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So Jesus tells another great story about a tree. And just when you think the story is going to be about judgement you find a picture of grace. Its ridiculous to think any vineyard owner would agree to keeping a fruitless tree in his precious soil, but then sometimes God thinks differently to us. May be this year there will be figs on the tree…

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Helpful sources:

Tom Wright, Luke for everyone.
Tom Wright, Luke for everyone.

The Blogging Church is a book which aims to answer the why rather than the how kind of questions.

Be not afraid – this is not a technical book. Brian Bailey explains to geeks and non-geeks alike how blogging is an essential tool for churches and church leaders wanting to communicate the story. If being church is about living the Christian story, then the telling of that story is what sharing the gospel is all about. If you want to share a story then you need to learn to blog. By sharing the story, you invite others to respond, joining the conversation.

“Blogging is about connecting communities through conversation.”
Brian Bailey

Brian presents some clear non-technical reasons why blogging could help your ministry or church by connecting people, building community and sharing the story. It doesn’t tell you how to set up a blog or what software to use – you can find that sort of information elsewhere. Brian focuses on what is important and what is possible with a technology that is now within the grasp of anybody. Included in the book are interviews with other church bloggers who share some of their experiences too.

If you don’t know what a blog is or what it has to do with church then you need this book.
If you do know what a blog is, this book will help you see its potential for sharing the story.

View books details at Amazon View books details at Amazon

The List…

Some of these sites are lectionary based, but that doesn’t mean that if you have some hang up about preaching the lectionary you should bypass them. Most sites have scripture reference indexes, so whatever the text, you’ll find something here.

1. TextWeek.com

TextWeek.com is simply indispensable. It is a huge collection of lectionary and scripture related resources. Just look what is available of for Luke 9:26-36 as an example. Content ranges from links to the text itself, through detailed contemporary and historical commentary, to the odd sermon (well not so odd actually), full liturgies and worship resources. The movie database provides a concordance of movie clips. The Art Index catalogues ancient and modern art masterpieces related to the bible reference or subject. And because you can’t leave home without it, there is PDA version that means you can take this week and next week’s resources with you!

2. LectionaryStudies.com

Rev. Bryan Findlayson’s bible study notes are like an online commentary on the lectionary. The Lectionary Bible studies are all based on the the NIV. Bryan in each study provides a fairly detailed exegesis on the passage, describing context and content. There are discussion starters and some detailed notes on Greek etc. Here’s his take on Luke 9:26-36. The layout of the studies is also pretty pleasing to the eye and easy to read.

3. ATLAS Serials

ATLAS gives online access to a collection of some of the best theology journals. You can read articles published in many of the leading journals from as early as 1924 to the present. I wish I’d discovered this at college! It does cost $99 for an annual subscription (less than most journals) but if you go through the link on textweek.com you can try it free for 30 days.

4. Preacher’s Magazine

Published by the Nazarene Publishing House, Preacher’s Magazine is distributed three times a year, with content that relates to the three seasons of the Church calendar: Advent/Christmas, Lent/Easter, and Pentecost. Each edition features different aspects of the pastoral task of preaching.

5. Reverend Fun

Now we’d be very boring people if there was not some humour thrown in somewhere. On this site you’ll find an endless supply of cartoons.

(Copyright Gospel Communications International, Inc – www.reverendfun.com)

There you have it. 5 great sites for preachers that are not desperate for anything but wanting to understand and communicate the message of the bible today.

The Lab Test

Its the beginning of another week. Here I am wanting to teach on the story of Jonah this Sunday in an all-age setting. Type Jonah into the search box on each site and lets see what I find…

• SermonSpice has a nice very short animation of the story just 40 seconds long. $7 though!
• BlueFishTV has a very cute retelling of the story by children. Its 1min 44s long and is just $1.99.
• SermonVideos.com – not a lot really. Just a couple of videos that are also on SermonSpice and nothing to do with Jonah.
• Highway Video – nothing.
• YouTube - OK, I confess I had to type Jonah and the whale, but sift through the rubbish you’ll find this simple animated version of the story

The Verdict

For me BlueFishTV comes out top. It is easy to navigate, has lots of good quality videos to download and is so much less expensive than the other paying sites. In second I’ll put YouTube and I guess if you lump in all those other video sharing sites you have a huge resource available. So huge it does make finding the decent stuff much harder. The main drawback with YouTube is the video format can mean that some videos are not of sufficient quality for playback in church.

So here’s how they rank based on my lab test:

1. BluefishTV.com – great videos and nearly free ($1.99 a download). (Lab Score: 4.5)
2. YouTube – where else do go for FREE video? Quality of video for playback in church is not great. (Lab Score: 4)
3. SermonSpice.com – lots of good video, but expensive. (Lab Score: 3.5)
4. SermonVideos.com – very similar to sermonspice but not as easy to navigate (Lab Score: 2)
5. Highway Video – judging from their home page, they seem to think its still Christmas! (Lab Score: 0)

Of course YouTube lets you embedd videos in your own blog:

Afterthought…

Does anybody know of a free site like YouTube dedicated to church/christian use or are all the Christians with video cameras too busy trying to make money?

Getting started

The main idea is that you can’t just call the plogger code from within your theme. You actually have to make the plogger index.php look like your theme, by calling the appropriate WordPress template tags from the plogger index file.

Step 1

Open the index.php file found in your Plogger’s installation folder.
Index.php is actually a very simple file, there are only a few lines of code in it.

The only three lines of code that you need to run Plogger are:
require("gallery.php");
the_gallery_head();
the_gallery();


You will need to keep these three lines of code handy.

Step 2

You now need to create a new index.php file. (It is worth making a backup of the old one frist though!). The new version will be made to look like your theme starting with the page.php file from the WordPress theme you are using.

Find your page.php file. Make a copy of it called index.php and open it.

Step 3

Add <?php require('../wp-blog-header.php'); as the very first line of code to the file. The index file will end up in your plogger folder. This line locates the WordPress code. The path shown here assumes your plogger directory is in a subfolder on your site and WordPress is installed in the root. If it isn’t you will obviously need to change this path.

Immediately after, on the second line you need to add the Plogger code:
<?php require("gallery.php"); ?>

Now remove everything inside the main content div tags and replace it with just:
<?php the_gallery_head(); ?>
<?php the_gallery(); ?>

The finished file should look something like:

<?php require('../wp-blog-header.php');
require("gallery.php"); ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div class="content">
  <?php the_gallery_head(); ?>
  <?php the_gallery(); ?>
  </div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>


Step 4

Save the file as index.php and copy it to the folder where you installed Plogger.

Step 5

Test it and tweak it – you are done!

Step 6 (optional)

Put a link to your gallery on your blog either by editing the theme sidebar code or use redirectify to point a page to the Plogger index.php file.

Step 7

Leave a comment here and tell Tim what he forgot to tell you!

It isn’t easy or elegant but it works!

“If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘People do not live on bread alone.’”

The three temptations of Jesus remind us of the story of the Israelites in the desert. Jesus in a sense stands exactly where they stood, he stands where we stand and chooses wisely. The people of God grumbled about God’s provision in the Desert. Here Jesus is tempted to live independently of God, to use his own powers to turn stone to bread. He shows us that life is found by learning to be dependent on God and choosing to follow his lead, which isn’t always the easiest, most comfortable way.

Perhaps the challenge to us is to our materialism.

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A lectionary image 2 weeks running! This could be a regular feature.

Rob probably doesn’t say anything that others haven’t said in their own respray of the faith for the post modern world, but he makes following Jesus sound possible, having brushed off some of the baggage we have accumulated. Rob is also the guy behind the Nooma DVDs. There is also a recent interview with Rob available on Premier TV online.

View details of book at Amazon

View details of book at Amazon

Buy the complete NOOMA Series Library of 12 DVDs ZCS

a living window into the church

Church without walls?

I think the biggest benefits lie in the way the tool encourages a living window into the church — One step towards a church without walls, to quote someone else. The whole blogging concept encourages the church’s ongoing story to be told. The effect is that the church looks alive. It is pretty easy to achieve too. Once set up, you just keep posting about news and events in the church and the community.

Geek free!

Now this is probably true for other similar content management and blogging solutions too, but I just think WP is easiest to use. Which leads me to another important reason. WordPress frees the church website from the grip of the geeks. You don’t need to know HTML, CSS or any of that stuff to maintain your church web site.

Community, community, community…

I think the communal aspect of blogging also has the potential to encourage community within and around the life of the church too, though I haven’t yet seen many good examples of this. May be it is a little risky to live your church on the Internet and it could also create a bit of a digital divide. Believe it or not, not everybody has access to the Internet.

Cory Miller has some other good posts about WordPress for churches and other thoughts on church communications too.

Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here! Let us make three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But Peter did not know what he was talking about.

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