Our friends over at the Anglican Church of Noosa are running a series of blog posts with guest blogger Simon Manchester on the theme of How to Enjoy Church.
The series encourages us to think about how we can make the most of our church services, not just for ourselves, but for others also - especially newcomers.
Since we're at a stage of church life at Trinity Mount Barker when there are lots of people around and a number of visitors every week, there is lots of good advice in these posts for us.
In a few weeks I'm giving a talk on "Technology, Connectedness and the Christian Life." In preparation, I've been doing some reading on how different people use various aspects of technology to communicate the gospel of Jesus.
On the website of Global Recordings Network, I came across something that I saw first-hand more than 20 years ago and which ever since I've struggled to convince people actually exists!
It's the "Card Talk" cardboard record player, pictured at right. Back around 1989 we discovered one out the back of our school library. Initially we couldn't work out what this strange piece of folded carboard was and why it had a needle attached to one end, but the fact that there was a vinyl record with the cardboard suggested this was in fact a record player!
Sure enough, we placed the record on the eyelet on the cardboard, folded the end of the carboard so that the needle rested on the record and when we spun the record, we could hear the sound! The vibrations of the needle were amplified by the 'baffle' of cardboard and we could clearly understand the spoken word recording.
At Trinity Mount Barker we're aware of the blessing it is to have people serve us through the production of resources that can be used in the building of people towards maturity in Christ.
We have a great hope that the benefit of resources such as Bible study guides, training materials, videos and music might not be limited to our church, but might be used by God for the building up of other local churches.
There's a fascinating article over at Time regarding the decision to use a very confronting picture of Aisha, a young Afghan woman, on the front cover of the August 9 edition.
In the piece, The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture, Managing Editor Richard Stengel, describes some of the process by which he decided to use the photo of Aisha, who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws.
Since children would see the cover on news stands, child psychologists were consulted on what the possible impact might be. Aisha's safety had to be assured, and her emotional well-being had to be taken into account.
But I thought the most interesting comment from Stengel was this: "... bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them."
Sometimes we sing them to new tunes, sometimes we sing them to the original tunes, sometimes we sing them to tunes that aren't the original tunes, but that are still a couple of hundred years old!
Some of the arrangements we use come from Page CXVI. Page CXVI is "a project started with the idea of making hymns accessible and known again."
Having been playing around with Wordle for the artwork for First Things First, the Ephesians teaching series starting tomorrow, I decided to put the text of this blog through Wordle to see what the word cloud would look like.
For those of you unfamiliar with word clouds, the words in a given text are presented different sizes relative to their frequency. So the most commonly used words are larger, the least commonly used words are smaller.
The finished product is below. It's pretty obvious what most of this blog is about!
I'm not a big one for a putting much on my computer desktop. I tend to have a plain colour background and at the moment the Recycle Bin is the only icon on my desktop. Call me a minimalist!
But I've got a new desktop background.
When I saw the image on the Sydney Anglicans website I couldn't resist!
Perhaps, I thought, this isn't a case of the sexualisation of young girls, who Melinda says are Supre's main customers. It might not be a case of turning young girls into fodder for an overly sexualised culture what treats young girls as miniture women. Maybe it's just what I would have to say is an appalling poor choice of shirt aimed at (older) women. So I checked the Supre website, looking for some statement of the primary market segment the brand targets. The very first comment I found outlined the company's summer fashions for "young trendy girls."
in tandem is a blog for ministry wives, with contributions from three women who are all married to men in full-time vocational ministry. Interestingly, the ministries that these men and their wives are involved in are remarkably diverse! As they say on the site, The role of the 'ministry wife' is one of the hardest roles to define, because every marriage is different and because there are so many ways of being 'in ministry'!
As I understand it though, their purpose in writing though, is to explore some of the unique challenges of being married to someone in vocational ministry.
Back around 1989 we discovered one out the back of our school library. Initially we couldn't work out what this strange piece of folded carboard was and why it had a needle attached to one end, but the fact that there was a vinyl record with the cardboard suggested this was in fact a record player! 
picture of Aisha, a young Afghan woman, on the front cover of the August 9 edition.
e sing them to the original tunes, sometimes we sing them to tunes that aren't the original tunes, but that are still a couple of hundred years old!
We've got a handful of photos from the Men at Work launch on 27th April.
in tandem
