Baptist Global Response is raising funds for disaster relief in Haiti. All Southern Baptist relief is being organized by Florida Baptist who have an ongoing ministry in Haiti to help the people there. If you want to help click the link.
Archive for category News & Such
Wanna Help in Haiti
Jan 13
My latest article for Christian Computing Magazine is online at: http://www.ccmag.com/articles/articles.php?recordID=236.
This month I reviewed QuickVerse 2010 & BibleGlo.
Would you like to add a Bible verse to your Gmail signature? The folks at www.eBible.com have made it an automatic features using Gmail’s Random Signature function in their “labs.”
Here are the instructions from an email I just got from them:
- Click on “Settings” in the top right of Gmail screen
- Go to “Labs”
- Find “Random Signature” about 1/4 of the way down the page. Enable it and Save Changes
- Go to “General” tab (first tab back in Settings)
- Enter this URL as below: http://ebible.com/api/random_signature?utm_source=random_signature&utm_medium=gmail. You have to add it to the box next to “Append a random signature from feed:”
- Save Changes
- Compose Mail, then discard, then Compose Mail again and you should see your fancy new signature with Bible verse showing !. Be patience, sometime it takes more than 12hrs or a day to create signature with eBible verse.
It works. I just added one to my signature.
I have created a new forum just for pastors and preachers. This is a forum dedicated to helping the pastors and preachers who like to work together to study the Bible. We will study passages, topics and theology together to challenge each other and help each other learn, understand and communicate God’s word.
If you want to join us, click the link above and start posting!
My January article for Christian Computing Magazine is now live. If you read my article on QuickVerse then I hope you will also go on over to Christ-Tech.com and post in the forums about it.
We just got an email from Samaritan’s Purse telling us that our Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes went to Botswana this Christmas. Here are some pictures of the kids opening the boxes sent there by people all over the world. If you care to you can to the site yourself by clicking the picture or here.
Are you First or Second?
Dec 9
People often pump their fists in the air to say, “I’m number 1.” But here is a site that wants you to know these people are not number 1. They are 2nd.
Unimaginable Grief
Jun 5
A church member sent this photo to me. Read the title and that is all I can say.
The woman in the photo is the wife of the man in the coffin. She wanted to sleep one last time next to his body before his burial. The man standing guard is there at the request of the wife. You can click the picture to see some other photos by the same photographer, I think they are of the same sad homecoming.
God bless and protect our troops as they serve in harms way!
Want to Go to the Moon?
May 4
I thought this was kind of cool. On NASA’s next moon trip they are going to take you with them. Well, not you, but your name.
From the website where you submit your name:
The Send Your Name to the Moon Web site enables everyone to participate in the lunar adventure and place their names in orbit around the moon for years to come. Participants can submit their information at http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/, print a certificate and have their name entered into a database. The database will be placed on a microchip that will be integrated onto the spacecraft. The deadline for submitting names is June 27, 2008.
My son did this and here is his certificate.
Frank Page is the President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He will conclude his second term this year. And he has encouraged small church pastors to nominate a candidate. I’ve been saying this for years, but it takes someone like him to get attention. Check out this article to read what he said and where he said it.
Why do we need a small church President?
- The vast majority of churches in the SBC are small. I pastor a church that averages about 120 in worship each week. That makes my church in the top 20 percent in size in the SBC and the top 10 in North Carolina. But when you hear about church life at the convention or from the convention’s institutions all you hear about is the mult-staff church with more than four or five hundred people. They don’t understand us and you can tell by the way they suggest we do things. If we applied all that they instruct most of us would not last long.
- Small churches are not an affliction on the SBC but the engine that keeps her going. And it is about time that our efforts and work were appreciated and lauded instead of made to feel like we have failed in some way.
- There are a very large number of pastors who lead small churches that are doing far better than the mega churches in our denomination. They baptize 300 people but have 10,000 in attendance at their weekend services. That is a 3 percent rate. In other it takes 100 people to baptize 3 in a year’s time. But there are some small churches that have no more than 100 and baptize 10 or 20 people. That means that in those churches it takes 33 people to baptize 3. A couple of years ago a pastor was nominated whose church gave tens of thousands of dollars to the Cooperative Program. But it amounted to less than a few percent. By comparison many churches with less than $50,000 budgets and bi-vocational pastors are giving 5-10 percent of their budget to the Cooperative Program.
- I tire of going to the SBC and being told how to vote and then being made to feel like I am not a true conservative if I don’t vote the way the big guys want me to. Thankfully Frank Page helped break that trend. But electing a pastor from a small church would take this a step further.
Now in case you might think I’m campaigning, if nominated I won’t run and if elected I won’t serve. But I pray someone in a church like mine will, so long as he serves a church like the ones described above.
