nathan j hill [dot] com

My Spiritual Direction Final Paper

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:04:37 -0600

Hop on over to the above url, grab some coffee or tea, and curl up with a splendidly, delicious read about Spiritual Direction & the Lord’s Supper.

Okay, so this may not be the most intriguing read of all time, but it was my final paper as part of my three year spiritual direction training program out of HeartPaths. It’s a good thing. I have learned a lot, and so I decided to pick a sort of practical intersection of spiritual direction and a ritual dear to my heart, communion. The paper turned out alright. I’ll link to it on my theology page eventually.

Praying

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:27:54 -0600

I’ve been thinking and reflecting a lot on the language I use as a vocational church guy. It’s often way too “churchy” for my tastes. But it is tough to step away from seminary trained-ness and speak simply. I am practicing however. Last night at a memorial service, I shared this prayer, which I attempted to make simpler and more focused.

God, Our Creator,

In this sacred, still space, we trust that You are here.

We believe that You meet us in our need, our loneliness, our pain, and our grief.

Though our hearts may ache and our world seems turned upside down, strengthen us. Hold us. Fill us with Your peace.

Give us courage to weep, to laugh, to remember, and to hope.

As you have been faithful to us, we respond faithfully to You, and share now ancient words of our faith that give us rhythm in the midst of the turmoil and trials of this life.

Our Father… (Lord’s Prayer)

How to build a church/non-profit website for super cheap

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:24:00 -0600

There are lots of companies out there that offer exciting packages to churches or non-profits, and some of them are good for what they provide, especially if you want to hand over some of the things to an outside team. But, you can build your own setup for around $20 a year if you are up for it.

How?

Go get a free wordpress.com account. Wordpress is pretty much the standard blogging engine out there. It’s popular, has a lot of support, and is pretty solid. Like anything, it has its limitations. Wordpress.com actually limits a bunch of things you can do with it compared to the self-hosted version (which can be had pretty cheaply too), but for starting out, it’s easy to begin there.

You’ll need a domain name ($10/year from GoDaddy or NameCheap) and $12 so that your new Wordpress.com site is hooked up to that domain name. It’s an easy process - they’ll walk you through it.

You then pick a theme for your site - there’s a growing selection, from simple to more complex. Then, start creating your pages and posts. For the most part, you are on your way to having a solid functional website.

Bonus: Twitter and Facebook are integrated, so you can ping those social networking sites instantly with updates when you post.

By the way, another alternative is Tumblr, which I use to host nathanjhill.com, and as I recall, you don’t even have to pay to point your domain to it. Tumblr is a great option with its own set of strengths and limitations too.

What about media and stuff?

Setup a Youtube channel for free, and post your videos there. Not only does Google then handle all of your bandwidth, anybody on Youtube can also discover your organization with a search. Vimeo is an alternative too.

Use a free MailChimp account as your email marketing tool, if you want. It’s a great setup and is just plain fun to use.

Sign up for Scribd and upload documents that you might need to embed and share, like a PDF or Word doc and so on. Alternately, sign up for Dropbox, and share files you need through its online or desktop interface.

Get your Facebook page going, and give your clients/members the power to post pictures of your organization at work instead of building elaborate photo galleries that no one will care to browse.

If you want to host a podcast, you might look into something like Podbean, which has a limited but free account that can get you started. OurMedia also will host your files for free as long as they Creative Commons designated. BuzzSprout also has a decent free plan depending on your usage.

For a shared church calendar, use Google Calendar. It’s simple and can be shared in a bunch of different ways, even via collaboration.

Speaking of that, I think Google still offers a free/non-profit version of its Google Apps for organizations. Everyone gets email at your domain (i.e. minister@mychurch.org) and access to Google Docs/Calendar/Voice/etc. Go for it.

Finally, for e-commerce stuff, you can make some donation buttons with Paypal for nothing, or use a nice site like WePay as a giving portal. WePay also lets you setup simple stores to sell physical goods.

Is this going to be as nice as an integrated solution? Almost. You will have to work to setup all these pieces and figure out their own individual kinks. Your site won’t have as many options as building something by hand or self-hosting a Wordpress install. But on the other hand, it’s super cheap… and super cheap is awesome.

And if you do go for a paid webhosting account, I recommend BounceWeb or NearlyFreeSpeech (only pay for as you much as you use each month, often just a couple of bucks).

If you have questions about this or need a little more one-on-one advice, ask away.

Thank You, Christmas! is out!

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:08:00 -0600

Thank You, Christmas! is out!:

If you like free, fun music, Thank You, Christmas! is my self-produced, unusual, quirky little winter set of sings celebrating all things holidays. I’m sort of participating with the Advent Conspiracy on this, sharing a gift from my creativity. These songs aren’t typical holiday fare, but they are fun and spiritual. Please spread theword!

Where was Jesus born?

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:28:00 -0600

One of my professors for some sort of practicum (worship, I think) in seminary loved to talk about Advent. He was this prim and proper guy, a senior pastor of a big UMC church in the burbs of Washington DC. As we explored the theological meanings behind the seasons in the life of the church, he explained why his church community always did a service of healing around Christmas time.

I’m sort of paraphrasing here…

It’s our biggest service of the Christmas season - people love it, because most people’s lives are filled with chaos, pain, confusion, and loss. We invite people to come forward to be anointed with a bit of oil and prayed for by folks who love to pray. We always pray specifically for the things in their life that they want to lift up. It’s simple and powerful.

We forget that Jesus wasn’t born in a nice hospital on the good side of town. Jesus was born in a barn, surrounded by animal feces. He was literally born in crap.

That resonated with me, because I’m never quite sure what to do with stories of angelic messengers, shepherds, miraculous births, and jealous kings. Sure, there’s a lot of intriguing stuff in there, but we tend to lift up the scripture in our churches in reverent tones or dress it up with red and white trim. We forget the weirdness of them. We forget that the stories were about injustice and hardship - that God moved in people who didn’t have money, not even a ride (yep, no mention in any of the gospel stories of a donkey or horse for Mary or Joseph).

Out of that came some sort of hope that took flesh - a child who grew to be a man - a guy who people kept encountering in their lives, who said and did the most intriguing things, or who made them want to leave everything behind to follow. And he too died without money or status or power or privilege.

Look, I admit I am in a major place of privilege. I am typing this on my computer, with great internet access, electricity, and resources to pay for all of that - I get it. Maybe that’s why I need to remember - maybe that’s why every Christmas I still search for something a little different, be it a song or a story or a piece of art, that connects me back to that smelly stable where a young, poor family had a baby. Could that be the real smell of Christmas?

May that smell - the smell of oppression, injustice, violence, and hate in our world - move me from my comfortable place and into loving action.

nbjames: @tcufrog05 during the children’s moment @edcc (Taken...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:46:07 -0600

nbjames:

@tcufrog05 during the children’s moment @edcc (Taken with Instagram at East Dallas Christian Church)

Bait & Switch Theology

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:23:18 -0600

Bait & Switch Theology:

This blog post is a great read.

Part of my faith story is growing up in Anadarko, OK, a town with 41% white people and 41% Native Americans. I loved my small town church - a bunch of good, wonderful people - but we never did a thing with our Native American neighbors. “They had their churches; we have our churches.” Granted that America’s legacy of racism, genocide, and colonization is difficult for anyone to deal with (especially a small town church), I longed for a faith that took Jesus’ words a bit more seriously to love your neighbor as yourself.

This article hits the nail on the head. When we reduce our faith to only a private, isolated piety/set of practices, we lose what makes our faith significant in the first place. The question I’ve heard asked before at congregational transformation events - if your church got up and left town one day, would anyone in your community know? Another recent book (Candlelight) I read says that the church should be a gift to your community. Our hands and feet can become gifts to our neighbors, no matter where we are.

God IS love. So, love people, okay?

Alternate Advent Fun

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:14:03 -0600

I try to spice things up for Advent with alternate advent tunes. I use them primarily in worship, but they’re just fun anyway. Still, I’d love some new ideas, so if you have any, please share.

Like:

“Let It Be” by the Beatles

“Christmas Song” by Dave Matthews Band

“From the Mouth of Gabriel” by Sufjan Stevens

“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night

“All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles

What am I missing?

"6 With what should I approach the LORD and bow down before God on high? Should I come before..."

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:24:47 -0600

“6 With what should I approach the LORD
and bow down before God on high?
Should I come before him
with entirely burned offerings,
with year-old calves?
7 Will the LORD be pleased
with thousands of rams,
with many torrents of oil?
Should I give my oldest child
for my crime;
the fruit of my body
for the sin of my spirit?
8 He has told you, human one,
what is good and
what the LORD requires from you:
to do justice, embrace faithful love,
and walk humbly with your God.”

- Common English Bible, Micah 6:6-8

Christ told the thief that he would be him today in paradise yet on the third day Christ told Mary not to cling to Him for he had not yet been to the father. Was Jesus a time traveller?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:11:17 -0600

Haha!

… Yes?

Maybe time collapses into nothingness for God. Is God outside of time? Or within time? Or what? I wish I knew.

I think the first story indicates the immediate nature of God’s grace, which is supposed to stretch us. Here is a man who has done wrong, accepts that reality, and, in the end, recognizes Jesus. It’s an affirmation of faith. In other words, God’s grace isn’t dependent on a performance. That can be real unsettling in most modern ideas of justice. It’s straight mercy.

The second story may point to an early Christian idea that Jesus died, went down into Hell, and preached/lived/shared salvation to the very demonic beings of the universe. It’s an interesting idea, definitely, even if you don’t buy into it. Plus, Jesus was different after resurrection - he was solid (as guys like Thomas are invited to touch his hands) but he could pop up behind locked doors and disappear in an instant (Walk to Emmaus). The gospel story was trying to say that something unbelievable happened - Jesus was here and yet beyond. He was not resuscitated - he was resurrected! Mary might have clung to the idea that he was alive again, but really, Jesus had work yet to do. Was he between two realities? Two different planes of existence? Was he just making a pit stop on his way to heaven? I think it’s unclear, because it was likely a bit unclear and mysterious to first century Christians too.

Sorry it took so long to answer your question!

Open Source

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:31:13 -0500

I’m still a tech nerd most days. I’m a fan of vintage computers and new shiny tech. I use my iPhone 4 everyday and enjoy an old dual-core G5 Powermac at home.

I like to get a nice long life out of any computer I own.

The challenge is that once a company abandons a platform, software usually follows suit. My G5 Powermac is an example. It works great and is plenty fast, but Leopard was the last operating system from Apple that supports this aging Mac. There’s still a lot of good software in the Mac world for this machine, but a bunch of applications I use are phasing out PowerPC support.

Someday soon, I will need to upgrade to a nice little Mac Mini or something.

But in the meanwhile, open source software is here to the rescue.

For example, web browsers for PowerPC Macs are a dying breed. With focus on faster Javascript performance and speed, speed, speed, there won’t be a version of Safari 5.1 and beyond for my computer. Camino is great, but it uses an older rendering engine that won’t be updated. Firefox has abandoned PowerPC entirely. Other browsers will follow suit as the WebKit engine is no longer updated for any PowerPC machine.

Enter TenFourFox - an open source PowerPC centric version of the latest Firefox, specially optimized for the Mac. It’s pretty great, keeping older machines up in the game for a while longer… even though it does indeed make some design tradeoffs that require workarounds (no flash/no plugins).

This is, in my opinion, the strength of open source software - the power of community over corporate decisions. For a while longer, old PowerPC machines have life. As long as vintage Mac users have resources and time, open source software at least provides the opportunity for outdated machines to be relevant.

This is why open source software is pretty cool, in my opinion.

But… it doesn’t always work. You can practically name on one hand the number of open source software packages that are actually good. (There are lots on the server side of thing, by the way.) On the desktop, you end up mostly with bad clones of popular commercial packages, like Libre Office/Open Office (Microsoft Office) and GIMP (Photoshop).

Now don’t get me wrong - I love the idea of these applications - free alternatives for work, home, and business. But, they still got to be good… or at least good enough.

LibreOffice is the offshoot of Open Office that supposedly had big bug fixes for speed and usability. Guess what? It’s bloated, slow, disorganized, and disappointing. I’ve tried to write papers in it, but it offers no upgrade over any version of Microsoft Office. (For a Mac user, Microsoft Office 2004 or any version of iWork trounces it easily. Heck, go get Bean - a small, fast, well-designed basic word processor done right.)

GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop but only in desire. It’s a terrible, disorganized application that teases you with great features but ultimately is very limited. Just the other day, I attempted to use GIMP to do something as common place as converting an RGB image into a CMYK format. There is no CMYK support for GIMP, just convoluted workarounds. A waste of an experience.

Yes, these kinds of things provide a glimpse of a future where technology and software are available for lots of people, even those without financial resources to afford them. It’s a great movement and effort, but it needs more polish. Open source projects still need lots of vision and direction. In the case of TenFourFox, I think it works. In the case of numerous others, there is work to be done.

Meanwhile, the good people at Low End Mac keep fighting the fight.

Have you ever been to Cartwright, Manitoba, Canada?

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:06:30 -0500

I sure haven’t. Thanks!

"When you live next to the cemetery you cannot weep for everyone in it."

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:14:58 -0500

“When you live next to the cemetery you cannot weep for everyone in it.”

- Russian proverb (as told by a mentor)

"The maxim of illusory religion runs: “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the..."

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:07:47 -0500

““The maxim of illusory religion runs: “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you”; that of real religion, on the contrary, is: “Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of””

- John Macmurray (Gifford Lectures, 1953-54)

I’m all over this video of some small group conversations...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:15:26 -0500

I’m all over this video of some small group conversations at the 2nd day mission track at General Assembly 2011. Talking about DC! Plus, Spencer Burke (of the Ooze) is a fun guy.

New books

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:33:39 -0500

Going to enjoy some reading through the rest of summer:

Many Colors (Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church) by Soong-Chan Rah

Missional Worship by Cathy Townley

& … a new bible, but specifically the Common English Bible, which is my new favorite translation (at the moment)

Yes.

End of the Story

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:40:41 -0500

End of the Story:

Doing an Advent tune in the midst of Lent.

But it works.

Aaron Niequist’s “End of the Story”

we say – hate doesn’t win

we’ve seen – Redemption in skin

we say – let the celebration begin!

we’ve seen the end of the story and Heaven wins

Heavy things

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:59:44 -0500

Sometimes, you can leave for a weekend and take a single bag with you for all you need… and yet come back loaded down with burdens, thoughts, questions, and hopes.

That was my weekend in a nutshell.

Great… but heavy.

Ever felt like that happened to you?

Finally decided

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:36:54 -0600

I’m late to the game, but I finally decided that I’m giving up something for Lent.

In the past, I’ve given up mostly negative things and have written about it. By negative, I mean - self criticism, cynicism, etc.. I’d suggest that too if you felt like giving up chocolate or cheese or whatever seemed a little pointless. Consider Lent an opportunity to improve your life rather than an opportunity to abstain from something you like.

But this year, I decided to give up a beverage I desperately love.

If all goes well, I am going to extend this Lent project indefinitely, beyond the initial 40 days. Just quit cold turkey.

I’ll leave it up to you to guess what beverage I am giving up.

Journey on through the desert, my friends.

Mother Teresa Quotes

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:33:26 -0600

Mother Teresa Quotes:

In my sermon today about love, I used a bunch of quotes from Mother Teresa, that I in turn, got from this great sermon out of the Gathering in Cincinnati. Cool stuff.