The Wall Street Journal has this interesting article about church “franchises,” based on “brand” models — the pastor is at one location, and appears at the franchises through DVD or video-link.    The focus of the article is Flamingo Road Church, in Florida (f/k/a Flamingo Road Baptist Church), “loosely affiliated with the Baptists.”  Flamingo Road hopes to have 50 churches and a $150,000,000 budget.   That would be equal to the entire 2008 Lottie Moon offering given by 42,000 SBC churches.

We’ve discussed this model before, but this article focuses on international franchises.  Are we on the verge of a global, branded evangelicalism?  Is that a good or bad thing?

A new study finds that $40 billion is being stolen from charities each year, on the order of 13%. Most likely culprit? “A female employee with no criminal record who earned less than $50,000 a year.” On average, she steals less than $40,ooo.

The most costly embezzler? Male executives earning $100,000 to $149,000 a year.

But won’t your audit catch it? No. “Most of these things are not caught by routine audits,” said Gary Snyder, who tracks nonprofit fraud in his newsletter, Nonprofit Imperative. “They’re usually done by someone in the financial area — the treasurer, the bookkeeper, the signer of checks — who knows how to avoid getting caught.”

If your members can’t trust the books, they won’t give — for good reason.  Good stewardship means understanding that audits aren’t enough to form a basis for the kind of trust that propels an effective ministry.

Caelan Cross, son of SBC-blogger Alan Cross, will be having a lymph biopsy this week. Please pray that it is not a return of cancer. More here.

Update: Cancer free!  Hallelujah!

Just what Baptists have always suspected:  dancing in the church causes big problems.  Like radical Islam.     From Mark Steyn, in the Wall Street Journal.

A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

“The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .”

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.

I’m used to a fair amount of e-mail paranoia. The next great computer virus is coming. Madeline Murray O’Hare is back from the dead. Proctor and Gamble’s got a satanist logo. But then I go to Snopes.com, and it’s always wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, I expected the same with this: “There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s [sic] of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.”

But, lo and behold, Snopes says it’s true. “Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview with <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i> that ‘My books are about killing God.’”

An interesting trend: people are demanding more transparency from those they do business with. http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/transparency.htm

“Leave it to an ever growing number of whistleblower sites, leaked emails, activist portals and disgruntled consumers to name and shame corporations for stupid, unlawful, unclean, greedy, unethical, despicable behavior.”

The rising generation expect more and more transparency from those they follow.  Is your congregation meeting this need ? Should it?

Sorry for the light blogging lately.  We’ve had a lot of excitement around our place lately.

Who knew that parenting would be so exciting?  Eating out for dinner with a sleeping infant feels like eating alongside a timebomb.

In some kind of cruel proof of concept, John Piper / desiringgod.org offered Armininans a $5 book sale today (your choice!) — just to show that only the elect can get enough bandwidth to actually make a purchase. . .

Anyone have any luck?

A “push poll” asks someone to make a supposedly unbiased decision by slanting the question. “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Joe if you knew he had killed his grandmother?” Nevermind if Joe’s grandmothers are alive and well.

Imagine the question is more important: would you rather have a baby with Down Syndrome, or terminate the pregnancy? Given that question, apparently, 90% of women choose the latter. But frequently, the question is loaded. Down Syndrome is presented as a irredemably awful outcome, prefaced by “I’m sorry, but….” Abortion, though, with all of its cultural freight, gets presented ambiguously.

Amy Harmon wrote in yesterday’s New York Times about a campaign by parents of children with Down Syndrome, designed to give pregnant women real-life information about raising children with DS. This is because millions more women will have their pregnancies screened for genetic disorders, at the recommendation of the The American College of OB/GYNs. This means more women face a genetic disorder “diagnosis” prior to birth, according to the Times.
Except the tests don’t “diagnose.” They merely reflect an increased risk. Poorly.

For example, if a baby truly has Down Syndrome, the new tests will produce a “positive” result 78% of the time — but falsely show a negative 22% of the time. On the other hand, if the baby does not have Down Syndrome, 5-8% of tests will falsely show a positive. Confused? That’s about as much clarity as doctors can provide, without additional, invasive tests that carry their own set of risks.

But young parents hear “diagnose,” “Down Syndrome” and “terminate?” in the same sentence. If they say “no,” they’re asked if they’re sure. And then, if they’re really sure. With information so poor, presentations so slanted, and pressure so intense, it’s little wonder that 90% of women chose the option presented as some kind of alternative.

Good for these parents, who are reminding us that the numbers being given by doctors are not as important as the faces that go with them.

This morning, I attended a talk by Mark DeVine, at the Blue River/Kansas City Baptist Association’s “Leader Learning Lunch.” Dr. DeVine is writing (at a furious pace) about the good, the bad and the ugly of the “emerging” and “emergent” church. I won’t attempt to re-write what he said, since his papers state his position clearly, but here are a few thoughts that stood out* (below the ‘more’):

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