bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Monday, July 29, 2002 ::

I shall call him Mini Metablog I'm no Martin Roth, nor am I a respected Canadian journalist who pseudonymously blogs as Bene Diction. But I can metablog on occasion. Especially when I'm short on ideas of my own. So here for your reading and hyperclicking pleasure is a mini metablog, one-eighth the size of a real metablog and proportional in every way.

Blogathon 2002 is over, and Dead Yet Living made it through the 24-hour madness, still dead yet living (although the site's blogging system is dead). Great job, Rich Clark and the rest of the DYL gang. My pledge to The Todd M. Beamer Foundation is on its way.

I've been wondering why one blogger named his site Fatblueman. And now I know.

Old news for most of you, but Bene Diction has made the transition from Martin Roth Online and is now blogging solo.

Punk Monkey's thoughts on leadership and the church are well worth reading. I agree with his assessment: leadership in the church should be different from worldly leadership, and our focus should be on discipleship, not leadership. Read his thoughts here and here.

And now for something that's actually timely: blogs4god is up and running. Formerly Martin Roth's "Semi-definitive List of Christian Blogs," this site modestly proclaims itself as a "cutting edge, groundbreaking portal" with "exciting navigational features, optimal feedback capability and an extensive search engine." If Dean Peters is still looking for someone to write a pithy slogan for his site, he should get with the blogs4god folks.

In my offline reading, I enjoyed a couple of articles from the recent issue of Christianity Today:

I shouldn't say I really enjoyed the cover story about Christian pollster/marketing expert George Barna, because it was very disturbing. Barna has a pessimistic outlook for the future of the church, and what's even more disturbing is that he and I share that outlook. Barna is looking to today's youth as the salvation for the church as we know it. In that regard, I'm probably even more pessimistic than he. (Seventeen years in youth ministry will do that to you.) The article is a fairly superficial treatment of Barna and his impact on the church and Christian leadership (ack, there's that word again). But it's tough to capsulize the work of such a savvy researcher and prolific writer in 5,000 words. Barna's 1999 book The Second Coming of the Church is one of the best studies of the issues facing the church in the USA today.

The flip side of the Barna story was CT's interview (not yet online) with Colleen Carroll, author of an upcoming book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. Carroll interviewed hundreds of young adults and comes away with a hopeful view for the future. The pessimist in me still sides more with Barna. But as I said, that's what 17 years of youth ministry will do to a person.

:: Andrew 08:14 + ::
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