We live in the Age of the Tongue. We have more means to talk than ever before. I can blog, update my status, tweet, text, voice record, video, and even phone, write on paper or have a face-to-face conversation! Our speech lasts longer than ever before. The internet’s ‘way back machine’ ensures that anything I foolishly said ten years ago can be used against me now. We are also more worried about what we say than ever before. Our sentences sometimes become our identity to the world. We had better make them either perfect enough to be unimpeachable or vacuous enough to be harmless. We also live in a ‘speak up’…
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Thinking Christianly About Ministry
In the second chapter of the book, The Christian Mind, Harry Blamires distinguishes between two kinds of thinking – Christian and secular. To think secularly “is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life on earth,” whereas to think Christianly, “is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or indirectly, to man’s eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God.” It is possible, Blamires argues, that one might think secularly about Christian matters, such as the unity of the church, and Christianly about secular matters such as the cost of gas. Indeed, Blamires argues that there is nothing that cannot be thought about…
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Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down
“Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” Well, they don’t. And I should know, I have two of them in my office. Weebles were launched in 1971 by Hasbro and successful captured generations of children’s imaginations. The egg shaped characters could be shoved around as much as one wanted and yet every time they were pushed they would return to their upright position. As I think about what I am doing in youth and college ministry, I am hopeful that we, the church, might help young people be like Weebles – that, whatever life may throw at them, they may wobble, but they won’t fall down. As freshman in college, confronted with…