A New Church Bible Study Website Project That's Gaining Some Steam

Back in March of last year I first heard from Brian David about a concept for a New Church Bible study website that he was working on with a couple of other people. One of the early experiments with the concept from around that time was internalword.com.

The project has now had a lot more thought put into it and they've done some presentations to try to get funding for it. And so now, rather than have me try to explain the concept behind the site, I can just tell you to watch the fun, short, RSA Animate-Style video that they put together.



You can also find a bunch of documents about the project on PittsburghNewChurch.org, including some images of what the user interface might look like. A note about those images: they look like a bad site from the 90s but, never fear, Brian assures me that they were just to try to explain the concept and, when they make the site for real, they'll get professional design and UI help.

Anyway, I think it's a cool idea and I hope that they get the funding that they're looking for so that they can give it a try. It's definitely one of those projects that will only work if a lot of people get involved so, if it sounds interesting to you, be sure to like the New Christian Bible Study page on Facebook.

P.S. They also entered into the debate that Rob Bell's book has stirred up with a little video about the New Church idea of heaven and hell.

General Church Websites Get Shareable

A couple of General Church websites have recently gotten features that they should have had for a while—sharing tools and subscription tools.

If you go to newchurch.org, and you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage you'll see that you can now subscribe to the news feed, either by RSS or email. That means you'll be updated whenever there's new content on the homepage of newchurch.org. And if you click on one of the items, you'll see that you can now share it with other people via email, Facebook, Twitter, or a bunch of other services.

These features are also being rolled out to individual society sites like BrynAthynChurch.org. So if you want to stay up to date on a particular local society, or you want to promote an event that's happening at a local society, you now have more methods at your disposal.

The sharing features have also been implemented on NewChurchAudio.org so it's finally easy to send people a link to a sermon that you really liked. I happen to know that other improvements are also in the works for NewChurchAudio.org. I'll let you know when they've been implemented.

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While we're on the topic of subscriptions, I'll mention that I recently made it so that you can subscribe to New Church Thought by email. If you scroll down on the right you'll see "Get New Posts Emailed to You" and a box where you can put your email address and hit subscribe. And you might just want to subscribe (if you haven't already) because New Church Thought is about to get an exciting overhaul and you'll want to keep up. (If you do subscribe there's a chance that you'll receive some nonsense posts as I work on revamping things. Just think of it as finding a couple of 2x4s in your inbox—part of the excitement of remodeling.)

Results of Swedenborgian Thought Survey

About a month ago I wrote a post about some surveys that Wendy Soneson put together to study present day thinking about Swedenborg's Writings. The results and her conclusions are now available on a website called Swedenborgian Thinking Today.

On the site there are the "Defining Faith" survey results and the "That's me in the Corner" survey results. For both Wendy gives some explanation of her thinking behind each question and how people tended to respond. She also provides some background on the survey and her thoughts about the implications of the survey results for evangelization.

The most interesting thing on the site to me, though, is a page where she describes the groups of believers that she observed in the survey results.

Based on the survey and communications related to the survey questions, I here group the respondents into categories. As an artist, I often turn to the arts, and now, songwriting, to help give a flavor of the group’s thinking. I use songs, loosely interpreted and with apologies to the writers, to give a right brain slant to these left-brain studies. Each group formed when I felt more than ten people fit the description. Surely there are more groups to come.

Audio from Swedenborg Colloquium on the Future of the New Church

On October 9th there was an awesome event. It's lengthy title was “‘Behold I Make All Things New’ — How? The Future of the New Church, Swedenborg Colloquium.” The advertisements for the event simply said,

The public is cordially invited to hear 12 Swedenborgian speakers present a variety of visions for the future of the New Church.

If you couldn't be there, the best way to get a sense for what the event was like is to listen to the recordings of the speeches. To listen to or download the audio recordings, go to Independent Voice for the General Church Community (ivotgc.org), specifically to the Swedenborg Colloquium Audio page. The files are all in MP3 format.

I'm also going to put links to the individual talks below with a few scattered notes from me. If you were at the event (or just listened to one of the recordings) and want to add some comments, please do. My notes do not adequately represent what each speaker said.

Everything to Do with "Pause: Make Space for God"

The most recent New Church spiritual growth program, "Pause: Make Space for God" just launched last week so I thought I'd let you know about all the different resources that are available for this program.

The main URL for all things Pause is newchurchpause.org. Almost everything is there I just want to highlight some of the things that you might not find otherwise. In particular I want to let you know that there are ways that you can participate even if you're not near one of the participating congregations.

Videos

First, here's a little video introduction to the program:

The Loving Arms Mission Has a NEW Web Site

The Loving Arms Mission used to have a web site at lovingarmsmission.org. Unfortunately that site got hacked and so had to be taken down. But, now they have a couple of new sites.

Their main site is lamchildren.org. It's a nice looking site with plenty of pictures and information. It looks like much of the same information that was on the old site (if you happen to be familiar with that site).

They also have a Facebook group which you can join. Recently there were links to 3 videos about the Loving Arms Mission posted on the wall. I'll embed them below. They also have a blog (lovingarmsmissionblog.blogspot.com) which seems to be under construction.

Enjoy the videos!

Find the Context of Passages from Arcana Coelestia

When I'm researching something in the Writings (the teachings of the New Church written by Emanuel Swedenborg) I often want to understand the context of what I'm reading. I want to know what chapter and section I'm reading from. In most cases I can find out what I want to know from looking at the tables of contents for the individual works on the Read the Revelation page of SwedenborgDigitalLibrary.org. (See, for example, the page for New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine.)

Passages from Arcana Coelestia (or Secrets of Heaven) are some of the main ones that I want context for—I want to know what text is being explained and what the general subject of the chapter is. If you look at the page for Arcana Coelestia on Swedenborg Digital Library, the first thing you'll see is a break out of all the doctrinal explanations that are interspersed between the explanations of the stories. This is helpful but not what I'm often looking for. If you read carefully, you'll see that you can also jump down to Auxilary Contents, which does tell you where the explanation of each chapter begins but not where it ends.

I wanted a little bit more so I decided to put together the tool below. A couple of notes: Typically the summary of the inner meaning of the chapter is the next passage after the first one listed for each chapter. The Kempton Project links take you to a more accurate translation of the text from the Word (read more about that here) and let you research where else in the Writings that text is discussed. The Bible Study Tools links take you to the New King James Version of the text on the very useful www.BibleStudyTools.com. And the chapter summaries come from here. I put this together mostly as a tool for myself but let me know if you find it useful or think of ways that it could be made better.

UPDATE: With help from Ian Thompson, the creator of www.BibleMeanings.info, the Arcana Coelestia links now take you to the relevant portion of that site. You'll find that it gives you a very handy interface for exploring the context of a given passage from Arcana Coelestia.

If you want to jump directly to a specific passage on BibleMeanings.info copy this URL and put the passage number you want at the end: http://www.biblemeanings.info/scgi-bin/hdref.cgi?p=AC (e.g. http://www.biblemeanings.info/scgi-bin/hdref.cgi?p=AC453).

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Arcana Coelestia Passage Context Finder

Jump to...
1000 | 2000 | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 | 6000 | Exodus (6633) | 7000 | 8000 | 9000 | 10000 | End (10832)

6 - 66 | Genesis 1
God created the heaven, the earth, plants, animals and man in six days
Genesis 1 on Kempton Project
Genesis 1 on Bible Study Tools

73 - 167 | Genesis 2
God blessed the seventh day; extra details of creation and the newly created earth
Genesis 2 on Kempton Project
Genesis 2 on Bible Study Tools

Online Archive of Ornaments in Swedenborg's Theological Works

NewChurchHistory.org (read more about it here) has a blog called New Church History Fun Facts. Back in May they published a post titled "Ornaments in the Theological First Editions of Emanuel Swedenborg".

I finally got around to reading it and discovered that NewChurchHistory.org has an article by Jonathan Rose on it about the ornaments titled "The Ornaments in Swedenborg's Theological First Editions". He wrote the article in 1998 and, in addition to including lots of interesting original research, the article also includes good quality images of all of the ornaments used in Swedenborg's theological first editions. For example, here are all of the Title Page Ornaments. And don't be deceived by the display size of the images; if you click on them you can download nice big versions of them. (Note: the Fun Fact says that the images can be downloaded for educational purposes so don't go selling them for millions of dollars.)

I don't know, maybe this is only cool to me but I'm pretty excited about figuring out somewhere to use these cool images.

While we're on the topic of stuff from Swedenborg's first editions, I should mention that BaysideNewChurch.org, in addition to some other pretty cool resources, has scans of all of Swedenborg's first editions available for download. The files are mostly just dumped there so you have to hunt around to find a specific passage but it's a great resource to know about. (If you're lucky enough to have a copy of Kempton Project that's not too old and if you can get a copy of the first edition files on CD, then you might be able to use Kempton Project to jump directly to the relevant image for a specific passage.)

NewSearch 4 / HeavenlyDoctrines.org Tips and Tricks

NewSearch 4

Back in February I let you know about NewSearch 4 being available for purchase. At that point I told you that you would soon be able to order it from the New Church Online Store. There was a bit of a delay but you can now buy NewSearch 4 from the online store.

In that post I also promised to post a full review of NewSearch 4. That may or may not happen. I also promised to explain how I got it working on my Mac. I'm pretty sure I'll do that.

For now I wanted to let you know about the NewSearch Support page (www.newsearchsupport.net). It's pretty basic but it does the trick. There is a description of a bug and how to get around it; there's a form where you can submit a description of the problem you're having with either the desktop or online version of NewSearch; and there's a known issues page where you can find instructions about how to get NewSearch to install on Windows 7 and how to make it work on the 64-Bit version of Windows 7.

HeavenlyDoctrines.org

I also want to tell you about a couple of things that I've learned about the online version of NewSearch 4, HeavenlyDoctrines.org.

There are extensive instructions on the search page but, if you're like me, you've only scanned through them briefly and assumed that you'd be able to figure it out. My main piece of advice is, if you're interested in doing more detailed and powerful searches, read the instructions; and, if you're just interested in doing basic searches, pay attention to the drop-down menu (see my beautiful screenshot).

I assumed that if I wanted to search for Divine and Human I could just put Divine AND Human in the search box and hit Enter. But, if the drop-down menu is on the default ("all of the words"), then I'll get results containing Divine, and, and Human. If I want to use boolean operators like AND and OR, then I need to select "boolean".

People have been looking for the ability to jump directly to a specific passage for a while. Chuck Ebert, who's in charge of the NewSearch project, has said that that's on their list of features to add to the online version. In the meanwhile he's put up instructions about how jump directly to a passage using the search box. Set the drop-down menu to "the exact phrase" and put the passage and number in using this format: Brief Exposition * n. 27. Yes the * needs to be there, unless you're searching for a book in Latin. I've discovered that it also works if you use abbreviations for the book titles—e.g. be * n. 27.

I asked Chuck if it would be possible for him to make a similar feature for searching within just one book. He told me that he'd work on it later this week. So hopefully I'll be updating this post in a couple of days with instructions about how to do that.

As a final tip I should let you know that all of the things that I've mentioned are explained on the HeavenlyDoctrines.org homepage (heavenlydoctrines.org). If you're like me, you have the actual search page (heavenlydoctrines.org/dtSearch.html) bookmarked and so never see the homepage. It might be worth checking the homepage periodically to see if they've added any other new features.

UPDATE:

Chuck has added a feature to search only within a certain book. Set the drop-down menu to "all of the words" and put what you want to search in this format: "brief exposition n. " regeneration. That will search for regeneration in just Brief Exposition. You do need the quotation marks and you do need the space after the n. and you do need the full title of the book.

It's not perfect. If you search for regeneration in Brief Exposition using this method, it also gives you a result from Conjugial Love that cites a passage in Brief Exposition. But that may be useful in your research as well. I've also discovered that you can imperfectly but usefully search within just one translation of a work by adding the translator's name to the end of your search—e.g. if you search for "True Christian Religion n. " regeneration rose it will mostly give you passages in Jonathan Rose's translation of True Christian Religion that mention regeneration. It will also give you a couple of other passages that happen to include the words true, christian, religion, regeneration, and rose.

Anyway, try it out and if you think of other features that you'd like or other ideas about how to improve the website go to www.newsearchsupport.net and submit a request.

Daily Marriage Emails

Caring for Marriage (www.caringformarriage.org) has just started offering a free, daily marriage support email called "Marriage Moats." Here's the welcome message that you get sent when you sign up:

Welcome to Marriage Moats!

My son Benjamin's latest recurring question is about moats. He asks "What is a moat?" eager to hear again what he already knows.

"A moat is water that surrounds a castle and keeps it safe from enemies."

He smiles, and asks what enemies are.

"They are people who want to hurt you."

He wanders off into a memory about moats in movies he has seen, and laughs about bad guys who fell into them.

People sometimes say that a person's home is his or her castle.
Marriage can be a castle, but that does not mean it is never under attack.

I am intrigued by the idea of a moat, as a deterrent for flame flinging masked marauders.

This daily message is called Marriage Moats, because it is a modest obstacle to those influences that undermine marriage. It will offer a puddle of protection in the form of a quote, or anecdote, or book blurb. Some mornings it will slip into your inbox, and you will hurriedly delete it sight unseen. Other days you will open it, as you invite in those few sentences that may surround your mental fortress with a waterway that keeps you safer. Water is like truth, in that it keeps you clean and quenched, and paired with a boat, gets you to places you would be hard pressed to find otherwise. Truth can transport you to resorts as well, places of refuge, and beauty.

Marriage Moats is one wet barrier you can create to stave off the armies of negativity and apathy that incessantly bash on your door.

You may even find it funny to watch the critical thoughts splashing and thrashing, unable to reach you, while you watch from a turret in the clouds.

I'm on a couple of different lists that email me inspirational stuff daily or weekly (e.g. Daily Inspiration from www.newchurch.org and the weekly newsletter from Gary Chapman (www.5lovelanguages.com)). Like Lori says, often I delete them or archive them immediately but sometimes I find them really useful. To sign up for "Marriage Moats" go to www.caringformarriage.org. Currently you can sign up for the program right on the homepage. Eventually it will probably be relegated to the Online Programs section. (Techie note: If you use an add blocking addon like Adblock Plus you'll need to disable that to see the sign up form.)

New Church Podcasts

Do any New Church podcasts exist? Up until today I would have guessed the answer was no. But I just found out from Rev. Dave Lindrooth (www.newchurchweblog.org) that Rev. Ethan McCardell at the Light for Life New Church (www.lightforlifenewchurch.org) has just started publishing his sermons as a podcast. You can find the podcast here.

It's free to subscribe and I recommend that you do because then the podcast will have more subscribers and, more importantly, then you'll have a couple of good sermons on your iPod when you need one. I haven't had the chance to listen to the podcast yet but I've gotten a lot out of other sermons I've heard by Ethan so I look forward to taking a listen.

On the subject of New Church podcasts, while looking at Ethan's podcast, I discovered that the Pittsburgh New Church had a podcast in 2008, though it doesn't look like it's been updated in a while. (You can find it here). And, I happen to know that another New Church podcast project is in the works so stay tuned for news about that.

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For more information about Ethan, check out his blog (www.ethanmccardell.com) and for more of an idea of the services at Light for Life New Church watch this short video that Dave Lindrooth put together.

A New Online New Church Magazine

I've been really meaning to tell you all about New Church Perspective (www.newchurchperspective.com) and now I'm finally getting around to it. It's a really exciting, New Church online magazine project.

Here's a bit from the About page:

New Church Perspective is an online magazine celebrating the understanding and application of New Church ideas with weekly essay publication.

More than a discussion forum, New Church Perspective is based on essays from a wide variety of writers on a wide variety of topics. However, this is a two-way conversation. Discussion and response to the weekly essays are warmly encouraged. We ask only that people are respectful of each other, the Bible, and the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg referred to as the Heavenly Doctrines.

(For more about the idea behind New Church Perspective I recommend reading the launch day post from Brian Smith, the Editor-in-Chief.)

Every Friday morning a new essay is published with some perspective on the New Church or New Church perspective on some topic. It was launched on January 1st and so far 10 essays have been published. I'm now going to list them and give a summary of what they're about to give you the flavor of New Church Perspective so far.

• "4 Reasons Most New Year's Resolutions and Other Habit Changes Fail and What You Can Do to Succeed" by Derrick Lumsden - The title pretty much says it. I particularly recommend the "Further Reading" at the end.
• "Growing Up in The Park: Reflections on My Sub-Culture" by Freya Henry - Using the theories of various developmental psychologists, Freya analyzes her development growing up in a New Church congregation.
• "Even as We are One" by Isaac Synnestvedt - This is my favorite article so far. If you only have the time to read one article, make this one it. It is an impassioned and humbling exploration of who is part of the New Church and an exhortation to try to see the Lord in all people.
• "Meaning-making and the Power of Writing" by Chelsea Rose Odhner - This is a chapter from Chelsea's undergraduate thesis and so it incorporates a number of scholarly sources. But don't let the word scholarly make you think it's boring; it's a fascinating, well written, careful exploration of the act of writing.
• "Are You Happy?" by Ronald Schnarr - Ronnie looks at what can keep us from being happy and encourages us to ask the Lord for real happiness.
• "Spiritual Body Image" by Pearse and Taryn Frazier - This article looks at the spiritual meaning of being human.
• "Buddhism and the New Church" by Ian Chapman - Ian's article is a short and interesting comparison of a couple of Buddhist teachings with New Church teachings.
• "Marketing the Writings" by Coleman Glenn - In this article Coleman imagines what could happen if someone launched a huge, year-long marketing campaign for the Writings.
• "Protecting Ideals and the Reality of the World in which We Live" by Stephanie King - In this heartfelt article Stephanie expresses both her strong ideals and her desire to understand and love people who don't. She raises a lot of good questions with no easy answers.
• "We, Distinct from Our Teachings" by Derek Rose - In this article Derek encourages us to think carefully about what we mean when talk about the New Church—the teachings, the organization, or the culture?

Hopefully this makes you want to read some of these articles and subscribe to receive updates every Friday and, most importantly, inspires you to submit an article yourself.

Glencairn Museum Has a New Web Site

Glencairn Museum has had a web site for a couple of years (www.glencairnmuseum.org) but it was a better-than-nothing site made by one of the staff members who taught himself HTML.

Glencairn now has a new web site. Glencairn generally has a pretty professional look and feel so I'm really glad that they now have a web site that represents them well.

Apparently it's in the plans to build a media-rich, schmancy site for Glencairn in the next couple of years but I'm glad they built this in the meanwhile.

Take a look around. It's not perfect but it is a heck of a lot better.

Get More Out of the Minor Prophets

Have you ever tried to read the prophets? They can be pretty dark, impenetrable reading at first. But, with patience and some help, they can become intriguing and uplifting reading.

In the last couple of months I wrote a sermon on Habakkuk and a children's talk on Haggai and now get a lot out of those books. In both cases I drew significantly on Rev. George McCurdy's minor prophets study guides. So far McCurdy has produced study guides for 10 of the 12 minor prophets. He just made his study guide for Micah available online so I figured it was a good opportunity to make sure that all of you were aware of this incredible tool.

Here's McCurdy's description of his guides:

These prophet study guides contain the information needed to undertake a verse-by-verse study of the Minor Prophet books of the Word. Within the study guide the reader will find a comprehensive presentation of the passages from the Heavenly Doctrine that have direct reference to the text, the passages from the Writings that the author has identified as possibly providing insights into the spiritual sense of the verse, and questions to stimulate reflection and insights.

You can get McCurdy's study guides from the New Church Online Store. Just search for George McCurdy. (Here's the one for Zepheniah.) You can also get them all for free online at dovepress.org. (Here's the one for Zepheniah.)

McCurdy's research, careful reading, and selection of relevant teachings is really helpful in beginning to see the internal sense of the minor prophets. But, even more than that, the humble and yet eager-to-learn attitude that comes across in McCurdy's reflections and questions, is an inspiring example of how to approach the Word.

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I also recommend this sermon by McCurdy.

Interview with Jonathan Rose about Swedenborg

I found an interesting interview with Rev. Dr. Jonathan Rose about Swedenborg on YouTube. The interview was recorded in 2000 by Andy Nesky, the president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Theosophical Society, as part of his "Science and the Outer Streams" series.

[T]he show and its content were exceptional. Andrew Nesky's unique knowledge of subject matter coupled with an amazing guest list created a format that could objectively and intelligently address esoteric and non-traditional areas of human thought. Guests came from all over the world and represented diverse and important perspectives on philosophy, religion, spirituality and the paranormal.

(See Nesky's web site, esotericgateway.com, or his YouTube channel for more information.)

The interview is about 50 minute long. Like any unedited interview it rambles around a bit but it provides an interesting overview of Swedenborg's life and key teachings, with the interviewer providing some interesting context from other thinkers. I've embedded the first video below. If you don't have the time to watch the full thing, use the links and notes below to jump in where it looks interesting.



Part 1
- Introduction
- Summary of Swedenborg's life

Part 2
- Summary of Swedenborg's life
- Swedenborg's claim about talking with angels
- Should people try to duplicate Swedenborg's experience?

Part 3
- Different stages of spiritual awareness

Part 4
- The deaths and struggles necessary for growth
- Swedenborg didn't try to start a church organization
- Ornaments and poetry in Swedenborg's works

Part 5
- Disagreements with other Christian groups about the trinity and the books of Paul
- Gnostic gospels

Part 6
- Rules that Swedenborg used in approaching scripture
- The need to see things for yourself
- How to interpret scripture truly

Part 7
- The need to interpret all laws
- The establishment of New Church organizations

Part 8
- Conjugial Love and other works
- Wrap up

New Church LIVE So Far

Here's my understanding of where things are at this point and what you can find online.

Last Sunday they finished their first 4 week series, "Creation Works." You can watch the first 3 weeks of it online. They have a YouTube channel and a Vimeo channel. You might think that you might as well stick with YouTube because that's what you're familiar with, but Vimeo is actually better. Vimeo allows them to upload longer videos so you can watch a whole week's message in one video instead of in a series of 3 or 4 videos on YouTube. They have organized their YouTube videos into playlists now, which makes it easier, but Vimeo is still better because you don't have to watch through (or skip through) a minute of graphics at the beginning of each of the "Creation Works" videos. Also, because they don't have to chop things up they seem to put things up on Vimeo first.

Here's what you can currently watch online:

• "The Road Ahead" - This is their introduction to New Church LIVE.
• "Creation Works" part 1: "Light"
• "Creation Works" part 2: "Expanse"
• "Creation Works" part 3: "Heart"
• Kids LIVE promo - Kids LIVE is their kids program which is starting up in August sometime.
• Greg Simons Profile - This is a short video about one of the guys that volunteers in the parking lot.
• "Down to the River to Pray" - The music at New Church LIVE is awesome. Currently this is the only video online of the music.
• There are also two old promos - Pen Pals and another one.

Their new series, "A Tale of 3 Cities," started today.

That's about all I know. If you want regular updates follow them on Twitter (twitter.com/NewChurchLive) or check out their Facebook page (www.facebook.com/NewChurchLive).

What's the point of preaching?

I was just browsing around the Washington New Church's new web site (www.washingtonnewchurch.org) and found a great little article by their new pastor (Rev. Mike Gladish) about the point of preaching and coming to church. It's on the first couple of pages of their summer newsletter (PDF). Here's an excerpt:

I like preaching, and I hope you can enjoy listening to someone preach, especially when the message being delivered is from the Word. But really, what’s the point? Why would you come and listen to me or anyone else “preach” when you can go to the Word for yourselves and learn all that you need to know in order to live well and prepare for heaven?

One answer is painfully simple: I get paid to study the Word and you don’t. Therefore I have an advantage (one that YOU provide for me) in that I am specially trained and can take more time than you can, as needed, to consider the context of the teachings, their meaning, the implications, and so on. In that respect I’m no different than a plumber or an architect: I’m a specialist. And like most specialists I have no authority to tell you what to do, but I can tell you what the code requires. Besides, if you didn’t come to church would you really spend that time reading the Word instead?

Which brings me to the main point. ...

I also liked Rev. Mike Ferrell's article about the use of vacation (pp4-5 under "From the Assistant").

Follow Swedenborg on Twitter (sort of)

If you want a sort of Daily Inspiration-like* quote of the day in your Twitter feed you might like to follow SwedenborgToday.

I'm not sure who set this up. Maybe it's the same person who's Swedenborg on Facebook.

* Daily Inspiration provides daily short quotes from the Writings. Subscribe for free in the bottom left corner of www.newchurch.org's homepage.

New Church LIVE Coming Soon

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a couple of ways that you can keep up to date with New Church LIVE.

On Sunday they had a preview event called "The Road Ahead". They described some of the things that they're hoping to do, asked for volunteers, and announced that they're going to be starting having regular services starting on June 21st and that their first series is called "Creation Works". Unfortunately for those that weren't able to attend the event on Sunday, it looks as though nothing of what happened on Sunday is currently available online. (That may be because the crew is taking a break after all the work that must have gone into preparing for the first event.)

The only new thing that I've found online is that there's now the first beginnings of a web site at NewChurchLIVE.tv and a goofy, under construction video.

Web Sites for New Church Summer Camps

There are a bunch of New Church camps that happen during the summer. The new NewChurch.org has a Camps & Retreats page that has information about a lot of them and links to their various web sites.

The camps happening this summer include Laurel Family Camp (www.laurelcamp.org), Jacob's Creek Family Camp (www.geocities.com/jcfamilycamp/index.html), British Academy Summer School (www.newchurchuk.org/bass/bass.php), and several others.

This page only includes information about General Church camps. Is anyone aware of any information online about other New Church camps?