BestPractices
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June 3, 2009
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 Remember that song, "If I Could Save Time in a Bottle"? Mike Fortune suggests something almost as good. It's called Time Banking, and it seems to me it has tremendous potential to connect people's talents and time with needs.
By the way, Mike also has a blog, called Fortune Cookies, that I enjoy, and you might, too.
What do you think? Check out our Night Owl Forum, now hosted at the new Vervent website, to join the conversation.
Blessings
Loren Seibold,
Editor, Best Practices for Adventist Ministry
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| Best Practices Pastor
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 Banking Time
by Mike Fortune
What's Time Bank? It's a community of people who support each other. Are you great at email and willing to help someone who isn't? Can you help someone with yard work? Are you good at editing or party planning? Earn "Time Dollars" by offering your services to Time Bank! Then, when you need a minor home repair, transportation to a doctor's appointment, or pet care (just for example-there are many options), cash in your "Time Dollars" instead of Googling help, paying someone from the Yellow Pages, or going into debt.
But the coolest thing about Time Bank is entire churches can register as "neighborhoods" online, making the people inside them available to each other and to the community. Not only does this archive and organize the talents and spiritual gifts of the members of a church, it also gives the church access to people in the community who actually need something from you! You won't have to knock on their doors or wonder what their needs are because they'll log in and actually tell you what they need!
We at Toledo First offered Time Bank all the ordinary things we already do, like movie nights, singing bands, potluck lunches, storytelling (think VBS or Kids Church) as ways for others in the community to come spend their time dollars. With their permission, we'll also be posting the passions and talents of people in our church who are willing to "tithe their time." We'll allow others in the community to join our "neighborhood" long before they belong, if ever, to our church.
If you contact Time Banks USA, they'll send you a start-up kit.
Time Banks USA
5500 39th St NW
Washington, DC 20015
www.timebanks.org
(202) 686-5200
What do you think about Time Bank? Have you tried it? How has it worked for you?
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Reading For Pastors
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Who of my generation could have imaged that General Motors would fail? Monte Sahlin has a thoughtful commentary about what GM's failure means to the church. Quote: "No institution can ignore changes in the world around it, make
decisions that suit the established leadership on the basis of internal
considerations and traditions, and hope to survive in substantially the
same form forever.... Religious organizations have no exemption to this reality.."
Three stories referencing Roman Catholicism:
Dan Serns takes on the joy stealers in church. Quote: "It's been a wonderful Sabbath morning. 'Pastor, that really blessed me' says one
member. A hundred people are affirming. The
last person in line stops, looks you in the eye, draws back a little,
wrinkles his nose and says 'Who taught you how to preach?' What are you tempted to think about all Sabbath afternoon?"
Tired of Christians being the punching bag for atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens? A piece in Newsweek gives Christians some ammunition in the God debate. A review of Robert Wright's smart book The Evolution of God.
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| Resource Review
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 Book Review
Great Stories for Gaining Decisionsby Louis TorresGreat Stories for Gaining Decisions is a long-over-due publication filling a need in our church today. College
graduates and dedicated laymen alike have grappled for decades with
statements such as "the secret of our success and power as a people
advocating advanced truth will be found in making direct, personal
appeals" and "at the close of every meeting, decisions should be called
for." Now, Louis Torres, a doyen of evangelism training and soul
winning around the globe, has shared both his techniques and expertise
in a book which must become a classic in this field. No soul winner should be without this effective how-to-do-it book in his or her library. - Reviewed by Bruce Price |
| To the Point
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The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
- Lewis Thomas
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
- Jules Renard
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
- Ray Bradbury
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as 'postmodern' the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a 'scratch' video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the 'intertextual' relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the 'metaphysics of presence' a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the 'predicament of reflexitivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the 'de-centring' of the subject, an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the 'implosion of meaning', the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a 'media', 'consumer' or 'multinational' phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of 'placelessness' or the abandonment of 'placelessness' (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates: when it becomes possible to describe all these things as 'postmodern' (or more simply using a current abbreviation as 'post' or 'very post') then it's clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.
- Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light
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News, Ideas & Reminders
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News reports have said that Scott Roeder, murderer of the Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, is a Sabbath-keeper. But according to Marty Weber, communication director in Mid-America, Roeder is not a Seventh-day Adventist. "A search of denominational
records reveals that no one with the last name of Roeder is a
Seventh-day Adventist in the Mid-America Union. Nobody we know in our
territory has ever heard of Scott Roeder," writes Marty.
- This is a value: this summer
Allan Martin is offering the Graduate Certificate in Family Life Education via intensive
courses at
50% off the normal tuition price. These are 2 one-week intensives, July
12-17 & 19-24, at Andrews University. They'll be taught by leading national experts including
Dr. Rene Drumm of Southern Adventist University and Dr. Curtis Fox of
Loma Linda University. The goal is to develop strong
healthy families in the church and the community. Contact:
reled@andrews.edu
or go to http://www.growingdisciples.info.
- Innovative Impact 2009 promises to be the best conference yet. Every
stop has been pulled out to create a leadership experience that impacts
your life and leadership well after the conference is over.Innovative Impact is not designed for a Pastor to come alone. It is
deliberately geared for pastors and the key members of their church
leadership teams to share and grow together over two days sitting under
some of the most insightful leaders in the "frontline" church today. Registration is available right now for this leadership event that will be held in Nashville October 11-13.
Got a tool, resource, site, article, idea or seminar that you like a lot? Share it with us at BestPractices@ameritech.net. |
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Upcoming NAD Events
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- SEEDS conference 2009: June 8-13, 2009, at Andrews University.
- SEEDS house church summit: June 10-13, 2009 at Andrews University
- InMinistry Center CE classes (advanced degrees for pastors); summer classes, Andrews, July 19-30
- AU 2009 Family Celebration Sabbath, featuring Mark Laaser on sexual addictions, July 27-18
- Vervent/UCAA Music and Worship Conference, September 17-19, Atlanta
- Innovative Impact, October 11-13, Nashville
- NAD-IAD Health Summit Orlando 2010 -January 24 - February 7
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Best Practices is a Vervent publication of NAD CHURCH RESOURCE CENTER. Editor: Loren Seibold, Senior Pastor, Worthington Ohio Seventh-day Adventist Church. E-mail:
Best Practices. You are free to republish pieces from Best Practices in your own
newsletter or blog, with attribution to the Best Practices newsletter and the
author of the piece. |
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