9Marks Ministries

Doesn't have anything to do with nine people named Mark.

Founded by Mark Dever. Confusing.

Not Very Punny

Just yesterday, the sight of me doing the educational equivalent of self flagellation spiked the interest of my father-in-law. My whip: the Hebrew language. An upside down view of pages of rote learnt verb and prenominal suffix paradigms, prompted my father-in-law to ask, 'What are you up to? Playing some kind of game with numbers?'

A good enough guess, I guess. He was looking upside down, and was fairly certain I wasn't writing English. But I said, 'If only it was a game'.

But it kind of is a game. I call it 'Parse or fail'.

*If you don't get it, click here. But no, it doesn't get any better.

What I got with a $50 Koorong Voucher (other than frustrated)

I received a $50 Koorong voucher as a gift (not a bribe) for leaving from my last congregation. This is what I purchased;

Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? by Wayne Grudem

You Can Change by Tim Chester

The Busy Christian's Guide to Busyness by Tim Chester

The Cross and Christian Ministry by Don Carson

Learning the Christian Life

My quest to play jazz clarinet continues and especially last night as I chatted away at a party with a friend of mine who is a saxophonist. Amongst much talk about what it takes to learn to play jazz, we came to the conclusion that learning an instrument is a lot like living the Christian life. That is, to do nothing is to be going backwards. It's often simply about consistent, intentional practise.

There's an old saying amongst piano players that;

If you don't practise for one day, you know.

If you don't practise for two days, your teacher knows.

If you don't practise for three days, the audience knows.

At that point the analogy kind of falls down, because God knows everything. But unintentially my friend reminded me that I need to be just as deliberate in my walk with God as I am at trying to learn clarinet.

The 'new' atheists: Marketing to a consumer society

Among the most recent assaults on the Christian gospel, we have a bunch of people who have been termed the 'New Atheists'. (To call anything 'new' gains a hearing in a consumer society, even if there is nothing really new in it. How many ways are there to say "There is no God"?)

Peter Bolt from here.

Pharisees and OH&S - UPDATE

I was going through some notes I'd taken in my phone and came across this one;

Pharisees are like OH&S.

No idea what I was thinking about at the time.

Perhaps I was thinking about how to explain the concept of Pharisees to workers. Pharisees are like most Occupational Health and Safety officers in that they are often interested in the minimum requirement. It's not about wanting to make a safe work environment but, wanting to do just enought to be seen to have done the job.

Then again I could have been thinking something completely different.


--UPDATE--
After a couple of comments, let me state this is not a veiled dig at those who banned handball. The note was dated long before that came up.

Completely unrelated.

Now while I'm on OH&S, I'm reminded of a song I wrote while doing my ministry apprenticeship. As part of our orientation, we all were given a document to especially read over and then find a creative way to present to the staff team. Having been given the AFES Occupational Health and Safety Code, I wrote a song; which involved me playing guitar and everyone singing along to a chorus. The verses were spoken and had associated dance moves such as 'The correct lifting technique' and the 'correct posture when using a computer'. The chorus went;

O, H and S

It's just common sense,

Put in a rather large document.

Geek Chic

My geek chic is increasing as I've gradually adopted using my iPhone Bible at college. Yes, I've gone to the dark side of those dear brothers in Christ (and lets face it, its almost always males) who I used to sneer at. My reasoning is its one less book to carry in my bag. But I still maintain that in most settings it is far better to have the paper version with you.

Anyways, today in chapel we were asked to "keep our finger in Acts 12". Not me. The closest I could get is keeping my finger on Acts 12. And that would have kept highlighting whichever verse I was touching. Perhaps the phrase "keep your finger in the Bible" is approaching its use by date?

Andrew Shead: Geek Speak 101

Andrew Shead lecturing in Hebrew 1A today;

"Genesis 17:17 "Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed" which in Hebrew is ROFL."

It's all a matter of emphasis

I read it once and paused. Hang on a moment, what? Another read. What? Third time through. Oh! I get it now.

It seems these days that every time I open a Koorong catalogue, more and more advertising paraphernalia seems to fall out. The one that caught my attention this afternoon was for the Crossway Conference (which as far as I can tell by the brochure has no location.) Now I'm not thinking of going. But even if I was thinking about it, I especially wasn't going during the first two attempts at reading the introduction sentence in the biography of the headline speaker Gene Appel;

Gene is recognised by many as a gifted leader with a passion for following Christ and a sensitivity for hurting people.

It's all a matter of emphasis, I suppose.

Now while I have your attention I don't know if you can imagine what its like to have a child with a penchant for choking on things and turning blue. I'm certain it's not the most pleasant experience for a parent. My little 12 month old niece Eleora had to get airlifted from the middle of the Northern Territory to Darwin and then to Sydney for heart surgery a few months back. Basically her own heart was choking her and she needed urgent treatment. Praise God she's now been fixed up good.

The reason my sister and her family were in the middle of the NT is because my brother in law is in the airforce. After initially offering full financial support, the defense force with no notice told my sister and brother in law that they would no longer meet their accommodation or car hire expenses. Stuck in a foreign state with two kids, one of whom was awaiting serious surgery, it was a great stress. Some Christian brothers and sisters who live a few suburbs from the hospital offered accommodation, but to have a sick child and be living under someone else's roof could be cause for even more stress. But God's graciousness was abounding as my brother in law phoned at just the right time to get put up in Ronald McDonald House for as long as they needed (which ended up being about 2 weeks). From memory I was told about 25 families request a place at RMH each week and only a handful of rooms are available.

To say thanks for the wonderful support they received, my sister and brother in law are walking 330km from Tindle (the airforce base near Katherine) to Darwin, raising money for Ronald McDonald House Charities. You can read more about the walk here. Or if you can spare a few buckeroos you can follow the instructions through the site linked above or my sisters personal support page here.

I think in many ways it is testament to my sister and brother in law's trust in Jesus that they are not just satisfied to accept the gracious gift of Macca's House as if it were somehow a right, nor to simply forget about the benefit they received there once they'd left, but rather do the hard work (and hard walk) of raising funds so other families can receive the care they did.

Perhaps you might consider going without your next trip to McDonalds in order to give $10 to Ronald McDonald House?

Here's my niece in a cute hat that is really just holding the tubes that enable her to breathe;

Visiting Melbourne and the stream of consciousness that gets me to KYCK

If only they had some Rugby League reporting in the media I could probably live in Melbourne. Sarah and I greatly enjoyed our first trip to Mexico and look forward to visiting again someday in the future. Highlights included the Shanghai Dumpling Restaurant down one of Melbourne's famous laneways, and getting half price tickets to the musical Fame. I also enjoyed discovering the CD of Kitty, Daisy and Lewis playing over the stereo in a vintage clothing store. Other highlights were Sarah and I whispering to each other 'Stinking cheaters' every time we saw a Melbourne Storm jersey.

The lowlight was without a doubt getting accosted by restauranteurs as we strolled along Lygon St looking for a bite of Italian food. For the record we went to the first place that was full of people and didn't have a spruiker standing out the front. My guess is that historically, as well as standing out the front hassling passersby, someone had the brilliant idea of giving out business cards, and it seems now everyone is following suit and shoving them in your hand before you can say no. I didn't really look at the cards until I emptied my pockets that night and discovered I could have received a complimentary drink from La Spaghetteria Ristorante. It doesn't even sound like a real restaurant, just like someone has tried to make "The Spaghetti Restaurant" sound authentically Italian.

The only thing hampering my enjoyment of the break was that I pretty much felt guilty the whole time about the amount of money we were spending. This has been one of the hardest things about being supported by others to do Christian ministry - not feeling able to spend money on anything over and above fairly basic survival needs (by Western standards). Also we're digging into savings by about 6K this year and when you're already spending more than you earn, its hard to pay for a holiday. Even though a break was severely needed, I'm already anticipating the first snide remark from someone about the cost of going to Melbourne for three days. I promise I won't throw a punch at them, even though I will probably imagine myself doing so in an elaborate Scrubs daydream kind of way.

While reflecting on my tightarse tendencies, I was reminded of the great teaching I got at KYCK (Katoomba Youth Convention + another K). From Ecclesiastes we were spurred on to make the most of the days we have, enjoying God's creation in the knowledge that there is more to life than stuff.

Having reflected more on KYCK over the past month especially in chatting with my mate Dave K, we worked out what was missing from KYCK this year, and I think it springs from having four preachers. Ecclesiastes was taught really solidly from the point of creation, but was lacking in being read in light of redemption. There was an evangelistic talk which moved from the frustration of life to salvation, but this was aimed at conversion and recommitment to Jesus. What was missing was one of the talks needed to go more specifically to the resurrection of the dead, which is the guarantee that the proclamation of the gospel becomes the work of this age which will last, which has eternal meaning and consequence.

I'm certain this view is held by all on the platform, and was often implied in the call to "don't waste your life, but just do something", but there was no individual talk which specifically brought this out. Super strong on creation, weak on redemption (over and above the call for people to become Christians).

Now this may have been a deliberate decision based upon the reading of the age that we are in, and as a paid gospel worker I personally needed to hear the creation stuff. But for most of the youth, I would suggest they would have benefited from hearing Ecclesiastes more specifically in light of redemption.

The Joshua Tree

[UPDATE] Just went through Google Reader and it turns out Mikey stole my thunder on this post. But Mikey, unless you were thinking about your post while you were going to sleep last night like myself, then technically I got in first.

Mark Dever was asked once if in order to sharpen his thinking, did he surround himself with people who disagree with him. His reply was something along the lines of, 'Life's too short to be constantly butting heads with people, and you generally don't have to seek out people to disagree with you, so no I don't.'

Not being as well thought out nor as intelligent as Mark Dever, I like having people around who have different leanings than myself in order to push me past my assumptions.

My first reaction is to disagree with everything Stuart Heath says. I don't know why I'm like this with Stuart. I've never met him, never spoken to him, never seen him as far as I know, but he's just one of those few guys who my first reaction is to say, 'No, I don't think that's right'. But let me tell you, it's worthwhile to listen. Stuart thinks about church, analyses it, considers things from first principles and has critical thoughts on just about everything that the denominational church structure thinks about 'church'. And he makes me think.

If you haven't found it yet, you might be interested in The Joshua Tree 'Kingdom Community' website/blog. From what I can gather from talking to Danny, a member (is that the right word?) of the JT community who is studying with me at college, much of the theory behind kingdom communities comes from the UK Crowded House model (while maintaining many differences). From what I can gather the Crowded House model doesn't actually have anything to do with the Australian/New Zealand soft rock band. They don't sing their songs, nor worship Neil Finn. It is rather a network of house churches with a focus of building community around the home.

My introduction to these kingdom communities was through a rather laboured discussion with Danny at college the other day. One of our problems was that we were using the same words to describe very different things. When I said church it was not what Danny was thinking when he said church. I wanted to talk to Danny about his role as a student minister - but I prefaced the statement with "For lack of a better word...", and many other things like that.

This has highlighted for me part of the great thing that Stuart, Danny and others involved are trying to do. That is, groups such as these of which they are a part, which seek for radical rethinks of what we are doing, could easily define themselves by what they aren't. Instead they are working hard to define what they are.

One of the things that caught my attention on the website was this post from Danny which looked at the tendency of ministers to speak about people as "resources". I'm not sure if part of the influence behind the post was point 9 from Andrew Nixon's '12 things I learnt from Connect09' on sydneyanglicans.net, which said;

9. Our church members are a wonderful gift from God and the greatest untapped resource we possess.

To be sure, there is an aspect of this way of speaking which is unhelpful. But ignoring the "We" language for a moment (as there is a sense where this article is directed at the ministers), at one level this point is speaking against the clergy/laity divide which Stuart often reacts against. That is, it is another way of saying "The best thing about the church is the church".

The Moore College Diaries 11/5/10

I am becoming increasingly overwhelmed with the entire college workload. It's not that I'm worried about "keeping on top of the readings", for one would need to have even contemplated the mountain to consider being "on top". No, I'm happy to let the readings slide until I can work out a method of reading in my sleep.

Of course I will never lose sight of the enormous privilege it is to be studying God's word full-time, and let's face it; it's quite amazing that the worst thing about my day is I'm "studying God too much". And yeah, yeah I know about the importance of making the most of the focused time to study while I've got it.

But why is there just so much to do? Why? I don't know what you could leave out, but it all seems so much. Thankfully the older year students have a way of pepping me up with their assertions that, "Oh, if only I had the time available that I did in first year".

I just don't get it.

Am I supposed to burn out? Maybe I'm meant to be a workaholic? Perhaps its even a noble gesture to ensure I enter vocational ministry with realistic expectations of what I am humanly able to achieve?

Either way, I'm thankful God has blessed me with a wife who says, "I know you'd never let me spend money like this, but I don't care. I've just booked us tickets to Melbourne for three days. We'll miss two days of college but we need to have some time away together." This is the same wife who called me "stupid" for suggesting I could do part-time radiography work during the morning of our one day off each week. This is also the same wife who lovingly informed me after preaching a few weeks back, "That was by far the worst sermon I've ever heard you preach. The congregation was bored and you reflected that back to them with your uninspired delivery."

It's not that she isn't also my greatest support and encourager. But in a world of platitudes and optimists, we all need a straight talker.

And God just doesn't make many like her.

It's time for a holiday*.


*rather than a "lecture free period"

Hebrew

The Hebrew word בֵּן (pronounced bane) means 'son'.

Our memory hook is, "My son is the bane of my existence".

I wish the word meant 'The Hebrew language'.

Thoughts on minor prophets

I heard of a study a few years ago which took a survey of what books were being preached on during an average Sunday in churches. What was found was a disproportionate amount of preaching on the minor prophets. The theory was that this was because they're small and are good fillers between series.

And its true, they are easier to get through. Especially compared to books like Isaiah and the like. Peter Bolt reckons the worst thing about heaven will be that awkward moment after bumping into the old guy with the beard who turns out to be Jeremiah. Following the initial exchanging of pleasantries, you know his next question will be, "Did you read my book?"

My last congregation I was a part of had a sermon series called 'Major profits from minor prophets' which was used as a bit of a filler between bigger series.

One of the great things about Moore College is the chapel services (which aren't actually in a chapel). So far most of our time has been taken by John Woodhouse working through 1 Timothy and Gibbo through 2 Corinthians (and at the rate he's going, I'm sure most people at college over the last 20 years have heard part of this series). The college tradition for chapel services is to have two Bible readings on top of the passage preached on. So far this year, the New Testament readings have been in Luke. Not being aware of the tradition to begin with, I kept waiting for a sermon on Luke. This made some of the sermon introductions a tad obscure, at least initially. It would be interesting to do a study to see what has been preached on in chapel services over the past. I wonder if there is a bias amongst faculty towards preaching epistles because of the denseness of theology contained within?

Man's best friend?

Part of what makes Adam unique is not that God breaths life into him, but that God speaks to him bringing him into relationship.

Consequently, I'm not sure what to think about people who talk to and about their animals as if they're part of the family.

Sniping on eBay

Dear Old People,

I appreciate your wisdom, and value your contribution to society. I recognise you as a beloved creation of God, of inherent worth and deserving of honour. Also, I value your efforts in attempting to keep up with technological advances by familiarising yourself with the internet and websites such as eBay. Thank you especially for learning to google a question you have before asking your children over the phone, who will simply google it themselves and then read whatever they find back over the line to you.

However, a small gripe if I may. When using eBay, why do you insist on constantly trying to outbid one another long before an auction has finished? I know, you want to see your name there as the higgest bidder, but chances are bidding will just continue to rise and rise long before the auction ends and you have unnecessarily raised the price. It feels good, doesn't it? To see your name there as highest bidder. To be asked if you'd like to raise your maximum bid, which of course you don't. I mean why would you? You're already winning. But oh, that's right, check back again that night and someone else has outbid you - so you might as well make sure you get back on top. And so it continues.

Please stop it.

This is how it's supposed to work. No one bids anything until at least 30 seconds to go. Then, you simply put in the highest amount you're willing to pay and everyone else does the same and voila - Robert's your mother's brother. If no one else is online, you get it for the cheapest price. Or if someone else is online and snipes you, you haven't gone over your maximum, and you haven't artificially raised the price with all of those pointless bids.


Thanks again,


Izaac.

Kitchen capers

The other morning I was making pancakes for the wife of my youth, and I decided to separate the egg into yolk and white. I was by myself and it wasn't necessary for the recipe, I just saw it on MasterChef and before I knew it my hands were tipping back and forth, rolling that egg around.

While I'm on food, recipes should not be allowed to have as part of their ingredients 'cooked (insert name of meat)', and then claim the recipe as a 'five minute recipe'. Honestly, who has cooked beef just lying around ready to go in their dinner?

Clarinet

My workload of late has meant my blogging mojo has temporarily (I hope) gone the way of my preaching mojo. And speaking of which, the displeasure of that sermon was recorded and is being critiqued this Thursday (*hangs head in shame).

However, with my blogging mojo lost, I've decided to just keep writing until it returns.

With the temptations of overworking myself at college, I decided at the start of the year that I needed a new hobby for when a break from study was required.

My first inkling was to sit down and play guitar or piano - two instruments I am relatively average at. For some reason on each instrument, I plateaued in my ability after about 3 years of sporadic practice. I needed a new challenge. For me, the choice was clear. I was going to learn the trumpet. Having always being a fan of ska music, I have long been a trumpet fan. I find myself often listening to music and imagining trumpet fills in the gaps between lyrics. To cut a long story short, good friend Matt from college studied at the Conservatorium of Music playing clarinet and convinced me with the offer of a free clarinet and free lessons, to teach me the clarinet. Oh well, the price was right, so close enough.

Ultimately my goal is to get to a level which I never attained in piano and guitar - the ability to play a decent solo. Especially some day in the future I would love to be able to play jazz (pronounced 'yazz') clarinet. While trumpet lends itself more to jazz, a clarinet is not out of place in a jazz band. I don't particularly love jazz, but I love the idea of great musicians playing relatively free and loose on the back of their talent. This reminds me of a classic Rich Hall line "Jazz is when you get a blues quartet and push them down a flight of stairs".

While all this thinking was going on, I came across an interesting theory from writer, Malcolm Gladwell. According to Gladwell, if you spend 10,000 hours honing your skills in any field, you will be world class. That is, everyone from Bill Gates to the Beatles spent on average of 3 hours a day for a decade honing their skills. Based on that definition, the only thing I'm on track to be world class at is Hebrew... and let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth.

Since I started off slowly a few months ago, I've been tracking my clarinet progress. There was a few weeks where I simply hit the wall, but since then I'm slowly getting up to about 20 minutes a day. It's a far cry from three hours, but it's what I have at the moment.

Here's my clarinet practice by the numbers;
77 days since I first tasted the reed
25 days I've actually played the clarinet
8.33 hours played in total or 500 minutes
20 minutes per practice, which works out to
6.5 minutes per day
9991.67 hours until I'm world class, or
599,500 minutes until I'm world class
277 years old, will be my age when I finally hit 10,000 hours at my current rate