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Seven minutes or less-a great way to meet visitors.
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To the Point:
If you live long enough, you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.
- I.F. Stone
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
- Robert W. Sarnoff
God would be well pleased if on Christmas each church would have a Christmas tree on which shall be hung offerings, great and small, for these houses of worship.... The tree may be as tall and its branches as wide as shall best suit the occasion; but let its boughs be laden with the golden and silver fruit of your beneficence, and present this to Him as your Christmas gift. Let your donations be sanctified by prayer.
- EGW, Adventist Home, 482
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
- Henri Poincare
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
- Will Rogers
The first casualty of war is the truth.
- Aeschylus, Greek writer (525 BC-456 BC)If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
- George C. Marshall
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man .
- H. L. Mencken
Got a favorite quote? Send it to BestPractices@ameritech.net. |
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 Thinking Aloud:Not an Especially Good Sabbath
by Loren Seibold
This past Saturday was the first rather cold Sabbath morning of the year; folks dribbled in late, as they generally do when it's cold.
During the first song, the praise team's sound system fed back so thunderously that I nearly jumped out of my skin. And it kept happening. We're trying to lead people in a moving worship service, while they're holding their hands over their ears! Some of my church leaders had prepared a delightful video offering appeal for our annual Christmas giving project. I was looking forward to showing it, but the picture froze and the audio was unintelligible. The audio-visual guys messed around awhile, then shouted from the balcony, "I think we got it now." But they hadn't. By the time we figured that out, there was no time for my sermon. We finished communion and sent everyone off to Sabbath School, while I hid out in my office, praying the second service would go better.
It didn't. The AV guys still couldn't make the offering appeal video work, though they'd fiddled around with it all through Sabbath School. More noisy fumbling while we all waited. Finally I told them to give it up. I apologized to the congregation and tried to explain the Christmas project myself. Awkwardly. In fact, every transition between service events was awkward. Even our normally excellent choir was affected. Inside, I felt as tight as a fist. Before I preached, I prayed for peace. It didn't seem to help much. My sermon felt (to me) labored and artificial, and I was sure the congregation was losing interest. In communion, the deacons ran out of bread and wine, and we waited long, uncomfortable minutes while they consulted with one another and ran back and forth for refills. So much for smooth, non-intrusive transitions.
By the time I said the benediction, that recording that sometimes plays in my head was telling me it is about time I quit this job and did something for a living that doesn't require leadership (of which quality I felt I demonstrably lacked) like selling insurance or pasting up wallpaper!
Afterwards, some of my friends assured me that most of what had knotted me up inside wasn't as bothersome to the congregation. The Holy Spirit had been at work, they said, though I hadn't felt it.
An afternoon nap was restorative. But I'm still not sure who to blame for this Sabbath train wreck. Satan? (That strikes me as an excuse; Satan's always against us--nothing new there.) Myself? The cold weather? The AV team? The impersonal laws of physics, as manifested in the AV system? Some of all of these, I suppose. Next week, I hope and pray, will go better.
Have you had Sabbath where things went really wrong? Tell us about it in a sentence or two. |
Cutting Edge Book
A Church in Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future
by Robert Blair Kaiser
Point: The Roman Catholic church is in crisis, and the election of Benedict XVI is a symptom of it.
Key Concept: The Catholic church is not the monolithic organization its heirarchical structure makes it appear. Deep fault lines are opening, concerning sex, culture, nationalism, clergy, money, and Christian service.
Pros: Kaiser is a clear and direct writer, who can make even rather esoteric concepts accessible to laypeople as well as us Protestants.
Cons: The RC church is such a huge, self-sufficient, self-referential organization, with its own jargon, that even with good writing you may occasionally have to google a word or concept to understand it.
Why you should
read it: The Roman Catholic church is the largest Christian body in the world, and arguably the most influential. There are a host of reasons--prophetic, ecclesiastical, political, theological--that Seventh-day Adventists should understand our historical arch-nemesis. I was fascinated by how many of the problems they face have an analog in our own church experience; despite different theologies, all institutionalized churches have similar challenges, and all church heirarchies similar temptations.
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