Know who you're evangelizing

Ben Gray, at "Blog Ministry," says that when we start to evangelize, we need to understand the culture of the people who are our "target audience". He briefly discusses boosting your effectiveness as a youth minister by understanding today's youth and pop culture. For example, he says that young kids prefer IM and MySpace to email. Read the comments, too -- there's some interesting stuff there.

On the front lines of global warming

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has a page about "Witnesses to climate change" that has blurbs and links to articles about four people who describe what climate change has done to their area and their lives.

Faith vs. a political agenda

The most-emailed link on Google this afternoon was "My problem with Christianism". In the Time article online, Andrew Sullivan voices concern about the ongoing attempt by some Christians to paint anyone who disagrees with their particular view of Christianity as "godless" or worse.

God's earth: Hotter climate in the future

The NOAA site has a good page summarizing global warming trends and predictions for the future of God's earth. The conclusions are especially significant in view of the current Administration's seeming tendency to ignore scientific facts and theories and stifle scientific research that don't fit its political agenda.

Take the Pulse of evangelism

The Lausanne World Pulse free online magazine contains lots of interesting news, information, and analysis of evangelism, outreach, and missionaries. The home page always dishes up the current issue -- May as of this writing. The May issue has a mini-bio about Jennie Fowler Willing, a strong supporter of women's involvement in missions in North America.

Among other things, Mrs. Willing served as an officer in the Woman's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. "In many ways, she was Methodism's Susan B. Anthony, and was certainly Evanston's and Illinois Methodism's most famous woman in history." [Quoted at "The Des Plaines Methodist Camp Ground", by CDCGA -- cached at Google].

The mini-bio in the magazine is topical and timely, since with Heritage Sunday 2006 on May 26th, the United Methodist Church celebrates 50 years of full clergy rights for women.
Related links:

• Professor recovers lost history of American women evangelists
• Empowered foremothers
• Social Holiness in New York City (scroll down to see the brief entry about Jennie Fowler Willing.

Miracle Money Chicken

"The Mystery of the Money Chicken" describes a church's experience that passing around to youth a chicken flower pot as a collection plate got better results than other methods. Interesting. Can your church adopt some similar practice and get better giving?

This posting came from the "Alas! and did my Savior Blog?" blog, penned by a young man preparing to go into pastoral ministry in the UMC.

Too cool toward global warming?

"It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases' causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable," said Tony Blair in a forward to a report of the British Met (meteorological) office. Even modest temperature increases could disrupt ocean currents and plunge Europe into a mini ice age.

Canada says the link between human activity and global warming is undeniable . Furthermore, a recent poll shows that 71 percent of Americans also believe that global warming is for real. An even greater percentage, 75%, want more Federal action on global warming. They are even willing to sacrifice to do something about it.
What is your church doing to protect God's earth? Are you part of the solution?

'Be' church, don't 'Do' church

In " The Unattractive", Pastor Jim Hoffman, Lee's Summit UMC, says that churches are failing when they get stuck in "doing" church instead of "being" the church.

More ways to read these postings

You can always come to this blog's web page to read the posts. That's my personal preference. But if you start subscribing to a "bunch o' blogs", the number of new articles may get large. One way to manage scanning them for what you really want to read is to use a " Feed Reader", which I've mentioned in prior posts.

Blog readers (a.k.a. feed readers or RSS readers) come in two basic forms -- web-based and ones installed on your PC. The web-based variety involves setting up an account at Google, Yahoo! or similar wites, then adding blogs to track. You log onto the Web site to see new headlines from the blogs in your list. The local install method gives you a program. When you run the program, many of which look similar to MS Outlook, you "subscribe" to blogs. The program then pulls down information about the blog postings and you read as you like.

Here are a few recently touted feed readers (blog readers):

• SharpReader (donationware)
• RSS Bandit (donationware)

Pew Forum smells nice

The Pew Forum of Religion & Public Life has a lot of great links, surveys, news, ...

One tidbit:
Americans strongly favor increased government aid to the poor. According to a July 2005 poll conducted by the Pew Forum and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 69% of Americans favor providing more generous government assistance to the poor.