fighting fundies

Newport Half Marathon is Coming! Yikes

This is the first time i've ever ventured anything like this, and I'm a getting keyed up. A great place to run, along the Hudson River looking out over Elis Island, the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan Skyline! And it's all flat, which is a BIG help. Last night I started getting a percpective on 13 miles as I mapped out how far that would be in relation to places near by my house, thats when fear set in. 13 miles is a long distance! Here is the course I will be running on Sunday.

interview on home 106fm

Yesterday had a little interview on Spring Arbor's College radio station home 106fm here in Spring Arbor, what a great little station. Tonight I do Mark at the College theatre called the "prop shop" should be fun.

Imagine the Bronx!

Had a great time at Fellowship Church in the Bronx two weeks ago, haven't had time to post about it, but I did want to mention this ministry date and the great blessing it was to me. My professor at Alliance Theological Seminary in Manhattan Dr. Louis DeCarro is Pastor of this Church, and invited me to come share the Gospel of Mark with his congregation. His wife is an amazing singer and leader of worship, they really made me feel at home, and I was blessed to see this little Church doing the work of God in this place. Five days a week the ladies of Fellowship Bible run a breakfast kitchen for folks in the neighborhood, and the place is packed everyday! An added bonus was being able to bring my old friend from Grad school Chuck Goodin with me, he ran sound and drove me to and from the city.

Let your light shine!

I've been spending the week with the Salvation Army doing some teaching at their arts conservatory and came across this story. I want to let my light shine like this.

In 1891 The Salvation Army opened its own match factory on Lamprell Street, in Old Ford, London, England, in answer to the pressing social problem of necrosis, popularly known as “phossy jaw”*.

In the match industry the work of making matches was usually done by young women, who hand-dipped the wooden match stems in white phosphorus, a chemical that was very dangerous and potentially fatal. Continuous exposure to this phosphorus on-the-job meant the jaw-bones of workers rotted away, facial skin glowed greenish-white in the dark and eventually led to brain damage. The Army challenged the industry by using non-toxic red phosphorus, providing better working conditions and by paying the workers higher wages.

Before long Army matches, known as “Lights in Darkest England”, caught the imagination of the public and forced the matchmakers to become aware of the social consequences of their work practices. Having accomplished its purpose, the Army closed its factory in 1901, though it took nine years before government legislation ensured that safety matches were indeed safe.

Good times in Wilmington

Heather and I spent this last weekend in Wilmington, NC where I performed for an event coordinated by Pastor Terry Henry and the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. Pastor Henry and I met up at Gordon Conwell Seminary in Boston this past May. What a treat it was, they put us up in a hotel right on the beach for three days, while our girls stayed at good friends back in Jersey. We haven't had this kind of time alone since Abbie was born, thats 13 years!

Thank you Terry!

Extravagant Expectations

This past Sunday I preached from Acts 19:8-20 and used a quote from the forward of Daniel Boorstin’s book “Image: a Guide to Pseudo Events in America” . I tried to connect the idea of magic, or the manipulation of spirits, (which we see in that Chapter with the Seven Sons of Sceva, who were using the name of Jesus as a kind of magical incantation to get what they want) with our cultures worship of consumerism, hedonism and nationalism. Comparing their idolatry with ours, Boorstin helped, heres the quote:

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect --we even demand--that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred. in the evening, we expect our house to only to shelter us, to keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theatre, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars to be spacious; luxury cars to be economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellences,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “Church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God, and to be God.

Never has people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

We are ruled by extravagant expectation:

Thats My King!

This is an excerpt from the late Dr. Shadrach Meshach (S.M.) Lockridge Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in San Diego. I preached this weekend from Acts 19, the passage that includes the story of the seven sons of Sceva who invoked the name of Jesus in an effort to ply their trade as itinerant exorcist mystics. I thought it an interesting counter point to see the way Dr. Lockridge invoked the name of Jesus. I've included two videos, the first one is the one that was shown in church and is shorter. the second one includes the entire excerpt from his sermon.