Happy 1-1-11

While not the first English Bible to appear, the KJV was the most successful and long lasting, still dominating some church groups today. We have entered into the 400th year of its publication (1611-2011).

While I have not read this concept anywhere , but surely it is out there somewhere, the NIV plans its release of its newest translation in March 2011, yep, just 400 years after the KJV. Surely, there is some comparison to be made there.

Some will like the new NIV, some will not. What else is new? It seems that we get married to a specific translation and the translation becomes sacred, not the concepts it tries to express. It is helpful to always remember that a translation is an interpretation, yes, even the King James Version.

In this New Year, why not be a reader of the world’s greatest story in celebration of 400 years of being the story in a language of the common folk which, incidentally, opened the doors for the story to be translated into every language of the world, which has not yet been accomplished, but groups like Wycliffe have a mission to do so.

It’s been busy the last couple of weeks. I have had two cataract surgeries. The second one was a bit tougher than the first one. I can see colors that I had lost from my vision. I can see clearly now at a distance.

I am writing also writing two chapters for an upcoming book from the Vineyard with a working title: Women in Leadership in the Church: A Kingdom of God Perspective. I am writing “Chapter Three: Why Interpretation is Necessary” and “Chapter Eleven: 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.”

I look forward to this time of year. But, for some reason this year, it has just flown by. It seems like it was just summer. Time drags along when you are a kid, but it seems to be in warp speed the older I get.

Here’s a link to our annual Christmas letter. I trust you have a Merry Christmas and the greatest of New Years.

Well, not all of the church and not really 90 seconds.

Today, I read a blog entry by Diana Butler Bass from Monday July 20, 2009. Entitled “The Real Decline of Churches.” Here’s what she had to say about the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Southern Baptist Convention–the largest and most conservative Protestant denomination in the USA–records a continued decline in baptisms and an increasingly aging membership. The oft-reported number of 18 million members has declined in the last decade to just over 16 million. And, according to journalist Christine Wicker (see her book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation), the internal number of active members may well be around 5 million people.

Here is a selection of what waits in store for folks in the Montgomery, AL area on their next Sunday visit in the Baptist arena. Of course, not all these churches are not Southern Baptist but they are Baptist in the South. There are others churches listed as well. These entries are as they were sent in to The Paper of Montgomery County.

East Side Baptist Church

• Here I Am and Here I Go

First Baptist Church

• Speaking the Truth in Love Ephesians 4:15

Friendship Baptist Church

• When We Leave Our First Love from Jeremiah 2:1-13

Freedom Baptist Church

• Sick of Home, Homesick and Home” from Luke 15-11-24

Other Churches
Wabash Avenue Presbyterian Church

• You Smell

Browns Valley Christian Church

• Life’s Difficulties Acts 21:17-32

and BTW: The Merry Mates Sunday School class will be having a class party after church.

Whitesville Christian Church

• Hero’s of the Bible

First United Methodist Church

• Second Chances 2nd Cor 5:17 & James 4:14

First Church of the Nazarene

• Wonder (Full) Bread from John 6:35-5

Possible Conclusion: No wonder the church is in decline. With a diet like this, they are most likely suffering spiritual malnutrition.

I am facinated by Tickle’s book, Great Emergence, The: How Christianity Is Changing and Why In just a few short, but poignant pages, Tickle produces a review of history that that can take one’s breathe away while still bringing the reader right into her/his present time.

She recently spoke at a conference in Memphis, TN a true Southern city with BBQ and Southern yarns too boot.

Yep, The cool Dr. Todd Hunter is back online and from the looks of him he has taken the pill. From the bowls of Boise, he has created a new ministry called Three Is Enough (TiE). He envisions TiE groups to take shape form Boise to the ends of the earth. He has entered the TiEtrix.

He states in his welcome post:

In one way TiE (Three is Enough) is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about the intersection of The Gospel, culture, church, kingdom, spiritual formation and evangelism. In another, more humble way, it comes from the closing chapter of my upcoming book from IVP—Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others. In CBB, I try to lay out some of the practical outcomes which surround one’s understanding—or misunderstanding—of the Gospel. Much of the conceptual work for the first section of the book comes from my D.Min. dissertation which was titled: Re-hearing the Gospel: Toward Improved Practices for Evangelism and Spiritual Formation.

So go ahead at take a look. Click here and you will be on your way. Don’t forget to take your pill before you make the leap.

Two important events have occurred this week. My first book, God’s EPIC Adventure, is in print and I’ve been Simpsonized!

It has been and interesting process starting a publishing company HarmonPress and publishing my first book, God’s EPIC Adventure through that imprint. It’s an interesting feeling to hold a book in your hand and seeing your name on the front cover. For years I have researched and written lots of material. I was used to writing things like, Sweet says, or McLaren says, or Wright says, but when I saw my name appear in that context in the ForeWord which is written by Len Sweet, Griffin says, it seemed a little strange. Brian McLaren wrote the Afterword. You can read all about it at HarmonPress.

Donna and I have been married 41 years today. I met her in Honolulu at the church where her dad pastored. How does one get God to call them to Hawaii? There was a new church plant on the island and I was attending their opening celebration and she was there. I didn’t officially meet her but she caught my attention. The next evening I attended the church where her dad pastored and she was playing a Hammond Organ. There was only one pew left when I arrived, yep, the front one. I caught her eye as I set down, she smiled at me and I was hooked for life. She is amazing, astonishing, astounding, fabulous, fantastic, fantastical, incredible, marvelous, miraculous, phenomenal, prodigious, stupendous, unbelievable, wondrous, divine, glorious, sensational, splendid, superb, terrific, dandy, dreamy, great, ripping, super, swell, tremendous, cool, groovy, hot, keen, neat, nifty, and hundreds of words that haven’t been invented yet. I love her more than I did yesterday and less than I will tomorrow. Yep, and I still love her propinquity!

Here we are on that wonderful day! We haven’t changed much, except those wild glasses. I should have kept them, they are back in style.

The day came and will go quickly, just like all other days, a mere 24 hours or 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds. Even though we count each day by hours, minutes, and seconds, it seems that the older one gets the quicker the hours fly by.

On my birthday in 1958 I was junior in high school and my dad was sixty-five years old that year. I though he was pretty old or at least it seemed so to me at the time. I was wrong. Today, I turned sixty-five and it seems really young to me.

It is true that I am in the winter of the life span. Lord only knows how many years I will have left and what effect I will have in God’s EPIC Adventure to partner with him in the recreation of his creation. Today, I am alive and am enjoying the time with two great projects. First, is the creation of Harmon Press (named after my dad) and the second is the creation of Missio Dei Learning Community.

Harmon Press has been in the womb since 2001. It’s been a long time getting born, but that’s not unlike lots of projects in life. The seed thought comes, it settles in, and sometimes it sees the light of day. The simple purpose of Harmon Press is to help authors, who have something important to say, get into print so the world can have the joy of reading their words and thoughts and they can have the joy of seeing their very words produced in a book. It’s true, if you are not visible today, the print world is not really open to you. However, with print on demand technology, it finally becomes affordable for an author to produce her or his own work. Our job at Harmon Press is to help these folks accomplish their dream of being in print. To kick of the fray, we are producing my very first book God’s EPIC Adventure which intends to help readers of Scripture have a fare shake at seeing the storyline of Scripture so they can become less fragmented in their own reading. It will take a reader on an excursion through Scritpure from Genesis to Revelation using the five-act-play model from Bishop Tom Wright. Its production target is the first of November.

The second project in hand is Missio Dei Learning Community. Missio Dei (the Mission of God) is being created to attract adult learners in our computer based society to access learning within an ongoing community online and live face-to-face encounters. We are not an accredited school but we do hold the status of being a “religious exempt” school in the State of Washington. We will be using a state of the art Course Management System to deliver courses for busy-in-life folks who won’t have to fight the freeway to get to class. The ultimate goal is to help Christ-followers experience the Grand Narrative of God and find their place of ministry in his Story. We are presently targeted to begin this process in the last quarter of 2007.

Both of these projects will have a web presence and will be fully online soon.

While retirement at age sixty five seems to be a goal, it seems to me as I have reached that age that life is full and enjoyable, and busy at this point with work. Since work is good and not a part of humankind’s rebellion, that’s a subject for another time, let work continue.

Recently, on my trip to Florida my brother Robert introduced me to Crocs. At first I thought he was feeding me a load of croc! His wife Allyn had just had leg surgery, her job requires her to stand for up to eight hours a day. After she purchased a pair of Crocs, she said that lots of her foot, leg, and back pain have disapppeared. She now has several pairs in all different colors to match her daily work wardrobe.

So off to the store to buy my first pair. I am an adult diabetic and foot problems are part of the deal it seems with diabetics. I wore them all day on the Saturday I purchased them and then wore them to church on Sunday, and all day on my return flight from Orlando to Seattle on Monday. They are so comfortable, I hate to take them off, really! Below is some information about these shoes. Oh, BTW, there are two other members of my family that have purchased a pair.

Cayman is a slimmed down version of the original Crocs. Perfect, airy, warm weather design that comes in full sizes and is made with croslite PCCR material. Slip-resistant and non-marking soles. Crocs are designed to fit loosely. The wide, roomy footbed may feel large at first, however this is one of the key reasons your Crocs are so comfortable. To adjust the fit, simply stretch the back of the heel strap slowly until it retains the desired length. Anti-microbial and odor resistant. Crocs will respond to body heat by molding to fit your feet. Available Colors: Army, Burgundy, Celery, Cotton Candy, Lavender, Pearl White, Sea Foam, Kelly Green, Ruby Red, Black, Chocolate, Light Blue, Lime, Navy, Pink, Purple, Red, Khaki, Orange, Sage, Sea Blue, Butter, Turquoise.

Your can purchase Crocs Cayman here!

It’s been a week since Jerry Falwell went off into the next phase of life. Some thoughts have been roaming around about his life. I did and do not ascribe to his form of fundamentalist theology. Having said that, his life and ministry seem to me to try and bring together what is often a dualism of Church and State. As a pastor, he entered into the realm of politics where the church has been so silent while the American state has become secularized.

He has passed and followed a rather contemporary cultural practice of leaving his ministry to sons. As I understand it, one son will become pastor of the church in Lynchburg while the other will assume duties as the head of the university. This is just another incident in which father-son inheritance in ministry secession has occurred. I am sure there are many. Some come to mind: Oral to Richard Roberts, Robert Sr. to Robert Jr. Schuller, Billy to Franklyn Graham, John to Joel Osteen. I wonder why that is.

I also wonder why there are not more pastors involved in political situation at the local, state, and national level. The belief of the founding fathers that there should be no regulated church by the state has turned into a dualism of Church and State. There is now a deep ugly ditch between the Church and the State.

I’m not advocating that we return to a former state of being that caused our forefathers to seek church freedom. In England today, N. T. Wright, who is Bishop of Durham, is also a member of the British Parliament and actually attends session of the Parliament while remaining a pastor of his local church in Durham. I realize that is an English model.

What I wonder is: what if pastors of USAmerican churches entered the realm of politics and remained pastors of their congregations at the same time. How would that change the ugly ditch between Church and State?

Well, Dr. Jerry Falwell has gone on to his life after death awaiting his life after life after death. I wonder what he thinks about where he is and if it is what he thought and taught it would be. I wonder if he could return what he would believe and teach differently. I wonder!

On February 23, 2007 the movie Amazing Grace will hit theaters all over USAmerica. It is the story of one man’s struggle for justice in his time and place. Below is a trailer for the movie. If you want more information, you can discover it at Amazing Grace Movie.

In our area (Seattle, WA), there has been a theological donnybrook of sorts around some ongoing remarks made by Mark Driscoll pastor of Mars Hill Church and commented on ad nauseam on the Convresation at the Edge blog. My pastor Rose Swetman has written an open letter to Mark. You may read Rose’s article here.

Today, a friend of mime, Todd Hunter, had his Doctor of Ministry oral exam at George Fox University. We went through the DMin program together. He is now officially Dr. Todd Hunter. I am proud to announce his achievement.

If you have dropped by looking for information about heart stents, sometimes spelled heart stints, here is an article on Heart Stents that you might be interested in. I hope it is helpful to you.

My friend Dr. Eric Sandras, recently from the Great Northwest now moved to Lancaster, CA has written his second book where he tells his readers that they should pack their boxes and bags, call the moving truck, give the old place a good scrubbing down, and move from “spiritual suburbia” to…

Well you will have to buy and read Plastic Jesus to find out what moving from “spiritual suburbia” is all about.

It’s well worth the read and I would recommend you purchase the book for a personal read or for a small group read. You will enjoy Eric’s humor and his turn of phrase.

Thanks for sharing Eric.

Several years ago on my Seeing the Bible Live site I had a section called AskDrWinn. I put it on hold while I was finishing my second doctoral degree. I have reestablished this but on its own site: askdrwinn.com. Go on over and check it out.

AskDrWinn is also listed at AskTheseGuys.com.

After a four month pause, I have started blogging again on my Story blog. There I am blogging material from my Doctor of Ministry disscertation project. Take a peak and make it a regular read.