Church Redone is looking for a new congregation to worship in. He’s learning all of the wrong things to do so no one can find you. It is pretty insightful, particularly in the fact that churches actually do these things. They actually take courses of action that inhibit healthy growth, keeping people from knowning they exist or how to find them.
He forgot one particularly good way not to be seen. Put your congregation in a building that sits on a lake surrounded by orange groves that is accessible only by a 1 1/2 lane dirt road hidden between the boundaries of 2 sub-divisions which you will probably not notice even if you are looking for it.
This was where we were worshipping when I started my ministry here. It truly was a miracle that anyone found us because you really couldn’t explain how to get there. Life-long residents wouldn’t know.
Dislike of dogma (doctrine) “is an epidemic which is just now doing great harm, and specificially among young people… . It produces what I must venture to call … a ‘jelly-fish’ Christianity in the land: that is, a Christianity without boned, or muscle, or power. A jelly-fish … is a pretty and graceful object when it floats in the sea, contracting and expanding like a little, delicate, transparent umbrella. Yet the same jelly-fish, when cast on the shore, is a mere helpless lump, without capacity for movement, self-defense, or self-preservation. Alas! It is a vivid type of much of the religion of this day, of which the leading principle is, ‘No dogma, no distinct tenets, no positive doctrine.’ We have hundreds of ‘jelly-fish’ clergymen, who seem not to have a single bone in their body of divinity. They have no definite opinions; they belong to no school or party; they are so afraid of ‘extreme views’ that they have no views at all. We have thousands of ‘jelly-fish’ sermons preached every year, sermons without an edge or a point, or a corner, smooth as billiard balls, awakening no sinner, and edifying no saint. We have Legions of ‘jelly-fish’ young men annually turned out from our Universities, armed with a few scraps of second-hand philosophy, who think it a mark of cleverness and intellect to have no decided opinions about anything in religion, and to be utterly unable to make up their minds as to what is Christian truth. …. And last, and worst of all, we have myriads of ‘jelly-fish’ worshipers- respectable Church-going people, who have no distinct and definite views about any point in theology. They cannot discern things that differ, any more than color-blind people can distinguish colors. They think everybody is right and nobody is wrong, everything is true and nothing is false, …. . They are ‘tossed to and fro, like children, by every wind of doctrine’; often carried away by any new excitement and sensational movement;….” J.C. Ryle quoted by J.I. Packer in 
“Prayer is designed by God to display his fullness and our need. Prayer glorified God because it puts us in the position of the thirsty and God in the position of the all-supplying fountain.”
My timing may have been off. At the beginning of Spring Training I thought that Papelbon may move back to the closer role after Jon Lester is ready to come back up. (insert my daughter exlaiming “Red Sox” here- much to my delight)
Yesterday my brother-in-law and I were in Barnes & Noble’s when I came across a Household Saints kit. I almost bought it for future object lessons. In the kit you get:
I haven’t read much in that field recently, though 
At first glance, The Astronaut Farmer looks like it may be a family movie. Not so much. There was just enough crudity/sexuality that I felt uncomfortable with the kids in the theatre.
I was listening to 
Sadly, this is not a movie but a man’s life. Singer of the legendary rock band Boston took his own life last week. The details have slowly been becoming public. My focus here is not on the how’s but the why’s of his suicide. And that why is a number of 
