Nathan's Blog

I got a 500 dollar gift card for Target from the Saturn dealer when I bought my car. It's really cool because Amazon and Target have this thing worked out so I can order anything off Amazon through Target, so my opportunities were endless. There were so many things that I could use it on but I took the easy way and just ordered an iPod. So I got this cool new gizmo in the mail. The problem with buying an iPod is that once I had the iPod there were several gizmos that it was "necessary" that I buy so I could make the most use of my iPod experience whether I’m in my room or in the car or in the bush. Now that I’ve spent my 500 dollars on the iPod and its various accoutrements, I have been trying to find out how to make the most use out of it.

never used iTunes before but it’s starting to grow on me. The podcast concept is something new to me. Since the glory days of Napster (can you remember back that far?)I’ve not really downloaded much stuff. There’s all kinds of cool stuff you can download. Some of it’s free and then there’s audio books and stuff. But I’m sure you already knew that. Anyways I was searching for some podcasts to download. I found some interesting things. Dr David Garrison has a bunch of stuff on Church Planting Movements. The NPR stuff is great. But I almost had a wreck today listening to a particular podcast I downloaded…

I’m in the middle of about 15 books at the moment but one of them is A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. I’ll have to say it has made me think quite a bit, yet at the same time he says things that I’m already thinking. I just didn’t realize I was thinking them until I read it. If that makes any sense, explain it to me. I have no idea how I found them but I found several sermons by Mclaren and proceeded to download them. They sat in my iPod for several days and today I had to make a long trip down to the coast so I decided to listen to one of them. The first one was on The Emergent Church being Monastic and Communal. Some pretty good stuff there, and just about the right length of time so that it ended when I got to my destination. On the way back I about had a wreck. The next sermon I listened to was on how the Emerging Church is Postcolonial. He talked about how the modern church has had a colonial mindset and for about 20 minutes he used none other than the exploitation of the Angolans by the Portuguese colonists to explain the evils of colonialism. It turns out that his Grandfather was a pioneer missionary to Angola with the Plymouth Brethren not only that but his father grew up in Angola. What he had to say literally blew me away. I’ll write more about it later.