Year in Review 2009: SimChurch Preview

Tonight’s post will be extra short, as my sickness recovery took a retreat, and I’m not feeling well at all this evening.

My light and temporary illness causes me to think even more about the Chandler family.  I’m still praying for Matt Chandler, lead pastor at The Village Church near Dallas, Texas, who underwent surgery today to remove a significant portion of the right frontal lobe of his brain after a seizure last week prompted several tests.  His faith and resolve, reflected in a statement posted this morning before surgery, is powerful.  I encourage you to read it.

As for the year in review part, tonight’s post looks forward into December for a book I plan to read.  My attention was caught recently by a book title released in October, and was further heightened when I looked at the author’s name and I realized I know him!

Although I haven’t read it yet, this month I plan to take up SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World, published by Zondervan.  Douglas Estes is an old friend from church and seminary, who now pastors and teaches in California.  We actually ran into Douglas and his family recently at park here (back towards the Eastern shores), when they were in town to visit their extended family.  I’ll write more about the book and Estes later, but you know this volume has to have some cred when his doctoral thesis from the University of Nottingham, UK, was titled, The Temporal Mechanics of the Fourth Gospel: A Theory of Hermeneutical Relativity in the Gospel of John (Brill, 2008).

Again, more on this later.  For now, after some rest I have to go brush up on my temporal mechanics.

[This is the fourth in a series, based on a blog challenge.]