miletwo::network

In a recent post by Brian Jones titled “Should An Openly Homosexual Person Be Baptized? – Questions About Homosexuality (Part 3)
” he poses some difficult questions that the church has struggled with and continues to struggle with for some time.  It amazes me how we respond to various types of sin and implement our own punishment on people, and then return home to our own well cared for basket of filth, acting like we’re so much better.  He speaks of pastors who will refuse to baptize an openly gay person and compares that to refusing to baptize a smoker, drunk, obese, or otherwise enslaved person who although they feel their behavior is wrong, they still fall into regular patterns of misbehavior. Do we treat them the same way?

Much confusion exists in online marketing circles on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, yada, yada, yada… which begs the question, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist quadrant of my brain takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the online community has to say. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.

In keeping with my primary mission of studying and describing my findings on “Jesus marketing” as it applies to our activities today, I’ve been studying patterns of how Jesus followers have spread the Good News of Jesus (aka Gospel) throughout history. One awesome resource I’ve managed to get my hands on has been Eerdman’s Handbook to the History of Christianity in which is outlined a complete history of how the church and the bible have been developed and promoted throughout history.

I love the guys at Church Marketing Sucks, but their recent nod to the concept of marketing Christianity using the terminology of other religions scares the bejeezus out of me. In a recent post focusing attention on the Dutch Catholic Church, they recognize a marketing attempt by the Dutch attempting to promote Lent as “the Christian Ramadan.”

The “Emerging Church” or “Emerging conversation” has been generating quite a buzz for the last few years, mostly because some of their ideals and beliefs are not entirely consistent with the bible. Mark Driscoll speaks in his most recent message from Question 2 in the “Religion Saves and Nine other Misconceptions” series titled: “Emerging Church” about his connection (or lack of) with the Emerging Church and how he came to be associated with them in the first place.

I read today in Seth Godin’s blog about a new site by the folks at Squidoo who just built a promotional tool that lets you become the central expert on all things in your area. Mayor of your zip code is a way to start a discussion group/info page about what’s happening in your slice of the world. You become the single relevant source of information on your community. That said, if you only spend a few minutes on it and then move on, it’ll fail. But, if you were to budget a significant portion of your time or those in your organization on working on your page, what do you think would show up in Google searches? What sort of interactions would you start having with people thinking about your little part of the world?

We’re still counting down to April and the release of Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled.  I’m looking forward to seeing this flick, not because I think it’s going to radically change the general thinking of our atheistic society, but because it appears to be an actual thoughtful and relevant look at the real problem at hand… censorship.  In an excerpt from their site it says:

For decades now, Neo-Darwinism has maintained a stranglehold within public education, suppressing all other theories on the origins of life - especially those that hint of a “designer”.

You may have noticed if you’ve ever seen this site before (not likely… but possible) that I’ve completely revamped and put up a bit of content related to who I am, my family, what I’m reading, etc. Of particular note is the block of content on your left called “churchianity” and I thought I might explain myself before we all get our underpants in a bunch.