"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?" - Al Boliska

For reasons I’ll explain in a minute I went searching this morning for an article I ran across several weeks ago. The problem: I can’t remember where I read it, if it was in print or online, or even what the title was. I only remember the general subject matter.
In the course of my internet search I stumbled across something called “Family Integrated Worship.” I’d never heard of it before but it seems to be a movement, albeit relatively small, that says biblical worship should involve the whole family. As in, there should be no nursery, no children’s church, no youth groups, and no age-defined Sunday School classes. All meetings of the church should involve all members of the family across all age spectrums.
And these people are on a crusade!
They maintain it is unbiblical to break up the family at church. Nowhere in the Bible does any worship take place which separates the family by age. So these churches always have all ages in all services. One pastor writes, “You might ask, ‘What do we do with babies?’ We have no problem with cooing children.” (I thought: I don’t either. It’s the screaming ones that disrupt everything.)
Anyway, these churches are very critical of congregations that segregate by age. Some of them go so far as to criticize parents who give their young children coloring pages or other activities to help them keep quiet during a sermon. They should be taught to sit still and listen to God’s Word. And if they can’t, “the rod should not be far from them.”
Whew!

This illustrates a general principle for interpreting the Bible. Because the Bible doesn’t say it can be done doesn’t mean the Bible forbids it. You can’t make what’s called an argument from silence.
Incidentally, this is the same logic which leads the Church of Christ to ban the use of instruments in their services. Nowhere in the NT are instruments mentioned, therefore they must not be used in worship.

OK, on from that interesting exercise to the drywall job for sanding and texturing. The amount of sanding necessary is inversely proportional to quality of the mudding. But it’s hard to tell about the quality of the mudding until it’s dry. In this case I was pleased to see I had to do very little sanding. I was only there about 45 minutes. They’ll do the priming and painting.

Chose the music for Sunday and worked on my sermon. Pergamum this week. Is it just me or does that sound like it should be a spice?

I could never be a zombie. I can’t see a thing without my glasses and I’ve been paying attention - zombies never wear glasses.

Pam made me a BIG bowl of tapioca pudding. Bad tapioca pudding is really bad but she makes it from scratch and it’s GOOD!
(I think she’s lobbying for something slim, sleek and athletic.)

Pathway Bible Church is a one-off, completely independent and unaffiliated. I am a member of the Grace Gospel Fellowship, a quasi-denomination with something like 125 churches around the country. Each church is independent and autonomous, but they cooperate together to provide a variety of church resources, run a mission and operate a college (my alma mater and the place I taught for 10 years). Prior to Pathway the churches I pastored were all members of that Fellowship.

Yesterday I got a questionnaire from the GGF sent to all the pastors in our group. A newly formed committee within the Fellowship seeks to increase diversity in GGF congregations. The form has about 24 questions that ask about the surrounding community, the pastoral staff and the congregation with regard to ethnic makeup.

Here’s the problem: the form uses the terms “racial” and “cultural” interchangeably. For example, regarding the pastor:
Do you have any close friends that (sic) are of another ethnicity?
Do you believer that the local church should be multicultural?
Are you actively pursuing being a multicultural church?

See what I mean? I don’t think those terms are interchangeable, and their differences are significant, especially as related to a local church. Here in the Phoenix area a large percentage of the population is of Hispanic origin (i.e., race). But many of them have been here for generations, have never been out of the U.S., speak only English and are in almost every sense indistinguishable from their white neighbor. A Black believer may have been raised in the burbs, grown up going to Applebee’s and feel most at home worshiping in what you and I think of as “normal” worship. Or, they may have grown up in the inner city, eating black eyed peas and worshiping with classic African American forms, including sermons that go until the preacher’s done. (Amen!)

Should we aim for racial diversity in our churches? Should we aim for cultural diversity?
See, I’m thinking there’s no such thing as genuine cultural diversity within a given church. To aim for that is to aim for homogeneity, some centrist form which is neither one nor another. And the real beauty of the Body of Christ shows up as we worship within the context of our very diverse cultures. Obviously, if that diversity includes ANY hint of superiority somebody’s in big trouble. But my very limited experiences with the African American church as it exists most commonly in the inner city convince me one of the worst things we could do would be anything that changes their forms.

I could go on, but you get my point. Race and culture are not the same thing. Racism is BAD, multiculturalism is GOOD. But true multiculturalism also requires separate and distinct. So a church could be multiracial and not multicultural. etc.
IMHO.