Waggle Dance

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I’m not so much against the January 1st resolutions to do better, it’s the January 2nd failure to follow through that I hate. But this year has to be different. The last year has been one of contestant changes and challenges, adding a new member to the family, new responsibilities at work, at church, at home, and on line. Without a concerted effort to get organized and better manage the little details, 2008 is shaping up to be a real cluster.

To that end, I’ve started to used a number of web services that should help:

1. Goggle Mail - I’ve been a gmail user for about two years, but just recently, I have begun to use their IMAP and POP3 services to consolidate a number of email accounts I have, including my home account. The search engine makes finding emails a breeze (what do you expect from Google?) and the ever growing list of add-on services and Firefox plugins make integrating gmail into the rest of my life easier and easier.
2. Google Calendar - another great Google service, makes a good central hub for managing my time and keeping other up to date on what I’m doing.
3. Remember The Milk - A very cool task list organizer with tons of options for reminders and integration with Google calendar.
4. Jott - I just stumbled on to this web 2.0 beta - call the “866″ number on my cell phone, leave a message, and it get transcribed into text and delivered to myself, a friend or even my Google calendar or RTM task lists.

Integrating these together, I can voice dial Jott, send a task to RTM, get reminders via my jabber account or SMS and view my calendar, a number of shared calendars, and my tasks all together on my Google calendar.
Of course, January 2nd hasn’t come yet, but 2008 is looking a little less chaotic from here…

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I just ran across a term I had never heard before: Churchianity. In a nutshell, churchianity is the result of taking Christ out of Christianity. Jesus commanded us, the Church, to “go and make disciples”, but the unfortunate reality is that we are more prone to go and make church members. When I say “we”, I, of course mean the “royal We“, also known as “me, myself, and I”. While I have heard my Master’s instructions to make disciples and to preach the Good News, I have to ask myself:

1. Who am I discipling, right now?
   If I look back at someone I have mentored or raised in the faith, or look forward planning to reach out to a new believer, I am either resting on my laurels or exchanging planning for doing. While I could say that I am waiting on God to direct me to someone or have Him direct someone to me (I would sound soooo very spiritual, too), but the truth is that there are 6.6 billion people on the planet. What are the odds God is having troubles finding someone?? No, the bigger likelihood is that God is waiting for me to really say “..not my will, but yours be done.”
2. Who is discipling me?
   If Jesus’s plan to spread the faith was for the apostles to go and make disciples, who go and make disciple, who, in turn, go and make disciples, it seems pretty clear that if I am to be part of the plan, I need to be part of that chain.
   I can’t claim that I am wholly instructed by my Bible studies, or else part of His instructions would have been, “go and hurl big leather bound books at the nations and hope they get it.”
   I can’t claim that I am being discipled by the radio and TV preachers and teachers, or else he would have instructed us to air-drop TV’s tuned to TBN over the unsaved nations.
   I can’t claim that I have arrived, that I am done being discipled, because, wacky doctrines of sanctification aside, I can’t find any place in the scriptures that describes a point where I would know all there is know about God and His plans for the world and for me. There is ALWAYS someone I can learn from, someone with a perspective or insight on the Father I can profit from.
3. What is the Good News?
   I know the gospel message, really I do, but if I expend the opportunities the Spirit provides me sharing the virtues of my church, the schedule and coming events, what is the Good News? That my church is a nice place with nice people and nice programs? If the “good news” brings someone to a service, at best the Spirit is faithful and they hear the real Good News, but, at worst, I’ve squandered the chance God has given me to share Christ and witness a true miracle - a life transformed.

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I’ve set up a Wordpress instance off of my church’s domain to host the ReadingThru project. I’ve looked at a number of “One Year Bible” blogs, and I hope this one is a little different in that it’s more about the thoughts and impressions of the moment than a detailed study of the text.

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