Whenever two or three people have been gathered together in the name of Australian religious history one question has always been raised: “why is the Diocese of Sydney so Evangelical?”

From Stephen Judd’s Ph D. thesis, Defenders of Their Faith: Power and Party in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, 1909-1938, 1984, p. 8.

(And yes, that means I’m still very much in the research phase of my 6000 word church history essay. Thanks for asking.)

The Moore College network can be a bit temperamental, but we’ve nothing to complain about:

In March 1920, the trustees agreed to install a separate telephone for the students; this was a great relief to the principal’s residence.

Ouch.

From M L Loane’s A Centenary History of Moore Theological College, 1955, p. 125.

I’d love to try this method of doing with less sleep, if my job next year permitted a siesta.

Siestas sound lazy, but this is all about feeling just as well rested for less actual time sleeping. Interesting.

How to Hack Your Brain, Pt 1 - Sleep.

Does anyone I know speak/read Arabic?

A few years ago, when I was doing MTS, I think I somehow lost my understanding that speech is powerful.

I still thought it could be negatively powerful, in terms of the harm gossip and slander can cause, but not positively powerful, in terms of spurring people on to change their lives under God, serve others, make sacrifices, worship God with their lives, and be committed to interceding for others before God in prayer.

This was probably the result of a thousand morning tea conversations that weren’t anything to do with God or his word. I felt awkward trying to draw a 55 year old businessman into a conversation about the sermon or his walk with God, so I let him take the lead and we talked about other things.

Gradually, I (unconsciously) came to think that speech with others wasn’t actually able to effect change, grow people, or challenge them. I can’t quite lock down the logic here, so if the causation is a bit fuzzy, let’s just say my shrinking faith in the power of words seems to have correlated with this period in my ministry.

A lot’s changed since then, and I recently* had a conversation with a young woman at my church, which seems to have had a really positive impact.

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Succinct, from Nerd Fighters.

Or you can view the primary documents.

My friend John Bartik is a funny guy.

Rose Ellen. She was born on Tuesday at 7.56pm, 3.07kg, 47cm.

In theatre, age 4min:

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You heard it here first.

See you on the other side!

UPDATE: Back on Twitter, just for this.

If you want more information on your local community, you can often use the community profile accessible from the local government website.

For example, from the Sydney City website (of which north Newtown is a part–where we live), you can access the city’s community profile.

And from the Canterbury City site, you can jump to the area’s community profile.

Unfortunately, some councils, like Marrickville, don’t seem to have purchased these profiles, and instead offer a single PDF with some data in it.

The Joshua Project has a list of the 100 largest unreached ethnic people groups in the world.

Numbers 1 and 3 are both Shaikh people, in Bangladesh and India respectively. Together they account for 200 million people, with roughly two-thirds in Bangladesh and the other third in India. They are overwhelmingly Muslim.

The Joshua Project describes the number of Christians among these people as “very few, if any, known believers,” with approximately 0.0% Evangelicals.

Check out The Joshua Project. For Christians, it’s much better than the CIA World Factbook, for example, because it deals with people groups, not just nation states. Loads of information for education, encouragement, challenge and prayer.

Want to know which is the dodgy butcher in your suburb? Want to know which Thai restaurants to avoid in Newtown?

Check out the NSW Food Authority’s name and shame list. Search by postcode or suburb name to view penalty notices on food retailers.

I’ll be avoiding this restaurant in Newtown, for example.