Virtually Paul

Stir It Up

I’ve blogged about Stir before here.

It’s a World Vision initiative aimed at involving young people in their work.

They are having another membership drive. Their explanation says it best:

To watch the video, you’ll have to click here to visit the Stir site.

Getting Ripped Off

Maybe this is just the first time it’s happened to me… but has anyone else had vultures coming and stealing their posts and republishing them?

That’s seriously just low. If you want to talk about something, fine, quote part of what I said with a pingback and talk… but ripping off my whole post on some automated site that doesn’t even claim to be anyone… I’m not happy.

I want the post removed immediately.

Copyright and Links Policy

Seeing as the author left me no other recourse, I’ve contacted the host. We’ll see what happens.

Dreamhost support,

It has recently come to my attention that the following URL, which you are hosting, contains plagiarised content from my weblog.

Offending content:
http://gospel.blogarium.net/2007/02/06/the-australian-public-doesn%e2%80%99t-click-with-jesus/

My corresponding post:
http://virtuallypaul.com/2007/02/06/the-australian-public-doesnt-click-with-jesus/

As you can see, the entire content of the post has been syndicated without consent. The owner of the offending website on:

Name: apache2-linus.mills.dreamhost.com
Address: 208.97.170.4

seems to be borrowing and resyndicating content from various blogs.

Please advise as to what action you will be taking towards this violation of your Terms of Service.

Kind regards,
Webmaster
VirtuallyPaul.com

EDIT - I’ve removed actual links to the vultures as this seems to be encouraging their automated pilfering of my content.

MarkSpace: Attention Bible Nerds

Hopefully the title of this post captures the attention of the relevant audience sufficiently.

I’d like to take a moment to introduce a friend of mine, or, more accurately, his blog.

Mark-MarkSpace

By way of introduction, Mark was the interim youth pastor at my church for a while, which gave me the chance to get to know him pretty well. Mark is now the full-time pastor at another baptist church and the blog, for the moment, seems to be an online rendition of his Sunday sermon text. I recommend that you RSS it for now. I’ll try to get him to let me fix up the tech side of it (including the URL).
By way of a real introduction, Mark could quite easily get himself a reputation for being a bit of a liberal theologian if he put his mind to it. He was the interim youth pastor who got into trouble for wearing a soccer jumper with a Heineken logo on the stage at church. We were thinking about burning him at the stake for it but no one could find a copy of the church constitution to work out how many votes we’d need to do it. Personally I find Mark far too interesting to box him like that. He has a unique way of drawing connections between scriptural concepts and suggesting some application to our present context. (As opposed to wrapping the bible around our present day presuppositions, which he regularly does a good job of avoiding.)
I’m not afraid to say that in the past, the exegetical amateur in me occasionally wants to red flag some of his ponderings when they appear to draw a bit of a long bow. In practice though, when I’ve thought about it, the long bow usually just means he’s tried to skip over an otherwise overcomplicated tangent, or that he’s made a conceptual jump that I wasn’t ready for just yet. Mark is also smarter than me and has spent a lot more time with his head in books, so I generally don’t mess with him on theological grounds and stick to criticising his poor attempts at web publishing to make myself feel better.
If you’re a 20-something single theological student who goes to a church where most of the preaching is focused on newbies or married people, then Mark’s blog is certainly for you.

Joke Police

Hmmmm… I think I’ve been warned…

Joke Police

Christian versions of the Mac vs. PC ads

I really like the points that these quite clever ad parodies raise.

Go here.

Not-that-quick-connection hint: quickly play/pause the other ads so that they load while you’re watching the first one

True Christian Community: The Real Building

It’s difficult to talk about buildings at my church without making reference to the one that’s being assembled under our noses.

But the metaphor for the church as a “building” in the New Testament, isn’t talking about the products of the construction industry. This is something that we often forget simply because of the way we use the word “church” in modern English.

“I’m going down to the church on Saturday to help with the working bee.”
“Which church is the wedding being held in?”
“That church over there looks very nice.”

The “building” described in the NT is not a physical one. When Paul (not me, the apostle) talks about the “church” he uses the Greek word ekklesia.
According to the commentary I looked at (see my Community Resources page) ekklesia refers to “an actual gathering of people” or “the group gathering for a regularly assembled meeting”.

Biblical commentators qualify the idea of ekklesia, proposing that Paul wasn’t referring to the church in an institutional sense either. The early church was most certainly linked in organic ways between the different gatherings. But here, Paul’s use of the word didn’t intend to carry an undertone of an earth-bound, organisational sense of federation, beyond their shared faith in Christ. When Paul wrote to the ekklesia in Corinth, or the ekklesia in Colossae, I don’t think he had the different gatherings listed on a database as member churches of the BURE (the Baptist Union of the Roman Empire). So, in my context at Essendon, I tried to imagine what it would be like, if we didn’t have our physical building.

I imagined what church would be like, if, at 5am every Sunday morning, Heath and Simon, our music guys, got up and put up a marquee made from about 80 sheets of blue tarp in Lincoln Park, just in case it rained… and we had church there every Sunday with musical instruments that don’t need electricity… Doug, who’s been worship leading for decades, whips out an old broom handle with bottle caps nailed on to it… the drum kit got stolen last week because someone forgot to pack it up… so Gary, my favourite drummer, is unloading a couple of upturned rubbish bins from the back of his car like that guy who busks in the city. Joan, everyone’s favourite little old lady, is getting into it with the tambourine. There’s no overhead projector. Just one of the tallest guys at church, Bruce, with a big whiteboard and a step ladder. When I picture that, the only things that are strikingly similar to the regular gathering I call church, are the smiling familiar faces.

Paul wasn’t writing to buildings, nor to organisations. He was writing to Christians who met together, living out real faith in a community. The community gathering is the building that Paul is referring to in Ephesians 2, as he writes to Gentile believers, extending to them the invitation for all believers, to enter into the church community.

Ephesians 2:19-22 (NRSV)
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

True Christian Community: An Introduction

Stained Glass Masquerade (popup window warning)

Those are the lyrics to a song by a band called Casting Crowns and for me they present a challenge. The song vividly depicts for us the false experience of community that many of us will experience at one time or another.

For me, the words remind me of my brokenness and my aloneness when I put up walls of self-protection that stop me from being real with other people. They bring to life for me the shallow, fake, empty reality that can exist for us in our approach to participating in the church community.

According to Wikipedia:

The word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all or many.”^[1] The Latin term “communitatus” from which the English word “community” comes, is comprised of three elements, “Com-” - a Latin prefix meaning with or togther, “-Munis-” - ultimately Proto-Indo-European in origin, it has been suggested that it means “the changes or exchanges that link” (Both municipal and monetary take their meaning here), and “-tatus” a Latin suffix suggesting diminutive, small, intimate or local.

So, you could probably describe community as “Localised, intimate exchanges that link together”.

The community at my church is something that’s extremely important to me. My strongest memories of being a part of a real community, being cared about, being accepted, and being loved, are all intrinsically connected to Essendon Baptist Community Church. So I guess that makes me living proof that true Christian community can happen in amongst us those of us who chose to gather together on Sunday mornings.

My purpose in writing the upcoming content on this blog, is to examine some of what the bible has to say about the way Christians are to live in community with each other. On its own merits, our community at Essendon Bapts certainly isn’t perfect… but even just in our youth ministry, there are some great things going on. People are investing in each other in some really encouraging ways. We really do have something special. Hopefully, I’ve got a few ideas here that apply universally… things that we can all take onboard as we interact with others in our communities.

The real story on Maccas food

Bec has all the good links.  I just steal them.  Go and have a look here.

A Christian STD: Spiritually Transmitted Disease

For everyone who hadn’t already realised that the Christian message often isn’t communicated or modelled very well by churches. I can identify with a lot of things that this article has to say. That doesn’t mean “write-off” church. But I guess it is worth being aware that the message that (should be) spoken from the front doesn’t always reflect every participant’s (primary) motives for being there.

http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1454

Link of the Week: How to resolve conflict in youth ministry