I’ve made no secret of my affection for pastor Matt Chandler of the Village Church. Of any pastor I’ve heard, he most closely does what I want to do with my writing. He brings the truth in an honest, stripped down, Bible based way that is not afraid to use satire and humor to get at the point. I’ve never met him, but I once hid behind a pole at a restaurant while he talked with Anne Jackson. I’m pretty cool.

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Next to Serious Wednesday posts, my favorite ones to write are the scorecards. Long, rambltastic explorations of everything from metrosexual worship leaders to surviving church as a single adult, they’re fun to write and tend to open up lots of good conversation.

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God is crazy. In the last few weeks, more than a 1,000 comments were posted for prayer on Stuff Christians Like. Strangers prayed for strangers. Readers prayed for readers. Friends prayed for friends.

I am continually grateful for your generosity. Thanks for praying yesterday during our first 24 hour prayer day.

We’ll do others.

Jon

Today is a day of prayer on Stuff Christians Like.

Today, starting at 7AM eastern time, people from around the world will be praying about the requests people left in the comments on this post and any new prayer requests that come in.

People from all over have volunteered to cover the hours of the day and the comments with prayer.

Let’s pray. Here is a link to hundreds of prayer requests. If you have a prayer request you would like someone to pray for, please post a comment on today’s post.

The list of people who will be praying is after the jump. (We’ll pretend daylight savings time is not happening until after we’re finished at 7AM Sunday morning.)

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(John Crist, you fantastic, completely unexpected guest poster. This showed up in my email one day, and I thought it was very true and very funny. I hope you do too.)

For those of us that have been to a Christian conference, retreat or youth camp in the last decade, we know the power of the Tangible Sermon Reminder. The TSR usually occurs when multiple speakers are up against each other, all vying for your inordinately short attention span and space in your pre-worn journal. We’ve all been victim of the TSR and it usually takes the form of a small, post-sermon giveaway that is meant to drive home the sermons’ main point.

As Christians, we don’t remember any of the sermons we’ve heard in the last ten years but I ALWAYS remember the TSRs.

Traditionally, the TSR comes in many forms. It can be as simple as a small cross or as complex as a bracelet with six different colored beads on it, all representing a different stage of the roman road.

But with TSR competition heating up in the last several years, Christian conference speakers have taken TSR use to new heights. It usually happens after the closing prayer (any earlier and the speaker could risk loosing the attention of the audience) and it typically comes in the form of a small trinket or memento. Before you’re inspired to change your life as a result of this gift, keep in mind that it was purchased with your tithe.

Now, everyone please look under your chair and find out the three most common TSR’s of 2009.

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As I’ve confessed before, a few years ago, my brothers almost had to have a joke intervention with me. It was a mess and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure how I got there. It started off so slow.

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These last two years have been a weird learning experience. From the Stuff Christians Like book to the blog, it’s been this fire hose moment of trying to communicate and share and not fail and take risks and try new things. In the midst of that, I feel like I’ve learned something about communicating …

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I am a huge fan of Tripp Crosby and Tyler Stanton. (Tyler has a new book too, check it out.) They both live in Atlanta and are at least 64% funnier than me. Sometimes we get together and beat each other’s jokes up and try to encourage each other to move to LA already and write a movie.

Recently, they did a video called “Things you can’t do when you’re not a dog.” I thought it was hilarious and hope you dig it too. You can watch it after the jump.

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OK, I used a random number generator to pick both of these winners.

Colin Burch won the Macbook Pro

Jennifer Phipps won the Nook

If that’s your name, send me an email with your mailing address please.

Thanks for playing!

“What we’re really doing is turning him into a drug addict.”

That is my favorite sentence from a recent article about an escaped monkey loose in Tampa, Florida. Apparently, every time animal control hits this monkey with tranquilizer darts he just shrugs them off and keeps running around down town. He’s become a bit of a local celebrity and has his own facebook page, which lists one of his hobbies as “Messin’ with the popo.”

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