Sponsors of a church planting event asked Mark Driscoll to create an 8-minute video discussing his thoughts on church planting to be shown at the event and distributed to all 1500 of the attendees.

After the video was shown, Bill Hybels criticized the video “from the stage because it did not speak of women church planters.” The sponsors of the event then caved to this, and decided against distributing the videos, leaving the poor guys that had created this stuff and schlepped it all from Seattle to Florida with 1500 coasters, “thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of wasted effort.”

Here’s Driscoll’s response to the weasels:

The leaders of the event are good guys whom I still consider friends, and I’ve never met Bill Hybels so I won’t speak about him personally.

A couple of random observations:

1. Driscoll is one of those lucky guys that have critics on both sides of the evangelical aisle. How many of them apply the hands-off technique to him (someone they don’t know) that he applied to Hybels?
2. For many of those critics who are on the right side of the aisle, Hybels’ Willow Creek Community Church is a favorite target. And Driscoll’s beliefs regarding gender roles are in keeping with those that these critics hold. So, are these people going to rush to Driscoll’s defense this time?

HT to BHT.

(Please be assured that this is satirical. I’m not the newest CRN assassin writer.)

We all know, of course, that John Piper is absolutely worthless, because he associates with Mark Driscoll and allowed (gasp) rap “music” to be performed in his church. And he had been so promising as a pedastal resider.

And John MacArthur is just as worthless for his eschatalogical views. This is even sadder, as he had been up on the pedastal for quite some time. (Though, I guess it’s for the best, as he kept trying to get down for some reason.)

Well, now we have to make room under the bus for 4 more people. It is with great glee sadness that I report this, but the Lord told me that I must write this missive.

Together for the “Gospel” has released a new video discussing last year’s conference and anticipating next year’s conference (for which two of the speakers are the apostates that I just mentioned).

Please be sure that there are no children in the room when you look at this next picture. It is so vile, that I hesitated to even post it, but in the end, it seemed good in the Lord to do so.

There it is, in black and white chartreuse and navy, brothers and sisters. By using the word “conversation” — which we all know is an emergent code-word for “movement” — these men have all freely confessed to being aligned with the Ecumenical Church of Deceit.

In retrospect, we should have recognized earlier that these men were worthless. But even with my great powers of discernment, I was fooled for some time. Think about it:

• Mahaney goes by “C.J.” — the initials of Christ Jesus. Obviously, he is ashamed of the gospel.
• Ligon Duncan goes by his middle name; his first initial is “J”. Clearly, he is also ashamed of the gospel.
• Mark Dever “ministers” in Washington, D.C. As we know from Driscoll’s negative example, no real Christian would be caught dead working in a largely unbelieving city. Who wants to clutter heaven with those people?
• Al Mohler, we already knew about. He “came out of the closet” recently, declaring that homosexuality was 100% genetic, had nothing to do with choice, and that he was leaving his wife for a guy named Steve.

In the early days of their group blog, all 4 men spent a great deal of time affirming the fact that they liked each other, despite their differences. Beyond the undertones of homo-eroticism in such statements, warning bells were sounded by the simple fact that so-called “Christians” who differed on some issues would even tolerate each other, let alone declare openly that they liked each other.

So please disregard anything and everything that these men have ever said or written. And, of course, please also disregard anything and everything ever written about them — unless it’s attacking them, of course (otherwise, you’d have to ignore this post).

(Hmmm. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.)

The Detroit Lions’ first regular season game is at Oakland. So the newest Lion can show Oakland right away how badly they messed up by not picking him as the #1 draft pick of 2007.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Max McLean — one of the foremost Bible narrators — is one cool dude. I saw him do a dramatic recitation of 2 Timothy at a conference once, and I could hear Paul acknowledging his approaching death.

But jam an iPod in my ears, and I can’t listen to Max very long. I’m a t-shirt and shorts kinda guy, and after a while, I wind up tuning out his high-falutin’ voice. And I have the same problems with most other Bible narrators, too. Which is a great pity in this MP3-on-the-go world.

So anyway, I’m thinking about recording and releasing the Just Some Guy Audio Bible. I don’t think my voice is that weird (here’s a sample of John 1:1-4 *), and it strikes me as an intriguing project.

A few thoughts:

1. I’ll go with KJV, since neither God nor King Jimmy collect royalties.
2. But, so as to not defeat the purpose of an alternative to McLean, my plan is to un-Olde the text, just by removing “eth”s and changing “thou”s to “you”s and such. No other changes whatsoever.
3. I’ll probably start with the New Testament.
4. I’ll try to get name pronunciations right, which is one reason to start with the NT.
5. I’ll do my best to at least be consistent with pronunciations.
6. Each chapter would be a separate MP3, but I’d package it up so that things could be downloaded more easily.

So, does anyone have any interest in this? It’ll be free, of course. I’m doing this for my own use, but I figure if someone else wants to benefit, great. Plus it’ll keep me at it.

Also, any other ideas / suggestions / etc ?

(* I realize that the sound quality of this sample is not perfect. I’m just posting it as an example of what my reading would sound like in general.)

I ran across the audio for this comedy routine a few years ago and still find it funny the 50th time through. Someone recently posted a video of a version of this routine on YouTube.

If you’ve ever worked a helpdesk, you’ll probably find this hilarious. Or even if you’re just technically savvy but have many in your life who aren’t, and they rely on you for help, you’ll find this funny.

The frightening thing to me is that, though I work third-level support, I still enounter people like the caller in this video.

(This video is rated PG for some mild language.)

I (and 100 other people) just got an email from a fellow employee that I’ve never heard of. The email requested that he be removed from any financial distribution lists that we have. Not that I have any idea what a financial distribution list is.

I think we’ve just been spammed requesting that we not spam.

It’s not often that I agree with Terence Moore. But I do on this one. (HT: Keith)

By the way, I don’t use the term “Steroid Boy” solely out of derision. The person to whom I refer has not given permission to the MLB Players’ Association to use his name (probably the only player in history to do this) and so technically, it’s not legal for those with deals with the MLBPA to use players’ names to use his.

Not that I have a deal with the MLBPA, but I wanted to uphold the tradition. Plus I think his agent is Scott Boras. Only Disney lawyers are nastier, so I don’t want to tick him off.

Tim Challies noted that this Toronto Blue Jays commercial with Frank Thomas has been banned because it supposedly contains violence (and I guess, promotes child abuse).

And some other geniuses are trying to get this one with Vernon Wells banned because he doesn’t look both ways before crossing a street.

I won’t bother pointing out the ludicrous nature of watchdogs with too much time on their hands wouldn’t be of any value. (Besides, I’m already over my 2007 limit for shooting fish in a barrel.) So I thought I’d just point out some of the other Jays’ commercials — mostly because I think they’re pretty good — but also to help the watchdogs on identifying why they, too, should be banned.

If you look closely at this one with A J Burnett, you’ll see an aluminum can in the bag. Clearly, he doesn’t recycle. It also promotes violence. And finally, it promotes littering — what if he had missed?

This one, with Troy Glaus, promotes animal cruelty.

This one, with Roy Halladay, promotes animal cruelty and child abuse.

This one, with Lyle Overbay, is my favorite as it’s the only one that’s kinda self-deprecating and Overbay pulls it off well. Oh, and it promotes violence against women.

For those of you scoring at home, if you’ve ever read a watch-blog, you know that Brian McLaren represents every last thought of every last person who has ever been in the same room with someone who ever embraced even one iota of one idea that might be remotely related to anything to do with the emerging church.

Well, that has apparently changed and just in case I’m not the only one who missed the latest Watchblog Whipping Boy newsletter, let me be the last to say that the mantle has now fallen on Dan Kimball.

Please be sure to alter your line-up cards accordingly.