A couple recently viral videos were rumored to be the work of ad agencies.  Can you guess which brands are being promoted in each of these?

Let me preface this post by saying that I've spent some time thinking, praying, and educating myself about the Biblical view of homosexuality and how that should affect our policies on gay churches here at MyChurch. But I also have a lot of learning to do. Which is partly why I'm sharing my personal thoughts openly here.

We have an awesome team of volunteer pastors that are church administrators - they accept, reject, or ask for more information from the hundreds of church submissions we get daily. (ie. hundreds of churches request social networks on MyChurch every single day). It's a huge task that involves investigating churches and even combing through statements of faith. They use the simple litmus test of the Nicene Creed to make their decisions on which churches to accept into our network of networks.

For "gay churches", they tread very carefully. We welcome churches that are welcoming to all lifestyles. Including homosexuality. Jesus would not have rejected followers based on sexual orientation afterall...

But we have rejected a few churches whose core agenda seems to be to promote homosexuality or gay marriage. There are some churches who have websites that are focused on this. And that's been a red flag for our church admins.

There is a term called "open and affirming" that some churches use. I think there's a lot of vague language in what this means. Does this phrase go beyond simply welcoming, and mean that the churches are promoting and even advocating homosexuality?

Every few months, I'll get (very long) emails questioning our policy on gay churches - from both sides of the coin. Everything from hateful emails that completely exaggerate or falsify claims, to passionately written letters that genuinly seek conversation.

I ask readers for thoughts. (but I will also make the disclaimer that this is my personal blog and I will delete comments that are not civil in discussion)

I've enjoyed the recent NBA playoff commercials where they have 2 players split down the middle, saying the same thing, with the theme "There can only be one"

Here's an example: Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal:

And Lebron James and Kevin Garnett:

Here's a funny spoof that SNL did, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

So amazing I had to share - this autistic man can draw an exact replica of a city after one helicopter tour of it.

Here is Rome:

Here is Hong Kong:

Found from Bill's blog 

For those folks who love pie graphs like this:

You may find this interesting.  It's a breakdown of denominations of churches here on MyChurch as of March 2008:

Nearly a third of churches identified themselves as non-denominational.  I don't know how this compares to national averages, but I do know we have some unproportionally represented denominations. 

Catholic churches, for example, are only 4% of MyChurch churches, but I'm pretty sure there's a much larger share of Catholic parishes in the US.

Salvation Army is also interesting.  I'm guessing 2% of MyChurch churches is probably a lot higher than what's really out there.  And that's mostly thanks to Eli and the folks running the Salvation Army network, MyCorps.org.