Wednesday Link List

Out of several hundred potential links, these were some things that got my attention this week. Clicking anything below will take you to PARSE, the list’s owner, a blog of Leadership Journal in the Christianity Today family. From there, click the stories you want to see.

• Essay of the Week: A moment-by-moment close-up look at church persecution in China.
• Those polls about church attendance? It seems not everybody is being entirely honest.
• More than just topical vs. exegetical, this author contrasts the larger nuances of Reformed vs. non-Reformed preaching.
• Infographic of the Week: A look at developments in missions and faith in Africa.
• The California wildfires just missed the home of Christian singer and actor Rebecca St. James.
• A report just released shows America’s largest Protestant denomination experienced a 13% decline in baptisms in 2012, the largest decline in 62 years.
• Here are six highlights from the Patheos live event last week concerning Michael Vines’ God and the Gay Christian.
• CNN offers a list of the eight worst places to be a Christian. (And no, Massachusetts isn’t one of them.)
• A Church-planter who knows reviews BiVo, a new book on bi-vocational ministry.
• You’ve seen top 100 blog lists, right? This list — and I don’t know how you’d compile this — presents the top 100 children’s ministry Tweeters.
• Russell D. Moore would say that if there are not people in your church with tattoos, you’re not doing it right.
• At one point, the militants who kidnapped 200+ school girls claimed they had converted. According to different religions, what exactly does converted mean?
• From a front-row seat, Jamie Wright reminds us that not every pastor’s kid has embraced the faith of his or her parents.
• After discovering he’s an “accidental ghostwriter” for some megachurch pastors, the author asks for attribution. One celeb pastor immediately got the source noted in a subsequent edition, while another initially suggested he get over it.
• If the local theater is now the destination of choice for Christian families on the weekend, you might want to see if your kids can handle Alone Yet Not Alone. (Officially, it’s PG-13.)
• Peter Enns describes how an academic honor takes place. (But not any mention if his compensation package changed.)
• According to the latest Pew Research survey, Hispanics are shifting affiliation from Roman Catholic to Protestant or none. Nearly one-in-four are now former Catholics.
• Technically, this link is a bit of an Easter leftover, but you really need to watch the video this local church produced, and what they did after.
• For the second time in their lives, tragedy strikes the family of an Alpha USA leader.
• An essay on the costs and benefits of Christian higher education: What outcomes do we want for our kids?
• Not-Music-Video-of-the-Week: It’s actually an audio demo of six tunes from a Christian-owned recording studio.
• My link list editor interviews my favorite Australian missional/emergent guru. (That’s guru in a good sense.)
• Are youth groups really driving kids away from faith? A look at headlines, polls and research studies.
• Didn’t realize until this week that Jesus has his own website. Actually, Jesus.org is packed with apologetics resources from people you know.
• For H.G. Wells, denying Christianity also meant putting some spin on one of his earlier writings.
• Sometimes the book you think you’ve never heard of is already on your shelf under a different title…
• …and here’s another one of those Top 50 Christian Books lists, and Top 25 Classics.
• The original Christian in Hollywood, Pat Boone is turning 80.
• Book Review: The Third Third of Your Life. (Maybe you’re there already!)
• In a riverside baptism in Puerto Rico, one man drowned and two were rescued.
• Is it possible the Tower of Babel was built in a different location that we thought?
• Similar but different: RBC, the people who produce Our Daily Bread have another devotional website called Our Daily Journey.
• Undated article online: Does your church have a Watchcare ministry? It allows more transient people to be involved in a church without full membership, even as a survey showed that 71% of churches asked prohibit members from joining other churches. (This was a recent Christian radio topic.)
• Billboard awards Chris Tomlin “Top Christian Artist of the Year” for 2014. For readers here, that’s not exactly news.
• In the UK, The Christian Institute is intervening in the case of a 13-year-old who wants an abortion.
• I’m deliberately burying this one near the bottom because the whole thing is so sketchy, but if you missed it: The article about the Richmond, VA home-school prom and the dads who kicked out the girl who was too cute.
• Yes, it’s okay to wear white pants to church after Memorial Day. Wiki Answers says so.
• Comment #20: Yours to do with as you wish. (If it’s on the net, it’s true, right?)
• On my own blog this week, a suggestion that the last decade necessitates a change in how we sort denominations.
• Finally, if dining out, should you pray when the bread or salad arrives, or wait for the main course?

When not hunting down links for you, Paul Wilkinson blogs at Thinking Out Loud, Christianity 201, and Christian Book Shop Talk.

Wednesday Link List

Regular readers will know this already, but I’ve never quite come out and said it: I find it somewhat snobbish when bloggers publish link lists where anything older than 2-3 days is considered obsolete. A true link sleuth will unearth some great material and won’t be concerned if the post is dated 30 days ago. If it was true then…

• Essay of the week: Church Planting in Montreal. A somewhat typical couple has been living together for ten years but has never gotten close to having any kind of spiritual discussion. And that’s just one challenge. The Quebecois version of Hybels’ “unchurched Harry” is quite different from “Harry” in the rest of North America. 
• Runner up: Remember that feeling when you were young and you came home from school only to find nobody home and you immediately thought everybody had been raptured?  Well, it happens to not-so-young college students, too.
  
• Okay, so that video about how to write a worship song wasn’t the first time Jordan at BlimeyCow waded into Christian music criticism. Or church camp. And different types of churches. 
• While everyone else on Sunday night was watching The Bible miniseries on History, one blogger was putting the final period on his review even as the credits rolled. I guess that way you get to say, “First!”  (The cable channel show beat all the big networks in the ratings.)
  
• If you know people whose Christian faith is characterized by what they are against, may I suggest you copy and paste this article and email it to them.
  
• For people who don’t know how to use a “table of contents” in a book, The Alpha Bible presents the Bible books in… well you know.
• Given the success of The Book of Mormon, a Broadway production by The Foursquare Church denomination on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson probably seemed like a good idea at the time. 
• The idea of gospel tracts probably seems somewhat archaic to most readers here, but the concision of these short presentations actual suits present attention spans. Now 31 Good News tracts are available on audio.  
• Matt Hafer comes out of church leadership hibernation with five ways for pastors to tell if people are truly on board.
• I know I often link you over to Christianity 201, but I really want you all, if nothing else, to catch this video.
  
• In some ways connected to a link we had here last week, a Christianity Today women’s blog suggests a little bit of Christianese is OK.
  
• As someone whose entire wardrobe was purchased at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, this is scary: Pat Robertson allows the possibility that those shirts and sweaters could have demonic spirits attached. (That’s why Pat buys professionally tailored suits, I guess.)
• Once we know the name of the new Pope, the new Pope has to choose a name. Past Pope picks included these. (You remember Pope Urban, right?) 
• How is it possible that this great song by the Wheaton College Gospel Choir has had less than 2,500 views in two years?  If this don’t bring a smile to your face, your mouth is broken. Watch, copy the link and share.
• Jon Acuff finds himself in a prayer meeting with someone who gives a whole new meaning to the phrase too much information. 
• If you missed it January, Shaun Groves shares songwriting secrets for worship composers. But ultimately, “I think worship writers have parted with standard songwriting practices because they’re creating with the live experience in mind. So their priorities are much different from those of a traditional songwriter.”
  
• The people at Thomas Nelson flatly refused us a review copy of this, but I’ll be nice and tell you about it anyway. Jesus: A Theography is a new book by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola combining theology and biography with –[free review time expired]
• …Mind you, that was already better than this guy’s review. “After a while, I finally put the book down and said enough.” (When you accept a free book you do agree to finish reading it.)
  
• Remember Anne Jackson? Well she’s still kicking around, still writing, and apparently this Friday is a special day. 
• Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Lutheran with attitude, shares her struggle preparing to preach on The Parable of the Vineyard. (Open the audio link in a new tab, then click back to follow the text; the whole sermon is about ten minutes.) Actual quote: “…you’d think that I’d totally remember a parable where poop is mentioned.”
• Meanwhile Steve McCoy’s kids, age 12 and 14, are taking sermon notes while he preaches.
  
• On our fifth birthday, we introduced you to Derek the Cleric. We had a tough time that day choosing between two cartoons and thought we’d stretch the written permission we received to do just one more.