Theological Musings

or those of you who don’t regularly read Michael Spencer’s Internet Monk blog, I wanted to point you to an interview Michael recently did with me.

The topic was “Worship and Music” and Michael gave me four very insightful questions on which to share my thoughts. You can read the interview on Michael’s blog here.

There are already some good responses over there, and you can feel free to join the discussion there (I think you have to register for Michael’s blog in order to comment) or provide responses here.

Thanks for the fun interview, Michael! I hope that the discussion is productive.

Until next time,

steve

y wonderful blogging buddy, Gordon Cloud, has interviewed me on his blog.  I realize that in the absence of genuine posts on this blog here, it’s not necessarily nice to write a post only to point you to someone else’s post, but bear with me!  Life has been very crazy the last couple of weeks, and I’m working to restore a balance to it once again that would allow me to post again and interact more here and elsewhere.

Anyway, hop on over to Gordon’s blog and read the interview there.  For those of you who only know me as a blogger, it will give you insight into the musical side of my life.

Until next time,

steve

onight, I decided to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress, version 2.1

You may have tried to access the blog while I had it down for the upgrade, and I apologize for that inconvenience. As it turns out, I am having to tweak a few things, so you may notice some changes, or things not working correctly around here for a day or two while I iron out the bugs.

If you see anything strange, please leave a comment here and let me know!

Until next time,

steve

othing of substance here, but wanted to alert you to some new things around here at Theological Musings, if you’re interested.

First of all, you may have noticed that I changed the banner picture at the top of the blog. I loved the misty bridge picture that came with the template, but finally found a good picture to substitute and make my blog that much more original. Where did I find such a picture, you ask? Right out our back window last October when the leaves were their prettiest here in Boone.

I also updated my picture in the sidebar, since the other one was well over a year old. I took the opportunity to enjoy the new Photoshop Elements software that we received as a Christmas present by overlaying my picture onto a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains that we took just a few miles from our house. The mountains are beautiful. Now, if I could just do something about the fact that my face is quite a bit rounder in this later picture than it was a year ago. Sigh…

Also, some of you may have noticed that I have included functionality on my blog now to see “Snap Previews” of external links before clicking them. A good example of this is when you mouseover this link right here. You should see a popup that shows what the target website looks like before you click on it. This only works with “external links” — that is, links that are outside of my blog. If I link to another page within my blog, you won’t see the preview. I also have disabled it for links to Bible passages on BibleGateway (such as John 3:16). There isn’t any need to preview those sites, in my opinion. (By the way, this plugin is available for WordPress.com users, as well, according to this article.)

Finally, I have added a new page to my blog called “WP Plugins“. This page would better be called “WP Plugin” (singular) for the moment, since I only have written one plugin, but hopefully this will not be the last plugin I write. As I develop more plugins, I’ll add them to that page.

Writing plugins for WordPress is a new thing for me, and I’m very excited about having written my first one. It wasn’t a whole lot more than making modifications to an existing WordPress function, but it was something that I wanted to have in terms of functionality, and something that I couldn’t find elsewhere in other plugins. So, I tried it myself, based on the info received on a support forum, and have now released it to the public!

If any of you have WordPress (I don’t know if you can install additional plugins on WordPress.com blogs, or just self-hosted WordPress blogs like I have), and would be interested in being something of a beta tester on this, download it and let me know what needs changed or what works well.

Thanks! I hope you all are having a blessed day. I hope to post again soon.

Until next time,

steve

am not going to get into specifics here because I’m not going to try to make an issue out of the specifics, but the last few days have brought some hurt here in the blogosphere. And I know I am not the only one who has been hurt.

My previous post definitely came from my heart, as I have experienced the “fire” and “hammer” quite a bit from a few others lately. Not the “fire” and “hammer” of the Word of God, but the “fire” and “hammer” of plain old criticism and judgment. In many ways, it has crossed the line into outright slander.

As I’ve talked with my wife about it, and done some very serious thinking, I have come to the conclusion that Christ is not in that. There are a lot of good, Christ-honoring blogs out there. But there are also some which seem to do more harm than good. This is not the first time I’ve seen the bad side of blogging. And it may not be the last. But this time, it has hurt a bit more deeply than before.

With that in mind, I want to publicly reaffirm some goals that I have for this blog. I am blessed to interact with some really wonderful people here, and I have grown quite fond of those of you that I get to interact with. So here, in no particular order, are some of the things that I pray will be true, and remain true, of this blog:

I pray that God receives glory from this blog, and that you each are blessed both here and (if you have them) on your own blogs.

I pray that this will always be a place where disagreement among believers is tempered with love and grace.

I pray that, while we may differ with each other, that we will never lose sight of what binds us together. For those of us here who are in Christ, we are truly bound together by His Spirit. It continues to amaze me that there is some very sweet fellowship here between simple church advocates and conventional church pastors, cessationists and continuationists, Calvinists and non-Calvinists… Not every discussion on this blog has been easy, and very few of them end up with either party changing their position — but we’ve learned a lot from each other, and we respect each other for their positions.

I pray that, no matter what takes place on this blog, that I will never present myself as being unteachable or above questioning on anything.  I’m not looking for people to follow me.  I’m looking for people to walk alongside me as I follow Christ.  Even though this blog has my name and picture on it, that is only because I’m the one hosting the discussion.

Finally, I pray that all of our speech here will be continually subjected to the standards of the Holy Spirit.

Thanks again to all of you who have made this blog a great place for interaction. Have a blessed remainder of the week!

Until next time,

steve