Three more blogs

I've often considered Reading the centre of the student blogosphere...today i can present your with further proof:

Josh John has just finished his second year at Reading. He's a top boy, and probably the only person to ever turn up to a Reading Family Church prayer meeting with a can of lager.

Josh Betts is RUCU events co-ordinator. We spent a great few weeks at the end of last year studying Galatians together. He once died his hair pink to raise money for a missions trip to India

Tim Hilton is probably ten or fifteen times cleverer than i am. He's studying for a degree in robotics and can juggle five balls at once. He also might be my great-great grandson, but i'm not 100% about that.


***update: it occurred to me this morning that i should have called this 'I like Reading blogs' but never mind.***

Two (more) blogs i've just discovered

On this, so far, very productive snow day i've spent a good amount of time browsing two blogs i've just found. The first, leithart.com is a veritable mine of Biblical articles. Including this excellent one on Matthew and pretty much all his stuff on Genesis. Plus, he has an excellent beard!

Also, give your iPod a birthday, and check out the faith by hearing audio blog. Especially their best audio of 2008 post. Excellent stuff.

Fish and Questions

Mars Hill had the hugely successful 'ask anything' series where mark Driscoll promised to preach, and is preaching through, the nine most popular questions as posed on the church website. At Reading Family Church we're doing things slightly differently. Sean Green, who leads the team that leads the church, has asked 'how do you know when God has asked you to do something?'

Go tell him!

2007 in review

This is my 185th post of 2007. Not as many as i probably would have liked at the start of the year, but still not a bad effort. It's been a good year, an interestin year, a hard year, and a year where i feel like i've grown a great deal in the Lord, and (much less importantly) enjoyed blogging very much. Here are som highlights:

January
The first month of the year was dominated by two things: Relay 2 and a brief overview of Operation Auca (1,2,3,4), something that stirs me greatly whenever i think about it. Relay 2 was exellent, probably my favourite Relay Conference, although it's hard to have a favourite because they're all so different.

February
I blogged more this month than any other (26 times) which is pretty good going given that Surrey Mission week was going on at the time. I think this month i started trying to blog every day, which lasted for about a week. I might try and get back to that soon though. Highlights included reading Ecclesiastes and watching little miss sunshine for the first time, feeling foolish, and discovering Richard Sibbes (thanks Bish!)

March
March followed February as is it's wont, and i travelled eastwards to Cantabury to help out with the mission week at UKC. It was pretty much the warmest mission i'd ever done, flyering in t-shirts and stopping to eat ice cream really doesn't seem right! I read some Proverbs and heard Matt Benton

April
April means one thing...Word Alive, and this time Word Alive meant one thing that would define the blogosphere for months to come. others have called it the 'atonement wars' so i'll steal boldly from them. This years word alive was a joy to be at as a relay, and as someone who loves sound doctrine. It was a priveldge to be involved with UCCF when something as momentous as this took place. I thought about the personal saving neccesity of propitiation and reflected upon division and marching bands.

May
In May my 365 came to end. it was a good year. Thought and wrote about the Holy Spirit. Sitting in Bish's front room listening to Carolina reading hers about and then reading mine out is a memory that will last with me a long time. If you're graduating this summer you need a really really good reason not to do Relay. I made my coffee and Bible blog debut delighting in the atonement and read about Calvin.

June
I always knew writing about Nooma would be provocative, but i never thought it would become my most commented on post. I remember trying to close down discussion and then leaving it when it got to 20, and then being amazed when a checked a few months later to see there were 31 comments on there, ranging from the supportive to the frankly bonkers. I stand by every word i said... the time in between has only shored up my convictions about the suicidal danger of the emergent movement. In other news, it was Relay 3, which was lovely and our last team days where we learnt about prayer.

July
July was a slow one. I went to Malta with my family, wrote about statements of faith, then went to Together on a Mission and Bulgaria...and that was about it! Oh hang on, and i met Rachel, which was very good!

August
I recovered from being in Bulgaria, and as a result, sadly not much happened here. And i mean sadly because blogging helps me think, and i needed to think a lot then... I wondered why we do mission and misunderstood Judges. And i moved back to Reading.

September
Another slow month as i started work and talked on Skype leaving me little time for meaningful blogging. Again, a pity. I went to TFA which was great, and spoke on Psalm 16 in church.

October
Reformation day, being delighted that i could own and read the Bible in a language i could understand. I still view the Reformation as hugely important and significant which i guess puts me in the minority. England failed at sport, but it was ok. To be fair, it's hard to view the rugby world cup as a failure anyway. I thought about white men and sunday school.

November
Another lean month. Although in my defence i was in North Carolina for the middle part of it. What a great place that is, i'm back there two weeks today. Anyway... I preached on John and Colossians, thought about manners and my iPod.

December
As the year ended i thought about sin and Obadiah and Mark Driscoll joined Facebook.

So that was 2007. I'm off to Cornwall for new years tomorrow so thats probably that until next week. Happy new year...

Blogs

Mark Dever, on the 9 Marks blog asks, 'where did all these Calvinists come from?

If Spurgeon was the underground aquifer bringing down the nutrients of earlier generations to those after him, then it was this generation of preachers--many of them anti-Calvinists--who, ironically, were the aquifers who brought us all Spurgeon. And friends, if you keep being told to buy Spurgeon, eventually you'll probably read Spurgeon. And if you read Spurgeon, you'll never be able to believe the charge that all Calvinists are Hyper-Calvinists, and that Calvinists can't do missions and evangelism.

Adrian Warnock continues with Terry Virgo:

Some people say now we have Epistles we don't need apostles. Although we firmly embrace the authority of the Scriptures, we believe that a local church is built on people and on relationships. We need not only pastors and teachers, but also properly functioning apostles, prophets and evangelists, all rooted in local churches and serving translocally.

Tech Monkey wants us to read about Edwards:

I relearned a truth from the life of Jonathan Edwards. That the Christian life is one of emotion, of joy, of getting to know God better each day. It is neither a life of dead formalism or excessive emotionalism that removes the focus from God and to the personal, subjective, experience.

And, about the same time that i had finally given up on her and deleted her from my blogroll, Anna Hopkins was writing this:

Firstly, let me state that a CU is NOT a church, it is a mission team. Churches can’t get onto campus, so the only way to spread the Gospel there is through the students who already attend the university. Christian unions are not a church, in fact it is crucial that all the Christians who attend the CU meetings are firmly rooted in a local church, where they receive sound biblical teaching and can grow in their faith.