Church Graveyards

Russell Moore has written an interesting article entitled "Should we miss our church graveyards?"

If you have time, it is worth reading.



--Mark

The Weather Channel is Never Wrong

Shortly after getting married and moving to Chattanooga, my wife and I began looking for a church that we could join and get involved in. After seeing the broadcast of Brainerd Baptist's worship service a few times, we decided that we would visit on the following Sunday.

We looked up the time of the morning worship service on the web site so that we would be there in plenty of time.

Sunday morning came and we got up and started getting ready to leave as normal. As we were getting ready I turned the TV on to the Weather Channel to see what the weather was going to be like. Everything was as normal except I noticed that the clock in the bottom corner of the screen was an hour ahead of what our living room clock displayed. I thought to myself that the time difference seemed strange, but continued getting ready.

I went upstairs and mentioned to my wife that it was weird for the Weather Channel clock to be wrong. Moments later, we realized that it was not 9:45 but 10:45 and we had completely forgotten to change our clocks the previous night for Daylight Savings Time.

Needless to say, we did not make it to Brainerd Baptist that morning; although we did make it (somewhat late) to a church that was much closer to our apartment.

I share this story to say, Daylight Savings Time begins this weekend. Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour on Saturday night.

(We later visited Brainerd, got involved in a Bible Study class and joined the church a few months later)

--Mark

The Church and The Big Give

I don't know what you do on Sunday nights but our family's tradition is to come home from church and make biscuits and eggs for dinner. After we eat dinner we usually end up watching (and probably crying during) Extreme Makeover Home Edition. No one knows how to tell a story better than those guys. Well tonight a new show debuted called Oprah's Big Give. This show is similar to Extreme Makeover in that the hook is helping someone who is in a difficult situation simply for the sake of generosity. In an effort of full disclosure, I must confess I am skeptical of anything associated with Oprah because of the new age religion she espouses and the following she has but I wanted to watch this show to see what it was like...

The show is great! Each team of two people was given $5,000 and the name of a person who needs help. Each team competes to see who can "help" the most. Together the teams raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in 5 days towards helping by organizing fund raisers, getting communities together, etc.

Here's the question I want to ask... "Where is the church on this one?" I love the show and the people that are being helped but why can't the church get creative like this in it's efforts to give? In my humble opinion we seem to do a lot of talking about taking the gospel to everyone but the church has lost it's platform in the world. The community could care less what the church has to say until they know how much the church cares. We've got the most important message anyone could hear and we've been commissioned to share it so we should be real good at finding ways to gain an audience.

I love the creativity of the show and think we can learn something from it. Come on church...let's see what we can do!

--Collin