Grits in the Old Testament

I am in the process of reading through the Bible. I noticed Leviticus 2:14,16:

"Also if you bring a grain offering of early ripened things to the LORD, you shall bring fresh heads of grain roasted in the fire, grits of new growth, for the grain offering of your early ripened things. . . . The priest shall offer up in smoke its memorial portion, part of its grits and its oil with all its incense as an offering by fire to the LORD." (emphasis mine, NASB)

Rather than "grits," the NKJV has "beaten grain," and the KJV has "beaten corn."

I don't think we need to offer such grain offerings today, but isn't it interesting that grits are mentioned in the Bible? Those of you who have not eaten grits need to try them for breakfast. When my wife and I were in South Korea as IMB missionaries, we made grits for some Americans who were in the country for a few weeks training at a Hyundai plant. We knew that they were missing Southern food. They were all from Alabama. The new Hyundai plant is in Montgomery, where my wife went to Robert E. Lee High School. We conducted a worship service for them on a Sunday and served the grits. Needless to say, they really enjoyed those grits in South Korea.

Spiritual Entertainment vs. Spiritual Service

A recent LifeWay survey gave some interesting stats about what SBC pastors think are the most critical ministries in their churches:

"When pastors were asked to list up to five ministries in their order of importance, the largest group (24 percent) identified evangelism/outreach as the most important. The next six ministries identified as most important were Sunday school/Bible study/small groups (17 percent); worship/specific worship services (13 percent); preaching/proclamation/teaching (10 percent); children/youth (9 percent); discipleship/spiritual growth/mentoring/counseling (7 percent); and prayer/prayer ministry/prayer groups (5 percent). When a list of the five ministries mentioned most often was compiled, however, children/youth moved to the top, identified as one of the five most important ministries by 85 percent of the respondents. The other four most-mentioned ministries were evangelism/outreach (68 percent); Sunday school/Bible study/small groups (53 percent); discipleship/spiritual growth/mentoring/counseling (37 percent); and worship/specific worship services (33 percent)."

Why do you think that children/youth ministries are at the top? I agree that such ministries are very important for the discipleship of our children and youth. I was a youth minister for about 7 years, and my wife (a seminary grad) is currently a full-time assistant in the preschool ministry at a church. What I see happening in many churches and what I have heard about from other pastors, however, disturbs me. I hear about many parents who like churches that provide places/ministries where they can drop off their kids while they do their own church thing. In such situations, the kids don't see their parents serving God. They sense that the churches are like restaurants that have kids' menus and adult menus. If you aren't happy with the service provided to you at one church, find another. Church attenders are seen as consumers, not as servers. Some churches provide the equivalents of spiritual Disneylands to entertain the kids. When the kids get old enough to drive on their own, we should not be surprised that they find more exciting entertainment outside the churches and leave. It's the consumer mindset. Pastor's intuitively understand this mindset. Unfortunately, many pastors try to imitate the world to attract young couples and their children. The problem is, if you bring them in with worldly entertainment, you must continue using worldly entertainment to keep them. Some pastors think they can trick the couples by slowly introducing the spiritual elements, but the couples aren't stupid. They recognize the "bait and switch" routine. I believe it's better to say from the beginning that our priority is spiritual truth and service, not entertainment. We may be regarded as irrelevant by most of the couples, but we'll have a stronger nucleus of members. Our criteria for success can no longer be large numbers of people. If the most successful pastor in America is the guy with the largest numbers, then Joel Osteen is the most successful pastor in America. Nope. Our criteria for success must not be size; rather, it must involve faithfulness, purity, and service. In regard to entertainment, small churches cannot compete with large churches, and large churches cannot compete with the world. Unfortunately, a lot of young couples care nothing about doctrinal truth. Thus, churches that prioritize doctrinal truth are viewed as irrelevant. Such couples like churches that emphasize entertainment over doctrinal truth. The denominational label is not important to them. I'm not willing to compromise with the world to attract bigger crowds, but I'm very willing to pastor a group of people who want to prioritize faithfulness, purity, and service. Even a small bit of salt can be extremely useful. We should not forget that the crowds quickly left Jesus after He stressed the cost of discipleship:

John 6:66-69 -- "As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, 'You do not want to go away also, do you?' Simon Peter answered Him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.'" (NASB)

Bad Stats for Christianity in America

The bad news was on the CBS evening news tonight, and it was also on the USA Today website today. Here are some excerpts from the USA Today article by Cathy Lynn Grossman:

“The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. . . . These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990. . . . So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, ‘the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,’ the report concludes. . . . Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%. . . . Kosmin and Keysar also found a ‘piety gap’ in how Americans understand God: While 69% say they believe in a personal God, the Judeo-Christian understanding of the Almighty, an additional 30% made no such connection. The piety gap defines the primary sides in the culture wars, Kosmin says. ‘It's about gay marriage and abortion and stem cells and the family. If a personal God says, “Thou shalt not” or “Thou shalt” see these a certain way, you'd take it very seriously. Meanwhile, three in 10 people aren't listening to that God,’ he says. ‘There's more clarity at the two extremes and the mishmash is in the middle,’ Keysar adds. Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, sees in the numbers "an emergence of a soft evangelicalism — E-lite — that owes a lot to evangelical styles of worship and basic approach to church. ‘But E-lite is more a matter of aesthetic and style and a considerable softening of the edges in doctrine, politics and social values,’ Silk says.”

The “E-lite” religion is what I find most disturbing. The E-lite folks find themselves in a convenient place. They don’t have to be biblical salt and light in their culture; rather, they can just fit in without making waves. For them, culture is more authoritative than the Bible. America will continue its descent into heathenism unless true Christianity is revived.

Biggest Snow in 40 Years

We had our biggest snow in 40 years in the Memphis area this past weekend. I took a few shots of our little mission church, including our sanctuary with new carpet. We won't be eating in there for a while, even though the room also serves as our fellowship hall. The carpet looks too good right now to chance it. We've started a community Bible study/brunch at a local coffee shop on Saturdays at 10:00 a.m., and it's going pretty well.

A Short Book Review:

Miller, Donald. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003.

The title of the 243-page book comes from Miller’s description of the stars: “They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz” (100). He regards Christian spirituality to be like jazz music—“something you feel” (239). Miller regards himself as a writer of “new-realism essays” (188). He gave evidence of his postmodern mindset about the lack of absolute truth; rather his decisions are based on emotions, etc.: “I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him . . . I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything” (103). He also explained, “There isn’t any truth anymore” (121). He said that Christian spirituality “cannot be explained” and “is something you feel” (57). Miller writes with a shifting style in which many images that involve sensory perception are presented to the reader. He believes that human depravity exists (17-18), and he affirms tithing (197). He grew up as a Baptist (130), but he went to some pains to criticize stereotypical traditional religion in the book, as evidenced by his mention of a “blow-hard preacher” (15) and “big-haired preachers” (33). In contrast, he affirmed his non-traditional church, referring to four of its qualities: “spiritual,” “art,” “community,” and “authenticity” (136-137). His respected friends in the book seemed to have a penchant for tobacco, cussing, and alcohol. Miller made some thought-provoking statements. For instance, while discussing his selfishness he stated, “Life is a story about me. . . . There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction” (182). This book is a must-read for those people who desire to understand the postmodern mindset of many emergent church attendees.

Interesting Quote

Last night I finished reading a book by Charles Van Engen, who is the Arthur F. Glasser Professor of Biblical Theology of Mission at Fuller Seminary's School of World Mission. Engen stated,

"To achieve our ends in our churches and mission organizations, we may have too easily used secular management principles whose bottom line was measurable production, not faith. We like results, we like to count our results, and we like to count what we can see. Thus, whether it be in church growth and evangelism or in relief and development, have we not tended to accept the scientific reduction of life to the material and visible, and then to justify our mission endeavors on the basis of visible results?"

Van Engen, Mission on the Way: Issues in Mission Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 221-222.

If I could make a generalization and compare most of our churches and religious organizations to ships at sea, it seems we have often been more interested in how smoothly the ship is running and how fast it is going than in the direction in which it is heading day by day and minute by minute. Thus, our leaders tend to be good administrators but not necessarily good theorists who can react well to changing conditions on the voyage. The captain of the Titanic knew what his final destination was supposed to be (New York City), but his crew did not react properly when an iceberg was unexpectedly in the way. The main concern seemed to be the comfort of the passengers and the speed of the voyage. If we are leaders, then we need to be leaders all the time, not just when we are designated as leaders at the beginning of the voyage.

Churches and religious organizations are not secular businesses. We cannot lead them as we would secular businesses. The spiritual welfare of each person in the group is important. We cannot look at them as expendable parts. Also, when we look at results, we must examine the genuineness of the results. Spiritual quality is more important than material quality. It is true that spiritual quality produces spiritual quantity in most cases, but we tend to be more concerned about quantity than quality. Are those who are baptized really Christians? Do those people who are baptized grow as they should? Do the churches that are planted last very long? Are they biblical churches with biblical leadership in place? Are the individuals and churches headed in the right direction? Are they equipped to react to changing spiritual circumstances? These are some questions we should be asking.

John Smyth, John Smith, and Squanto: Some Thoughts on Thanksgiving

This is the time of year when we typically think about the Pilgrims. They left England in September of 1620 and arrived off the coast of New England in November of 1620 – not a good time to arrive in New England. They stayed on the Mayflower for a while until they found a good place to build a community. That place was Plymouth in what is now Massachusetts. Plymouth had been discovered by John Smith before the Pilgrims set sail from England. A different man with a variant spelling of the same name, John Smyth, was also connected with the Pilgrims. Smyth was a member of the same Separatist congregation in Gainesborough from which William Bradford led his group of Pilgrims to America. The Separatists experienced a lot of persecution in England. This persecution motivated Bradford’s group to go to America and Smyth’s group to go to Holland.

Smyth founded the first church to practice believer’s baptism in Holland in 1609. He baptized himself, Thomas Helwys and about 40 others. Smyth baptized by affusion, or pouring. (Immersion came into practice with Particular Baptists in 1640-41.) In 1611 Helwys led part of the group back to England and established the first believer’s baptism church on English soil in Spitalfield, a section of London. He attempted to moderate his views between the Calvinism typical of the English Separatists and the Arminianism of the Mennonites.

The Pilgrims were not the first folks from England to sail near the coast of New England. Many English traders and fishermen sailed there before the Pilgrims arrived. On one occasion an Indian called “Squanto” was captured and taken back to England. He was trained to speak English so that he could go back to New England and assist traders in making deals with the Indians. He was eventually released, but he was later captured by another group of Englishmen when he went out to greet them upon their arrival. They took him to Spain to a slave market, and he was sold to a monastery. There he became a Christian. Once again, he was returned to New England. After the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they experienced a very tough winter. Only 50 of the 110 people on the Mayflower survived the first winter. Squanto, who had experienced persecution at the hands of English people, took pity on them, and he showed them how to plant corn (putting seeds in a mound of dirt with a dead fish for fertilizer), how to get sap from trees, how to tell poisonous plants from medicinal plants, etc. The Pilgrims would not have survived the second winter without Squanto’s help. They had a good harvest in October of 1621, and they were able to store food for the coming winter. About 90 Indians joined them for three days of a thanksgiving celebration in October.

For what should we be thankful this year? In difficult times when the economy is bad, we of course are thankful that God has provided us with the material necessities of life. We should also, however, be thankful for spiritual blessings. We see some of these listed in 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4:

1. Our spiritual growth – We should count it all joy when we fall into various trials because such tests of our faith produces patience so that we can be complete/mature (James 1:2-4).

2. The sacrificial love of Christians for each other – We should follow the example of Squanto, who risked being captured again when he helped the Pilgrims.

3. Faithful living in the face of persecution – As our culture becomes less Christian, we will see more and more of this quality. The Christians in Thessalonica were persecuted greatly. The people there were less receptive to the gospel than were the people in Berea. Some of the Jews in Thessalonica were persuaded (Acts 17:4), but many of the Jews in Berea believed (Acts 17:12), and the Bereans were more “fair-minded” (NKJV) than were the Thessalonians (Acts 17:11).

I am thankful to God for the spiritual growth I see among Christians in my sphere of influence. I am also thankful for their sacrificial love for each other and for their faithfulness in difficult circumstances. Contrary to what the prosperity teachers say, life on earth for faithful Christians quite often includes spiritual battle and painful trials; a pain-free heaven comes only after physical death. Thankfully, God has provided to us the resources we need to be victorious on the spiritual field of battle before death.