I spent some time over the last week reading all the 60 or so posts for the Synchro blog. All these bloggers came together to share their thoughts on how to bridge the gap between people of all sexual orientations and the church. You can check out the other blogs by clicking below. My Post | Blog List | Twitter Feed

Here were a few posts that stood out to me from the pack that I really enjoyed.

Deeper Moments
Sharing the Gospel in the Gay Village
Grace Unfolding
What I Learned from Kim and Luane
Confessing Assumptions About Sexual Identity :: Moving Away From Drawing Lines to Starting Dialogue
Befriending our Gay Neighbours
Sexuality Issues
Christianity and Homophobia
Paradoxy
Some Stats That are Interesting

I’ve stopped doing links on my site and moved over to Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter as a better way to share things I’m doing, reading and watching online. It’s much less time-consuming and less in your face if you aren’t interested. I’ve shared these videos via Google Reader, but I just think they are all great interviews that need to be more watched. So watch them.

Peter Rollins is obviously a gifted storyteller with great analogies and examples to help grasp what the church is called to do. This is an amazing interview.

Explaining Emergent Churches – Inner Compass from Calvin College on Vimeo.

A helpful interview to understand the difference between me and my parents, and me and most people I interact with in Sarnia all day long.
A movie that I hope to watch soon

And a movie I watched at the Justice Film Festival here in Sarnia last weekend. It was called We Feed the World, it’s mostly done in subtitles, so you don’t know what they are saying in the trailer but it is brilliant.

Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not “being who you are”. Great little post by Seth.

When we were in South Africa and Swaziland I was amazed at how many children and people had cell phones. One child would have no family, barely a home, but he would have a cell phone. It came across as weird at first. Some orphans were given cell phones because it was always free to receive calls without a plan or anything else, so they could send a “please call” to someone for free and then receive a call in case of emergencies. So this new direction that Bill Gates is heading in is super interesting and I think will work great. Even in the mountains of Swaziland we had cell phone access.

This looks like a hardcore app.

Oh dear. A helicopter landing pad at a church? (ht)

Tonight six of us came to the space and put up a wall that will separate the office area from the gathering area at theStory’s space. I am hoping to be able to rent out desks in the office to people downtown over time. Eventually hopefully it will also work to start to supplement some of the income for being in a place like this.

Pernell’s blog is back, I have made a rule (that only applies to him and Darryl, and possibly Joe) that their blog has to be back and working and live (without wimping out saying they aren’t into blogging) for at least one year before I put them back on my blogroll. Cause I know that’s the only reason they have a blog anyway.

Ron and I have decided that we want to go to a tech conference sometime soon. We have been to enough Christian, Bible and theology conferences and I think it’s about time that we treated ourselves with the second half of our lives. Any ideas which one we should go to?

A Tale of Two Realities by Zaya Kuyena. This was posted by my friend Zaya who has been a great supporter of our conference but shares some struggles with conferences like ours; struggles that I have but aren’t nearly as central to my heart. So this was a good post and needed.

Suggestions from the Consumer Driven Church

A biography on the Google boys (ht)

Kindle 2 was announced.

That’s all I got for today. I’ve been thinking quite a bit, but not posting at all, not sure why. I’ve been working on a few posts that I haven’t posted, and one open letter that I’ve been told on numerous occasions that I should post and also not post, still haven’t decided. We’ll see. The conference has been taking up quite a bit of time lately.

The price of experience. Really interesting observation.

New church downtown Toronto

If you are in Toronto on Feb 15, make sure you go to Love Comes Down. Click for more info. Lon is a cool guy that is really doing some great things in the Toronto area.

Offset your emissions. It sucks that once again money is the answer to everything. But if you insist on releasing that much emissions into the air on a yearly difference than you can AT LEAST try to offset it. With my car (well close enough, it didn’t have my old car listed) I could offset my emissions for driving for $186 a year. It’s a cool system and at least helps you evaluate and understand the costs of doing things we don’t really think about.

1981, before the internet….check this video out.

Cheap photobooks of your facebook photos

How Dan understands the Bible. Sounds about right where I am, but way more intense and a much better explanation. I did a long series on the Bible a few years back when I was at Tyndale and wrestling through what it was supposed to mean.

Looks like some folks will be at Cultivate this year on May 16, 2009 like Jordon from Saskatchewan and Steve from New Zealand. I usually make it to these gatherings, or at least I try to.

This month we have a party challenge for those of us at theStory. Basically its working in conjunction with the parables of the Lost Coin, Lost Sheep and the Two Lost Sons that we are studying this month.

A cool stop motion

Watched the movie called For the Bible Tells Me So. It was great.

Google’s task list in Gmail Labs is now on the G1 (and the Iphone)

The XXX Church guys are planting a church in Las Vegas. Nice work boys. I love their unique and always needed approach to the gospel.

I don’t really follow Twitter accounts. I find them annoying and usually uninformative. There are very few people in this world that I want to have minute by minute updates on their lives and none of those people use Twitter. With that being said, if people used Twitter like Leonard Sweet does, as Michelle points out, I’d be a lot more inclined to follow the feeds. Jumping into someone’s brain occasionally to see some of their questions or thoughts on situations is quite interesting. However, then it gets really annoying again when it becomes like a Facebook wall where you start posting messages to people. Jordon is now moving his Tweets to his sidebar now too, which is good, I think it’s where they belong.

I have been waiting for this for a really long time. Brilliant move and now there is seriously no reason ever for anyone ever to use Outlook. Gmail is now offline!

Sweet new website that gives you recommendations of what movies to watch by what movies you like.

Going to a show on Friday called the Where’s the Band tour. It’s all the frontmen from a few of my favourite bands and most importantly Thrice. (Dustin Kensrue of Thrice, Matt Pryor of the Get Up Kids, Chris Conley of Saves The Day and Anthony Raneri of Bayside). It’s sold out though, so you can’t go, hopefully I’ll get some nice pics.

We have finished filming our first ever commercial for this year’s Evolving Church conference, and I’m pretty pumped to get it online. Mind you we shot it ourselves with our cheap equipment, but I think its great. It should be up before the end of the week.

Gran Torino was a great movie, really enjoyed the character development. Seven pounds was also pretty good, a little predicatble but still good. Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler are the next two on my list. I’ve also just started getting into the season called It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It is absolutely hilarious, a little racey, so if you are sensitive pretend I didn’t write that.

This e-mail reminds me of a lot of people. Some of those t-shirts are really hilarious though. Some….a little over the top.

Oh Mark Driscoll. Seriously, what a douche.

This weekend I was able to get OSX (or as Joe calls it, OS TEN) onto my PC using Kallyway. This is a giant step in my ultimate goal in life to prove to everyone how horrible of an investment purchasing a Mac is. If OSX will run perfectly on any laptop, it will be official that Mac users buy Macs and spend twice the money for the same speed strictly because of style and brand loyalty. I knew this was true long ago, but finally it is becoming more realistic. Plus, I’ll be able to run Final Cut on my PC now too, because none of my friends refuse to believe me that Premiere is just as good as a program, if not better in my opinion.

I’m now officially using Google Reader. Don’t know why I wasn’t before, I should have known that having it all online was a good move. Plus, now I can read it on my phone too with my Google Reader app.

We have an amazing new soup/wrap place across the street from theStory called Spoon Lickens. There is going to be 150 different soups to choose from on the take-out menu and 9 different ones each day to order. 3 of the 4 soups I’ve had were out of this world. It’s a bit pricey, but I’m pretty pumped we have another great restaurant downtown Sarnia.

I now realize that almost all my links are somehow tech related. Guess that’s just how it swings this week.