Category Archives: blogging

Happy Birthday Mast Tab

Posted on by

I know it’s been a few weeks since I posted anything. The Read the Bible series/podcast went on hiatus when I took a full time job at the end of last summer. I wasn’t really looking for a job; I had just updated my resume and was considering looking for another church, possibly a full time secular job so I didn’t have to be in a hurry looking for a church, and an opportunity sort of fell in my lap. So I am still the pastor at Unity in Plainville, GA, and also work a 24 hr. on call schedule five days a week. And I’m on the city council, and I have a wife and we’re raising a teenage daughter, and she is in the marching band and girl scouts… between work, ministry and family, my “extra time” for blogging really took a hit. In recent weeks there has not even been a Happy Monday or Satur-deja Vu post.

Here is the buried headline: WordPress reminded me this morning that I have been on this platform for 18 years. If my blog were a person it would be an adult. When I first met Michael Spencer, his blog The Internet Monk had only been around three years. He had only blogged a total of 10 years when he passed away. I did not start blogging until he launched a podcast and began to transition away from posting as often.

I wanted to note the occasion. Since it caught me off guard there’s no bloggoversary special, lifetime stats, etc. Just the acknowledgement that it’s been a minute since I started doing this in 2008. Let me just encourage everyone reading to do well and do good.

Long live the blog.

Loose Ends

Posted on by

I need to tie up a few loose ends before they are left hanging another week. Let’s start with a news story that should have been included in the Deja Vu. I added it later as a comment but not everybody reads those, and email subscribers may not know about comments that are added later.

Lawrence County in Tennessee will no longer excuse absences even with a doctor’s note. Each student will be marked either present or absent and there will be no more “excused” absences. School intervention will begin after three absences and juvenile authorities will be contacted after eight absences. The school system says they are stressing attendance and responsibility because in the real world young adults will be expected to come to work even if they are sick.

Continue reading →

Read the Bible

Posted on by

There’s more than one way to read the Bible, what matters is that you are reading it. I have read the Bible through in a single year but I don’t push that on people. If there are books in the Old Testament you have never read then you need to sooner or later; even though I would agree that the New Testament speaks more directly to Christians. “All scripture is good” but all scripture is not equally useful to our daily walk.

Continue reading →

Yes We Are

Posted on by

I re-entered the blogosphere yesterday with a rather weak statement by asking the question Are we back? I wanted to emphasize the soft launch aspect and point out that we are not trying to restart all the spinning plates that were going before. I have updated the Our Daily Bread and Bible Gateway features in the left-hand sidebar. That only takes a couple of minutes and it’s a good routine for me to start the day with; I have been updating the verse of the day on the Unity Baptist Facebook page this whole time. Our Daily Bread now has a daily video devotional you can subscribe to, so check that out.

Continue reading →

Are We Back?

Posted on by
Easter Sunday

So when The Master’s Table went on hiatus last fall I was hoping that would last a few weeks and we would resume business as usual. After a week or two of not having the stress of Happy Monday and Satur-deja Vu bearing on me, I had a little bit of guilt because of how good it felt. I would often stay up late on Sunday or more likely get up early on Monday morning to meet a self-imposed deadline. Discussing theology, responding to headlines and reviewing books is easy when you can pop out a post every now and then when there are things to write about i.e. stuff I need to get off my chest. Cranking out those e-zines twice a week became a grind and like I say, I felt a little guilty about how good it felt to not be under the pressure to produce those on a regular on-going basis.

Continue reading →

The Widget is Broken

Posted on by

At the top of the left-hand sidebar is a list of recent posts at the Unity Baptist church website. I don’t know when it happened but I noticed this morning this list is longer than usual. That wasn’t a change I was aware of making but when I went into the control panel nothing had actually changed. I changed the number of items to display to 4 and clicked update. I changed the number to 3 and clicked update. It has been set to 3 since 2015 when the church website launched but nothing I do changes what is displayed in the sidebar. Funny that.

Happy Monday No. 500

Posted on by

The Happy Monday truck doesn’t look like it’s aged a day. You wouldn’t age either if your image was digitally manipulated and then just reposted on occasion for the next several years. Fail Blog used to “send in the Fail boat” so I thought maybe Happy Monday could be delivered by box truck.

Continue reading →

The Jesus-shaped Project

Posted on by

In iMonk Radio Podcast #96 Michael talks about shutting down the Internet Monk website and starting a new project, Jesus Shaped Spirituality. So let’s address the Internet Monk website first. He was warning people at the time that if where was anything they wanted to keep forever they needed to download it and save it. His plan was to heavily redact much of the material he had written and posted between the end of 2000 and the spring of 2008. He did delete some older posts but never to the extent he discussed early on. Internet Monk continued for another decade after Michael passed and there are 20 years worth of posts archived today at iMonk.blog

Continue reading →

Steve Brown

Posted on by

For the past several months we’ve been going through the Internet Monk Radio archives and re-sharing those episodes. Each time Michael Spencer mentions another blog or podcast I try to find that and see if it still exists. Many times they do not. I often find websites that have not been updated in years. When he shares a resource that is still operating I try to point those out and include a link in my post.

Continue reading →