Travis Seitler: Web Designer

Laurie Reyes (Ordinary Mother) just recommended Seeing the Gospel in all things, a post from Mark Lauterbach’s blog, GospelDrivenLife. I read it, I liked it, and I so I thought I’d pass along the recommendation:

“…when God speaks of the places where he was faithful, he develops the details. When God writes about the places of failure, he speaks of his care and not their sin. He made this point — God is forgetful of our sins. He does not summarize our lives as those moments of great transgression on our part. In our self-righteousness we make a monument to our sins and live in endless regret of them. In our pride, we make monuments to others sins and remind them of them. But God records his gracious care of us in our sin so that we see his mercy and not our evil.”

Mr. Lauterbach is the senior pastor of Grace Church in San Diego, CA. Laurie’s husband, Jason, is a pastor at Chesapeake Community Church in Joppa, MD. If only both were bloggers…

New Attitude is back, and they’re blogging live from the conference! I think that’s just cool. (HT: Adrian Warnock.) It looks like a pretty nice conference; I guess I’ll have to get the session CDs once they’re made available.

In addition to the official blog, Carolyn McCulley, Jenn Romanski and Brent Thomas are liveblogging the event.

However, in a shocking turn of events, it was revealed to attendees that C.J. Mahaney stepped down as senior pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD in order to prepare for his starring role in next season’s new sci-fi series, Stargate: T4G. Mahaney will reprise his role as Jean Luc Picard, a 24th century starship captain sent 300 years in the past to lead a 21st century ragtag special ops crew into the Delta Quadrant to prevent the rise of an alien race known as the Borg. (And if you don’t believe me, ask Agnax, whose post I discovered while typing this!)

Just a heads-up: links for all three of C.J. Mahaney’s sermons at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN are up now. If you like C.J.’s style, I’d recommend you subscribe to his local church’s sermon podcast. He may not preach there as often as he used to, but pretty much all the guys who do received some degree of training from him!

(Photo by Sola Lumina Captura. You’ve got to check out his other photos!)

Yes, I’m a geek!

If I hadn’t proved it yet, hopefully this will be the clincher: I’ve mapped each and every Sovereign Grace Ministries member church in Wayfaring! That’s right, each one — including the in-progress church plant in Frederick, MD! (That was was pretty hard to peg exactly, seeing as how they haven’t found a place to meet yet!)

(That’s supposed to be a live view of the map; if it doesn’t seem to be working, you can load the full version.)

My biggest trouble—hands down—was with the churches in Mexico. They’ve got some strange addressing methods down there, and I couldn’t make las cabezas o las colas of them!

My goal was to map the meeting locations, rather than the mailing addresses. Wayfaring doesn’t have the same data that Google Maps does, though, because apparently Google doesn’t make all that data available in their API. It didn’t cause me much trouble, but some of the markers may be off a few hundred yards as a result of having to eyeball it.

It’s interesting… looking over this map, I can’t help but notice a certain tendency to hug the Appalachian mountain range. I wonder if that’s intentional.

I also see a distinct lack of SGM church planting in the Northwest U.S. I think they ought to plant one in Las Vegas. Who’s with me?

Silly headline, perhaps? Don’t jump to conclusions, though; I think it was just a one-time thing.

The Black Calvinist went to T4G and loved the sound of 3000 male voices praising God, so he caught it on his cell phone and e-mailed it to himself. He loved it so much, in fact, that he wanted to share it with those of us who weren’t able to attend. Wonderfully sporting of him, right? (I thought so!)

Well, as Bob Kauflin pointed out in the comments section, this was apparently a T4G no-no (which, to his credit, TBC was unaware of). And where most would then demand that the file be removed, what does Bob do? He simply asks that the song be properly credited.

Now that’s dealing graciously! Way to go, Mr. Kauflin: I commend your thoughful response!

(Photo by Sola Lumina Captura.)