amazing friends

Dee Dee and I had some visitors from Baton Rouge this past weekend. Two friends of ours from Parkview (both are now part of the Ring Community Church) came up Friday. They had been planning this for a long time and the date shifted a time or two. They were trying to get a date when another friend of ours (Angela) could come as well. We thought that all three of them just wanted to come together to see the kids (oh and us too by the way), but when they got here we discovered the real reason for all the planning. Paula and Ann drove the 12-14 hours (depending on how much you stop) from Baton Rouge and arrived here at about 8:15 Friday evening. Paula called and asked if Dee Dee and I could come outside to help them unload their stuff so they wouldn't have to make two trips in the cold. When we walked out the front door of our apartment building we saw Ann with a video camera and Paula holding out a key and asking "Can you give us a ride to the airport on Monday?" Looking around we saw, not Paula's car which we were expecting, but a strange car with a big red bow on the hood. (For those who may have missed it, my car died on me about 5 miles after leaving the Air Force Base where I was training this past summer.)

I still don't think I have the story completely straight but it seems that Ann's old roommate Katy got a new car and wanted to donate her old one to someone who she knew really needed it. Ann told her she knew just the people. They picked the car up a couple of months ago and Patrick, Angela's husband, has had it and has been working on it ever since. A couple of weeks ago their entire community group at the Ring got together and prayed over the car before bringing it to us. I don't know how many people have been involved in this whole thing but to each and every one of you I say "Thank you and I pray that God blesses you as much as you have blessed us. We love each and every one of you."

Semester #3 in the books

I've now completed my third semester of seminary. I took fewer classes this time than I have in previous semesters but for some reason I seemed to be more stressed out this semester. I think part of the problem was that I actually had too much time on my hands. Since I had less to do I tended to put it off longer. Time management is obviously not one of mine strong points and I really need to try to improve on it. I'll get my chance pretty soon. I'm taking a one week course in January so I'll have to manage things pretty well in order to get everything done on time.

Hopefully, now that I'm out of school and life is going to be settled down a little for the next month or so I'll be able to blog more often. We'll see how things go.

Veteran's Pride

I just read on Military.com about a campaign to get veterans to wear their medals this month in honor of Veteran's Day to show their pride and patriotism. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson says that he hopes that this will become a tradition for all national holidays, and said he thinks it will benefit the current services as much as the retired troops. I think this will start dialogues, inspire neighbors to talk to veterans who live next door about their sacrifice. I hope it will help with recruiting, because our veterans are the face of America.You can read the entire story here.

Well, I decided to show my pride and patriotism by wearing my medals on my blog. That way they are always visible. If you know someone who has served in our Armed Forces remember to say thank you this Veteran's Day. In fact, you don't have to wait until Veteran's Day, you can say thank you to a veteran any time of the year. It will make their day. If you've never served in the military you can never understand just how much a simple thank you can mean to someone who has made the commitments and sacrifices that our military servicemembers make every day.

P.S. For any vets or servicemen reading this the ribbon rack above was created with Ultimaterack. This is the best rack builder I've found on the web. The programmer has actually incorporated the regulations for order of precedence for each service so that your ribbons are ordered correctly. Military.com doesn't even have this implemented yet. Plus he's got many of the National Guard and civilian awards incorporated into his ribbon sets. Check it out.

Car repairs. Is there a bigger money pit out there?

The past couple of weeks have been stressful for us. A few weeks ago I went out to get in the van to go to school and it wouldn't start. I pulled the battery and had it tested and it was fine so the problem lay elsewhere. We ended up having the van towed to a garage and after more than an hour it turned out to be a loose connection to the passive anti-theft system. The system is designed so that if power is cut to it power is cut to the entire electrical system. So they reconnected the wire and charged me $12 for the time it took them. No big deal, except... We've known for a while that there was a slow leak somewhere in our coolant system but no one has been able to find it. Well it obviously finally got big enough that these guys found it. To make a long story a little less long we waited until Dee Dee's parents were in town, so we could have the use of their car, and put the van in for the repairs this past Monday. I picked it up 1 day and $950 later. Of course that amount only covered the absolutely necessary repairs. The total bill would have come to around $1300 if I had gotten them to do everything that needed doing. Anyway, we got the van back and Dee Dee's mom left to drive back out to where they are parked in their motorhome. Ten minutes later we got a call from her. Her car broke down. Their problem was with the transmisison and ended up being significantly more expensive than ours. Everything is back up and running again now but finances are tighter than ever as you can imagine. I know God never promised that seminary would be easy, but sometimes I pray it could be just a little less stressful.

Saints go marching home... but at what cost?

Last night I watched as the Saints returned to the newly refurbished Superdome for the first time in over a year. I loved seing the team draw on the emotion of the night to beat the rival Falcons. Alot of people have criticized the city of New Orleans for rebuilding the Dome while people are still without adequate housing in the city. Being from south Louisiana I understood the necessity of rebuilding the Dome and drawing people back to the city in order to stimulate the economy. However, last night, one of the comments made by the announcers really struck me. He said that the new coach, Sean Payton, had someone come up to him this summer and tell him that even though he did not have a place to live or a job he had purchased 6 season tickets because that's how much he believes in the Saints. The announcer told this story to emphasize how important the Saints are to the city and how much havign them back home will help to energize the citizens. But I couldn't help but to draw the exact opposite conclusion from his statements. Here is a person who does not have a job or a place to live who is spending what money he has on tickets to a game. How lopsided has our culture become? How addicted to athletic competition? I don't even know what else to say but that I am disgusted.

Hello world!

That simple statement has been the result of countless computer programmers' first lines of code. As they move on to learn new languages they often return to this familiar phrase. I think that it is appropriate here for my return to blogging after such a long hiatus since I am moving to the new version of Blogger. Many, many, many, many things have transpired since my last post more than 5 months ago. I'll give a quick run down of the summer's activities here and will likely expound on some of them later.

1. I finished out my first year of seminary on May 11.
2. I worked full time (plus some) at our church for the next two weeks preparing for our software switchover from Shelby to Fellowshipone (these are church management database programs).
3. On May 28 I packed up my car and drove down to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL for Commissioned Officer Training (with 209 other new Air Force officers) and the Chaplain Candidate Course (with 47 other chaplain candidates). My instructor for COT turned out to be from Louisville, and I found out around the middle of the course that he is actually a graduate of SBTS and is a pastor of a church here in town.
4. On July 14 I graduated from CCC and was ready to spend a week on vacation in Baton Rouge before returning to Louisville and work.
5. Less than 5 miles after leaving Maxwell my car overheated which cracked the block. We ended up selling it for scrap and are now living life with one vehicle.
6. On July 24 I returned to work and to all the problems that had been waiting for me all summer. I worked full time until school started back.
7. On Aug 15 I began my third semester of seminary. I decided to take things a little lighter this semester. I'm only taking 3 classes (Ministry of Leadership, Elementary Hebrew, and Systematic Theology I), but since 2 of those classes have a combined 3000 pages of reading and Hebrew requires quite a bit of study, on top of the fact that we're still getting the new software properly configured for the way we do church, I thought this would be a good idea.

Well, that's the whirlwind version of my summer. I'm planning to do a complete redesign of this blog sometime in the near (or possibly not so near) future. I just need to come up with a good name. If anyone is still poking their heads in here periodically, don't give up on me (and leave me some suggestions for names if you'd like). I promise there will be much more coming soon.

P.S. Here's a shot of Dee Dee and I just before going to our Dining Out (a formal, military dinner).

immigration debacle

OK, I've stayed out of this whole immigration reform thing till now, but I've finally gotten fed up enough with this ridiculousness that I have to comment. I am so sick of hearing people on the MSM complaining that some of the bills being put forward to reform the immigration laws would "criminalize undocumented workers". These people are here in violation of current immigration laws and therefore they are already criminals. I'm also sick of hearing people talk about the need for a "guest worker program". We have one. It's called getting a green card. What we need is not reform of the immigration laws, but enforcement of the laws as they currently stand and I think that the vast majority of Americans feel the same way. Our senators and representatives spend too much time debating what they think we want and what they think is best for us and far too little time actually representing us and listening to what we really want.

GEAUX TIGERS!!!

My brother-in-law pointed out that I have been remiss in posting about the incredible run of the LSU Tigers basketball team in the men's NCAA tournament. So Kyle, here it is. I'm sitting here right now getting ready to watch the Tigers take on UCLA for a chance to play Florida for the championship. And our women's team gets a chance to knock of Duke just like the men did. It's always a good thing when Duke loses but it's even sweeter when the Tigers knock them out in the tournament. Geaux Tigers!

Update:
Well the game just ended and the Tigers were on the short end of the final score. It was still an incredible season. This was a team that wasn't supposed to do much. We were picked to finish third in the SEC West and ended up as one of the final 4 teams standing in the Big Dance. Way to Geaux Tigers!

I feel like I need to say something about the commentators for the game. With 15 minutes left in the game and UCLA up by 21 points the commentators basically called the game and said it was over. I've played and watched enough basketball in my life to know that you cannot call a game at that point no matter how badly the losing team is playing. I've actually seen a high-scholl team that was down by 21 with 3:00 left hit 6 three-pointers, a two-pointer and a free-throw and end up winning the game in overtime. Through the last 15 minutes of this game the commentators continually talked of how dominant UCLA was in the game and at one point said that this performance by UCLA was the best they had seen in the tournament so far. They must have been watching a different game than I was. UCLA only scored 9 points over the final 15 minutes. How is that dominant? If LSU could have hit a few more shots down the stretch it would have been a totally different game. I just wish these guys could drop their bias for the big name schools like Duke and UCLA in basketball and USC in football and call the games like they actually happen.

anniversary

It was one year ago today that God set in motion the events that would lead us to apply to the Air Force Chaplain Candidate Program. For those that have been following this blog you probably already know the story, but in case anyone wants to read the details you can find them here. As I stated in my last post I found out that I have been accepted into the program. Well, I have received my letter of appointment and this past Friday we drove to Cullman, AL to meet Dee Dee's parents so that her dad (who is a retired Air Force officer) could swear me in as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve. All that's left now is to get the final paperwork in so that I can receive my orders to attend training this summer. This has been a long process and at times we wondered if we were really following God's plan. But every step of the way He has revealed to us that we are doing what He wants us to do. Thanks for all the support and especially for all the prayers that so many have offered up for us over the past year. They really mean alot to us.

into the blue

Well it's official now. I just got off the phone with my recruiter and he has received my letter of appointment as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve. All that's left now is for me to be sworn in and to contact the Chaplain Candidate Office to have my orders cut for this summer's training classes. I'm not sure yet exactly when we'll get the oath accomplished. I have asked my father-in-law, who is a retired Air Force officer, to swear me in, so we have to wait till they can wrap things up in Louisiana with his dad and drive up. This has been an incredibly long year of working towards this point but we have seen the hand of God on us throughout the process. We continue to pray that he would guide us and we continue to covet your prayers as we prepare for this next phase in our lives. I'll be gone for 6 weeks this summer so Dee Dee will need lots of prayers and support to make it through that time with 3 kids and no family in the area.

Well I better cut this off. I have two mid-terms this week and I need to get to studying. I post more details later.

ports, pork barrels and whiny politicians

Wow. It's amazing how quickly time can pass by between posts. It feels like just a couple days ago that I made my last post on this blog but I see that is has been almost two weeks. With school assignments and meetings and projects at work time can very quickly get away from me. Anyway, on the the reason for this post.

I have not said anything about the whole port scandal though I have been following it via talk radio and the internet. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about a Middle Eastern country controlling some of the terminals in our ports. The security is still the responsibility of the Coast Guard and the Dept. of Homeland Defense but it just doesn't seem quite right to me to allow a potentially hostile country to control some of the means of shipping in this country. But that's not really what this post is about anyway. My problem with the whole situation was the way legislation was presented to oppose it. Attaching an amendment to a bill that the President could not possibly veto just seems like a dirty underhanded trick to me. I know, I know, it's the way things are always done in Washington. You attach an amendment to a bill in order to get your pet project through. And that's my problem. Our politicians act like a bunch of kids. If they can't get enough other people to agree to vote for their pet projects they whine and cry like a bunch of babies and find a way to slip it through. You can almost here them sitting around saying "Well if you don't vote for this, I won't vote for that." In fact, sometimes you actually can hear them saying it. I hear echos of children playing "If you don't play like I want to play I'm going to take my toys and go home. Nyah." I just wish they'd all grow up and let their bills live or die on the strength of their own merits, and stop attaching riders for silly insignificant junk to bills that really matter.

*Stepping down off soap box now.

some companies still believe in customer service

As I'm sure many others have, I have long been decrying the general decline in customer service in our culture. The old adage of "the customer is always right" seems to have been pitched out the window in favor of an "I just show up to get my paycheck and I don't care what you want" type of attitude. Well, today I found one company that still has excellent customer service. I ordered some of my books for this semester through Christianbook.com. One of the books was on back order so it was not shipped out with the others. I checked my account yesterday and noticed that the back ordered book had indeed been shipped, 2 weeks ago. I called Christianbook today. As is common a computer answered and gave me a list of options to choose from. But it was only 2 options as opposed to the confusing list of possibilities at many other companies. I selected my option and was placed on hold ... for a total of about 3 seconds. The person that answered listened to my explanation then asked for the order number. When she pulled up my order she said "Yep, it would probably be there by now so we'll reship it." I was flabbergasted. In a world where we have to navigate increasingly confusing automated phone systems, and then explain our problems to 17 different levels of management before being told that it's not the company's fault and that there is nothing they can do to rectify the situation, here is one company that still believes in customer satisfaction. I'll definitely be ordering more from them in the future.

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.

here we go again

Tomorrow starts yet another semester in what seems to be the never ending cycle of school that my life has become. My second semester of seminary will hopefully be better than the first. In previous entries here I blogged about the questions and doubts I was having about being here at all, but God has dispelled all the doubts and answered all the questions. Plus, I got my schedule worked out much better this semester. I'm taking:

Intro to New Testament II
History of the Baptists
Survey of Christian Ethics
Greek Syntax and Exegesis

I got my classes worked out so that I'm only in school on Tuesday's and Thursday's. The first three classes listed above will be back to back from 1:30-5:35 p.m. on both days. Then on Thursday I'll take Greek from 7:00-10:00 p.m. This will be so much better than last semester. Then I was in class Tuesday-Friday. I had 5 classes on Tues and Thurs, 2 on Wed, and 1 on Fri. Plus I would have a class, then a break, then a few more classes, then another break, then another class. In between all that I had to try to fit in some work hours.

And to top everything off, my stack of reading this semester has decreased by approximately 7 inches. The only scary thing with the reading is the fact that my professor for Baptist History authored 3 of the 5 assigned books, and coauthored one of the other ones. That should be a challenging class, but interesting.

Now that school is starting back, and I will have to be a little more disciplined with my time, I am going to try to return to blogging more regularly. Hope you'll all tune in.

Book of Daniel

Last Friday I actually watched an episode of "The Book of Daniel" the controversial program about an Episcopal priest and his dysfunctional family. In the show this priest is addicted to drugs, he has a son who is gay, a sister in law who is a lesbian, his wife has a horrid, antagonistic relationship with her mother and he has just hired a construction firm run by the mob to build a school at the church he pastors. Many people have been offended by the portrayal of Jesus, whom the priest can see and interact with on a physical level. I personally found him to be funny. At one point he asks Daniel (the priest) "Aren't you going to take a pill? Somebody said something mean to you." Sometimes I think that is exactly the reaction Jesus has to us. We claim to follow Him and rely solely upon Him, but when we are attacked or when something bad happens to us how often do we turn to our own personal crutches?

To me the really sad thing about the show was how accurate its portrayal of liberal Christianity seemed. They have taken the acceptance of all people into the church and twisted it into the acceptance and even tolerance of all practices, no matter how sinful. They have gone from looking the other way when what they considered to be a small sin occurred to embracing all practices and not calling them sin, even in cases where the practice is clearly prohibited by scripture. This is what saddens me about "The Book of Daniel". Not that it is such a horrible portrayal of what Christianity is supposed to be (which it most definitely is), but that it is such an accurate portrayal of what mahy modern American churches have become.

Anyone else have any comments on the show or the state of the American church?

kudos to ER

I just got done watching tonight's episode of ER and I was incredibly impressed with the way they presented the war and veterans' views of the war. Dr. Gallant, who is recently back from Iraq, visited a wounded friend in the VA hospital. Even though the friend was horribly injured the only thing he wanted was to go back. Gallant later told his new wife that he wanted to go back also and in trying to explain his feelings to her he told her "There's a war going on. Some people may like to forget that, but I can't." What an awesome statement. What an incredible presentation of what the military truly feels about this war no matter how much the MSM tries to tell us that they are disillusioned and have low morale. From this veteran, kudos to ER for presenting the true picture of our military servicemen's feelings.