These Articles Resonate

April 1, 2009 at 4:23 pm (change, Feedback Received, Introspection, Leadership, Musings) (actions, change, Christianity, community, compromise, conversation, criticism, direction, excellence, expectations, growth, ideas, ignorance, leaders, Leadership, management, mediocrity, motives, opportunity, people, power, relationships, religiosity, secularism, shattered, struggle, transformation, unchurched, vision)

Meh! In the past week, or two, I’ve read some articles that seemed to have a common thread for me.  Can you guess what that theme is?

BETWEEN THE LINES

Caught In the Act Of Thinking

Obama is following Roosevelt’s approach of making early down payments on big ideas.

By Jonathan Alter | NEWSWEEK

Published Mar 28, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Apr 6, 2009

Mid-tweet in last week’s press conference, reporters were already complaining that President Obama wasn’t making news. And by the old standards, they were right. Obama didn’t drop any bombshells, or rein in his agenda, as so many have been urging, or tee up a YouTube-ready sound bite. The same gasbags who had blasted him for demeaning the presidency by cracking jokes on “The Tonight Show” and drinking a beer at a basketball game (hadn’t some favored George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 precisely because he was better “to have a beer with”?) now claim Obama’s boring. On Sunday he had to defend himself on “60 Minutes” from the charge that he was “punch drunk” with mirth; by Wednesday, he was derided as too serious and professorial.

Facebook Hockey Sticks, MySpace Languishes

121 Comments

by Michael Arrington on March 23, 2009

What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly – Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what’s worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million.

Why Facebook has never listened

and why it definitely won’t start now

Scobleizer

My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.”

His words were meant to get us out of letting the customers run our business mode we often found ourselves falling into.

The coming evangelical collapse

An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

By Michael Spencer

from the March 10, 2009 edition

Oneida, Ky. – We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

The Evangelical Collapse: A Statistical Analysis Part II by Michael Bell

March 16th, 2009 by iMonk

Guest Blogger Michael Bell (The Eclectic Christian) returns for his second round of statistical evaluations of “The Coming Evangelical Collapse.”

As I was time limited when taking my first statistical look at “The Coming Evangelical Collapse“, I wanted to follow up with a few more observations about some of Michael Spencer’s statements:

Any questions?

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