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Where Giants Have Walked!

So today I made my trip to Lambeau Field. I am here in Green Bay for Youth Specialties and had to take the chance to come to this legendary place. I remember watching those old NFL FILMS about the coldest NFL game ever played on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. Today it was about 65 degrees but that is OK. It is an amazing facility, just breathtaking to see what they have done with this stadium, it just went through a major renovation and it is now a place that is used year round and a place where the community gathers. it is amazing to see a small town like Green Bay (100,000 residents) with such an amazing stadium, it is something to be proud of.

Even though I am not a Packers fan I am a fan of Lambeau Field and the great football heritage here. This town has more football championships than any other, in second place is my Pittsburgh Steelers. Two small, blue collar cities with a lot in common! I am off to Fargo which is famous for wood chippers!

Enjoy the Pics!

Favre and Fargo!

So i have just embarked on one of my most unique Youth Specialties CORE trips ever. I have to speak this weekend in Green Bay and Fargo/Moorehead Minnesota. That's right Fargo, it brings to mind images of wood chippers! Fabulous! The cool thing is that I have never been to North Dakota, Minnesota or Wisconsin so three more states fall off of my "Never Been There Before" list! Currently I am sitting in the Detroit Airport eating at a National Coney Island. Good food. They have a mission statement, you should check it out! I hate Detroit but the airport is actually nice, maybe they fixed it up for the Super Bowl, you know the Super Bowl the Steelers won!! I brought my camera so I am looking forward to getting some photos of Lambeau field, the frozen tundra, well actually it is supposed to be about 70 degrees there today!

So will Brett Favre come back this year? I will find out from the fine folks in Green Bay. I don't know, he looked pretty tired last season, like an old man staring into his fastly approaching future. Which I believe for Brett would be a lot of golf! Not to shabby!

I will post some pictures later!

Bye,

Mark

I knew it was killing us!

Death by Suburb!

Found this post from Out of Ur which is the blog for leadership journal. I think the issue talked about in this post is one of the most under talked about issues facing the church, that being what living the way we are living is doing to us and to our children. It seems nobody is really confronting a lot of these issues. I am the father of a newborn son (parker) and I pray that we as a family will avoid this way of life at all cost!

David Fitch (at Out of Ur) on "The Brutal Burbs: How the Suburban Lifestyle Undermines Our Mission."

By idolizing the family, suburbanites may become focused on consuming more stuff to create the perfect home and family. There is nothing but contrived affection left to keep the home together. And children who learn they are the center of this universe from parents actually develop characters that believe they really are the center of the universe.

After decades of this suburban lifestyle America is left with families split by divorce, kids leaving in rebellion, and millions on various drugs to relieve the emptiness as the idolized family turns out to be a myth. Apart from the personal destruction the suburbs can bring, suburban isolation also poses a real problem for the spreading of the gospel.

If hospitality is to be a central way of life for the spreading of the gospel, the alienation of the suburbs is a condition of our exile we must overcome. Elsewhere I have said:

… evangelical Christians must consistently invite our neighbors into our homes for dinner, sitting around laughing, talking, listening and asking questions of each other. The home is where we live, where we converse and settle conflict, where we raise children. We arrange our furniture and set forth our priorities in the home. We pray for each other there. We share hospitality out of His blessings there. In our homes then, strangers get full view of the message of our life. Inviting someone into our home for dinner says “here, take a look, I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” By inviting strangers over for dinner, we resist the fragmenting isolating forces of late capitalism in America. It is so exceedingly rare, that just doing it speaks volumes as to what it means to be a Christian in a world of strangers.

Found this post from Out of Ur which is the blog for leadership journal. I think the issue talked about in this post is one of the most under talked about issues facing the church, that being what living the way we are living is doing to us and to our children. It seems nobody is really confronting a lot of these issues. I am the father of a newborn son (parker) and I pray that we as a family will avoid this way of life at all cost!

David Fitch (at Out of Ur) on "The Brutal Burbs: How the Suburban Lifestyle Undermines Our Mission."

By idolizing the family, suburbanites may become focused on consuming more stuff to create the perfect home and family. There is nothing but contrived affection left to keep the home together. And children who learn they are the center of this universe from parents actually develop characters that believe they really are the center of the universe.

After decades of this suburban lifestyle America is left with families split by divorce, kids leaving in rebellion, and millions on various drugs to relieve the emptiness as the idolized family turns out to be a myth. Apart from the personal destruction the suburbs can bring, suburban isolation also poses a real problem for the spreading of the gospel.

If hospitality is to be a central way of life for the spreading of the gospel, the alienation of the suburbs is a condition of our exile we must overcome. Elsewhere I have said:

… evangelical Christians must consistently invite our neighbors into our homes for dinner, sitting around laughing, talking, listening and asking questions of each other. The home is where we live, where we converse and settle conflict, where we raise children. We arrange our furniture and set forth our priorities in the home. We pray for each other there. We share hospitality out of His blessings there. In our homes then, strangers get full view of the message of our life. Inviting someone into our home for dinner says “here, take a look, I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” By inviting strangers over for dinner, we resist the fragmenting isolating forces of late capitalism in America. It is so exceedingly rare, that just doing it speaks volumes as to what it means to be a Christian in a world of strangers.

Let the Stupidity Continue!

Came across this on Mike Devries's blog awakening which is one of my favorites. Sometimes I wonder how we are ever going to reclaim the name "Christian" in this culture due to stupidity like this...enjoy!

Speechless.

While cruising through my Bloglines subscriptions this morning I came across this little beauty. I guess the nice folks behind The Left Behind Series are in process of developing a video game [yes, you read that right... a video game] based upon the book series.

Ah, yeah.

Know I have seen it all.

The more I see stuff like this, the more I realize just how utterly ridiculous this makes Jesus look. And we wonder why the world wants nothing to do with the resurrected Jesus.

Props to Justin over at Radical Congruency for bringing to light what he calls "possibly the single worst idea ever". Couldn't agree more. Exactly what are these people thinking?

The best lines from Justin's post...

The idea of religious video games that celebrate the death and eternal destruction of non-adherents - worse yet, that makes their annhiliation the primary task of the Christian community - raises my abhorrence for the Left Behind phenomenon to a level of utter disgust that I previously reserved only for racism and genocide.

Left Behind is to Christianity what terrorism is to Islam. Both are narcissistic and destructive distortions of otherwise (mostly) benign religions. Believing in hell or something like it does not require us to take pleasure or desire to participate in the destruction of others. If God wants to kill certain people at a certain point in history, that’s his business. And he can damn well do it himself. He doesn’t need any help from a bunch of self-righteous, overcaffeinated adolescents with bad theology in one pocket and ammo in the other.

I am speechless [and embarrassed] once again. Unbelievable. [Sigh.]

Just imagine how much money was wasted on making this game and how much money will be wasted in buying it! I am feeling a little queasy, so I gotta go!

mark

While cruising through my Bloglines subscriptions this morning I came across this little beauty. I guess the nice folks behind The Left Behind Series are in process of developing a video game [yes, you read that right... a video game] based upon the book series.

Ah, yeah.

Know I have seen it all.

The more I see stuff like this, the more I realize just how utterly ridiculous this makes Jesus look. And we wonder why the world wants nothing to do with the resurrected Jesus.

Props to Justin over at Radical Congruency for bringing to light what he calls "possibly the single worst idea ever". Couldn't agree more. Exactly what are these people thinking?

The best lines from Justin's post...

The idea of religious video games that celebrate the death and eternal destruction of non-adherents - worse yet, that makes their annhiliation the primary task of the Christian community - raises my abhorrence for the Left Behind phenomenon to a level of utter disgust that I previously reserved only for racism and genocide.

Left Behind is to Christianity what terrorism is to Islam. Both are narcissistic and destructive distortions of otherwise (mostly) benign religions. Believing in hell or something like it does not require us to take pleasure or desire to participate in the destruction of others. If God wants to kill certain people at a certain point in history, that’s his business. And he can damn well do it himself. He doesn’t need any help from a bunch of self-righteous, overcaffeinated adolescents with bad theology in one pocket and ammo in the other.

I am speechless [and embarrassed] once again. Unbelievable. [Sigh.]

Just imagine how much money was wasted on making this game and how much money will be wasted in buying it! I am feeling a little queasy, so I gotta go!

mark

It's in the Jeans!

This is just funny! It isn't real just a joke, but you bet someone will probably try it!

mark

Opening the Secret!

Over the past couple of years I have become a Brian McLaren fan even though I don't agree with everything Brian says, I believe he has a deep love for Jesus and is trying to help the church unearth and reveal the Christian faith in a way that is truer to it's original intent and in a way that is appealing to those who have been burned by church and religious people and their rhetoric! So I picked up his latest book The Secret Message of Jesus. and have enjoyed the little I have read so far. I encourage you to go to the link above and check out the reviews of the book. People like Brian draw such divergent reviews it is fun to read, although one of the sad things is that you will see the ugliness of some people who call themselves Christians but write like idiots! Here is a quote from the book.

"Think about the people who--even though they have given up on organized religion due to bad or boring experiences with it--still have a high opinion of Jesus. Or maybe "opinion" isn't the right word: what they have is a certain sense of possibility regarding Jesus, a sense that there might be more going on with him than most people realize, including perhaps many who call themselves Christians."

Or as U2 sang "I still haven't found what I'm looking for!"

In Jesus,

Mark

P.S. Make sure you check our the new books listed on the side. Some good reading!

Haven't we all thought about this?

Seriously, Haven't we all wanted to do what this guy did! Click HERE! You won't be disappointed!

mark

DUH!

Here is another dumb survey that they could have paid me a million dollars to tell them the same info and saved themselves a whole lot of time! Here are a couple quotes ftom the USA TODAY Story.

"This is the first time we've shown that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex," said Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, chief author of the report.

The teenage pregnancy rate in the United States is three to 10 times higher than that found in other industrialized nations, making that and exposure to sexually transmitted infections a major public health concern, the study said.

Youngsters "may begin to believe the world view portrayed and may begin to adopt the media's social norms as their own. Some, especially those who have fewer alternative sources of sexual norms, such as parents or friends, may use the media as a kind of sexual superpeer that encourages them to be sexually active," the report added.

You can find the entire story HERE!

All they had to do was ask a youth pastor!

mark

Still Burning!

This month marks the release of the first major motion picture about the events of Sept.11, 2006. It is called United93. This is the plane that was hijacked on 911 but never made it's target in Washington because the passengers fought back. The plane nosedived into a field about an hour and a half Southeast of Pittsbugh, which is where I lived on that day. Seeing the trailer for the film has stirred up emotions all over again emotions that for me have stayed since 911 just below the boiling point. Emotions that boil all over again with the slightest bit of provocation. This story touches me so deeply because I have been to the field where the plane crashed on three different occasions, twice with high school students who were deeply moved by the experience. I have seen the countless momentos left there by family, friends and strangers. I am now a father and I think now of all the children who lost mothers and fathers that day because of the sick agenda of some ideological bastards.

The whole thing to this day enrages me and to be honest with you that is the way I want to stay, angry. Maybe that is not the most Christian answer I could write and maybe it is wrong of me to feel that way but I want justice, I want restoration of what was lost, I want punishment, I want things to go back to the way they were before. Maybe I am right to feel this way, maybe it is what Jesus felt when he walked into the temple and saw people being robbed and stolen form and He burned!Maybe, I just don't know but that is how I feel. People say pray for peace, and that sounds great on a bumper sticker but when I read my Bible I don't see peace ever happening.

In Jesus,

Mark