I’m sure everybody has their pet peeves when it comes to things their pastor does that you wish they would stop. I was reminded of a practice that pastors do the other day that annoy me and border on being unethical. A man came to visit me the other day who was from out of town and came to visit our church while he was on vacation.

He was telling me a bit about his church- that they just called a pastor from another state and when he was hired he “brought in his own youth guy”.  That got me thinking about all the other stuff that annoy me that Southern Baptists do that many people don’t call them out on. For example:

Going on dates is getting expensive!  I spent $18 for tickets, $20 on a babysitter, and because my wife didn’t eat dinner before the movie $10 on a medium drink and popcorn! That is the LAST time we’ll do movies like that again.

Okay, enough with the rant. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (or HPATHBP) broke away from the pack of Potter films with this new entry. The mystery element fast-paced action of past movies both took a back seat to an element that was only touched upon in most of the other movies:  relationships. It was something that both the book and the movie took a chunk of time out to focus on and, for the most part, it worked.

When I accepted the job as part-time youth pastor at my church, I knew that I was going to have to get a second job right away. So, After a few months of sending out resumes, I finally had landed a job as the night manager at Chic Fil A.  I didn’t know what I was getting into when I accepted the job. After all, I told the owner it would take me three months to truly learn not only the ins and outs of working for chic fil a, but also the ins and outs of being a manager.  I had “manager” experience, but only as a pastor- never as a business operator.

Anyway, after six weeks, I could tell this was not the job for me, so I made the hard decision to quit. And let me tell you, my boss was not sad to see me go. I found out the hard way what leadership and employable skills I was lacking. After I quit, I decided to write down the things I learned while I was there.

When I was seven years old, my mom told me that for doing something good (I can’t remember what it was: a good grade, completing some chore), she would bring home a surprise for me. Well, she did. She bought me my first Transformer, Ravage. The transformer that could transform into a jaguar and a cassette tape.  Although there are much cooler Transformers that I liked more than him, Ravage holds a special place on Nathan’s memory lane, just because it was my mom who knew me well enough to know what would make an awesome reward for a job well done.

Never in a million years would I ever imagine that I’d see a live-action Ravage on the big screen. And it was worth the 22 year wait. Unfortunately, that was one of the few things worth seeing in this new edition to the Transformers universe.

“Now, let’s be fair…”

No, let’s not. In fact, let’s give fairness a good swift kick in the…

Sometimes I bemoan the cheeziness of youth ministry. I’m all for having fun and being relevant to an extent, but I have seen some real doozies in my time. Worship leaders, youth pastors, speakers, etc who really give youth ministry a bad name are peppered all over the country.

This video is a great satire that exposes all that is wrong with the cheeze factor of youth ministry. It’s like the cameramen from The Office came and did a documentary about youth ministry. It’s a wince-inducing satire that, quite frankly is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Check it out:

Christian writers have a tendency to run in similar circles. Emergent church guys run in the same circles, reformed guys run in the same circles, church growth experts run in the same circles, etc. You get the idea. So, it was just a matter of time that I would end up reading Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations. Many of the guys I read have read and recommend reading this book. The endorsements alone should make one want to read the book. It is a who’s who of conservative evangelicals. Chuck Colson, John Piper, Al Mohler, Randy Alcorn, C.J. Mahaney, Mark Dever, Joshua Harris (of couse), and Joel Belz (founder of World Magazine) are just some of the names that have signed on in agreement with this book.

Not to mention the foreward is written by none other than Chuck Norris.

This may be the only movie in all of the history of mankind that can be known both as a sequel and a prequel. I guess you can call it a sprequel.

McG, whose name fits more with McDonald’s characters than with serious directors, directed this new installment of the Terminator franchise. And even though it has some serious flaws, I have to give them credit on a few things: