My sweetie and I are jumping in the Buick and heading north for the weekend. North and west to the 2006 Desiring God Conference. It looks like it will be an excellent conference and is already sold out. We can’t wait. Not only do we get the great speakers, but we get a weekend alone together! Don’t get much better than this.

I guess you would call this a “Productivity Enhancer.”

[HT: Paulo]

Derek Thomas has a brief but helpful article about The Didache at reformation21. The Didache is an ancient Christian document that I have to admit a fascination with. In beginning Greek, our final was to translate a piece of it having never seen it before. That was a challenge but a fun one.

In the past, I have used The Didache to argue that baptism’s mode is not of paramount importance. Chapter seven is about how to baptize and it lists some options for acceptable modes. Included is pouring water over the head of the one being baptized. This doesn’t always persuade others since the document is not inspired scripture and there has been debate over the dating of the document. I would never give any document other than Scripture a place of authority on practice and belief, but if this is a first century document (more about that in a moment) then it shows the lexical range of the word baptizo within the Christian community. Baptizo does not always and only mean immersion, it came to take on a more elastic meaning within the ecclesial community.

Read On…

As I’ve mentioned, EM Bounds’ book Power Through Prayer has really been affecting my thinking and, more significantly, my praying. Here are some significant sections that stood out for me. I’m sure that these kinds of things have been mentioned during homeletics classes, but I didn’t hear them and I should have been made to hear them. It isn’t that I didn’t already know them, but Bounds puts them in a strong and memorable tone.

Ones I will hold on to and hopefully learn from:

Volumes have been written laying down the mechanics and taste of sermon-making, until we have become possessed with the idea that this scaffolding is the building. The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness. By it we have lost the true idea of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent conviction for sin, lost the rich experience and elevated Christian character, lost the authority over consciences and lives which always results from genuine preaching. (Chapter 12)

Devotion to God—there is no substitute for this in the preacher’s character and conduct. Devotion to a Church, to opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy—these are paltry, misleading, and vain when they become the source of inspiration, the animus of a call. God must be the mainspring of the preacher’s effort, the fountain and crown of all his toil. The name and honor of Jesus Christ, the advance of his cause, must be all in all. The preacher must have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no ambition but to have him glorified, no toil but for him. Then prayer will be a source of his illuminations, the means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his success. The perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish is to have God with him. (Chapter 10)

It may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly successful ministry prayer is an evident and controlling force—evident and controlling in the life of the preacher, evident and controlling in the deep spirituality of his work. A ministry may be a very thoughtful ministry without prayer; the preacher may secure fame and popularity without prayer; the whole machinery of the preacher’s life and work may be run without the oil of prayer or with scarcely enough to grease one cog; but no ministry can be a spiritual one, securing holiness in the preacher and in his people, without prayer being made an evident and controlling force. (Chapter 6)

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.