Month: November 2006

This group is based here in Waxahachie…
From The Baptist Press:

Pastors and western-heritage church leaders who believe God must be a cowboy at heart voted to ramp up the growth of the cowboy church movement at the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches 2006 Annual Cowboy Gathering, prior to the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting.
Fellowship members voted to increase their current budget of $120,000 to $290,500, hire two staff members, double church planting school funds from $4,800 to $10,000, double ranch house school funding to $8,000 and quadruple event funding.
The BGCT 2007 budget, approved by messengers to the annual meeting, increased funding for the fellowship fourfold—earmarking $25,500 for western-heritage churches.

The Baptist Standard writes about a new film that suggests that traditionally right-wing Republican evangelicals could have a big part in key enviromental reform:

A Canadian film team has released in United States theatres The Great Warming, a movie about climate change and the initiatives aimed at reversing its trend toward permanent ecologic damage.
Unlike other recent environmental movies, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, The Great Warming portrays evangelicals as a group with the potential to push governmental policies toward sustainable living.
It also has hearty endorsements from the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life, all of which have urged churches to host screenings and discussion groups about the movie…
Historically, evangelicals haven’t cared much for talk about climate change. Cizik said that’s because “environmentalism has a sort of a ‘left-wing tilt.’” Plus, many pastors never have preached about caring for creation. Once church members begin hearing sermons about the environment, he said, they’ll realize it’s an important issue.
The response will become significant when evangelicals change not only their lifestyles but their votes. Evangelicals comprise between 40 percent and 50 percent of the Republican base. Cizik said he believes if the largest group in the Republican coalition would demand its leaders work on climate change, clean air and pure water, then GOP leaders would listen.

I wrote about this somewhat a while back after reading Rob Bell’s book Velvet Elvis.When we think about creation, remember that God calls it “good.”
The word is used throughout the Creation narrative to say that God perceives his creation as “good.”

“The God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it was so. The next verse is significant: The land produced vegetation. Notice it doesn’t say, ‘God produced vegetation.'”

God empowered creation to do something.
We are empowered with loads of potential. All of creation is.
And this is for all you “tree-huggin-haters” 🙂 (who I admit, I used to be one of you):

“God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation, commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it… They are in intimate relationship with their enviroment. They are enviromentalists. Being deeply connected with their enviroment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence.
That is why litter and polution are spiritual issues.
And until that last sentence makes perfect sense, we haven’t fully grasped what it means to be human and live in God’s world.” DOH!

This one may be best for my dad. He typically has several hundred emails in his inbox at any given time.
Grant Robinson has several ideas for keeping that e-mail inbox clear of messages to save you time thoughout the day.
I did a little house keeping myself and managed to get my inbox down to two messages that I’ve left in there simply as a reminder to respond to. I’ve set up other folders in Outlook along with rules to automatically sort my e-mail as it comes in.
I have one for Laurie, Family (immediate, extended and future), daily newsletters/emails and several others. It’s kept my inbox clutter free all day. Now I don’t sit sorting through as much e-mail. I only look at and respond to e-mails in particular categories, rather than sorting through a lot of other stuff that’s not important.

From Treehugger and T3 gadget mag:

Japanese celphone juggernaut Docomo is prototyping this “hybrid mobile phone with solar panels.” It looks small enough for Derek Zoolander, and as British gadget mag T3 says, “Powered solely by the beating rays of our closest star, it means you’ll never run out of natter-juice, and puts an end to travel chargers and emergency batteries.”

payin’ da bills:

From Treehugger:

Graeme North, the pre-eminent practitioner of eco-architecture in New Zealand, been building with rammed earth, mud brick, cob and hay bales for over 30 years in New Zealand.

And the pictures of the homes look pretty cool.
Although the idea of mud homes reminds me of Thursdays episode of My Name Is Earl where the guys go and live in an environmentalist commune for a week, where the homes were made out of cow dung and stray.
Not too appealing. Especially when they said they had to rebuild the walls every time it rained. Ha.