Here’s a mail-out I’ve just sent to people on my e-list.

Email me (see the contact button on this page) if you’d like to be added to this list. Rowland.

~~~

Hi friends, on a very pleasant April Fools’ Day Sunday, in Melbourne, Australia)

Here’s the first of these mail-outs from my Mozilla Thunderbird email program (I got tired of Microsoft Outlook Express seizing up – and once exploding, causing half my folders to disappear without trace!)

One of the fascinating exercises I engage in occasionally is to find out who visits what John Mark Ministries website articles when… After midnight (my time) 105 people, including, no doubt, some ‘last-minute’ pastor-preachers read the Palm Sunday sermon at http://jmm.org.au/articles/17209.htm. So hopefully a number of congregations benefited. And a growing number are also Googling for a Good Friday sermon. Here’s the most popular, based on the movie The Passion of the Christ – http://jmm.org.au/articles/12508.htm .

Liberal Christian Huston Smith has written a brilliant book titled The Soul of Christianity, in which he attempts to explain Christianity in a way just about everyone will accept. Quite a challenge! Two excerpts: ‘If Jesus had not been followed by Paul, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in a generation or two’. ‘The Christian worldview compressed into a sentence: the world is perfect, and the human opportunity is to see that and conform to that fact’. More provocation: http://jmm.org.au/articles/19470.htm.

Can you pass the Religious Literacy Test? Try it at http://jmm.org.au/articles/19460.htm

On a lighter note, here’s a screen-full of ‘Ponderisms’ (like ‘There are two kinds of pedestrians, the quick and the dead’). More – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19468.htm

Some Australian Islamic clerics believe it’s OK to cheat on taxes – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19464.htm . For much more on Islam/terrorism etc. – from many points of view – see http://jmm.org.au/catalog/keyword/i-10.htm etc.

Is the worldwide Anglican communion about to break up? http://jmm.org.au/articles/19435.htm

Is it ever right to kill? Conservative commentator Bill Muehlenberg takes on his critics – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19435.htm

A very moving poem about drought and suicide – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19437.htm

Review of Alan Hirsch’s provocative/radical new book on the church (The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church) – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19453.htm

Humor again: how do you explain the sex of cats to a child (in public???) – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19432.htm

For those of you who have sons, did you know that a king-size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq ft house 4 inches deep? More – http://jmm.org.au/articles/19426.htm

Finally, for others like me who play with Google, try this: put John Mark (just those two words) into that search facility and discover something quite interesting 🙂

Have fun!

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

http://jmm.org.au/

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