So funny. I watched this video and thought... sounds a lot like Austin. I don't know though... I think the fact that weird Austin is totally surrounded by super conservative central Texas... it just comes off as extra weird.

I don't think that's the point. As churches we lead massive volunteer teams that give. We give life-inspiring messages. We give help to those who need. We give instructional care to kids and students. We give opportunities for people to connect in community with others. We should be the experts in "free" as we give to our communities through unpaid volunteers. It's a "free" and giving environment that drives the church and we should be the experts at this and other industries should be looking to us for how it's done.

I don't see churches changing the way they are funded. People don't give to the church to get a product, but out of obedience. The church uses that to serve the community. I don't anticipate that aspect changing although many churches do have some creative endeavors to bring in funding other ways, but it's usually not the majority.

Wow, i was about to upgrade my other blogs as well... I might wait until I know I've got them backed up properly. Sorry you had to go through that. Good thing for backups!

I posted about this many moons ago: http://www.childrensministryonline.com/humor/cuss...

A co-worker sent me the link to Ed's post and I loved it. We mistake authenticity with the freedom to be crass. It's not the same.

Now I'm trying to stop saying sucks and crap not because of this, but I'm not sure I want my children talking like this. :)

Wow. I must have arrived and no one told me. Henry wants to be like me when he grows up. Ha!

I'll take a screenshot of my June desktop and post it later today. I've got some desktop cleaning to do first and I'd be embarrassed for anyone to see how cluttered it has gotten. This monthly screenshot thing has been really good accountability for me.

Yeah, I heard about this yesterday on a tech podcast I listen to. I think it's only natural that Kindle would add blogs to the service, but I have to agree with you on the pricing. I can't imagine many people wanting to shell out much money to subscribe to something you can get for free on most any other device. We'll see, won't we.

This post reminded me of the Chapter "Dee Dah Day" in John Ortberg's "The Life You've Always Wanted." If you haven't read this book, stop what you are doing right now and order it. One of my all time favorite books. I've read it at least five times.

"OMG! Okay, so like this flight attendant came up to me and said, 'excuse me, you can't talk on the phone' or something like that... Whatever. We'll I pulled out this gun and said like, 'Lady, I've got a gun, like I'm going to do whatever I want.' OMG, I wish you you could have seen her..."

I'll give props where props are due. Last year I hadn't yet started at Gateway, so I made my own business card pointing to my twitter, blog and cell phone. This year I have a church card, but it doesn't have my blog, twitter or cell, so I made cards again. It was Matt's idea (www.mckeelive.com) to put the stuff on the back about where someone met me. I distributed my cards all over the bloggers lounge, so there isn't really any way for me to know how effective they were. I want to say that they did keep disappearing, but it could have been Chad using them as utensils http://tinyurl.com/crnyd3.

I love the use of the Google Docs form. I've never embedded it in a site before... it looked great. I'll have to look into trying that sometime.