Timothy's Thoughts

T here’s been much talk about visitor parking at churches. Some people are very thrilled with the idea. Some people…not so much. I rode past one of Sikorsky’s buildings the other day and saw a whole row of visitor parking. I jokingly said that we should paint the visitor spaces at church purple, to match the visitor card. But what I noticed about Sikorsky’s visitor spaces was that it was obvious that they were visitor spaces. The background is blue, not purple, but it makes them stand out. It is helped by them being vertical, instead of horizontal. If we’re going to do visitor parking, this may be something to think about. And, I’ll have to say, I’ve read some things that make some very good arguments for visitor parking. Thom Rainer mentions parking in his article “5 Things the Unchurched Notice at Your Church.” So keep in mind, that regardless of what I say here, visitor parking may be a very good thing to have. But let me present a different point of view. Walmart Doesn’t Have Vis...

T here’s a whole city out there that most people have never seen. I moved to Fort Worth in 1997. Having grown up in rural Missouri, my impression of Fort Worth was that it was a big city that wanted to call itself country. This was Cowtown and I went looking for cows on numerous occasions, without much success. What I did find was traffic. Lots and lots of traffic. Being the country boy that I am, I’m not a fan of this thing called rush hour. In the country, when you want to go somewhere, you go. It may take you an hour to get anywhere, but you go and the only thing that might slow you down farm equipment moving from one field to another. I learned to plan my life around traffic and discovered that the city folk did too. But what does that have to do with this unseen city? Traffic in cities tends to flow in these channels that we call freeways. In Fort Worth, we also have these six lane streets that handle large amounts of traffic. Neighborhoods are connected to these major streets, so...

I ’m fascinated by desire paths . In the video below, Tom Hulme discusses designing based on desire paths in dirt. But desire paths aren’t always paths that we can see from satellite photos. Since I do quite a bit or work with websites, I spend a significant amount of time looking at website statistics. In particular, I look at the phrases people type into search engines. There are a number of search phrases that I have targeted. When I see these show up, this tells me that what I’m doing is working. But things get more interesting when I begin looking at the other phrases. Not long ago, on a church website, I saw that someone had visited the site after typing the phrase, “hanging of the greens service ideas.” On one hand, this is of little importance. At some point, the church had positioned itself on this desire path by holding a “hanging of the greens service” and someone posting something about it on the website. You can be sure that the person following this path isn’t going to vi...

F or the past couple of weeks, our Sunday school class has been looking at some of the Apostle Paul’s letters. Now, you may be wondering how Paul’s letters relate to hashtags. Recently, I’ve been seeing hashtags…I mean a lot of hashtags. I’ve been seeing posts with three or four or more hashtags. I see posts where half the post is taken up with hashtags. What do I do? I ignore the post and keep on scrolling. I suspect most other people do as well. We need to think about hashtag strategy, and I think Paul’s epistles can help us with that. Paul’s Form Paul followed a standard form, when he wrote his epistles. This may have been how he was taught to write in school, but it is worth considering. First, he tells the reader who he is. In your Bible you’ll see that all of Paul’s letters begin with the same word. Can you guess what it is? Absolutely right. “Paul” is the first word of every letter. (Hebrews would be an exception, if it is written by Paul.) Next, Paul gives a brief introduction ...

S o, as I’m reading through 1 Corinthians and trying to prepare for a lesson on Sunday, it occurred to me that when we get to chapter twelve, Paul is still dealing with problems. He has just addressed the unfair distribution of the Lord’s supper. Chapter thirteen is going to call for them to place a priority on love. But that usually not the way we address it. Usually, when we see this thing about spiritual gifts, we ask people what their spiritual gift is. We may even send them off with a spiritual gift assessment and when they come back and tell us that they have the “gift of wisdom” or the “gift of prophecy” or whatever it happens to be, we start trying to match them up with some ministry that tends to have a lot of people with the same assessment as they have. Besides the fact that the Bible tells us nothing about what circles to fill in for each of the spiritual gifts, what does that have to do with problems? It seems to me that Paul is stating what he seems to think is obvious to...

S ome years ago, following a committee meeting at church, I made a sarcastic comment to a friend about what had been discussed. I don’t remember what I said, or what had been discussed in the meeting. What I do recall is that I found myself summoned to a meeting at church, a few days later. I show up at this meeting, not even thinking about the earlier conversation. But when I got there, the door closed and the conversation began, “Someone told me that you’re upset.” So much for my idea that this meeting had something to do with a project I working on at the time. For the next hour or so, we discussed this thing that I didn’t want to discuss at all. A simple offhand comment had turned into a position that I was expected to defend and my attempts to dismiss the whole thing did nothing to bring the conversation to a close. All from me just thinking aloud. I learned something from that. Venting is not allowed. Never say something that you aren’t willing to defend. I was looking for someon...