It rained hard enough last night to wake me up wondering about the source of that noise. By this morning we'd had 3/4" and several areas in the goat pen were pretty muddy.
Goats don't like the rain so they'll hang out in the barn all day. It will be a mess soon.
I got Sally back yesterday. The good news: she runs great and the oil pressure and engine temp are much better than they were with the old engine. The tranny shifts well and when it's supposed to.
The bad news: I had to pay the bill. Gulp.
We got almost 1.25" of rain today.
Oregon
I'm reading a really good book my older brother recommended. He hadn't finished it yet but based on what he had read he thought it had something to contribute to the ministry of the local church.
I think it has a TON to contribute and I'm about 60% through it. Brett has decided that based on my comments about it he'll read it, too. I think other staff will follow suit.
Move, by Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson.
In the first part of the book they put church attenders in in one of four progressive categories. Recognizing that it's a continuum (!) it's helpful to identify the four stages of spiritual growth that people go through. They identify these stages by the key characteristics that mark each and support their delineation with objective data collected from a complex survey of 1,000 evangelical churches across the country. That is, They're not pulling this out of their ptuckuses (ptcucki?); they know whereof they speak because they did their homework before coming to their conclusions.
And some of those conclusions are disturbing vis a' vis what most churches think is going on in their congregation.
The second half of the book is why it's titled Move; they use results from that survey to identify the factors that move people from one category to the next. And those factors are different depending on which movement it is (from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, or 3 to 4).
One of the reasons I'm so enthused about the book is that the move from 3 to 4 is what I'm tasked with working on at UFC. So it's very timely and I'm finding it very helpful.
But I sure wish I'd read this 45 years ago.
OK, that would have been a problem because it was first published in 2011, but I should have read it then. My ministry would have had greater clarity and intentionality.
Sometimes I really want a do-over.
1 comment:
Pastor Josh read that book and did a sermon series a little over a year ago. At a personal level, it has helped me visualize where in my life I am a 2 or a 3 (he used four chairs as visuals). Its also been a help to us as a board as we talk about where we are at as a corporate body.
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