There are only a couple of days left in Advent. Check it out:

Our church’s RiverKidStuf got a great write-up in the Baton Rouge-area newspaper this past weekend, The Advocate. You can read it online at http://www.2theadvocate.com/features/29822044.html.

It’s exciting to see something that we’ve worked on get some good press! I especially love the line that describes RiverKidStuf, simply, as “innovative programming that also gets parents involved [and] children bring their parents” to learn. The show works on two levels so that both the children and the adults appreciate and understand the message.

The whole idea is that parents should be the primary spiritual influence in their kids’ lives, and the church can – and should – support that. Our church, River Community, and the many others that do a KidStuf production, do so to provide a shared experience for the whole family, to get kids and their parents on the same page, better able to talk about the same stuff. This is a great way to help parents, who may not be comfortable talking about spiritual things themselves, talk to their kids about God.

The Advocate’s write-up is definitely worth a read, if anyone’s interested in more info.

For those of you who have ever read Don Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz, Miller now has his own blog. He’s the guy who gave a prayer at the end of the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

His first blog post is quite humorous – it’s his email correspondence with Barack and Michelle Obama. Check it out here. The blog is running on WordPress, of course.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Blue Like Jazz, I do highly recommend it!

An “Out of Ur” blog post “Crowded Loneliness & Quiet Contemplation” briefly mentions how fractured our lives are in America today, and suggests “lectio divinia” as one option that can help, on an individual basis. Here’s a quotation:

Americans are knee-deep in the unprecedented phenomenon of grouped isolation—what [Randy] Frazee refers to as “crowded loneliness.” We are in desperate need of meaningful relationships, yet too busy and too pulled to maintain them.

Even worse, our attempts to relieve our sense of isolation often contribute to our fragmentation. We might join a small group, for example. We’ll get in contact with 3 to 11 other dedicated Christians and commit to meet and study the Bible every week.

But what happens? Those 3 to 11 people become another chunk of relationships that we have to manage [. . .]

I appreciate the insight that meditating on scripture can help to “defrag” (as one commenter on the post puts it) our often-hectic lives. I think, though, that we need to find an additional solution to de-fragment community. Part of the solution has to be continued emphasis on the idea that the church is not meant to be just another box for us to tick off our list — the church community (globally and locally) is a body in which all individual believers are an essential part, which also means that believers need to be integrated into the body, otherwise they will wither and dry up.

In the United States especially there is a tendency to consider church just a Sunday activity — one of many different activities in which we participate. We may sign up for a small group, but then that small group’s meetings will be just a Monday night activity (or whenever the group meets). I do think it’s critical that we Christians understand that Christianity is not just another personal belief system — it’s a community-focused way of life.