O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! – Luke 13:34

No related posts.

The Body of Christ, Given For You – John 6.51-58

The First and the Last – Mark 9:30-37, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

Divine Impossibilities – Mark 10.17-31

Impermanence – Mark 13:1-8, Daniel 12:1-3, Hebrews 10.11-18

I’ve been promised that some audio has been recorded for 2010, but video is also in the works and I’m excited to get that put online when it’s available.

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3. Streaming DVD playback with VideoLAN

(via JR Woodward)

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Yes, that makes me a ginormous slacker.

But after seeing the photos my friends took on their recent excursion to the Holy Land, I wanted to stitch together the panoramic photos I took. Some of them stitched up really well! Clicking the link will take you to a massive full-size version.

Caesarea Mauritima

The theater at Caesarea Mauritima

Aqueduct at Caesarea Maritima

A view from the cable car at the top of Masada

Herod's northern palace on Masada

From the shore of the Sea of Galilee

Peter's house in Capernaum

Huge scale model of Jerusalem at the time of Christ

The Dome of the Rock

Basilica of the Annunciation

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Site Picks from Pretty Good Lutherans

Susan at Pretty Good Lutherans has a nice little list of some good ELCA websites. Unfortunately, it’s buried in the sidebar way down the page. But it’s worth clicking through and having a look at some of the sites. These aren’t perfect – for example, the SE Pennsylvania Synod’s domain name is “MinistryLink.org,” which isn’t particularly appropriate to a specific synod’s site, and they’re still a little jargony, but they are definitely a cut above the rest and deserving of a good long look.

She’s also got a list of “Makeover Needed” sites, with two seminaries topping the list (and I’d add more, personally.) Jennifer reminds me that I should link ChurchMarketingSucks.com, a long-running blog that has developed a great, professional community offering free feedback on site designs for churches and parachurch organizations (look for the Flickr group).

Last but not least, the newly formed 8bit network is doing some great work in blogging about church outreach and marketing with technology across a number of sites. It’s new, but has a lot of great potential and I’m watching it closely. Here’s an example of a recent post on website design at ChurchCreate – not that the article itself has a thousand great new ideas, but because it offers them in a condensed format, and has already gathered a great community that comments on the articles. Definitely worth subscribing.

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Lessons Learned

There is room for categories and tags on a blog. About a year ago, I was struggling with the role of categories on the site, and I decided to abandon categories in favor of tags only. It took me quite a while to go through and re-categorize all those hundreds of old articles.

Microblogging belongs on microblogs. I tried to use a category for “Asides” to format small, microblog-worthy tidbits for easier consumption. Turns out I didn’t use it very often, and most of my posting of links happens on Twitter and Facebook.

Better to launch early than not at all. It was hard launching this one when I did, but if I didn’t, I’d spend a month tweaking and tweaking until it was “perfect.” Then I’d probably find a flaw after launching it anyway.

Disqus is a great platform for comments. The Wordpress plugin for Disqus makes it really easy to connect to this comment system, and it gives your visitors the ability to use their Twitter or Facebook accounts to log in and comment on your site. I wish I’d known about it sooner.

Questions? Comments on the new design? I’d love to hear from you below.

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For US Cellular, if your phone number is 815-555-1212, your email address to receive text messages is 8155551212@email.uscc.net. Other carriers have the same feature, here is a huge chart for figuring out your own address. You still have to fit into the 160 character limit, so remember to turn off your signature line if you have one, drop the formalities, and keep it very terse (including the subject line). Here’s an example:

Subject: CGH
New: John Doe 315-1, Claude Bawls CCU
Old: Seymour Butts 412-2

If you go over 160 characters don’t worry, as you’ll probably just get two text messages instead of one. This has been a great help for us to know what’s going on when we’re away from church through the day.

Include your own tips for making the most of cell phones in ministry in the comments section below!

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I don’t know about you, but sometimes Martin Luther’s famous advice to “remember your baptism” rings awfully hollow for someone like me, who was baptized as an infant and, frankly doesn’t remember his baptism. Now I fully understand that he really means “remember that you are baptized.” And I fully support infant baptism: after all, in Holy Baptism, as in all of salvation, it is God doing the work, and it’s not up to my power or ability to choose. Especially this year, though, I have been looking for ways to claim baptism in a deep way.

For Ash Wednesday, the theme we had chosen was “confession,” and I was led to see an opportunity to connect Holy Baptism, confession, and absolution together in a powerful way. Here’s what we did:

The Concept

Worshipers are given squares of white fabric, which represents the traditional white baptismal garment, and water soluble fabric marking pens, which represent sin. During the sermon, they are invited to make a brief confession by writing a few words on their square of fabric. After receiving the imposition of ashes, a sign of their repentance, they proceed to the baptismal font, where they dunk their fabric in the water and see their sins washed away and the purity of baptism restored. Afterward, worshipers are invited to carry the cloth with them throughout the Lenten season as a reminder that they are baptized.

Before the Service

These instructions are based on some hindsight – we didn’t do it exactly this way, but if you choose to do this next year, you can benefit from what we learned.

1. Obtain a few yards of white cotton fabric from a fabric store. Cut the fabric into 3″ squares. It might help to use pinking shears to prevent the fabric from unraveling.
2. Get some posterboard, and cut it so that the pieces are slightly larger than your fabric pieces. If there’s a key verse in the sermon you want the people to remember, you might print the posterboard with that verse – or the fabric, for that matter, if you can figure out how to do it! Use scotch tape to attach a fabric square to each piece of posterboard, giving a writing surface and preventing bleed-through.
3. Buy a bunch of water soluble fabric pens. You want the water kind (blue), not the air kind (purple). If you have more than one Ash Wednesday service, you’ll want to reserve a few pens because some of your pens will probably wander off. Sometimes you can only find them double sided, with blue on one side and purple on the other – if so, tape the purple cap on tightly so that people won’t use it. While the purple ink will wash out, it’ll take much longer.
   

   True story: one person who ended up with pink ink [oops!] turned to me and said, “I guess my sins don’t wash away so easily!”

4. It’ll be helpful to have a few towels on hand for wet hands and to handle any spills.

During the Service

1. Announce what is going on several times, since this will be new to your congregation. We did this both during the announcements before the service and during the sermon, where the baptismal imagery was unpacked.
2. Remind the congregation to remove the fabric from the posterboard backing. Nothing worse than soggy paper!
3. We found it useful to have one of us do the washing first, facing the congregation so that they could see what is going on. Make sure to show them a little bit of scrubbing, as the ink comes off much faster if you put a little bit of effort in.
4. A long period of silence (2-3 mins) prior to the imposition of ashes will give the people an opportunity to write a confession. We did this right after the sermon.
5. Designate someone to stand near the font holding a towel for peoples’ hands. Don’t have them stand so close that the congregation thinks they can see what’s on their slip of fabric.

Reaction from the Congregation

So many people found this meaningful! Here are some of the public, written comments I’ve received since Wednesday afternoon:

“I brought mine to the office and am going to place it near my computer as a reminder.” – TG

“That was a great experience.” – JS

“Very meaningful, Spirit-filled service!” – BO

“…made for a great learning lesson/devotional tonight before bed.” – CB

What do you think? How would you improve on this idea? Let me know in the comments!

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Response to the Arguments

Javascript makes page load slow

Well, okay, it can, but I use jQuery.ready, which doesn’t. I don’t really care if the TOC is visible the second the page renders, so I’m willing to wait.

DOM manipulation is browser specific

Well, okay, it can, but the DOM is an open W3C standard, and modern browsers do a good enough job that I don’t expect there to be problems. Besides, jQuery sorts out most of the difference that matter.

Javascript doesn’t know about the database

Here I agree. But the objection only applies if you want TOC navigation across pages of a multi-page post. If you need that functionality, I highly recommend the Hackadelic plugin because it will do what you want. But I don’t make multi-page posts, and if I do, I only really need intra-page navigation.

The Freedom Software Model

In the Freedom Software model, most unpaid programmers are just out to scratch an itch – and to share in case someone else has the same kind of itch. There is significant overlap between the Hackadelic plugin and my own, but I’ve got a different itch to scratch, and I designed an elegant little tool to do it. Yes, I could probably scratch my itch well enough with the Hackadelic plugin, but I personally think lightweight and elegant and in-browser are features. The beauty of Freedom Software is that an entire ecosystem of tools can grow up, coexist, borrow ideas, and maybe eventually die off. This is the “bazaar” model.

Conclusion

I was certainly flattered to have the engagement over this, my first Wordpress plugin. Thanks for the constructive engagement and for bring to light that everything we build starts from a set of assumptions and requirements. That kind of critical conversation is what will continue to make Freedom Software great.

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Download

Download from Wordpress Extend

Is this plugin helping you make money? Buy me a cup of coffee!

Installation

1. Upload `jquery-toc.php`, `jquery-toc.css`, and `jquery-toc.js` to the `/wp-content/plugins/jquery-toc/` directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Important! – Configure the Table of Contents to customize it for your theme.

Demo

You’re looking at it. This site has a working example of the plugin. Look at the pink box in the top-right corner of this post.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does this plugin work automatically for every theme?

A: Nope. The default settings provided will work out the box for the Wordpress Default (Kubric) theme. Beyond that, you may have to change settings to get it to work with your theme.

Changelog

• 1.0 – First public release

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