Month: January 2009

Via Sojourners:

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

My understanding of the ethics of sweatshops just got more complicated.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

We’ve received the year end apportionment data for the forty largest churches in the annual conference. We contributed 100% of our apportionments for a total of $33,144. Ranked by the amount of apportionments paid, Coffeyville First is 27th out of more than 330 churches in the conference (I don’t remember the exact number). Well done people.

I got the chance to speak with Bishop Jones during a break. He told me that N. T. Wright’s concept of “Life after life after death” with paradise as an intermediate stage before the final restoration of the new heaven and new earth matches the understanding of John Wesley found in his Notes on the New Testament.

Jenny and I are at the Kansas Area Seminar on Professional Ministry. We just learned of a great online resource for the works of John and Charles Wesley: www.divinity.duke.edu/wesleyan/texts/index.html.

By way of Will Willimon’s blog (see the link at right), I found the mission statement of the North Alabama Annual Conference: “Every church challenged and equipped to grow more disciples of Jesus Christ by taking risks and changing lives.” That got me thinking, what risks do we at Coffeyville First need to take? Have an answer? Drop me a line at johnandjenny@revcollins.com

The Vision Team meeting for this Wednesday is being postponed because Jenny and I will be in Wichita (see the previous post).

Jenny and I are off to Wichita for the Kansas Area Seminar on Professional Ministry tomorrow. We’ll be back Thursday. Jenny’s dad will be here to take care of Elizabeth.

An interesting blog entry by Brian McLaren over at God’s Politics.

Yesterday we made three technological developments that you might be interested in:

1. Embedded Video: For the Video sermon illustration for this coming Sunday, I’ve managed to take the movie clip and embed it in the presentation. What this means: playing the movie is as simple as moving through to the next slide and thus the sermon should flow more smoothly.
2. Website: With help from Tony Wood I’ve gotten started on rebuilding the church website upon the more expansive, widely used, and free WordPress platform. The old website will remain in place until we launch the new one.
3. Recording Sermons: We’ve wanted to make recordings of the sermon available online and by CD for shut-ins, but the process was very time consuming and the results were of questionable quality. We received a new portable digital recorder (a Tascam DR-1) that in early tests is easily and simply producing very high quality recordings.

From UMNS (United Methodist News Service):

UMNS now offers a Twitter feed to keep followers informed with daily headlines and links to its stories online. The feed will also include updates and other pertinent information from the News Service. You can find our feed at: http://twitter.com/UMNS. UMNS also has a Facebook page – go to www.facebook.com and write “UMNS” in the search engine – and you can find UMTV stories on YouTube, Google video, and GodTube.

Come celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the continuing of his dream on Saturday, January 17, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. at the First Christian Church, 9th and Elm, Coffeyville, KS. Refreshments follow. Celebration sponsored by PINCH.