Looking Ahead to the Fall

The summer is winding down. It has been a good summer. I took three classes. We visited family in PA. Michelle and I are caught up on Lost. I read some good books. (Old School by Tobias Wolfe, Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card, On the Priesthood by John Chrysostom, and The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis were among the better ones.)

As the summer ends, I look ahead to the fall, which will has a lot going on…

Weddings

The most obvious thing that stands out on Michelle and my fall calendar is the crazy number of weddings we have to attend. There are five before the end of September. Michelle has more showers and bachelorette parties to attend than she can handle. Of course, this is a good problem to have. We are very happy for our friends and excited to celebrate their new lives together. One cool thing for me is that in December, I will be performing my first wedding. I’m pumped about it, because I love the couple. I am proud that they want me to bless them in this way.

School

School starts in a week. I’m excited, although it is going to be an intense semester. The core courses for my program are coming up, and, according to the horror stories of past students, they are the most difficult ones. I’m a little rusty on my Hebrew, and that scares me. Hopefully, I’ll be alright after some more review. It may not matter how much review I do though, because Dr. Beale and Dr. Walton are going to kick my butt either way. The only class I feel ready for is my Barth class, since I’ve read most of the readings before. I’m finally starting to understand that guy.

Ministry

Michelle and I have been figuring out our ministry schedule this fall, as well. Right now, it looks like we are going to be continuing to teach in Sunday school, following the kids we were with last year who will now be 4th graders. I’ll be team teaching with a guy who is in the same program as me. Michelle will also be playing in the orchestra on Sunday mornings.

What is new for us this year is Alpha. It is the program our church uses for new Christians and non-Christians to help them explore the basics of the faith. I’m not too familiar with the program, although it is a national thing that a lot of churches do. From what I understand right now, we will be leading a table discussion group. We’ll watch a video that raises some basic issue of Christian belief, and then talk about it over a meal. I don’t know much more than that, but I am excited about it because I don’t spend a lot of time with non-Christians or new Christians in my daily life. (i.e. in the Wheaton College library) In order to have time to do Alpha, Michelle and I are not doing a small group with Ecclesia. This is both good and bad. We were in a small group with great people, and the past couple years have been a lot fun with them. It is sad that we will not be spending a couple hours each week with them, talking and praying. However, our group has been ready for a change for a while now, and this will stir things up for Michelle and I in a good way. We will be stretched, and that it is so important for our own growth. Because of that we are very excited.

On top of this, I will also be coordinating the “Labs” ministry for Ecclesia. These are the training and educational sessions that Ecclesia does every month or so. I am looking forward to helping with this again and helping to develop other teachers in our community. More and more, teaching and training ministry is becoming a passion of mine. This year will be a good year to develop that.

Blogging

If you haven’t noticed by now, I am going to be very busy this fall. What does this mean for the blog? Considering that I had a flexible schedule this summer, and the blog fell silent for weeks at a time…probably that not much should be expected. I hope to keep writing, I doubt I’ll have consistent time to do it. I have learned my lesson of promising to write about certain subjects too far ahead of time. I still hope to write about heaven and the Lord’s Supper and respond to Tim’s comments on my Ephesian’s paper and many other things, besides…but I don’t know when or how it will pan out. Instead, I would expect waves of sporadic posting for a while. I’ll basically write what I feel like at the moment, not attempted any extended series of posts. Oh well.

End of the Semester, Sister’s Wedding, and Summer Blogging

The semester is done. Thank God. The summer will be a welcome break. I will be taking classes, but they will be one at a time and paced out so as to leave Michelle and I plenty of time to enjoy the summer.

This week, my youngest sister, Hillary, gets married. It is quite a big deal for our whole family, and we are really pumped. Although, I’m sad because she will be moving out of state. The guy she is marrying is a solid man, and I am really proud of them. Please pray with me for their wedding, that it would be meaningful, that as they make their promises to each other, that they would mean them and God would give them strength to keep them. Pray also for their marriage, that it would be full of grace, that they would help each other become more like Christ, and that their family would be a blessing to the people around them.

As far as blogging goes, this summer, hopefully will provide plenty of opportunity for that, that means I will be able to blog some. I have had some good requests of topics to write about. My foster sister asked me to write about heaven, because she is interested in that. Heaven is a fun topic, so I think I’ll tackle that. My other sister liked my baptism thoughts, so I think I might finish those and maybe post a couple of thoughts about the Lord’s Supper. Also, Tim left some good comments on my Ephesians paper, and I would like to respond to those. So, if all goes well, I hope to hit up those topics pretty soon.

Moving and Blogging

A week ago, Michelle and I moved into a new apartment. “The Experiment” is over, but the data is still being processed. The reason I haven’t posted much about it for the last six months is that most of what we learned and experienced was not interesting enough to share online. On the other hand, the interesting stuff is probably too personal to share online. So, there is not much left to say. Overall, I’d say it was a good experience, and under the right circumstances with the right people, I’d do something like it again. But, Michelle and I are happy to be in our own place again. We’re just a few blocks from Wheaton College. I can walk to class, and I am enjoying that a lot.

Because the last couple weeks were spent moving and unpacking I haven’t been able to blog much. I will slowly get back into the swing of things, I hope. Although, it may still be a month before I get rolling completely. I have final papers and exams coming faster than I like.

I have more thoughts on baptism, especially after going to the Easter Vigil at Church of the Resurrection, where they performed baptisms and recounted the rich Biblical imagery for baptism through Scripture reading. However, the series has gotten long, and probably less than interesting for most people. Plus, I’ve been getting comments from weirdo’s on the internet, and I don’t want to get attract any more of them.  So, unless I have a request from someone reputable to continue on the topic, I’ll move on.

As more people are reading my blog, especially from my own community, I feel like I should start using it to address more of the particular concerns of my community, rather than just what tickles my fancy. I get a lot of questions emailed to me, and I love addressing people’s concerns. I might try and tackle more of the issues I get asked about here on the blog.  So, if you have a question or an interesting thought, let me know, and we’ll talk about it.

All this is to say, real posts will be coming again soon. Stay tuned.

Spring Break

One of the nice things about being a student again is that you get time off every few months. It is great. My break is going to be quiet and relaxing. I’m going to be catching up on some odds and ends in my life. I’ll hang out with some friends and do some reading. The only interesting I’ll be doing is going to see a slam poet that Michelle is bringing in for her classes. That’ll be sweet. I also plan on writing some posts for the blog, including the promised follow-up posts on baptism. It should be a good break.

Happy Blog-A-Versary!

Four years ago today my buddy, Steve, persuaded me to get an account on (the now defunct) ModBlog. A few clicks later, “the Postmodern Puritan” was born. Almost 300 posts later, here we are. It has been fun to blog. I didn’t expect to write as much as I have, but it has become a regular and enjoyable part of my life. Looking over the posts, it is interesting to see where I’ve come from and how I’ve changed and matured (see my first year of ModBlog posts here).

Here are twelve of my favorite old posts:

• Palm Sunday is the Church’s April Fools Day
• Three Routes of Escape from the (Pragmatic) Evangelical Church
• Church as Bootcamp for the Heart
• Churches in Our Own Image
• Friendship, the 8-Hour Work Day, and Electronic Gnosticism
• Forgiveness, Ritual, and the Barbie Dream House
• Cell Phones and the Fragmentation of Families
• A Crying Baby at the Lord’s Table
• The Joys of Scooting
• Papa Murphy’s Conversation
• The Awkward Cross
• Obedience, Heroes, and Doing What You Love

DGQ: Citizen of Nowhere?

I am officially done with one semester of grad school. I have conquored: Greek 101, Hebrew 101, Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament, and Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds of the Old Testament. Next semester has a great line up. More Greek, Hebrew, and three theology classes: New Testament Theology, Reformation Theology, and Contemporary Theology. I just ordered my books, and I am pumped. But, that is school, and right now it is Christmas break. So on to other things…

I am going to be adding a new “feature” or “category” to my blog. It is a little something I like to call, “Darn Good Questions” or “DGQ” for short. The idea of DGQs originates from my undergrad days, when I first got to college. I was so in over my head with all the things I didn’t know, that I needed some way to keep track of the things I wanted to learn about . So, I would carry around a small notepad in my back pocket and write down anything that sounded interesting that I did not understand. It evolved into a list of books, topics, and questions that I would periodically go back and investigate. I have learned a lot by doing this. These days, I use my Treo to write down my questions. In college, my friends got really into giving me questions that they wanted to know about. Our favorite question was, “Do penguins have knees?” Questions like these come up all the time for me, and so I am going to share them with you.

All I am going to to do is post the question here on the blog in the category “Darn Good Questions” and if any of you can find out the answer, leave it in the comments section. I’ll look things up sometimes, but I often don’t have time to keep up with my questions. That is why I want to share them with you. One of you might have a spare 10 minutes to go read something on the internet about the origin of “nook and cranny” or whether or not Mongolians really eat stir fry or whatever it is I want to know. So here is the first DGQ:

Can you opt out of citizenship? I was born in the United States, so I am, by no choice of my own, a citizen of it. However, I could choose to become a citizen of another country. If I did so, I would, most likely, loose my citizenship in the U. S. But, what if I just didn’t want to be a citizen of any country? I’m not thinking of doing this or anything, but I am really curious if citizenship is forced upon all people. Is there a way to choose to be a citizen of no nation? Or do you have to be a citizen of a country?

Soon

This blog will be returning soon…just a few more tests and the semester will be over. Maybe I’ll have time then.

Searches that Lead to My Blog

So, in the last two days, people have found this blog via the following searches:

• is the church for evangelism or strengthening
• puritan a wife who won’t obey
• how to find true friendship in a church
• nbc heroes Christian cockroach image of
• frankena model
• mark driscoll infant baptism
• “animal without knees”
• discovering spiritual gifts + young adult
• puritan, male dominance

I don’t know what to think of that. It scares me that people looking for stuff about obedient wives and male dominance would find my blog. First of all, I don’t talk about complimentarian/egalitarian issues that much, and secondly, I certainly wouldn’t espouse anything that deserves the term “dominance”, even in my most complimentarian moods. And thirdly, I hope people aren’t looking for tips on how to be a dominant male or make their wife obey.  God forgive us for warping the blessing of genders so much that we would speak in such terms. Here is my word to all of you coming to this blog because of such searches: treat your wife like Jesus treated the church. Give up everything to serve her. Do everything you can to make her flourish, to become beautiful, to become holy, to become who she was made to be…even if in doing so it cost you your life. Once you do that, we can talk about what it means to be “the head” of your wife.

I consistently get a lot of hits from searches for the Frankena model because of this post and spiritual gifts hits from this post. Who knows what people were looking for when they searched “animal without knees”…unless you are talking about penguins…but they do actually have knees, they are just awkwardly placed. The Heroes just makes me wonder what the person was hoping to find, although I understand why they would find my blog from that search. And, I hope the person searching for friendship in church finds it. If you are in Dupage County, IL, you are more than welcome to come and visit my church, Ecclesia. We’ll be your friends.

A few of my favorite searches from the past weeks are these:

• should a christian watch heroes…[the answer is YES!]
• roman catholic postmodernism
• is it a sin to call homosexuals fags…[the answer is YES!]
• how to talk like a puritan…[be very, very wordy]
• angel warrior comic
• vbs songs obey obey o
• shakey face
• lightning and volcanoes

Reading Calvin’s Institutes

Have you ever set out to read one of those big, fat classic books that you know a well-informed person really ought to have read? It may have been The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Moby Dick, or The Odyssey. You get real motivated one day, so you sit down and read about 50 pages in one shot. You feel good about yourself, but then, the next day you can’t seem to get the motivation to tackle it again. So, this classic text sits on your nightstand (or coffeetable or backpack or back of the toilet or wherever you keep the books you are reading) for about two weeks, taunting you as you choose magazines and random stuff on the Internet over it. Then, after a couple of weeks of feeling guilty for not reading it, you realize that you’re probably not ever going to pick it up again, so back on the shelf it goes. Sure, it makes you look good to have a solid collection of classics on your shelf, but as people peruse your books and are impressed with your cultured reading habits, you know that you have really only read about 50 pages at most of each one. As a result, you constantly say to yourself, “I’m going to get to those books one day. Maybe on my next vacation, I’ll pick that one up again. This summer, when things are slower, I’ll read that one I’ve been meaning to read.” And so on…but you never do.

In the the theological world, one of those classic books everyone should have read but hasn’t is John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. It is big, famous, and very influential, but most people (like myself) have only read condensed versions or summaries. I’ve picked it up many times, but I’ve really only gotten through about 50 pages at most.

Of course, the problem is, I’ve been reading it by myself, which means I have little external motivation to keep going. Which is why, when my friend Steve suggested we read it together and blog it, I was much more hopeful that I would actually get through the whole thing. So, this is what we are doing. We are starting a tumblr and slowly reading through the Institutes. We’re picking out a quote from each section and sharing our comments, just a few sentences, on the section as a whole. This is just a tangible way to track our progress and give us some motivation.

This may work. It may not. But, if you want to track our progress, you can read along with us at: theinstitutes.net.

If you want to read along with us, go ahead and pick up a copy of the Institutes or read it online. We’re not sure what pace we’ll be going at yet, but it will probably go in bursts over the next year (if we’re successful).

Steve is using the newer Ford Lewis Battles translation. I am reading the older Henry Beveridge translation.

My Blog is PG-13?

This website said my blog was PG-13 based on the presence of the word “death” and “pain.” I’m not so sure of that. If I’m going to get that rating, I need to start cussing more.

My Tumblelog

My friends smerickson and syntatic just started a tumblelog, which is basically a blog for quick, simple, frequent posts. For some time now, I have been using my del.icio.us account to try and do that. I basically collect links of interesting things I have read. When I saw tumblr, I realized this was what I was looking for instead. So, from now on, I’ll be sharing shorter, quicker things on my new tumblog: PomoPu Jr. Enjoy.

Blog Fast

I have been feeling very distracted and overloaded with media lately. I have been spending too much time at work checking the blogs that I usually read, and I have been thinking too much about writing on my own blog. Over the past few months I have accumulated so many articles and stories in my “to read” pile, but I never get around to reading them. Most of them are not even articles of substance. I want to be intentional about what I read, not idlely surfing around the web picking up here and there what I find. So, in order to fight my distraction and to help me evaluate my strategy for interacting with the web, I am taking a break from blogging, both reading blogs and writing on my own. I will only check the blogs of my personal friends and the news. I will be doing this for the month of September. In October, I will decide how to procede with blogging in a healthy way.

My Del.icio.us Account

For a while, I was posting clippings from things I had been reading on the web on a Google Notebook account, but I have switched over to del.icio.us. I bookmark my most recent reading, and it gets posted on the sidebar of this blog. Often times, I will post a link there with a short comment instead of putting it up here on the blog. If you are interested at all in what I have found interesting on the web, you can pick up the RSS feed for it here: Claytonius Maximus Del.icio.us RSS Feed.

My Google Notebook

I am experimenting with Google Notebook right now, and I think I kind of like it. One thing I want to try and do is post things to a public notebook that I found interesting, so that other could read it. Instead of making a whole blog post about it, I thought people could just see the articles and clippings in the notebook. So, I’ve posted a link to my notebook on the sidebar. Check it out: My Google Notebook

I suppose there is probably a better way to do this with del.ic.ious, but I have never really used it, so this will have to do for now.