Enlarging the Place of Our Tent

Enlarge the place of your tent;
Stretch out the curtains of your dwelling, spare not;
Lengthen your cords
And strengthen your pegs.
(Isaiah 54:2)

While a significant portion of the Baptist blogosphere is busy retreating, regrouping, and reorganizing, Praisegod Barebones is preparing for a major expansion. For the month of July, I will be offline (let's face it, I've pretty much been offline throughout the last half of June). When I return in August, I will do so bigger and better. I want to be careful not to overpromise, so I'll give you a few things that I think are practically certain at this point:

• Podcasting: I plan to produce occasional podcasts. In fact, if all of you would send in donations, I could listen to them on one of these. You know, maybe I'm going about this all wrong. My first podcast will announce that God will take me home on Labor Day if the good Southern Baptist people haven't purchased an iPhone for me by then. Or maybe I should leave that tactic to Art Rogers, since he lives in Tulsa.
• The Fifth Century Initiative: I am very hopeful that the Fifth Century Initiative will cease to be "my" project and will become a conference involving a large group of faithful and visionary Baptists.
• Online Sermon Calendaring: I have authored a web application that allows me to plan my preaching easily and from anywhere with Internet access. The resulting content is available to display online with great creativity in presentation. I've been hard at work over the past year modifying the code to make it accessible to multiple users. I hope to debut it in August. I'm not promising a "killer app" or anything—it is software written by a preacher who is self-taught in C#, T-SQL, AJAX, Javascript, and ASP.NET. Of course, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
• And, of course, Southern Baptist political commentary will continue apace. During my blogging vacation, I recommend that you spend some time getting to know Dr. Thomas White. His blog is here.