Ken

I was just thinking ... if my parents were still alive, I'd be spending much of my time trying to explain technology to them. Anyway ...We now have LifePoint's weekend messages available as podcasts. You can listen to the mp3's at http://lifepointcast.blogspot.com by clicking on the title of the message. Or, if you prefer the podcast you can subscribe using this link. For those of you using an aggregator like iTunes, simply past http://feeds.feedburner.com/LifepointPodcast into the box under Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast. This will allow you to be automatically updated.We'll try to have them up by Tuesday afternoon each week. Of course, you don't get the smell of the coffee but it's the next best thing.

I've decided to take a break from preparing my message for the end of this month and blog a bit. It's all because of a book title: "The Violin Explained." No, I haven't grown soft and decided to take up the violin -- though I might just to spite you.It's the title of a book a lady is reading on the couch at Twiggs. The title made me want to look around and see what everyone else was doing (especially since I'm probably the only one writing a sermon). There's an elderly lady doing her crossword puzzle; most days she brings a book but today must be puzzle day. Another lady is working through a textbook of some kind. I'm not curious enough to be nosey. The guy in shades with his iPod is hiding behind a laptop screen. A middle-aged man with the only pressed shirt in the place…

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…