It's come to my attention that my reader base is expanding. Andrew, Rhett, and my parents have a new company of folks with whom to share inside jokes originating from these posts. All are welcome, tell your friends.

My apologies for the long break I've taken from posting. It's not for lack of time or material, all that's missing is the spark to come online and do something other than check my fantasy football scores.

For those of you who are interested in the immerging church I have good news. There are many other folks who share your interest. After the first day of classes at lunch when Dr. Sunquist referred to my inquiry about the immerging church as request for heretical prophesy I was not apt to bring up the topic again. However, other people have. In a lecture Dr. Sunquist himself (perhaps in a better mood?) referred to a new wave of Christian churches looking more like the Asian tradition. (More on that as I figure out what the asain traditions were.) He also refers to the basic thesis of his entire class on church history: that churches are both indigenizing in that they give the believer a since of home and pilgrim-izing in that the Christian is never fully comfortable in his/her society. We feel drawn to be different and renewed with no abiding sense of what our worship experience should resemble.

The bulk of the history class would seem dry to an observer who was not involved with the daily class, so I'll move on to Gospels. After the introduction about literary concepts and Jewish traditions we moved on to a focused study of the text itself. Using the Transfiguration story we examined which synoptic gospel might have been the first. Basically, every word of Mark's telling can be found in either Matthew or Luke or both. This (along with many, many other studies) leads many scholars to believe that Mark was first and Matthew and Luke had access to his material when they wrote their gospels. To me, that's flawed. If you read War and Peace and were asked to retell the story in it's entirety but with different language, would you submit a novel that was longer or shorter? I think we'd all go shorter; there must be some words we could cut out for the reader's digest version. Also Mark uses words like "suddenly," "intensely," and "exceedingly" that they others don't use so I figure he's cutting out tangential references that emphasize a point just to replace them with emphatic words. As time goes on I'm sure I'll learn just how absurd that suggestion is.

In Greek, we've come through most noun forms and are learning verbs now. To expound upon our vocabulary Dr. Gagnon will submit an explanation of the nuances of the word. In the book the verb "ak-oo-oh" means "I hear" (or "I am hearing") but Dr. Gagnon is sure to remind us that 15% of the time it means "listen" and occurs in the new testament 428 times. Thanks, Dr. Gagnon, I may not know any modifying adjectives, but I'm well prepared for the three in twenty chance that God means for us not just to hear Jesus but also to listen to Him. If that's not unclear enough, "lu-oh" (used 42 times) can mean to untie (13 times), loose (4), release (8-10), break (4-5), or destroy (5-6). I would enjoy a discussion about whether Mark 1:7 means that John the Baptist thought he was unworthy to destroy Jesus' footwear. Who then would be worthy to break the Messiah's shoes?

Finally there is Spiritual Formation, the class that has received the most negative press from these postings. Taking it for what it's worth and realizing my own spiritual weaknesses makes the class a bit more interesting. Our Eugene Peterson text urges the reader not to consider spiritual resources as mere self-help manuals. Ultimately there is very little one can do to help oneself. The help comes from relationship. Now that I've said something positive I feel less bad about saying that the lecture on Tuesday, September 20, was the most ridiculous 75 minutes I've experienced in a long time. The topic was creation. Not Genesis, the Big Bang, with all the little analogies that fifth graders learn at the natural history museum. "If the earth were 10 years old, man would have come onto the scene 2 days ago..." It would have been more tolerable if Dr. Robbins hadn't stopped after every sentence to allow us to gasp and be shocked by the craziness of it all (which, if you can’t read my tone, no one did). My favorite point was when she stated that the circle of life was so wonderfully balanced that everything that is toxic to one organism sustains another. That's fine for oxygen and carbon dioxide between humans and trees, but tell me what organism takes in a spoonful of nuclear waste and develops more efficient lymph nodes? Some things are just nasty and if Christ is in everything, where is He in that?

I apologize again to anyone who has faithfully checked this blog and been disappointed. I always have something more to add and I hope to satisfy y'all more in the coming days. One funny note on “y’all,” I’ve decided that I might attempt to speak in a southern drawl because I’ve found that some professors can be highly critical of misuse of language. While I hate to reinforce hard and fast prejudgments by northerners on the intelligence of southerners, I figure they’ll cut me some slack when I say “from whence” in a voice resembling Kevin Spacey’s in the screen adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and not remind me for the third time that day that “whence” implies “from.” Only so many times will they accept the excuse that I, like Mark, simply wanted to be emphatic.

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