David Fitch

I've recently begun to pick up on David Fitch's Reclaiming the Mission site. David doesn't write every day, by any means, but when he does write, it's worth reading.
He makes an interesting statement in his latest post that Chicago, in spite of having some of the biggest mega-churches in the States, is actually the least churched city in the States, something even Dave finds hard to believe. Believe it.
At the end of this particular post he tells us he'll be running a Fuller DMin program soon. He says: We are going to first dissect Christendom/post Christendom assumptions, modern-postmodern assumptions, and what constitutes the practices of being His Body in the world. Then we are going to dissect and analyze some church planting manuals.
These include one from Tim Keller's church in Manhatten and Mark Driscoll's Acts 29 materials. David has some other manuals on this list (see the course details) and the course reading alone comprises some 3,000 pages. Even without going to the course, you'd learn a huge amount from the reading alone...

Alltop

Want a way to keep up with various blogs and other sites that relate to (Modern) Church? Find it hard to pick and choose from all the results you get on Google? (Though let's not knock Google!)

Try Alltop.com. This site claims to take the 'nuggets' out of search results (presumably leaving the dross behind), and then it banks them up in a wide variety of categories. The one that might interest most readers of this blog would be Modern Church (Church doesn't exist on its own, interestingly enough, which might say something about the readership of sites on modern church, and the readership on sites related to church and church alone?)

But there are dozens of other categories, and more are being added all the time. The site is updated every ten minutes or so, and they have some complex approach to deciding what should go on there. It might be 'a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford' but it's more likely to be the 'results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop.'

Since Alltop is supposedly run by two guys and a gal in three separate places, their co-ordinating skills are fairly remarkable. The photo is of one of them: Guy Kawasaki.

Slideshow

On one of the blogs I read regularly, I came across a 'slideshow' that had been sent on from yet another blogger.

It's a slideshow giving some definitions of the differences between Modern and PostModern. It's not long, but there are several slides that would make good starting points for discussions about the point in history we're now in and what we're leaving behind.

I think slide 18 says it all: We must think like missionaries again! Which of course is what this blog is all about.

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