PaulPrins.net

Life has been very full lately. This is a very good thing. The four spheres that make up my life are still rolling along, moving, and being used by God. So a quick life update is in order for those who keep tabs on my wife and I through here.

Our Marriage

Things are going well. We are quickly coming up on our three year anniversary in January. We have been hanging out still in Minneapolis, and our cat is getting more and more crazy as the weeks go past (check him out on twitter)

Nineteen05 – Work

Things are really starting to pick up! We just finished an update last night that has gone over very well. There is also a lot of interest from the conferences we went to this summer. It is really excited to see the years of work starting to culminate in this type of response. So much love out to all of you who are current and soon to be clients of ours. So awesome!!

Substance Church – Internship/Work

Church went multi-site last week (officially, we had a soft-launch for several weeks to work out the bugs). This has been a really exciting change and transition for us at Substance. I am still working through my Pastoral Internship there for Bethel Sem (see below). It is fun running a campus, and at the same time when I think about the reality that I lead a campus it is a bit overwhelming. I love the logistics of it, and am stretched by the amazing people I get to serve as they make their church happen every week.

We just relaunched the church on October 4th and since then I’ve been close to a dozen new people to the church who have no sort of church background to speak of within the last 5+ years. These men and women are the reason I love Substance!

Bethel Seminary – School

I am now half way through my program! This rocks my world. I can hardly believe it. My bookshelf seems to think I am more than half way through, but it has been really good. Looking forward to getting through this quarter and lightening my load a little bit so I can focus more on nineteen05. Fun to realize that after this term I’m also done with languages! Greek has been a huge challenge to me, but its actually really fun when you look at something and know what it says. Amazing!

Thats it, life is full of goodness. So that does tend to mean that this blog is not as full. Till next time!

This is the second and final sermon I needed to give for my Preaching Practicum course that I took this summer. It was this past Sunday (8/16/09) that I had the opportunity to Preach at Eden Prairie Presbyterian Church (www.eppc.com).

I preached from John chapter 14 verses 23-27 and this was the second and final sermon presented for my Preaching Practicum at Bethel Seminary.

This is the Fourth sermon that i’ve given outside of a classroom since I had any professional training as a preacher.

I would really love feedback and thoughts on the style, delivery, and content of the message.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Also if you’d like me to email you when I have preaching engagements in the future leave a comment and I’ll add you to a list. Think it’s a good idea to do that.

I just finished up 9 straight days of class, 8+ hours a day. While it was very intense and time consuming it was a great experience, though one i don’t think I will need to repeat. I took my first Old Testament course (OT501) on Genesis – Ruth, and then immediately rolled into my Preaching Practicum.

There is still work to be done for each course: papers and exams for OT501 and a sermon to write and deliver for preaching. But I thought it was worth celebrating regardless. Below is the sermon I gave at Woodridge Church on Sunday evening to part of their exchange service (thanks to those of you that made it out!).

There had been some very sizable changes from the way the sermon was delivered the day before in class. Even so, I don’t believe the audiance was any wiser for it, or that it really hurt my illustrations/approach. Would love to hear your thoughts!

Found a talk given by Erwin McManus through iTunes. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Erwin leads Mosaic church out in LA.

‘The reason I can take you through this time is not because I’ve studied this theoretically, not because I’ve read a thousand books, or not because I’ve written one. But because I spend my life immersed with people I love. And that the journey we’ve taught people to go on doesn’t work for them.”

“I’ve been noticing that across universities that whenever you have God verses Atheism, or Creation verse Evolution debate people move further from God, not closer. Christians feel more affirmed and more confident they are right and they loose their effect and impact on their university. But we don’t care about that, we just want to win. I’ve also noticed that we fill the room with all the wrong people. We fill the room with everyone who wants to win too. And what’s funny is that the Christians in the room and the atheists in the room are the same. The both just want to win.”

“‘I heard the voice of God for the first time and the only way I can describe it is like falling in love for the first time.’ I was driving down the 210 to a meeting when I was reading this email and I began to weep, it was overwhelming to me. How many of you would describe hearing the voice of God like that? If you want to reach post-moderns you need to be a deeply spiritual person. It has to be a natural and organic part of your being.”

There was more but stopped feeling like transcribing it out. I am so encouraged by him.

Some of you may or may not know that I started a software development company in January 2008. It has been a long 18 months so far of development, redevelopment, and working very closely with the amazing people over at Substance Church.

Well this summer is our official launch of our company by making ourselves known to the Church world. Our main presence for the time being is going to be at conferences around the Midwest and hopefully by early 2010 we will be branching out into other regions of the country.

To go to conferences we need a booth to have set up. So far we’ve gotten in some of the physical objects for the booth (2 x 24″ HD dell displays!) but we need to get stuff out to the printers if we’re going to have it back in time. Below are the two big print items for the space in their final forms.

The first is the backdrop for our booth space. It is 10′ wide by 8′ tall. You can imagine there being a two foot wide table running into it on each side. It’ll look really professional.  I can’t actually remember the time I designed something that got sent out to a printer (we’re using EPS-Doublet because I always had a good experience with them from my MidwestSkier days). With that said, I am very pleased how it turned out (logo design by ned wright @ space150).

The latter is a pop-up sign that will sit next to each of the displays inviting people to come and play with the software. I really enjoyed how clean and simple each of them turned out to be. Now to sit down and design our hand outs… (Images after the jump)

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This has to be one of the most awesome notes that my wife has left for me yet.

For the record, I have been awake for nearly 6 hours and haven’t seen the lady bug yet. Must be an extra sneaky one.

It has come to my attented after being at Wisconsin Dells the beginning of last week that not everyone shrills and screams on water slides. While I see this as tragic, I also don’t believe that my doing so affects my masculinity in the slightest bit.

Scream away my friends, scream away. If the life guards laugh it is only because they are jealous of your fun.