Gospel.com Blog

Have you walked through the aisles of video games at Best Buy or Gamestop lately? If you have, you’ve seen the bewildering array of game titles lined up on the shelves, their flashy box art promising hours of immersive entertainment.

So how do you, as a parent or discerning gamer, tell the good games from the bad?

There’s no shortage of video game review sites out there eager to share their opinions on the latest titles. But beyond the question of gameplay quality, which games will engage you with wholesome content—and which will fill your TV screen or monitor with virtual ultraviolence and other gratuitous elements? It’s not always clear from the game’s description and rating whether or not it’s appropriate for your family.

If you’re familiar with Al Menconi Ministries, you know that for years, his team of game reviewers have been offering a Christian perspective on the latest video games. Now, it looks like his reviewers have launched their own ministry: Reviews4Parents. They’re a game review ministry that doesn’t hide their Christian approach, and doesn’t apologize for weighing a game’s moral and spiritual elements in their analyses.

They’ve already got a large library of reviews online, including recent hits like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Prototype.

So don’t be left in the dark about video games—see what Reviews4Parents has to say. And if you’ve got any other tips or ideas for weeding out the good from the bad when it comes to video games, feel free to share in the comments below.

You might have noticed a new type of ad appearing on certain Gospel.com pages: Google sponsored links. Sponsored links–which you can see on many sites around the web, including Google.com itself–automatically generate relevant ads based on the content you’re viewing.

Here’s what they look like on Gospel.com:

We hope that you’ll find the new ads useful and unobtrusive. The goal of these new ads is to financially support the site without interfering with your use of it. If you have comments, concerns, or ideas about how we can do this better, don’t hesitate to contact us. The ads are generated by Google and not by Gospel.com; if you spot an ad that you think is inappropriate, please let us know and we’ll take action to remove it.

Thanks for your ongoing support! We have some exciting improvements in store for Gospel.com, and we hope you continue to find the site helpful and encouraging!

The start of the school year is a time filled with excitement, preparation and probably more than a little dread. Many of you know of someone who is starting college for the first time. They are headed into an extremely invigorating time filled with exciting experiences.

While college is generally a fun time, it can also be a tenuous time for people’s faiths. It’s often the first time one needs to take charge of their faith. No one forces you to read your Bible, or pray or go to Church. Those things become your choices.

That’s why ministries like InterVarsity are so necessary. They provide ways for students to immediately start taking responsibility for their faith and ways to connect to other students who are doing the same.

Recently, they published an article titled A New Year on Campus that details their expectations this coming year. I really enjoy hearing Alec Hill’s take on InterVarsity’s passion:

Simply put, we love students, faculty and the campus. For nearly 70 years, InterVarsity has been sending missionaries to universities, colleges, community colleges and institutes. We seek to discern what the Lord is already doing on a particular campus and then align our activities with His. We believe that the best way to reach a university community – after prayer and “scouting out the land” – is identify as many “missional” Christians as possible and then equip them to impact others for the Kingdom.

Do you have any stories about how ministries like InterVarsity impacted your time at college? Any college students headed off looking to get involved in InterVarsity?

BibleGateway.com just announced a new feature: the Embed Passage tool. We posted this on the BibleGateway.com blog, but because so many of you who read this blog also use BibleGateway.com, we thought it would be helpful to post it here as well.

Ever wanted to quickly and easily paste a Bible passage from BibleGateway.com into your blog or website? We’ve just added a tool that makes it easy to post Scripture passages from certain translations on your blog: the Embed Passage tool.

The Embed Passage tool automatically creates a cleanly-formatted version of the Bible passage you’re reading, which you can then paste into a blog or website. It also generates a URL that links straight to the passage.

To use it, just click on the Embed Passage button in the row of icons above the Bible passage you’re reading. You’ll see a window like this:

Here’s how it works:

• The Passage field shows you which Bible passage is currently being used. If you want to change the range of quoted verses, you can do so by editing the book name or numbers and clicking Update.
• To copy a permanent link to the Bible passage, click once in the Link field to select it, and copy it by right-clicking and selecting Copy. Alternately, press Control-C (Command-C on Macs).
• To copy the entire Bible passage, click once in the Embed field to select it, and copy it (see the instructions in the above step).
• You can then paste the link or the passage text directly into a blog or HTML editor. To paste it, right-click and select Paste, or press Control-V in Windows (Command-V on Macs).

By default, the Embed tool leaves verse numbers in the passage, but does not display footnotes, headings, or cross-references. You can toggle any of those options by clicking Show embed options at the bottom of the window and checking or unchecking the appropriate boxes:

We hope this tool makes it easier for you to link to or quote Scripture on your website or blog. Give it a try and let us know what you think, and how we can improve it. You can also post your thoughts and suggestions on the Bible Gateway fan page on Facebook.

Currently, the Embed Passage tool only works with our public domain Bibles, like the King James Version, and a few others, like the New King James Version, the New Century Version, and The Message. In the future, we hope to expand it to cover all of our Bibles. Here’s a list of Bibles currently supported:

• American Standard Version
• King James Version
• Young’s Literal Translation
• Darby Translation
• 21st Century King James Version
• New King James Version
• The Message
• Douay Rheims 1899 American Edition
• Worldwide English New Testament
• New Century Version

Fallen and Flawed recently asked twelve bloggers to summarize the Gospel in 10 words or less. While the exercise is intentionally provocative, summarizing your faith in 10 paltry words does force you to examine the fundamentals of your beliefs.

Here are three of my favorites from the resulting list:

• “Whole world sorted, put right, made friends again through Christ.” Andrew Jones [Tall Skinny Kiwi]
• “Christ died for our sins, was raised and is Lord.” Trevin Wax [Kingdom People] quoting Martin Luther.
• “Be sick. Be loved.” Jon Acuff [Stuff Christians Like]

And here’s my humble addition:

“Grace and peace proffered in the loving name of Jesus.”

What about you? How would you summarize the Gospel in 10 words or less?

The Washington Post recently reported on six Franciscan friars who decided to take a 300-mile walk:

The pilgrimage was the idea of four young friars just finishing their training in Chicago and working toward taking lifelong vows. Seeking to emulate the wanderings of their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, they wanted to journey together as a fraternity, ministering to one another and to strangers, while depending on God for every meal and place to sleep. [...]

They tried to live by the ascetic rules Jesus laid out for his 12 disciples: “Take nothing for the journey — no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.” The less they brought, they reasoned, the more room they could leave for God. [...]

Some rules, however, had to be made on the fly. They had agreed not to carry any money, but just minutes into their first day, strangers were pressing dollar bills into their hands. So they made a pact to spend what they received each day on food, often high-protein Clif bars, and to give the rest to the needy.

The WaPo has a slideshow of pictures of the friars’ journey. You can also track the frairs’ trip through the Friarwalk blog. And there’s more commentary on the story at GetReligion.

According to these reports, the friars were often stopped by people who wanted to share problems and concerns. Simply by being visible and open to these conversations, the friars became a kind of walking confessional. Food, money and shelter were given freely to them; despite their meager supplies, none of them went hungry or was hurt in the course of the journey.

Any kind of spiritual discipline is like that: it’s usually something incredibly simple, like not eating for a time, or praying for an hour, or walking from point A to point B… but while they’re simple acts in themselves, God can build them into something extraordinary. Fasting brings us to question our relationship to food and to God. Time spent in prayer brings us to radically reassess our life priorities. Not every skipped meal or hour of silence will pulsate with spiritual insight, but it’s these simple acts of devotion from which God produces fruit in our lives.

Would you ever take a trip like the friars’ journey? Have you seen God do something extraordinary that began as a simple act of spiritual discipline?

William Vanderbloemen recently posted on his blog about the issue of pastoral care and social networking:

While in the middle of working, I saw my parishioner was online, on Facebook, while sitting in ICU. We had a brief visit via chat, and a nice interaction.

I left the chat wondering: does this count as pastoral care?

On the one hand, nothing replaces face-to-face interaction…On the other hand, I’m currently six states away, they are in ICU round the clock, where cell phones are prohibited, and Facebook gave me a great way to supplement my care for them given our realities.

He goes on to ask: is using social media in pastoral care acceptable? Is it even valid to call it pastoral care?

I think few would argue that tweets or wall posts should fully replace face-to-face interaction. But few would argue for an outright ban on pastoral social networking. As one of the commenters on William’s post points out, “Can you do pastoral care by telephone? By letter? By email?” The issue is more the intent of the users than the medium they employ.

In some ways, connecting to parishioners through social networking is the next logical step for our increasingly digital lives. It’s not uncommon for a pastor to live in an entirely different neighborhood or community than the people in their church. So, if there’s little opportunity for face-to-face interaction throughout the week, it’s only natural for pastors to find ways to immerse themselves in the virtual communities that their congregation is spending so much time in.

What about you? Do you think that true pastoral care can happen digitally? Should we call it something different entirely?

Whether it’s a time of trouble or a time of celebration, there’s no substitute for friends that know you.

A recent article at InterVarsity Press tells the story of four men who met and supported each other in college—and beyond. Before they moved away from each other at the end of their time at Duke, they made a covenant with each other to remain accountability partners and friends for the rest of their lives:

“In college, Christian fellowship is handed to you on a silver platter; plenty of fun activities, Bible study and prayer, and really cool Christians are just down the hall or a short walk across campus,” reflects Peter Ahlin. “For me, the hardest part of leaving Duke was being geographically separated from my closest Christian friends and having to try to find fellowship that was even remotely as exciting and fulfilling as that which I enjoyed in college.”

Knowing they were facing a huge transition in life that would take them away from their college support network, these four guys were encouraged by their pastor to make a serious commitment to stick together—not just as friends, but as accountability brothers. Under the framework of a covenant, Jeff Donnithorne comments, “we felt like we needed to be in each others’ lives in an intentional way. Good intentions are not always enough and accountability really does require an extra level of commitment.” So these four guys created a written document on the day before graduation that “added a level of importance and seriousness when we put our names on it.”

Read more about their inspiring friendship.

The influential preacher William Carey was certainly a unique individual. In his own terms he was “merely a cobbler,” but he was also a pastor and one of the great missionaries of the Christian faith.

Carey combined a fierce desire to preach to the unreached with a servant’s heart. During his ministry to India, he opened a college and planted a botanical garden, as well as worked on translating the Bible into several languages.

The Christian History Institute recently published his article An Inquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen.

Here’s an excerpt:

As our blessed Lord has required us to pray that His kingdom may come, and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it becomes us not only to express our desires of that event by the word, but to use every lawful method to spread the knowledge of His name. In order to do this, it is necessary that we should become in some measure acquainted with the religious state of the world. As this is an object we should be prompted to pursue, not only by the gospel of our Redeemer but even by the feelings of humanity, so an inclination to conscientious activity therein would form one of the strongest proofs that we are the subject of grace and partakers of that spirit of universal benevolence and genuine philantropy, which appear so eminent in the character of God Himself.

You can read the whole article and learn a bit about Carey here.

It’s been several weeks since the death of uber-entertainer Michael Jackson, and as time has passed, so has the media frenzy that surrounded the event. Few bloggers and pundits have not had something to say on the topic, but I think there’s room for some reflection on Jackson’s life and death from a Christian perspective.

To that end, there’s a good post at the Digital Evangelism Issues blog about the Jackson media frenzy, with some solid links (one dispelling a Christian myth that’s already sprung up around the story of Jackson’s death—that didn’t take long!). James Watkins has also blogged a bit about Jackson’s passing. Good starts to what I hope is a broader conversation in the Christian community about fame, celebrity, and the way we relate to cultural icons like Jackson.