Sunday, October 05, 2003
There's an interesting and different take on the words of Jesus at The Words online. It's not a translation, but a topically organized paraphrase of what Jesus taught, with some nice pictures.
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The Journal of Web Semantics is trying to be both an on-line and print journal of Semantic Web work, with free electronic access until the end of 2003. They have the neat idea of driving the website from technologies that are described in the journal.
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Philip Greenspun talks about the point of blogging at the Harvard blogger's conference called BloggerCon. It's a nice introduction. I never would have thought of Marcus Aurelius as a blogger, but i guess it fits.

I'm still sorting out the value of blogging to me. Key benefits: it gets me writing, it sometimes even gets me thinking, and it provides a highly accessible journal/scrapbook of things of interest i come across. However, i constantly fight against the temptation to just surf, repeat, and briefly comment: there's not much value in that. And i don't think i've managed to clearly define a "community of interest" yet: i'm not even sure what kind of sense that makes, given the tendency for RSS aggregators to make us all samplers rather than ones who delve deeply into content in a focused way. While i'd really like to do is write one solid piece every few that addresses something of value and says something worthwhile. Unfortunately, good writing takes real time (at least for me), so i often start and don't get things done before other matters press in (as you can see if you've looked at my stories, several of which are unfinished :-/).


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Donna and i visited the Seventh Day Grace Church yesterday, where she had been invited to preach her sermon on Amos. There were several things that were different about this congregation that started a few months ago. They meet in a small chapel-like building on a farm that's owned by a Christian. The congregation is small, maybe 50 people: about half of them are kids. They have a potluck after their services (which start at noon), and then hang out together: sometimes they're there until 8 at night, just relating and having fun together. They don't currently have a full-time pastor/teacher: instead, they bring in a different speaker each week. That's how donna came there: one of their members also attends Cedar Ridge, loved her sermon there, and asked her to bring it. Their leader said this allows them to ask preachers to "bring their best sermon" and get a wide variety of them on their limited budget, rather than having to support a full-time pastor and get a mix of their best and their ... other.

All in all, it got me thinking about different models for how to be God's people in fellowship and worship. I especially liked the strong sense of community, arising from the fact that so many of them knew each other, and that they planned to spend time together eating and relating as part of their gathering. I suppose the challenge for this approach always comes when you grow past the founding families. But who says churches have to be so large that they can't work this way?


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