Welcome to WLL # 125, the first link-list I’ve composed entirely in HTML. Let me know if renders a little weird on your screen. (Weirder than most weeks, that is!)
- A female senior pastor in the American Baptist denomination is rethinking the concept of pastor appreciation.
- Matt Hafer offers what I consider to be fairly balanced look at that fall/harvest/Halloween ritual of taking the youth group to a hell house.
- Bob Kauflin digs into the somewhat thorny area of local church congregations that add, subtract or modify the lyrics to existing modern worship hymns and choruses.
- Two of your favorites, David Platt and Francis Chan sit down in a very clean room to talk together on video about discipleship.
- You come to church ready to place a $75 check in the offering, but then you decide the music is too loud, so you write “VOID” across the check with a comment on the worship, and place it in the offering anyway.
- In the first of two iMonk links here, Chaplain Mike notes the CNN report that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has removed the web page identifying Mormonism as a ‘cult,’ following the site’s namesake’s visit with Mitt Romney.
- At World Magazine, writer Jamie Dean isn’t too concerned about a Mormon in the White House, because she doesn’t see either candidate as approximating Christian Orthodoxy.
- And over at The Christian Post, they’re announcing that the once popular blog Pyromaniacs has gone political, with multiple posts (six, count ’em) on why the Republican candidate is the better choice. Too bad. I was once a regular reader of Team Pyro, but that was before the Reformed community voted to secede.
- Starry, Starry Night Department: A Christian perspective on the art of Vincent Van Gogh.
- Shaun Groves hits the road as an opener for Mark Schultz and Anita Renfroe (who has to have sweet tea at every stop) and lets the rest of us in on the anatomy of a concert road trip.
- Chaplain Mike at iMonk looks at the music ministry of Ken Medema, who we remember for the song Lord, Listen To Your Children Praying.
- For our music video link this week, here’s an artist I’ve never heard of doing a song I didn’t know, but Shelly E. Johnson’s All Things Beautiful was a delightful surprise.
- It’s been fifty years since Vatican II. Did it move the church in a more evangelical direction? George Weigel comments on the anniversary, in an article that lets me quote the phrase “ecclesiastical parthenogenesis.”
- And after posting that link, we learned that George Weigel made other news this week, being the first speaker at the first Roman Catholic event — not mass — held in the Crystal Cathedral which the diocese has purchased.
- Phillip Longmire has wrestled with personal faith issues and is one of the latest bloggers at Alltop-Christian with his blog Half Baked Lobster. Here’s a great study he wrote on the Antioch church.
- We leave you with a graphic for a sermon series that’s probably being copied in various places. This has been all over the Christian blogosphere, but in case you missed it…
Thinking Out Loud 