good stuff ...

Barna released a new study called What Teenagers Look for in a Church. One really interesting statistic: One-sixth of teenagers (16%) and one-quarter (25%) said they had "a spiritual experience" online where they worshipped or connected with God. If you really care what I think about it you can read the work blog, but you'd better be pretty bored.

Granger Community Church recently wrapped up their Innovate 2007 conference. You can watch all of the session here. I'm watching Guy Kawasaki talk about The Art of Innovation right now and it's pretty spectacular. It started out with a cute live performance, a Granger music video that was pretty cool, a couple worship songs (which made me feel better about being a worship leader and a mediocre singer ...), and a really cool Granger video that wrapped up their 2006. It takes 25 minutes to get to Guy's presentation, but it's worth it. (Oh, and it's long, but I say keep it open on half your screen and respond to emails on the other half.)

For those of you who were looking for spiritual content, I will briefly describe my frustration as I read Judges last night:

I started to notice a pattern by chapter two, and began to jot subtitles in the margin. "Evil ... bondage ... cry out ... deliverer ... peace ... evil ... bondage ... cry out ... deliverer ... peace ... evil ... bondage ... cry out ... deliverer ... peace." I started to get frustrated with Israel and my righteous inner monologue was shouting, "Just get your act together already!"

Then I had a Calivn and Hobbes moment - one of those where Calvin looks out at the reader and the little asterisk (*) appears over his head. I was astonished at the grace of God in the Old Testament (when He's often accused by unbelievers of being mean and hateful - psh) and in my life. I'm used to it in my life, but to read it in the third person made it real again. Because I got frustrated and God kept sending deliverers over and over and over ...