With Everything (Elevation Remix) – by Hillsong United from Elevation Worship on Vimeo.

The quality of music coming out of Elevation Church is truly remarkable especially when you consider many of the risks they take regarding instrumentation. Check out their Vimeo page to see more.

“Neil Young” has even done a rendition of this new hit:

Quoting the original article:

This unexpected, spontaneous, and scripted dance (aka Flash dance) was performed by over twenty thousand people. How did they do it?

1. Planners recruited 800 people using Facebook and Twitter
2. Choreographers taught a simple dance to these 800 “dancers”
3. Dancers were planted amongst the crowd, who then the dance to the people around them
4. Music started playing, people started dancing.

One person doing the dance is funny. 100 people in the front of the stage doing the dance is entertaining. Everybody doing the dance in unison is amazing.

This the pow’r of the cross.
Christ became sin for us.
Took the blame, bore the wrath,
We stand forgiven at the cross.

Oh to see the pain written on Your face,
Bearing the awesome weight of sin.
Every bitter thought, ev’ry evil deed
crowning Your bloodstained brow.

Now the daylight flees, now the ground beneath
quakes as its? Maker bows His head.
Curtain torn in two, dead are raised to life.
“Finished!” the vict’ry cry.

Oh to see my name written in the wounds,
for through Your suff’ring I am free.
Death is crushed to death, life is mine to live
won through Your selfless love!

Accident Closes McCarty For 3 Hours

A Lafayette man was taken to the hospital and McCarty Lane was closed for nearly three hours Sunday night after a motorcycle accident.

According to Officer Nicholas Amor of the Lafayette Police Department, Jeffrey Mikels, 28, of Lafayette crashed his motorcycle while leaving the parking lot of Danzers Show Club, 3481 McCarty Lane, at 7:20 p.m.

“All we know at the moment is that he pulled out of the parking lot and didn’t hit any other vehicles,” said Amor. “When we arrived he was bleeding from the head.”

Mikels was taken to Clarian Arnett Hospital after the accident. Officers at the scene said his injuries do not appear to be life threatening.

After the accident, McCarty Lane between Creasy Lane and U.S. 52 was closed.

Amor said alcohol is not believed to be a factor in the crash, but police will not know for sure until a medical examination is completed.

I have been having people contact me for the past couple of days asking me if I’m ok, but so far no one has called me asking why I was driving out of the Danzers Show Club! Anyway, I’m going on record saying, “That was a different Jeffrey Mikels!” Actually, there are three Jeffrey Mikels in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and one of them has the same middle initial as I.

On top of that, my local namesakes have been busy. Last March, “Jeffrey Mikels” got a divorce (that was published in the paper too), and “Jeffrey Mikels” also has a criminal record (publicly searchable county database).

So, in conclusion, I have not been in a motorcycle accident, have not recently been divorced, have no criminal record, and have never frequented the Danzers Show Club.

However, I did laugh a lot when I read that I had!

Here’s the gist: Men today grew up in a world where it was largely okay for a husband to work 50 hours a week, come home, sit in his chair, and watch TV until bedtime. However, though women have not lost the desire for men to be strong breadwinners, they have lost the patience for a man who would watch sports all night from his special chair. Instead, they are looking for a soulmate too.

However, the personality traits that make for financial success often are at odds with empathetic listening and intimate conversation.

As the article says:

It would be funny if it weren’t so painful. “It’s probably the real cause of half of all divorces,” according to Sam Margulies, a divorce [6] mediator in Greensboro, North Carolina, and author of several books on the subject of marital breakups. The changes in women’s lives — their roles, ambitions, opportunities — have been considered from every angle. But men’s lives have changed too, in ways that are more confusing, more contradictory and often less welcome. Men did not ask to have their roles redefined. Now, they’re looking for an instruction manual complete with fine print — and a translator’s guide as well.

What’s a man to do?

Please read the article and tell me what you think: http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/23158

Since I wrote an article on this very topic (see Is There Recovery for the Homosexual?.), I thought it would be good to have a link to this new article here and to add a few comments of my own.

It just seems that the secular world is trying to ignore the truth that SOME people who self-identify as homosexual are able to ADJUST desires or at least find fulfillment outside the homosexual lifestyle.

What if we lived in a society with a VERY vocal and VERY strong lobby promoting the use of smoking? What if in the context of that society, a report was done testing the effectiveness of anti-smoking programs? What kind of news articles would we be reading? “Programs to change smokers to non-smokers don’t work, report says”

It’s the combination of a VERY vocal lobby, a VERY supportive society and the inherent attractiveness of sexual sin that wage war against any “change” programs.

It’s exactly the same as when you read about how “Abstinence Programs Fail Among American Teens.” If the society fully supports something that’s pleasurable, all programs opposing that position will fail more often than not.

“Sometimes, contemplatives think that the whole end and essence of their [spiritual] life is to be found in meditation and interior peace and the sense of the presence of God. They become attached to these things. But recollection and meditation are just as much creatures as an automobile. The sense of interior peace is no less created than a bottle of wine. The experiential ‘awareness’ of the presence of God is just as truly a created thing as a glass of beer. The only difference is that recollection, meditation, and interior peace – and the sense of the presence of God – are spiritual pleasures and the other are material. Attachment to spiritual things is therefore just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. The imperfection may be more hidden, more subtle, or seemingly more ‘excusable’; but from a certain point of view, that only makes it all the more harmful because it is even more difficult to recognize or deal with.”

-Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

This is one incredible quotation and it is a challenge to all of us who long for spiritual experiences and spiritual feelings.

• watch it
• hear it
• read it

http://projects.nickblundell.org.uk/wikidbase

It’s a database… It’s a Wiki… It’s WikidBASE!

OpenStomp

http://www.openstomp.com/

It’s a multi-effects guitar pedal that runs on opensource software.

1. What is your greatest moral failure, and what is the greatest moral failure of the USA?
2. What current Supreme Court justice(s) would you not have appointed?

Watch it for yourself and then watch the commentary afterwards by the CNN reporters and see a new kind of political debate take shape prompted by the creativity and courage of Rick Warren and Saddleback Church.

PS. If the video below doesn’t work, try visiting the link below it.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/16/warren.forum/index.html

Check out the amazing pictures on the hammer gallery site and read some of the incredible stats on snopes.com.

http://churchrelevance.com/resources/churches-to-watch/

Check out http://www.storyofstuff.com/ for yourself.

I saw something last week on American Idol that really freaked me out. They opened the show by having the contestants perform Shout to the Lord by Darlene Zschech!

If you don’t know the song, Shout to the Lord is one of the most popular contemporary worship songs of all time. It’s popularity alone is perhaps the reason American Idol chose to have the top eight contestants perform it, but I was really creeped out by the whole thing. Watch it, and then I’ll tell you why I have a problem with it.

My problem with it…

I have always had a problem with the commercialising of Christianity. I don’t have a problem with the practice of paying teachers for teaching or for paying pastors for pastoring or artists for performing or writers for writing, etc. But I have a problem when someone uses their own Christianity to make money (“Buy from me because I’m a Christian.”) or when a person plays off Christian values to make money (some of the biggest “Christian” bookstores are owned by secular firms because they saw a business opportunity).

What was American Idol doing? Were they affirming their own Christian values? Were they playing off the values of their audience? Were they performing a great piece of music for its own sake?

My guess is that it was option number two. I don’t have anything against that song or the people who love it, but frankly speaking, there are many other songs they could have picked with better lyrics, better instrumentation or better melodies. No, they picked the most popular worship song for one reason… to make Christians think American Idol was a good show to watch. Just look at the comments on YouTube to see what Christians now think of the show.

Such irony for a show called American Idol to play off its Christian audience!