ben.atwood.com.au

One of the pluses of working on staff at a church? Receiving unsolicited emails people submit via the website (I’m not sure why they choose me – there are six other people on staff!). Here are some excerpts from two which I thought were worth sharing.

#1 – received 25/08/2008

I am writing to you on behalf of Anderson, Indiana-based pop/rock band no greater sky. We are scheduling dates for our upcoming Australia tour, which will run from November 21 to February 11. We would love to have Toongabbie Anglican Church as a part of our tour! Specifically, we will be in your area
23-26 November. Whether it be through a one-night, weekend, or week-long concert and/or worship event, we are open to what will meet the needs of your church best. We are also available for Christmas events. Below, I have included dates that are available for booking.

I did end up looking up the band’s myspace page and it turns out they are a real band. Is it a sign that you’ve made it as a church when US Christian pop/rock bands are saying that they would love to include you as part of a tour? I suggested to others in our staff team that we book in the week-long concert and/or worship event, but so far, I haven’t heard back.

#2 – received 11/09/2008

God said to worship on the Sabbath not Sunday. You can easily check and see the Catholic Church changed it about 400 AD. and every church has kept this day since. Wrong. Saturday is the day. God said to work 6 days and to rest on the Sabbath. You study some and you will see that Saturday is the day.
The 4th commandment says to keep it Holy. You sin every week by worshiping on Sunday. You will also see that the emperior [sic] worshiped on a Sunday and he with your good buddies the Catholic Church decided they could change anything in the Bible, but they can’t changed [sic] a thing.

Picked up this morning when I checked my emails. I apparently missed the memo which locked Saturday in as the only acceptable Sabbath…and the memo where I became good buddies with the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church. Better get me to a confessional and deal with all those sinful Sunday church gatherings I’ve been a part of for the past twenty-three years.

Wordle seems to be the new toy for those hip computer people (thanks to Guan for the find). It makes plain text more interesting by plotting it into artistic clouds, coloured and everyfink. Sweet, eh?

The applications for various word-related frippery are many and varied. Guan pointed it to his journal; others have allegedly converted the ESV New Testament into word clouds. The interesting thing is that when you…wordle your text (behold, I am anticipating that ‘Wordle’ will suffer the same fate of ‘Google’ and become verbised), the size of each word reflects its frequency in the source. Ashamedly, this reminded me of the various psychometric instruments which utilise word frequency as an independent variable, and made me think that psychology journals would be so much easier to read if they only used word clouds instead of graphs. You can take the nerd out of the university, but…

Anyhoo, if you weren’t at SNC on Sunday night, you can catch up with what was said by clicking below. Perhaps you could play ‘Spot the Illustration’?

1. Ben Arthur Cairn, 2. Chhole (Indian Curried Chick peas), 3. Tyndale Monument, 4. How much more red could this be?, 5. GA S3 Cast, 6. Not a good time for a photo, I’d rather have coffee first, 7. Lahore art, 8. thursday: dessert, 9. 21May06 Bangladesh Missionaries (21), 10. Plus haut, 11. Shades of life, 12. Batwood I Can Take That Shot Too

From Kathleen.