I was reading Dave Barry’s Year in Review a few days ago, as well as others. I wasn’t really thinking much about the whole concept - after all, every writer who’s anyone does a “Year in Review” piece sometime - until a tsumani hit the other side of the world. Estimates are that there was a quake of magnitude 9 underwater, which caused a massive tidal wave that threatened to wipe most of southeast Asia clean. This happened after all the “year in review” articles had been filed, humorous or otherwise. (Granted, it would have been in particularly bad taste for Dave Barry to joke about this, but the point is that none of the other review wires had time to include this.)

The disaster made me think of, among other things, the problems with running an article like this before the year is truly finished. Undoubtedly, this incident was one of the top newsmakers of the world in recent memory. It probably ranks up there among the worst disasters of all time. And yet, five years from now, someone will look back at the NY Times, Washington Post, or USA Today, read the “Year in Review,” and never see mention of this disaster. That’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it?

Come to think of it, it’s not just journalists that have this problem. They have deadlines and such, so one might argue that, with an early deadline, the system is inherently flawed. But looking beyond all that, this anecdote reveals a flaw in human nature - the desire to wrap things up before they’re really finished. The lack of patience, you might say. Our society has preconditioned us to want things now, or even yesterday. We have the internet, the almighty god of the immediate. We can download, purchase, ship, and even view our products online with the push of a button over ever-increasing bandwidth capacities. With RSS, we don’t have to even wait for Baal Verizon to load up fifteen news pages from around the world, because we have an instant news feed updated every fifteen seconds culling the headlines from dozens of internet sources that you’ve probably never even heard of! (Phew!) Not that any of this instant stuff is bad in and of itself…but it shows that we, as a people, are willing to sacrifice the future to get what we want now, and that’s a dangerous trend.

Wise men have said before: “It’s not the destination that matters so much as the journey.” It is among the journey of life that we learn. Much as 13-year-old kids would like to take a pill and wake up 25 the next morning, common sense tells us that would be a horrible idea - he would have no concept of working to support himself, no concept of social interactions among his new peer group, no concept of personal responsibility. It’s in the waiting that the true gems and skills of life are revealed. And to those who have the capacity to wait and learn at the same time, I say congratulations - you have learned a skill in life worth learning.

For anyone who might just have happened to try to connect to my site within the last fifteen minutes or so, I apologize. I went through a rather painless upgrade of my Wordpress software. I’m now running WP 1.22, a minor upgrade from 1.21. It’s really not that hard…it’s just one of those things that you hesitate to do the first time. But it’s done, and everything works (as far as I can tell), so this site should be good to go.

Scott Aniol has written a well-thought-out defense of the traditional Christmas celebrations. There’s a reason the first six letters of the holiday are CHRIST; but at the same time most of the traditions we have today are harmless additions, provided we don’t get so caught up in the traditionalism that we lose the opportunity altogether to focus on Christ’s birth (and the reason for that birth).

My dad made a good point in his Sunday School lesson this morning, and it’s a point that Scott brings out, too. The church has two (or three) ordinances - baptism and the Lord’s Table (and possibly foot washing, which some have made good, if stretched, arguments for). Historically, the only events celebrated in the life of Christ are His death and resurrection, and because of the close proximity of the two events (three days), they’re usually celebrated at the same time - Easter. (Yes, the Roman Church spends a whole month celebrating it, but it’s not a national craze to celebrate Lent, now is it?) We have good reason for this - the resurrection occurred close to the Passover, a holiday already celebrated by first-century Messianic Jews. When Christianity branched out to include Gentiles, the season was “dumbed down,” if I can use that term, to give the Gentiles something to celebrate. Enter Easter. We have the historical precedent for that; but it wasn’t until a lot later that Christians decided to celebrate the birth of Christ. Why? Strictly speaking, the birth of Christ technically accomplished nothing in itself. Granted, without the Birth of Christ, there could be no Death of Christ (duh!) and therefore no salvation; but the only significance of the birth is that it provided a means for death. Why celebrate it?

Read the rest of his article; I won’t rephrase everything he said. Keep your eyes on Kara Ministries’ weblog for more good studies. Thankfully there are fundamentalists out there who actually think through stuff they believe and come to a solid conclusion on pretty much everything. Scott’s one of those people - has been since I’ve known him. Incidentally, I’ve snitched some of his thoughts (from a set of emails a few months ago) for a much larger and longer thesis on the state of music in the church that I still have yet to finish. Maybe this Christmast break…

Merry Christmas, all. And for those of you who are enjoying a real white Christmas…I hate you. (It rained here yesterday. Hard. It was also 60 degrees. Today it’s been quite cold. Why can’t the precipitation and the cold air ever arrive at the same time? Or at least why can’t the cold air arrive before the precipitation?)

I hear my Midwest friends are snowed in. Lucky dogs. I understand you think it’s the end of the world, but you only got two feet. Five feet would be a different story. Enjoy it, though - at least it looks like Christmas out there. Grrr…

Christmas is coming - two days away. I plan on spending tomorrow beating Jedi Knight II: Outcast. After I do that, I’ll play it over again without the benefit of the walkthroughs. Honestly, I’ve always had problems figuring out where to go and what to do in those FPS games, especially Halo. Were it not for zacfoo I’d never make it in that game. Anyway, this is a thread about Christmas, not my favorite PC game(s).

I came across two good, thought-provoking cartoons the other day. Both comics are used with permission from Gospelcom.net. The cartoons themselves are from a series called Reverand Fun. Note that, by way of hated disclaimers, I don’t endorse quite everything he draws, but that’s life. These two are powerful enough to speak for themselves. (If you don’t quite get the significance of the first one, look at who’s sleeping in the hotel room on the far right.)

Compare the last comic to an article on Snopes regarding the origins of the abbreviation “Xmas.” Christians over the years have loudly complained that the abbreviation is a deliberate attempt to remove Christ from Christmas. While that may have some validity, this article offers another explanation. Yes, I know the “Xmas” comic and this article are in disagreement. I say, write, and type “Christmas” unless I’m absolutely running out of room on a page - it’s a habit that I don’t intend to change. But I’m not sure how militant I’d be against others doing it. Like so many other things, unless there’s a good reason to go against established tradition, you might as well keep the status quo.

A few weeks ago, a game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons more than made up for the lack of hockey this season with a surprisingly violent fight. It all started with a flagrant foul and ended with very long suspensions for most people involved. The biggest antagonist, Ron Artest (who decked not one but two Pistons fans during the brawl) was suspended for the rest of the season. An outside arbitrator upheld Artest’s ban today, much to my personal surprise. You see, in America, most sports players are apparently above the law. If a major sports figure were to go out, get drunk, and rape someone, he gets a slap on the wrist and maybe some negative publicity (not to mention names, but his initials are Kobe Bryant). If I were to do that, on the other hand, I’d be thrown in jail without a second thought. Why? I don’t play professional sports.

I’m glad to see today that someone in the sports world is finally starting to actually uphold punishments to self-absorbed athletes. This whole suspension thing is headed to federal court (why??) but at least the groundwork is laid to punish this guy hard.

Scrap the whole update thing. It turns out it’s far more complex than it looks, considering my hosting package doesn’t have the right software installed on the server and I don’t have a good FTP client. It’ll have to wait until the weekend, I guess. Considering this Saturday is Christmas and the next is New Years, it might have to wait until I have a day off from work. There shouldn’t be any changes that you would notice, so fear not. I’ll just have to wait to play with the new toy until later.

This site may be down for a little while this evening into tomorrow. I’m running some scheduled maintenance (namely upgrading my WordPress installation). Shouldn’t be long, and I anticipate that, if nothing goes horribly wrong, I’ll be up and running within the hour. If not…let’s leave it at that. If all goes well, I’ll be back up and running in no time.

I have been deemed a dedicated user and now have four (4) Gmail invites to hand out. First four people to comment (leave your email in the appropriate field!) get invites sent to them.

For those not in-the-know, Gmail is a mail service from Google. You get a gig of storage, POP3 capability (I have to say I like the web interface better, though), and a revolutionary email indexing service that allows you to tag your emails with category labels (Friends, Roommates, Jokes, etc.). Once that’s done, you can search for mail that falls under the “Jokes from Friends” category, the “Jokes from Roommates” category, or the “Friend and Roommate” category. It’s really pretty cool. (Dare I mention that there’s also a Firefox extension that tells you when you have new gmail?)

:second time posting this…thank you, Scripturizer plugin…:

Our story begins a few months ago with the death of a Marine in Iraq. He maintained an @yahoo.com email account. After he was killed, his family requested that Yahoo! deliver his email account to them so they could keep track of his last affairs and such. Reasonable request. Only Yahoo wasn’t so reasonable. They rigidly stick to their laws - accounts expire in the event of the death of the account holder, or 90 days after the last login, whichever occurs first. No password, no email; it doesn’t matter that the people asking for the email are the grieving parents of the soldier.

Do what you will with this. Boycott ‘em, email ‘em, whatever. Me, I’m going to go find a new internet portal that’s a little more patriotic…or at least understanding.

I apologize if anyone has been reading my comments lately - I’ve been having issues with “comment spam” for some time now. I thought I had it all in check, but another two sites hit me this afternoon with random spouts of verbage and semi-inspirational comments on a bunch of posts since Friday. I’ve deleted the posts and should be back to normal. If anyone decided to try their hand at online poker, I’m quite sorry - you should probably be institutionalized. I’ve added the offending URLs, emails, and IP addresses to my blacklist, which should stop it for a while. In the meantime, if you ever see those comments when reading a post, please email me and I’ll scrap them as soon as I can. If you don’t know my email address…I’m not giving out my school account, so just comment and perhaps I’ll see it.

Wow. Today is cold. Mad cold. Excessively cold. Cold as in “I had on my down parka and was still chilly” cold. Woke up this morning and greeted an 8 degree morning. Eight degrees. Windchill was the negative of that - quite below zero. Wow…it was cold. Last night wasn’t as cold, but it felt worse because I had a fleece jacket on.

IMPORTANT PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT

Lands’ End Polartec fleece jackets are wonderful. Ask for one for Christmas. Just be aware that they are absolutely worthless in the wind. It’s just a fleece shell that works wonders, even at 20 degrees. Just without wind.

Today’s computer tips include my favorite list of Firefox extensions. If I have time this afternoon I will list all the reasons I love Firefox. For now, just download it and the following extensions and themes:

Theme
There’s only one you’ll ever need - the ever-popular Noia 2.0 eXtreme. I don’t know what the name stands for, but it’s an excellent theme.

Extensions
Firefox allows you to have “extensions” that expand the program’s already extensive list of features. These are the ones I think are absolutely essential; you may find others and think that these are not as essential. Whatever.

• JustBlogIt - essential for bloggers out there. Find a page you like, right-click the page, select “JustBlogIt!” and type away.
• WebDeveloper - essential for, well, web developers. Has a host of features, checkers, and nifty tools to help you figure out why your CSS doesn’t look like it should. BTW, this was essential for figuring out the three-column layout this site employs.
• Download Statusbar - not as essential, but still a good tool. Reduces your downloads to a hideable bar at the bottom of your screen. Shows progress, speed, and estimated time to finish.
• FoxyTunes - more or less essential for all us audiophiles out there. With the advent of MediaPlayer 10, which minimizes quite nicely to the task bar, this isn’t as useful. But when I’m at work and only running WMP 9, this is great. I can control every aspect of most popular audio player software packages right from Firefox.
• Gmail Notifier - essential for people who use Gmail. NOTE: at this time, it appears this is out-of-date. I couldn’t get Firefox 1.0 to install it. I suggest checking their site frequently to see if it’s been updated. If you care.
• Adblock - absolutely essential. If you don’t download another extension, download this one. I’ve been able, with some wildcard action, to block every single graphic ad from all my favorite sites - The Weather Channel, Airliners.net, and others. It doesn’t just block offending images, either - thanks to the “Block iFrame” option, I can stop a blocked ad from even taking up space on the page. Absolutely wonderful tool, and I’m a little surprised it’s not in the actual shipping copy of Firefox, it’s so useful. YOU MUST GET THIS EXTENSION!!!

That’s about it for the Firefox stuff. Remember, you can download the program here if you don’t have it already. Over 12 million people can’t be wrong. Get rid of IE (to whatever extent you can - it’s so hooked into Windows that I wouldn’t suggest trying to uninstall it; just stop using it and don’t look back) and make the switch.

This is turning out to be a bad game. The blood always boils when the Eagles play Dallas. Always has, and always will…even though this year the Birds are 12-1 and Dallas is 5-8. Not much rivalry there. But today is a bad game all the same. The Eagles are playing about as bad as when they lost to Pittsburgh, and the only reason they’re not being crushed is because Dallas is such a bad team. McNabb has three turnovers - two INTs and a fumble. David Akers, usually quite reliable, had a PAT blocked. The defense is giving up way too much yardage. And, as is usual for this season, they’re worthless against the run. Dallas has been marching downfield all afternoon, and it’s only been Testaverde’s thick fingers that have kept Dallas out of the end zone.

Win or lose, this is a bad game. Mind you, I would love to see the win, because that means Philly has a first-round bye and homefield advantage throughout the playoffs. But it may not happen this week. And even if it does, they’re going to need to shape up to pull anything off.

So, as is true Philly Phashion, a good team is croaking in the final stretch. Why must this always happen?

Living in the city presents its own special sets of challenges. People who know me know that I’m aiming to work as an assistant pastor (meaning I act as “ministerial spackling” and fill what holes need to be filled) in a church somewhere in some city. By “city” I don’t mean just anyplace that happens to have a Wal-Mart, although such things are nice to have around. I’m talking something along the caliber of Boston, Philly, NYC, Chicago…all the places you think of when you hear the term “big city” thrown about. I wouldn’t classify my hometown as a “big city,” though I would say that it is a city in its own right - the population of Allentown proper is over 300,000 souls.

I have known and worked amongst people who have never really spent more time in a city than is required to whiz by it on the interstate bypass. To them, the city is full of its own special mystique - crime making up not a small portion of that impression. One dear fellow (bless his heart) from the hills of NC was spending his summer in Brooklyn. (Before I get too far and think to laugh at him, consider that I, who have worked in Philly every summer of my college life, pulled the same reversal working for a summer in a NH town that had a population of 200 on a very full day.) He was deathly afraid of being robbed at knifepoint in an elevator in broad daylight. Those of us who have lived in this kind of environment laugh, because we know that such things happen usually only to those who ask for it in one way or another. Crime may be a big problem, but it’s not something that I fear, at least not too much.

I write this today because currently my neighbor is playing something that is technically classifiable as “music” (it has rhythm [quite a lot of rhythm, actually], harmony, and, I assume, melody buried somewhere in there). I don’t honestly mind that he’s playing it - he has as much of a right to play what sounds like Justin Timberlake on large amounts of crack as I do my Christmas classical guitar. The problem is, I’m sitting in front of my speakers listening to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” (well, the guitar is actually playing the tune CAROL), and about the only thing I can hear is people exercising improper vocal technique who probably couldn’t land and hold a steady job if their lives depended on it. Granted, we do live in a row home, meaning we share a common wall. But he’s in his basement playing this music, and the floorboards on our second floor are shaking!

The question is, what do I do about it? On the one hand, he could be a good neighbor by lowering his stereo decibel output to, say, a dull roar, as opposed to an afterburner. He might do this if I went downstairs to my basement and beat his wall with a mallet. This has been tried before, and to some degree, it works. At least for a few minutes. (C’mon, you know how you did it when you were a kid watching TV - parents would tell you to turn it down, so you would; and as time went on you’d slowly turn it back up until it was louder than before.) I could simply leave it be, on the ground that this is the city, and a certain amout of sound bleed is to be expected.

I think I’ll let it go. After all, it’s not that hard to filter out. Spending upper elementary school with a newborn sister next door to me taught me how to sleep through just about anything. Filtering out what I don’t want and/or need to hear is actually pretty easy by now, especially after a whole semester of Adolescent Psychology (which I got a B in, BTW, so I took enough from there to pass the course). Growing up with this part of city life has taught me “live and let live” to some degree. Eventuallly, he’ll turn it down. In the meantime, I can create enough white noise in this room to blank out whatever he’s playing.

mounty here, blogging from the Airmall at the Pittsburgh International Airport. Absolutely nothing new to report, except that the USAirways newest addition to the fleet, the Embraer 170, is a wonderful plane for short hops. Comfortable seats, even for a not-quite-small person like I. (Like me? I can never remember.) Good seat width, leg room, quiet…all around a good investment on their part. On the other hand, that chicken sandwhich was not worth the $6 I paid for it. Fries aren’t bad, though.

Drew (the owner of the laptop currently being used to bring you this all-important update in my life) had his first flight since he was five. I wanted to scare him with stories of a plane jumping fifty feet in turbulence, or the time that only one power generator was working (and we took off anyway), or the time I nearly had an Airbus A319 fly into a stand of trees 200 feet away from where I was standing, but I decided not to. The drive to Atlanta was freaky enough without filling his mind with disturbing plane horror stories. Maybe on the way back to school…

On that note, I’M NOW A COLLEGE GRADUATE! Wheeee! (Or, as my friend would type, w00t!!!!111) I was up on the front of the stage at chapel today to help announce our new GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORD CAROL-SING ATTEMPT numbers: we had a grand total of (get ready - we blew away the competition)… seven thousand, five hundred fourteen peope show up. That would be 7,514 for all you news people scouring around. I’ll help out your search engine requests now:

Bob Jones University Guinness book world record carol sing greenville

There. Happy? We shattered the record, and I don’t think anyone will get close to that until next year, and it’ll be hard at that. May the records also show that Old Navy and the folks at Times Square are complete blockheads. Who is going to show up at 8:15 on a Monday morning to sing carols in Times Square? What were they thinking?

Drew wants his laptop back, so I’m outta here. Merry Christmas.

From time to time I’ll bring you articles of interest that I’ve found. This one today is by Pastor Scott Aniol over at First Baptist Church, Rockford, IL. (You can visit his personal side on the sidebar.) Scott’s written a good article about the excellence of the printed media versus the visual media. He makes some excellent points in the article, and I think he correctly fingers why most people like the book over the movie. Read the article over on his site. It’s in PDF, so you’ll need the free Acrobat Reader to read it. But most people anymore have this pre-installed, and it’s built-in with most Linux kernels.

This afternoon, Men’s Glee had a mini-concert out in the Student Mall. Okay, it wasn’t mini. It was under 40 degrees out, and we performed for almost an hour. I was almost feeling robbed, but eventually we did end up singing “The Gift,” an arrangement of “Simple Gifts” done by the King’s Singers. I was feeling robbed because I had the solo in that song, and, well, I don’t get a lot of solos around here. But we finally did it, and I was happy. I would have been happier had I been able to feel my toes. My feet were completely numb this afternoon, leading me to wonder why in the world it had to be today that it finally started feeling like winter. Not to mention that singing in the cold isn’t a good idea and my grad voice audition is today…grrr. I shouldn’t have been singing. But it’ll be fine once I get back into the swing of things. (Even now it’s only 38, feels like 30. It’s snowing in the mountains of TN. Lucky bums in Knoxville…)

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be; and when we find ourselves in the place just and right, it will be in the valley of love and delight…

[Listening to: Gift (Simple Gifts) - King’s Singers - Little Christmas Music (02:13)]

:sniff: Today was my last time out with Z Choir, the extension to which I can say I’ve been faithful for over four years. In four years I can count the number of music checks and rehearsals I’ve missed. I have not missed any extension for which I’ve been in town. In four years, I’ve seen a lot of things and people come and go. I’ve seen the occasional people, and I’ve seen the faithful few (Jon Michalek, I raise my keys to you, good sir). I came in at the beginning of an era (the “Scott Aniol era”) and left at the end of another era (the “Tom Mount era”). No, seriously, if I had to give it an era name, I’d say it’s the “Deedrick family era.” Z Choir is my baby, even if I only directed on two separate occasions. The extension has inspired me to bigger and better things - choral writing and safer driving being two of them. The men of Z Choir are my closest friends on campus - after all, when you spend that much time in a car with the same people, cramped, lost, and hungry, you either come to love or loathe them. As is the case with real love, I have chosen to love them…and it’s been a wonderful four years. I could always count on seeing the same people Wednesday evening for practice, decked out in complete scrubs (sometimes literally, in zacfoo’s case). I could count on seeing the same tired, “get me back into bed right now” faces (Tim White) or the “I’d rather be sleeping, but this works, too” faces (Nate Cary). I will remember the times sitting in Broke lobby, listening to the director at the time (Scott, Tim, Vince Edwards, Ping Ngian, Jon or Brent Deedrick) complain about how the new e-pass system had completely vaporized itself as he was creating the pass for the morning, and we have two minutes before we have to leave for Macon, GA, and can’t we just use a paper pass? I mean, we’ve got blanket approval for just about anywhere in the Southeast, and…no? C’mon! (Trust me - this happened to every single director I can ever remember.)

I’ve got memories galore:

• getting lost every other week (sample directions: “turn left at the Pumpers, then go a spell until you see a big rock/tree/other natural landmark - take a right there and go a ways until you see a stop sign…”)
• nearly dying on the way to Columbia (Matt Wilson: “Uh, Jon, that van’s getting closer…” Jon: “I know…my brakes aren’t working…” Car: SWERVE SEVERAL TIMES)
• nearly dying on the way to Spartanburg (”What in the world is that lady thinking? She can’t see my car RIGHT NEXT TO HERS??? Why is she merging INTO MY CAR?!?” Car: SWERVE SEVERAL TIMES)
• too many nursing home chuckles to keep track of (”…and I pray that all these fine young men find good wives…” “You look like a Methodist preacher. Hey, Barbara, I’ll be this one grows up to be a Methodist preacher!” “None of you are leaving here without giving me a hug. And if you don’t give me a hug, you’ll get a spanking!”)

The list goes on an on. I’ve done so much stuff with the group that I can’t imagine life without Z Choir. I guess I’ll find out next semester…

Today we fulfilled a dream of mine ever since I realized that there were some high-quality girls in our sister society. The Classics have a choir: like ours, only smaller and lacking in male voices. For so long I’ve heard our two societies out in the back pavilions singing together and thought, “We sound really good together.” The musician in me said a Z/Classics Choir could be a smash hit; the single guy in me said…well, remember what I said about being cramped on long trips with people and eventually forming good frendships? Yeah. Anyway, I’ve tried several times dropping hints to the sitting director, but it wasn’t until Brent took over last year that I finally found an ear. And even then, I had to take the initiative myself to get it done. I’m in a class with a Classic who has an extension with the Classics choir at a nursing home. I talked to her, and we finally organized a caroling session at the nursing home. It was great - we went out there, sang together in a song service, then broke up into mixed quartets to go room-to-room caroling and giving candy canes out. Wasn’t quite like I was thinking it would be (we outnumbered them 2-1), but it was still great. I finally accomplished my goal, and most of the guys seemed to enjoy it. So, I hope from now on that will become a regular thing each Christmas.

I could go on. I would, but I do have exams to study for. To any guy in Z Choir who will read this, stay faithful - the extension needs people…well, people like me who will set aside time and make this extension their primary extension. I wear my involvement as a medal - proudly, but not in a stuck-up way. The way I see it, I had a chance and the ability to help an extension out, and by God’s grace I was able to stay faithful and finish the course. I won’t repeat the Nate Morgan Speech, ‘cuz I’m not a director. But be there for the extension. You have no idea what kind of impression it will make on people.

[Listening to: The Three Kings - City of London Sinfonia - Christmas Night: Carols of the Nativity (02:21)]

This is today’s SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT UNTIL SUN DEC 12 2004 04:00 PM EST from the Weather Channel:

… COLDEST AIR OF THE SEASON TO ARRIVE MONDAY NIGHT…

A COLD UPPER LEVEL TROF WILL FORM AND DEEPEN ACROSS THE OHIO VALLEY MONDAY WHILE STRONG SURFACE HIGH PRESSURE DEVELOPS OVER THE MIDWEST. THESE SYSTEMS WILL PUSH A STRONG ARCTIC COLD FRONT ACROSS THE CAROLINAS AND NORTHEAST GEORGIA MONDAY EVENING… USHERING IN THE COLDEST AIR EXPERIENCED SO FAR THIS SEASON. WINDS WILL REMAIN STEADY AND FAIRLY STRONG DURING THIS TIME… SO VERY LOW WIND CHILL LEVELS ARE EXPECTED AS WELL.

Apparently this is cause for concern. Isn’t it “trough” and not “TROF”? I should mention that temperatures are expected to dip as low as 30 degrees at about 2:00a Tuesday. Break out the windbreakers, people - we’re heading for a cold snap!

[Listening to: Mountain Wildflower - Tim Janis - December Morning (02:32)]

I’m curious - why are churches in our circles so far behind the times? I was browsing my “referrer” list (which tells me where all you folks clicked in from, if you clicked in from somewhere), and I found some google search that a few people have found me on. I clicked that and browsed the other results, which included a list of KJV-only churches in California (not surprisingly, listed as “officially fundamental,” some listed as being “unashamedly pro-KJB,” but all with the letters KJB underneath the church name; does this sound at all familiar and/or tiring?)

I won’t harp on that. Not tonight - I’m too tired and have too much to do. But I will harp on their websites. What’s up with churches being hosted at Tripod or Hypermart? They have space on free webservers, which just about any geek will tell you means the quality is absolutely wretched. In our experience (I speak for geeks the world over) there is no such thing as a well-designed site that resides on a free web server. I have never seen one. They’re all chintzy, the product (most of the time) of the services own “click & drag” page-builder wizard. Invariably that design method looks canned, pre-packaged, whatever. It looks cheap. Going below the surface for churches, it says, “This ministry isn’t important enough to us to spend the extra $15 a year to buy our own domain name and hosting plan [which is how much mounty’s corner is costing me] and get someone in the church to make a quality site.” Okay, so perhaps no one in the church is a web designer. Call a local Christian college - we’re money-starved students who make our money raking leaves on the weekend (like I did - $10 an hour cash, plus lunch at Jack in the Box to clean an attorney’s patio; yes, I got the Reindeer Ball, and no, it’s not going on my antenna) to get a little spending money or pay their monthly bill. My roommate does a little web design on the side. Call and ask, for cryin’ out loud!

And tracts. Wow. I’ve seen some really poor tracts in my day. Good content (most of the time), but the illustrations inside are pencil drawings scanned and resized; and very often the tracts are run off on cheap paper at local Kinko’s or something. There are some that are downright ugly - who wants to look at anything whose cover fades from pink to gray? Who wants to see simple drawings of kids weeping in hell (I’ve seen it, and it angered me enough to write a letter to the publisher)? Contrast this to a few months ago when the local Assemblies of God church down the street did a door hanging drive on our street. In the package were three different tracts, all on heavier-stock paper with glossy, high color illustrations in an attractive layout. I actually wanted to keep the tracts and read them (and I did; nothing wrong with them unless you object to using the NIV in it, which I don’t). From a lost person’s perspective, this is a church that he’d want to attend. They’ve got sharp stuff and their own website. The pastor’s email address isn’t at Juno or any other service - he has his email at the church’s own website address, and I’ll bet he can access his webmail or Outlook account on the road, too.

What’s wrong with getting a little ahead of the times, at least on the fringe stuff? I’m glad our church has its own website, and our pastor has his address at our church’s site (I think; if not, he still could if he wanted to). The guy designing our site isn’t a professional web designer, but he knows HTML, graphics formatting, and some tricks to make a sharp webpage. I personally am glad that my church thinks it’s important enough to have our own website so that people can look ahead of time and see what the church is all about.

[Listening to: Gift (Simple Gifts) - King’s Singers - Little Christmas Music (02:13)]