OK....I found the thing about "Refresh Templates".....(here), so let's see if I can publish this post now

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  the new Wordpress RSS link
  


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I have begun posting exclusively to my wordpress blog at wp.theoblogical.org. I will eventually point my default theoblogical.org to the home page of wp.theoblogical.org. As a kind of place holder, here is a javascript renditio of the feedroll listing for what I am posting right now.

• the new Wordpress RSS link

The Wordpress version is at this link

RSS is : feed:http://wp.theoblogical.org/?feed=rss2 (I still don't get how Wordpress 's feed: attached to the URL is any kind of standard. It doesn't work when I plug this URL into any Reader I've tried. I have to lop off the feed: prefix) anyway , here's the RSS url WITH ther feed: attached

If you wanna comment on something here, try over on the wordpress version. I'll trackback to this link from there so if you want to comment on this post, the link to the WP version will be here

Anybody else with MT 3.2 blogs having problems, or commenting on a 3.2 system?

This is causing me to renew my thoughts about moving it all to Wordpress. MT also needs to provide a set of instructions on how to do the "dynamic template" thing , which uses some PHP files to pull archive files. My MT installation has been taking an inordinate amount of time to save a new post (since it is writing and re-writing all the sidebars, etc.)

Anyway, any hints or suggestions about this woulld be greatly appreciated. If any of you who have commented before might try it to see if you have problems, that would help too. I'm still trying to pinpoint the source of this problem.

I have often commented to people how today's "Emergent Church" movement reminds me of the "Lay Renewal Movement" of the 70's. I read "The Edge of Adventure" by Bruce Larson and Keith Miller, and from there I went on to read anything I could get my hands on by either of these guys, and along the way picked up Robert Raines, Elton Trueblood, Lloyd Ogilvie, and I took a course at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from Findley Edge (an early Lay Renewal writer/advocate, as was Elton Trueblood) on "Church Renewal" in 1979. MIller , Larson, Raines, and company really opened up theological vistas for me. I went on from there , along with the exposure I got to Clarence Jordan by my youth minister (he took a group of us to Koinonia Farm in 1974) to delve into the writings of Elizabeth O'Connor, who wrote about The Church of the Saviour. MIller and Larson and Raines took stories from the Church of the Saviour fairly often to point out how important it is for the laity to be in ministry, and not simply depend upon "preachers" to "do stuff". Seems like such a simple concept, but so often "the ministry" is asumed to be referring to the ranks of "profesional clergy".

From Andrew:

Kimball on "Emerging" and "Emergent"

Dan Kimball is blogging out a brief history "> of how "Emerging Church" and "Emergent" came into USA's ecclesiastical vocabulary.

Emergent Church Cover
1970 (I bought a hard copy) and in 1984

from Dan:
Vintage Faith: Origin of the terms "Emerging" and "Emergent" church - Part 1

Now, the irony is that about 2 years ago someone bought me a copy of a book called "The Emerging Church" that was published in 1970 written by Bruce Larson and Ralph Osbourn. It actually is a great book and I have been in contact with one of the authors who now is in his 80's. So in 1970 the church was "emerging" and someone even wrote a book about what was emerging then. They actually have a great quote in this book which says:

Will we face the reality of . . .

* 30-some thousand children dying each day from preventable causes
* two-thirds of the world earning less than $3 a day
* my own nation using violence to install ‘democracy and freedom’ in other countries, all the while growing the largest deficit we have ever had
* the 45 poorest countries in the world having a combined GNP equal to the 3 wealthiest individuals in the world
* and so much more…

Will I dig down into the well of pain that these realities bring me? Will I face my own complicity in the mess that we’ve made of God’s garden? Will I begin to see the suffering as part of the divine Abyss where God dwells?

All I know is that I’ll never see it on my own. And neither will you. We need others who take seriously the dangerous adventure of following Jesus into the depths, who will encourage us to lay down the ways we’ve fooled ourselves, numbed ourselves, confused ourselves into thinking we have to mimic a “reasonably successful life” until we’re better prepared to start following Jesus seriously.

Maybe together we can begin to lighten our load enough so that we can take off together on hiking expeditions down, down, down as deep as we have the courage to go, toward our real life together. As Kelly calls it, “a life of amazing power and peace and serenity, of integration and confidence and simplified multiplicity”—all our many selves dwelling together in peace.

And maybe we’ll start living that life now.

Gordon was telling a vistor from Kansas about the roots of the Potter's House, and how it was designed to take the conversations and the lives of the people of the Church to the people in the neighborhood and the city.

Yes, the Internet is full of what's wrong in the world, because it is a part of it. Becuase it is a channel to carry communications, it is used to push products, serve the commercial interests, and manufacture false needs.

It is also a way to create a place to tell stories, and by virtue of it being online, searchable and indexable and "taggable". It becomes a way to link together related stories, related resources, and compare notes on what we have received from those resorces.

Just as Elizabeth O'Connor's books were a way of telling the story of the Church of the Saviour, it was also a part of that story that God used a bunch of ordinary people in the nations' capital, but this is meant to say that God is at work and calling for participation all across the world. People who "came to see" or came in search of signs that such things were possible sometimes come to stay, but more often they are seeking new and faithful forms for God's People to take to where they live. This would be my hope for a Web-based narrative and resource aggregation in the tradition of the Servant Leadership School; a Seminary for the Church.

This one on this post last week was encouraging. They had problems with TypeKey, so they emailed me. This one had made some comments and also this one . They

I found these Thursday night, and emailed the people involved, thanking them for their encouragement. I also had a guy comment on spell checking, and so I emailed him and we had a discussion about that. I told him that this may well be a major reason to move to Wordpress, since it has a built in spell check, and MOvable type requires a plugin, which I tried and could not get to work (required too much dependence on the host to install or tweak several things)

Anyway, this discovery of unseen comments came at a time when I had begun to also feel a bit better about my "engagement" with work and friends and life in general. I had been feeling pretty low over the past month or two, and everything seems to have picked up, and seeing that there WERE at least a few reactions in the blogosphere was additionally encouraging. Feeling better and more involved and feeling that people value my input contributes to my sense of having something worthwhile to say, which gives me the energy and the confidence to keep plugging away at making my blog more of an accurate reflection of what I am feeling, doing, and thinking, and what interest and inspire my friends in the blogosphere.

Smart Mobs: How Kerry campaign ditched Dean campaign p2p tactics

How Kerry campaign ditched Dean campaign p2p tactics:

Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign.

While this is also a key issue with maximizing democracy (the "participation" thing), it is very much at the heart of what I feel strongly about how peer-to-peer is an important theological piece of the ecclesial pie (not neccessarily the technology-enhanced variety of p2p, but the concept of an interdependent, collaboaration with God andf one another as we seek together to resist the culture and be a particular people.

Of course, I have much to say on the topic of the technology-enhanced version, and how this EXTENDS the reach both in geography and time of the ftf (face-to-face) kind of p2p. The "connectability" of blogs is growing by leaps and bounds via things such as comments, RS, trackbacks, tagging, and the list goes on. Demonations and church bodies of all kinds and sizes has a huge task before them in "equipping" the saints in the skills of communicating and turning to one another for encouragement, sharing of stories, helping all of us to find one another so that the callings God is "transmitting" can be received in the context of those whose gifts and talents bring them together for a particular task, at a particular time.