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Dear friends, last week, I had hoped to start a series on the Metaverse and the Christian life. I discovered that I was more ambitious than I realized, and I haven't had the time to do the thinking and reading that I need to provide another installment. In the meantime, here's a lighter piece containing another subject that's been on my mind.  Last Monday during the Super Bowl, the L.A. Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford threw a pass that made the entire NFL world’s jaws collectively drop.  A tiny bit of context for non-gridiron fans. One of the most well-established principles of throwing a football is that you need to align your front foot in the direction of your target and square your shoulders so that your upper body is pointed in the direction that you want to throw to. In the screenshot I snagged from Youtube below (please don’t sue me NFL) you can see that Stafford’s (red circle, bottom center) posture clearly indicates that he wants to throw to the slot receiver (r...

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post sharing my frustrations about doing church on Zoom . "Why is it so hard to explain why physical is better than virtual?" If I could sum up my problem in a nutshell, it would that we all agree  on the basic idea. "Physical things are better than virtual". Almost all of us would rather be having a coffee with a friend in a real cafe than drinking homemade Nespresso over a Zoom chat with someone behind a computer screen.  But it's hard to articulate why. We struggle to explain something that we already know by instinct. "Because physical is just better!" doesn't really tell you more information.  My friend replied to my post asking me a question, "What do you think or how does it apply to ministries trying to reach those in the Metaverse?" The Metaverse, for those who missed it, is an ambitious new initiative by Mark Zuckerberg to take the idea of social media to the next stage of evolution. Instead of ...

Reflections of a fearful man coming off vacation and looking for rest The rules of Keepy uppy could not be easier to understand. You inflate a balloon, choose an arena, find an opponent, and serve. Each player takes turns tapping the balloon to keep it alive, and person who allows it to touch the ground loses. Last year, some grownups turned this kid game into an official tournament with its own World Cup . This highlight is insane.  Abby loves playing Keepy uppy. She was introduced to it through the Australian cartoon that took over the kid’s world in the last couple of years. Here, click this link and give it a go yourself and ruin your productivity for the rest of the day. Pro tip: If you play on an iPad, you can tap the balloons with with both thumbs and last way longer than on a computer with a mouse.  When Abby and I play, we aren’t in competition. Naturally as a kid, she plays as if we’re on the same team with the same objective. Every time we play, she works himself ...

The other night I was part of a meeting for the children's ministry committee at my church. As we planned for the start of the school year we faced a thorny issue that many other churches across the city have been tackling: Should we run Sunday school in-person or over Zoom ?  To be fair, for many churches this is a no-brainer for one reason or the other. Since the vaccination rate for NSW hit over 95% at the end of last year many churches have reopened normal physical service and never looked back. But there are also plenty of churches who still meet primarily over Zoom.  My church falls more into the latter category. Currently as I write, only two of our six Sunday services is meeting physically, while the rest are still operating fully online. Let me say that my purpose in sharing this is not to make a judgment on whether churches should fully open up or stay online. If I had a general opinion on that, it would be that no one should generalize such a complicated issue and c...

In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, Homer takes his family out to a steakhouse where he challenges trucker Red Barclay to a steak eating contest; whoever could finish a 16 pound (7.3kg) steak first wins. As the contest begins, We see Red confidently carve into his steak when the camera pans to a panicky Homer, frantically buttering a bread roll . No Homer! Don’t fill up on bread!  I always try to share original insights into the world of ministry when I write, but sometimes the truth about how I’m feeling comes in a deep shade of cliché. I am struggling with how busy ministry is. There is always more I could do, always something I could do better, always more great ideas that I just don’t have time for. This is the downside to the exceptional freedom that most pastors have with their time. Week to week, there are certain responsibilities that are both urgent and important. You can’t not write a sermon if you are preaching this Sunday. You must drop everything to visit a...

All we see is light for forever 'Cause the sun shines bright for forever Like we'll be alright for forever this way Two friends on a perfect day Belonging is such a strange word. It is a verb, which if you remember your primary school grammar, means that it’s a “doing word”. Doing implies action. “Jog” is also a verb, which is why you can say, “Let’s go jogging!” But no one ever says, “Let’s go belonging!” That’s awkward. Technically you are using the word correctly with respect to its part of speech, but no one says stuff like this. Belonging is passive. You either are or are not. You either belong or you don’t. When it comes to the subject of belonging, being a member of something, being a part of something, you cannot, by the rules of English grammar, take action to do it .  You can’t belong the same way that you can make a sandwich.   But with respect to life, I can hardly think of another word that is more vital and more desperately lacking in our lives than belong...

I’ve been thinking lately about how to raise Christian children. Recently, an influential sociologist of religion named Christian Smith released a new body of research examining how religious parents pass on their religion to their children. He didn’t just study Christians, but also interviewed and surveyed Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Hindus. And across his wide-ranging research, he identified a few key factors that strongly contribute to the success of raising children with faith.  Isn’t that something that we all deeply desire as parents? Don’t we all want our children to grow up with genuine faith? Don’t we want them to own their beliefs? To truly know Jesus, to love God, to have a real relationship with God? And don’t we want them to go to church, not because they are forced to, but because they truly belong to the Christian community?  This is my deepest desire for my kids, and from the bottom of my heart it is also a great fear as well, tha...