So last night I had the chance to do some practice on the pipe organ at Central Park Presbyterian Church in preparation for the talent show coming up a week from Sunday. I showed up at 6:45 and the kind man had already turned on the lights and turned up the heat so I could practice. I pulled out my copy of Tocatta and Fugue in D-Minor and got right to it.

Two hours later was reminded of a time soon after I started taking piano lessons when I swore I never wanted to play the piano again. The song in question was the Suzuki classic Lightly Row, and the challenge was to make the left hand play something different than the right hand was playing. Fortunately, I got through it, and my hands have been happily individually dexterous for years now. Enter the pipe organ, which includes two manuals of keys, plus two octaves of pedals.

For twenty-some years now, I have trained my brain that the left hand follows the notes on the bottom staff. But not on the organ! Early on in the Bach piece, there is a little pattern where the hands play some separated chords, just stepping down: B-flat, A-minor, G-minor, A. The pedal moves in parallel, playing D C B-flat, A. It must’ve taken me 30 minutes of practice to try to play those two lines. My left hand just kept getting lost.  I think I pulled something, somewhere in my brain.

I found I can play the pedals pretty well by themselves; the intervals are pretty easy to figure out, and with a little practice I’ll know where the notes are without having to look. I can play the pedals and the right hand together without too much effort. But the left hand just doesn’t want to cooperate. I’ll try to get over to the church again next week for some more practice and we’ll see how much I can get worked out. Worst case, I’ll creatively omit some of the harder pedal parts for the talent show… I’ll feel bad about doing it, but it’ll be better than not playing it at all.

One other thing took getting used to with that organ: the timing. Since it’s a real pipe organ, driven by real air, there is a perceptible time lag between when you press the key and when you hear the note. When you’re playing long held notes, it’s not that big a deal. But when you’re playing Bach with all the sixteenth-notes, you have to mentally force yourself to make your fingers do the right thing and ignore the timing. It took me a while to get that figured out, but I think it makes sense now.

I’m sure I’ve used that title before, but oh well. Seems like this place has been filled up with book reviews lately and not much else. Let’s see, what else should I talk about? The cold? The temperature display on my PC at the moment says it’s -9 degrees F outside. We’re supposed to get a heat wave by the weekend, though – up into the 20’s!

Life has pretty much settled down for now after the craziness of December and early January. One bit of fun is that we’re having our church talent show down at Central Park Presbyterian Church (a facility we’re talking about buying), and they have a nice pipe organ… so I got a request for some organ music. I’ve been working on Bach’s famous Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor for a couple of weeks now and have the keyboard parts learned pretty well… but I’m worried that the pedal parts will be my undoing. I’m headed over to the church tomorrow night to practice on the organ for a while. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s a total flop I’ll just pull out some piano fugues and play ‘em on the organ… good enough. But still… a PIPE ORGAN! Too much fun.

My dad loaned me Hell’s Best Kept Secret by Ray Comfort back at Thanksgiving, and sadly it had set by my night table since then, still waiting to be read. Dad reminded me about it the other day, so I picked it up last night and read through it. It’s a short little book, maybe 150 pages in paperback, but contains a lot of good stuff.

I was not really familiar with Ray Comfort before reading his book. A quick online search shows that he is the main man at Living Waters ministry, and that he’s done a series of TV programs called “The Way of the Master” with Kirk Cameron. His website says that Living Waters “…has been equipping Christians across the world for more than 30 years. We train Christians who want to learn evangelism — by teaching them how to witness the way Jesus did.”

I will admit that a brief browsing of the Living Waters website makes me a bit queasy; products they have for sale include the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution Board Game and novelty Million-Dollar bills that contain a Gospel presentation. I’m not sure I’m to keen on either of those ideas, but then this is supposed to be about the book, right, not about Ray Comfort’s ministry in general.

Mr. Comfort gets right to it in the first chapter. We find out that Hell’s best-kept secret is the message that our sins condemn us to hell unless we trust Christ for salvation. He says that the reason 80 – 90% of “conversions” from altar calls and crusades fail is that people are coming because they are promised something good, that Christianity will make their life better. Then when tribulation comes, people fall away because all of a sudden Christianity isn’t helping them out any more. He gives the illustration of two men on an airplane. If you offer the first one a parachute, telling him it will make his flight more pleasant, the guy will immediately take it off, because it’s heavy and bulky and uncomfortable. If you offer the second one a parachute, telling him to wear it because at any minute he’s gonna have to jump out of the airplane from 20,000 feet, he will thank you profusely and will keep the parachute on regardless of the discomfort, because he has a view of the danger that will come should he not have the parachute.

Comfort quotes profusely (and at times repetitively) from D. L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon, among others, to say that an understanding of our condemnation under the law is a key starting point to understanding the Gospel. In that message I can’t disagree with Comfort – he’s right on. The Good News of salvation through Christ isn’t really good news unless there’s something we need saved from. Where I wrestled with this book wasn’t in the particulars of the message, but was more with my reaction of the entire method he was proposing. The book itself is about 20 years old. I see him writing it to react against what he’d seen at big evangelistic crusades (Billy Graham, maybe?). Then several times in the book he talks about doing streetcorner preaching, or about stopping at a train station and just having the Lord direct him to people who he could sit and talk to. In all those cases, I see them being more prevalent and on-topic 20 years ago than they are today. Let me try to explain.

I think Dr. Tim Keller hit it right on back at the Desiring God 2006 conference when he noted that our world to day is post-Christian. He talked about a historical 20th century progression of evangelism techniques that started with the crusades of Billy Sunday, then later Billy Graham; later it transitioned to the personal evangelism methods found in Evangelism Explosion; then towards the very end of the 20th century and into the 21st we have “seeker services”. Keller postulates that we have three problems in reaching postmoderns: 1) a truth problem – they don’t like our exclusive claim of truth. 2) Guilt problem – it assumes they have a consciousness of guilt. 3) A meaning problem – they don’t believe texts can really get a meaning across.

Number 2 is the one that I think hits it – for many people these days, there is a lot to establish philosophically before we can get to the idea of an absolute standard and guilt before God. Now, I think most of them have an inner understanding of guilt but won’t admit it; they have been convinced that there is no absolute truth, no God to whom they are accountable, and thus their feelings of guilt are a product of some bad thinking on their part. So when we start the discussion, we may not be able to start with “do you understand that you’re guilty before God?”, we may have to start with “what is truth?” and go from there.

I wrote over a year ago that the place that makes sense for me to start the story is with this phrase: “Things aren’t right.” There is a statement we can all pretty much agree on. Yes, some hardcore types may want to argue that there is no “right”, so how can things not be right… but as C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, you only have to do something bad to that person to get them to start appealing to a universal moral standard. Then we can talk about why things are wrong, and how God has a plan to set them right again.

I have over the past few years started tending towards the Calvinist side of Gospel presentation. Not that I’m going over into full five-point Calvinism; that’s a topic for another post. But it seems to me that we are called to proclaim the Gospel to everyone. Even as believers, we need to be reminded of the Gospel, of the good news that God has provided a way for us to be redeemed and to become a part of His kingdom. Non-believers need to hear it, too; how far back in the story we have to start will largely depend on where they are philosophically. For those who still have a Judeo-Christian mindset, we can probably start with Mr. Comfort’s approach and talk about our guilt before God. For those firmly entrenched in postmodernism, we’ll probably have to back up a few steps. Either way, we have good news to share, and we need to share it.

My dad loaned me Hell’s Best Kept Secret by Ray Comfort back at Thanksgiving, and sadly it had set by my night table since then, still waiting to be read. Dad reminded me about it the other day, so I picked it up last night and read through it. It’s a short little book, maybe 150 pages in paperback, but contains a lot of good stuff.

I was not really familiar with Ray Comfort before reading his book. A quick online search shows that he is the main man at Living Waters ministry, and that he’s done a series of TV programs called “The Way of the Master” with Kirk Cameron. His website says that Living Waters “…has been equipping Christians across the world for more than 30 years. We train Christians who want to learn evangelism — by teaching them how to witness the way Jesus did.”

I will admit that a brief browsing of the Living Waters website makes me a bit queasy; products they have for sale include the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution Board Game and novelty Million-Dollar bills that contain a Gospel presentation. I’m not sure I’m to keen on either of those ideas, but then this is supposed to be about the book, right, not about Ray Comfort’s ministry in general.

Mr. Comfort gets right to it in the first chapter. We find out that Hell’s best-kept secret is the message that our sins condemn us to hell unless we trust Christ for salvation. He says that the reason 80 – 90% of “conversions” from altar calls and crusades fail is that people are coming because they are promised something good, that Christianity will make their life better. Then when tribulation comes, people fall away because all of a sudden Christianity isn’t helping them out any more. He gives the illustration of two men on an airplane. If you offer the first one a parachute, telling him it will make his flight more pleasant, the guy will immediately take it off, because it’s heavy and bulky and uncomfortable. If you offer the second one a parachute, telling him to wear it because at any minute he’s gonna have to jump out of the airplane from 20,000 feet, he will thank you profusely and will keep the parachute on regardless of the discomfort, because he has a view of the danger that will come should he not have the parachute.

Comfort quotes profusely (and at times repetitively) from D. L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon, among others, to say that an understanding of our condemnation under the law is a key starting point to understanding the Gospel. In that message I can’t disagree with Comfort – he’s right on. The Good News of salvation through Christ isn’t really good news unless there’s something we need saved from. Where I wrestled with this book wasn’t in the particulars of the message, but was more with my reaction of the entire method he was proposing. The book itself is about 20 years old. I see him writing it to react against what he’d seen at big evangelistic crusades (Billy Graham, maybe?). Then several times in the book he talks about doing streetcorner preaching, or about stopping at a train station and just having the Lord direct him to people who he could sit and talk to. In all those cases, I see them being more prevalent and on-topic 20 years ago than they are today. Let me try to explain.

I think Dr. Tim Keller hit it right on back at the Desiring God 2006 conference when he noted that our world to day is post-Christian. He talked about a historical 20th century progression of evangelism techniques that started with the crusades of Billy Sunday, then later Billy Graham; later it transitioned to the personal evangelism methods found in Evangelism Explosion; then towards the very end of the 20th century and into the 21st we have “seeker services”. Keller postulates that we have three problems in reaching postmoderns: 1) a truth problem – they don’t like our exclusive claim of truth. 2) Guilt problem – it assumes they have a consciousness of guilt. 3) A meaning problem – they don’t believe texts can really get a meaning across.

Number 2 is the one that I think hits it – for many people these days, there is a lot to establish philosophically before we can get to the idea of an absolute standard and guilt before God. Now, I think most of them have an inner understanding of guilt but won’t admit it; they have been convinced that there is no absolute truth, no God to whom they are accountable, and thus their feelings of guilt are a product of some bad thinking on their part. So when we start the discussion, we may not be able to start with “do you understand that you’re guilty before God?”, we may have to start with “what is truth?” and go from there.

I wrote over a year ago that the place that makes sense for me to start the story is with this phrase: “Things aren’t right.” There is a statement we can all pretty much agree on. Yes, some hardcore types may want to argue that there is no “right”, so how can things not be right… but as C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity, you only have to do something bad to that person to get them to start appealing to a universal moral standard. Then we can talk about why things are wrong, and how God has a plan to set them right again.

I have over the past few years started tending towards the Calvinist side of Gospel presentation. Not that I’m going over into full five-point Calvinism; that’s a topic for another post. But it seems to me that we are called to proclaim the Gospel to everyone. Even as believers, we need to be reminded of the Gospel, of the good news that God has provided a way for us to be redeemed and to become a part of His kingdom. Non-believers need to hear it, too; how far back in the story we have to start will largely depend on where they are philosophically. For those who still have a Judeo-Christian mindset, we can probably start with Mr. Comfort’s approach and talk about our guilt before God. For those firmly entrenched in postmodernism, we’ll probably have to back up a few steps. Either way, we have good news to share, and we need to share it.