Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

Rev. Albert Collver – Assistant to the LCMS President has a nice post that fits with my theme “Free Internet Tools That Really Work.”  What I like about the post is how it blends the old with the new.  Also nicely featured is a surprise. Rev. Collver writes:

While I have used Google Books for scholarly papers, I never really considered using it for genealogy. Google scanned in all sorts of public documents, including wills, court records, local histories, et al. It is amazing what can be found online. Just a few years ago, quite a lot of research and hunting in indexes would need to be done just to find a book.

Here’s the link to his article: http://abc3miscellany.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-books-and-genealogy-will-of-john.html

There are lots of free and very useful tools on the web.  Go out and find them use them and let me know what you find.

Pastor Jonathan C. Watt

Depending on where you are and how well the church records have been kept, you may have a wealth or a dirth of information to use in writing a funeral sermon.  What you will almost always have is birth date, death date, and if you’re lucky, baptism and confirmation dates.  By using that information and whatever else you can glean (livelihood of parents, etc.) and what you can find online, you can come up with a very personal funeral sermon.

I am not, of course, saying that the sermon is about the deceased.  It isn’t.  We preach Christ and Him crucified.  But at a funeral, you are preaching about Christ and Him crucified for a particular person.  That’s where the Internet can be a great gift.

As I prepare funeral sermons (especially for the elderly), I’ve found two sites to be absolutely indispensable:

1.  Sanctus.org:   Just looking at this site in a straightforward way, it gives you the upcoming readings for the historic lectionary in the current liturgical year.  It tells you when Easter is going to be, and such.  But it’s much, much, more than that.  Stan Lemon has produced an algorithm that can give you the liturgical calendar for any year.

If you go to sanctus.org, you will see a calendar for the current year.  If you then click on the right or the left arrow on the side of the month, you will be moved to a page with an address something like this:  http://sanctus.org/lectionary.html?month=01&year=2011

If you look at the last part of the address, you can see how you can find information about the year in which a saint was born.

Look for example at this link.  Here you will see the liturgical calendar for March of 1932.  Two years ago, as I was writing a funeral sermon, I learned that Fred had been confirmed on March 20th, 1932.  By pulling up the calendar at sanctus.org, I was able to learn that Zion Lutheran Church in Accident, Maryland used to traditionally do the rite of confirmation on Palm Sunday.  This information was very helpful to me as I served a vacancy at that congregation and buried eight of their members.

Sanctus.org can also tell you what readings a pastor probably used at a baptism, confirmation, etc.  It is a joy to consider some of the texts that may have been important in the liturgical life of someone who has died.

2.  Wikipedia.org.  Fred was born on November 11th, 1918.  To find out what was going on in the world then, I went here.  Wikipedia has a page like this for every year.  It’s very helpful to know what was going on when someone was born.

On the basis of the information I was able to glean from sanctus.org and wikipedia.org (and in just a few minutes) as well as little smidgens I heard at the funeral visitation, I was able to write this introduction to my funeral homily for the next day:

“Alta, Robert, James, Debbie, Leslie, Brett, Dennis, Jeffrey, Gladys, Ruth, family and friends of Fred —.  Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Fred was born on the last day of World War I.  When Jonas and Laura — celebrated the birth of their beloved son, the world celebrated that the war that had taken ten million lives was coming to an end.

“On a Tuesday, just a month and a half later, the joy went up from earth into heaven when Jonas and Laura brought Fred to the waters of baptism.  On that day God put His Own Name on Fred by the waters of Holy Baptism.  On that day Fred became not just the child of Jonas and Laura but a child of God Himself.  The Holy and Blessed Trinity gave Fred the gift of faith on that day.  He was washed in the blood of Christ, and he received the gifts of life and salvation in which he lived throughout his earthly life and which he enjoys even now.

“On that day there was joy in the presence of the angels.  Fred’s Savior, Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, rejoiced that another little one had been snatched from the clutches of death and hell and brought into His fold.

“After Fred’s baptism, his parents faithfully brought him to church and Sunday School here at Zion.  His mother taught him to pray when he went to bed.  Every night Fred would say, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

“Fred was able to pray this prayer with confidence.  The confidence wasn’t because of Fred’s faith, though he had it.  It wasn’t because Fred was growing into a devout young man, though he was.  Fred was able to pray with confidence because of who His Savior was.  Jesus had won every good gift of life and salvation for Fred when He bore his sins to the cross and suffered the penalty that Fred deserved.

“As Fred grew in years, he was instructed in the Christian faith and confessed it on the day he was confirmed at the age of thirteen on Palm Sunday.  After Fred’s confirmation, God continued to give Fred great and wonderful gifts.  Fred received into His mouth His Lord’s true body and blood, and when Fred received this gift, he also received all that God promises to give through it:  the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.”

From here I talked a little bit about Fred’s wife, children, work, and hobbies (about two paragraphs).  Then I transitioned with these words:

“But all Fred’s virtue could not prevent the hand of death from closing around him this past Friday.  During all of those years, and even while God was giving Fred all of those blessings, death was lying in wait.  Death was there because Fred was a sinner.

“From the moment that Fred had been conceived, he had been soiled with iniquity.  Even on the day of his birth, Fred was a sinful man in need of the Lord’s mercy.  And sin longed to pay Fred its wages.  Those wages, as we know, are death.  And so now, ninety years later, the grave has claimed Fred.

“This brings us to today’s Old Testament reading from Hosea. “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”  Hosea gives us the Lord’s answer to death.”

What follows is the bulk of the sermon, and you can probably guess where it’s heading.  The cross and our Lord’s resurrection.

The Internet has provided us with some wonderful tools that can be used to add a personal touch to our funeral homilies.  By preaching the specificity of the person who has died, we are also able to preach the specificity of the Savior who has done all that is necessary for their salvation.

Now for Something Completely Practical.

One of the most important aspects of Pastoral care is the home visit.  I remember old time pastors telling me “A home going pastor makes a church going people.”  While I reject the idea from a theological standpoint (only God working through the Spirit in Word and Sacrament makes peoples’ faith grow) it is true enough from a sociological view.  A congregation whose pastor is regularly in their homes is a congregation who knows the pastor loves them and is concerned for their spiritual welfare.

The problem with home visits?  Scheduling.  Phone call after phone call yields little in the way of appointments.  Cold calls most often fall on empty houses.  Society isn’t just mobile in the sense that people move from community to community, people are active outside of their homes many nights (especially if they have children at home).  I don’t have a solution for the busyness of people.  I do have a simple way to help you plan, schedule and keep track of your visit schedule.  Once again we turn to a free web service “Remember the Milk”.  (http://www.RememberTheMilk.com)

One of the great things about RTM is its simplicity.  As far as to-do lists programs go, this one works the way I use a to-do list.  (Frankly before RTM, I used about a hundred slips of paper shuffled about my desk, this was not organization this was chaos).   It is a testament to RTM’s flexibility that I have found ways to use it that I hadn’t planned.

Scheduling Home Visits with Remember the Milk.

I’m going to outline three steps here to help you create and maintain a visit schedule using the free web service Remember the Milk.

Continue reading

Lectionary at Lunch at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

You don’t get more geeky than the internet and original language bible study.  Well, I’m a geek and proud of it.  Next in my series on “Free Internet Services that Really Work” is Concordia Seminary St. Louis’ “Lectionary at Lunch.”  When I was a lowly Seminary student every Wednesday I used to sit at the feet of the Exegetical (bible study from the original languages) Professors  at lunch time and listen to them translate and explain the Old Testament (in Hebrew) and the Gospel Lesson (in Greek) for the upcoming Sunday’s readings in church.  It was a great way to prepare for when my teachers called on me to translate passages of the bible in class.

When I became a pastor I discovered that keeping up on translating the bible for preaching became very difficult.  The parish ministry has many demands on a pastor’s time.  Unfortunately, it’s very easy to let the deep study of God’s Word in the original languages slide because it is very time consuming.  The thing is, in preparing to be a pastor that kind of deep study was a daily occurrence.  I spent countless hours parsing verb, diagramming sentences, and memorizing vocabulary.  None of that time spent was useless as it has paid off in spades every time I open the texts in Hebrew and Greek.  As one of my professors said, “Reading the bible in English is like kissing your wife through cellophane.” (I think it was Gibbs).

Enter Lectionary at Lunch.  In the old days those lunch reading sessions were recorded and posted to the internet for download.  Now they are podcast and available through many different channels on the net (see list below).  They have since removed the Lunch and added the Epistle reading.

Lectionary at Lunch is no substitute for personal deep original language study of scripture but it is a great way to begin preparation for preaching.  The professors read and translate the texts from the Lutheran Service Book Three Year Lectionary and then add a few suggestions for preaching.  One of the best features is the variety of ideas and emphasis that come across as the Exegetical professors take turns in the task.

As a side benefit, a busy pastor is able to keep his hand in the original languages even when his schedule is packed.

Concordia Seminary Web Site http://www.csl.edu/Resources_AudioVideo_LectionaryatLunch.aspx

Concordia Seminary on iTunes

http://itunes.csl.edu/

Pr. Jonathan C. Watt

Open DNS Logo

A few months ago (back in December), Google rolled out Google Public DNS and it encouraged people to use it for a faster Internet experience. This was the first time for many that the term DNS became a household word. DNS stands for Domain Name System (click for Wikipedia Entry). DNS is sort of like a phone book for computers on the Internet. It looks up the web address that you type in and turns that into a number computers can use to locate the website. For instance, when you type “google.com” into your web browser address bar, DNS turns that into the number 72.14.213.147. If you enter that number in your web browser, you will go to Google’s home page. Without DNS, we would have to type in a series of numbers for every web page that we visited — sort of like looking up the name in a phone book and punching in the number on the phone.

So why would you want to use Google’s Public DNS or another service like OpenDNS?

The two basic answers to this question are speed up your Internet experience and improve security.

A third answer is available if you use a service like OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com) – web filtering. This is a great option if you have children at home who have access to the Internet. Both of my kids have Nintendo DSi’s that can access the Internet. The Nintendo DSi has a web browser built by Opera on it. My nine year old son likes to search YouTube and Google for funny videos like boys making funny noises or things blowing up, etc. It isn’t too hard to imagine him typing in something “innocent” and receiving a picture or video that is completely inappropriate or downright nasty. Or he might hear something on the playground at school or on the bus and type it in … next you know, something you don’t want the kids exposed to is on the screen. While every parent should supervise their kids on the Internet, it isn’t possible to do it every moment — especially if your kids have a portable device that can access the Internet. OpenDNS solves that problem for our family. If the kids accidentally (or purposely) type in something inappropriate, the web page is automatically blocked based on criteria my wife and I set. All in all there are about 50 different categories that can be blocked ranging from academic fraud (paper mills) to gambling to lingerie to sexual themes. In addition to these sorts of categories, OpenDNS automatically blocks illegal activities and malware.

OpenDNS has two basic options that will interest the home user: the free account and the $9.95 per year (that’s right — per year) Deluxe account that gives you more customizable options. Besides the “custom” option, where you decide by selecting from 50 categories what to block, there are four basic pre-set options: High, Moderate, Low, and None. High level filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters. Moderate filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity. Low filtering: Protects against pornography. None: Blocks nothing, but still offers the benefits of faster DNS service and malware protection, etc. With the Deluxe version you can add Whitelisted sites, etc. My house uses the “Moderate filtering” option with some minor customization.

One of the best things about OpenDNS (besides its price) is that it requires no special software, etc. Instead, you change the settings in your router to point to the OpenDNS servers. This provides protection to any computer, even guests’ computers, in your house. So you don’t have to worry about your children’s friends coming into your house with their computer or portable Internet device and downloading the latest album or movie leaving you to get in trouble with the RIAA or a large fine to pay for piracy.

The Internet offers many wonders but also many dangers for the family. It is great to have a tool like OpenDNS for the home to help keep your family safe from bad and dangerous things on the Internet. Another advantage is faster Internet surfing, protection from Malware and illegal activities. Considering you can use it for free, go give OpenDNS a try.

(originally posted here)

– Rev. Albert B. Collver, Ph.D.

Books for the spring quarter.

Pastors have lots of books. Despite the advent of more and more digital works, theology by in large remains in the print domain and our libraries continue to grow. The question before us is how do we manage our ever-growing libraries?

While some have their own organizational methods and can exist without using technology, many of us have to use digital tools to manage our libraries. These library managers will used to track your number of books, where they are located, who you have loaned them to, and how much you have spent on your books (don’t show your wife). Some of the software can also track your DVD and CD collections and some even can track your tool collection. Tracking your “stuff” can be helpful if you ever need to file an insurance claim. No more guessing, simply hand the adjuster your list of goods lost (stored off site of course as a backup).

Library Managers are easily found through a google search. Here is what you need to look for:

• Auto Searching. Most library management programs reach out to services such as Amazon.com to gather information based on your search parameters. More advanced programs also reach out to services like the Library of Congress to gather even more information. The most common search variables are titles and ISBN numbers.
• Auto fill. You want the software to accurately fill in data from the above web services.
• Available Fields. Some software offers more fields than others. A helpful program gives you plenty of options for importing information.
• Export Functionality. While you may love your software now, you may hate it in a year. However, if the software you used doesn’t allow for easy exporting you may be stuck with the software unless you want to manually reenter all of your books again.
• Print Services. It is best if you can both print out a list of your books and also print labels if you are so inclined.

Like I said, a quick google search can turn up many options for management. I’d like to highlight a few of these programs.

If you are interested cloud computing LibraryThing might be of interest to you. It allows you to catalog your books and make your library searchable and by others. It is free to catalog up to 200 books. Beyond that you can pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. This is a growing service with one major downside. If you don’t have internet, you don’t have the service available. One cool feature is that you can buy a CueCat Scanner to quickly scan your books. You can also share your library and view the library of others.

Desktop Options (Mac focused):

Delicious Library is the most popular piece of software out there in this category. It has a slick interface and is very user-friendly. It uses the iSight camera available on most Macs to scan barcodes and import the information from Amazon.com. This program has a number of options including books, music, tools, and even clothes. I used this for my first three years of mac ownership, but switched after I had some library corruption issues that weren’t able to be fixed. Delicious Library currently retails for $40.

Another option is Bookpedia by Bruji. Bookpedia has a nice clean interface at the inexpensive price of $18. Bruji offers three companion applications to Bookpedia: CDpedia, DVDpedia, and Gamepedia. You are able to bundle applications together to lower cost which also allows you to get what you need (for example, I don’t catalog my CDs). Bruji’s website includes a number of user-created plugins that give access to more functionality beyond what most users will want/need.

My current choice of library management software is Booxter from Deep Prose Software. It doesn’t have the most eye popping interface but it is a powerhouse for managing my books. I now have over 1,000 books in the program and it doesn’t slow down at all. What I love about Booxter is the ability to do what I want with the software. It easily searches both the Library of Congress and Amazon.com to get information. I can quickly add in information about purchase price and retail price. One huge feature of this program is that it allows me to specify if a person is an author, editor, illustrator, or translator. Somehow, this feature is lacking in many other pieces of cataloging software. After I get all this information imported I can print labels or print lists. Unlike Delicious Library, Booxter does not catalog multiple media types in the same window. Instead you have multiple libraries. I have two now: one for books and the other for DVDs. Booxter retails for $49.99.

There is one last piece of software I think deserves mention: Librarian Pro from Koingo Software. I want to mention this because it seems to be a stable and feature rich program and also is cross-platform (both Windows and Mac). It comes at a great price: $19.95 for a single-user license and $7.95 for a single-user educational license.

Smart Phone Resources

For those of you with smartphones such as the iPhone there are some dedicated apps out there. However, the ability to integrate the above programs with an iPhone are somewhat limited. Amazon.com, who provides much of the data for these programs, limits what can be synced with a phone. Both Delicious Library and Bruji had iPhone apps which removed from the app store at the request of Amazon. You can export your library as a PDF and store it on your phone.

Summary

Like I said in my introduction, some of you can exist without this software. I cannot. If these programs interest you download them and take the demos for a spin. If you have any other program suggestions especially on the Windows side of things, leave a comment and we can add them to the article.

by Rev. Charles R. Lehmann

I am the pastor of a very small rural church near Accident, Maryland.  Our weekly attendance varies between forty and sixty.  It is a lovely group of people who have been faithfully receiving the gifts of God for the past 146 years.  There are a number of challenges that a congregation like Saint John’s faces.  One of the most significant is visibility.

Our neighboring LCMS congregation is right on the main drag.  You cannot drive through Accident without seeing Zion.  It’s absolutely impossible.  We are a mile off of the main drag.  Unless you know we’re here, you’ll never just happen to drive past.  Visibility is an issue for us, and the Internet has been a great blessing in increasing our visibility.  In the less than a year since we’ve put up the website below we’ve had 6 visitors and 4 new members who came simply because of this website.  For a congregation our size, that’s an enormous blessing.

The challenge, however, is extreme.  How can a small struggling congregation have a decent web presence when they have practically no money available for such things?

Website of Saint John's Lutheran Church, LCMS, Accident, MD

In this post, I hope to help answer that question.

Continue reading

Rev. Jonathan C. Watt
Trinity Lutheran Church, Creston, IA

I’m not really a list keeper.  Well, at least I never was before.  But put a guy in a church with no secretary and you have to keep lists; prayer lists, visit lists, board agenda items, thank you notes to send, “to dos” for everything from newsletter article ideas to sermon illustrations to remember.  So, what’s a forgetful pastor to do?  I’ve tried them all.  Post-it notes are great but they don’t always stay where they are put.  And you can’t haul your computer monitor with you to a meeting.  The paper to-do note pad works but it’s either too large to carry everywhere or small enough to get lost, and a forgetful pastor like me often forgets where he put it.  Oh and don’t forget, you actually have to look at the paper list to remember what’s on it.  I’ve tried PDAs. They work well but good ones just cost too much.  And if you have a cell phone who wants to carry two devices?  It doesn’t take long to feel like Batman with a utility belt.  Now I must admit new cell phones look to be merging into very useful tools that will do a lot for the forgetful pastor.  But again the cost can be a factor.  Here’s one solution that I’ve found that is actually free (with internet access).   It doesn’t solve all the portability problems but there are some slick features that make it work well for me.  The answer http://RememberTheMilk.com

Remember The Milk is an online web service for managing your “to do” lists and more.  Here’s the description of the service from the provider:

Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

One of the strengths of RTM is that it is available wherever you have access to the internet.  (BTW that includes access from your cell phone browser at http://m.RemembertheMilk.Com).  But even more than that is the feature rich, easy to use interface.  Oh, did I mention that a basic account is free!  I’ve been using the service for years.  The basic free account does all that I need and more.

Here’s just a sample.  I use Remember The Milk to track my Sunday morning prayer list.  I make an entry for each prayer request using a label at the beginning (i.e. “Cancer: John Doe”).  That way all the requests for “cancer” are sorted together.  I set the due date for the Sunday the prayers will be done.  Now I can easily list the prayers for Sunday by searching by due date.  But even more than that, RTM has a very rich natural language way of setting how you items to repeat.  Usually I set prayers to repeat “every Sunday for 3 times” or “every Sunday until 1 Dec 09”.  After the Sunday list is printed I mark the prayers a completed and they repeat the next Sunday as I have specified.

Sunday morning announcements are done in a similar fashion.  For example I can remember to put an announcement in the bulletin that the Youth Group meets the third Wednesday of the month by having an announcement repeat “Every month on the 3^rd Sunday”.

Here is a list of a few other things I track with RTM.  Items I want to discuss at meetings.  Books I’ve let out.  People I need to contact.  Shutins I’ve visited with communion.

Here’s a short list of other features in Remember the Milk.  You can have an unlimited number of lists.  The user interface if very intuitive.  Items can “tagged” with keywords to make searching and sorting easier.  The system can remind you via eMail and SMS messages of due items.

There are many more features that make Remember The Milk a very useful program to use and one that I depend on every day.

Pastor Jonathan Watt.

Since this is the beginning of the Church Year, it seems appropriate to ask the question of how one keeps track of the liturgical cycle on your computer.  I am all in favor of keeping and planning these things in advance as much as possible.  There are numerous ways to do this.  We’ll start with the three year series, and then do the one year series.

First of all, the LCMS Commission on Worship has provided Word Documents for the three-year lectionary that include all of the dates and other information available.  You may find all of those available online by CLICKING HERE.

If you prefer to go “old school,” Concordia Publishing House has a really nice chart available for your use HERE.

CPH has also done a fantastic job of making the three-year lectionary available in both Google Calendar, Outlook & iCal.  Go HERE to find them.

Another wonderful resource is that Logos (makers of some of the finest bible software anywhere) has a free lectionary viewer that includes the  one year and three year lectionaries from LSB.  HERE IT IS.

Now on to the one year lectionary:

The LCMS Commission on Worship page has a number of great resources for the one-year lectionary as well.  You’ll find it HERE.

Pastor Mark Schlamann has edited the COW chart and included it with the calendar dates and put them into a nifty color coded Microsoft Excel file.  You can download it here: 09 10 one yr guide

Mr. Stan Lemon maintains a great website called Sanctus.org.  This site includes all of the one year lectionary in calendar format, plus in a Google Calendar that will work with iCal or Outlook or nearly any calendar program.  More than that, he has it setup so that it will link you to specific bible translations.  It is a great site that I highly recommend.  He also has it self so it works very well on an iPhone or any other smart phone with internet access.

Another great program that works with both the one year and three year lectionary is Leitourgia.  It is available in both Windows and Mac formats, and uses many different lectionaries.  You can download a trial copy and try it out to see if you like it.

There are numerous blogs and other sites that provide commentary and other info on the Church Year, but I think this is enough to get us started.  What do you use for the Church Year?