Daily Life

How to Wreck Your Church in 3 Weeks

22 August 2010 By The Grinder 2 Comments

I am re-posting this since we discussed this subject in Sunday School today and I referred to this article, and I thought it would be helpful for anyone who might have wanted to wreck their church in only 3 weeks.

How to wreck your church in three weeks:

Week One: Walk into church today and think about how long you’ve been a member, how much you’ve sacrificed, how under-appreciated you are. Take note of every way you’re dissatisfied with your church now. Take note of every person who displeases you.

Meet for coffee this week with another member and “share your heart.” Discuss how your church is changing, how you are being left out. Ask your friend who else in the church has “concerns.” Agree together that you must “pray about it.”

Week Two: Send an email to a few other “concerned” members. Inform them that a groundswell of grievance is surfacing in your church. Problems have gone unaddressed for too long. Ask them to keep the matter to themselves “for the sake of the body.”

As complaints come in, form them into a petition to demand an accounting from the leaders of the church. Circulate the petition quietly. Gathering support will be easy. Even happy members can be used if you appeal to their sense of fairness – that your side deserves a hearing. Be sure to proceed in a way that conforms to your church constitution, so that your petition is procedurally correct.

Week Three: When the growing moral fervor, ill-defined but powerful, reaches critical mass, confront the elders with your demands. Inform them of all the woundedness in the church, which leaves you with no choice but to put your petition forward. Inform them that, for the sake of reconciliation, the concerns of the body must be satisfied.

Whatever happens from this point on, you have won. You have changed the subject in your church from gospel advance to your own grievances. To some degree, you will get your way. Your church will need three or four years for recovery. But at any future time, you can do it all again. It only takes three weeks.
Just one question. Even if you are being wronged, “Why not rather suffer wrong?” (1 Corinthians 6:7).

HT: Take Your Vitamin Z

Filed Under: Daily Life

Liberty’s Unbelievable Response to Ergun Caner

26 June 2010 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

I was dismayed when I learned today that the Liberty University committee organized to investigate the habitual exaggerations of Dr. Ergun Caner has given him more or less a pass, demoting him from President and Dean to Professor of Global Apologetics. The committee found that Caner “made factual statements which were self-contradictory.” Not only is the verb-age extremely unclear, it is appears to be a cop-out. For one, Liberty did not even bother to answer whether the statements Caner made were true or false, or which story is true – only that they failed the consistency test. Of course, they have long stated that this is not an ethical or moral issue (right – since when is lying a moral issue?). SBC Today even declared that Caner was exonerated!

Unbelievable. I am very disappointed in LU today, and grieving for Ergun Caner. While Caner has apologized to the board for ‘misstatements’ which caused the investigation, he has not apologized to anyone for publicly lying or exaggerating about his upbringing (I listened to Caner jaw on for 20 minutes about his life as a teenager in Turkey – all completely made up), his knowledge of Islam, his supposed linguistic ability (claiming to know Turkish and Arabic, faking an Arabic accent, and pretending that English is his second language), and his attempt to smooth the whole thing over by claiming a right-wing Calvinistic conspiracy. Instead of repenting on the day the report was issued, Caner was tweeting things like, “Donuts R holy“.

I’m not hoping for blood. But the world is watching this, and this must be handled in a biblical way; not swept under a rug. Very sad.

Filed Under: Daily Life, Southern Baptists, Stupidity

Kindle vs. iPad

28 May 2010 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

Ah, decisions, decisions.

Kindle vs iPad from TheBrigadier on Vimeo.

Read the whole post here.

Filed Under: Daily Life

Wikipedia and the Cities/Towns That I’ve Called Home

17 May 2010 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

There is so much wrong with Wikipedia that it is difficult for me to admit it has some usefulness. . For example, one can provide links on his blog to every city he has ever called home. Here are all the cities/towns that I have called home (and the length of time I lived there):

1. Geneva, FL (10 years)

2. Anchorage, AK (6 years)

3. Mount Vernon, IL (9 months)

4. Orlando, FL (2 years)

5. Jackson, MI (2 years)

6. Durham, ON (2 years)

7. Sanford, FL (5 years)

8. Ulan-Ude, Siberia (5 years)

9. Gorno-Altaisk, Siberia (3 years)

Filed Under: Daily Life

Planting Soon…

30 March 2010 By The Grinder 7 Comments

To save some $$ and to learn new skills, Maya and are launching a vegetable garden on my grandmother’s property. Using every free evening we began preparing the soil last week. Now we are very near to planting, and I thought it would be interesting to document the process thus far. We began with this (click on the images for a closer look):

We then removed the foliage and debris with a lawn mower and rakes, and then gave the plot a once over with my uncle’s rototiller. It looked like this on Saturday:

After that, we removed more debris (mostly grass lumps, sticks and leaves) and then added liming material to increase the soil pH. With the lime down, we tilled it again yesterday evening. Here is what it looks like now:

The seeds we ordered from Burpee Seeds and Plants and Cooper Seeds should arrive tomorrow, and we hope to have at least half of it in the ground by the weekend. The total investment to date is $100, including the seeds, lime, and a few tools. Money saved to date: None. I’ll keep the tab here as this project develops.

Filed Under: Daily Life, Gardening

My New Writing Project: Know Your Enemy

17 March 2010 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

I am working on a series of book-length biblical studies, which I hope to get published. I’ll be posting about them here from time to time. The series is tentatively called “Know Your Enemy“. With these, I will attempt to show how several different sins destroy Christians. Of course, the purpose is to help Christians keep from being sidelined by deadly sins. The following are the studies I have planned thus far, in the order I am preparing them.

How Pride Kills, A Biblical Look at the Sin of Pride
How Worry Kills, A Biblical Look at the Sin of Anxiety
How Lust Kills, A Biblical Look at the Sin of Lust
How Things Kill, A Biblical Look at the Sin of Covetousness

Stay tuned. My plan is to have the first installment ready for publication by the end of the year. If I fail to meet this goal, I plan to add one more book to the project and I will call it, How Laziness Kills, A Biblical Look at Mike’s Slothfulness.

Filed Under: Books, Daily Life

To Study or Not to Study

10 February 2010 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I received an acceptance letter for a doctoral program at a decent school. The acceptance was provisional upon successfully completing the four remaining classes in my MDiv program and graduating at the conclusion of this semester. I am merely fishing for options, though, and have not decided to do a doctorate right away. If I take the plunge, three more years of study and a dissertation await me. At some point, I would like to study and do research at that level – the only question is whether I should begin in the Fall or wait a year or three.

Decisions, decisions.

Filed Under: Daily Life, graduate studies

65 Years Ago…

27 January 2010 By The Grinder 3 Comments

On this day, 65 years ago, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz Death Camp, where more than a million people (Jews, Gypsies and Slavs) were murdered by the Nazis. May we never forget the unbelievable atrocity that the Jewish Holocaust was, or the evil ideology that drove it. If we can remember, maybe we won’t repeat it.

Oh for the fallen we weep,
Never will we forget.
Oh for the fallen we weep,
always will we regret.

Oh for the fallen we sing,
our joy in their memory.
Oh for the fallen we sing,
if only their names we see.

Filed Under: Daily Life

Daily Reading Plan

30 December 2009 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

Mine is a bit different – but this plan is good for reading the Bible through in a year. Here is another plan, just to compare.

It is easy and very rewarding to read through the Bible in a year, and I highly encourage the practice.

Filed Under: Daily Life, Devotional

1950 Down, 300 to Go!

30 December 2009 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

A 3 credit-hour class means that the “lecture time” for the class is 3 hours a week for 15 weeks. In reality, some courses might have less than 3 hours of lecture time a week; yet, in all cases the participatory classwork plus lecture consumes at least 3 hours a week – if the prof is doing his job. Add to that the minimum of 2 hours of homework, readings, work on writing projects, and examination prep., etc., and the time toll of the class amounts to 5 actual hours of work a week, or at least 75 hours a semester (and often much more!).

Thus, if one were to have completed 78 credit-hours of an M.Div. program, that would represent at least 1950 clock hours of work (out of 2250 for the program). That sounds like a lot of work. No, it is a lot of work. But well worth it, mind you.

Filed Under: Daily Life, graduate studies

Declare His Glory to the Nations!

10 December 2009 By The Grinder 2 Comments

Filed Under: Daily Life

Family Day Hike

11 November 2009 By The Grinder Leave a Comment

On Monday, after a crazy busy weekend, we took a family day and went hiking in the jungle-like basin of the Econ River. I did not take many photos, but I’ll post a few of the kids, just for fun.