An interesting resource for preachers: thehardestquestion.com.

I have been at those meetings. A group of church people sitting together arguing about an issue, about something that has gone awry. In the middle of the conversation about the awful F-word, someone steps up, the voice of reason, and makes the statement.
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When studying Biblical texts, one of the obstacles I constantly have to deal with is the notion that an indicated author is not neccesary the author in a modern understanding of the word. We don’t know if it was Mark that wrote Mark, and if it was there are probably some add-ons that are not his or hers. For some this sounds like we are dealing with fraud or forgery, someone claiming to be something that he is not. The reality is more complicated than that though.

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At Faith and Theology: Rowan Williams: a letter to a six-year-old there is a story about an answer Rowan Williams sent to a 6 year old.

They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected. Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible.

I saw a link to this website on Facebook and decided to put it here.

Brotherhood Mutual – Church Insurance – Children & Youth.

As a response to Pastor Al’s sermon this morning I decided to translate one section of my Bible blog. The chapter I have chosen is naturally chapter 9 of John’s Gospel, the gospel reading for today. The idea with the Bible blog is to write down thoughts and speculations that arise when I read through the whole Bible, publishing a chapter a day here on iSpeculate.net. I hope my translation is slightly more accurate than Google Translate would be.
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Recently I installed Ubuntu on an old HP laptop, thinking it would be fun to experiment with it. Due to my extensive use of iProducts, and lack of connectivity between them and Ubuntu I have not yet started to use the system as much as I had planned.

However, I have listed few programs that I would like to test out on Ubuntu in coming weeks and months.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus
2. http://inkscape.org/
3. http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/GIMP
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus
6. http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/OOWeb

Laura Wacker Stern writes on Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog about Struggling with leadership “effectiveness”.

The leadership models recommend constant evaluation in order to measure the “success” of an event, sermon series, or outreach ministry. From formal congregational surveys to first-time visitor interviews, we are encouraged to build accountability structures into our day-to-day church operations. Such evaluations alone are certainly understandable, yet they can create a narrow, data-driven measurement of success. Increased participation in worship, new professions of faith, and additions to the membership rolls disproportionately define a congregation’s faithfulness to the Gospel.

Frederick Schmidt writes about theological education in the article:Is It Time to Write the Eulogy?: The Future of Seminary Education. It contains various interesting and important topics, but this part caught my attention.
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