I was having a look at The Gospel Coalition’s lovely website when I came across this section in their doctrinal statement:

“God’s New People: We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. This universal church is manifest in local churches of which Christ is the only Head; thus each “local church” is, in fact, the church, the household of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth.”

This sounds exactly like the theology of church that we’ve been taught here at Moore College and which we refer to as the Knox-Robinson doctrine of church (after our former principal and vice-principal who loved to speak of the church in this kind of way).

The thing is, I was under the impression that this view was one of our rather idiosyncratic ‘Sydney’ things – and yet here it is – signed by all the big name American evangelicals.

what did I miss?

Here is a great little bit of software which makes it a cinch.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/86349

It adds an item to the ‘PDF’ menu in the Mac OS Print panel called ‘Create Booklet’

It then automatically adds blank pages until your document has a number of pages that is a multiple of 4. Then shuffles them up without making any mistakes and lays them out side by side on paper that is twice as big as your original document (so make your document in A5 if you want to print onto A4). Finally it saves a PDF on your desktop that you can then print away.

Still need to find a big stapler, but it takes out most of the pain.

I thought pretty hard about the top level structure of the site’s navigation. There were two principles for me:
1. I wanted to keep it lean. Previous attempts at making church websites have tended to spiral out of control and become bloated with content and this was reflected in an expanding navigation. Besides, the books say 5-7 links in your main nav is the ideal.

2. More Importantly: I want it to be a no brainer for users to work out where they need to click to have the question which drove them to the site answered.

So I decided on this:

• HOME
• NEW HERE?
• SUNDAYS
• WHATS ON
• RESOURCES
• CONTACT US

I’m sure you’re thinking that there’s nothing remarkable about that list, and there’s not. But there were a few I culled. Many sites have an ‘ABOUT US’ or ‘INFORMATION’ section, with content like staff profiles, the history of the church, or the church’s mission statement. I figured that kind of content is mainly relevant for new comers – seasoned attenders know what the senior minister looks like, so I put (some of) that stuff in the ‘NEW HERE?’ section.

I’ve also seen a lot of ‘MINISTRIES’ pages on church websites. This is where all the groups and activities which meet during the week get a plug. I just felt that the term ‘MINISTRIES’ could be pretty opaque to a visitor. I toyed with GROUPS, or ACTIVITIES, but in the end I decided to rename my CALENDAR Page ‘WHATS ON’ and lump all that in together.

This is also why I didn’t call the SUNDAYS page ‘SERVICES’. While we do run church services on Sundays, I think in interweb land Services are things that a company like NRMA offers their customers.

Now, when I think back to my three users and imagine their questions, I think it’s pretty clear what to click on.

The local not-yet-member
What time is church on Sunday? (SUNDAYS)
What’s this church going to be like? (NEW HERE?)
What’s the phone number of the church office? (CONTACT US)
Where is the church? (The map is on the ‘CONTACT US’ page and I think this might be a problem with my set up)

The Church member
What time does that men’s event start again? (WHATS ON)
I missed church last week and want to catch up on the sermon. (RESOURCES)

The Christian From Another Place
I’ve heard that Alan Lukabyo is a gun preacher, where can I listen to his gear? (RESOURCES)

The interweb has been around for a while now. Surely, there need not be such a thing as ‘out of print’. Can’t publishers just put all their old works on print-on-demand libraries like lulu.com.

And why can’t I have the option of buying a PDF and downloading it immediately? Save some money, time, paper and diesel.

Rant Over.

I’m reading for an essay on John Howard Yoder’s ethics and I found this pretty amusing.

“Mr. Yoder’s stance reached a wide theological audience when his book The Politics of Jesus was published in 1972. But his analyses of Christian attitudes toward the state, of pacifism and of major theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth had been gaining notice since the 1950’s.

Mr. Yoder first drafted a 50-page critique of Barth’s views on pacifism while a doctoral student under Barth at the University of Basel in Switzerland–and he gave a copy to Barth shortly before Barth was to be on the panel conducting Mr. Yoder’s final oral examination.”
from: http://theology.nd.edu/people/research/yoder-john/

In particular, this caught my eye:

Bidirectional text.
For languages that are written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, Snow Leopard now elegantly handles mixing in left-to-right text. It also has a split-cursor option that shows the appropriate cursor direction at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

I’ve been getting 25 min sermons down to about 6MB, and still very clear and easy to listen to. That’s pretty good I reckon, that’ll upload and download nice and fast.

Here’s my export settings in QuickTime Player:

First up, I had in mind three separate groups of users who I wanted to cater to in the following order of priority:
1. The local person who is not yet a member of our church. My great hope with this site is that Christian and non-Christian people in the Dundas area who are thinking about coming to church or are invited to come to church by a neighbour will be helped to actually come by the website.

2. The church member. My second hope is that our church community will find the site genuinely useful. I want the site to serve communication among our members. I want them to know about and like the site so they will email the link to everyone they know.

3. The Christian from another place. I have benefited greatly from churches who put quality sermons and resources online and I’d love for our church to be able to make our little contribution to the growing library of evangelical resources that are on the internet.

So my first step in thinking about this site was to identify these three groups of people who I want to target. Have I missed anyone?

I had been thinking in terms of three groups of users.
1. The local person we’d like to come to our church, they need basic info – where and when – plus lots of good vibes. They find the site through Google or some other advertising.
2. The church member – they need details for events and more complex features like event sign up.
3. The Christian from another place who is looking for a sermon or resource.

But what I hadn’t considered was that a good church website really helps your church people extend an invitation to their friends and neighbours. Google isn’t going to be your key referrer. It will be your number 2 people shooting an email to their number 1 person friends.

There are two factors that made this option compelling for me.
1. Gmail is a great mail service… its fast, reliable, free. It has a generous amount of space (7GB per account), has a good web interface as well as POP/IMAP and all the rest. It’s a snap to create new email addresses and manage all the accounts.

2. Once you have Google Mail on your domain, you can tap into Google’s other collaborative web apps really easily. The church staff will already have accounts and the sharing settings are automatically set up. So everyone can share calendars (at cal.dundasanglican.com.au), documents and spreadsheets (at docs.dundasanglican.com.au). Looking forward to seeing what we can do with it.

All I could find was was a Good News New Testament with background music here.

And if you want to make your own – licensing is problem…

but I just found this from our friends at the NET (New English Translation)

from http://bible.org/copyright
“(NEW) There has been a lot of interest in producing audio recordings of the NET Bible for local ministry user. Therefore a local ministry eg. Church is granted unlimited non-commercial rights to use the NET Bible text to make audio recordings. You can produce audio recordings of partial or complete books of the Bible (WORK) for free distribution on email and/or CD within the congregation, and as free MP3 downloads made available on the church website and the personal blogs of members of the church to be of benefit to the church at large. This permission is contingent upon an appropriate copyright acknowledgment, on the distribution copy (website or CD) and you need to include an audio insert at the end of each recording in addition we require that you grant us permission to use your WORK and any promotional material that you use for the WORK.Sign and send us the NET Bible Contributor License Agreement form.”

Thanks NET for translating God’s word for us and for your generous, open licensing.

I’ve got a microphone – anyone got a good news-reader voice?

I reckon part of the problem is an over ambitious ideas about the kinds of content that will be available.

You build your site thinking ‘wouldn’t it be great to have a photo gallery’. It would, but if no one is taking a steady stream of good photos, then the gallery’s most recent pics will be the ones you uploaded when you launched the site from the church camp back in 2006.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice for each staff member to have their own blog on our site’ – certainly – but if they’re not blogging now, why will suddenly start if you make a website with blogs?

I have definitely made these mistakes before.

Generating content is the big killer for church websites that are anything more than a few static pages (a very good and respectable option in many cases.)

I reckon the trick is to start by thinking “what content does our church naturally generate?”

I am in the process of building a new site for my church and I boiled it down to these three things: Sermons, a Calendar and a weekly blog (currently appearing on the front of our hand out).

That is more than enough to work with and keep a site looking fresh and up-to-date, but limiting myself to these three streams of content, already in production week in and week out, greatly increases the chances that the site will keep fresh.

Thats the theory anyway – we’ll see how it goes.

It is an encouraging read. John is a great leader, a gospel hearted man and a clear thinker. You see it in this article as John wrestles with the tension of conserving what must not change and strategically adapting to best serve the cause of Christ in the here and now.

And it is an exciting read. I love Moore College. I love studying here and I love the people I’m studying with. And the responses John flags- for the college to evolve with flexibility, a focus on preaching and mission, and engagement with the wider Christian community without compromising what it has always done best- paint a bright future.

Everything you hear and read on this passage brings up the ‘tension’ with Paul and his gospel of justification by faith alone and not by works. They explain how Paul and James are not in conflict. Both apostles are in agreement. James is not talking about how a person is justified, but about what true faith looks like. “We are saved by faith alone, but saving faith is never alone.” This is all very helpful.

But one verse has always bugged me. “24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” It just sounds like too much of a contradiction. I think I’ve lived with it by imagining that James is being a bit sloppy with his language here. If we read it in context we see that James and Paul do agree and had James and Paul been able to get together and talk about it they would have come up with a joint declaration in which Paul would have persuaded James of the importance of using such an all important term like justification with greater precision. In other words – a version of Luther’s solution to the problem.

But tonight I saw something that I hadn’t noticed before. James is not saying ‘a man is justified by works and not by faith alone’. I’ve been reading ‘you see …’ as some English colloquialism meaning something like ‘the point is …’.

Maybe he is saying ‘You SEE that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Which is saying something very different, very much in line with the rest of the passage and not nearly as uncomfortable in the same Bible as Ephesians 2:8.

So, is that a legitimate exegetical move or is it a bit too convenient?

What do you think? Did they nail it?