Stan Taylor

Gordon Atkinson recently posted to his blog If We Could Do Church, in which he tries to imagine what a Christian community would look like if it were free of most of the institutional baggage of contemporary churches.
(The comments to Gordon’s post are also interesting: Gordon clarifies some of his thoughts and several commenters refer to existing Christian communities that exemplify many of the characteristics that Gordon imagines.)
I’m always ambivalent about the church as institution, but I’ve been feeling more negative about it than usual lately, so Gordon’s post hit a nerve. I’m willing to admit that there’s always going to be some administrative overhead in maintaining any group of humans (even in Gordon’s conception of a church community), but I think it’s a constant struggle to weigh the amount of time, money and effort we put into the institution itself vs. the amount of those resources that are absolutely necessary for the group to use the remaining resources to help others. Many churches, it seems, get more caught up in maintaining the institution itself than I think they should.
I think the key difference comes down to size. Gordon says that his conceptualized congregation would be small enogh “to meet comfortably in a living room.” The larger the group of people, the more organization overhead you incur.
Another possible solution to this dilemma may lie in our Methodist circuit rider roots. In thoe circuit rider days, Methodist churches were small groups of individuals who managed themselves, and a circuit rider pastor only showed up from time to time to provide a minimal amount of professional guidance.

They say that the weather in Texas changes quickly. (Of course, I’ve heard the same declaration about other places I’ve lived). That’s certainly not true in the summer, which is predictably hot and sticky. But this time of year, we do live up to that claim. Yesterday, it was in the mid 80s and very humid. We got a cold front through during the night, so it’s in the 40s with a brisk north wind this morning. Today’s high will in the low 50s. Fun.

Over at BoingBoing, Dale Dougherty traces the genesis of a news story, in this case, retail sales numbers for ‘Black Friday’. He shows how this story, which is communicated on every news media every year after Thanksgiving, starts with a press release based on very questionable market research methods from an industry trade group, and then gets repeated as fact by news media.

A couple of years ago, we bought four Christmas stocking hooks that sit on the mantel. Each has a big brass letter on it, and they’re intended to spell NOEL. But we decided that’s too boring. We now have a new Christmas tradition: each year, a different member of the family spells something else. Last year we celebrated the first LEON. This year, Hannah spelled LONE.

My wife Katie is a former United Methodist minister. She served a parish for 2.5 years in the late 90s before deciding parish ministry was not for her. It’s a long story, but this post isn’t about her experience in ministry; it’s about mine.
Even now, almost ten years later, I’m still coming to grips with how totally unprepared I was to be the preacher’s wife. The biggest problem was that I had no idea that many parishoners hold the minister (and her family) to a different (higher?) standard from other people.

This is Samuel’s early Christmas gift. Her name is Penny, she’s half-chihuahua, half-terrorist, and about six weeks old.

I got a 4GB iPod Nano earlier this week (thanks, Uncle Jim!), and I have to say, I understand the success of iPods/iTunes: Apple simply got a lot right. Just as with their computers, Apple took advantage of being able to control the entire experience: music management with iTunes, the seamlessly integrated iTunes Music Store, and of course the iPod hardware and software.
I’m a big geek, so I’m not fazed by occasional complexities and difficulties of hardware and software, but I can see the Apple appeal: it just works with fewer problems. I guess that’s worth the higher price point for many people.

I dreamt last night that I was explaining different types of taxation (flat tax, progressive taxation) to a group of ten-year-olds. I was able to explain it clearly, the kids understood, and they engaged in intelligent discussion about it. When I recounted my dream to Katie this morning, she replied that it was an odd coincidence: taxation is this week’s subject in the freshman studies course she’s teaching. Though, she added, sometimes it feels like she’s trying to teach this stuff to ten-year-olds.

So, my coworker from Professional Services walks over to my desk with his laptop and our company’s application running (names changed to protect data integrity).
Coworker, pointing to laptop screen: “Where did all this [blah blah] data come from?”
I answer: I entered it into our application from that spreadsheet you sent me about [blah blah] data configuration.
Coworker: What spreadsheet?
Me, typing furiously, then pointing to my laptop screen: the spreadsheet attached to the intranet wiki page about [blah blah] data configuration.
Coworker: Where did that spreadsheet come from? I didn’t send you that.
Me, typing spreadsheet filename into Google Desktop Search, results showing an email from Coworker with said spreadsheet attached: Ah, but indeed you did.
Coworker: I’ll be darned.
Score one for Google Desktop Search.

The latest trend to sweep blogdom, it seems, is to tell how you got ‘into computers’. So, I thought I would add my story.