Yet another reason I love my brother...

Lately I’ve had a quote from Chuck (a rather fun TV show on NBC Mondays) set as my IM status message. (Oh, it’s also at the top of my blog header.) In the show, Chuck complains that it’d never work to have a relationship with his hot love interest Sarah, because she’s a CIA agent, and he says he’d try calling her, and she wouldn’t be available because she’d be “off somewhere in Paraguay quelling revolution with a fork…” I loved it. What a great line.

So it’s been my IM status for a week or so now. And every time Ryan starts a chat, he starts it out this way: “viva! viva! viva!”. (The first time he followed up with “fork that!” :-) )

For Ryan, I have but three words, and I’ll even make ’em Spanish: ¡Si se puede!

Observations from the weekend

  • Your house doesn’t have to be amazingly clean to invite friends over.
  • Even if it was amazingly clean when the night starts, it won’t be when it ends. Not with 4 kids playing for three hours.
  • That’s OK. You can always clean up again.
  • Good food + good conversation = a great time.
  • Hearing friends’ back stories is fantastic.
  • When your friends read your blog, you have to try to remember which stories you’ve already blogged and thus shouldn’t re-tell.
  • We should do this more often.

The Church Search, Week 3

After deciding early in the week that Cedar Valley Bible was off our short list, we spent a lot of time talking about where we might go next. We know the other place we definitely want to try out is Maranatha Bible Church, so we tentatively decided last night that we’d head there this morning.

Then last night Laura decided she didn’t want to sleep. From 3:00 until 5:00 she was awake in our room at least four times. Needless to say, Becky and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. Finally Laura went to sleep and slept in until 8:00. As I write this at 9:15, Becky is still sleeping. Given that we’d need to leave the house in 30 minutes to get to Maranatha on time, I think we’ll be cashing it in this morning and giving it another shot next week. Part of me feels guilty for not getting to church; the other part of me is happy that we have the freedom to just rest when we need to. God is good.

Time for some piano music

I switched over from my usual podcasts and indie rock this morning to give some iPod love to a genre I’ve ignored far too much as of late: classical piano. To be more specific: Bach and Chopin. What a fantastic way to start the morning.

Now, I’ve spent innumerable hours over the past 20+ years with my backside on a piano bench and my fingers hacking away at some composer or another. And ever since I was a kid, let’s face it, I did a lot of hacking. Sure, I had assigned pieces that I was supposed to practice every day. But more often than not what I’d do is just play through those pieces once or twice, then put them down and move on to something far too hard for me, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a Chopin Ballade or something by Debussy. The weeks when I actually did practice my lesson, my teacher was always blown away by my progress. I wonder at times how well I would’ve progressed if I’d practice like he expected.

When you have small children, though, the amount of time available for you to practice the piano goes down quite a bit. First, they take up your time directly. Second, they go to sleep early and playing the piano would wake them up. So I haven’t done a lot of practicing in the past few years. Occasionally I’d pull out a book and hack through a little bit of Rachmaninoff, but that has been about it. If I get a chance to sit down at a piano somewhere else, I usually just improvise for a while, though it has been frightening just how much I remember of Beethoven Sonatas and Bach Fugues that I learned back in high school.

The other night I sat down at the piano after dinner and actually practiced a new piece. Rachmaninoff’s Polichinelle Op. 3 No. 4, if you really care. (You can hear Rachmaninoff himself perform it on YouTube.) It’s difficult enough that I can’t just sight read through it at full speed, but not so difficult that I get disheartened trying to practice. I am hoping that I can actually put a little time into it, commit it to memory, and eventually have something new to play on occasion, rather than just murdering a section from Chopin’s Ballade #1 like I usually do.

How I do love my piano music.

Short list got shorter

Well, we talked about it some more last night and agreed that Cedar Valley Bible Church is off our short list for the reasons I discussed earlier. So now we’re back to looking at our short list, figuring out where to head next. Not sure if we’ll visit Stonebridge one more week or skip down to the next church on the list.

More likely we’ll sit down with the phonebook, newspaper, or some other reference list and work through the short list again to figure out what places we might have missed… then we’ll go from there. Still praying for guidance on a daily basis.

Buffalo Chicken Dip recipe

Lydia asked for it, so here it is…

Ingredients

  • 2 (10 ounce) cans chunk chicken, drained - I prefer to boil a couple of chicken breasts and shred those in place of the canned chicken
  • 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
  • 1 cup Ranch dressing
  • 3/4 cup pepper sauce, such as Franks® Red Hot®
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese

Instructions Heat chicken and hot sauce in a skillet over medium heat, until heated through. Stir in cream cheese and ranch dressing. Cook, stirring until well blended and warm.

Mix in half of the shredded cheese, and transfer the mixture to a slow cooker. Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top, cover, and cook on Low setting until hot and bubbly. Serve with celery sticks and crackers or tortilla chips or, my favorite: Fritos Scoops.

An end-times deal-breaker

So yesterday afternoon I noted that the next church on our short list for visiting during the Church Search was probably Cedar Valley Bible Church. I know a few folks there, including the couple that has brought Andrew Peterson and company to town twice for concerts. I’ve been to a wedding there, too, and my overall impression was that the church might be a little further over into the conservative homeschooling culture than I’d be comfortable with, but then, it might be OK.

The only other note I’d made about Cedar Valley thus far was when perusing their Doctrinal Statement online, it seemed to me that they had a far more detailed and lengthy statement on the End Times than do most doctrinal statements I’ve read. A very literal, pre-trib, dispensational sort of end times view. Still, as of yesterday, the church was still on my short list.

Then last night I cruised on over to the Cedar Valley website again to check out Sunday morning service times, and I noted this link on the sidebar: “2008 Second Coming Conference”. That’s right, in November Cedar Valley Bible will be bringing in a special speaker from Friends of Israel to speak three times over two days. The topics:

  • “Close to Construction” - Presentation on the movement in Israel to rebuild the Temple and how it could fit into Bible prophecy.
  • “Pre-Tribulation Rapture” - A look at some different views of the rapture along with Biblical proof for the pre-tribulation position.
  • “Signs of the Times” - Biblical evidence that we are now living in the end times.

And that’s just about a deal-breaker for me. Let me explain a little bit why.

I grew up in what I’d consider a pretty standard set of evangelical churches. We attended a C&MA church for a while in Fremont, NE, then a Bible church in Granbury, TX. I got the basic dispensational teaching on the end times - basically, Left Behind without all the dramatic stuff that made LaHaye and Jenkins best-sellers. Imminent rapture, followed by a 7-year tribulation, followed by Christ’s return for 1000 years, followed by Satan being let loose again on the earth, followed by another clean-up and the ultimate destruction of the earth and creation of a new one, etc. Most of the time I was just confused by it. Maybe it was partly my practical engineering nature - we’re not gonna know what’s happening until it’s done, right? So who really cares?

I stayed basically in that theological position until reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope a year ago. In Surprised by Hope, Wright explains, among other things, the amillennial position on end times in a way that actually made sense to me. It turns out there is a whole ’nother way to interpret the passages in Peter, Thessalonians, and Revelation that I had never been introduced to. And that there were legitimate, reasonable Christians who believed it. Talk about an eye-opener. Since then I’ve read a couple of books by Kim Riddlebarger on amillennialism, which too have been helpful. At the moment I’d say I’m at the point of leaning toward an amillennial position, but feeling no need to be dogmatic about it. There are far more important things to get worked up about than the end times.

Which leads me to my end-times deal-breaker with Cedar Valley Bible. This (apparently second-annual) “Second Coming Conference” shows me that they’re very interested in being dogmatic about a pre-trib dispensational end-times viewpoint. And while I’m OK with them believing that (heck, Noelridge, Imago, and Stonebridge all have the word “premillennial” in their doctrinal statements), I’m not really OK with a church being dogmatic about it. That just won’t work for me.

Becky and I had a good talk about end-times stuff last night and why I feel this way about it. I don’t know that we’ve decided anything yet, but I’m really leaning toward taking Cedar Valley off our list.

[N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for Amillennialism at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist at wtsbooks.com]

The Church Search, Week 2

Week 2 of the Church Search took us back to Stonebridge Church for the second week in a row. (We kinda figure it’ll take at least a few weeks at any given place to really be able to make some sort of reasonable judgment on things.) We got out the door five minutes earlier this morning, leaving at 8:30 for a 9:00 service. We were there in 15 minutes, but the child check-in desk was quite a bit crazy this morning, so we still ended up not getting in to the sanctuary until the worship band had just about finished the opening song. Hopefully they’ll get the check-in stuff figured out soon.

Some continued/revised impressions carrying on from last week:

  • The folks seem quite friendly, and I’m enthusiastic about the age range I see. There is a good spread of old, young, teenagers, and children.
  • A lot of the music is unfamiliar, but it’s pretty solid stuff. During each song I’d be wondering “man, where did this song come from?” and then the last slide would have the author’s name and I’d recognize it. The last song of the service was written by Bebo Norman and Mitch Dane and I thought hey, I’ve met Mitch, even had lunch with him. Kinda cool.
  • The worship team was a little bit scant this week - fewer vocalists, no keyboard player at all. Makes me wonder how many folks the worship pastor actually has signed up, if he’s struggling to get people. If we were there I’d like to participate, just not be leading the team.
  • Jeff Holland’s doppelganger of a young adult pastor was supposed to be preaching, but apparently came down with a nasty cold yesterday. So, the senior pastor got to wing it, but still gave us a good sermon on Psalm 23. Enjoyed it.
  • The one thing I’ll gripe about the sermon, and I hassled Richard at Noelridge for the same thing: pastors that somehow refuse to use contractions when preaching. So far as I know, there’s nothing particularly unholy about ‘couldn’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘don’t’, and the like, but Pastor Richard at Noelridge and Pastor Randy at Stonebridge both seem to banish them from their vocabulary as soon as they get behind the pulpit. Anybody else get that from their pastors?

Next week Stonebridge is doing their official dedication of the new building, and they’re expecting a LOT of folks. They’ve actually gone door-to-door to everyone within a one-mile radius of the church dropping off small gift bags and inviting folks to visit. If it’s gonna be that crazy, we’ll probably take next week to visit the next church on our list. Not exactly sure yet which church that’ll be, but I’m kinda guessing Cedar Valley Bible.

It may be a little early to come to conclusions about Stonebridge after only two weeks, but my interim conclusion is that I like it, a lot. There’s a lot of good things going on there, a lot of good attitudes about things I think are important, and good teaching coming from the pulpit. If all the churches we visit are this good, it’s gonna be a difficult decision.

The Coffee Experiment, Day 30 or so

I have just about finished up the bag of Starbucks dark roast that we had here at home, what to get next? Well, I came home from work yesterday to find that my beautiful wife had picked up a pound of Columbian Orange Bourbon light roast from Brewed Awakenings, and a coffee grinder to go with it. What a great surprise!

So this morning, after one false start (didn’t grind the beans finely enough the first time), I’ve got a pot of coffee that tastes awfully close to what I drink down at BA when I visit there. Very good stuff. At some point maybe I’ll try out the french press and be a true coffee snob, but for now this stuff is working for me just fine.

Living Life Together

It is becoming more and more clear to me lately how we are created for community, and how much we need that community to live our lives. When we announced a month ago (though it seems like it has been much longer) that we were leaving Imago Christi Church, the primary reasons were a need to recalibrate and reprioritize. What I have started to see in the past month is how much the need for community played into our busyness and weariness.

Let me back up just a bit. While it was by no means the beginning of the issue, Becky and I had a long discussion on the way home from an Andy Osenga concert earlier this summer. (I’m stunned that I didn’t blog about it at the time, but I did post pictures to Flickr.) Andy introduced his song “Hold the Light”, as usual, by telling the story about his small group. They have gathered in somebody’s backyard every week for a couple of years, sharing life stories, praying, encouraging, and living life together. It’s a powerful song, and a powerful story. On the long drive home I found myself getting jealous of my friend Andy. How I would love to have a group of folks like that.

Over the past several years as a church leader I’ve been a part of dozens of discussions where we’ve talked about building community. How do we build community? We know we need it. How do we make it happen? Too often the solution seemed to be another program. Things like “let’s organize a small group book study” or “let’s start a group based around this particular interest”. We’d try to find leaders for the group, put out a signup list, and then get frustrated because the same people who were asking for community weren’t signing up for stuff.

Here’s where I think we, and many churches, have made the mistake: we focus so much time and energy on church programs that we rob ourselves of the time to just live life together. The best friendships and most supportive community I’ve experienced in my life haven’t come out of any church program; they’ve come from people deciding to get together around meals and activities to just live life. Meeting up at someone’s home to play basketball, eat a meal, watch football on TV. Taking off on the spur of the moment to help someone move a piece of furniture. Taking a Saturday to help someone move to a new house. What saddens me is how many times we’ve not done things like this because we were too busy - and usually too busy with church stuff.

This is easy to lament, but harder to correct. We’ve taken the first step by the only method we could see that would work. Now we’re looking for another church, and the place we’re looking for will need to place a high priority on this sort of community. I’m praying every day that God helps us find it.