Wednesday Link List

So, if I go to see one of the many faith-focused movies currently running, can I skip church that weekend? While you ponder that, here’s this week’s link-o-rama:  Clicking anything below will take you to PARSE, the link list’s benefactor.

• A pastor reflects on being the one succeeding David Platt, even though Platt was never there. The downside of video preaching.
• The most interesting thing about Thom Rainer’s late March list of Twenty of the Most Influential Evangelicals in America was the ongoing suggestions and amendments that appear in the comments.
• So…did Noah actually preach (as in the movie) or did his actions speak louder than words?
• Right now, John Hagee’s Four Blood Moons is a huge bestseller in the Christian book market. But author Mark Hitchcock does not think the coming eclipses are prophetic markers.
• Last Thursday a New York Appeals Court overturned a 2012 ruling which now leaves schools unable to rent space to religious groups in NYC.
• Imagine having access to everything Billy Graham ever preached, from 1941 to 2006, typed, underlined and marked with his handwritten notes, for reading, printing, downloading and keyword searching. Now everyone can have free access.
• Essay of the Week (1): A university English teacher — who also happens to be the daughter of Christian singer Ray Boltz — wrestles with the phrase, “the agony of mothers.”
• Joni and Friends has released a new book for the fathers of children diagnosed with a disability. Read a free sample “Courage When There Are No Answers” the first chapter of Another Kind of Courage.
• For Rachel Held Evans, the World Vision thing was the last straw. Her article, questioning her future commitment to Evangelicalism got nearly 900 comments. On the weekend, she moderated her extreme response…
• …and perhaps World Vision Canada wasn’t more tolerant, at least according to one former employee’s story from six years ago…
• …Meanwhile, the blog Stuff Fundies Like goes a bit off-topic in order to send a goodbye letter to a formerly sponsored child.
• Unless you’re prepared to spend big bucks, moving forward, you might not get as much mileage out of your church Facebook page.  (For UK readers, would that be big pounds and kilometerage?)
• In addition to all the other changes he is making, Pope Francis is reforming the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank aka “The Institute of the Works of Religion.” (The name of the place that has my savings account pales in comparison.)
• First, the Bishop of Bling, then there was the Archbishop of Atlanta. (Alliteration always adds a little.)
• Are you reading this in the popular Firefox browser? If so, you might want to read this.
• Finding our way out of a trap we all fall into: Moving from Churchianity to Christianity. (Our first link to a writer in Ecuador!)
• Remember that line in The Jerk where Steve Martin screams, “The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!” Well, the new Top 300 Ministry Blogs list is here. (Wait, I’m number what? That can’t be right.)
• It’s getting to be a rarity to read an album review, but this one thoroughly covers the worship ministry of Paul Baloche and his new live recording.
• A different perspective on the issue of praying before everything from municipal to federal government meetings. What if it was this prayer that was in question?
• Analogy Avenue Archive: Ten things your spiritual life and woodworking have in common.  (Be sure to read part two.)
• Oh my! A church-based mixed martial arts club? Teaching cage fighting to youth group kids? A pastor-vs.-pastor fight club? Check out this forthcoming film.
• I couldn’t figure out why the Easter Sunrise service was at 6:15 this year, but I guess if Easter is later, the sun rises earlier. Check out the time where you live.
• So you’re a young student in hermeneutics class, and the prof says, “…and whatever you do, don’t ever go to the Bible to find a text for Sunday’s sermon.” Wait! What?
• An Oregon mother was found guilty on all seven counts for the beating death of her four-year old son she thought was gay.
• A few books have noted that the average church reflects feminine tastes. Here are seven ways to get the men in the church more on board.
• Billy Graham soloist George Beverly Shea once sang, “Someone slipped and fell/Was that someone you?” I think of that line whenever I hear of another high-profile pastor brought down by moral failure. On Monday, one writer offered ten responses.
• Internet tracking organization Technorati’s fastest rising religion blog this month is deCompose by novelist Mike Duran.
• Most readers here know what happened to Growing Pains child star Kirk Cameron, but for kid actor Jeremy Miller, life went a different direction.
• Essay of the Week (2): Zondervan author Tyler Blanski guests at a Catholic website on the topic, Why Did God Make Eve? (Glad He did, though.) (God, not Tyler.)
• A nominal church attender might either lean in to faith, or lean away. How do we keep them from joining “the nones?”
• Religious identity and national identity blur, creating problems for over a quarter of a million former Soviet refugees in Israel.
• In another ‘Holy relics’ analysis, a look at the Christian flag. (A teaser for this piece suggested letting your eyes cross in church and seeing the Christian flag blend into the U.S. flag.)
• Here’s another list of misused Bible verses, this one coming with the observation that a Twittered verse “often leads us down the wrong path because it reinforces an artificial structure on the text.”
• Guest Speaker Sunday: Here’s eight things the guest speaker would like from the host church. Dress code, yes. Internal politics, no.
• Artist/Video of the Week: The JJ Weeks Band featured recently on this K-LOVE video.
• Back to the Noah movie, one reviewer wrote: “As frustrating as anything on display is the script’s complete abandonment of the animals as a dramatic element.”
• I think I left this one off a few weeks ago: A theory on the reasons behind the increased divorce rate among Southern Baptist couples.
• From the mind of Jon Acuff: Three things that are okay to do in church, and not okay to do elsewhere.
• Tim Challies imagines the type of Bible he would create if it were left up to him. There would be a Q&A section at the back.
• I had a great time on Saturday morning watching a time-shifted simulcast conference of Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend speaking on the principles of the Boundaries series of books.
• Want more links? This week on my own blog I looked at the top Canadian Christian blogs.  Also there, my recurring rant about interdenominational Good Friday services, and our own April Fool’s news story.

Paul Wilkinson’s writing the rest of the week is made possible by readers at Thinking Out Loud and at C201, and by viewers like you.

Above: After a forever away from posting something new, Sacred Sandwich awoke as from a giant sleep.

Below: This is from the Abandoned Pics Twitter feed: @AbandonedPics and is a wooden church somewhere in Russia. 

Click the respective images to link. (Or the irreverent ones.)

Link List Themes Revisisted

Yesterday’s link list was posted just before 6:00 AM EST, and as of 11:00 PM EST, while there had been many page views representing hundreds of unique visitors, there wasn’t a single comment.  Actually, that’s pretty standard here, but this was a particularly ‘heavy’ list of stories and I’m wondering if people are missing the larger themes:

• Tennessee teachers aren’t being told they can’t pray, but they can’t pray in public, as (my words now) they are in an advocacy role and would be setting some kind of example that apparently is a negative example.  Can you say, “slippery slope?”
• A teen leading the charge for social change is told he’s not exactly doing “wrong” or “bad,” but he should focus on preaching the gospel.  Haven’t we spent the last several decades deriding those who preach the “social gospel;” and while so criticizing them from our lofty theological perch, we did absolutely nothing to deal with poverty and injustice. 
• A pastor — who may have crossed a line with this — invites another pastor to a seminar where the purpose of the seminar is stated from the outset as being to discuss the things on which we disagree and perhaps tend to sweep under the doctrinal rug.  While it’s a bit on the edge, it would finally clarify once and for all if this other pastor’s position on the trinity is the deal-breaker some of us believe it to be.  But it will never happen at all if certain conservative reformers simply boycott the seminar.
• Mexico’s proposal on marriage could be the germination of something that is, long term, more insidious than the adoption of same-sex marriage.  It makes marriage modular, reinforces serial monogamy perhaps, but with an air that is more reflective of polyamory.  With simple divorce, there was always an opt-out if it didn’t work; but with Mexico’s proposal, the termination of the marriage after 48 months is really the default setting.
• Switzerland adopts anti-tolerance.  Again.  The message is clearly, this is our country, our customs; if you don’t like it, leave.  Without commenting further, I wonder where this — or a backlash against it — leaves both the Swiss and more tolerant North Americans in the next 10, 20 or 30 years?
• Isn’t the Texas oil-change shop’s John 3:16 verbal coupon idea enough to set Christianity back about a century?  If you have to have a license to work on cars in Texas, they should also require a license before you can go public with wacky evangelism schemes.
• Does it bother anyone that Cathleen Falsani wrote 200 pages about Justin Bieber’s faith without ever sitting down with either JB or his mom?  Sure she has seven pages containing 211 footnotes, but…

Anyway, these are the big picture items from yesterday.  IMHO anyway.  So are TOL readers simply passive on these things, or were you just too busy to catch the links?