Social justice gets a bad rap among many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, but Tony Campolo sets us straight.
Will also present for food: Internet Ministry Conference
It’s official: I’m presenting at the 2008 Internet Ministry Conference hosted by GospelCom. Gospel Communications has teamed up with the Internet Evangelism Coalition and now the two conferences, GospelCon and the Internet Evangelism Conference, have been merged. The conference serves two dual purposes: one is to train GospelCom’s ministry partners…
Ranking the Divine: The Holy Spirit and Search trends
I’ve often heard it said within Pentecostal circles that the Holy Spirit gets little recognition — even within our own Pentecostal and Charismatic circles. Of course, there’s some theological justification for this: According to Jesus’ promise in John 14:26, one of the Holy Spirit’s primary roles in the believer’s life is…
Will Social Network for Food
As most of you who regularly visit know, back in November of 2006 I was laid-off from CTI. It wasn’t anything nefarious or antagonistic — CTI always has been and continues to be very good to me, still tossing occasional freelance work and article assignments my way. (Hopefully because of my…
Shameless Self-Promotion: Blogger’s Choice Awards
Okay, I’ll fess up. I am a shameless self-promoter. Yes, I blog for the writing and for you, my Gentle Readers, but it’s also nice to get feedback and see real-world data that makes the feedback … um … exciting. So, some time back I nominated my own site, yes…
Blog Stats: Get your info-jones on with weblog traffic metrics
Table of Contents Automattic FeedBurner Google Analytics QuantCast Others…? If you’re like me, you want to know whether anyone’s eating the meat you grind out from the butcher shop of ideas called your blog. Sure, there’s some measure of pride and ego involved: as your stats move ever upward your…
Spider-Man 3 Bible Study / Discussion Guide
My Spider-Man 3 movie-based Bible Study is here, at long last! I have permission from CTI to provide the study here on my site. Over the next few days or weeks, I’ll post the previous combo-study I wrote for Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2 as well. Warning: the following contains…
Should Ministry Leaders Blog?
Hat tip to Michael Davis for alerting me to this question posed over at Total Leadership: “Should Ministry Leaders Blog?” Here are my thoughts… A blogger with a “why” beats one with only a “how” Blogging can be a waste of a leader’s time if he doesn’t know what he’s…
Spider-Man 3 Rocks!
Update: The Spider-Man 3 study can be found here. Yesterday I caught a premier press-screening of Spider-Man 3 and I’m officially here to tell you that this movie rocks! And, yes, before you criticize me, that is official trade lingo for a movie that … well … rocks! It may…
Spider-Man 3 Movie-Based Bible Study Coming!
Update: The Spider-Man 3 study can be found here. In early 2005 I wrote a Bible study for the Spider-Man 1 & 2 movies, currently only available via ChristianityToday.com. Last week I stopped by the offices of Christianity Today International and “volunteered” to freelance the Bible study for Spider-Man 3,…
Virgina Tech Massacre and … Repentance
How to get arrested at Central Bible College. Plus: The Unremarked Transgendered Issue
I was surprised to read of a recent arrest at Central Bible College when some folks arranged a non-violent protest and an attempt to “dialog” with allegedly “homophobic” school officials over Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered issues recently: Central Bible College: Our First Act of Civil Disobedience (via Soulforce) The blogger,…
Christian Blogosphere Blogroll
Michele, blogging at Reformed Chicks Blabbing and Life Under the Sun has taken over where the former “Christian Bloggers blogroll” (defunct since October, 2006) has left off. Her mission: Get every orthodox Christian blogger linked up. It’s an ambitious task. I’m here to help. While not as selective nor exclusive…
New Feature: In-Line Editable Comments
Hello, Gentle Readers. If you’re part of the one-percenters who comment here from time-to-time you might be happy to know that I have enabled a feature to edit comments after you’ve posted them, and you don’t even have to leave the page! (Thanks to Ronald Huereca.) Come on, leave a…
Misplaced Love: On Greed, Addiction, and Bad Affection
Greed is the surprising accompaniment to almost all our sins. We all like lists. They help create organized presentations, and they are easy to remember. Perhaps that is why God chose a list format to present some of his most well-known laws. But what if we took that list — the…
Eternal Certainties: The Hope of Heaven
While things are confusing down here, we can always trust in the hope of heaven. About an hour northeast of Indianapolis on April 26, 2006, a tractor-trailer drifted across the Interstate 69 median. In its path: ten students and staff in a Taylor University van. The tractor ripped through one…
Apostasy: Rejecting Ideas
In some cultures and eras, apostates face certain death. In America, it’s the church that’s dying from apostasy.
Apostate – it’s not exactly a common word. But for those doomed to hear its rare pronouncement, it can mean imminent death or serious eternal consequences.
Like repentance , apostasy implies a rejection or abandonment of a practice, ideal, or belief. And one religion’s penitent is another one’s apostate
Top 20 Bloggers (PneumaBloggers, that is)
For some time I’ve wanted to provide some sort of real-world ranking system so that those of you who want to know who the “big fish” are can find them, and so those of you who have successfully worked your blog into the stratosphere would get a little praise for…
Yet more PneumaBloggedy Goodness: PneumaWidget, Power Reader and More!
In a mad dash of creative craziness, a few more things have popped up on the PneumaBlogs tool-set. So, for your blog-reading enjoyment, here’s a quick summary of everything not covered in my previous post (“PneumaBlogs, PneumaSphere, PneumaSearch“). FireFox Search Plug-in First off, fellow PneumaBlogger Christoph Fischer (“my cup of…
PneumaBlogs, PneumaSphere, PneumaSearch
In case you haven’t noticed, over the past several days I’ve been trying to bring my “Pneuma” pages up-to-snuff within the new design and to make them all a bit more usable. Just now I’ve added a third page to my collection: PneumaSearch. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone crazy with…
Internet Evangelism Thoughts
My friend and fellow PneumaBlogger, Frank N. Johnson over at Strategic Digital Outreach, was recently highlighted on GospelCom’s GospelCon blog. In “Flawed Follow-Up or a Flawed Philosophy of Evangelism?” Frank writes: “[T]hose of us involved in internet evangelism in the West have, in many cases, devalued face-to-face relationships and neglected (or even abandoned) the local aspect of Christian community. . . . [W]e … are much too quick to assume that virtual community is just as ideal as face-to-face community. . . .
39 Tips to Improve Weblog Traffic and Visibility
Here are some tips I’ve learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site’s traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I’m a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.
Still jobless and fancy free
This is just a quick update on what’s happening in the BlogRodentSphere. (Yes, I take my “branding” too seriously, sometimes!) I’ve been unemployed since November 9. However, by God’s grace and the help of friends, Jennifer and I have not suffered from a loss of income. In fact, I’ve only drawn one week’s worth of unemployment checks. We’ve managed to keep busy with enough freelance work that we’ve been able to make our dreaded mortgage-payments and other sundry bills relatively on-time. We’re without health-insurance, though, so we are praying none of us fall ill.
Prayer Request: Collection agency came calling
This morning we were woken by a collection agency that wants $2,000 from us immediately. Back in November 2005,I wrecked my little beat-up Toyota in a traffic pile-up caused by a driver in the wrong lane. The car was totaled, towed to a lot, and I signed the paperwork agreeing…
Making Firefox faster: editing your about:config
As I mentioned previously, my workhorse laptop was stolen late December, 2006. Since then I’ve been using a much older laptop circa 1988. Okay, it’s not that old, but it’s a Pentium 4 with only 500 MB of RAM … and it turns out, my Firefox browser occasionally likes to…