David Letterman’s Top Ten Countdown: More specifically, ten Bible verses prosperity preachers need to stop using…
• …Also at Faith Street: Some historical context: Ten things you should know about Arminianism…
• …On a similar topic, The Gospel Coalition looks at the idea of Reformed Arminians. (Passing the olive branch?)
• KidMin: “Like many other churches, on Sundays our kids are in the literal church basement and we don’t have the option of changing the physical location.  However, we can change the symbolic location: when we commit to getting our kids out of the figurative church basement, we began to notice that the basement starts looking like a pretty appealing place to hang out.”
• 9 Reasons why your church’s pastor is not returning your phone call. 
• When less is more: Two reasons to avoid having too many program options at your church.
  
• Podcast of the Week: Devoutly religious parents never got their daughter a birth certificate or social security number; so even though she was born in Texas, at 19 she couldn’t get a job, couldn’t get a passport, couldn’t enroll in college. She talks to Radio Lab. (Background video, Faith’s cry for help.)
  
• Quotable: A collection of 40 quotes from medical experts and/or medical textbooks which affirm that life begins at conception. 
• Essay of the Week: A Christian Education specialist asks, What do we say to our children when the world doesn’t make any sense? (This is the first of four parts.)
  
• Testimony of the Week: What happens when we’re tuned in beyond our five senses…
• …Related (at the same blog): 23 Things which are real but not material.
• Video mystery of the Week: The new song by John Mark McMillian — which reminds me of Coldplay — is titled Wilderlove, but what does that mean?
• Non-music Video of the Week: A one-minute devotional from Our Daily Bread; great for church websites and Facebook pages.
• Tacoma’s Daniel Herron, age 16, has started The Robloxian Christians, an online church. But not all teens are on the same page…
  
• …A 12- and 13-year old are now in Juvenile Detention after doing over $8,000 damage to a Florida church.
  
• Christianity Today phased out Leadership Journal — the former home of this Wednesday Link List — but now appears to have replaced it with Pastors.com. 
• Finally, because “Faith Healer” on a resumé doesn’t lead a lot of places, Todd Bentley is back at it, this time in Hamilton, Ontario.
  

From Twitter: “Some churchy words for @worldscrabble champs this week, Quinquennial scores at least 30 if you could actually do it!”