Ken

Saturday evening Tonya and I attended the wedding of a young lady who was a part of our first church ministry. It was a fantastic event. The wedding was held at the La Mesa Church of Christ and the reception was downtown at the Westin. Gene and Sandy Watkins are the proud parents and Shannon was a beautiful bride.We still remember when she got braces ...

Last Friday night rolls around and Tonya and I had a night without the girls. So we make our way to Red Lobster to enjoy dinner before catching a movie. We sat down at 5:00 and I left at 6:15 without ever seeing even the shadow of our food. But I did enjoy four refills of Diet Coke and a bowl of Gumbo. Our waitress took our order, went on break, came back from break, and apologized for our food taking so long.What did we order that required such lengthy preparation? Tonya ordered fried shrimp and I asked for a salad! Finally, sometime around 6:30, the manager appeared and gave our food to Tonya for free. I did enjoy the salad ... the next day!

I attended a breakfast meeting of several San Diego-based church planters. We're a bunch of guys in our 20s and 30s (and maybe 40s) who've planted churches within the past two or three years. We meet on a semi-regular basis to catch up and fine-tune each other.Like myself, each of these guys have chosen to plant in urban areas rather than in suburban subdivisions. There obviously needs to be healthy, missional churches in the suburbs but we also need healthy, missional churches in our urban areas. Our urban areas of today are not the urban areas of the 1970s. They are increasingly populated with young, educated, passionate, artistic people. Here in San Diego we are experiencing a renaissance in our urban areas. The church must be a part of that.From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it may be a bit tougher to plant in urban areas because you don't have the…

If you're a news junkie like me, and I know there's at least two others, you'll like this link: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm. It's courtesy of Will Edwards and it's fascinating. It takes news stories and ranks them according to what people are paying attention.Yes, Will might seem to be a mild-mannered musician but he's a news junkie, too!

As a self-admitted baseball fan, I must confess to being a die-hard Cub fan. Along the way I've cheered on the Padres and Giants, and went to a few Oakland A's games as well. But I've never been a big fan of the Chicago White Sox. For people from in and around Chicago, it's rare that someone cheers for both teams. This is in spite of the fact that they are in different leagues. You just don't do it.Most of my lack of affection for the White Sox has to do with my lack of affection for the American League. In my mind, real baseball is when the pitcher bats. That's just the way I am.So ... for that reason, I've never really followed the White Sox. But here's where the Illinois in me comes out. The White Sox are in the ALCS and I'm cheering them on. Well, not…