Well, after a couple of months of want-to, and a couple of weeks of hard work, the new blog is now live! I’ve spend the greater part of the past week tweaking the design and importing over quite a few of my previous blog posts from our family site. Didn’t realize what five years of blogging looked like until I tried sifting through 700+ entries to find those that fit the new blog!

Still not completely where I’d like it. For example, the side navigation on the individual post pages (the one that says “Such and such” is the previous post, and “Such and such” is the next post) isn’t working correctly. You can still reach any post via the archive links in the main nav, or in the side bar of the individual post pages, or via the search box. Hopefully I’ll get the last little bugs fixed next week.

For now, it’s good enough, and with the fam getting set to head out to Nashville for a mini-vacation I wanted to go ahead & get it up and running.

FYI - you can now reach me at ChrisEdiger.com or InTheThinPlaces.com. Family stuff will likely end up more so right here at TheEdigers.com, although some will bleed over to the new blog as well.

More on the “Thin Places” in later posts on the new blog. For now, hop on over & take a look, then let me know what you think. I’d love any feedback!

Just finished watching this from Hillsong's website. It's a clip showing & talking about their latest live album "This Is My God" being released in July. Needed this awakening today - good stuff...

So, Bill Gates is finally gone from the day-to-dayness of Microsoft. In a series covering the leaving, Seattle based blogger Todd Bishop drew from the archives and pulled out an internal email rant from Bill to his team after unsuccessfully trying to download & install Windows Moviemaker from the Microsoft website. It is absolutely hilarious!

You can read the text of the email on Todd's blog here: "An Epic Bill Gates E-mail Rant"

Or you can listen to a dramatic reading of the email by Dave Ross of KIRO-AM/710 in Seattle below:

Today was a good day. Started off kind of crazy with juggling between a dentist & haircut appointment for myself, the last day of swim lessons for the kids, their own haircuts, and a last-minute doctor's appointment for Josiah who began complaining about his throat hurting last night. It ending well, though, as we had some good friends from Nashville stop by on their way back from vacation in Florida.

The McCaskills were a part of the homeschool co-op we were in, and quickly became good friends during the three years we were in Nashville. Tonight was such a good night as we talked together, laughed together, ate together, etc.

Makes me even more excited about our trip to Nashville next week! We're heading there Wednesday morning to spend about 5 days. Our good friends Chad & Jessica have asked me to officiate their wedding at Gladeville on Saturday, so we'll be doing wedding misc for part of the trip. Spending considerable time with our friends Craig & Barbara (yes, they're 'good friends' too, just thought I was being a bit repetitive :-) ).

Here's a couple of pics of the gang before they headed out tonight...

I've begun working on the design for the new blog (which will reside at both chrisediger.com & inthethinplaces.com). I'm hoping to have something launched around the first of the month. Posts here may be sporadic until that happens.

I'll send out an invite once it is up!

Finished reading Clusters: Creative Mid-Sized Missional Communities this morning. This book was co-authored by Bob Hopkins and Mike Breen and birthed out of the journey of a number of churches seeking to reach people in a post-Christendom UK.

I picked this up because I got a chance to meet Mike about a month ago and because Bridgeway, the church Andrea and I were a part of in Oklahoma, is one of the churches who have been adopting the principles of mid-sized community (MSC) that this book addresses.

The hardest part, for me, was that this book comes off very textbookish. Not sure if it is because of the writing style of Hopkins, who, I believe, writes most (discussing principles Breen developed), or because it is meant to be a manual of sorts for churches seeking to move toward MSC. In either case, it took some determination to push through some of the heavier text. If someone were to pick up the book outside of a true desire to understand and implement the principles within it, they would have difficulty, in my opinion, getting through it.

That being said, this book has done more for me in helping me understand how a church like Bridgeway is structured and operates - a church that I feel very much akin to.

I won't go into the full details (I did take a lot of notes in my Moleskine, which speaks well to the content), except to encourage anyone looking to find a new model of doing church to check it out. So much more in that our country is beginning to slip into the same post-Christendom challenges that have been found in the UK in the last couple of decades.

You can grab the book from the 3DM website, and even download a digital copy for around $10.