Wednesday Link List

Clicking anything below will re-direct you to PARSE, the blog of Leadership Journal who snapped up the rights to this weekly aggregation of linkage before Salem Communications could even submit a bid. From PARSE, click again on the story you want to read.

• Don’t question your leader. That’s the message this week in several Mars Hill-related (Mark Driscoll) stories like this one…
• …and a number of Lampo-related (Dave Ramsey) stories like this one
• This one is suitable for framing: 25 Bloggers summed up in a single sentence.
• Last Friday, CT documented church demolitions in China with photographs of officials removing the crosses from churches.
• Justin Welby became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to host a live call-in program, but same-sex marriage questions took up 20 minutes of the hour.
• Essay of the Week: Jen Hatmaker writes about parenting troubled teens.  (You might also enjoy the article’s prequel.)
• A recent book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenges the idea that he was an assassin that is sometimes used to justify redemptive violence.
• After the passing of Maya Angelou, many Christian writers hand-picked quotations to join the general tributes; but in this clip, her faith was more pluralistic.
• Even as confused Left Behind followers are thinking the “new” movie is actually the fourth in the old series, the trailer for the remake of the first movie is now out introducing Nicolas Cage in the lead role.
• Must read: Proverbs for people who use social media.
• With over 500 comments, here are some reader suggestions on what an all-Fundamentalist TV station lineup might look like.
• This week we decided to ‘love on’ our friends at the Dictionary of Christianese who examine the phrase ‘love on.’
• Did Fred Phelps have a late-in-life change-of-heart on some issues?
• If there’s a modern worship song that’s unique to your congregation but deserves a wider audience, let the writer know about the Sing It Sunday song contest.
• Should church staff be allowed to start new ministries nearby existing ones? Will they take parishioners with them? A look at non-compete contracts.
• A Christian author feels that Franklin Graham’s desire for leaders to stand up on moral issues is based on a false understanding of God’s holiness.
• A former student of Bill Gothard’s ministry now believes the entire ministry should be shut down.
• Your mileage may vary, but this writer thinks the reason we go to church is not sermon and not worship.
• A 29-year old woman describes her bi-vocation as a Catholic teacher and a tattoo artist, “the best of both worlds.”
• …Meanwhile the creators of the Jesus Tattoo advertisement lost their lawsuit over a rejected ad in a school publication.
• If you know someone who faces discouragement in ministry, this story is for them. (It’s also a reminder that results don’t happen overnight.)
• Jefferson Bethke has a new “spoken word” album. (That was the genre that launched Word Records all those years ago.)
• Faced with a “No Prayer” edict at their graduation, these students simply ignored it.
• One in four Canadians belong to the “nones,” but they are surprisingly religious.
• WLWJS or What Language Would Jesus Speak? The Pope and Israel’s Prime Minister squared off over this recently, and a BBC reporter gets two paragraphs in, but then can’t resist asking if Jesus existed at all.
• If you’re a religion writer, you can write about anybody’s faith, but articles about witches are still off-limits.
• From earlier last month, the video of the 20-ton boulder that just missed a Boston area church.
• Among Brad Lomenick’s latest list of young influencers, was Ben Houston, lead pastor at Hillsong’s Los Angeles location.
• Here are some thoughts for those of you who want to get your church to have a Bible study culture.
• Do not do this: Top 5 worship leader fails.
• Starting July 2nd, Churches in Canada need to be careful about sending unsolicited email, as new anti-spam legislation carries fines up to $10M.
• Here’s the teaser: Holiness, toothbrushes, sex and cars.
• Stewardship Department: Is it time to pray about your cable bill?
• It may be an innocent kid ministry song to you, but to Christians in communist China in 1972, it formed a secret code.
• If you need to brainwash your congregation to tithe more, you could take some tips from this guy.
• Classic video: Check out how this church performs How Great Thou Art.
• More recent video: Malcolm Gladwell spoke at Saddleback in March. Gotta catch up on that, but it’s 66 minutes long.
• Finally, after linking last week to Skye Jethani’s piece about long sermons, we’re wondering if a concentration of Sunday morning services ever show up on Wind Map.

So that’s this week’s list. We didn’t even steal anything from iMonk or Rachel H.E. Tune in next week; same bat time, same bat channel; or visit during the author during the week at Thinking Out Loud, C201, or Twitter.

Hitler’s Pants after the assassination attempt. Some feel that surviving the event only empowered him more. Source: Rare Historical Photos

To P or Not To P, That is the Question

Out of Ur recently reported on a survey which asked pastors about sermon length. Personally, I think some pastors are capable of going 46 minutes, and some are done after 23. You can read that report here.

Frankly, as interesting as the results were, I particularly enjoyed this item someone left as part of a comment. I offer it to you as originally punctuated:

Paid – Professional – Pastors – in Pulpits – Preaching – to People – in Pews…

Prevent – Public – Participation – Promoting – Passive – Pew – Potatoes….

Procuring – Power – Profit – Prestige – for the Prevailing – Parsing – Pastor…

Thursday Link List

Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe chapel in Le Puy-en-Velay, France. Not exactly visitor friendly. Where the pastor’s parking space?

My dog ate my homework.

Seriously, I couldn’t think of anything original today. I keep having this bad habit of posting great stuff in the summer on Saturday and Sunday when nobody’s online reading; and then the well runs dry during the week…

• After he slashed her neck, a woman spent 90 minutes sharing her faith and reading her Bible to her attacker before heading off to the hospital for 20-25 stitches and staples.  
• If your church website says “missions” is a core value, and yet the music ministry budget is four times as big as your missions ministry, your church culture doesn’t line up with your stated values.
• I promise you, you’ve never heard How Great Thou Art performed like they do it at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This is a must watch!!!
• No, seriously, ya gotta watch that video.
  
• We can receive insight into the living by looking at how they treat the dead… This is what happens when the bodies of refugee asylum seekers are left floating off the Australia coast.
  
• Francis Chan is one in a series of eleven high-profile guest speakers in the Follow Me series of Saddleback Sundays. I really enjoyed (needed) this message.
• There’s a goldmine of great worship songs and modern hymns in the catalog of Keith and Kristyn Getty. Enjoy The Perfect Wisdom of Our God.
• Evangelicals tend to look askance at the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books, but here’s a solid argument for accepting the alternative version of The Book of Esther. 
• Twelve stressors that missionaries face pare paired up with questions you can ask to bring issues to the surface.
• Randy Alcorn’s thoughts on the afterlife turn up in Eternity, a 120 page graphic novel.
  
• A Kansas church finds a stash of Bibles in many languages in mint condition… but what they really need is new church restroom.
• Here’s the unofficial results of an unscientific survey in which pastors — albeit subjectively — reported how long their average sermon runs.
• Finally, from our sister blog, Christianity 201, a look at how when we turn back to God, He runs to meet us where we are.
  

Well, we could do this all week, but…