I put together a website, www.HeroNU.com to help my church’s outreach plan for a sermon series my Pastor is presenting this summer. It’s called “Heroes: An Old Testament Teaching Series”.

When Pastor Dan presented the opportunity, I jumped at it because, the best way to learn about building web pages is to build web pages.  As you may know from a previous posting, I just started to learn Drupal, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to “go live” with it.

As you can see, this is basically a one-page site, and comes no where close to using Drupal’s true power and scalability. But that is the good thing about Drupal, too. You can have an extremely complex site with multiple sections and menus, or you can create a simple site like this as well. Sure, I could have just used some static HTML, but I would have lost a learning opportunity as well.

In fact, I did learn a great deal about simple things like nodes, blocks, themes, permissions, user rights, etc. So it was a win in my book.

Now I’m thinking about how I can add to what is already there.

Any ideas?

The New York Times reports on a recently released report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on religious affiliation in the United States.

The graphic below tells the whole story:

As a “protestant” it does sadden me to see this, but it also gives me that internal nudge that every Christian asks of themselves periodically: “What am I doing to make a difference?”

Read the NY Times article to get the overall look at the report and read the full Pew report to find out more details, but here is the key paragraph that stood out for me:

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

Broken down this says that a very large chunk of the unaffiliated are the younger demographic in our society. I have heard many pastors and speakers talk about the importance of teaching our youth what we know to be true, and this is the data to prove it.

What are your thoughts?