The Carnival's back in town

October 18, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
3 Comments

I’m having some friends drop in next week. They’ll be visiting from all over the world and you’re invited to join us. The next Christian Carnival is being hosted here at RodneyOlsen.net.

The most recent edition is posted at Tale of a Kansas Girl.

The weekly Christian Carnival is an opportunity for Christian blog writers to share their best posts from the previous week. The topic of the post doesn’t necessarily have to focus on Christianity but it must reflect a Christian worldview, and the writer must be Christian to qualify. You may wish to consider that the readership of the Christian Carnival will be more varied than your usual readership, and you might do better contributing a post with broad appeal.

I’ve taken part in the carnival many times over the years and this will be the third time I’ve hosted the carnival. I’ve already received a number of contributions and I’m looking forward to offering readers of this blog some great links when the carnival is published.

If you’re a Christian and you’ve never contributed before, or if it’s been a while since you have, how about having a look through your posts for this week and choosing something to contribute. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, just a post that outlines your point of view or is designed to get others thinking. Being part of the carnival could be a great way to gain a little extra traffic at your blog.

The easiest way to get involved is to submit your article through the Blog Carnival Submission Form. Otherwise, you can email the submission address.

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday evening at midnight, Eastern (US) Standard Time. (EST is GMT minus five hours.) That means it’s midday Wednesday here in Perth, Western Australia.



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When your god dies

October 9, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
9 Comments

USmoney.jpgWhether you believe in a supreme being or not you’d have to admit that humans have an inbuilt desire to worship. You might not call it worship but we do have a strong tendency to raise people or things high on the pedestals of our desire.

We worship other people, money, success and many other things in our lives. We give ourselves completely and often stake our lives on whatever it is that becomes our god.

The worldwide financial crisis has brought the death of god for many people across the globe. Many people who have put their trust in riches are now scrambling to keep their heads above water. Even those who would have said that money and financial security weren’t the most important things in their lives have started to see just what a hold it has had on them.

This story tells us about a man who found the current crisis too much too handle. Without the trappings of riches he felt it was better that his entire family was dead, so he killed his wife, his three sons and his mother-in-law before taking his own life. Police found three letters he had left in the family home detailing his financial difficulties. What a terrible tragedy. It’s so sad to think that someone believed so strongly that death was better than life without money that he threw away so many precious lives.

I’d have to admit that Bono has given the current crisis a bit of perspective that’s hard to argue against.

It is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire (Group of Eight nations) can’t find $25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable disease and hunger.

I guess it’s a reminder to us once again to decide carefully where we choose to put our trust. When our god is money, we will be let down. When our god is other people, they will fail us. When our god is success, we will find it slipping through our fingers.

What or who will you choose to worship?

Teach those who are rich in this world not to be proud and not to trust in their money, which is so unreliable. Their trust should be in God, who richly gives us all we need for our enjoyment. – 1 Timothy 6:17



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More wisdom from Father Bob

September 26, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
1 Comment

I’ll have something here for you to read later.

Until then, you should be reading Father Bob Maguire’s post School Holidays.



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I challenge you …

September 25, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
5 Comments

… to watch this video all the way through without crying.



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Do we need a Christian Twitter?

September 22, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
3 Comments

gospelr.pngI spotted an interesting article on TechCrunch a few days ago.

In the post Gospelr: Twitter For Christians, Don Reisinger wrote about a brand new service specifically for Christians. Gospelr is microblogging for Christians and can even be set up to send posts to Twitter.

It’s got some interesting features that make life easier for users such as the colour coding. A normal post to Gospelr is shaded brown. Replies made to you are shaded green, while imported messages from services like Twitter are colored in blue.

I’ll admit that I headed on over to the site and signed up to check things out. It was a very busy site a few days ago as many people started signing on but it seems to have slowed down now. I guess it’ll need to reach a certain critical mass for it to be worthwhile.

I suppose the question remains, why do we need a service like this specifically for Christians? If extra functionality is added to allow it to display my tweets from Twitter I reckon I’ll get a bit more use out of it but I’m always cautious of anything that creates a Christian subculture.

While I fully understand the desire and even the need for like minded people to gather together, I wonder if there is good cause to duplicate services that could already achieve that purpose.

Ryan left the following comment at the TechCrunch article:

Couldn’t this have been done by setting your Twitter account to private, and only following people who align with your beliefs? Just sayin’…

He wasn’t alone in questioning the need for Gospelr. Buddy commented:

keeping the christian subculture alive! thankfully, because Jesus really would prefer us not to associate with sinners.

i’m headed over to my favorite christian restaraunt to eat some christian pancakes and read my christian paper, then i’m going to go to my christian job and open my christian computer and communicate with my christian friends and cohorts.

please stop making this stuff. just use twitter or the ten million other tools like this if you want to communicate “share thoughts, ideas, words of encouragement, prayer requests, daily scripture readings, and oh so much more.”

christian t-shirts are a bad idea. christian bumper stickers are a bad idea. christian twitters are a bad idea.

Dave said:

brings an interesting new meaning to the expression, “preaching to the converted”

Joe commented:

My question for gospelr is what prevents us from sharing thoughts, lifting others in prayer, announce causes that need help, encouragement on twitter in the first place.

You know when I think Jesus will return? When the entire Christian subculture dies a horrific death.

Jesus did not call us to huddle amongst ourselves and exclude all others. Light much? Salt much? Get into the world. Love them. Serve them. If necessary, you die for them.

While I admit that some of the posts I’ve seen on Gospelr would suggest they were made by people hopelessly out of touch with the wider world, I think there are still plenty of people using the service who have every intention of staying connected to the society around them.

So if we’re going to jump in and use a service like Gospelr, how should we use it? As a way of ‘shutting out the world’? I hope not. How about a way of connecting with others who share our faith and combining to reach out to the world? That would be my hope. I appreciate any opportunity to have my faith sharpened by others and being able to connect with other Christians through Gospelr might be a very good thing.

If you haven’t tried Gospelr, give it a go. Let me know what you think.

Do you think we need to duplicate services like Twitter and others or should we simply use the original and be salt and light? What do you see as the benefits or the disadvantages of such services.



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