Heres a YouTube video of a guy setting a Guiness World Book Record for most T-Shirts worn at once.  He donned 155 Tshirts and added 100 extra pounds of weight.  Who has this much free time to think this stuff up?

The Us Census population clock is close to turning as we add our 300 millionth person here in the USA (likely tomorrow). Now is that cause for celebration or concern?

ALPHARETTA, Ga. (BP)-The North American Mission Board has named San Diego as the next Strategic Focus City-an initiative that will bring additional Southern Baptist attention, volunteers and resources in an all-out effort to share the Gospel of Christ with metro San Diego’s 3 million residents. 2007 will be the planning year for the San Diego outreach, with full implementation in 2008-09.

Ferm A. Whittaker, executive director for the California Southern Baptist Convention, said Baptists there are excited about partnering with NAMB to reach the lost and make disciples in the Golden State. “With at least 33 million unchurched Californians, we must do everything possible to tell every man, woman, boy and girl about Jesus and His saving grace. This is one more way to help California Southern Baptists’ culturally diverse congregations be on mission and be Kingdom builders,” Whittaker said.

San Diego-the seventh largest city in the U.S.-was named a Strategic Focus City because it is a largely unchurched mission field, said John Yarbrough, NAMB vice president for strategic initiatives. “Only 15 percent of metro San Diego’s 3 million people attend church regularly,” Yarbrough said. “We also chose San Diego because of its existing strengths. The major advantage of metro San Diego is its being home to many strong and dynamic Southern Baptist churches.” [Read more...]

This week Ron May spoke about serving our city.  As we lay out the importance distinctives of Park Community Church, one of those is serving.  Park has always been a church about serving the city.

As we renovate a warehouse for our permanent church home, I am more and more intrigued by adaptive reuse and other recycling measures being used in the marketplace. I came across this article in Business Week about a house in Boston that is being made from recycled materials from Boston’s legendary Big Dig tunnel project.

After seeing a house designed by Jinhee Park and John Hong, principals of the Cambridge (Mass.) firm Single Speed Design, these innovative architects were commissioned to use discarded materials from Boston’s Big Dig to build a house for one of the project’s contractor, a contractor in charge of destroying the residual materials from Boston’s Big Dig. The contractor had a junkyard full of concrete and steel and this idea to recycle it into a house for himself, says Hong. Constructed with more than 600,000 pounds of discarded concrete and steel, the Big Dig House has become a prototype for recycling large, heavy materials.

This is the type of stuff I love to see, where contractrors are looking for ways to reuse and readapt.

The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals

From Christianity Today: The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals

People and movements can be defined by the books they read and remember.
The time it takes to read and digest a book requires us to engage someone else’s ideas with more seriousness than almost any other activity. So it is with some trepidation that we (CT) present this list.

These are books that have shaped evangelicalism as we see it today—not an evangelicalism we wish and hope for. Books that have been published since World War II—not every book in the history of Christianity. Books that over the last 50 years have altered the way American evangelicals pray, gather, talk, and reach out—not books that merely entertained.We asked dozens of evangelical leaders for their suggestions, and they sent in their nominations. Then we vigorously debated as a staff as we ranked the 50 books. (We’re still debating.)

The top five listed by CT?

1. Prayer: Conversing With God. Rosalind Rinker
2. Understanding Church Growth. Donald Anderson McGavran
3. Mere Christianity. C. S. Lewis
4. The God Who Is There. Francis A. Schaeffer
5. Knowing God. J. I. Packer

Interestingly, the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren was #42 [Read more...]

Over the last two years, we have been excited to follow along as Willow Creek was getting ready to launch their city church.  Park Community Church has had a long history with Willow — in fact we are about the 15th church to join the Willow Creek Association back more than 10 years ago.

On October 1, Willow Creek started having services in Chicago in the Auditorium Theater.  This will be a video site, which will play on large video screens the pastor’s message from the day before (Saturday) from their suburban Barrington church services.  Having been in the city for 19 years, we know that need that exists in the city for churches that are reaching non-churched people and Willow will be a great addition to the network of churches already here. They have a great young “campus” pastor named Steve Wu — we look forward to meeting him and spending some time with him.  We say “welcome”!

Check out the NY Times article chronicling the latest in Hollywood’s attempts to cash in on the Christian film-going audience. In this article, NYT reports that 20th Century Fox has unveiled a new division, FoxFaith, that will release up to a dozen religious-oriented films each year: “Many of the films, with budgets ranging from about $3 million to $20 million each, will be released straight to DVD. But the studio said that at least six a year would be released nationally in theaters by an independent distributor working with Fox, starting on Oct. 6 with Love’s Abiding Joy, a western based on the novel by the Christian writer Janette Oke about a couple facing the trials of life on the American frontier.” “What we’re trying to do is create great movies that are story-driven, that happen to tap into Christian values,” said Simon Swart, the general manager of Fox’s North American home entertainment division. “The genesis of the FoxFaith banner is that it’s a Good Housekeeping seal, a marketing umbrella for these pictures, so that people can have confidence the movies won’t violate their core beliefs.”

The article also reports that the new division is the “biggest concerted effort by a major [Read more...]

This week, Associate Pastor Scott Clifton looked at sharing our faith and the inportance of building into one another’s lives over an extended period of time.