New look

I am having a shot at redesigning this blog site using the existing templates and hacking into them as little as i can. expect a little mess while i do this, but when i am finished, i will have another custom template available to whoever wants it.

Back??

Are we back? I hope so. It has been ages since I've been around to this neck of the woods. It's good to be back. I agree with the monkey...I promise to be active and all that other jazz he had to say.

back - so are we :)

andrew - it's good to see posting :) i have tried over the past, but life seems to be getting in the way - but i am back - as you are back - as we are all back :) (just could not do a "you and me" thing - needed to bring the whole community in) - i will, as i have promised on other blogs, to be active - proactive and not reactive :)

i think it would be a great idea to expand the global voice to others - i love hearing the voices of people all over the place - i have been feeling a touch in my heart to head overseas - just trying to figure out where God is telling me to head - ireland? england? australia? only God knows, and right now it's a secret :)

pax

nice to be back

wow - its been ages since i came here, but blogger has changed its interface so i thought i would try a new posting.
also, a kingdom space blog turned 2 year old in april. we have suggested closing down this blog but for some reason we never seem to. i am kinda hoping that people from africa and asia would join us herer for some good conversation - which was on of the original goals.
what do you think?
be nice to keep this going in blogger as a free site.

Tiny Loans Have Big Impact on Poor

From the New York Times

Microfinance is a long way from the world of venture capital where Mr. Khosla, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, a venture capital business, and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has earned a formidable reputation as the man with the Midas touch. But in February he said he would start working part time at his company to spend more time with his family and on his passion: supporting microcredit initiatives for impoverished regions.
The Share program, or Society for Helping and Awakening Rural Poor Through Education, was founded in 1991 by M. Udaia Kumar, who had been involved in providing training programs to poor rural entrepreneurs. The program has reached 300,000 needy families with loans totaling $75 million.

It goes on with this

An estimated 3,000 microfinance initiatives serve the world's poor but a scarcity of money has limited their expansion. More than 70 percent of them serve fewer than 2,500 borrowers each.
Only 30 microfinance initiatives have grown to serve more than 100,000 poor borrowers. One of them, the pioneering Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, reaches more than three million borrowers. A total of $4 billion has been disbursed since Grameen started making loans in 1976 with seed loans starting as small as $35.
The majority of the microfinance initiatives struggle to find grant financing and to stay in business. The money they do receive is often in small grants of $5,000 to $50,000. The ventures are typically viewed as risky propositions for loans from commercial banks.
But advocates hope Mr. Khosla's evangelism for the initiatives will help them increase support from mainstream institutions.
Some microfinance projects are tapping into commercial financial institutions. In India, the Grameen Foundation is starting a company called Grameen Capital India in partnership with Citigroup and India's leading ICICI Bank to help microfinance initiatives get guarantees for financing.
And business leaders and entrepreneurs are increasingly seeking to support microfinance organizations because of their financial soundness and broad social impact, said Julie Stahl, program officer of the Grameen Foundation USA.
"We are seeing a groundswell of support coming from leaders in the high-tech and venture capital worlds," Ms. Stahl said. Bob Gay, managing director of Bain Capital; Mike Murray, a former vice president at Microsoft; Rob Glaser, founder of RealNetworks; and Craig McCaw, a pioneer in the wireless industry, for example, have all been involved with microfinance projects.
It was heartening, Mr. Khosla said, to see that the entrepreneurial principles of Silicon Valley applied just as well in rural India and Bangladesh. "Granted, they are not as profitable as Google, but they have the same level of social impact."

Islam 'will be dominant UK religion'

via Religion News Blog

Islam will be the most widely practised religion in the UK by 2020, according to British and Muslim magazine editor Sarah Joseph.
She says mosque attendance is expected to outstrip church attendance over the next 16 years.
Estimates suggest that anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people a year convert to Islam in the UK, which is currently home to approximately 1.8 million Muslims.
"We are the second largest faith in Britain and will be the largest practising faith in Britain by 2020 if you use church and mosque attendance as a measure," she told the GDN.

Sarah Joseph does have a stake in saying such things but it is an interesting comment. Islam is growing very fast in the west and will continue to have more and more of an influence.

Everythings a'changing

Hi everyone, this is Andrew. I want to thank everyone for contributing to this discussion over the past (almost) two years. This blog will be winding down and will pop up on another blog system (Typepad) that will enable us to do some new things and do all things better.
The theme will continue to be what God is doing around the world. I will try to get more non-Western bloggers to be involved this time- something that I had tried to do but never succeeded.
The conversation level will also be upgraded to an in-depth discussion of missiology in the global emerging culture. I will be sending out invitations shortly, and if you would like to be one of the bloggers who contributes to this conversation, then please email me tallskinnykiwi at hotmail.com
The name may stay the same (or you could suggest a new name) but the address will change - i will put a link here when we have it.
Sometime this month.
Thanks everyone.

Andrew Jones

Can you help me get rid of a nuisance ?!

Some unfriendly people in Germany have written some very unfriendly stuff about me. That´s okay. People are free to say what they want. The problem is, that that their homepage is quite popular, so it is high up in Google. Whenever someone types in my name at google their bad stuff about me turns up on page one of the search. So anyone looking for me first gets to read that junk about me! YIKES.

Can you help me kick them out?

The best way would be to ask all your friends to make a link on their homepages to one of my homepages. That should get my own pages higher in Google and should be enough to kick them out of the first page of the google search! (providing you really have a number of nice friends...)

The Link could be to any (or even better all !!!) of my pages:
http://kerstinpur.blogspot.com [my German personal blog]
http://berlinrocks.blogspot.com [Stories about God and Berlin and both]
http://www.downtoearth.de [My internet shop for stuff on transformation of cities and people]

THANK YOU (and your friends!) A LOT!

Mayhem notes

Jeremiah Smith has some excellent notes from Mayhem posted on his blog.

Study cuts Kenya HIV estimates

From the BBC

A survey in Kenya has found fewer people may be infected with HIV than previously thought.
The study, carried out by the Kenyan government, suggests 6.7% of people have the disease.
Previous estimates had put the figure as high as 15% or 4.8m people.
Experts said the figures based on a sample of 8,561 households across the country are the most comprehensive to date.
The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey is carried out every five years and is used by ministers to plan health and social policies.

Indie Allies Meetup

find out more at indieallies.meetup.com

Indie Allies Meetup is coming again soon on January 13, 2004. As you can see, there is over 1800 people signed up worldwide and we are looking for more. If you have signed up, go an vote. If you haven't, it is FREE to join, and takes about 30 seconds to join. It is a monthly gathering of people who are exploring new ideas in Christian thought and expression and want to see what God is doing in their communities. If you haven't signed up, you are missing out on a great time. There is no central agenda, just a meeting over coffee and a beverage to see what's up in your part of the world.

I just got home from a cool lunch meeting. It was with Dan - my local denom guy - and Paul Kaak of CMA. We were talking about the possibility of doing a CMA Greenhouse in SoCal some time next year. I know it's been done before in our area, but we may make another run at it. I've known about Paul through Jason, Kevin, and some others. Cool dude with some good insights about the Kingdom. I really like the way he has a passion for an organic expression of the Kingdom of God, but isn't antagonistic toward the traditional/institutional approach to church. He's well balanced and has a good heart. He clearly cares about following Jesus with integrity and encouraging others to do the same.

After lunch, I had coffee with Dan and talked about some stuff in our local association of churches. In particular, he told me about some possibilities that are only just dreams at this point, but if they were to develop . . . spine tingling ministry stuff could happen. I almost don't even want to think about it because there's so much potential there, and yet so much potential for it to get really screwed up. I need to breathe a little before I think about it any more.

Brian McLaren's new website

anewkindofchristian.com

Soularize Photos

I am uploading the pictures that Jeb and I took while in Boston at Soularize. I have some Tuesday and Wednesday pictures posted online and will posting more during the day. Not only that but some other people have been uploading some pictures as well.

The Soularize Fotoblog

Tuesday pictures from Boston
Wednesday pictures from Soularize, TheOoze Booze Cruise, and the Boston Bruins/New Jersey Devils game from the Fleet Center
John Wilford's pictures
Greg Mulkey's pictures

More to come later today.

Connect Europe

If you wanna see what God is doing in the area of youth and prayer in Europe have a look at Connect Europe. [Stolen from Marc van der Woude...who is one of the key energizers behind it.]

Prophetic flashmobs and other stuff

Last week I joined a prayer event in Llanelli that could best be described as 'prophetic flashmobbing'. Flashmobs are sudden gatherings of people at a predetermined location at a predetermined time, who basically do something wild and creative together, and then continue their journey. A sort of postmodern version of a Blitzkrieg. Heidi Plympton from England took the initiative - she sensed God was saying to her to do a prophetic prayer and worship tour on three 'hights': Llanelli in Wales, and Glastonbury and Salesbury in England. A small core group prayed into this and gave a 'trumpet call' in their network. Whoever felt led to come, joined in and brought whatever God told them to bring. Some fifty people showed up. It was an experiment with a refreshing freedom in the Holy Spirit in which a special prophetic-creative synergy developed. Not something to talk about, but something to experience.

More about my trip to Wales at Marc's Messages.

new site...

emergingchurch.info is a new emerging church web site. it's a place for stories of what is happening, reflections on what is emerging, discussion on anything and everything related to emerging church on the sites discussion boards, a selection of blogs and the obligatory links. i am excited about the site - do visit, join in the discussion, bookmark it, tell others, blog about it, and if you are involved in something that might fall under the loose label 'emerging church' then please add your story to the site....

rss xhtml?

have just checked kingdom space blog for the first time in ages and fixed a broken link from my blog to it.... i'll be honest - i haven't got a clue about RSS and XHTML - life is too short to keep up with these things!!! any suggestions for a novice wondering what on earth it is all about and why is hould bother to switch?....

Changes to this blog

Hi everyone. Hope your summer was great. We are changing a lot of things on this site at the moment. We are switching to xhtml, adding RSS, and trying to find some non-Western bloggers who can keep us in tune with what God is doing in their countries. Let me know if you have any suggestions. And if you like the way this new blog looks, then you are welcome to use the template for your own blog.

When do we have understanding?

Check out, More about being embarrassed about not knowing more.... .

A great story about what it really means to understand something, and how the interchangeable notion of weakness and strength is a truth which is not contained within the walls of the church.

Short words work well

I just read a very interesting techincal paper. It was about extending the Java programming language, and as a way of making his point, the author of the paper decided to only use words of one syllable, and then to allow himself to define words of more than one syllable in the course of the paper.

If you have PDF reader, and you can deal with a technical discussion of programming languages, you can read the paper, but for this blog, the thing which was so interesting to me was the last part, where the author reflects on the process of writing the paper.

...

I would like to tell you what I have learned from the task of designing this talk. In choosing to give up the many long words that I have come to know since I was a child, words that have many fine shades of meaning, I made this task much harder than it needed to be. I hope that you have not found it too hard on your ears. But I found that sticking to this rule made me think. I had to take time to think through how to phrase each thought. And there was this choice for each new word: is it worth the work to define it, or should I just stick with the words I have? Should I do the work of defining a new word such as mirror, or should I just say “looking glass” each time I want to speak of one? (As an example, I was tempted more than once to state the “ly” rule for making new words that change what verbs mean, but in the end I chose to cast all such words to one side and make do. And I came that close to defining the word without, but each time, for better or for worse, I found some other way to phrase my thought.)

I learned in my youth, from the books of such great teachers of writing as Strunk and White, that it is better to choose short words when I can. I should not choose long, hard words just to make other persons think that I know a lot. I should try to make my thoughts clear; if they are clear and right, then other persons can judge my work as it ought to be judged.

From the work of planning this talk, in which I have tried to go with this rule much more far than in the past, I found that for the most part they were right. Short words work well, if I choose them well.

Thus I think that programming languages need to be more like the languages we speak—but it might be good, too, if we were to use the languages we speak more in the way that we now use programming languages. All in all, I think it might be a good thing if those who rule our lives—those in high places who do the work of state, those who judge what we do, and most of all those who make the laws—were made to define their terms and to say all else that they say in words of one syllable. For I have found that this mode of speech makes it hard to hedge. It takes work, and great care, and some skill, to find just the right way to say what you want to say, but in the end you seem to have no choice but to talk straight. If you do not veer wide of the truth, you are forced to hit it dead on.

I urge you, too, to give it a try.

From "Growing a Language", by Guy L. Steele Jr.

I think it would be a good thing to add "those who love God and want to do what He says" to that list. We should give it a try.

Ranchero Software: NetNewsWire

Thanks Mike on the tip re: Ranchero Software: NetNewsWire. I am redoing my site with RSS feeds in XHTML. Any more tips?

Plea for RSS

As I expand the list of blogs I try to keep up with, the need to automate the process of "which blogs have changed since the last time I read them" has become greater and greatter.

The solution for this is something called RSS, which is a way for content providers to provide an index to their content.

I run a program which scans the RSS feeds for all the blogs I have subscribed to, and I get a list of the posts which are new since the last time I looked. Right now, 5 out of the 21 blogs I follow have RSS feeds.

Calling all bloggers, please please please check with your blog software to figure out how to generate an RSS feed. I am currently using TypePad for my faith-rambling blog, which is a subscription service and it provides an RSS feed for everyone. I understand that currently blogger/blogspot only provide RSS feeds for the "Pro" level blogs. I don't know about any other blog services.

For Mac users, the software I am using to both read AND post to all my blogs is NetNewsWire. Sorry, don't know what PC users are doing.

Heretics?!

Discovered a books whose title caught me:
Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up: A New Look at Today's Evangelical Church in the Light of Early Christianityby David W. Bercot
Haven´t read it. But sounds cool! I think we must think and rethink Christianity ...in the light of (present and past) culture, history and what the early church was really like. Guess some interessting discoveries await us.

Ecclesia Network is now online.