Click on the Image below to play (MP3)

Please leave comments/thought! Not to bad for my 7th message I’ve given.

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!

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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!).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

‘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.

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)

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.

Here is what I found. Most places I found decimal values for Lat/Long only used up to 8 decimal places (depending on rounding), yet the most I found was 16 values to the right of the decimal place.

For those out there using mySQL and wanting to store these values I’m using the type: decimal(20,16) and while it will be overkill for some values, it should accommodate the extreme circumstances that arise.

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

It is also supposedly going to help improve UMA performance (which allows me to place calls over a wireless network). Hopefully this means when I switch from their network onto my wifi my calls won’t get dropped.

Well back to  programing.

Also, this Eastern world has a solid claim to be the direct lineal heir of the earliest New Testament Christianity. Throughout their history, the Eastern churches used Syriac, which is close to Jesus’s own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. Everything about these churches runs so contrary to what we think we know. They are too ancient, in the sense of looking like the original Jerusalem church; and they are too modern, in being so globalized and multi-cultural.

I personally really enjoyed what some of the research has uncovered about the eastern churches work in contextualization and their cultural interactions with other faiths and people groups.

Undoubtedly, its ability to relate to other cultures and religions in a way that does not necessarily mean conceding any fundamental claims on either side. These Christians interact freely with Buddhists and exchange ideas to the point that some use a lotus-cross symbol. At the same time, this is an authentic version of ancient Christianity – liturgical, monastic and mystical.

From its earliest ages, Christianity has always been a vastly wider, more diverse and more global faith than we ever give it credit for.

It was actually Christian Bishops (non roman) that translated the Buddhist scriptures into the local language of the people of Tibet because Christianity was there before. The same Christians used imagery and language from religions like Buddhism to communicate the scriptures.

There are many questions that get raised once we embrace the reality that Christianity was a global faith long before any modern mission movement. Questions like:

• How does the extinction of the majority of the church in the 14 century effect our eschatological (end times) perspective and theology?
• With a thousand year tradition of contextualizing scripture how does this change our scholastic and daily use of the bible?
• With a smaller cannon (number of books in the NT) that we have in the west should we look again at what was included in ours?

I think that the most striking is that we have never heard about this Church in the west. Yes it was mostly exterminated in the 1300’s, but there is a whole other set of valid traditions of the faith (that in some cases may be more valid expressions of Christianity). Why not? Instead of trying to bring the gospel to a place like China, we are trying to salvage the faith that existed there for a thousand years. Instead of trying to discover how Islam and Christianity can coexist we can look at people who lived that way for centuries.

The most important question I believe has to do with how this affects our view of the church. There was a church that didn’ t use Greek philosophical concepts to understand God, they didn’t have church fathers like Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and so on. So without devaluing their Christianity, how can it change and inform our experience and practice of the faith today? (the same question I have for the church of the Global South today).

I believe the answer to that question will be quite liberating for the church, if the church can embrace the reality that we are the off shoot of only a small portion of the faith.

[Top Image is a Cross and Lotus from the "Nestorian" Christian Monument in China, 781 CE, bottom is the newest book by Philip Jenkins]

Quotes from  Belief Net

My top three podcasts are:

1. Internet Business Mastery
2. Ted Talks
3. Armada Skis

The full list of podcasts I listen to on a regular basis, alphabetically.

• Armada Skis – (http://www.armadaskis.com/community/vcast.php) – 1-7 minutes
  My friend Eric Iberg started this company a few years back with a bunch of friends. Love to keep up with them, this is an easy way to do that. Plus it’s free and has killer skiing.
• Ask A Ninja – (http://askaninja.com/) – 1-5 minutes
  Doesn’t update nearly as often as he used to (I think he has a channel at rever now) but always makes me smile.
• Freeskier Magazine Podcast – (http://freeskier.tv/) – 1-5 minutes
  Some decent segments to feed the skier in me.
• Geeks and God – (http://geeksandgod.com/) – 60+ minutes
  Mildly interesting and WAY to long for the content they provide. Never the less, they are kind of the only podcast relevant to my  industry.
• Internet Business Mastery – (http://www.internet-based-business-mastery.com/) – 40-55 minutes
  I can’t say enough good things about this podcast. Its the only one on my list I eagerly away each week. Most of the insights are quite brilliant and the application is almost always apparent, if not explicit. If you run a business that is heavily reliant upon the web, this one is a must.
• MacBreak – (http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak) – 1-7 minutes
  A video podcast dedicated to everything mac. Gotta love it.
• pouringdown – (http://pouringdown.tv/) – 2-5 minutes
  Just a beautiful and inspiring set of video from Daniel Liss, a resident of NYC. Not updated super frequently, but is always a joy when it is.
• Strong Bad Email – (http://podstar.homestarrunner.com/) – 2-5 minutes
  Because if you’ve never heard of homestarrunner.com you have really missed out. really, a lot.
• Substance Church Sermons - (http://substancechurch.com/podcast/) – 40-55 minutes
  I’m a titch bit bias on this one. Not only is this our church (and I helped with the launch team 4+ years ago), they are also the church most helping me develop nineteen05. Wrote the software that manages this podcast myself!
• TED Talks (video) – (http://www.ted.com/) – 15-25 minutes
  The Technology, Education, and Design conference puts a ridiculous amount of there inspiring talks online. Love it. Since i will likely never be able to afford the very expensive ticket price (thousands per person) this becomes the next best thing. Listened to almost all of them, except for some of the musical ones, and the real out there ones. Inspiring, must check it out.
• Wall Street Journal on Small Business – (http://online.wsj.com/public/page/podcast.html – rss Feed) – 7-8 minutes
  Short and sweet, right to the point full of news relevant to my needs as a small business owner. Helps me keep on top of what other service type businesses are doing (the focus of much of their reporting).

I realize that it looks like a lot, and that all I must ever do is listen to podcasts but most of these update quite infrequently (less than weekly).

My hope is that you might have found something in here worth checking out. If you have any you listen to on a regular basis you think I might enjoy let me know in the comments!

I was trying to remember back when I was first integrating the podcast  features and it seems so long ago that I just assume that it was and has always been there. Finally to the last two major pieces of development, as it was laid out in January 2008. The thought of having all the initial development completed is astounding to me.

We can hardly wait to drop this who app on the church community as a whole. The first major introduction is coming in march with Substance Church. I’d say more but I figure making you wait is just as much fun.

Well I must be going. Have to finish putting everything away before my wife gets back from spending time with a friend. Will try to post a new photo of our view soon.

The message I gave was an adaptation of one that i prepared for a preaching competition over at Bethel Seminary. So it was the second time giving the message, and much improved over the first time. If you have a half hour check it out, and please leave me your thoughts and feedback!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Be blessed!

The last two years have gone by so quickly! Of all the things i could post here, some sweet and enduring things crossed my mind, and then I saw this from one of the best sites on the Internet.

Thank you so much for putting up with such a ridiculous husband. I love you more then i ever thought I could.

(Oh and for the rest of you, I did get her flowers, not just this fabulous post about squirrels and coffee).