Gospel.com Blog

Steve from Sports Spectrum points out a recent NFL ruling on churches showing the Super Bowl. You can read ESPN’s article here.

From Steve:

Due to pressure from politicians echoing their constituents’ outcry, the NFL has relented on their banning of big screen Super Bowl showings at church and ministry outreach parties. Families and those uncomfortable with sports bars/restaurants–as well as churches and outreach ministries–were left to abandon their plans to gather groups for viewing the big game. This was even after they had purchased a big-group-oriented presentation, such as SportsSpectrums.com’s Power To Win.

For SportsSpectrum.com the NFL’s relaxation of this rule is incredible news. One of our major promotions is a half-time outreach presentation called Power To Win. In Power To Win, a prominent NFL player gives testimony and encourages viewers to consider a decision for Christ. The presentation also includes performances from various Christian artists.

This year, Power To Win had to be formatted into a “Halftime HomePak” due to pressure to comply with screen size and viewer limitations (all of which no bar has ever had to comply with). So, the testimony of LaDainian Tomlinson (and, in the past, Tony Dungy) were constrained to small groups huddled around small TV sets.

This ruling means next year looks much brighter for Power To Win and Super Bowl XLIII in 2009!

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

As empty a snack as it might be, the latest Dennis Quaid vehicle, Vantage Point, showcases the actor at his best. Here a plays a Secret Service agent who stumbles onto a conspiracy during an attempt on the President’s life. The films “final sequence is awfully satisfying,” says Greg Wright, “even if there isn’t any quotable dialogue in the film and Vantage Point ends up being about nothing at all. It’s like getting to the bottom of your popcorn bag and realizing you’ve just had nothing but popcorn.” And sometimes, he concedes, that’s just fine.

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There are two new audio sermons online at the Soulation audio library:

• God Is Your Hero by Dale Fincher, which takes a fresh look at the David vs. Goliath story and CS Lewis’ Narnia tales, and talks about what it means to have God as your hero.
• How the World Is In Us by Dale and his wife Jonalyn, which explains why human beings are “spiritual amphibians”—we live in two different worlds, the physical world and the spiritual world. Sound strange? Listen as Dale and Jonalyn talk about the need to understand both aspects of our existence.

If you haven’t listened to one of Dale or Jonalyn’s messages, it’s well worth giving one a try—they have a unique and humorous way of taking seemingly abstract concepts and showing what they mean for your everyday life.

The latest Online Pulpit essay is up, and asks an unusual question: if you’re in a leadership position in your church, do you have a mentor?

Most of us might assume that our pastors and leaders “have it together” and don’t need spiritual guidance—but the pressures of leadership mean that your pastor might need a trustworthy mentor or accountability partner even more than the rest of us do:

As pastors and Christ followers…. we know we never outgrow the need for mentors. In every stage of life mentors are vital. Children, young adults, parents, married couples—individuals in literally every stage of life benefit from having a guide along the way. As I have been focusing on this important aspect of ministry the last few months, I have been asking myself the question, How are we ministers and the church doing?

If you’re a pastor who doesn’t have a trustworthy mentor to turn to, read this latest essay by Joan E. Tyvoll and consider the ways such a person might strengthen your ministry.

Yesterday we talked about several good youth ministry leadership resources. Here are three more good essays to add to that list, courtesy of Youth Specialties:

• Are you a “side-door leader”? You don’t need to be a member of the church staff to be an effective leader in your congregation. Kent Clayton talks about the importance of “unofficial” leadership:

  Side-door leaders are people who have influence in ministry settings without (necessarily) having an official role as leader; real leaders are those who wield power, regardless of position. Leadership is changing—in the postmodern milieu, people value following those worth being followed over pursuing those with the right titles. Structures and systems no longer hold the validity they once did. Sometimes, the real authority lies with the parents, the long-term youth volunteers, and even the students who shape the culture of a ministry’s leadership. Paid staff and youth coordinators aren’t necessarily part of that mix. In the real world, leaders are recognized, not appointed. Side-door leaders know how to weave influence without storming the main gates of a board, committee, session, or staff hierarchy.

• Youth leaders, have you given up on the prospect of getting your middle-school students to be spiritual leaders for their peers? Cliff Olson writes about the difficult but not impossible tasks of cultivating middle-school leaders.
• Does your ministry have a single leader directing all of its operations? The last several decades have shown that by organizing your youth or church ministry into gift-based leadership teams, rather than following the traditional hierarchical model of leadership, you can expand your reach.

Take a read through and see if any of these ideas are applicable to your ministry!

Part of the job of a Youth leader is to train up the church leaders of tomorrow. It’s exciting. It’s necessary. It’s daunting.

For those that have stood in front of a crowd of teenagers, you know what it’s like looking at a sea of bored faces, lots of shoe-staring and whispered side conversations, it can be difficult. But being a part of the change that takes a high schooler from a passive recipient of information to a particpating member of the body of Christ is stunning.

Here are a few articles on leadership development written for youth workers:

First is this article on developing an environment for leadership development from Youth Ministry Exchange.

How to identify leaders in your midst

And from Legacy Youth Ministry Resources comes a lengthy discussion on Training Student Leadership: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapters Three and Four, and if you’re interested there are more chapters.

This week, we’re focusing on the topic of leadership. You can find a lot of leadership resources on our Leadership topic page; but we’ll also be highlighting a few good resources in more detail here on the blog.

So where to begin? “Leadership” is a pretty broad topic—in a Christian context, it can cover a wide variety of roles. There’s “official” church leadership—pastors, worship leaders, and other church staff. You can also lead a small group or a Bible study. And you can be a Christian leader outside the church grounds: you might have a leadership role in your community or your business, or you might just be someone that other people look to for advice and direction.

To kick things off this week, one ministry with a special focus on leadership is Officers’ Christian Fellowship. Many of OCF’s resources use a bit of military-specific language (it is a military ministry, after all), but I think you’ll agree that their leadership guidance is applicable to just about anyone. Here’s a quick tour of some of their free resources for leaders:

• Leading Effective Small Groups is one of the best primers I’ve seen on managing a successful Bible study group. It includes a great list of 20 ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s for a Bible study, and even a section on a touchy subject: how to deal with disruptive people in your Bible study. (It’s also available as a PDF download.)
• The 100 Days Bible Study is a great resource for Bible study leaders. It’s a 70-page document with short Bible study topics and discussion points covering dozens of topics. It’d be very useful for an impromptu Bible study, or for use when your small group needs something to talk about.
• Follow Me is a short essay that looks at the type of leadership that Jesus demonstrated, and offers ideas for emulating him.
• Eleven Bible studies about leadership, thoroughly addressing each of the traits that makes for a good Christian leader, from your attitude to your role to your vision for your group. There’s also an essay about Leading a Bible study which is essentially a shorter version of the longer essay we mentioned above.
• And if that’s not enough, OCF has many more articles on the topic of leadership.

If you’re a leader in your church community—officially or otherwise—take a look at these materials!

Why is singing such an important part of the Christian tradition? That might sounds like an odd question, but how many other religious or social groups get together regularly… to sing? The latest edition of Uplook Magazine is out (and freely downloadable as a PDF), and its focus is on the songs we sing, and the reasons we sing them. Among the articles are in-depth essays looking at some of the most famous songs in Psalms, “the hymnbook of God’s people.” This issue would be especially useful if you or your small group is working through the Psalms in a Bible study.

Download the January/February issue of Uplook Magazine here. Previous issues are also available for download in the Uplook archives.

Ben Stein’s new project Expelled is a critical look not at the shortcomings of Darwinian theory per se, but at the ways in which the Darwinian scientific establishment is apparently seeking to suppress open dialogue about competing theories. The justification for this suppression is that competing theories are not really “scientific,” so free speech is not the issue, “academic respectability” is.

But as Mr. Stein stated, “I think we’re missing something extremely basic in our understanding of the world, and how it got created and I’d like us to return to that. And, I think, by returning to those bigger subjects of how the world got created and what our place in the world is, we will find a new moral fence which is very much lacking.”

Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright reports on a recent conference call with Stein.

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

It sure seems this time of year that films pushing past 90 minutes are rare. Cloverfield has been the shortest of the bunch, but this week’s releases won’t bring David Lean to mind any time soon.

Perhaps the best of the bunch, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a rush-rush headspin of a family fantasy. “I’m having significant trouble coming up with a good precedent for what director Mark Waters delivers here,” says Greg Wright. “I honestly can’t think of another film that has captured both the ‘danger’ of goblins (and Faerie in general) and their whimsicality.” But it all goes by too fast, he asserts — and he’s none too happy about the father subplot, either.

Another of this week’s big releases, Jumper, is just as thin, being awfully short on sense as well as minutes. But it’s a good look at the ways in which “’special’ people will always be (justifiably) targeted by the morally indignant,” advises Greg Wright. Still, he concludes, audiences “far too accustomed to superficial and multiple false endings will find that the film’s climax just offers too little payoff. It all ends up feeling like a cheap paste-on toupee looking for a hat.”

Mike Smith had better luck with Definitely, Maybe, a romance of sorts in which a young girl challenges her father to find where his marriage went wrong. It’s a film, he says, that “takes the age-old question ‘Why do marriages fail?’ and tosses it into the larger question: ‘Why does any relationship fail?’ Director Adam Brooks comes up with a pretty direct answer.” And it’s one that Smith likes: personal responsibility.

Jeff Walls was not so impressed with the formulaic Step Up 2 the Streets, though he “can appreciate all the physicality and athleticism that goes into these vigorous dance moves.” He’d rather rewatch something with Fred Astaire than wait around for the sporadic comedy and dance wedged in with the cliches. But if you like the dance formula, this one does it pretty well.

If you like really short films, Kathy Bledose says adults are a good fit for the collections of Oscar-nominated shorts going into limited release this weekend. And on other fronts, Jennie Sphor doesn’t find much to celebrate in the French sex-drama The Witnesses, while Greg Wright finds George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead about as good as your going to get out of zombie film.