They’re winning. When we cancel things out of fear, they win.

Just in case you think the fear is unfounded, check this out.

Update: Hey, the German’s think it is “crazy” to cancel the opera! Someone in Europe has some backbone.

The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day. If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the remainder of the day. – E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer, chapter 9

I’ve just noticed that there is a film coming out titled Amazing Grace. It is the story of Willam Wilberforce and his fight to end slavery in the British Empire and that pretty much brought it to an end world wide. Ioan Gruffudd is playing Wilberforce and Albert Finney is playing John Newton. Gruffudd played Horatio Hornblower and did a wonderful job. ¹Sadly, he also played Reed Richards in the recent waste of film and time The Fantastic Four. To get some idea of what Wilberforce was able to do in ending slavery, imagine if one man was able, within his lifetime, to get America off of oil and on to renewable resources. Slavery was economically important to the Empire almost to the point oil is for the West. My analogy was overstated, but not my much. I hope that they allow Wilberforce to remain a Christian in their adaptation of the film. The presense of John Newton and the name of the movie leads me to believe they have.

Anyway, this could be an excellent movie if this is done well. Justin Taylor linked to a blog that summarized a few reviews and they are mixed. Okay. It’s still an excellent story if they’ll just do it right. This makes me think of another film that could be excellent if it were well written and directed. The story of one of my theological heros Benjamin Keach. He was one of the authors of the 1689 London Baptist Confession. The time period he lived in in London was extremely complex politically and religion was tightly intertwined with politics. When Keach became a Baptist, it cost him dearly. He did it because he was convinced it was the right thing to do. As I was reading The Excellent Benjamin Keach I was impressed that with some careful filling in of the gaps, the story could be an excellent film. Not a huge appeal but it could still be done well.

Can a church be a church without a preaching pastor? It is a complicated question isn’t it? More complicated than it seems. A knee jerk response in either the affirmative or negative misses the complexity of the question. The relationship between pastors, elders and preachers must be considered. Actually, the need for elders comes into question as well. As does the role of preaching in the church.

In church planting groups, there is a growing discussion of whether the need for a preaching pastor isn’t slowing the movement down. ¹For example, see Neil Cole, Organic Church, San Francisco: Jossy-Bass, 2005, 159 and Drew Goodmason’s blog entry amongst other sources. I would say that it most certainly is and that is not the question or the issue. So far, I have not heard the question asked of whether a church should be planted without a preaching pastor. What I’m getting at is not whether the church is or is not a church without one, but what the best for a church is. Some of the younger church planters are saying that they can simply download sermons from SermonCloud or somewhere else on the internet and play them on any given church meeting. ²You guessed it, there is also a move away from traditional Sunday morning worship to other days and times in the week. With advances in technology, we can all benefit from the best preachers and teachers without having to have our own. The money used to pay for a pastor can be spent on other endeavors. Everyone wins!!

Well, back to the complexity question for a moment. Is it biblical to have a church without a pastor? I think it is. Consider Paul’s direction to Titus in Titus 1:5, “I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.” So there were churches in Crete without elders and Paul sent Titus there to appoint some. Here were churches that had been planted without the benefit of having a pastor there at the beginning. On the short term missionary trips I have been on, we have seen churches started because God grated repentance and faith to a group of people but hadn’t raised up a pastor for them yet.

Read On…

Okay, so now I have a 20″ iMac G4 1.25GHz, Airport Extreme, 80GB hard drive, SuperDrive (CD-R/W, DVD-R/W). It is simply beautiful. The screen is large and clear and beautiful. One bad pixel out of nearly 2 million. Not bad. You can only see it when the screen is black. It isn’t noticable when there is color.

When Apple first introduced the iMac, remember the old ‘space egg’ ones, I wanted one. When they released the ‘snow globe’ G4s, I wanted one even more. The design is eligant and beautiful. And it runs Mac OS X so I don’t have to worry about spyware or viruses.

On top of that, I was finally able to get DSL. I had to switch my local phone service from AT&T to AT&T. Yea, I didn’t get it either. Old AT&T vs. SBC AT&T or something. Got the same deal and was then able to add DSL for only $12.50 per month. Sweet.

The set up of the DSL was a pain. I tried to do it with the install disk on my Powerbook and it would crash when it got to the point where it was going to configure the network connection. I tried it on the iMac and it got past that and when it tried to contact some websites, it reported that it was unable to get on the internet. Fine. I transfered the settings to the Airport base station and bam, I’m on the internet at real, usable speeds. I’m glad the installer didn’t work, I didn’t want the extra software they were going to install.

A while ago, I pointed to some information on Calvin as a missionary supporter and sender. Michael Haykin, a Reformed Baptist and church historian, has an article at Reformation21 on the same issue. Again, it is really helpful and refreshing to see that Calvin was not apathetic towards missions as the caricatures that have been painted of him have held.

Here is a picture I took this weekend at the Sun Lake Forest Preserve. This preserve recently opened and so my daughters and I took a walk through it. It is lovely. We saw what we believe were two whooping cranes strutting across an open field. I brought the camera and got this picture as we were heading out. Gillian got a really good one of a grasshopper. I’m still fiddling with it and should have it posted this weekend.

I’ve been posting some of my pictures at MacDesktops.net. You can take a look at my collection there if you’re interested. If you do, the one titled “Eden” is a picture Bernie shot one foggy morning. The reality was more stunning than the photo but it is still a great picture.

I got a free MP3 copy of E. M. Bounds Power Through Prayer from SermonCloud. It is a high quality audio book, not like one I saw from a website once that had a computer reading the classics. That was irritating!! No, this is read by an eloquent human being.

Beyond the sound quality, this is a book I wish had been required reading in our initial homiletics class. Were I to teach that class, I would take most of the first day or so of class just reading selections. To assign it for reading might subject the book to the kind of hurried reading seminary students must do just to keep up. I’m only up to chapter 6 and so far Bounds had spoken at length about the preacher and the pastor and their need for prayer. It has been richly convicting. This would be one of those books that I would end up underlining every sentence. To me, this book should be part of every pastor’s regular reading schedule along with J. Oswald Sanders’ Spiritual Leadership. I know they will both become part of my regular reading schedule when I finish seminary.

You can read Bounds on line here at CCEL for free. It is available in many other formats as well. Sanders is not available for free. Both are worth the price you would pay to buy them bound and printed.

So the pope quoted a 14th century emperor’s statement about the violence of Islam without approbation or condemnation and Islam demands that Pope’s apology with a display of violence. Okay. There are many comments about this in the blogs I’ve read but the best has got to be from Herr Luther.

Luther at the Movies is an excellent blog even if I don’t always agree with Lutheran theology. The author’s insight and wit are wonderful. He does a pretty good Luther impersonation as well. Worth a read!