Tomorrow is Sunday 1st October and Arun Community Church is having a thanksgiving service. It just so happens that I’m on the rota to lead worship for the meeting and have spent much of the day with a guitar in hand, trying to choose a set of songs that reflect what I believe God wants to do tomorrow!
As I’ve said before, I absolutely LOVE to worship. It’s one of those things that just captivates and inspires me so I take the responsibility quite seriously. What I’ve found today is that it can be very hard to find songs that fit in with a particular theme. After a bit of trawling across Google, I’ve found a few websites that allow you to search for a particular theme or subject in a song, yet often I (or the church congregation) aren’t familar with the song results they return. The other option is software packages. The church have tried a few different worship programmes over the years yet none are that satisfactory or available to me on my home computer!
So that just leaves me with pages of song books and print-outs. It’s quite time consuming but I actually appreciate looking at each song individually and deciding if it will fit into the mix. The list I’ve prepared for tomorrow is:
- Beautiful One - Tim Hughes
- Happy Day - Tim Hughes
- I Will Dance (Undignified) - Matt Redman
- Oh Praise Him - David Crowder Band
- Holy Is The Lord - Chris Tomlin
- Everything/Consuming Fire - Tim Hughes
- My Jesus, My Saviour - Darlene Zschech
- See his Love - Tom Lockley
- Praise Him You Heavens - Russell Fragar
My concern with this list is that although they are mostly around praising God, they are not specifically about thanksgiving - the theme of the morning. It’s not a major problem as I guarantee we won’t get a chance to play all of these and I usually end up swapping things around as God does His thing. Maybe I’ll post the actual playlist tomorrow afternoon to see how it differed!
I just found a link to the funniest Christian parody website yet! Datetosave.com claims to help single Christians bring others into the kingdom through dating. As their tagline reads “Dating to save people from Hell!”
From the site:
Doesn’t God look down on missionary dating and tells us to not be “yoked with unbelievers”?
I looked up yoked, and the dictionary says it’s a “A crossbar with two U-shaped pieces that encircle the necks of a pair of oxen or other draft animals working together.” I would never encourage anybody to do this on a date… I think the thing that is more important is that we should use our talents for God. If you’re really good at dating, or just really really good looking, then you should use that to bring souls to God.
Should you date one person until he comes to Christ, or should you date lots of people?
Jesus told us to reach the “outermost parts of the world.” I mean, I’m not going to fly to Kenya and date some guy who eats worms, but I think for me, “outermost parts of the world” means all the hot guys that live around me here in Fremont, California. But, God told me not to be a polygamist, so the goal would be to dump your boyfriend before witnessing to your next one. If you follow my tips, you should have no problem!
In no way do I endorse the content or views expressed on the site, but it is funny!
Thanks to Marko for the link.
This has been posted all over the web and seems to be a tongue-in-cheek advertisment from the sacred sandwich. Ironic no doubt but it’s scarily not too far from actual products available. Check out ship of fools for more “Gadgets For God”.
iTunes 7.0.0
Originally uploaded by Tom M Ward.
I love this! It seems there are a few glitches with the new version of iTunes, but what a great effect!
The last two days I’ve been attending a conference by The Rank Foundation up in Lancashire. Although specifically for youth agencies supported by the Foundation, the focus was on evaluating the work that we do.
In the youthwork field, it is widely established that it can be very difficult to effectively evaluate the impact that your work has on an individual, group or community. How, for example, can you prove that by taking a young person on outings each week, they are developing their communication skills and raising their self-esteem? Another common complaint from workers is that they are constantly pushed to provide quantative data (numbers attending, ages, etc.) rather than qualitative information about relationships, personal development or anecdotal evidence.
To this end, the conference aimed to explore the process of evaluation - teaching basics, identifying challenges and thinking through what development needs to occur in our own agencies. We talked, debated and planned in small groups learning from each others experiences.
Personally, I found it an enjoyable (although exhausting and intense) experience. I met some wonderful people doing fascinating work and facing similar challenges. I got to lead some workshops on “getting your message across through print” and recieved some positive feedback.
So what did I learn? If anything, I came away with a sense that we really need to knuckle down and focus the work that we do at The WIRE, something Mark and I have discussed for a while. This means really evaluating the service that we offer to the community as well as our in-house procedures and systems - no small task… although I did get some good advice on how to go about it!
Ben and sam
Originally uploaded by bobweasel.
There’s quite a few services out there that rely on ‘tagging’ bits of information for searching, indexing and organising (del.icio.us, technorati and flickr to name a few). But recently I’ve noticed a few websites that are making use of tagging to tie information to specific geographical locations. Flickr is the latest one to catch my eye as I can now drag and drop my photos onto a map (similar to google maps) to show where they were taken!
Now imagine the power of searching for a particular thing in a particular location and seeing the results! A lot of fun could be had with this (and of course, a lot of mischief), and there are even more powerful photo-tagging tools out there too!
Personally, I haven’t (yet) got the time to go through hundreds of photos and geotag them all, but it could become a very useful idea for future images I upload.
I found a link today for eBible, a free website with “live” searching of the Bible, commentaries and references. You can save and highlight passages, look up meanings and facts, then share tags and links with friends. Kind of like MySpace or del.icio.us for the bible! I’m not yet sure just how useful the service is so check out the link to take a tour and sign up if you’re interested. It could become a great resource for youth ministry! Let me know how you get on…
UPDATE: I just found this post on eBible and other thriving online Christian resources
read more | digg story
Riflessioni di fine estate - Reflections of end summer
Originally uploaded by Bagna.
I spotted this under the Flickr ‘Interestingness’ group. What a great shot!
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