Unseparating Church and State: The right way

Lets stage our own Greenslide. If every member of your church joined the Greens and advocated for the environment, for social justice, and for a less rabidly anti-Christian platform we’d have the makings of a fantastic party.

(Via St. Eutychus.)

From kottke.org: Searching for Jesus:

From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, ‘Jesus, Interrupted’, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

Shame about those, you know, facts.

This is one of those articles I wish I’d written, since it’s entirely and precisely about me.

How to write badly well.

Use it wisely, friends.

Bartik is writing a book. It’s shaping up to be a cracker.

It’s only in draft stage at the moment, with 4 of the 10 chapters written, but this is something that’s going to revolutionise leadership paradigms all over the world: in business, politics, churches, and beyond.

Here’s the rationale for using Moses as a paradigm for effective leadership:

“Moses of course went on to become easily the most significant, prolific prophet and judge in the history of the Bible. Even in these early stages, Moses was headed for greatness.”

As I said, keep your eyes peeled. This will seriously change your life. Or someone else’s.

A bunch of Christians who play Ultimate Frisbee got together recently and chucked around ideas that might help establish and grow a community of Christians in the sport. There are other Christian people around who play, but we don’t all know each other, and many find the culture at tournaments a little difficult at times to reconcile with their faith and practice.

I was in on that discussion.

To get things rolling, we’ve put together a site and a web forum as a means of helping people find out who other Christians are, chat, organise to meet up at tournaments, pray for one another, and a bunch of other things. It may go in different directions. We’ll see.

The aims that we chucked around were the following:

1. Get discussions running on any questions about the Christian faith
2. Get to know other Christians in the frisbee community.
3. Give each other some accountability during tournaments. (Not in a bad way, but you know)
4. Ask about how to handle situations that come up regarding conflicts between frisbee and faith
5. Introduce topics for study, ie. we could have continuous threads running about various sections of the bible
6. Have general fellowship with each other
7. Make online prayer requests… if that’s not too awkward for people.
8. Introduce new people to the concepts and beliefs of Christianity
9. Challenge each other to really show God’s love to everyone!

It’s kinda primarily aimed at those who play at a tournament level, but open to anyone in the frisbee scene. No, you don’t have to be a Christian to join (but understand that this is what we’re on about).

If this sounds like something you might be keen to be a part of, check it out. Sign up, contribute.

And let me know what you think.