Year: 2009

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Changed by Jesus – Sermons

I preached at Willoughby the past two Sunday nights. The series was all about the difference that the gospel and knowing Jesus makes. Talk 1 was from Luke 19 and looked at the change in Zacchaeus upon meeting Jesus. Talk 2 was from Luke 16 and looked at the Shrewd manager and how his story encourages Christians to make decisions shaped by Jesus and eternity.

changed by Jesus

Here are the mp3s from the two talks:

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Top 5 websites for making free church graphics

I was asked after a recent sermon where I got the graphics from the PowerPoint and sermon handout. Here’s my answer that I emailed to the staff and leaders at Willoughby. Copied below for your convenience.

pic from http://www.creativemyk.com/gallery.aspx?id=3891

  1. www.creativemyk.com – some of the gear on here is a little bit cheesy, but there’s plenty of good stuff. I just subscribe to it via RSS (What  the heck is rss?) and anytime I see a good one, I download and store in folder on my computer.
  2. www.sxc.hu – good range of free stock photos – they are also royalty free – so if you publish a book – you can use their pics without giving royalties. They’ve also got a good paid service – but I think there’s enough good stuff you don’t need to pay coin
  3. www.simplyyouthministry.com – there are some very very very cool backgrounds on here. Download all their folders, unzip them – and then put them into one gallery on your hard drive for quick viewing. The newer ones are better than the older ones (ie – the ones from 2002 are increasingly uncool design!!)
  4. www.stufficanuse.com – these guys have some fully pimped gear. You can download photoshop files etc.
  5. www.dafont.com – there are lots of really bad font sites online – and plenty that have annoying pop-ups. This site has some good gear and no pop-ups. I typically won’t download the ones that are “free for personal use only” – ie I’ll get the ones that the licence allows using on church material without having to buy the font.
  6. www.irfanview.com – yeah I know this makes 6, but this isn’t strictly somewhere to download gear. I have some sweet design software (adobe creative suite) – but often for something quick – I’ll just use PowerPoint. Put some fonts on your background – copy all – and then paste it into irfanview – you can easily crop and then save as JPEG (or any other number of file names).

Hope this is useful!

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Should Frank Farina have been sacked?

Brisbane Roar made a brave move today in sacking Frank Farina as the coach of the A-League football (soccer) team. On Saturday morning, Farina was charged for the second time for drink driving. Farina was one of Australia’s greatest players and I believe a very good coach. Were the Roar a little bit harsh in ripping up his contract?

frank's distraught eyes

I don’t think so. While I genuinely feel sorry for Farina, the seriousness of the action taken against him shows how much responsibility coaches have in their example to their players and the community. Other football codes, of which Rugby League particularly comes to mind, would do well to take note of the swift and serious consequences of stupidity – only then will they have any chance of changing their seedy culture.

Here’s what Roar Chairman, Chris Bombolas, had to say:

“I acknowledge Frank’s contribution to the club but we can not excuse or condone his behaviour off the field […] It is simply not in step with we expect of our players or our coaching staff, or what the community expects […] The message from our board is very clear: the community and our fans expect a professional standard of conduct and behaviour and so do we.”

PS – if you stumbled here via google, I used to think that “soccer was life, and the rest just details” – that’s a bit silly, life is all about Jesus.