Integrating Missionally

My FL Fan Wife

I’m the luckiest man alive because I’m married to the greatest wife around. I know many men say that and believe it. I just know it’s true.

When I was in college, I had a set of priorities that governed my life:

1. God
2. Sports
3. Food
4. Women

And they were in that order. I was looking for a Godly, athletic woman who could cook. My reasoning was that I couldn’t live with the first three but could the last one. When I got to seminary, I found her, and was able by God’s grace alone to marry Brenna. (I out-punted my coverage in a big way!)

One of my desires the past couple of years has been for God to lift her up in due time for the faithfulness and obedience to God that she has lived. Since 1993, she has led children’s ministries in four states (Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, & Delaware). She has led those children’s ministries in traditional churches, contemporary churches, missional churches, small churches that rent their facilities and large churches whose facilities were built before she was born. She has served as a bi-vocational children’s minister and a full-time paid staff person. She has made a huge difference in the lives of parents and kids every where she goes. In addition to that, she has served in the public school system, in church-based child development centers, and corporate child development centers, including starting one at a church where she was on staff. In addition, she taught a college class on children’s ministry at a small Christian college in Alabama.

I promised her that before I got any more schooling after my Doctorate, she could work on hers. She has been granted entrance into a PhD program in Education and we’re trying to get the funds for her to start. I so want her to be able to work on that if she chooses.

She has written an illustrated children’s book – we’re waiting on the illustrations to be completed. She’s also been invited to write a chapter in a forthcoming children’s ministry book and has had a couple of ideas published in Children’s Ministry Magazine.

She is a smart lady with a great mind for children’s ministry, learning styles, and family ministry. She would do a great job if you ever needed someone to consult with you on children’s ministry.

All that to say that right now, she has a great series of posts on learning styles, and learner-centered education. Take some time to check these out.

I know, I am publicizing my wife; it’s what a good husband should do, right? Well, quite honestly, I think she’s better at this ministry thing than I am. She has strengths and capabilities I don’t. She has some weaknesses, one of which is that she’s a big Florida fan, as noted by the picture. But she has a great passion for helping parents and their children develop in their relationship with each other and with God. And she has been very successful at it.

Take some time and get to know her. Ask her questions, bring her to speak, or have her work with your church’s children’s ministry. She can help you greatly.

Love you, hun…

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Lectionary Resources

Recently, I decided to begin using the lectionary texts as my primary plan. I decided to use it for a few reasons. First, it means I don’t have to constantly try to develop series. Some say that is a lazy way to preach, but it really isn’t. In fact, it actually allows me to fulfill the second reason for going to the lectionary: it allows us to follow the Christian calendar centered around the birth, life, death, resurrection and second coming of Jesus. In this, we don’t follow the civil religion of America, but a calendar ordered around the one who paves the way for an eternity with God. Third, it takes a church into passages it would not consider otherwise. When was the last time you read from Zephaniah, much less preached it? Finally, it puts us in the company of those who have gone before us for centuries, even millennia.

When I decided to make this change, I began to look for resources to help in the preparation of sermons. I quickly realized that four or five commentaries for each of the four passages would mean a lot of trips up and down the stairs to my library, and a lot of books in my study. For a guy with bad knees, that was a daunting thought.

While doing some searching, I discovered this series of books being published by Westminister John Knox Press called Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Common Lectionary. They are putting out several volumes for each of the three years of the lectionary cycle. For instance, now we are in Year C – it just started last week. I currently am using Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 1.

Each week in the lectionary has four texts. For each of the four texts, there are thoughts from four different pastors or theologians looking at the text from a different perspective. There is a theological, a pastoral, an exegetical, and a homiletical perspective for each of the texts. Each perspective would be around 1-1.5 pages each, so their thoughts are not exhaustive. However, it provides a great starting point to understanding the text and allows you to begin to see how the four texts are related. If you need more exhaustive resources, then you could pull a commentary if necessary.

This is a tremendous resource for those who are using the lectionary as a preaching plan.

I have a question for you regarding the lectionary:

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A little technology post here.  I have a mac and last week I ran upon a program called Books.  It is an open-source book cataloging application for MacOS X.

What it does is allow you to use the ISBN number (or author or title, etc) of any book you own to create an entry into its system so that you can keep track of your cool book collection.  It even has a section to record to whom you might have loaned the book out.  But it gets better!

It actually has a button that if you click it, the program will engage your iSight camera (or any other default video camera attached to your computer) and produce a video capture screen that has a series of lines on it.  If you put the bar code of the book up to those series of lines, it will read the bar code, grab the ISBN, put it in the new book ISBN section so that you can click “Quick Fill”.  It will then go out to the internet database you have chosen (I use amazon’s US site) and download all the information about the book into your database.

Voila!  You have cataloged your entire collection in no time.

Give it a try!

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Some good links to look over at the end of the week.

Writing/Blogging:

1. 24 Things to do When Stuck for a Topic to Blog About
2. Word 2007 for Writers: Part 3 – Master Documents and Outlines

Science/Technology:

1. Makers of Firefox come up with a new Web browser
2. Magnifying Taste: New Chemicals Trick the Brain into Eating Less: Scientific American
3. The Frontal Cortex : Morality and Distractions
4. The Supercollider is about to go online.

Ministry:

1. internetmonk.com » Do Baptists Believe “Once Saved, Always Saved?”
2. JDGreear.com: Attempting to Do Ministry Against the Strong Man
3. Thoughts from the Edge – a new podcast by Todd Littleton where he talks about the difference between right belief and right behavior.
4. The Suburban Jesus Hates Me by Michael Spencer, aka iMonk.

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Here are some reads I found really interesting and wanted to share them with you:

1.  An Intrinsic Interest in God by Brenna Phillips.  People have an intrinsic interest guiding their quest for knowledge. I began to think specifically as a children’s minister and how to apply that to a child’s intrinsic interest in understanding God and faith.

2.  Dark Knight Shift:  Why Batman Could Exist – But Not for Long at Scientific American Mind.  To investigate whether someone like Bruce Wayne could physically transform himself into a one-man wrecking crew, ScientificAmerican.com turned to E. Paul Zehr, associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do. Zehr’s book, Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero (The Johns Hopkins University Press), due out in October, tackles that very question.

3.  Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter at Scientific American Mind.  During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems.

4.  The Mr. Spock Guide to Effective Blogging by Copyblogger.  When the author sat down to write about the need for rational, logical planning for your blog, he found no better model. Sure, blogs are personal, emotional constructions. But if your blog isn’t performing the way you want it to, try using a little Vulcan logic to move it in the right direction.

5.  Networked structures: Liquid v. Solid church by Alan Hirsch.  If Apostolic Genius expresses itself in a movement ethos, it forms itself around a network structure. And once again this tends to be very different to what we have come to expect from our general concept of church.

6.  Paris Hilton mocking and ad by John McCain at Fox News.  This is a real funny story and a funny video (at the bottom of the article.  Attention…Paris in a bathing suit.

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