mountain masala

rural resource ministry

I'm back at work this week and have just completed 3 days helping train rural ministers in 'resource ministry'. A team of five of us led the event, and we had about 20 participants, both lay and ordained, from across the state. it was a very worthwhile time, and the start of some more intentional work here.

with more rural ministers working with multiple congregations, and some new people in regional rural resourcing roles, our synod (and most of the Western world) has a need to retrain and reorient ministers to equip others for ministry rather than simply provide ministry. that is stating the obvious, as we all know that the church has been training ministers to be self-sufficient in single congregations for decades.

and while we might think that 'the priesthood of all believers' is a given biblically, we also know that it is rarely the reality.

we did a number of things over the three days. the two that I'll post here are the quotes about 'equipping ministry' that I put around the room as a 'read and discuss in pairs' activity, along with a table on ministry resourcing styles. I wasn't entirely happy with the range and content of quotes, and the table on ministry needs more work. I also did a session on adult learning and may post some of that here too.

I really enjoyed sharing the event with our rural ministry team and plan to post a fuller summary on our synod website. it is quite bizarre that when several of our synods are equipping 'resource ministers' we have so little sharing of what we are doing.

as part of my study leave in the second half of next year I'm hoping to check out rural resourcing approaches overseas.

Download equipping.pdf

Download multiple-congregations.pdf

research on youth spirituality

a little over a year ago Peter Eckermann and I hosted two focus groups - one with young people and one with youth leaders - here in Adelaide as part of a global study on youth spirituality being conducted by Search Institute.  the study has been conducted in  13 countries, and when they say 'Australia' they mean  our groups (ie. we're the Australian sample - many more in the other countries!)

the initial research is an attempt to work out what criteria and language to use to conduct a wider global study (eg. can you make a global multi-faith spirituality questionnaire?)

anyway, the first brief summary of stage one is here.

in relation to this and my forthcoming PhD project I have registered www.youthspirituality.com and plan to have this up and running early in this new year. stay tuned.

i was going to post about my PhD proposal, wasnt I?

cheap and brilliant software

i was moving files around on my computer and came across a demo copy of PhotoPresenter from Arizona Software. This costs US$8 and its brilliant! Choose any iPhoto album and add one of 32 animations, including some very stunning quartz composer generated 3D image animations. you can customise settings on many of the animations, and it has iPhoto-type choices to add music, fit slides to music, loop slideshow etc. my favourite effects are night city (from an Apple advert), flying through, floating tiles, floating photos, book, apple tv intro.... there are a lot of application preference options, including multiple monitor support. this is great and simple. I'll be using it lots and every Mac owner should have it.

for the second time I've bought a MacHeist bundle, getting some very cheap software and at the same time helping raise funds for some great charities. These guys bundle together a whole lot of Mac applications (12 on this occasion) for a ridiculous price (US$49 today). My interest was attracted by iStopMotion, Snapz Pro, err.. Wingnuts and some other stuff. Like last time, there are some apps here that I'll never use, but also some surprise discoveries. well worth a visit.

the kids have discovered PhotoBooth on the Mac and we have some hilarious photos. particularly using the mirror effect. apparently Leopard (no, I'm NOT going there yet...) has new filter effects that work with PhotoBooth and iChat,  both using  quartz filters.  for those of us still on the old  stripey cat, you can download new filters here. they wouldn't install on Tiger, so I used Pacifist to extract the qtz filter files.

I then double-clicked on them to see what would open in Tiger. a whole lot of them wouldn't. so I separated those that did. I was going to follow this procedure, but clearly its written for the new PhotoBooth! The old one doesnt use Quartz Composer files in the same way! What I found in the PhotoBooth contents/resources folder (control-click the application icon and choose 'show package contents') were Video1.strings and Video2.strings, which contain the two lists of effects for the Tiger version of Photo Booth (1.3). You can open these files in Text Edit. A spotlight search doesnt show me where one of the filters (thermal camera) is located... so its not a separate file (eg. a qtz effect). At this point I'm starting to guess that I can't add Quartz (qtz) files into this thing. But there is a Video.qtz file there. hmm... too much work involved at this stage...

I'm going back to braising a leg of pork - doing the old north carolina pork thing - white vinegar (well, in this case white, cider,  brown malt and sherez), brown sugar, red bell pepper flakes, worcestishire sauce, tabasco, mustard powder, garlic, salt, water -  plus I added some honey, then some Mexican Mulato chillies and tomato paste... Back in Durham NC, Bullock's was the best place to get this shredded, smokey, vinegary pork along with their famous hush puppies - deep-fried corn meal.

gosh I miss the south...

y'all come back now....   

another month, more downloads

my new month's music from emusic.com is some old jazz - Coleman Hawkins, the Gerry Mulligan Tentet with Chet Baker - the new Ben Lee album "Ripe", and "Letters from Sinners and Strangers" by Eilen Jewell (country-bluesy-rockabilly). I'm about to let the kids choose an album each. I know I've said this a bit here but I am loving 75 songs a month for $20...

try sage sociology journals

I'm currently trying Sage online sociology journals for free until the end of March.

Go and join up and download articles! Some great youth and other stuff.

Click here.

the semi-naked chef

apologies to jamie oliver, but its bloody hot again, and while I should wear an apron....

the good weekend mag had some great christmas recipes by terry durack, but of course I forgot to take them to west wyalong. we each provided some salads and dessert for the christmas lunch. I made the good old turnip salad (sans pomegranates - couldnt find them anywhere, including west wyalong! - but there they were at the supermarket as soon as we got home!)

Terry had great salad which I sort of made from memory, using what was available in the WW supermarket... some red cabbage, sliced & marinated in water & lemon juice overnight (I don't think this achieved anything, but I couldnt remember what terry had done). some fresh beetroot which I baked (garlic cloves, balsamic vinegar and thyme). the recipe (jamie oliver) has fresh rosemary, but we were in WW... AND THE SUPERMARKET WAS SOLD OUT OF BALSAMIC VINEGAR!! they had balsamic vinaigrette, but I wanted bloody vinegar!

sold out? clearly, cuisine has hit cootamundra (and surrounds). apologies for the alliteration. the headline could have said "bland goes balsamic". west wyalong is in "bland shire". really.

I was desperate. I went back down to my WW holiday haven, "thom, dick & harry's", a really nice little gourmet food & gift shop run by one of yvonne's old school friends. my second favourite shop is harvey norman, formerly for decades "fred's tv" which has the best discount CDs west of Forbes!) THEY WERE SOLD OUT OF BALSAMIC VINEGAR! what is going on in the Riverina? however they did have Maggie Beer's vino cotto, which just shows you what a classy place this is. given the shameful price, I went back to the supermarket and bought some red wine vinegar as well.

so the most spoilt baked beetroot in western NSW had vino cotto and red wine vinegar, not balsamic after all..

the salad consisted of the sliced red cabbage, the beetroot julienned (I dare you to try in your christmas clothes...),  and thinly sliced lettuce (one of those red leafed ones - I never know which is which). trying to fake the forgotten recipe, I added a splash of red wine vinegar, a double splash of vino cotto, some squeezes of fresh lemon, and the SECRET INGREDIENT which I remembered from Terry's article - MAPLE SYRUP. yep. they sell the Canadian stuff in west wyalong.

personally, I thought it was a winner. but jenny's prawn salad was clearly a standout on the day. I mean. i would kill for prawns any day, but especially in WW at Christmas.

now I just have to find terry durack's recipe and post it!

went to see "Enchanted" with Maddy yesterday. just loved it. I'll have to see it again to count the movie references. of course, Disney making fun of fairy tales within what ends up being a fairy tale... perhaps a touch of tim burton wouldn't have gone astray. I have to say that the "picture book" ending was stunning and has me thinking... now how could I...? you'd need to make a 3D book and do some rotoscoping...

back to the kitchen. I bought some $2 ramekins today, so we're having beef pot-pies - a kind of goulash - paprika, dried bell peppers, red wine, mushrooms, worcestershire sauce, etc.

further christmas culinary concoctions coming shortly. the tale of the mouldy black ball...

not to mention the gorgeous bottle of Henchke red that Rod gave me for my birthday. smell. sigh. swirl. gasp. sip. ah.

emusic again

oops I lied. emusic was 50 songs for US$14.95. it's 75 songs for US$19.95. I just upgraded...

holiday heat

we had a week in west wyalong doing pretty much nothing and have since been  back home cooking in the heat.

have been learning how to use my new keyboard with Ableton Live. A long way to go but its fun!

I've was trying to work out what to do about the Quicktime problem. Apparently there's a problem with Final Cut Pro 5 (which i use) as well.

anyway, I found this on one of the Apple discussion forums....

1. Download the QT 7.2 installer from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime72formac.html
2. Download Pacifist from http://www.charlessoft.com/
3. Use Pacifist to open the package file on the QuickTime 7.2 disk image
4. Select the following 2 folders within Pacifist's window under "Contents of QuickTime720.pkg", and use the "Install Files to Default Locations" command under the File menu:
      /System/Library/Components
      /System/Library/QuickTime
5. Select to install w/ Admin privileges and give your password
6. Restart your machine.

I tried that but it didnt solve my Arkaos problem. So as of yesterday I've been doing a reinstall of OS 10.4 which runs with Quicktime 7.2. Very tedious but its almost over. I did discover that the latest GrarageBand update (4.1.1) requires QT 7.3.1, so I'm going to run an older version. At least Arkaos is behaving....

The moral of the story is to hold of on system upgrades until you know what you're in for (which I usually do.....)

Listening to Beirut, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, the Shins....