The God Journey

From a listener to us… Now, from us to you:

Our apologies to all of you already subscribing to The God Journey on iTunes, but you need to recheck your feed. For reasons too complicated to explain here, we had to change our feed to iTunes from our original listing, which has since been deleted from iTunes. You can use the button below to go to iTunes and re-subscribe to The God Journey under our new listing. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we should be all set now. Thank you for your cooperation.

Our current podcasts we are also experimenting with various suggestions we’ve received from our listeners to improve the podcast. We’re scaling the podcast back to a 30-minute target instead of a 50-minute one. We’re also going to provide two downloads of the podcast, a lower quality one for those downloading with limited or costly Internet access and a higher quality one for those who would prefer better sound. We’re also going to be looking for a greater variety of music bumpers, and would be grateful for any contributions from original artists so we don’t run into copyright problems.

If you have any input regarding these changes or others you’d like us to consider, please pass them along.

Thanks to the generous help of Greg at Greg’s Head.net we now have an RSS feed on our Audio Page for those of you that would like to subscribe to our webcast. Thanks to the new iTunes 4.9 you can arrange for The God Journey to be automatically added to your iPod whenever we post a new edition. Other aggregators out there will also work to keep you up to date on the latest production.

We’ve had a number of you write us and suggest that we incorporate an rss feed link so that people can subscribe automatically through an aggregator like iPodder or iTunes to new releases. We would love to do this, but find the learning curve a bit beyond our intelligence at this point. If you have some expertise here and would like to help us, could you please email Wayne or give him a call at (805) 529-1728. Thanks! We’d appreciate it and so would a ton of our listeners!

Thanks to all for your patience. I’m back from my ten-day trip through Pennsylvania and Brad and I will be getting together tonight to tape our eighth version of The God Journey. We should have the result up tomorrow.

For those waiting for our next edition of The God Journey , it is going to be a while, unfortunately. My move the last week cut our available times to record. Year-end school things for Brad’s children cut out this week, and I leave Monday for 11 days in Pennsylvania. So, the next show won’t be up until early July or so. We are so sorry for the delay, but it could not be avoided.

But we have loved the feedback we’ve gotten on our blogs, emails and comment lined—(805) 626-4212. We will be tackling some of those comments and questions next time we get together. We’re hoping to fall into a much more consistent pace in days ahead to keep the conversation going. Our two busy schedules have made that a bit difficult over the past month. Please don’t give up. Keep the questions and comments coming and we’ll get to them as we can.

Until then, check out some of the past shows you might have missed, or listen again and give us your feedback, questions or ideas for future shows. You can add them to the comments section of this blog!

Thank you for the input we’ve received on my last blog here and at Lifestream. They will help us put this show together. We had originally planned to tape the show this evening, but scheduling conflicts made us postpone it until Monday. So there is still time to contribute on the topic of people leaving the Sunday morning institutions…

For our next webcast we want to talk about the three articles that the major Christian magazines. in America (Christianity Today and Charisma) have published about people who no longer fit into our Sunday (or Saturday) morning congregations. Each of these articles speak negatively of those who have left and advance the notion that it is the duty of every Christian to belong to one of the institutions that call themselves church to be part of the body of Christ. One even points that out while admitting that the structures itself are dead. Here are the articles in case you missed them:

• The Church Why Bother? by Tim Stafford
• When Christians Quit Church by Andy Butcher
• Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons an interview with Eugene Peterson

Wouldn’t it be helpful to discuss the pros and cons of these articles? That’s exactly what Brad and I plan to do in our next edition of The God Journey, to be taped on Wednesday, May 4. We hope to shed some light on the growing conflict between those who are in the institutions and those who are not and for that we would love some of you to help us out with your thoughts, questions and insights.

• Do you agree or disagree with these articles?
• Are you no longer part of an organized congregation? Why? Have you found your experience with church has increased or decreased by this choice?
• Are you part of a congregation and miss those who have left and wish they’d come back? Why?

If you would, we’d love to include many different voices, and you can record your comments or questions by calling our comment line in the U.S. at (805) 626-4212. You can also contribute by commenting on this blog by clicking on the “comment” button below.

Brad and I have the goal of doing a show each week, but we realize or schedules and the course of life won’t always allow that. Our next show will be taped on April 20 and air shortly thereafter.

We want to thank all of you who have given us your feedback by email, blogs and phone calls. We’re excited where this little journey will lead us and excited about adding more of you to the conversation. We are giving some attention to improving the audio quality and the avenues for feedback. Your prayers and suggestions in this endeavor are always welcome.