See the times and venues for all the ACL 2007 bands here.
Author: Jonathan Dodson
Coldplay's New Website
Coldplay’s new website uses a timeline to offer audio, lyrical insights, and various facts about the band.
Cultural Diversity and Community
Here are some recent reflections from Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, on the obstacles to community in highly diverse towns and cities:
What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?
This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
What is your experience? Do diverse places foster alienation and isolation?
HT:RF
Things I Wish I'd Known When I Planted My Church (Chris Elrod)
1. Half of your core team will leave you in the first year. I heard other church planters say this, but I didn’t believe it. Going into year two I had already lived it. At present we only have one couple from our original core group. Some moved out of town…others lost the vision…others never got it in the first place.
2. Never pick staff from outside the church. I kept trying to bring in staff members from the outside. They were already “ruined” by other churches and just couldn’t grasp the concept of what God called us to do. We have had much better luck by recruiting staff from within Compass Point.