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Hunger for the WORD + Pray for the WORLD

SOULIES UNDERGROUND is on this Friday night. As I’ve learnt more about the persecuted church, I’ve been struck by the hunger for the Word of God of underground/secret church members. So SOULIES UNDERGROUND will be an opportunity to be BOUND WITH our brothers and sisters in the persecuted church by learn from their hunger for the Word and also spend time praying for them and for our world. We’ll be looking at Romans 8.

If you’re not part of our youth community, you’re more than welcome to join us online!

We’ve just launched www.souliesunderground.com which will include a live video stream and the opportunity to interact via twitter and facebook. Check it out for details.

Why broadcast it online? There probably aren’t many ‘real’ underground churches broadcasting their gatherings via webcam!!

Here are 3 reasons:

  1. I first read about running an event like this in David Platt’s book Radical. And then Secret Church was simulcast to over 50,000 people around the world in April this year. Our aims are smaller scale, but I like the idea and that leads to point 2…
  2. The technology is fairly straightforward. Livestream is free. LIVE THEME is relatively cheap and easy to customise. And it’s brilliant! (Affiliate link)
  3. If a few more people can be encouraged from God’s Word (in Romans 8 ) and spend some time praying for the persecuted church, then why not?! I’m keen to keep leveraging new technology for good things. I think this is a good thing.
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OK Go – End Love – Official Video

OK Go make creative film clips. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another still:

Tech specs:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

(from here)

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South Sudan: A New Nation Rises

Praise God for the ways that he’s answered prayer for Southern Sudan! The Republic of South Sudan is the newest nation in the world, with Independence Day on July 9, 2011. Read about the nation at Wikipedia and SBS World News. Pray from here and here.

PHOTO CREDIT: A man waves South Sudan’s national flag as he attends the Independence Day celebrations in the capital Juba, July 9, 2011. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

Check out all the other amazing pics over on Boston Big Picture.

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Look for Evidences of God’s Grace

I really enjoyed the past weekend away with SOULIES Youth Leaders. On Saturday we spent some time on a midyear ministry review. Review sessions can easily become unnecessarily negative. And negativity breeds negativity. Which then in turn breeds negativity. And so on. So we spent some time thinking about how to flavour our review by looking for evidences of God’s grace. In this vid, Mark Driscoll explains this concept:

Looking for evidences of God’s grace is not about ignoring areas for growth and improvement, but rather remembering that we have so many places that we see God’s kindness to us. Our review session on Saturday was really encouraging! I’m thankful for the many good things that God is doing among us, and we had a good opportunity to respond with praise and thanksgiving.

My hope is that in the ongoing process of reviewing our youth ministry that we would continue to flavour it with thankfulness to God for his incredible grace.

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Hey Christian: Don’t be a jerk!

I’m excited to be spending the weekend with the SOULIES Youth Leaders. Good vibe so far. We’re hoping to have a good mix of business and pleasure. The main teaching content will be on ‘Humble Orthodoxy‘. We’ll reflect on some of Josh Harris’ writing and 2 Timothy. Not sure on what ‘Humble Orthodoxy’ is? Check out this comic that Josh shared on his blog:

That pretty much sums it up!!

I’ve written on Humble Orthodoxy a bunch of times. Click here to read a bit more.

It’s a message I need to keep hearing, and I’m guessing it’s probably a message many of my readers need to keep hearing too!

Josh also posted a recent sermon on Humble Orthodoxy. I might try and listen this weekend…

Familiar with Humble Orthodoxy? How do you try and cultivate it in your life? (ie What do you do to guard yourself form being a Christian Jerk?)

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Pinch + Punch // July 2011

New reader of this blog? Pinch + Punch will give you a run down of some popular gear on DMDC for the past month. Likewise, you can check out my about page and/or archives. I’m thinking of selling some targeted advertising on this blog. It would be events/products that I think are relevant to readers of this blog. The aim wouldn’t be to make a squillion dollars, I have a job! But I am keen to try and cover some of the costs of this and other web projects. Let me know if you think it’s a dumb idea!! Or if you’d be interested in buying a spot.

Above is my fave pic from the July smashing mag desktop designs. And here’s the best of June (according to clicks) and some other stats: