Reading Barna's "Second Coming of the Church" and his contrast of pastors and leaders got me thinking about different church models that put mission first. What if the church was lead by someone who viewed themselves as a CEO of a non-profit, instead of a shepard?

1. gather people
2. feed and care for them
3. motivate them to go out

Of course, the problem here is that the first two tasks are never ending, so the church rarely reaches the place where they're "ready" to go out.

What if instead the whole purpose for coming together was their shared mission, and fellowship, teaching and training, and worship all happened in that context, pulled together by the mission? This would free the Mission Pastor to really lead, because the mission (rather than the church as a social organization) would be the focus.

Reality magazine has an interesting article on why people stop attending church and what happens afterwards.

Good introductory article by Gerry McGovern about classification.

 "If you are a knowledge worker, a key skill you require is how to classify content."

Looking for a mechanism to help me think out loud about the Bible, using new kinds of markup (XSEM, DAML) and linguistic processing to enable novel approaches and uses of it. I'm also especially interested in developing a training curriculum for building Christian character, and hoping this may help me form these thoughts.