by Bret Capranica | Sep 8, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Prayer
I want my prayer life to grow and be more and more significant. Here are a few steps and thoughts I’m pursuing to deepen my pursuit of the Lord in prayer. Commitment. I’m assuming a time set aside for significant prayer. Some don’t go along with this. However, I think there is enough example from the life of Jesus (who withdrew often for concentrated times of prayer), or Paul who called us to devote ourselves to prayer (Ephesians 6; Colossians 4:3). The psalmists and their very intricate prayers suggest that they lingered long and often in significant times of supplication. Thus there should be a heart-driven commitment to regular times of personal concentrated prayer. So how can we learn to develop a more significant time of concentrated prayer. Disable Distractions. The internet. Umm, if you’re reading this, you’re using it. I find that this has become one of the single greatest distractions to good use of time in general and significant prayer specifically. I can literally Twitter my time away in the morning and lose time for significant prayer. I love to read the news and my iPhone makes it and e-mail continually accessible. Going off-line – putting my very portable laptop and handheld out of reach keeps the internet from being a prayer killer. Other reading material. The place where I pray is also the place where I do most of my significant reading. I am attracted to good books and I can quickly spend an hour reading through one of the myriads of books stacked around me and my place of prayer. It is a discipline to keep only...
by Bret Capranica | Jun 23, 2009 | Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Southern Baptist Issues
Yesterday was a day of travel-not much interesting to report. Justin and I flew in to Louisville on different flights. It was fun introducing him to the Cracker Barrel. His life will never be the same. We picked up Pastor Stephen Jones (his flight came in after ours). Fun stuff, huh. Travel. You can visit the convention web-site for the aftermath from the Southern Baptist Convention Pastor’s Conference. However, Justin and I did have the opportunity to attend the 9Marks at 9 session this evening. 9Marks is the ministry headed up by Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Dever opened the meeting (after 9:30 p.m.) and three decisions crucial for the church to make if it is to thrive: 1: We need to decide if we are going with the spirit of the age and treat the church as if it has ADD or put everything on expositional preaching. God’s word has always made God’s people not vice versa. 2: We need to decide to recover the corporate nature of the church and resist the rampant individualism that is defining modern Christianity. 3: We need to decide to grow our church either by seeing the customer as king or pursue true spiritual growth. We pursue spiritual growth through 3 accountabilities: a. Accountability to each other: expressed through membership. b. Accountability to our elders – Hebrews 13:17 c. Accountability of the pastor to God – Hebrews 13:17 Great stuff. In reality, the Convention has not yet begun. It officially kicks off tomorrow morning. Here’s a brief look at our schedule today: 6:30 a.m. – Founders’...
by Bret Capranica | Jun 12, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology, Twitter
Should an ordinary pastor get involved in the latest social media extravaganza? Drawbacks and benefits abound. Like most things the devil isn’t in the device as much as in the one using it. To each his own, but here are five temptations to avoid and ten reasons why I use Twitter. Twitter Temptations 1. Narcissism. Twitter assumes not only that others care what you are doing, but that you should have a group of followers enamored with what you are doing. Who can know a person’s motives for Twittering, Facebooking, or involvement in any other social media. But if you lust for a following Twitter (or social media in general) may bring out the worst in you. 2. Wasting Time. This is obvious. If you have Twitter tools to interrupt you on your computer, or perhaps have it text you when someone sends you a Tweet, you can be continually interrupted, checking in and responding, that you will inevitably neglect the important issues of your life. 3. Too Much Info. Twitter is not a place for confrontation of sin or a place to air out your disgruntled feelings. Some tell us too much about what’s in their hearts. Not everything we think or feel needs to come out of our mouth or from our keyboards. 4. Not Enough Info. Some don’t say much when they Tweet. “Eating cereal” may be significant when you are an avid 140 character Twitter-bug, but if such is the sum and substance of your comments, it is hardly a benefit to anyone. 5. Avoiding the Face-to-Face. As with virtually all electronic media, it is...
by Bret Capranica | May 25, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
Here’s the last installment on the technology series: An area where I will be sticking with the paid versions is Groove. What, you don”™t know what Groove is? You need to. Groove is a collaboration software tool that comes in the new Office 07 suite. I can create multiple workspaces, invite who I want to them, assign permissions and begin sharing any sort of document with whomever I want (of course, they must also own and install Groove). If they make changes to the document, it synchronizes the doc for any who are a part of the workspace. You can even create files on your desktop to be “Grooved” and share those files with those you want so that you don”™t have to recreate or upload files to a separate workspace. The only problem with this is that the 64 bit version of Groove does not work with Vista and Microsoft has no plans to make it work. Go figure. This was a major bummer for me. For pastoral ministry this has become invaluable. Our pastoral team collaborates with one of our members who actually puts up a copy of the bulletin each week and we all add our two cents. I do this also with our Sunday School bulletin, PowerPoint presentations, and a vast array of documents I want to share with others. I looked into Zoho”™s Sharepoint-like site, but it simply was not as easy to use or set up. Groove has been a pleasure to use. What about note taking? When Office 07 came out I became hooked to One Note. However, I think the free...
by Bret Capranica | May 23, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
More on my wrap up of Cheap Technology and the Ordinary Pastor Excel is a tool I regularly use, especially since I oversee our church”™s finances. The ability to quickly create charts and graphs in Word and extensively manipulate them to fit your desired look and express your information as you desire is easy. Word has vastly improved the styles of their charts and graphs, adding more 3D effects and sharper colors and backgrounds. Numbers is the Mac version, and it simply produces a better-looking product than does Excel and is very easy to use. I”™m no Excel power user, but what I do with it was not as easy to accomplish in the OpenOffice platform. Let me say a word about PowerPoint. I used to despise PowerPoint. They have the WORST looking templates. Another area Microsoft just simply does not do well in ““ really professional, modern, crisp, clean, sharp presentations. PowerPoint 07 is a great improvement over previous versions. I do a PPT presentation almost every week that I teach my mid-week class. OpenOffice is a joke. I also extensively tried out the free (and the paid versions) of Sliderocket. Sliderocket has some real potential, but was so buggy that it created some major headaches for me. I also called their customer support for help because once it was out of beta, I couldn”™t seem to get anyone to respond via e-mail. The guy was awesome on the phone and assured me that someone would follow up with my problems ““ I have yet to hear from them. While it still irks me that PowerPoint is so...
by Bret Capranica | May 22, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
I”™m going to wrap up (belatedly) my little series on pastoral ministry and the quest for inexpensive technology. Honestly, this is not really an issue for some pastors (or others). Some are in the position where expense is not really an issue. Or they are willing to forgo something else in order to have the better technology. After evaluating the free side of life, I think it is worth spending some money in order to have the better technology and thus a more productive time accomplishing what you do and yet there are a few apps. Let me start with productivity suites. Word Processing, Number Crunching and Presentations. Hands down, MS Office: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are your best bets (all of these in the world of PC). For a basic suite, of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (more on this one later), you”™ll pay about $150.00. If you are a student, you can get the Ultimate Office suite for about $60.00. That”™s really the way to go for the power and ease of use you will gain over the zero-priced material like OpenOffice.org. Why pay the money for these? Word is the universal powerhouse of word processing. Other programs, including WordPerfect and Pages with the Mac, have to adjust to it. It is the standard platform. Office has become much more user friendly. Though it did take me awhile to adjust to the new ribbon format, the UI is much cleaner, easier to use, faster to navigate, and even pleasing to the eyes. As said before, OpenOffice reminds me of Windows 98. In Word (Excel, PowerPoint) you can...
