Daily Links 12-10-13

In today's roundup of links: a century of baseball games, advice for book reviewers, kids leaving the church, and more.

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One of my favorite sites, Retrosheet, has just announced they now have the past 100 years of baseball games on their site. This is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to look back at the details of any baseball game.

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Since I tend to stockpile books and seem to be constantly finding new ways to receive them to review I found this to be a good process to consider in whether I should read a book.

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This is scary: 10 reasons our kids leave church:

We all know them, the kids who were raised in church. They were stars of the youth group. They maybe even sang in the praise band or led worship. And then… they graduate from High School and they leave church. What happened? 

It seems to happen so often that I wanted to do some digging; To talk to these kids and get some honest answers. I work in a major college town with a large number of 20-somethings. Nearly all of them were raised in very typical evangelical churches. Nearly all of them have left the church with no intention of returning. I spend a lot of time with them and it takes very little to get them to vent, and I’m happy to listen. So, after lots of hours spent in coffee shops and after buying a few lunches, here are the most common thoughts taken from dozens of conversations. I hope some of them make you angry. Not at the message, but at the failure of our pragmatic replacement of the gospel of the cross with an Americanized gospel of glory. This isn’t a negative “beat up on the church” post. I love the church, and I want to see American evangelicalism return to the gospel of repentance and faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins; not just as something on our “what we believe” page on our website, but as the core of what we preach from our pulpits to our children, our youth, and our adults.

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Quiz time: 75 of the best animated movies of all time. How many have you seen? I only scored 35 but that's because most of the animated movies I have seen are Disney films.

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A little homeschool humor, via Pinterest.

Source.

Daily Links 9-26-13

The darker side of Peter Pan, money and marriage, pocket notebooks, what the next generation considers normal, youth in church and more in today's links.

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J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, had a sad life. Neatorama has the complete story. Although Barrie faced a lot of tragedy, his story of the boy who never grew up has brought joy to countless children over the years.

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This seems a little obvious: pooling your money leads to a happier marriage.

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This is a fascinating article: the six hours aboard Air Force One following the assassination of President John Kennedy. (Hat tip: Stephen Mansfield)

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This is cool: the pocket notebooks of 20 famous men.

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We're doing youth a disservice by segregating them from the rest of the congregation:

Simply put, we do teens a disservice when we segregate them from the life of the church. When we build youth ministries that don't fold students into the life of the congregation, the unintended consequence is a future of empty pews. Pew Research reports that 20- to 30-year-olds attend church at half the rate of their parents and one-fourth the rate of their grandparents. These young adults were teens a decade or two ago, and many of them were active in youth ministries. As result, many today ask what we can do to reverse this
regrettable trend, wondering how to get formerly churchgoing youth "back" into church. In my view, we must engage students in the life of entire congregations. Then and only then can we model and shape a biblical view of the church as we entrust the faith from one generation to the next.

We've always made it a point to try to worship together in a family. I can remember once visiting in a church and almost getting into a heated argument because we wanted our children with us rather than the rest of the youth. This article makes an excellent point and is well worth reading.

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The Mindset List helps understand what the current generation defines as "normal". It's a surprising list.

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How one pilot's sweet tooth helped to defeat communism.