Index Card Animals

Miles has been busy drawing up a batch of animals - we put them online and had him describe each drawing. Click on the drawings for a special message from Miles. Personally, I am saying, "not bad for a 3 year old...".

1 Corinthians 1 Unity and the Message of the Cross

So I am reading through 1 Corinthians and the verse that spoke out to me was vs. 10, "...be of one mind, united in thought and purpose." What a profound statement; Paul was speaking to a church that was strugling with division and pleading with them to be united - in thought and purpose. So the question that begs to be answered is, "what is our purpose?". Is there a single purpose for the church of Jesus Christ? Could there be? With all the vision and purpose statements that church leadership comes up with, could it possibly boil down to one single thing? (this reminds me of the wisdom of Curly in the movie "City Slickers", when he talks about the one thing).
Well , lucky for us, Paul reveals later in the chapter what this one thing is, in verse 18: it is called "The Message of the Cross". Duh! Paul describes it as "The power of God", that "Christ was crucified" which made us "pure and holy" and gave us "freedom".
This just struck me - what other thing could the church focus on than this, the message of the cross - the Power of God that gives humankind freedom and opens the door for a relationship with God. And of course Paul says that to the world, this message is foolish, but to those who believe it contains the very power of God. It reminds me of Romans 10:9 which says that if you "confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". Simple, foolish, almost too easy - yet that is the ONE THING that contains the power of God to change our lives and our eternal destiny.
Tonight for me it is just an amazing reminder of why I do what I do, and why I believe what I believe.
So the lesson is for the church, whatever we do must boil down to one thing - that we share the Message of the Cross and trust in its power to change lives.

Believe (the Shamu show)

Mondays are my sacred "day off". A day to recharge and to spend much needed time with my family. This last monday we went to Sea World and it was a blast. What I wasn't expecting was to be mezmorized by the Shamu Show, "Believe". They begin the show with video shown on what looks like two large matching LED screens. When the show gets into full swing, the screens sepparate and move along a track to combine and make one larger wide screen. They also operate as independent screens as well. Oh yeah, they rotate as well. And when they rotate, they are showing both live video from (what looks like) three cameras, plus an overhead camera, as well as a couple underwater cameras. It's all pretty amazing, I am more interested in the software that is used to control the "splitting" of the screens; how and when to split the images and when to combine them. I am not really into the moving, rotating in a live setting, but I do like the idea of having instant recallable screen positions - that would be really cool for a church stage. One part of the service could have two side screens, while another part could have a super widescreen image... (I think Willow Creek has something close to this).

Leadership

I am researching leadership ideas and POV's for an upcoming retreat and found this interesting quick read article about servant leadership.

Then there's this one titled "What if Jesus was our Boss?"