Wednesday Link List

Photo: Drew Dyck

A fresh crop of October links! Mind you, they’re all dated September. But they’re new to you.

• Campus prayer focus See You At The Pole turned 24 last week.
• MGM has acquired a 55 percent stake in the film and television production company owned by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, the executive producers behind the Emmy-nominated “The Bible” series.
• The family of Calvary Chapel’s Chuck Smith have launched a lawsuit against the church over distribution of the late pastor’s property, royalties and life insurance; and also elder abuse…
• …Staying with Orange County, CA megachurches, Christ Cathedral, the former Crystal Cathedral, will see a $113M renovation including reworking the glass panes “which create excessive heat and light and bad acoustics” to be replaced with “new, white panels, called petals, that will open at varying degrees.”
• How reading demographic trends should lead to churches asking some serious questions, at a ratio of three questions to every stat.
• Essay of the Week: A response to the purging of Christian-themed and Christian-published books in a California charter school.
• The locations are sometimes called ‘third spaces’ and the ministry style is often termed ‘incarnational’ but in Seattle these churches take many forms.
• ‘Team Soul Surfers’ on reality show The Amazing Race consists of shark bite survivor and Christian author Bethany Hamilton and husband Adam Dirks. While Bethany’s handicap has sparked some media attention for Season 25, the pair finished last Friday in 5th place out of 11.
• Tuition = $0.00 — Ranked #1 on a listing of top Christian colleges, the school operates tuition-free.
• “Every pastor is an interim pastor.” New book deals with leadership transitions and succession.
• Canada’s national television network reports on the rise of The Sunday Assemblies, a network of atheist churches.
• Leviticus births an app as the eScapegoat roams the internet searching for sins to atone for at Yom Kippur. (No actual Halachic atonement implied.)(I like the site URL, escgoat… escape goat… eScapegoat.)
• Preaching Place: Ten things to consider when drafting the introduction to your sermon.
• Missions: If a particular part of scripture is not available in the language of a particular region, English is the next best thing. But all the easy-to-understand English versions of the past fifty years are protected by copyright. So Wycliffe Bible Translators offers fifty open-source, copyright-free Bible stories.
• The “Sinner’s Prayer” is the latest dividing line, brought into focus because of remarks David Platt made that some considered inflammatory, even prompting this response in song.
• 

  Click the image to read about the outcry over the updated design of the VeggieTales characters on Netflix

  Sunday nights at Willow Creek now include The Practice, an 18-month experiment which came out of asking, “What if a church was more like a gymnasium than a classroom? What if the church gathering was a time when we came together to practice rather than just listen?”
• Some Christian radio stations may be “safe for the whole family,” but following Jesus is dangerous. (Wait ’til you see the title of this one.)
• Online congregations can watch rebroadcasts or on-demand. Saddleback had 162 rebroadcasts, one almost every hour of the week, but switched last month to on-demand for several reasons.
• Zondervan author Christine Caine is launching Propel, a digital magazine for women in leadership.
• Last week we noted four reasons why church choirs are dying; this week we’re given nine reasons to keep the choir going.
• If you missed it, last week CT launched a new page, Third Culture with Peter Chin, “a term used by sociologists to describe individuals who don’t fit neatly into one cultural category or another, be it ethnically, racially, or culturally.” Or, as the tag line suggested, the faith of the hyphenated.
• Two weeks ago Pope Francis spoke about resurrection causing one writer to wonder if the Pope believes in the rapture?
• What were the odds? Not only did this blog’s print equivalent, Leadership Journal do a cover story on ‘Neuro Ministry,’ but so did Youth Worker Magazine.
• Yet another Christian film to report, this one opening in select markets on November 7th. As I dig deeper, Wayward: The Prodigal Son seems to have a Mormon connection.
• There are so many ways I could introduce this link; so may different ways you could tag this. Perhaps sufficient to say our children are entering a time of rapidly shifting paradigms.
• John Piper’s four reasons why people don’t open their Bibles between Sundays.
• Jamie Wright is suffering from Post Short Term Overseas Trip Disorder (PSTOTD) and finding it difficult to go shopping.
• Another church does the “reverse offering” thing; this one handing out $500 checks.
• They shall drink deadly gasoline and it will not harm them. Like it or not, there are strange things done in the name of Christianity.
• A company that sells domain names reported last month that .CHURCH was in eighth place among top level domains…
• …Speaking of cool addresses, there’s forgive.me one of many from the Billy Graham association.
• Parenting Place: Carlos Whittaker wants to remember to tell his daughter five things.
• Even pastors sometimes skip over the genealogies. Here’s six directives to slow down.
• In the UK, children under the age of consent were tested for sexually transmitted diseases, without parents being informed.
• …Also in the UK, Catholic and Jewish schools are being forced to teach the tenets of other faiths as part of a religious studies program that allowed them to simply teach their own doctrines.
• Statistically, at most of your churches, the issue of mental illness doesn’t come up in a sermon.
• …Also at Huffington, a pastor pledges four things if he has gay children.
• If you need something for Facebook today, copy/paste or link this one.
• On my own blog this week, getting inside the culture of restaurant-abstinence.
• This time it’s a member congregation of the Mennonite Church USA that’s leaving the denomination over… the usual issue.
• Finally, when successive church building programs go vertical instead of horizontal.

Yes! The links are still also at Parse, the blog of Leadership Journal, a division of Christianity Today. Click here to read there!

For our closing graphic we return to TwentyOneHundred Productions’ Facebook page, the gift that keeps on giving. 2100 is the media division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  (We poached another one from them for tomorrow…I feel like I should make a donation to my local IVCF chapter…) Click the image to link, or follow them at this page.