I must get this book.

The Stand To Reason dudes review a book that sounds awfully interesting: Why We're Not Emergent (by Two Guys Who Should Be).

I must get this book.

Modern Mechanix: "What Will Life Be Like In The Year 2008?"

Interesting retro-look-back article here that gives a pretty interesting look at what life was prognosticated to be like by futurists* in the year 1968.

*Futurist: Someone who predicts what the future will be like based on extrapolations from present-day conditions and reasonable trends. Not to be confused with theological futurists, who (correctly) interpret the Apocalypse as being mostly yet-to-be-fulfilled.

Bob Hyatt: Dialogical Preaching

I find this fascinating. I'm not ready to do this on a regular basis on a Sunday morning - this is a lot more along the lines of what we used to (and will again, once interest in it grows again) do in home fellowships...but it's sort of what we're still able to do at CC Lakeshore on occasion being that we're not much bigger than a typical home fellowship anyway, when I'll ask questions of the congregation during the study - with the purpose of actually getting answers - for the purpose of encouraging real interaction with the Text.

Adoption Day

So my lovely & gracious wife and I pulled in to the driveway of our small yet tiny house Saturday night, after shopping for stuff with which to decorate the sanctuary for Resurrection Morning. Since we'd been out all day (driving almost to Detroit), we hadn't gotten the mail yet, and so my wife went to check it. We'd pulled in to home to get my car, so that after decorating, she could just go home and sleep, knowing I would stay until about 2 a.m. as normal preparing for Sunday morning, and as we'd gotten out of her car, I'd joked, "Gosh, wouldn't it be just swell if the adoption finalizaiton papers came in the mail today and we didn't wind up having to appear before a Wayne County judge and all that...?"

When my wife opened the mailbox, there was a manila envelope there, right on the top of the pile. She hesitated getting the envelope out, but finally did so, and opened it, peeked in - and screamed. She ran to me, and jumped on me. All the while, I'm freaking out myself, wondering what it was. All she could do was hand me the envelope, and I looked in...

ORDER OF ADOPTION
Let it be knonw, that having found...blah, blah, blah...that from this date and henceforth, the parents of the adoptee are: {myself and my wife}, and the name of the adoptee is Masen Elijah Macon

It's over, he's ours, and I still haven't peeled either myself or my wife off the ceiling yet.



To top it all off, the date of the order was March 17th - St. Patty's Day, which is a very significant day for my wife's family (being Irish and all).

Sweet...

...and also just for fun...

One of the blogs that I follow in my Bloglines reader contained an "HT" to another blog (and now that I know what "HT" means - thanks Bri'D), which I jumped to, which led to another, and another, and...

...you get the general idea.

Anyway, one of those blogs contained a pretentious "My Personality Profile" badge on it. Now, I don't put much stock in this sort of thing - I admit, I'm very suspicious of most things psychobabble. My opinion on that has been changing over the years, largely through interaction with another CC pastor who also happens to be a licensed counselor, but even still, the aversion persists...

My natural skepticism amplifies when we get to the subject of "personality profiles," which I tend to view as little different than those fortunes you get out of those really cool cookies you get at the local Chinese restaruant after you pig out responsibly enjoy your Sweet & Sour Chicken. Just general enough to fit anybody, just quasi-specific enough to give people the impression that they're actually accurate.

Sort of like a group-think kind of Rorschach test, that your company usually sinks a lot of good money into that could have gone to profit-sharing.

Argh.

Anyway, it was free; for grins, I took the test.

For further grins, I shared the results with my lovely and gracious wife and a good friend, sort of as a "chuckle chuckle chortle snort" kind of thing.

...they said it nails me.

D'oh.

ENTPs are logical, innovative, curious and downright inventive. They see possibilities for improvement everywhere and possess the ability to understand complex concepts. ENTPs are introspective and carefree nonconformists. They often neglect the more common areas of life while pursuing new solutions. ENTPs can be good conversationalists and exciting company.

About the ENTP Expert Quotes & Links

"ENTPs are idea people. Their perceptive abilities cause them to see possibilities everywhere. They get excited and enthusiastic about their ideas, and are able to spread their enthusiasm to others. In this way, they get the support that they need to fulfill their visions"
- Portrait of an ENTP (The Personality Page)

"It is so natural for these individuals to practice devising gadgets and mechanisms, that they start doing it even as young children. And they get such a kick out of it that they really never stop exercising their inventive bent"
- The Portrait of the Inventor Rational (Keirsey)

"ENTPs are usually verbally as well as cerebrally quick, and generally love to argue--both for its own sake, and to show off their often-impressive skills... argument as a sport."
- ENTP Profile (TypeLogic) "ENTPs contribute an innovative, versatile, and enterprising approach to work. They view limitations as challenges to be overcome and look for new ways to do things. They need to find a niche for themselves in order to be free to maneuver. They prefer the start-up phase of a project rather than the followthrough or maintenance phase. Once the project is designed, they prefer to turn it over to someone else."
- ENTP - The Innovator (Lifexplore)

"...attention seeking, experience junky, insensitive, adaptable, not easily offended, messy, carefree, dangerous, fearless, careless..."
- Jung Type Descriptions (ENTP) (similarminds.com)

It even gives a list of "Other Famous ENTPs," both real and fictional.

Among my apparent "real" ENTP-fellows:

1. Alexander the Great (oh yeah...)


2. Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt (the "Walk Softly But Carry A Big Stick" guy...I knew there was a reason I always liked him...)


3. Richard Feynman (the dude who thought up the entire field of quantum computing)

and others.

I don't get too excited about all that, though, since "Celine Dion" apparently shares my same personality-DNA.

::insert blank stare here::

My fictional personality-mates are even more interesting, including:

1. Cosmo Kramer


2. "Doc" Brown ("...one-point-twenty-one gigawatts!!!)


3. Wile E. Coyote


4. Q (the quasi-omnipotent bane of Captain Jean-Luc Picard)

I'm really not sure what I think about all that...

Anyway, it was fun...now back to real work...

I Are Smart

Well, since everybody else is doing it, I figured - why not.

So I took the Blog Readability Test.

Turns out, this blog will elucidate and entertain a college undergrad.

TV Reviews

Yay, me.

You can't see it, but I'm high-five-ing myself.

Yuddie.

Open Letter to the Growthinistas, Pt. 1.5

Dovetailing just a bit with my previous OLTTG post, I just read this a.m. (again, in my Bloglines reader) another great post from the Church Matters dudes, this one examining the question of whether or not I consider my gifts to be "too big and spiffy" for the field that I'm currently called to.

I.e., though I know the Bible tells me to not "despise... the day of small things," do I subtly in fact view the "day of small things" I'm currently in as somehow just a stepping stone to "something better," or do I view my lot as what it really is - my calling that I am to discharge as a faithful steward, no matter what the cost?

This blogpost from the 9Marks dudes is something of a book report on the biographical preface to The Letters of Samuel Rutherford by Andy Bonar. My wife had fallen in love with the Letters a few years ago, and had read them to me (I like the sound of her voice - she could read the ingredients of squid pituitary and aardvark navel goulash to me, and I'd like it...), at which time I really came to like Rutherford.

Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish Presbyterian in the 17th century whose writings on the Rule of Law have had immeasurable impact on, among other things, the formation of our own federalist/constitutionalist government here in the U.S. of A. The Letters (which are available online here) are a collection of...well...letters that Sam wrote during a time of great personal trial and first published as soon as three years after his death in 1661.

All-in-all, a stupendously good and spiritually eye-opening read.

Specific to the question of the OLTTG, however... the author of the 9Marks blogpost added the Letters to his devotional reading, and was commenting on the biographical sketch of Rutherford that Andy Bonar put in to his (and the currently most enduring edition of) the Letters. He makes one particularly timely and telling observation:

I wonder if one of the main challenges facing churches might not be that too many potential shepherds think their education, gifts, and abilities would be wasted in humble, anonymous service? If there are not too many of us who remember too infrequently that the Chief Shepherd knows His blood-bought sheep in country villages are worth caring for? I wonder how many men "settle" for this or that little congregation as a "stepping stone" to a bigger, "better" ministry? How many fear that anonymity is synonymous with unfruitfulness and a certain kind of death?

And, yet, Rutherford speaks to us hundreds of years later and his faithfulness shames the most gifted and talented among us (well, let me not project onto others; it certainly shames me). Bonar adds this line a couple paragraphs later:

Anwoth was dear to him rather as the sphere appointed him by his Master, than because of the fruit he saw of his labours.

Because Christ place him there--not because he saw "great fruit"--Rutherford rooted his heart in that place and that people. May we all be satisfied to serve, and find satisfaction in serving, wherever the Master places us. And may we never regard our congregations--however small--as unworthy of our gifts or our care.

The pastors whose legacies endure and whose lives and ministries we respect as we look back on them from the perspective of history are those who weren't consumed by things like numerical growth, or setting tithing goals, or...or...or...

The pastors whose legacies endure and whose lives and ministries we respect are those whose driving passion was faithfulness to their calling, no matter the cost. The pastors whose legacies endure and whose lives and ministries we respect are those who loved the Lord with abandon and lived that out in life by pouring themselves out and giving the last full measure for the flocks that God entrusted them with - completely without consideration to so many of the things that dominate the thinking of so many of our contemporaries.

Many (probably most) of us aren't called to be shepherds over dynamic, explosively growing congregations whose monthly budgets are measured in excess of five digits - though, upon reading many other pastors' blogs, I think that's what we (and by "we" I mean "pastors in general") lust most after.

I want to be like Sam Rutherford.

Preachers are Hypocrites

One of the blogs I read avidly in my Bloglines reader is the Church Matters blog. So long as you read their church polity stuff (the ninth of the "9Marks") with a fairly massive block of salt, it's actually quite good.

Today's offering is just awesome: A Hypocrite's Guide to Preaching.

Good, great stuff...

Liberals are Crazy.

Now, the article refers to political liberals, but Dr. Lyle Rossiter's premise on the correlation between liberalism and mental disorder probably translates well to the question of theological liberals, wouldn't you think?

How long do you think it'll take Ricky Abanes to come to the Open Source dudes' defense, there, eh?

---

Okay, that last statement was more than slightly snarky. And unjustified.

Da Scoop'a on NOOMA

Greg Gilbert, on the Church Matters blog, has done a three-part series examining Robbie Bell's NOOMA videos.

Living in Bell's backyard as I do, I very much appreciate Gilbert's perspective, which I found to be fair and accurate.

At least, from my perspective, anyway...

Gilbert's Scoop'a on NOOMA
• Part 1


• Part 2


• Part 3

Good stuff.