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Here is another design resource for people who want to add a better context to their content. Just in time for the holidays too.

Tioti: Tape It Off The Internet

This new site is and aggregate for TV shows that you can download. I don’t know about anyone else, but I get the cheapest deal I can on cable (we actually have Dish) but it is still more than I think it is worth, especially when I just don’t watch that much TV. With this site and many others like it, you could conceivably get rid of cable forever.

My plan looks something like this. TV+Mac Mini=Just what I want. I can even download and burn shows to DVD and have them archived. If you are familiar with public domain copywrite law then, even better, just torrent them.

Passage Magazine

I just came across this new site/magazine for Christian men that seems kind of cool. They at least have some very stereotypical “man” stuff - i.e. video games, sports, technology, etc.

I wonder how long they can keep the man content going?

ht: ypulse

I was wondering when this idea would happen. Someone has spoofed the Mac commercials from a Christian perspective. Awesome.

See it here.

I haven’t talked about discipleship in a while. Some of you may have wondered what happened to all my drive for working out my ideas on discipleship. Well here is a fresh dose!

I think the sole area that the church needs to focus is on discipleship. Many of our churches do many things well. We pray, worship, preach, teach, equip and enable people with a zeal and efficiency that is laudable. Yet there is a discrepancy that I see in too many churches in the number of decisions they claim and the number of transformations we see. It is the difference between justification and sanctification as the goal of our decisions/commitments to Christ. I agree with Fitch, in that, individual decisions without a narrative or life of transformation are just senseless.

“An action, or for that matter a decision, is simply unintelligible separated from the rest of one’s life story/narrative and one’s cultural context because it is not capable of being made sense of. Apart from a context, a decision will appear to be an arbitrary act made on the spur of the moment for short-term immediate gain with little long-term consequences.” (The Great Giveaway, P. 35)

In other words, what good is a decision apart from a submission to God in the life that follows?

What good is a church that produces these decisions without the following transformation?

Is there any more evidence we need why people are falling away from the faith and leaving churches in droves? Without discipleship, there is no culture to transform lives. There is no expectation and no means to meet any expectation in the lives of people making decisions. This makes the church like illegitimate fathers - creating new lives for the sheer sake of creation without thought of sustaining those new creations. I feel like one of those children. I have lived as a Christian for many years and worked in many churches and never been discipled despite attempts to find someone who could or would.
Discipleship has to be re-thought and made to be a means of creating a culture of transformation in the lives of the people who come to know Christ.