A quick reminder that next week Brook and I are hosting a gathering of Southminster 20 and 30 year olds at our place: BBQ, Soda/Beer/&c, Games and Conversation. Come for some good fellowship! If you think you might be coming, send me an email.
And I’m still trying to find a good name for this group. [...]

Posted in Young Adult No Comments »

Here’s an interesting piece of news from RNS.
Staying in bed outranks sitting in pews, survey says
by Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
WASHINGTON — A good night’s sleep ranks far above attending church as a favorite activity, a nationwide poll shows.
The Barna Group asked more than 1,000 adults to say how much they looked [...]

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One of my favorite websites to visit when I’m surfing is Dave Walker’s cartoonchurch.com. Walker is British (so far as I can tell), Anglican (again, so far as I can tell), and has a keen eye for all sorts of everyday details about being part of a religious community. Often his drawings cut at the [...]

Posted in Faith 1 Comment »

Since launching the blog a few days ago, I’ve gotten some good questions about what blogs are, why people blog, and so on. If you want way too much detail, check out wikipedia’s entry on blogs. (Wikipedia is a free, public-edited encyclopedia). Basically, a blog is an online diary or journal in reverse chronological order. [...]

Posted in General Comments Off

When they talk about it, the youth in Southminster’s youth group talk about how tight-knit they are. They celebrate the fact that they all know each other so well, particularly since our 25 or so youth go to nine or ten different schools in the Kansas City area and are spread out all over the [...]

Posted in Youth 2 Comments »

Brook and I are going to launch a fellowship group for young adults next month, with a gathering at our home. We’ll have BBQ and a few hours of games and conversation. We’re hungering to get to know the young adults in our church better (particularly since we’re still pretty new here), and we know [...]

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Well, not all of those who walked the links Wednesday at Tomahawk Hills for the Annual Southminster Golf Turnament can be called Hackers. Then again, some of us (myself included) really can’t play. I was along for pastoral support, though I’m not sure that my prayers did any good. In golf, alas, God shows no [...]

Posted in Southminster General 1 Comment »

I’m guessing that everyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a new parent of twin girls, the joy of my life. While I am relatively new to the community, I care strongly about a strong, vibrant children’s ministry at Southminster, as do other parents of small children. This is for reasons both personal and [...]

Posted in Children's Ministry 2 Comments »

News today that Harvard is bringing back religion courses to its undergraduate curriculum:
Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending.
The surprisingly bold recommendations come after years of rancorous internal debate over what courses should [...]

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Last Sunday we used a video from Rob Bell’s Nooma devotional series (a phonetic spelling of the Greek word for spirit: pneuma) as a discussion starter in youth group. Rob Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, one of the fastest growing congregations in the United States. The videos [...]

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