Here, based on the number of comments, are the top 10 posts on Stuff Christians Like for the month of November.

1. #658. Resisting the Vampire Invasion

2. #660. Wishing there was a Christian version of Lady Gaga

3. #656. Arguing about whether heaven will serve Chick-fil-A or In-n-Out (Part 2)

4. #656. Arguing about whether heaven will serve Chick-fil-A or In-n-Out (Part 1)

5. #651. Youth Group Rules

6. #657. Seeing your pastor in the wild.

7. What if?

8. #649. Rooting for Tim Tebow.

9. #652. Secretly believing the prosperity gospel.

10. #653. Using the word “gospel” as a verb.

Wow, just wow.

A few weeks ago, my four-year-old McRae and I were talking about God. We tend to have some fairly heated theological conversations because she’s Dutch Reform and I’m not. After discussing a few of the many things that make God awesome (He loves us, He gives us sunny days, etc.) McRae turned to me and with all the seriousness that a child can muster said, “God sure made Santa special.”

What am I supposed to do with that?

You have to admit, she has a point. Unless her father is a liar, then Santa is pretty special. Because based on what I’ve told her, he is able to deliver toys and treats to every person on the planet in one night. And he has reindeer that can fly. And he is some kind of omniscient because he knows if you’ve been good or bad. And to top it all off, he controls an army of little green elves who apparently love working nonstop in the North Pole.

But, as a Christian, where does Santa fall into our discussions of Christmas? I think we have 3 possible approaches:

(more…)

The contest is closed. Thanks so much for entering. Winners will be announced soon.

When I was going through the absolute worst season of my life, I played Chris Tomlin’s song, Indescribable about 82,000 times. I would listen to the line that songwriter Laura Story created, “You see the depths of my heart and you love me the same” over and over again because there is such hope in it.

That’s reason #1 that I dig Chris Tomlin.

Reason #2?

He donated an autographed unnecessary scarf to the Vietnam Kindergarten project.

You heard that right.

When Chris’ folks emailed me and asked if they could give you fabulous things this holiday season, I wrote them back and said, “What if Chris donated something for the Vietnam project? We’ve got a Metrosexual worship leader mascot and Chris is one of the original worship leaders that made it OK to be hip, what do you think?”

I was expecting Chris Tomlin to say, “No way, jerk.”

But he has a sense of humor. He got the fun of the whole thing with Zakk and he autographed a scarf that one lucky person is going to win.

And someone else is going to win a stocking full of his favorite things:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It’s a Wonderful Life

Candy canes from Lindale Candy Company

A turkey from Greenberg Turkeys

Chris Tomlin CD – Glory in the Highest: Christmas Songs

Chris Tomlin CD – Hello Love

And as if that wasn’t enough, 5 people are also going to win a  copy of Chris’ CD “Glory in the Highest.”

Let’s keep it nice and simple.

Comment, “thanks Chris Tomlin!”  on this post by Tuesday, December 8th and you’ll be entered in the contest. I’ll pick 7 winners at random.

That’s all you have to do.

Thanks Chris Tomlin!

The AJC in Atlanta continues to be incredibly kind to Stuff Christians Like. In today’s edition of the paper, they published a second article about the Vietnam kindergarten project.

Here’s the link if you want to read it.

Here’s the link to the first article they wrote when we raised $30,000 in case you missed that.

“Trying to capture the might and majesty and power and beauty of God with Microsoft Word is like trying to capture the sheer terror of a hurricane with crayons on a piece of paper.”

I wrote that sentence three weeks after Stuff Christians Like started in 2008. I was trying to describe the magnitude of God and the impossibility of ever capturing even a sliver of His glory on paper.

But right now, I’m having a really hard time describing what we did in the last 25 days. We raised enough money to build two kindergartens in Vietnam! I told the AJC newspaper that when I received the message that the goal had unexpectedly been met, I was sitting in a meeting at work. I had to leave the room because I was afraid I was going to start crying.

This doesn’t begin to make sense. This thing God did. It doesn’t. But it is beautiful. And so is this video. It feels free floating and fantastic, the way that yesterday felt.

Capturing the love of God with a video isn’t much easier than with a pen or a keyboard, and the truth is that sometimes exuberant moments like this week can feel silly, but like David said in 2 Samuel 6, “I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes.”

Chances are, you don’t know any 6 year olds in the Hoang Then Village.

More than likely, you’ve never kicked it in the Phong Tho district.

Until three weeks ago, the word “Vietnam” had never even been mentioned on this site.

We’re in the middle of one of the worst economic crises in decades.

It’s the holidays, a time when money gets stretched thin.

“Stuff Christians Like” isn’t even an original idea.

But.

But.

But.

We serve a wild card of a God, don’t we?

We serve a God who parts seas and quiets lions and raises the dead.

And apparently, we serve a God who loves to build kindergartens in Vietnam, because that’s what happened yesterday. This shouldn’t have worked. Who am I to ask you to go on a wild adventure like raising $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam? Who are you to think that out of 112 million blogs in the world, this one could be bigger than just a blog? But we did it.

On November, 9th, we raised $30,000 in 18 hours to build a six room kindergarten for 240 kids in Vietnam.

And in doing so we realized we hadn’t stepped out far enough. So we doubled our goal. We pushed the limits of “what if” and decided to raise $60,000.

Wes Molebash stepped up and started drawing Zakk, our meterosexual worship leader mascot who will be completed soon. Abraham Piper, Scott McCellan, Pete Wilson, Brad Lomenick, Anne Jackson, Jesse Phillips, John Saddington, Wendy Maybury, Ben Arment, Matthew Paul Turner and countless others pitched in.

And we all gave. In $5 donations and $10 donations and $100 donations. Finally, the last gift came in yesterday that pushed us over the edge.

$6,023.

That’s what someone gave anonymously on the 25th day of this crazy journey. And we’re finished. We did it.

Construction will begin in the next few months, with details I’ll share as I get them. We will all pray about the right answer to “what’s next?” And we might even go visit the schools in Vietnam.

But for now, for this moment, for this day, the impossible feels a lot smaller, the difficult feels a lot easier and the potential of what a community of people online can accomplish when they lean into God feels undeniably big.

Thank you.

From the Acuff family, thank you.

From Samaritan’s Purse, thank you.

From the kids in a village in Vietnam who might never know exactly how a school desk with their name on it appeared in their village, thank you.

I am honored to be a part of this community and am thrilled to see what God, who deserves all the glory, has in store for all of us in 2010.

That I am aware of, my wife has never taken notes when she’s come to see me speak. Although she would argue that she’s heard whatever I’m saying a million times because I usually try to just speak what we’re living, I think her gathering a binder full of notes might be in order.

When I was a kid, I remember one pastor’s wife who used to do that. My mom kind of held her up as the gold standard pastor’s wife. She sat in the front row every Sunday morning with an open notebook and a scribbling hand. And my mother, although rapt with attention to hear what my dad was preaching, rarely took notes and I think may have secretly compared herself to that other pastor’s wife down the street.

The challenge is that there’s really not a good system to compare sermon note taking skills. You would think that by this point, Christianity Today would have released some sort of scorecard we could all universally use to grade the quality of our note taking but like so many other things within Christian culture I fear that burden has fallen upon our shoulders. And thus, I give you …

(more…)

If I owned a laminator, I would never leave the house.

Every flat surface I could get my hands on would be continually coated in a clear cover of crystal coolness.

I heart laminators.

And the reason I do is the same reason I thought I could be a writer.

Mrs. Harris.

When I was in the 3^rd grade at Doyon Elementary School on the North Shore of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Mrs. Harris told me I was a writer.

More than just kind words, she laminated a book of poetry I scrawled with my little hands and I swear I thought I had published a book.

The poems weren’t great. They were very rhymey rhymey like:

In the fall,

The leaves are tall

And man must wrestle with the unrelenting meaningless of it all.

(I might be misremembering that last line.)

But I didn’t care if the poems were silly. I had published a book! Sure, it was held together with string and the penmanship was shaky, but it didn’t matter.

I had published a book!

More than 25 years ago, Mrs. Harris changed the very course of my life by believing in me. She and my parents and other people believed in me.

That’s why I love laminators.

That’s why I write.

That’s why I want to finish raising money for both of those kindergartens in Vietnam.

I don’t know much about that corner of the world, but I do know this…

kids need Mrs. Harris.

In Ipswich, Massachusetts.

In Atlanta, GA.

In the Hoang Then village.

And we’re less than $6,200 away from raising money to build two kindergartens in Vietnam.

Let’s finish.

For the Mrs. Harris who told you that you could be a writer or an accountant or a mom or an anything.

For the kids who won’t get a place to start in life without a wooden desk and a classroom.

Let’s finish.

$5, $10, $100, $500, it doesn’t matter the number.

Let’s finish.

Click here to donate.

If I ever become a high paid executive, I already know the first two things I am going to do:

1. Purchase nicer belts.

2. Say the phrase, “I’ve got an open door policy.”

The first one is obvious. Everyone knows the power belt is the new power tie. Nothing says, “I’m all about commerce and synergizing our optimized customer touch points” like a gleamtacular belt. Right now, because I’m just a lowly copywriter, I only own one belt. It’s reversible. One side is brown fake leather and the other side is black.

The second part of my master plan is murky. There are a handful of phrases every executive I’ve ever met says at least once. One is “I’ve got an open door policy.” Executives are always talking about open doors, but to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine ever juking around a personal assistant, plopping myself down in the CEO’s office and saying, “Hey, I saw that your door was open. How things going on your end? This new timesheet system is killing me.”

I just don’t see that happening, but “I’ve got an open door policy” is still a fun phrase and it’s kind of the opposite of one my old boss used to say. When people would bring him problems, he would say, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions to problems.” It’s the corporate version of when you’d ask your 3rd grade teacher how to spell a word and she’d tell you to look it up in the dictionary instead. (Remember those things? They were made of paper and heavy? Wow. Good times, good times.) …

(more…)

We hit another goal of raising $3,000 to build 2 kindergartens in Vietnam and you know what that means – Zakk gets accessorized. What items did Zakk, our metrosexual worship leader, get this time from comic genius Wes Molebash?

An acoustic guitar.

Can’t you see him being that guy who pretends he didn’t know he had it with him in the trunk of his silver VW jetta? He calmly pulls it out by a campfire on a retreat and sings an acoustic version of some tearjerker and lends his unnecessary scarf to the crying ladies so they can wipe their tears?

What’s truly brilliant about that guitar is the sticker on it. Zakk is so hip that he’s moved beyond wearing an Apple logo from the iconic computer company. He’s actually got a pomegranate sticker on his guitar. Both old testament biblical and perhaps the hippest fruit around, Zakk is boldly saying, “Pomegranate is the new apple.”

We’ve only got two more drawings of Zakk left in this whole project and if we raise just $2,605 we get to see the next one. (If we raise $6,605 we’re done with both kindergartens.)

And wait until you see what happens this Saturday. A huge Christian musician actually donated an autographed item from Zakk’s current collection to the cause. I was blown away by who was willing to do it.

Let’s finish this. Let’s give hundreds of kids in Vietnam kindergartens to attend.

Click here to donate.

Question:

What kind of coffee does Zakk drink?