The joy of dumpster stomping

Five reasons why my Palm One is programmed to remind me to climb into the dumpster at school every Monday, and jump up and down awhile:
1. It saves us hundreds of dollars each year on garbage fees.
2. I need the exercise.
3. It is humbling, and I need to constantly remind myself that I do not grow in biblical humility simply by hearing the command and hoping; humble intentions need habitual humble acts. Especially those of us with a measure of authority need "the dumpster effect" to remind us not to lord it over others. There is one Lord of our one Faith.
4. It is, I hope, a good example to my students.
5. It brings joy, to practice simple acts of obedience that tie my life together, acts that integrate faith and behavior, intent and practice, attitude and acts.

Outlandish Proverb of the Week #345

"He that is not handsome at 20, nor strong at 30, nor rich at 40, nor wise at 50, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise."
Collected by George Herbert, 1633.

Whatever it takes

"There is but joy and grief;
If either will convert us,
we are thine:"
from "Affliction", George Herbert

On not counting heads in church.

This may sound cheap, or trifling; perhaps it is. But here are four reasons for abandoning the almost universal habit of counting the number of people in worship services:
1. It is unnecessary. I guarantee you, any pastor who steps into a pulpit, week after week, for more than six months, can tell you within a margin of error of plus or minus ten, how many people are in the room.
2. It is distracting for the ushers doing the counting; it takes them out of the service for that time.
3. It is distracting for the people being counted.
4. It sends the wrong message to everyone involved. You, worshiper, are merely an unnamed part of a statistic after all; and, if the number is larger than it was a week ago, or a year ago, does that mean we are "successful"?
I pity the poor pastors who judge their own effectiveness by the headcount; and I feel for those who don't, but whose Boards do.
It would be handy to be able to build a biblical case against counting; the closest I can come is God allowing Satan to incite David to take a headcount in 1Chronicles 21. It is not clear what the nature of the evil is here, but if you assume a faithless reliance on numbers on David's part, then surely, in a culture as statistically driven as ours, we face the same danger. Comments???

The prophets still speak: "Image trumps word."

Half a century ago Jacques Barzun commented, "Everywhere picture and sound crowd out text. The Word is in disfavor, not to say in disrepute--which indeed is one way of abolishing the problem of communication." The House of Intellect, p.16.
I noticed that the bookstore at Bethlehem Baptist sells a full-length book that addresses just this issue. How do people of the Book continue to hear and share the eternal Word of God when movie/video has taken over as the primary conveyor of meaning; when the majority of adults do not read a book a year; when our churches splash Powerpoint images throughout services, whether they open the Bible or not? Does anyone think this is largely a generational non-issue? Or is there a new Iconoclast Controversy headed our way, one more thing to divide the Church? Or, more hopefully, do the same new technologies that have created this mess contain within them undreamed of new opportunities for the Word? (After all, the images produced by a revolutionary new technology--propaganda woodcuts attacking both Luther and the Pope--are gone or relegated to obscure used books; the words of Luther are still readily available, and sold, and perhaps even read, 500 years later.)

Where are the great men.....and women?

Ginger and I are enjoying a few cold but sunny days in Minneapolis with our daughter Kari. Last night we were blessed by attending the Maundy Thursday service at Bethlehem Baptist Church.
One of the loves that Kari and I share is of books, especially old books, so I especially appreciated her gift of a long-sought copy of Chesterton's Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men (1906).
"One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men. I would say superior men, only that the hero thinks of himself as great, but not as superior. This has been hidden from us of late by a foolish worship of sinister and exceptional men, men without comradeship, or any infectious virtue." p.8

No new heresies

The current rash of anti-intellectualism in our Evangelical churches is nothing new:
"Formerly the prejudice against a man having a book was very great. In my own case, even in 1812, I lost as many customers as paid me for the goods they had to the amount of 500 pounds a year, on a gentleman discovering that I had a roomful of books."
Francis Place, Parliamentary Papers, 1835. (Quoted in Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect. 1959)
For a contemporary take on this issue, don't miss David Wells, No Place For Truth (The first of four volumes in his series that attempts, largely successfully, to help us make sense of Post-modernism and the Church).