The Dave Test

I happened to check out Google + just now, and found a post from a guy called Frank Viola.  The name sounds familiar, and apparently his two blogs are regularly in the top 10 of all Christan blogs on the Web today, but I can't place him particularly. 

Anyway, he's talking about a book with the rather odd title, The Dave Test, by someone who's equally unknown to me: Frederick W Schmidt.  Even Viola admits that Schmidt is no celebrity, though the bio on Amazon shows he's no slug either, and this isn't his first book by any means.  I'll quote the bio in full:

Reverend Dr. Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. is an Episcopal Priest, Director of Spiritual Formation and Anglican Studies, and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas.

Prior to his arrival at SMU, he served as Canon Educator and Director of Programs in Spirituality and Religious Education at Washington National Cathedral; as special assistant to the President and Provost of La Salle University in Philadelphia; as a Fellow of the American Council on Education; and as Dean of St. George's College, Jerusalem. In addition he as served as a lecturer in New Testament studies at Oxford University, and as a Tutor in New Testament studies at Keble College, Oxford. He has been a guest lecturer at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas, Dallas.

He is the author of numerous published articles and reviews, including entries in Doubleday's Anchor Bible Dictionary.
He is author of A Still Small Voice: Women, Ordination and the Church (Syracuse University Press, 1998); The Changing Face of God (Morehouse-Continuum, 2000); When Suffering Persists (Morehouse-Continuum, 2001); Conversations with Scripture: Revelation (Morehouse-Continuum, 2005); What God Wants for Your Life, Finding Answers to the Deepest Questions (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); and Conversations with Scripture: Luke (Morehouse, 2009). Dr. Schmidt holds a bachelor's degree from Asbury College, the Masters of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary and the Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University.

The Dave Test - its subtitle is A Raw Look at Real Faith in Hard Times - gets its name from the author's brother, who found he had a brain tumour, and the book aims to give its readers tools on what to say and what not to say to those who are in a major crisis. Words that help, rather than hurt.  This is the main reason I'm mentioning it on this blog, because it has the potential to be of considerable help to those in ministry, especially in those difficult times when someone comes to you and says they're giving up on God, because why would God let them have a cancer in the middle of a promising career, or why would God let their son die in a senseless accident...and so on.  Read Frank Viola's review, and his commending of the book.  And check out the reviews on Amazon, where you can also read a bit of the book.

Unchurched

There is a dread code word that church people, particularly Professional Church People, use for those who are, well, unchurched. For sheer stupidity it ranks with ‘deplane,’ as in ‘in an emergency, you will deplane from the door or window nearest you that is marked as an exit.’ My favourite days are those in which I am a thoroughly ‘deplaned’ person.

The best commentary on the word ‘unchurched’ that I know of came from a grocer in a small town in Iowa, apparently one of the suspect heathen. One day the pastor of the Lutheran church approached him about providing food for a district meeting of church evangelisation committees. These are the people, the pastor explained, who have a special ministry – here he paused, significantly – a special outreach to the ‘unchurched.’ The grocer took the order for cold cuts, sliced cheeses, rolls, cookies, and fruit. When the pastor unveiled the large deli platter in the church basement, he was startled to find that the centrepiece was a cross constructed out of slices of bologna.

From Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith, by Kathleen Norris, pg 325

Clevedon Leadership Conference

Thursday 27th Jan to Friday 28th Jan 2011

Join other leaders at Clevedon Presbyterian and get inspired to lead your congregation into an exciting future. Bring your spouse or one or two of your leadership team or come on your own and enjoy the hospitality of sunny South Auckland.

This conference will help you discover how you can take yourself and your leadership and congregation to a new level of ministry to your community.
As we prepare to move our congregation to a new property, we would like to share with you the possibilities your congregation has for the future.

Mark Chapman - Minister
This Year's Speakers Include: The Clevedon Family Ministries Team

The team will teach you how to engage with the non-church community as a Mission Church.

Hear how to cope with stress and why more and more ministers are burning out.
Plus much more...

On the Cost and Grace of Parish ministry - Jason Goroncy

As of today, Jason Goroncy from Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership has just posted the 14th episode in an ongoing series called, On the Cost and Grace of Parish Ministry.

I've been keeping up with these since they began, but wasn't sure how many were to come, so haven't notified the readers of this blog until now. This is a superb series of articles on all manner of things related to the series title: today's focuses on suffering, and in spite of its length (it ran out to 14 pages as a word document, including the pictures) is worth sitting down and reading carefully.

At the bottom of the latest post are links to all the other posts. Take an hour or so out of your time and read these.

Another statistic bites the dust

I'm always interested to see whether stats are as true as they're claimed (see my earlier post on Bradley Wright's book on this topic).   Mike Fleischmann has written an article in the Leadership Journal called How outsiders find faith, which deals to a widely-held statistic, as follows: 

It was something I had heard repeated as long as I had been in ministry: "85 percent of all people who accept Christ do so before the age of 18." I was never exactly clear where that statistic came from, but I had no reason to doubt it either. Everyone I knew considered it an evangelistic axiom.


He goes on to show that there's an element of truth in it: around 85% of those brought up in a Christian home with two Christian parents who are actively involved in their church will become Christians before the age of 18. That doesn't leave just 15% of people who become Christians after this age, even though at first sight it looks as though it should. Fleishmann writes:

Interestingly, what I was seeing in my own ministry didn't match up with that. I was watching unchurched people at every stage of life respond to the gospel. Were these just anomalies to the pattern, or was there something more?

He determined to check the statistic out, and not surprisingly proved it was only partially right. 

What quickly became apparent in the data was that the large percentage of believers from Christian homes skews not only our evangelism statistics but also our understanding of the situation. While many of us say we are determined to reach "the unchurched," many of our assumptions are based on the experiences of those who were raised as Christians—for instance, the assumption of when people come to faith.

I discovered that when someone from an unchurched background makes a lasting decision for Christ, it happens much later than we have often assumed and is spread out across every stage of life. Of those, a majority (57 percent) accept Christ between the ages of 21 and 50.

Another point he makes is that while those brought up in Christian homes tend to become Christians as a result of an 'event' - often the rather inappropriately-named 'outreach'  - those who come to faith later in life (and this can even be well into the sixties or seventies) usually come to faith through a friend - not necessarily a close friend, but someone who cares about them in some way.  

When you ask someone raised Christian, "How did you come to Christ?" they typically answer by telling about an event. They'll describe a time and a place where they made their decision, often mentioning who they were with.

People from unchurched backgrounds, however, answer the same question differently. They typically tell about an extended process, life circumstances, key relationships, and significant issues they were working through.

Often their actual point of decision is less defined. For instance, 11.4 percent of committed Christians from unchurched backgrounds cannot identify a specific time or place where they accepted Christ. For those of us raised as Christians, this can make us a little uncomfortable. Their less defined and sometimes unconventional turning points are not what we're used to.

If you want to read about someone who became a Christian in a stationery cupboard, check out John Shore's (somewhat hilarious) blog post: I, a rabid anti-Christian, suddenly convert.

One of the ugly sides of the Internet

One of the least mentioned issues in ministry is porn, particularly the easy availability of Internet porn.  I'm not talking about child porn here, but porn intended for men in general. 

And it doesn't just affect men in the congregations, it affects some ministers as well, though at present we have no New Zealand statistics on the extent of this problem.

A recent interview showed up on Newsbusters.   The article has the title CNN highlights porn's destructive effects on society?  (I'm not sure why there's a question mark at the end.)

The interview is with Gail Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.   The figures she presents are horrific: 420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn websites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn each and every day.   (While these are American stats, most of these sites are presumably available to New Zealanders as well.)  

Furthermore, according to one study, in 56% of divorce cases, one of the partners has an obsessive interest in porn.   Porn becomes the equivalent of a man having an affair, and worse, the women in question are able to 'satisfy' needs that his wife may not be willing or able to.

Plainly, getting up on a Sunday morning and preaching on this topic would be something of a shock to the average congregation.   But for some men in the congregation, it may be necessary....

Vocation vs Job revisited

An extract from a post by Bob Hyatt in the Out of Ur blog, again on the topic of where 'job' ends and 'vocation' begins - or vice versa.

First, as always, I need more fully to embrace the Gospel at a personal level. My failure at turning off ministry and making true rest a part of my weekly rhythms reveals within me a basic disbelief of the Gospel truth that Jesus is enough and that my identity can and should be rooted in his finished work for me--not the results I get, the church I pastor , how well (or poorly) it’s doing, or whether I think people are approving or disapproving of me based on the amount of access I give them to myself and my time. The only way we pastors will ever find sustainability and longevity in ministry is if we do what we tell other people to do ALL THE TIME: Rest our souls in the finished work of Christ. Stop getting our identity from our job/ministry. Take some time to unplug, unwind and, more importantly, connect with God, our families and our own souls again.

Clusters...hubs

Len Hjalmarson writes in a recent blog post:

One of the very large and looming questions we hear from churches is how to transition from inward and program oriented to outward in mission. As Mike Breen and Bob Hopkins point out so ably in “Clusters,” the question is not adding a new program, or shifting deck chairs, but a call for a shift in the very culture of the community. The most profound shift is from control to accountability: away from the centralization of ministry and the cult of leadership.

Our church has begun to work with these too, calling them 'hubs.' However, ours have begun for a somewhat different purpose. Being missional in our church wasn't so much our problem as building community, and this is what the hubs focus on. They also include mission, but for the moment that's a not the highest priority. Clusters or hubs usually contain up to fifty people, including children.

Clusters is a book that came out in 2008. It's subtitled Creative Mid-sized Missional Communities. Being a British publication it doesn't seem to have made the impact that an American title might have. However, you can read about Breen, St Thomas' Church in Sheffield, and more, at the St Thomas' site. The people at St Thomas have gone through several transitions, and detail them in the story. Their use of the word 'clusters' is explained on this page too.

Vocation vs Job

The following paragraphs are extracted from a post by Brandon O'Brien on the Out of Ur site.

The struggle for pastors today, says Eugene Peterson, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.”

According to Peterson, a job is “an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated.” Most jobs come with job descriptions, so it “is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not…whether a job is done well or badly.” This, Peterson argues, is the primary way Americans think of the pastor (and, presumably, that pastors think of themselves). Ministry is “a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by a denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation.”

A vocation is not like a job in these respects. The word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, “to call.” Although the term today can refer to any career or occupation (according to Webster), the word (vocatio, I imagine) was coined to describe the priestly calling to service in the church. So vocation=calling. This is how Peterson is using the word, anyway. And the struggle for pastors today, he continues, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.”

When I was a boy, and growing up in the Catholic church scene, there was always talk of 'vocations' - so and so has a vocation to be a priest, or a nun, or.... It was like certain people were handpicked by God to go and do something the rest of us klutzes couldn't quite manage.

And in a sense, that's correct. While we're all ministers (in the sense that Protestant churches use the word), only some of us are called to be ministers, to take on a vocation. That's not to say, of course, that we don't have a vocation elsewhere, as Peterson mentions in relation to the artists he worked with at one time.

Theology of self-care

Roy Oswald's book, Clergy Self-Care, begins by looking at the theology of health/wellness. A colleague provided the following notes in relation to this section of the book:

• God is omnipotent and omnipresent, ministers are not!

• God in Christ has done all that is necessary to redeem the world. Ministers do not need to save the world again.

• Mission and ministry belong to whole Body of Christ; a communal activity. Ministry does not belong solely to the Minister.

• Ministry should be a response to an experience of the grace of God. However motives can become distorted and ministry can flow from guilt or the seeking of personal fulfillment.

• Ministers are created beings, and with all humanity have limitations and weaknesses.

• Human beings are responsible for the stewardship of God’s world and themselves.

• God has given a model of self-care in observing the sacred rhythm of work and rest, the Sabbath. Jesus provides a model of doing ministry and taking care of himself; a balance of work and rest.

• Ministers need to learn that to be a person of compassion; we must not to be strung out with every human need that comes along.

• The biblical view of human beings is that the body, heart, soul and mind are all interconnected, parts of our whole being.

You will never see revival in the West until you are willing to use your women

When I attended a Pentecostal church, one of things that struck me most was that they took a 'Scriptural' point of view in relation to women preaching in the church, but a very non-Scriptural point of view when it came to women being missionaries overseas - on their own, without support. In other words, out of sight.

In the latest Next-Wave ezine, there's an article by Felicity Dale entitled Rethinking the Challenging Scriptures. The challenging scriptures in question concern the role(s) of women in the church. The thing that most struck me about this article are the words she quotes from Yonggi Cho, who, in 1983 (when Dale visited him) ran a church of some 350,000 members.

Yonggi Cho said: You will never see revival in the West until you are willing to use your women.

That was 1983. A good number of women in NZ have since managed - often with considerable difficulty - to become priests and ordained ministers in mainline churches. But as a colleague said to me yesterday: the average number of women in a Presbyterian Church congregation is around 70%. The average number of men in the leadership (that is, as ministers or elders) is around 80%.

Don't these figures clash just a little in your mind? Perhaps Yonggi Cho's words say more than we think.

Felicity Dale writes a blog called Simply Church which (among other things) has a focus on women in ministry and the need they have for the support and encouragement of men to achieve their goals.

Leaders Who Last

Rowland Croucher has placed a review of this book by Margaret J. Marcuson on Facebook. What follows is just a part of the review.

Here’s one of the best little (150 pages) books on pastoral leadership with an American mainline church /Alban Institute flavour to emerge in the last decade.

They say every sermon/book should be summarizable in one sentence. Here’s mine for this one: ‘Your pastoral leadership style/conflicts can’t be understood apart from your family-of-origin experiences; so be patient: most changes in a pastor’s approach and a congregation’s responsiveness will take time and sensitivity to that church’s history as well.’

Margaret’s a Baptist, but as a non-fundamentalist Baptist myself, I hasten to add that the people she quotes and the ideas she espouses indicate that she’s a ‘broad church Baptist’ (yes, some of us do actually exist!).

Some of her (and her professional friends’) wisdom:

• When we are less dependent on the approval of others we can be more effective in our ministry (p. 6)

• Carrying other people, until we can’t do it any longer, is the real source of burnout, not overwork (11). We can be the most help by giving people space to find creative solutions to their own struggles (17). Identify who in your family you were trained to rescue so as not to mistake legitimate professional helping with illegitimate family rescuing – which is inevitably tied to unhealthy ways of trying to feel good about oneself (18-19).

• Many clergy are oldest children: they learn early to over-function in relation to others, to take responsibility for them (34-5). Of course not all that we learnt from our families is negative. Ask: ‘What gifts did your parents give you?’ (36). An initial step in looking at our family story is to create a family genogram (37). And remember: the problems with parents is that they had parents (46).

• Clarifying your vocation: Where do I want to go? What energizes me? What future possibilities do I see? What legacy do I want to leave? Do I know what I love to do? Can I do more of it? What was my original thinking in going into ministry? If I had to write down my ministry purpose in one sentence right this minute, what would I say? (73).

• The person who desperately wants to be liked is never the most popular; the leader who desperately wants others to follow is not the most effective (76)

• Teresa of Avila’s daily prayer: ‘Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you; all things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance attains to all things; who God possesses in nothing is wanting; alone God suffices’ (110).

The excellent final chapter on personal spiritual disciplines includes such classical wisdom as: worship in different places and traditions, go outside, find a spiritual mentor, read Scripture devotionally, not just for your sermon preparation.

At the end of each chapter are some very helpful discussion-starters. The ten questions to ask about your church’s history are brilliant (32). I’d suggest this book as an excellent resource for your pastoral colleagues’ support-group.
Alban Institute 2009

More from Croucher

As promised, here's another article from Rowland Croucher on the issues of stress and burnout amongst ministers. This one begins with a story about a man who had the ability to preach, but always lost his church job through conflict. In the end he was virtually down and out, his wife just managing to make ends meet.

Rowland goes on to look at what helps a pastor/minister last the distance.

Today it's both easier and harder to be a pastor. Easier, because we have more resources to help us - like the World Wide Web for sermon-material (ever used the search-engine Google as a concordance?), more support-groups to encourage and pray for us, better access to the world's practical theology experts, and a higher standard of living, on average, than pastors have ever enjoyed.

But it's also harder. Many of us can identify with the apostle Paul who said, 'Who is equal to such a task?', about his own call to pastoral ministry. These days the expectations of our people are higher - and more likely to be expressed vigorously. Up-front leaders and speakers compete with dynamic personalities on television. There are more 'religious' people not attending churches (in the West) than ever before in history. Our people are likely to be better-educated - and differently-educated than we are. 'One size fits all' doesn't work any more: people are more mobile, and brand-loyalty doesn't work for Generation X'ers (those born since 1965) - or even Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964).

He offers a number of suggestions over several articles (I've only listed the first few here, as the others run comfortably on from the one before.)

1. Jesus as the model for ministry
2. Spiritual formation -keeping on bel
3. Images of Ministry - what is yours?
4. Saint or Pharisee?
5. Keeping the Spiritual Disciplines - this point keeps turning up; is God saying something?!
6. What about the 'Call'?
the rest of the article appears in a second page:
7. Understanding yourself - how much does your family history affect your work?
8. Co-dependency - blaming others for your own faults
9. Mentors and Networks - absolutely essential!

Keeping it Simple

Here are some significant marks of a faith-based, holistic program of communication and caring organisation, as expressed in Mark 6:7-13 (in The Message translation.)

He sent them off with these instructions:

‘Don’t think you need a lot of extra equipment for this.
You are the equipment.
No special appeals for funds.
Keep it simple.’
And no luxury inns (6:7-10).

This is a brief extract from John Smith's Who Needs an Agenda from the Faith Page?

John Smith describes himself as a Keynote Speaker, Biker, Business Anthropologist, Author, Advocate. I'm not entirely sure what a business anthropologist is....

See also the quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on The Daily Writer.

Intergenerational

It's the 16-year-old that has relationships with 66 year olds and 6 year olds who is more likely to stay involved in a faith community after [he or] she graduates.

Kara Powell writes on the Out of Ur blog that it's now been statistically shown that children and teenagers who are continually segregated off from 'adult church' during their growing years aren't likely to get attached to the church as they become young adults. They tend to slide away and lose their contact altogether.

Powell writes that: In the 1940s and post World War II, there was a real burst in parachurch organizations focused on ministry to teenagers and young adults, such as Young Life, InterVarsity, and Youth for Christ. In many ways, they led the way for the church in realizing that we need to focus on specialized discipleship and teaching for teenagers.

In spite of great results, the result was age-related segregation. And with many young people only going to youth group and not to church, there's no link to the adult church community.

Powell sees the future as intergenerational youth ministry.

I'm not entirely sure what intergenerational youth ministry actually is; wouldn't the better phrase be intergenerational ministry? Not to forget the youth, but to integrate them.

Cracked Pots

While trying to track down a book called The Cracked Pot, the state of today’s Anglican parish clergy, by Yvonne Warren, I came across an article from 2007 on the Church Times archives, called What Price Priesthood? by Rachel Harden.

It discusses clergy burnout, stress, the difficulties of being ill and then having to recover within the parish, long hours with little time off, and other problems of ministry. Yvonne Warren, herself the wife of a clergyman for 40 years, notes that the Church in the 21st century is experiencing a cataclysmic time of change, with huge implications, and says, “This has affected patterns of ministry more than most, and many clergy are feeling the impact of this, not just in terms of workload, but in their sense of frustration and feeling of increasing irrelevance in a largely secularised society.”

Another book is mentioned in the article: Clergy Burnout: Recovering from the 70-hour work week. . . and other self-defeating practices by Fred Lehr. Lehr had a terrible time saying “no”, and loved feeling needed. “In reality it exhausted me, and I hated constantly being caught between my family and my congregation. I found myself helplessly falling in what we call burnout.” He sought help, and used his experience to work on a specialised treatment programme.

The Society of Martha and Mary produced a report in 2002 called, Affirmation and Accountability. In it they called on dioceses and other church structures to provide more constructive solutions for clergy who were on stress-related sick leave.

The article is fairly long, but well worth checking out. There are several personal statements at the end from people who have been through burnout and similar struggles.

Unfortunately, The Cracked Pot is now out of print, and only available through Print on Demand at the publishers, Kevin Mayhew. Affirmation and Accountability is also hard to get hold of in NZ (there is one copy, at the Kinder Library). Clergy Burnout is more readily available.

Ignatius the Ultimate Youth Pastor

The video below turned up on the Vertizontal blog. It's well put together, and the cast have a easy approach to their roles. Vertizontal thinks it explains things a little too much, but compared to some Christian videos I think it does pretty well.

It was shot by Taylor Robinson and George Wiley, with video post by Jason Poole and audio by Eric Chapman and Nate Dregger. The role of Ignatius is played by Josh Keefer. Written and directed by Travis Hawkins. Student Life produced the video for a free youth minister event called Refuge. It was conceived as a satire for what they consider to be an unhealthy "rock star" culture that has been growing inside Christendom, as well as an encouragement for the unheralded heroes on the front lines of ministry.

I think most youth groups would get a good laugh out of it - and perhaps even find the idea behind it thought-provoking.

Wellness....or not

These figures were quoted in a review on Amazon.com for the book, Mad Church Disease
Some recent statistics from The Fuller Institute, George Barna, and Pastoral Care Inc.

90% of the pastors report working between 55 to 75 hours per week.

80% believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastor's children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.

33% state that being in the ministry is an outright hazard to their family.

90% feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the ministry demands and 50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job.

70% say they have a lower self-image now than when they first started.

70% do not have someone they consider a close friend.

40% report serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month.

33% confess having involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in the church .

50% have considered leaving the ministry in the last months.

50% of the ministers starting out will not last 5 years.

94% of clergy families feel the pressures of the pastor's ministry.

The profession of "Pastor" is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions, just above "car salesman".

Over 4,000 churches closed in America last year.

Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month last year.

Over 1,300 pastors were terminated by the local church each month, many without cause.

Over 3,500 people a day left the church last year, over 1.25 million people.

This shows that there's all the more need for an emphasis on Wellness amongst ministers and their families. If it's happening there, it's happening here (in fact we know it's happening here).

The other 3 billion

I've only just caught up on this story, so excuse it being a little 'old.'

The 'other 3 billion' is a phrase used to describe the 3 billion people on the planet who don't have ready access to the Internet. O3b Networks is based in the Channel Islands and has a project well under way to provide 16 satellites that will drop the cost for ISPs and operators to provide Internet access over 3G (third-generation) and WiMax networks to people in countries like Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

Partnered with HSBC (a worldwide banking corporation), Google, and Liberty Global, a private equity provider that provides phone and Internet access in 15 countries, this project will use medium range satellites, which can recieve and send signals at around 120 milliseconds, which is close to that of a fibre network. While fibre networks were already available in developed countries, the laying of them is not economically feasible elsewhere.

Why is this of interest to the Church? Because the Internet is one of the most extraordinary gifts humankind have received in the last century. It enables evangelism, outreach and ministry on a scale undreamt of, and achieves these in a myriad of ways. Certainly, like any other system, it has a dark side, but this isn't a reason to ignore it.

Goodbye Radio, Hullo Internet

It was once thought that radio was the most economical of the large-scale broadcasting opportunities for evangelism. Now it looks like the Internet is taking over in this area too.

Many churches around the world are filing podcasts on their websites, and thus making the churches' sermons and other material available to those who might have listened to the radio in the past. And it's being done at almost no cost, which means that even small ministries can play a part in reaching listening audiences.

Only a couple of years ago, podcasts were virtually unknown to those outside the elite areas of the Internet world; now they're being downloaded enthusiastically by all sorts of Internet users. And since they can be transferred onto MP3 players, they're as accessible as radio was. (Remember when people used to carry 'trannies' on their shoulders in order to listen to music? Trannies were monoliths compared to the technology now available.)

Only a few months ago a question was asked in our church: what did people think was the most used part of the church website? It came as a surprise to most of us that the downloading of sermons was the top feature - and not by church members, but by people in various parts of the world.

Incidentally, Radio NZ has a screed of podcasts available. Check them out. And here's the link to the DCBC podcast page.

The symbol at the top of the page is that used by Apple to represent podcasting.