Building up the church?

Never thought about doing it this way. The First Church of Lego. See here for more.

Reading the Bible as a whole

Here's a great quote about how we need to read the Bible (or let the Bible read us) from J.I. Packer. Thanks to Milton Stanley at Transforming Sermons for sharing it (he gives credit to Mark Loughridge). It's definitely worth not only reading, but applying.

". . . we are not in the habit of treating it as a book - a unit - at all; we approach it simply as a collection of separate stories and sayings. We take it for granted that these items represent either moral advice or comfort for those in trouble. So we read the Bible in small doses, a few verses at a time. We do not go through individual books, let alone the two Testaments, as a single whole. We browse through the rich old Jacobean periods of the King James Version or the informalities of the New Living Translation, waiting for something to strike us. When the words bring a soothing thought or a pleasant picture, we believe the Bible has done its job. We have come to view the Bible not as a book, but as a collection of beautiful and suggestive snippets, and it is as such that we use it. The result is that, in the ordinary sense of 'read,' we never read the Bible at all. We take it for granted that we are handling Holy Writ in the truly religious way, but this use of it is in fact merely superstitious. It is, I grant, the way of natural religiosity. But it is not the way of true religion.

God does not intend Bible reading to function simply as a drug for fretful minds.

The reading of Scripture is intended to awaken our minds, not to send them to sleep. God asks us to approach Scripture as his Word - a message addressed to rational creatures, people with minds, a message we cannot expect to understand without thinking about it. . . .the Bible comes to us as the product of a single mind, the mind of God. It proves its unity over and over again by the amazing way it links together, one part throwing light on another part. So we should read it as a whole. And as we read, we are to ask: What is the plot of this book? What is its subject? What is it about? Unless we ask these questions, we will never see what it is saying to us about our lives.

When we reach this point, we shall find that God's message to us is more drastic and at the same time more heartening than any that human religiosity could conceive."

Often we treat the Bible as nothing more than a glorified "Daily Bread" that contains our inspirational thought or spiritual challenge for the day. Would that we would let the Bible be what it is and unleash the Spirit to use it to transform the core of who we are.

Link

The Sadness of Joy...

I've often wondered why Jesus wept at Lazarus' tomb. I've heard many sermons on it and none of them have ever really settled the issue. Jesus, of all people, knew exactly what was going to happen. He even knew that through His death and resurrection that death would be defeated. Shouldn't this corpse walking out of a tomb been a moment of victory? Didn't Jesus realize that it would foreshadow His own resurrection? Shouldn't He have been filled with anticipation as people saw the power that God has over death? And yet there it is in black and white, the easiest Bible verse to memorize, "Jesus wept." (Jn. 11:35)

I think that I have a better understanding of this now. It happened last week as I presided over a funeral of our friend Janice. Janice went home to heaven at age 42, leaving behind 3 children: Ryan, 20, Rob, 19, and Heather, 18. Janice has fought cancer for the last 18 years. We have known her for the last 2 years, and her kids have spent time living with us while she was in the hospital. (More info on that here.)

I had worked hard on my comments for her funeral. Although it was sad to say goodbye (even temporarily) to someone so young, my hope was that the funeral could celebrate the end to her battle with cancer. A battle that was won by Jesus. In order to help keep that focus clear in the service, I wanted to end my comments by reading from I Corinthians 15:50-58 from "The Message".

50I need to emphasize, friends, that our natural, earthy lives don't in themselves lead us by their very nature into the kingdom of God. Their very "nature" is to die, so how could they "naturally" end up in the kingdom of Life?
51But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I'll probably never fully understand. We're not all going to die--but we are all going to be changed. 52You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes--it's over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we'll all be changed. 53In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. 54Then the saying will come true:

Death swallowed by triumphant Life!
55Who got the last word, oh, Death?
Oh, Death, who's afraid of you now?

56It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. 57But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three--sin, guilt, death--are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!
58With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort.

That should bring people to the joyous point of remembering that death's hold on us is only temporary. The last word belongs to Jesus. Janice's battle is over. She has been victorious. And verse 58 tells us to throw ourselves into Christ's mission, knowing that He can complete all that He has set out to do. I envisioned reading the passage with power, confessing with confidence the joy that we have from Christ's defeat of death.

But what actually happened was that as I read I became so overwhelmed with sadness that I could barely finish the passage. And it was at that moment that I realized something. Sin, it's hold on us, and the ramifications it has for our lives is something so terrible that we should not gloat in our victory. Yes, Jesus has the last word, and in that we can have hope. But our rebellion against God has filled this world with such pain and misery that at times our joy has to be laced with sadness. That's part of living in a fallen world - a situation that will not be remedied until the Kingdom comes in all its fullness. Having a taste of what Jesus offers helps us to see the horrible reality of what the world has a little more clearly. Seeing what is to come brings us joy, but also overwhelms us with sadness for what is.

It's a bittersweet feeling that my friend Matt Auten has appropriately named "the stab". That sense of happy sadness or painful joy that reminds you of the celebration to come while showing you the desolation of the world all around you (and even in you).

So I think that's why Jesus wept. Yes, He knew the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven. He knew the power and promise of God. But that knowledge only made Him more susceptible to the pain of the death of Lazarus and the sadness of those who loved him. And by experiencing that He was able to transform it into resurrection joy. As we know the joy of God better it emotionally stretches us to higher heights. But the view from those heights constantly reminds us of the depth to which sin will carry us. Our call is to embrace the sadness and let God transform it in and through our lives.

So it's important to remember God's words through Paul...

Death swallowed by triumphant Life! Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who's afraid of you now? ... With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort.

Don't ya just love old George

Mildred, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church's morals, kept sticking her nose into other people's business. Several members did not approve of her extra curricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence. She made a mistake, however, when she accused George, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town's only bar one afternoon. She emphatically told George and several others that everyone seeing it there would know what he was doing. George, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just turned and walked away. He didn't explain, defend, or deny. He said nothing. Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred's house...walked home....and left it there all night.

Sheer power

A picture of Katrina. There is power which we can't even begin to comprehend.

To Dunk or Sprinkle...?

John Piper and Bethlehem Baptist Church are taking a courageous stand as they seek to clarify what is necessary for church membership, especially in regards to baptism. It's a bold step and one that needs to be taken. Thanks to emergesque for the link.

"The central issue at stake is: How should we define the membership of the church? That is, what degree of biblical understanding and agreement should a person have in order to belong to a local church? Or to put it another way: Should the door to membership in the local church be roughly the same size as the door to the universal church? If so, what is the basic set of beliefs that a person should be willing to affirm - or at least not deny - in order to give good evidence that he is born again into the family of God and a follower of Christ? After more than three years of study and prayer and discussion of this issue, the Council of Elders believes that membership requirements at Bethlehem should move toward being roughly the same as the requirements for membership in the universal body of Christ. That is, we have come to the conclusion that it is seriously questionable to say to a person who gives good evidence of being a true Christian and who wants to join Bethlehem: you may not join. This conclusion raises problems of consistency for our present Constitution and By-Laws and our present church Affirmation of Faith and Church Covenant. These documents hold up some less than essential beliefs that must be affirmed in order to be a member at Bethlehem. Thus the door to membership at Bethlehem at the present time is significantly narrower than the door to membership in the universal body of Christ. The elders believe this should be changed because of how serious it is to exclude in principle any truly born-again lover of Christ from membership in the local church. The most obvious change this involves is allowing the possibility that a person may become a member who has not been baptized by immersion as a believer but who regards the baptismal ritual he received in infancy not as regenerating, but nevertheless (as with most Presbyterians) in such a way that it would violate his conscience to be baptized as a believer. The elders are proposing that under certain conditions such persons be admitted to full membership."

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Sorry for the silence...

Life has been very busy this week. Last fall we "semi-adopted" a couple of teenagers, Heather and Rob (See here). They lived with us for just over 5 months while their mom was in the hospital with cancer. They wormed their way into our hearts and will forever be a part of our family. This past Tuesday @ 11:05am their mom went on to heaven. It was a sad yet beautiful end to an 18+ year battle with cancer. So life has been busy. Please pray for Rob and Heather and their older brother Ryan. You can read more about the situation at my sister-in-law's blog here, here, and here.

By the way, everything my sister-in-law writes about my wife is true. She comes into her own when she is caring for others. She has a gift for organizing and serving that takes the load off people and makes them feel at home, loved, and secure. When I married her I never imagined how thankful I would be for her presence in my life. She is a gift to all who know her and an instrument of God in the lives of so many people. She's not a bad kisser either.

Thanks for your prayers. I'll post more as soon as I can get to it.

Being Missional

Once again, Scot McKinght of Jesus Creed cuts right to the heart of the issue. He writes...

"The Real Shepherd, the Pastor of pastors, Jesus himself, was a compassionate person whose compassion for people drove him to prayer and to action for the people. A missional orientation will only be genuinely missional to the degree that it is prompted by compassion."

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Spirituality in America...

Interesting article in Newsweek. Here's a sample...

"You can know all about God," says Tony Campolo, a prominent evangelist, "but the question is, do you know God? You can have solid theology and be orthodox to the core, but have you experienced God in your own life?" In the broadest sense, Campolo says, the Christian believer and the New Age acolyte are on the same mission: "We are looking for transcendence in the midst of the mundane." And what could be more mundane than politics? Seventy-five percent say that a "very important" reason for their faith is to "forge a personal relationship with God"—not fighting political battles.

Today, then, the real spiritual quest is not to put another conservative on the Supreme Court, or to get creation science into the schools. If you experience God directly, your faith is not going to hinge on whether natural selection could have produced the flagellum of a bacterium. If you feel God within you, then the important question is settled; the rest is details.

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Where Do You Want to Play Today - Inside or Out?

Here's a great post from Tod Bolsinger (It takes a church blog) that reminds us to get out and be a family.

"When we came upon the rest of the adults on the way out, the kids were a good 20 feet ahead of me. My crawling pace was no match for their scampering little legs. When I finally caught up, my wife said to me, "You should have seen the girls' faces. They were so proud of themselves, so excited." They were genuinely having fun playing in a cave marching a mile in the cold dirt, hanging onto a old gas lantern. This memory is in such stark contrast to the now famous quote from Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Louv cites a fourth grader who says to him, "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are.""

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Making church your life - or life your church.

Now here's an article (long but very worth the read) that will stretch your thinking a bit. It's from Len at nextreformation.com. In the article Len calls us to some radical steps in order to help the church see itself as a living community of faith 24/7 instead of a group that meet together once or twice a week.

Here are some excerpts -

I take my cues for this article from Mike Bishop’s article of 2002 that appeared at Next Wave online. Mike astutely observed that the deeper problem in the Sunday church paradigm may be rooted in our Greek way of thinking about culture. Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks divided life and culture into categories of sacred and secular. In postmodernity, we are learning anew to question such assumptions.
What does it mean that "all life is sacred," and how will that impact our use of meetings versus "doing life" together? What does leadership look like in a community of friends (if we can even use the "L" word any more...)
"The way many evangelicals worship contributes to a secular world view or at least fails to challenge it. By worship I mean: gathering of people, singing hymns, praying, reading Scripture and hearing a sermon. By secularism I mean a world view wherein God is relegated to the edges of life." (Mark McKim)

One of the challenges we have had to face as we worked through a more incarnational and holistic approach to gathered life was dealing with traditional expectations based on our churched culture. We wanted to move from doing church to being the church in all expressions of our life, but we had people coming to us who were expecting to come to a “home group” or “bible study.” They expected to experience a “service” where various components were prepared and then handed to them on a platter.
But in our paradigm, we thought that description better suited a theatre or an audience than a gathered community. We were not interested in staging a performance, and we weren’t worried about who was in control.. our desire was to celebrate our life together.
The classical elements of a gathering are these. Many faith communities believe they must hit each point in order to have a valid gathering:
* worship (ie singing and meditation)
* word (teach/preach, response maybe)
* sacrament
* in all this, a hierarchy (positional authority) and an order
* an ethos of activity focused on a stage, with little space for reflection
But if the center is not the gathering .. if the focus is life 24/7... and meetings are secondary and not the end but one means of building life.. if a teaching need not be wrapped up with a neat conclusion in 20 minutes, but instead can be more like a learning conversation.. if defined leadership can fade into the background in favor of a real community.. things can begin to follow a different path.

While I don't agree with Len on everything - he really pushes the idea of a time of "detoxing" from church as we know it now - I do think that many of the things he is saying are very important for us to wrestle with AND to begin to act on. The way we currently 'do" church does reinforce the idea that faith has very little to do with everyday life. We meet away from society for a very contained period of time to think about Jesus and His call. We then re-enter the "real world" and live there until our next escape into church. We have to make structural changes that help people to live out their faith in every expression of their lives. We have to begin to see our lives as "church", our activities as "worship", and our friendships as "evangelism.

Len continues...

Isn’t it odd that we call our worship gathering a “service,” but less readily term our daily acts of service “worship.” We have inverted the priesthood and made it something truly divorced from life. We made something sacred into something secular, relegating it to the margins of life.

These are thoughts worth thinking - and implementing. Read the article and let me know what you think.


Link

Note - Len also refers to an article by Mike Bishop that can be found here.

Pat Robertson clarifies...

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson, who called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, said on Wednesday he was misinterpreted and there were a number of ways to 'take him out' including kidnapping. 'I said our special forces could take him out. Take him out could be a number of things including kidnapping,' Robertson said on his 'The 700 Club' television program. 'There are a number of ways of taking out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted,' Robertson added."

Well, maybe, but it seems to me that it would have been smarter to say - "What I said was a bad thing to say. I'm sorry."

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More on Pat Robertson...

Here's a link with the exact quote (and video) from Pat Robertson. Is this what the world thinks of when they think of Christian leaders? I hope not.

Link

Missing God as He stands there in front of you...

Excellent reminder from Paul Littleton who writes -

"If you are going to take your clues as to what to believe from your parents, grandparents or that preacher you loved growing up without testing and proving it by the Bible and in light of it's historical development then you may, like those religious people in Jesus day, miss God as he stands there in front of you. It was their firmly-held traditional interpretations of the Old Testament that prevented most in Jesus' day from seeing him as the one God had been promising sent to set the world aright."

From the "I can't believe that he actually said that" department...

For some reason this just doesn't seem like "You are the salt of the earth...you are the light of the world" behaviour.

"Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson called on Monday for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him a 'terrific danger' to the United States. 'We have the ability to take him (Chavez) out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,' Robertson said."

Read more if you can stomach it.

A bit more clarity...

I posted here about my desire for believers to at least give equal time to doctrine and practice. This has been something that I've been wrestling with for quite some time. How do we "do" church in a way that supports and encourages real life change and transformation rather than settling for mental affirmation to set of doctrinal propositions. While my thinking is still very fuzzy in regards to how this might play out, I have gained a bit of clarity, maybe, I hope. What I am envisioning is something very much like a monastic rule. For those of you not familiar with a "rule" the best known rule is the Rule of St. Benedict, used in Benedictine Monasteries all over the world. In a monastic community the rule is the guideline by which the monks or nuns live. It gives a common set of expectations and behaviors that everyone is committed to living out. Now maybe this is a little too much to expect from a church today, and I can see where it could definitely lead to a problem with more legalism, but I only said I had a little more clarity. What I am envisioning is a series of statements, agreed upon by the believers in a given location, that would communicate what Christianity should look like when lived out in the given context. A series of basic principles that are solidly Biblical, but also practical. Values that we hold to be true and the practices that would naturally flow from people who held those values. My goal over the next few months is to spend some time thinking about what this might be.

If you are interested in more about a modern "rule" I am going to print below an example from Brian McLaren. This is something that has developed in the "emergent community". This a long post, but worth the read. It will give you an idea of what I am envisioning for the church. Keep in mind that this is written for those who would consider themselves a part of the "emerging church movement" and as such has some specific details (especially in the last section) that relate to that movement. The first three sections, however, could be applied at a local church level almost verbatim.

Members of the global emergent community hold in common four values and practices that flow from them. In the language of a religious order, we call these four values our rule:

1. Commitment to God in the Way of Jesus:

We are committed to doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, as the Scriptures teach. As lifelong followers of Jesus, we seek to live by the Great Commandment: loving God and loving our neighbors – including those who might be considered “the least of these” or enemies. We understand the gospel to be centered in Jesus and his message of the kingdom of God, a message of reconciliation with God and among humanity.
We are committed to a “generous orthodoxy” in faith and practice – affirming the historic Christian faith and the Biblical injunction to love one another even when we disagree. We embrace historic spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, contemplation, study, solitude, silence, service, stewardship, and fellowship, believing that healthy theology cannot be separated from healthy spirituality.

PRACTICES:
- As Christ-centered people, to understand the gospel in terms of Jesus’ radical, profound, and expansive message of the kingdom of God.
- As people seeking to be formed spiritually in the way of Christ, to learn historic Christian spiritual practices (disciplines), and to use them for the development of character, integrity, and virtue which flow from true communion with God.
- As participants in the historic Christian faith, to be humble learners and to stimulate learning in others, and to give priority to love over knowledge, while still valuing knowledge.
- As lovers of God and God’s truth, to seek wisdom and understanding, which are the true goal of theology, and to engage in respectful, thoughtful, sacred conversation about God, world, and church.

2. Commitment to the Church in all its Forms:

We are committed to honor and serve the church in all its forms – Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal. We practice “deep ecclesiology” – rather than favoring some forms of the church and critiquing or rejecting others, we see that every form of the church has both weaknesses and strengths, both liabilities and potential. We believe the rampant injustice and sin in our world requires the sincere, collaborative, and whole-hearted response of all Christians in all denominations, from the most historic and hierarchical, through the mid-range of local and congregational churches, to the most spontaneous and informal expressions.
We affirm both the value of strengthening, renewing, and transitioning existing churches and organizations, and the need for planting, resourcing, and coaching new ones of many kinds. We seek to be irenic and inclusive of all our Christian sisters and brothers, rather than elitist and critical, seeing “us” we were used to see “us versus them.” We own the many failures of the church as our failures, which humbles us and calls us to repentance, and we also celebrate the many heroes and virtues of the church, which inspires us and gives us hope.

PRACTICES:
- To be actively and positively involved in a local congregation. We work in churches (as pastors, artists, lay leaders, whatever) seeking to live out authentic Christian faith in authentic Christian community.
- To seek peace among followers of Christ, and to offer critique only prayerfully and when necessary, with grace, and without judgment, avoiding rash statements, and repenting when harsh statements are made. To speak positively of fellow Christians whenever possible, especially those with whom we may disagree.
- To build sincere friendship with Christians from other traditions.

3. Commitment to God’s World:

We practice our faith missionally – that is, we do not isolate ourselves from this world, but rather, we follow Christ into the world. We seek to fulfill the mission of God in our generations, and then to pass the baton faithfully to the next generations as well. We believe the church exists for the benefit and blessing of the world at large; we seek therefore not to be blessed to the exclusion of everyone else, but rather for the benefit of everyone else. We see the earth and all it contains as God’s beloved creation, and so we join God in seeking its good, its healing, and its blessing.

PRACTICES:
- To build relationships with neighbors and to seek the good of our neighborhoods and cities.
- To seek reconciliation with enemies and make peace.
- To encourage and cherish younger people and to honor and learn from older people.
- To honor creation and to cherish and seek to heal it.
- To build friendships across racial, ethnic, economic and other boundaries.
- To be involved at all times in at least one issue or cause of peace and justice.

4. Commitment to One Another

In order to strengthen our shared faith and resolve, and in order to encourage and learn from one another in our diversity through respectful, sacred conversation, we value time and interaction with other friends who share this rule and its practices. We identify ourselves as members of this growing, global, generative, and non-exclusive friendship. We welcome others into this friendship as well. We bring whatever resources we can to enrich this shared faith and resolve.

PRACTICES:
-To make an annual pilgrimage to an emergent gathering; to give one another the gift of our presence at annual gatherings whenever possible.
-To publicly self-identify with emergent where appropriate and to represent emergent well whenever we can; to exemplify the best of what emergent strives to be and do.
-To invite others to participate and welcome new participants.
-To seek to be positive and constructive in caring for the emergent friendship. To find some specific way we can help the circle of friends in emergent - by hosting gatherings, by networking people, by recommending good books or other resources, by writing for our website or other publications, by serving in some behind- the-scenes way whenever we can. To honor “unsung heroes” among us.-To stay reconciled to one another. To give one another the gift of commitment not to give up on, betray, or reject one another, but instead, to encourage, honor, and care for one another.
-To stay informed about emergent locally and globally via the website and email updates.

Do you have an 8th grade education?

8th Grade Final Exam: Saline, KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case. Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
8. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
9. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of theRebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:

1607
1620
1800
1849
1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentence:

cite, site, sight,
fane, fain, feign,
vane, vain, vein,
raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver,Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.


Wow. Makes you wonder if we're not getting what we used to get out of our education system.

For more info on this exam click here. The reality is that most of the students who took it failed it. But I'm not sure that any Grade 8 students that I know could pass it.

From the "Too much time on your hands" Department

"AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A former Hollywood stunt man now living in the Netherlands launched his greatest project to date Tuesday: a 45-foot replica Viking ship made of millions of wooden ice cream sticks and more than a ton of glue. Rob McDonald named the ship the "Mjollnir" after the hammer of the mythic Norse god of thunder, Thor. After the 13 ton boat was lifted into the water by crane, "Captain Rob," as he is known, stood calmly on the stern as a team of volunteers rowed the apparently sturdy vessel around the IJ River behind the city's central station."

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Laying all presuppositions aside...not!

It appears that one of the key ideas that undergirds true scientific inquiry is being left by the wayside. What I remember from my science classes was that one of the keys to a successful experiement was to set aside your expectations and seek to look at the data objectively. From the article below, it seems as it the intellectual elite of Harvard University have forgotten this basic premise. They are funding a multi-million dollar research project to investigate the origins of life on planet earth. Here's a comment from professor David Liu:

'My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention,' said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard."

Shouldn't he wait to see the data before assuming the outcome of his research?

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The Necessity of Humility

This week I'm preaching on Acts 9-10 - Peter's education in regards to the gospel going to the Gentiles. I have been reminded once again that one of the fertilizers for spiritual growth is humility. In my web wandering I came across the following which just reiterated what I was learning.

Professor Tim Huffman writes about the great reformer Martin Luther and the need for humility as we seek to follow Jesus:

“For Luther, the enemy of the grace of God was not irreligion but religion itself, not one’s distance from God but a confidence in one’s nearness to God. The cross, as Forde (Gerhard Forde - “On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518”) puts it, “reveals that the real seat of sin is not in the flesh but in our spiritual aspirations, in our ‘theology of glory’.” (p. 1) The “theology of the cross…attacks what we usually consider the best in our religion.” (p.2) “The delicate thing about it is that it attacks the best we have to offer, not the worst.” (p.3) It is the most religious, the most pious, the most virtuous of Christians for whom the message and impact of the theology of the cross are hardest to hear and to appropriate. Its message is that our devotion, our piety, our deep religious commitment are the hardest barriers of all for the message of the cross of Christ to break through. Yet, our only hope is not to rely at all on what we do, not even the best we do; nor on what we avoid doing, not even the hardest work of self-denial; nor on how much we conform ourselves to what we take to be God’s will—because all of these finally constitute works of self-righteousness, and their effect is to wall us off from the true righteousness that comes only from Christ, the Christ of the cross. The “better” we are, the harder it is for is to acknowledge our total depravity, and our total need for God’s utterly undeserved acceptance. This is a painful but necessary reminder that every one of us comes before God and the Christian assembly as a sinful and helpless person, full of gratitude for God’s love in Christ. But where is theological humility in our churchly debates and struggles? Far too often the debates reveal what are really personal ambition or a defense of cherished personal positions…What could happen if we began our discussions and debates with the confession of our own sinfulness and our own lack of worthiness before God? What if we granted to others the grace that comes from acknowledging that we, like they, stand judged by the Law; and that they, like we, are redeemed by the cross of Christ? What if all parties set aside their confident assertions that they are right, and they alone? Would (our debates) develop differently if (they) were approached in the spirit of Luther’s theology of the cross, rather than in a theology of glory, in which each debater were confident of his or her own goodness?”

Peter had some lessons to learn. Odds are that we do too. Can we follow in humility? Think about it.