15 Ways to Reinvent Your PC

Catalyst | The Leadership Filter for What’s Next in the Church

The Leadership Life of the Senior Pastor, Part 3
By Dan Reiland

Senior Pastor, when I wrote Shoulder to Shoulder, Strengthening Your Church by Supporting Your Pastor (Thomas Nelson), I was thinking of you. It can apply to all pastoral staff, but the core of the idea encompasses the role of the senior leader and raising up a church of strong, committed people.

I’d seen too many staff and members of a local congregation attempt to “fix” the pastor rather than come alongside and support him or her. I was determined to do something. Shoulder to Shoulder speaks into these issues in a positive and productive way with chapters like “I thought my pastor was supposed to support me,” “Champion your pastor’s humanity,” and “I’m not sure I even like my pastor.” (Other chapters deal with maturity of the believer with topics from serving to tithing.) The book is widely used today in various environments from small groups to church boards. By the way pastor, the intended readers of the book are the people who attend your church.

So, what is the point in all this? And what’s with the shameless plug of my book? The point is that the role of senior pastor is a difficult one. I’m not whining on your behalf, I know many jobs are difficult. But your role is unusual and greatly misunderstood. Hey, some people really do think pastors work one day a week!! It’s unbelievable. And for those that suspect you might work more, they have no idea what you do: everything from daily administration to financial issues, staff issues, board issues, sick people, new people, unhappy people, sermons to write, problems to solve, buildings to build, new technology to keep up with, IRS regulations to learn, worship style, children’s ministry, student ministry, political overtones, social justice, community involvement, prayer meetings, salvation, and of course the decision on the color of the new carpet. The church never sleeps and unfortunately, that is nearly the experience of the pastor as well.

Preaching by Faith and by Sight | LeadershipJournal.net
Preaching by Faith and by Sight
How oral communicators are joining the visual revolution.
The Leadership Survey reported by Eric Reed

We are entering the third age of communication, according to Andy Crouch, culture guru and director of our Christian Vision Project. The first age was oral communication, when history and theology were captured in stories and shared around campfires and tables. The second age was written communication, when the stories were committed to papyrus and sheepskin and paper and finally mass-produced, thanks to Guttenberg. Now comes the third age. You might call it the age of Spielberg. Andy has coined another name.
“Many centuries after the shift from oral to written culture, we are now well along in the transition to visual culture—where the predominant mode of communication is images rather than words,” Crouch says.
“Just as the shift to writing required the skills we call literacy, so visual culture requires its own skills—for lack of a better word, visualcy.”

Very Neat Idea. I like his thinking and his attitude about weeding out until you have what is necessary.

The Low-Information Diet:

How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours

Hallelujah! Finally, a simple “help your mother-in-law” application with Bonus File Sharing!

Wowee! Andrea and I tried tonight. It took longer to download than to figure out how to use it and set up our VPN.

Awesome, awesome.

Notes: This is not for unmanned computers, e.g. Gotomypc and Logmein. It is for live user to live user.

HT: http://scobleizer.com/

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CrossLoop – Simple Secure Screen Sharing
What is CrossLoop?CrossLoop is a FREE secure screen sharing utility designed for people of all technical skill levels.

CrossLoop extends the boundaries of VNC’s traditional screen sharing by enabling non-technical users to get connected from anywhere on the Internet in seconds without changing any firewall or router settings. It only takes a few minutes to setup and no signup is required.

Is CrossLoop Secure?

Security is built into all aspects of CrossLoop. Session data is encrypted at the end-points before being sent using a 128-bit encryption algorithm using a randomly generated 12-digit access code. Explicit permission is required before any screen images are sent to a remote computer. CrossLoop is a secure tool to remotely assist any PC on the planet.

Maxwell’s Guidelines on Sexual Temptation

Good, sage advice from John Maxwell

If this is the state of cultural awareness and the barometer of our Christian worldview, then we are changing the road signs to Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Simpsons have been on TV for eighteen years—the second-longest running primetime program behind 60 Minutes. So unless you’ve been in the Peace Corps for a good chunk of that time or simply don’t watch any television, you probably already have an opinion about America’s favorite animated family.

The show’s creators know this, and, in a stroke of genius, use it to their advantage in the uproariously funny self-aware opening to The Simpsons Movie. Let’s face it. Most television shows don’t translate well to the big screen, and that’s especially true for 15- or 30-minute cartoons that don’t have the depth or nuance to expand into feature length. But The Simpsons, with its broad range of slapstick and satire, effortlessly stretches to four times the usual length of a 22-minute episode, yielding one of the most successful television-to-cinema transplants I’ve ever seen: “Best … feature-length … episode … ever.”

Good article to help discipline your Reading Habits

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Life Action Revival Ministries::Deliberate Reading

Deliberate Reading 

Written by Brian G. Hedges   

Great leaders are usually disciplined readers. Reading widely and reading well serve the mind as good nutrition and aerobic exercise serve the body. Too many church leaders have flabby brains.

As Os Guinness says, we have fit bodies but fat minds.[1] The primary remedy for our mental obesity is deliberate reading, which involves deliberate choices as to when, what, and how we read.

ChurchReport.com

America’s 50 Most Influential Churches

The Church Report is pleased to once again announce this year’s 50 Most Influential Churches in America. Each year, we look forward to working with Dr. John Vaughan and appreciate the input of pastors from throughout the country that provide their insight as to who is really influencing America’s churches.

Page: False hope in Baptist Maginot Line a vulnerability
Posted on Jun 12, 2007 | by Brent Thompson

SAN ANTONIO (BP)–An insidious false thinking has left the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention vulnerable to defeat by Satan, and the convention’s only hope is old-fashioned confession and a Holy Ghost revival, SBC President Frank Page told convention messengers during his presidential address June 12.

Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., preached from Psalm 51:1-3, giving a short history lesson about the infamous Maginot Line formed by the French after World War I to protect France from invasion by Germany. Page said building the system of forts and defense systems along France’s eastern border from the south up to Belgium was a tremendous feat and a marvel of technology and engineering at the time.

Find music by tapping the rhythm of the song’s melody.

Not sure what the name of a song is?

Use your computer keyboard to tap the rhythm of the song. SongTapper.com will help you find the name of the song. Its fun, its easy, and thousands of daily visitors find it very helpful.

All you have to do is tap the song rhythm and SongTapper does the rest. After tapping is complete you will see a list of matching songs. If we can’t identify your song, you can teach our system by entering the song name.

Biblical Dating: Tips for Engagement by Scott Croft 

This column raps up an intermittent series on “stages of a dating relationship.” Other installments included “Are you Ready to Date?“,
“Navigating the Early Stages of a Relationship,”
and “Growing in Intimacy,” which ran back on July 5.
If the editors are on their game, there will be links to those pieces embedded here or at the bottom of the page. To avoid repetition, I’ll assume knowledge of those columns and move on to the finale.

Conn. AG: Sexual Predators Lurk on Facebook – News and Analysis by PC Magazine