On February 23, 2007 the movie Amazing Grace will hit theaters all over USAmerica. It is the story of one man’s struggle for justice in his time and place. Below is a trailer for the movie. If you want more information, you can discover it at Amazing Grace Movie.

I am leading a dissertation course at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, WA. It’s a great experience. Having finished my second dissertation last April, I realized again that for the most part my dissertation will set on the library shelf and collect dust. Of course in my case because of it’s size it will collect more dust than some of my cohortians.

I found the following YouTube movie which is an effort to get folks to read the hard work that goes into a dissertation. Hope you enjoy it.

Over the years of teaching and training in the church, I have suggested on more than one occasion that the church is not the primary source for the spiritual formation of children. This primary responsibility belongs to the family. Traditionally, families have not been trained with this notion in mind. Training is always going on with kids and they are being spiritually formed even if we are not actively thinking or reflecting about it.

I just found this resource that I thought might interest you. It’s written by Ivy Beckwith, who is apart of the Emergent Village conversation. She has written Postmodern Children’s Ministry: Ministry to Children in the 21st Century Church in which she speaks about the spiritual formation of children and their place as full participants in the community of faith.

Here is a brief part of her introduction:

The church’s ministry to children is broken. A cursory look doesn’t reveal its brokenness. From the outside children’s ministry looks healthier then ever. But it is broken. It’s broken when church leaders and senior pastors see children’s ministry as primarily a marketing tool. The church with the most outwardly attractive program wins the children and then the parents. It’s broken when we teach children the Bible as if it were just another book of moral fables or stories of great heroes. Something’s broken when we trivialize God to our children. It’s broken when we exclude children from, perhaps, the most important of community activities – worship. It’s broken because we’ve become dependent on an 18th century schooling model forgetting that much of a child’s spiritual formation is affective, active, and intuitive. It’s broken when we depend on our programs and our curriculum to introduce our children to God – not our families and communities. It’s broken when we’ve come to believe that church has to be something other than church to be attractive to children. It’s broken when we spend lots of money making our churches into play lands and entice children to God through food fights and baptisms in the back of fire trucks. And perhaps most importantly it’s broken when the church tells parents that its programs can spiritually nurture their children better than they can. By doing this we’ve lied to parents and allowed them to abdicate their responsibility to spiritually form their children. A church program can’t spiritually form a child, but a family living in an intergenerational community of faith can. Our care for our children is broken and badly in need of repair. Let’s imagine together a new way, a new future.

I trust you will pick it up and give it a read.

I have had open heart surgery and five heart stints/stents. I am also an adult diabetic. Diabetes effects my nerves and their ability to send messages in my body. So my heart pain is never the same because my nerves send and received messages differently because of the diabetes.

I though about how that looks in the “body of Christ.” It seems more than not that messages that need to be sent are garbled because of damaged senders and the results it a mess trying to figure out what the communication really is. We may have a kind of “spiritual diabetes” in the church, which has effected our nervous system and causes pain that is unrecognizable.

Now that’s not a thought that I cherish living with “physical and spiritual diabetes.” The medical world tells me that diabetes is only controllable not curable. I choose not to believe such. That doesn’t mean that I stick my head in the sand (sugar sand at that) and “eat my way” into a sugar coma. My faith provides me with hope that God can heal me of that disease in this life. I choose to believe that. That would lead me to also believe that “spiritual diabetes” in the church could also be healed within the body of Christ. I choose to believe that also.

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Then click on the Play Button. The presentation will begin in a couple of seconds.

Yesterday, February 4, 2007, I was at the Monroe Vineyard to be present some thoughts about Scripture. I chose to talk about Scripture from a Story perspective over against my conversation partner: reading it fragmentively.

Usually, they present an audio version, but MV has started making videos available via their net site. I found out one thing about my talk that I would have never seen in an audio version. I like to hold my hands together and rub my nose. Yuck! I’m sure you can see other peculiar things as you watch. My hope is however that you may find in this presentation a view that “living in God’s EPIC Adventure” an playing our part is what being a follower of Jesus is about. Enjoy!