Archive for October, 2008
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It’s Not My Fault: A Word on Blame Displacement
I’ve been devouring this new book I have by the late Edwin Friedman called “A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.” It’s been one of those books that came at the perfect time for me …
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ESPN Linkage: My 15 Minutes of Non-Fame
Most of you know a recent blog post of mine was one of the links in this article on ESPN.com (go to #6 and click the link there). Needless to say, it was pretty cool. There was a …
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Book Recommendation: Linking Arms, Linking Lives
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God Hates Philadelphia Sports Teams
Perhaps William Penn and God are in cahoots on this one…
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Super Christians? Nope, Just Normally Obedient.
We’ve spent the last couple days hanging out with Tim and Jenn Fidanzo who are from Portland, …
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Church History Class – 400 years in 4 hours.
My co-pastor, the one and only Gary Alloway, will be teaching a course on church history tomorrow morning at The Well. The class starts at 9am and goes till 1:00. In those four hours he’ll be …
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Reflecting on Adoption
[/caption]Doing some yard work
Tomorrow we are celebrating our son Mason’s 2nd birthday. (His birthday is on the 30th though). It’s hard to be believe that …
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How To Start a Blog…
So over the past few years I’ve had a number friends who have said they wanted to start a blog but they didn’t know how. There is always the “here is why I have a blog” approach and often people …
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Does God Close Doors? Or Are We Scared of Difficulty?
You may have heard the saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Well a simple search of the internet tubes you’ll find that there are many other versions of this.
For example, when the going gets tough…
the …
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My Article on Preaching and Politics on Neue Ministry.com
I was recently contact by the people at NeueMinistry.com to turn my recent blog post on preaching and politics into a featured article for them. …
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My Workspace
One of the nice things about my line of work (pastor / freelance webdesigner) is that I get to … -
The Most important Jobs in the world (repost)
I had some weird, strange happenings with WordPress this weekend. So, this post has moved to a new url… http://www.toddhiestand.com/the-most-important-jobs-you-never-think-about-or-appreciate/01/
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Wasteful Spending?
Dorie Morgan, who I am proud to call a member of our church community has written a wonderful little reflection on spending in suburbia and reminds me of how we need to continually think carefully about our way of …
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Learning to Read Like Daddy
Today is my day off so I’ve been doing my best to stay off the computer. While Mason has been …
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USPS Shipping Blunder
I’ve been waiting for a new book that a friend strongly recommended to me for the …
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Misusing the Word Missional?
Somehow I fear that the word missional is often misunderstood merely as “social justice.” That might be the fault of how we talk about that aspect of the concept. But, if we understand the church as “a sent …
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Resources on Suburbia
Today I spoke at Biblical Seminary for the installation of John R. Franke as the Lester and Kay Clemens Professor of Missional Theology. Gary and I will be discussing the challenges and opportunities the church faces in the Suburbs.
In …
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The Church as Sent: Five Important Thoughts from David Bosch
I’ve been reading David Bosch’s book “Transforming Mission” for almost four years now. If you are familiar with the book, you will know why its taken me so long to get through it. It is essentially a …
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The Connection Between Debt and Mission.
I’m becoming convinced that in suburban America one of the things that hinders our ability to respond to God’s call on our lives is money (and the mishandling of it). Too many followers of Jesus are so busy trying to …
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Light Bulbs and Really Big Rooms
Sometimes I feel like we start life sitting in a dark room that is full of unlit light bulbs, except for one. This lone bulb gives off just enough light to see your immediate surroundings. With this light we see …
