Misc Thursday

"A focus on the church service as connecting point perpetuates the idea that following Jesus is about going to church." Read more from Ryan. HT Jordon

DCist maps - Google maps of DC with overlays of the Metro lines.

People particularly want to know if Aslan comes off as a Christ-figure, or just some warm and fuzzy magic lion. Well, I personally cried every moment Aslan was on the screen. But then, I walked in with my character development done by my Jesus thing. I so wanted to be Lucy and Susan, with their heads resting on his body on the stone table. I wonder if people who don't love Jesus will feel the same? So, I am going to say that Aslan is absolutely discernible as a figure of Jesus -- for those who have eyes to see.

From Barb who has seen a prescreen of Narnia

In December 1800, after seven years of missionary labor, Carey baptized his first convert...
...over the next 28 years, he and his pundits translated the entire Bible into India's major languages: Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, and Sanskrit and parts of 209 other languages and dialects.
By the time Carey died, he had spent 41 years in India without a furlough. His mission could count only some 700 converts in a nation of millions, but he had laid an impressive foundation of Bible translations, education, and social reform.

An article about William Carey, one of the first missionaries to India. A few things that article didn't mention about him - he was a botanist, conservationist, writer, father of printing technology in India, first to make indigenous paper, astronomer, started libraries, introduced the steam engine to India, a shoemaker, etc. Yup, amazing stuff. Another older article about him here.

MTI - Mission Training International. They have an intriuging debrief program called DAR - Debrief and Renewal, where it is on site, lasts for a week and done in the context of community. Would be fun to go and learn from them.

I just changed my delicious 'missions' link on the sidebar. It used to be a link to the rss feed, so that you could just plop it into your newsreader. But I think it might be more useful as just the straight browser link. If you really wanted the rss, there is a link to that at the bottom of the page. And for those of you that don't use del.icio.us, you really should.