This is Just Sad — Baby Killed for Interrupting Farmville

So this is what it’s come to in our popular culture? Really?

Just sad.

Don’t know how to respond except, “God help us.”

See the whole story HERE

#pastors24 Twitter Results

Jeremy, who planned this Twitter Feed, has posted some results from the exercise to show what pastors do on a pretty random, non-Sunday day.

First, when all of the Tweets were made into a Wordle and this is what came out:

That’s cool.

Also, the following is Jeremy’s comments on this:

• Meetings are one of the top words pastors used. Whether it is meeting with a student, parent, committee, teacher, youth…we are meeting a lot.
• There’s a lot of “youth” mentions which is powerful. It may be a bit swayed since at least 2 of the participants are in children’s and youth ministry, but still neat.
• A lot of pastors do work on meetings, worship, bible studies the day-of. A large number of pastors were actively working on their evening programs the day it was to happen. This isn’t a criticism just something I noticed.
• Many pastors worked 12-13 hour days, even if the first/last hours were doing computer work.

Go Check Out More over on Jeremy’s Blog, HackingChristianity.net.

This Pastor’s Day — Wednesday, October 27, 2010 Twitter Feed

Worked out to be about 8.5 – 9 hours of church-related work…plus the whole “community involvement” time spent in two different play practices. You can see the whole Twitter Feed from the #pastors24 experiment on Twitter. What this worked out to be is a time-tracking exercise via Twitter and I think it was good for me to see the various things I do throughout the day…but also to see just how many times I was interrupted as I was trying to get something done. Particularly with the building-related issues there are a lot of distractions. This is something I might do every once in a while to give an account of what my day looks like. I think Twitter is uniquely suited for this.

Privacy and the Internet — A Helpful Venn Diagram

In case you had any questions.
From Make Use Of.

Clergy Trusted Less Than…(GULP!)…Politicians?

Image via Wikipedia

Here in Alaska we have a hotly contested battle for a Senate seat with three candidates in the race running just about even.  But each of them has their problems.

The Democrat, Scott McAdams suffers from…well…being a Democrat in a very Republican state…that and a lack of experience beyond being Mayor of a small town.

The Republican, Tea Party-Approved candidate, Joe Miller suffers from his connection to the Tea Party and questionable ethics (such as a dishonesty in his job as lawyer and then trying to cover it up).

Republican write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski suffers from her inability to abide by the results of the Republican primary, which she lost to Joe Miller.

There is a certain amount of nastiness between the two Republican camps and it’s clear in our own town that supporters of these two candidates have had a field day taking down and/or vandalizing the campaign signs of the other.

It’s a heated…yet very interesting race.  And, of course, we’re bombarded by mailers and robocalls on a regular basis.  There are other races going on and there will be more to vote on when Tuesday comes.  However, these are the folks getting most of the attention.

As this is happening around us and as we struggle with what it means to try to choose between candidates when we’re not sure how trustworthy they are, us clergy have received a bit of bad news and it came to me in the form of an article by Michael Jenkins, President and Professor of Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary:

According to a survey conducted by “Scientific American,” “religious authorities” rank at the bottom of eight categories of persons trusted “to provide accurate information about important issues in society.” On a 1 (strongly distrust) to 5 (strongly trust) scale, clergy (at 1.55) ranked below “elected officials” (1.76), “companies” (1.78), “journalists” (2.57), and “citizen groups” (2.69).

I want to reiterate this point, just so we don’t miss it: ministers rank below politicians in believability and trustworthiness.

Maybe we have one piece of the puzzle why folks are not beating a path to the doors of the church…

Clearly, those of us who are in ministry have some fences to mend. Or, to reach back to the jargon of the sixties when the phrase was first coined, we have a “credibility gap” that needs to be bridged. The only way to gain trust is to earn it.

So, we are left to ponder why this is the case?   The media?  A couple bad apples spoiling the whole barrel?  A disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the behavior of those in the church?

And, regardless of the reasons behind it, we are left to try to figure out what to do about it.  My take is that we are left to slowly but surely work on real relationships with persons where our trustworthiness is shown and lived out.  I’m not sure anything else will be able to bridge this divide.