Leading a Bible study Feedback: Part 3

Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at the comments I received in response to my Leading A Bible Study series. So far I have considered the feedback concerning the meeting location and the feedback concerning the discussion portion of the evening.

Today I would like to finish by looking at some of the suggestions I received regarding the conclusion of the meeting.

Homework Frustration

Assigning “homework” or a challenge each week can really help bridge the gap between life inside and outside the Bible study… but, if you’re not careful, it can end up feeling like a burden…

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The Torah and Injil are for mankind!

I’ve often been told that the Torah and the Injil were only for the Jews. However, two problems:

  1. The Qur’an never explicitly tells the Jews to follow the Injil, only the Christians
  2. The Qur’an actually describes both as “guidance for mankind”, even if the translations often try to obscure this:

The Pickthall translation doesn’t hide it:

He hath revealed unto thee (Muhammad) the Scripture with truth, confirming that which was (revealed) before it, even as He revealed the Torah and the Gospel. Aforetime, for a guidance to mankind; and hath revealed the Criterion (of right and wrong). Lo! those who disbelieve the revelations of Allah, theirs will be a heavy doom. Allah is Mighty, Able to Requite (the wrong). – Qur’an 3:3

Thumbnails in Facebook

As you know, I write my blog entries a while before they actually get posted. Since writing this entry I have found better ways of achieving the desired effect using WordPress Plug-ins. However, I decided to post it anyway since I think it’s still quite a neat exercise in tricking computers to do what you want… 🙂

Today is purely a technical blog for my fellow bloggers.

I’ve had a problem that has been bugging me for some time.  If I post a link to a blog entry on Facebook which contains no images, then no thumbnail image is displayed:

I’ve noticed that when I don’t have a thumbnail image, the web traffic generated by people visiting my blog from Facebook seriously declines.

This is particularly problematic for my “Friday Frivolity” posts. Since these entries are usually just a few lines of text and a YouTube video, they have no thumbnails when shared on Facebook.

Tonight, I found a fairly simple solution to this problem…

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Leading a Bible study: Part 4

Today I thought I’d post the fourth part of my five-part series on leading a Bible study. In the earlier posts (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3) I discussed some Do’s and Don’ts of preparation, beginning the meeting and starting the discussion. Today I would now like to continue to discuss some suggested Do’s and Don’ts of guiding the discussion…

DON’T: Sit inappropriately close. It’s kinda creepy 😉

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Tattoo Follow-Up

Last week I shared links to two other blog posts which discussed the issue of Christians getting tattoos. Needless to say, there was quite a lively discussion on my Facebook page! In the discussion, quite a few of my Christian friends shared the stories behind their tattoos and, despite my personal dislike of tattoos, I found the whole things fascinating so I thought it might be a nice idea to do something of a follow-up post…

So, if you are a Christian and have a tattoo, please contact me. I’d invite you to send me a picture of your tattoo, together with a little bit of the story behind it. I’ll then collect them all into a post for next week 🙂

jesus-shepherd-tattoo

 

Hello world…

…and so to my first blog entry. So what’s the point of this blog? Several years ago I blogged fairly regularly about whatever was on my mind, but then Facebook came along and almost overnight I stopped blogging.

Facebook was an infinitely more convenient way of sharing news and photographs with my friends, but my blog served other purposes too. I wrote about my work in software development and about things going on in my spiritual life and, of course, life in general. I intend to re-launch my old blog at some point to write exclusively about technology, but what about everything else?

The title of this blog is “This Restless Pilgrim” and it describes well how I’ve felt over the last few years.  These years have certainly been interesting ones,  filled with uncertainty, adventure, frustration, heartbreak and excitement. I moved to London for the first time and moved around a lot before ultimately leaving England and travelling 5,489 miles away to live in the United States. Living a rather rootless life like this tends to teach you some important life lessons and the whole experience has left me with the feeling that they should be shared.

Also over the last few years I have also found myself increasingly called upon to explain and defend Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Pope Benedict recently spoke about the use of technology to proclaim the faith and search for truth. As a consequence, I would like to share some of my exchanges regarding the faith.

It has been said that a wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others. So, if you would like to learn from my mistakes and get a little wiser (or just feel like having a bit of a laugh at my expense) please feel free to stick around.

Prophet and loss

On Saturday, Harold Camping proved himself to be a false prophet when no rapture materialized…

Three days before the supposed event, I wrote the following:

When the predictions of such groups fail to come true and Jesus inconveniently decides not to turn up, excuses are usually given e.g. “Jesus did return, but did so invisibly!”.  I’m guessing that probably the same thing will happen with Christian Family Radio on May 22nd.

I just read the following:

“Radio evangelist Harold Camping said in a special broadcast Monday night on his radio program Open Forum that his predicted May 21, 2011 Rapture was ‘an invisible judgment day’ that he has come to understand as a spiritual, rather than physical event.”

Straight out of the Jehovah Witness play book! Camping’s prophetic credentials seem to be shot, but mine are looking pretty good, hey? 🙂

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