Church shopping

For several years, we attended a church in Austin. We live in the ‘burbs, so it was a long drive (30+ minutes) and of course, nobody in the congregation lived near us. How we ended up attending this church is a long story, and we were never terribly comfortable with the congregation, not to mention the commute, so we never joined.
About 18 months ago, we decided to find a church closer to home. We attended services at the nearest Methodist church, First Methodist in Pflugerville, and at another Methodist church in the next suburb. The service at the Pflugerville church was okay, nothing to write home about, but we liked a lot of things about the other church: the senior pastor is one of the most dynamic preachers I’ve ever heard, they’re growing and have lots of different programs that interested us.
When it came time to make a decision, it came down to the following factors: the other church offered the things we thought we wanted in a church, but the Pflugerville church is our neighborhood church–our kids would be with the same kids at church as at school and in the neighborhood, etc.
I thought about this for a while and concluded that ‘church shopping’ is a bunch of bullshit because it’s all about your own personal needs and desires, not about other things, of which community ranks highly.
So, we ended up joining First UMC Pflugerville, and we’re really glad we did. For one thing, the issue of community has turned out to be correct. We’re really glad we’ve deepened our roots in our local community.
Today, I just ran across an essay that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I think it’s related to this topic: How to Find a Church, by Gordon Atkinson

Conspiracy theory

I’ve been pondering President Bush’s possible motivations for his Social Security privatization push, and the only thing I can come up with is this: the private sector sees that massive pile of money sitting in the Social Security trust fund doing virtually nothing (well, except financing the federal deficit) and would really like to use it to capitalize commercial enterprises.
Joshua Marshall offers another, more nefarious, motivation: Social Security privatization is the first step in Bush’s plan to keep the federal government from having to pay back the trillions of dollars it has borrowed from the trust fund–and to destroy Social Security in the process.
I’m just as willing as the next liberal to believe that Bush is capable of such a nefarious act, but as compelling as Marshall’s idea sounds, he offers no explanation of exactly HOW privatization is the first step. When someone hypothesizes an entire chain of events that would tie the administration’s current efforts to this dastardly goal, then I’ll analyze it and see if it seems logical and fits the facts. Until then, I’m inclined to think it’s just your run-of-the-mill Republican privatization effort–granted, on a scale that’s unprecedented in American history.

Dogs need a home!

We’ve taken in two dogs from a friend who suddenly had to move away and couldn’t take them. These sweet dogs really need a new home, preferably together. If you live, or know people, in the Austin area, please put out the word.
I’ve created a web page about the dogs.
UPDATE: We found homes for both dogs.