John Simons

New Study: Young Adults Leave the Church between 18 and 22.

According to LifeWay Research, two-thirds of young adults who regularly attend church stop attending between the ages of 18 and 22. First off, they had to do a study to figure that out?

I found a link to that article today at the NAMB Center For Missional Research. It reminded me of a conversation I had this past weekend on a related topic.  I was talking with a local youth pastor about his youth group (my son attends — he is the only middle schooler at our church).  We were talking about how different his group is than many others in town.  His Wednesday night event centers around Bible study.  They are currently working their way through Romans.  Most of the youth groups seem to focus on entertaining kids, and throwing in a quick devotional to “sanctify” the evening’s event.  The entertainment model was what I saw at several churches when I was in high school (and even college).
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Tags: Church, youth group, youth pastor

Habitat for Humanity

I have been spending some time over the past year volunteering with Habitat for Humanity of Marion County. Almost a year ago, a went to one of their informational meetings with one of the guys from church. Turns out that he and his wife met the criteria to get a house. Once they got accepted into the program, another guy and I started putting in hours to help them get their house. › Continue reading

Tags: Agape Place, Habitat for Humanity, living the gospel, Marion County

Opera Web Browser

Like many people, I have moved beyond Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  I first moved away from using IE after I got a spyware infection several years ago.  That led me to research the other browsers available and start using Firefox as my browser of choice.  That was probably 3 or 4 years ago.  It didn’t take me long to become a fan of of using tabs to have more than one site open at a time.  Recently, I have run into challenges when using multiple tabs.  Frequently, Firefox will choke, or shut down altogether.  It has been frustrating me greatly.  I recently had lunch with a friend, and we shared a gripe over Firefox’s issues.

 Today, I saw that David Russell has begun using Opera for causal browsing. He still uses Firefox for web development using tools like Firebug and the Developer Toolbar.  After considering trying Opera for several weeks, I have broken down and installed it on my computer for the first time.  This is my first post with Opera.  So far so good.  I have several tabs open, and no issues yet.

After I have used it for a while, I will post on whether I still like it.

Tags: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, web development