Good old ecuminism!

There's nothing new under the sun, as they say, and what you think it is a good idea is often pre-empted by someone with a similarly good idea. Nevertheless it was still good to come across the NZ Methodist Church's blog with a very similar name: Mission:Resourcing. It treats the topic of Mission Resourcing in a slightly different way to us, but the best part about it is that they too are being missional. The more the merrier.

The reason I discovered their blog was that they were advertising Lynne Taylor's seminars on using data from the 2006 Census to give pictures of the community in which parishes work. Check out the details here.
Lynne actually works for the Baptists, and is based in Christchurch. She works part-time doing statistics and logistics.
Our office has done a bunch of similar work, and very shortly the Presbytery Stats (which were sent out on DVD to all the Presbyteries early this year) will be available on the Presbyterian website.

Expelled - Ben Stein

There's a new film available in the States called Expelled, which aims to align Darwinism with Naziism, to disprove the theory of evolution and promote Intelligent Design, to claim that scientists and university lecturers who don't agree with evolution are sidelined in their careers.

Of course the film is being heavily promoted amongst Christians, especially on various evangelical sites and blogs. So I did some checking out, since part of the aim of this blog is source good DVD material for use in churches and amongst home groups. I started by watching (or trying to watch) the extended trailer, but for some reason it doesn't want to download properly. However I got enough of an idea of it to want to check out things further.

Ben Stein, who 'stars' in the movie (it's more a doco than a feature), is anti-Darwinism - not in itself a bad thing - and so are the producers of the movie. Clicking further back and forth across the web I eventually came across a writer who says he's a passionate moderate Christian who is a member of a United Methodist congregation. His name is Henry Neufield. Henry's no slouch, he's no fly-by-night blogger, and he seems pretty sane.

He slams the movie for six reasons:
It misrepresents evolution;
First amendment issues are badly confused;
Academic freedom doesn't guarantee you a job or tenure;
The problem for intelligent design is not that it hasn't been considered;
The connection of Hitler with evolution;
Lastly, the one that annoys me most, is the lie that accepting the theory of evolution is the equivalent of atheism.

I don't have space here to give the detail from Henry's post, so I recommend you check it out on his blog.