Summer Adult Bible Study Series

This next week I'll be enjoying having the opportunity to lead our adults in our annual Summer Adult Bible Study series. We pattern this somewhat after the old January Bible Studies that were popular for many years among Southern Baptists and which I suspect some still observe.

We started doing these series my second year on staff at First Baptist here in Lee's Summit and have done so every year but one since that time. Our focus this year will be on the book of Galatians with its theme of the freedom we have in Christ. I've also been going through Phillip Yancey's What's So Amazing about Grace with a couple of guys and his insights on legalism dovetail quite well with Paul's emphasis in this letter.

The first several years we did these, we began with either testimonies of folks who had gone or recent missions trips, singing groups, etc., then we had refreshments followed by the Bible study. For the last couple of years, we've dispensed with the other speakers and activities (but not the refreshments of course--we are Baptists after all!). We typically have somewhere between 80 and 100 adults who attend the four-night study--not a bad turnout for a midsummer weeknight activity.

These weeks of the Summer Adult Bible Study series are about as close as I get now to my former days as a seminary professor, and I relish the opportunity to teach the Scriptures to some folks who want to go deeper into God's Word. Prayerfully, we will all also seek to apply the truths we discover to our daily lives.

Safely Back in Guatemala City

Blake and I arrived back in Guatemala City late this afternoon after a very busy time of conferences in Quetzaltenango. The teaching sessions were well received by the 70 folks who were present for the training. As always, there was lots of good interaction and many questions. The trip out took a long time--close to 8 hours from the time we left the airport. That included time to pick up Carol's son David from his school and then the drive out. A detour in Chimaltenango took close to 45 minutes I suspect. We stopped for about an hour as well for dinner. Later, mudslides from the recent tropical storm Agatha caused delays as the normal 4 lanes through the mountains were reduced to two lanes in many places. We saw huge mounds of dirt, rocks, and trees that were covering the roadway in many places. As we got within about an hour of Quetzaltenango, we had to stop for more than an hour while two huge frontloaders were clearing the highway from a slide.

The return trip today took a little less than 4 hours, including a half hour stop for some hot chocolate at a restaurant where we frequently stop on the way back.

Tomorrow we will visit the Tabitha ministry in the morning and deliver a big suitcase of shoes for the children that the Wyatt Park Baptist Church in St. Joseph, MO collected for the kids. Later we will head to Antigua for some sightseeing and shopping. Tomorrow night we'll be eating dinner at the home of Carlos Cerna, the former executive secretary for the Guatemala Baptist Convention and the person who was largely responsible for the early formation and structure of the BGCM's partnership here. It will be nice to see him and his family again.

Friday morning we have an early flight out as we head back to Kansas City.

8th Round of Leadership Training in Guatemala

Our pastor and I are leaving early Monday (7:15 a.m. flight) for Guatemala via Houston on Continental. Assuming the planes are on time, we'll arrive about 1:20 p.m. and drive directly out to Quetzaltenango to spend the night and be ready for the leadership training conferences that start on Tuesday at noon. Like good Baptists, we always start with food. Blake will be leading in 3 sessions that day and I'll follow up with two on Wednesday before we head back to Guatemala City later that day.

We'll do some sightseeing in Antigua on Thursday and well as visiting the Tabitha Ministry in Guatemala City before returning home on Friday. As always, I'm really excited about the trip and the opportunity of being with the folks down there again.

After we return, the following week is our church's Vacation Bible School and then the following week I'll be leading in a study of Galatians for our annual Summer Adult Bible Study series. We've been doing this for several years now and always have a good turnout and a good time studying and then eating some desserts together. I did mention that we Baptists like food, didn't I?

Whirlwind trip to Columbus, OH

I've been off the radar screen the past 3 days in terms of emails, blogging, Facebook, and anything else in the world of computers. After finishing up the Wednesday evening Bible study, I headed out to St. Louis with my third son, Josh, who has enrolled in law school this fall at Ohio State Univ. in Columbus. We drove to St. Louis that evening, getting in shortly after 12:30. We stayed at the home of one of his college buddies and headed out early Thursday morning for Columbus.

We met with the financial aid officer of the law school on Thursday afternoon and received lots of helpful information. The rest of the evening and a good part of Friday was spent assembling furniture (dining room table and chairs, as well as a study desk) and helping him get settled a bit in an apartment.

We traveled back today, covering the distance in about 10.5 hours. Managed to listen to a bit of the U.S. soccer team's match against Ghana which ended the U.S.'s participation in the World Cup. Tomorrow we'll be cheering for Argentina against Mexico. That's a bit tough of course since we've lived in both countries, but we lived for close to 14 years in Argentina vs. 9 months in Mexico, so that tips the scales towards Argentina for sure.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's services as the youth choir and mission trip team will be sharing their program and testimonies of their experiences this week among the Lakota Indians on the Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota. This is the second summer that our youth have gone there to work among these Native Americans.

Next week will be spent finalizing details for my next trip the following week (July 5-9) to Guatemala for the 8th round of leadership training conferences that the BGCM has sponsored there. Our pastor and I will be sharing the teaching responsibilities this time and I'm excited that he will get to experience firsthand the wonderful fellowship and hunger for the Word and training that the participants always demonstrate.

An Incredibly Sad Tragedy

I stumbled across a link to an article on the Baptists Today website that was sad and tragic beyond words.

It seems that a dispute surfaced in the home of a South African family this past Sunday over what would be watched on television. The father, David Makoeya (age 61), wanted to watch the soccer match between Germany and Australia in the World Cup, while his wife and two adult children wanted to watch religious programming featuring gospel music. When the father tried to assert his authority by changing the channel by hand on the TV set after being refused the remote control, the family responded violently, banging his head against the wall. The family did phone the police, but only after the father was badly injured. When the police arrived, he was already dead. Initial court proceedings also revealed that he had been stabbed in the back.

What can anyone say in response to this senseless tragedy? That such violence could be generated over the choice of television programming is itself ridiculous, but to compound matters even worse, the violence was perpetrated by those who insisted on watching religious programming and listening to gospel music.

Clearly there was a tragic and complete disconnect between the supposed profession of a Christian faith by the family members wishing to listen to gospel music and their actual conduct. The scandal of hypocrisy casts a long dark shadow over this entire incident. When religious zeal (if you can call it that) runs amok and totally disregards the most basic Christian ethical principles imaginable, such unspeakable tragedies can and do materialize.

It's high time that Christians examine their lives for evidence of the fruit of God's Spirit at work in them, rather than merely relying upon some supposed conversion experience or their affiliation with a religious group. I can only grieve the loss of this father's life at the hands of his own family and speculate as to how this senseless tragedy may well fuel the arguments of skeptics as to the truth of the Christian faith.

Link to Sermon on Esther

Our A-V guys have gotten around to uploading the sermon files for the past couple of weeks, including a sermon I preached back on June 13th on Esther. I basically related the story of her life in dramatic fashion, drawing 4 truths from her courageous example and the dialogue she has with her cousin Mordecai. If you have the time to listen to it, here's the link.

Word & Way article on Katy Trail Mission Trip

We had a bunch of our members who did a 4-day, 225 mile bicycle ride on the Katy Trail from Clinton to St. Charles, Missouri recently to raise money for Smile Train, an organization that helps fund cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries in 3rd world countries. Vicki Brown of Word & Way caught up with them along the way and wrote a great article about their efforts.

The group shared their report last Sunday night along with the youth who had just returned from their summer camp experience at Falls Creek, OK.

Update from the last week

I've been too busy of late to find time to post anything to my blog, so I thought I'd take a few minutes tonight and give a brief recap. On the heels of a very successful initial First Serve project the previous weekend, this past week was filled with pastoral ministry responsibilities. I officiated or helped officiate in 3 different funerals in just five days. Then on Friday it was off to Jefferson City for the quarterly meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Missouri. We had a very productive time together. Yesterday I had the opportunity of preaching in both of our morning services as our pastor was vacationing with his extended family in Colorado. I chose to relate the story of Esther as a drama and then focused on 4 principal truths from Mordecai's dialogue with her in chapter 4:13-17.

My main points were these:
1. You cannot always run away from trouble - v. 13
2. Silence is not always golden - v. 14
3. God always raises up a deliverer - v. 14
4. Great blessings carry great responsibilities - v. 14

I'll try and add a link later to the audio file when it gets uploaded in case anyone would like to hear the message.

Tonight I participated with about 20 of our folks in distributing some of the extra publicity cards highlighting some of our summer activities and ministries that were left over from the Downtown Days event. We met at 6:00 at the church for pizza and then split up into 10 teams. We had an odd number so I wound up taking one section by myself and stuck 100 of the cards in the doors of homes. It took about an hour and a half. The walking wasn't bad at all--though it was a bit humid still. The tough part was that almost every home was either a split level or a raised ranch and most of them had anywhere from 5 or 6 to 10 or 12 steps up to the front door. Multiply that number of steps times 100 houses and I got in a pretty good workout. My left knee let me know that it hadn't been exercised that strenuously in awhile.

It was a good evening and I'm relaxing a bit, reading some blogs before getting ready for bed. I have a meeting tomorrow with a couple of guys that I meet regularly with every other Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. We've been discussing Phillip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace?

Initial First Serve Project now History

This past weekend our church launched its initial First Serve project. These are designed to be a series of events (one per month) that will give our congregation the opportunity to serve and engage the community of Lee's Summit, Missouri with the love of Christ. We chose to participate in the Downtown Days Festival in Lee's Summit that featured several hundred booths with vendors, politicians, non-profits, and other groups offering their products and services, as well as lots of live entertainment and carnival-style rides.

We offered free parking in our church's parking lot and distributed free water to those who parked there. In the downtown booth space which we rented, we distributed free water, popcorn, Flavor-Ice popsicles, and brochures announcing our summer activities. We even had one member who is a licensed massage therapist take her portable massage chair downtown and offered free massages to those passing by.

We had dozens of our members involved in the project and made many significant contacts with families who had recently moved to the area, some of whom mentioned that they are looking for a new church home. In other cases, folks were simply shocked that we were offering free water and popsicles without requiring anything of them in return. We learned a great deal from this initial First Serve project and are excited about future opportunities we're currently planning.

Encouraging News from Guatemala

I wanted to share some good news I received today from Brady Garcia, who at the start of this year moved to Santa Cruz del Quiche in Guatemala to begin a new church. When our initial team from First Baptist Lee's Summit went to Cantel in 2008, he was pastoring a church there. Brady has attended each of the training sessions that the BGCM has conducted in Quetzaltenango in Western Guatemala since 2007 and always is quick to share how the training has been applicable in his local ministry setting.

Brady writes, “Here in Santa Cruz del Quiche, everything is going well, thanks to God. This week we began five cells or small groups. I am working with a group of alcoholics on Wednesdays with 6 attending. Very soon I will begin to offer Bible classes to the children of two schools as we did in Cantel, since I think I have a little bit of experience in this field. The families that are attending church are very committed and we have our services scheduled for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays with Sunday School and worship in the afternoon. The children meet separately, although we’re lacking some materials for them, but God will provide. Also this week, a group of youth will begin meeting on Fridays. As you can see, brother, I am very busy (thanks be to God), and the best part of it is that here I am putting into practice all that I’ve learned in the training sessions that you all have come to share. Blessings, brother, and I hope to see you in July.”

It's such an encouragement to receive a note like this and hear how God is blessing and using the visits of teams from our churches and the ongoing training sessions to help equip Guatemalan leaders for their ministries. My next trip there will be July 5-9, and our pastor, Blake McKinney, will be going with me as a conference leader. I know that he will be a tremendous blessing to the leaders there as he shares with them.

How People Recognize Authentic Christians

Barry Howard has a great article (in truth it reads like a devotional) today on EthicsDaily that addresses the title of this post. In the process of reading it, I also discovered the origin of a phrase that I've heard all of my life and never knew its source--"the real McCoy."

I hope you'll take the time to read the article. You can find it here.

Barna on Truth

Turns out that George Barna wrote a blog post on Truth the day after I had written and posted my previous entry on the same topic. I particularly liked the quote from George Orwell that Barna cited: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Maybe we're not quite in a time of universal deceit, but I'm afraid we're not far from it.

Truth - A Candidate for the Endangered Species List?

What ever happened to honesty? Last time I checked, the Ten Commandments still contain the words, “Thou shalt not lie.” Unfortunately, lying seems to have become a national pastime, rivaling baseball in its popularity and certainly surpassing it in terms of the numbers who engage in the practice. That point was driven home again this week by a news story about a Harvard student who had gained admission to the prestigious university by falsifying transcripts, submitting bogus SAT scores, fabricating recommendations from professors, and plagiarizing the work of others. Lest you think that this is some isolated case or limited strictly to the secular world, multiple stories in recent weeks and months have also disclosed incidents of pastors and church leaders who have embellished their resumes—claiming to have attended schools or obtained degrees when they had not in fact done so. A prominent Baptist university president is currently under investigation for apparent false claims made about his upbringing as a Muslim terrorist.

What would prompt someone to make a false claim about their own identity or qualifications? Some might suggest the desperation to get ahead and succeed without paying the necessary cost in terms of time and study. Ultimately, it comes back to a display of the basic sin nature that infects us all and presents us with the temptation to build ourselves up in the eyes of others. In Ephesians 4, Paul repeatedly urges us to practice truthfulness. We’re to speak the truth in love (4:15), to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth (4:24), and to speak truth with our neighbor because we’re members of one another (4:25). The transforming power of the gospel is to change us as we reflect God’s light: “for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth” (Eph. 5:9).

You probably remember your parents telling you as you grew up, “Honesty is the best policy.” It really is. May the truth that is in Jesus mold and shape our character so that truth-telling marks our daily lives.

A Personal Record

No, I didn't set any new personal best in a sporting event. That would be nice, but this new record was in the area of ministry. This morning I performed a wedding for the oldest groom that I've ever had the privilege of marrying. Allen joined our church about 8 years ago, beginning by attending a Sunday School class that I was teaching at that time. Allen is a Bible scholar and frequently helps lead chapel services at John Knox Village where he resides. Allen also became a good friend of our third son, Josh, who interviewed him for a class assignment about his recollections of World War II. They've gone out to eat together on a couple of occasions and keep tabs on each other through me. Josh is currently studying in China and thus couldn't attend the wedding today.

So, about that record.... Just how old is Allen? He will be turning 99 on May 10th. He was a bit concerned about how folks might respond to the notion of him getting married a week and a half before his 99th birthday, but when he broke the news to the current Sunday School class he attends (one of our largest at church), there was an overwhelming display of support. That was demonstrated today by the great turnout. We had to find additional chairs for the chapel at John Knox to accommodate the crowd that came.

The funniest moment in the service was when I related the experience of meeting with Allen and his bride-to-be a few weeks ago to discuss the plans for the service. We talked about the components and order of the wedding ceremony itself and when we had completed that, he asked me if I had any words of advice for him. When I told that story this morning, everyone laughed. I told them that's exactly what I did when Allen asked me the question. I generally ask a prospective couple to meet with me for several sessions of premarital counseling, but I told Allen that anyone who had lived successfully for 99 years didn't need any advice from me. I told him I was certain he could offer me a lot of wisdom. All in all, it was a beautiful service. I pray that they will enjoy the time that God gives them together.

Great Staff Retreat

Our ministerial staff has just completed a two-day retreat at a retreat center in Kansas. We tackled some pretty challenging items on our agenda as we seek to move forward into the future, building on the momentum of our recent 150th anniversary celebration. Discussion centered on a new mission statement for the church, a new missional outreach strategy toward our community entitled "First Serve," a possible shift in our approach to Sunday morning worship, some adjustments to our Wednesday night schedule, and some preliminary talks about a more intentional and better-defined process of moving folks along on the path of discipleship and spiritual maturity.

All in all, it was a great experience with a wonderful spirit of camaraderie. Even when dealing with some potentially difficult and divisive topics, there was a great deal of maturity demonstrated as folks felt free to express their convictions and their input was received and affirmed by the rest of the staff. I feel very blessed to be a part of our church and a member of its staff.

Wonderful Weekend

Our church's 150th anniversary celebration this weekend was a tremendous blessing. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 people at John Knox Pavilion last night for our family dinner. It featured some good food, but more importantly, some great music and testimonies by some of our long-time members. We had several tables filled with folks who had been members for 50+ years. The member who has been here longest is a 93-year "young" woman who joined at the age of 11. Several others have been here for 60+ years. It was great to hear their reflections on what the church has meant to them and their families.

Today began with a continental breakfast in the fellowship hall and then a combined worship service that featured three brief messages focusing on the past and the present and outstanding music from three choirs (adult, youth, and children), the handbells, the orchestra, and the praise band. The service featured two songs written specifically for the occasion which were quite beautiful--one performed by the orchestra and the other by the adult choir. The service also incorporated dramatic interpretation of some of the music. All in all, it was a wonderful weekend with a great crowd and outstanding worship experience.

Follow-up Journal article

The second of the two articles in the Lee's Summit Journal regarding our church's 150th anniversary celebration was published yesterday.

Lee's Summit Journal Article on Church Anniversary

I was interviewed a couple of weeks back by a reporter from the Lee's Summit Journal (our local paper) about the upcoming 150th anniversary for our church that we will celebrate this weekend. I hadn't received the history books at the time the reporter stopped by so I loaned her a printed copy of the manuscript that I had on hand.

The anniversary is featured on the front page of today's edition. Overall, I thought it was a pretty good write-up. She majored on the Civil War period a bit more than I would have, but I suspect that's because she skimmed the first few pages of the manuscript where that was treated.

I'm looking forward to the second part that will be published on Friday.

Pete Briscoe on God's love for us

I missed the Aha! on-line conference that Leadership Network did recently, but received an email invitation today to watch this testimony by Pete Briscoe, pastor of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship in Carrolton, TX. It's well worth the 5:15 minutes it takes to watch it.

The Book is Here

Thursday afternoon one of our church secretaries received a call from a freight line, informing us of a shipment due to arrive in 15 minutes. It was a bit of a surprise as I had spoken with my contact person at the printer who had told me that the books probably wouldn't ship until sometime on Friday and would most likely arrive this coming week. I was okay with that, as it still meant that the books would be here a full week and a half or so before our 150th anniversary celebration on April 17th and 18th.

When the secretary told me she thought that it might be the books coming in early, I experienced the excitement of a father-to-be awaiting the coming of his newborn baby. I was thrilled when a big freight truck pulled up with one pallet containing the books, fresh from the printer. We had ordered 500 copies and they actually wound up delivering an extra box of 20 for a total of 520. I made an executive decision with our minister of education who has been heading up the anniversary planning committee's work to give a complimentary copy to each staff member as well as our pastor emeritus. I also plan to give one to the artist whose commemorative painting helps grace the cover and to his son-in-law who helped with the graphic design of the cover.

This morning we had a huge Easter crowd in both morning services and some of our ladies were selling copies of the book before, between, and after the services. I had the opportunity to sign copies for many of those who chose to purchase a book today. The end product turned out to be 262 pages long. The history book was a major focus of my life for about 9 or 10 months, and I'm really excited to hold it in my hand in its final form. Several have asked me what I'm going to do with all my free time now. I'm not sure what the next major project will be, but for the time being, I'm enjoying the feeling of having wrapped this one up.