bible software

My first class of the day was cancelled today so I went to the library to complete an assignment for another class. We had to spend an hour working with the BibleWorks program to familiarize ourselves with it. So I spent my hour playing around with the program and found out that it is incredibly powerful and also incredibly un-user friendy in my opinion. I somehow got the display changed from showing a single version of the Bible to showing a parallel display of 5 different versions and couldn't change it back. I ended up exiting the program and getting back in. Granted I only spent an hour of the program but it just didn't impress me all that much. I much prefer e-Sword. While e-Sword does not have the tools for grammatical analysis and the like (which I probably wouldn't use outside of class requirements anyway) it has one MAJOR advantage over Bibleworks. Bibleworks 6 runs $299 while the new version 7 is $349. e-Sword is free! That's right boys and girls, you can download it for free from the internet. There is also a huge user community on the web which provides support and additional modules. There are several user groups on Yahoo! Groups that are devoted to e-Sword. Just go the the Yahoo! Groups page and do a search for e-Sword.

I'm sure that if I were getting into incredibly detailed exegesis of a certain Bible passage, or if I wanted to know how many times a certain form of a word appeared in the Greek New Testament, then BibleWorks would be the program I would go for. But since I'm using my computer to read the Bible and possibly do some research in commentaries or dictionaries e-Sword more than meets my current needs.

proud parent

On Saturday Ashtyn and I braved the frigid temperatures and the snow and ice covered roads to go to her final basketball game of the season. Her team hasn't done very well (they finished 1 and 5) but they had fun and really improved through this short season. When we got to the church the coach asked all the players and parents to come downstairs into one of the school rooms. He wanted the parents to witness the type of devotional that the kids have been hearing before each game. He used an Evangecube to present the plan of salvation. If you are unfamiliar with the Evangecube, it's a really neat witnessing tool. It's one of those perpetual cubes that you can continually unfold in the same direction and they keep going back into the cube shape.

Anyway, as he was walking everyone through the cube when he got to the picture of the empty tomb Ashtyn raised her hand and said "I know a good verse for that. 1 Corinthians 15:4 - that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,". Most of the other players on the team were kind of looking at each other like "huh?". One of our ministers kids is on the team and her mom spoke up and said, "That's one of their Awana verses". So the coach put in a plug for the Awana program at our church on Wednesday nights. And of course through all this I'm sitting there going "Yes! That's my girl!" It's awesome to see how spiritual things are starting to come together in her mind and how she is beginning to connect them.

what should the local church look like?

For a while now I've been pondering this question. What exactly should the local church look like? I've seen statistics that say that less than 1% of all ministers will ever serve at a mega-church, one that runs over 2000 in Sunday worship. I have been privileged to serve at 3 (FBC Jonesboro, GA; Parkview in Baton Rouge, LA; and Highview in Louisville, KY). But one of the things I have seen by being involved in large churches like this is how poor a job we do of discipling people and truly getting them involved in the life of the church. Sure we have programs for all ages and Bible studies every night of the week, not to mention choir, men's groups, women's groups, recreation and all the other stuff that comes up. But does this really get people plugged in?

At every church where I have served you can look through the database of members names and see thousands of people who joined the church and are still officially members but who have not been seen or heard from in years. There are hundreds of people in each church who "walked the aisle" to join the congregation and asked to be baptized and are still listed in these databases as "pending baptism". Some of them have been listed this way for 20-25 years. Why have we let things get to this state? I think that in many ways we have been too lax in making sure that people understand what is expected of them when they become Christians. We have fostered a culture in our churches that leads people to believe that all they have to do is walk forward and shake the preacher's hand and get their names on the official membership roll of "First Church in the City" and that will serve as their "get out of Hell free" card. In studying church history I was amazed to see that in the first few centuries of the church, when someone wanted to be baptized they waited, sometimes up to 2 years, while they were discipled and taught what it meant to be a Christian. While I don't think we need to return to a set catechism I do think that a time of study and reflection would be appropriate. We have focused so much on numbers, while saying that numbers don't really matter because "every number is a soul won to the kingdom", that we have almost forgotten that new believers are like babies. They need to be fed and cared for in order for them to mature into adult believers.

So back to the original point of this post. I wonder if we have not focused too much on getting as many people into the pews as possibleby adding more and more pews, and too little on training the ones who have heard the gospel to be able to share it with others. I've talked with some friends about our conception of church and it seems that there are many others who are wondreing these same things.

Here are just a few of the questions that are popping up in my mind:
Should we focus more of our money on ministry and less on buildings and facilities?
Would it be better to keep the size of the church smaller in order to foster closer relationships?
When the church grows should we expand the current church, or start a new one?

In my Baptist History class at here at Southern Seminary we have been reading various confessional documents from William Lumpkin's, Baptist Confessions of Faith and one in particular jumped out at me. In 1611 Thomas Helwys, wrote

That the members off everie Church or Congregacion ought to knowe one another, that so they may performe all the duties off love one towards another both to soule and bodie. Mat. 18.15. I Thes. 5.14. I Cor. 12.25. And especiallie the Elders ought to knowe the whole flock, whereoff the HOLIE GHOST hath made them overseers. Acts 20.28; I Pet. 5.2, 3. And therefore a Church ought not to consist off such a multitude as cannot have particuler knowledg one off another.

It seems that this debate has been around for a long time, and it is likely that it will be around for a long time hence. But these are questions that we need to ask ourselves through every generation, for by not asking them, and making sure that the image of the local church is in line with scripture, we run the risk of following man-made traditions that will lead us away from scripture and therefore away from God.

Any comments or thoughts? They would be much appreciated.

cool idea

As I was surfing through various blogs the other day I stumbled on Thoughts from the Change Race and Race of the Century. These blogs were the result of two friends sitting around a pizza place and talking about how much change is lying around on the ground because people lose it. They decided to have a race to see who could find $100 in change the fastest. One of them actually did it in about 4 months.

I love this idea. I immediately started trying to think of how this could be used for ministry. Unfortunately I haven't come up with anything yet but I'll continue working on it.
If anyone else has any bright ideas let me know in the comments section.

that's more like it

I posted before about the huge stack of books I had to read for the Fall Semester. My stack of reading has shrunk considerably for this spring. The pictures below show the books that compose my required reading for each semester. I placed an 18 inch baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger Museum next to each stack as a point of reference.

There is one book missing from each stack. A friend borrowed one Spiritual Disciplines book from last Fall and one book from this Spring has not yet been shipped by CBD. So each stack should actually be about 1/2 inch taller. Hopefully this difference in the amount of required reading will equate to a little more time to spend with my family this semester.

Well, that's about it for tonight. Gotta go read one of the books in that stack on the right.