These ten blog posts were not chosen by Leadership's editors, but by the thousands of visitors to Out of Ur every month. Thanks for contributing to the conversation this year. In order of popularity, here's a look back at the most visited and commented upon posts from ?06.

1.
Brian McLaren on the Homosexual Question
Finding a pastoral response.
The couple approached me immediately after the service. This was their first time visiting, and they really enjoyed the service, they said, but they had one question. You can guess what the question was about: not transubstantiation, not speaking in tongues, not inerrancy or eschatology, but where our church stood on homosexuality. Read more.

2.
The Haggard Truth
Gordon McDonald on soul assassins and the future of evangelicalism.
It is difficult beyond description to watch Ted Haggard's name and face dragged across the TV screen every hour on the news shows. But as my friend, Tony Campolo said in an interview last week, when we spend our lives seizing the microphone to speak to the world of our opinions and judgments, we should not surprised when the system redirects its spotlight to us, justly or unjustly, in our bad moments. Read more.

Making a resolution for 2007? Before you do, check out the resolutions of one of America's most celebrated pastors. Eric Reed shares with us Jonathan Edwards' effective resolutions.

Jonathan Edwards was a serious man. Even at 19, the young man who would become a leading figure in the First Great Awakening took his faith seriously. In several sittings over a one-year period, Edwards drafted 70 resolutions by which he governed his life and ministry.

For such a young man, he wrote a life's code that was amazingly well-rounded. He addressed personal spiritual growth and physical temperance, and matters of attitude, behavior, and relationship. Edwards wanted to live as if he had "already seen the happiness of heaven, and hell torments."

The Wharton School of Business has posted an article on their online journal, Knowledge@Wharton, about the growing trend of marketing products through churches. In part 2 of the article we hear from some critics of linking business practices and ministry including Jim Collins, author of the business best-seller Good to Great.

The overlap between commerce and Christianity also leaves some churches vulnerable to purely commercial marketing, says Moore, director of the American Studies program at Cornell University. "When you have churches thinking along business lines, receptiveness to sales pitches is just the direction that things go." Megachurches are particularly vulnerable because they are so intent on growth. "Religious organizations actively seeking to grow and expand - raise money, reach new members - do things that are as much secular as religious," Moore notes. "When you have megachurches with huge auditoriums, and lots of stores and schools and gymnasiums inside, it begins to look less and less like a religious place."

Growth is key to megachurch success because large, enthusiastic congregations are what megachurches "sell" to potential members, according to James Twitchell, author of the forthcoming Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face.

A reoccurring issue on Out of Ur has been the effort of secular corporations to market to and through the church. But Leadership hasn't been the only one to notice the trend. The Wharton School of Business recently published an article outlining why companies are adding churches to their marketing strategies. Wharton's online journal, Knowledge@Wharton, was kind enough to allow us to repost the article for church leaders to discuss.

Church pastors last year had a chance to win a free trip to London and $1,000 cash - if they mentioned Disney's film "The Chronicles of Narnia" in their sermons. Chrysler, hoping to target affluent African Americans with its new luxury SUV, is currently sponsoring a Patti LaBelle gospel music tour through African-American megachurches nationwide.

Advertising has begun to seep into churches, and the phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down, say academic, religious and marketing experts. Among the wave of early adopters: the Republican Party, which successfully sold its platform to church-goers in the 2000 and 2004 elections; Hollywood, which discovered the economic power of faith when Mel Gibson's church-marketed film "The Passion of the Christ" became a blockbuster; and publishing, with Rick Warren's best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life, heavily marketed by a Christian publishing house.

Megachurches offer a particularly tantalizing opportunity for those intent on network or "word-of-mouth" marketing, a strategy that capitalizes on social relationships to spread product information and influence purchasing, according to Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams. "Megachurch members are drawn together by a strong common bond. Networks that exist naturally facilitate word-of-mouth marketing, because people tend to share information with those they are close to," she says.

Last December, David Fitch challenged the popular trend known as "Experiential Worship." Fitch said, "?we can no longer be naive that a ?religious experience,' like the one sought in a rock concert worship service, provides immediate access to God." And Shane Hipps has asked us to think more critically about using technology in worship. This week, we welcome a new contributor to Out of Ur. Perry Noble is the Senior Pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina. He not only endorses the use of technology to create experiential worship services, Noble believes Sunday morning should be the most entertaining experience people have all week.

From time to time we will have a church leader call NewSpring wanting to know what in the world we are doing to reach so many people. I have had this conversation with many people, and I have seen many walk away either discouraged or disappointed because I did not give them a magic formula. The bottom line is that if a church wants to impact a community it takes work.

For far too long the church has been lazy?that's right?LAZY. We have sat back on our butt and done nothing, asking God to "do it all" while claiming to be "led by the Spirit." And then people walk into our boring, lifeless, and predictable services and we give "God all the glory," or all the blame!

One of the things I have realized from reading Scripture is that Jesus was far from boring. He created experiences for His followers - experiences that they never forgot, and the church should be doing the same.

On Sunday morning Pastor Dan Kimball of Vintage Faith Church arrived at the coffeehouse where his congregation worships to discover three of the three hundred sketches decorating the space were nude drawings. After debating the nature of art, holiness, and the church's responsibility, Dan had to make a decision - flash the flesh or lose the nudes? Dan's first post outlined the nature of his deliberations. Here is the rest of the story.

The nude drawings were very tastefully done, classical and artistic, it was not erotica. But we took them down. I felt keeping them up would cause more questions than it was worth. Additionally, there was no time to warn parents about the nudes on the walls of the coffeehouse before our worship gathering.

"We modern, well-educated, pastoral Dr. Phils may, if not careful, begin to think our answers are more important than God's Word or God's presence. But we must remember that we are servants of Christ in the ministry of healing damaged hearts, not religious answering machines."

-Randall Hasper is pastor of Paseo del Rey Church in Chula Vista, California
Taken from "Domestic Disputes" in the Fall 2006 issue of Leadership journal. To see the quote IN context, you'll need to see the print version of Leadership. To subscribe, click on the cover of Leadership on this page.

One of the most famous churches in the world, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was originally decorated with dozens of nude figures on the ceiling. Painted by Michelangelo, the chapel is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Western art. However, a later Pope was uncomfortable with the nudity and hired another artist to paint loincloths over Michelangelo's nudes. For centuries people have debated the pope's actions. Was he advancing holiness or desecrating art? Not long ago Pastor Dan Kimball from Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, faced a similar decision.

I got a call Sunday morning as I was driving to our worship gathering. A friend informed me that the coffeehouse our church worshiped in had new artwork displayed including a number of nude drawings. He asked what we should do? No one taught me how to handle this in seminary.

We recently opened the coffeehouse as phase one of our building plan. We are using it for worship until we develop a business plan that allows us to open the coffeehouse to the neighborhood every day like a normal coffee shop. The mission of the coffeehouse is to be a place where those outside the church can meet us, develop friendships, and hear and experience the gospel in a variety of ways.

The coffeehouse has an art theme that changes every 6 to 8 weeks. We recently asked people from inside and outside the church to submit art from their sketchbooks. Our art team strung cords all around the room like a spider web, and the artwork was fastened to the cords. A local tattoo artist submitted beautiful tattoo sketches. Another artist created landscapes. But among the three hundred sketches submitted were three nudes.

Gordon MacDonald told us a while back that the church he serves was considering changing its name. It has finally happened. His account of a 180-year-old congregation's year-long wrestling with its identity is amusing and instructive. Read on.

About a year ago I filled some of this space with comments about changing a church's name. At the time our New England congregation (Baptist in background) was thinking about exchanging its 180-year-old name for something more adaptable to the times. I invited comment from all my readers. And all four of you wrote to me. (Just fooling). Actually, there were a significant number of responses.

Many e-mails were thoughtful and gave evidence that people had done their homework and accumulated useful insight about how and why a church's public moniker ought to be reappraised occasionally and sometimes changed. One or two respondents trumped me by writing that if I prayed more, Jesus would provide the name since it is his church.

A name is important. It can say something about who you are or who you want to be.

A few years ago churches that were serious about their work were "purpose-driven." Today those same churches might call themselves "missional." The upcoming winter issue of Leadership will ask what exactly it means to be missional. David Fitch is a regular contributor to Out of Ur, pastor of Life on the Vine, a missional community in Long Grove, Illinois, and the author of The Great Giveaway. In this post Fitch asks if owning a building is contrary to missional church values.

Is buying a building always contra being missional? Upon first instinct, the answer would be yes. Certainly missional gatherings would hesitate to invest in a traditional church building. But are there times when inhabiting a building might itself be incarnational according to missional logic?

One positive thing about the end of modernity is that truth cannot be held captive by the rational, the strictly representational, or the logocentric. It must be embodied. So we who live in these times naturally resist any attempts to strip truth of its embodiment. Missional living, we say, must be incarnational.

But if truth is to be embodied, if we are not going to be limited to only words, then we must embody ourselves as a physical presence in the community. This might include inhabiting a building.

This morning I attended a prayer breakfast in my town for World AIDS Day. Despite the blizzard conditions, leaders from local churches, schools, and relief organizations gathered for the event. More than a few people remarked about the odd group. My table had three evangelical pastors, a newspaper reporter, and a board member from an organization led by a gay man. Across from us were Roman Catholic nuns in their habits, Wheaton College students, and leaders of the gay community.

The two main speakers represented the polarity of the group. Ruth Bell Olsson is the leader of the HIV/AIDS ministry at Mars Hill Church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ruth comes with solidly evangelical credentials, and she also happens to be Pastor Rob Bell's sister. The second speaker was Dan Pallotta, founder of AIDSRides and Breast Cancer Walks. Pallotta's passion for AIDS awareness stems from his own experience as a gay man in Los Angeles watching many in his community die from the disease.

In a time when cultural divisions are as distinct as blue and red, the coming together of liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and gays, was refreshing - at least to me. But not everyone is happy about the emerging connection between evangelicals and those outside the conservative camp. Rick Warren, for example, has taken flak for inviting pro-choice Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) to Saddleback to speak at the HIV/AIDS summit today. Saddleback responded to the critics:

"We do not expect all participants in the Summit discussion to agree with all of our Evangelical beliefs. However, the HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot be fought by Evangelicals alone. It will take the cooperation of all ? government, business, NGOs and the church. That is the purpose of this Summit."