THANK YOU, ALL OF YOU, FOR ALL YOU DO!

Here at the end of the year, it’s only fitting
to say thank you to all the people who have made not
only the Holiday season special, but to those who have
blessed us all by their above and beyond service. At
the great risk of forgetting someone:

Thanks to everyone in worship and music ministry who
excelled in leading us in worship this season, and
especially to our Worship Director, Matt Cooper.

Thanks to the guys who just painted and fixed up Room
113, turning it into one of the best-looking rooms on
campus: Brad Goodrich, Alex Vago and Joseph Kwong.

Thanks to the those who lit the Advent candles this
month: the Sulistios, the Joshuas, the Gardners and to
the Debra Cuda and Joyce Callen.

Thanks to the Vision Task Force who worked hard this
year to steer us in a new and exciting direction:
Keith Allred, Don Buchanan, Robin Giammalva, Bob
Rardin, Janet Stephens, Errol Strickler and Deanne
Strickler.

Thanks to all our wonderful interpreters, laboring
week by week to make the worship services accessible
to people speaking Mandarin, Spanish and Indonesian:
Sofia Kwong, coordinator; Robin Chandra, John Cortez,
Katharin Kuhn, Victoria Fan, Lucina Felix, Philip Pan,
Gelia Ramali, and Lisette Rhine.

Thanks to our office and support staff: Kathy
Alexander, Betty Kelly, Gene Mills and Bob Marston.

Thanks to all the people who make dinner for our
mid-week children’s ministry. What a great
group!

Thanks for all those who work in our ESL (English as a
Second Language) ministry: Martha Beyer, Bob Boyd,
Celia Bushfield, Joyce Callen, Ralph Ramirez, and Jim
Weiss.

Thanks to all the people who help with audio-visual:
Ismael Felix, Justin Giammalva, Chuck Hysell, Bib
Johanessen, Than Tran and Terry Yocum.

Thanks to all our teachers: Sunday school, youth, VBS,
home Bible studies and so forth—to many to
mention!

Thanks to Joseph Kwong for wiring us for high-speed
Internet.

Thanks to Dave Lazzarini and Errol Strickler for
making numerous repairs around the facility and for
giving the restroom by Laura’s office a
“complete makeover.”

Thanks to Betty Marston for directing His Kidz.

Thanks to Howard Somer for the use of his theatrical
lights for special occasions and for all his hard
work.

Thanks to Janet Stephens for being to
“registrar” for several educational events
we held this year.

Thanks to Karin Wentzel, the lady who writes the
checks to pay the bills.

Thanks to Paul Parker who has done so many things
behind the scenes to improve our use of technology.

Thanks to all of our hard-working Diaconate members,
and to our Moderator, Alex Vago, who concludes his
term Dec. 31.

And thanks be the God, who gives all good things and
who will continue to guide and bless as we enter 2007
with faith, hope and love.

--Pastor Glenn

Re-Dating Christmas

Most people assume Jesus was born on Dec. 25. After all, that’s the date celebrated throughout the world as the day of His birth. A careful analysis of Scripture, however, clearly indicates that Dec. 25 is an unlikely date for Christ’s birth. Here are two primary reasons:

First, we know that shepherds were in the fields watching their flocks at night at the time of Jesus’ birth(Luke 2:7-8). However, shepherds did not remain in the fields of Judea at night during December due to lack of forage and the bad weather.

Similarly, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary says this passage argues “against the birth [of Christ] occurring on Dec. 25 since the weather would not have permitted” shepherds watching over their flocks in the fields at night.

Second, Jesus’ parents came to Bethlehem to register in a Roman census (Luke 2:1-4). The Romans would have known better than to have taken such a census in the dead of winter, when temperatures sometimes dropped below freezing and roads were in poor condition for traveling (due to rain).

So if Jesus Christ was not born on Dec. 25, does the Bible indicate when He was born? The biblical accounts point to the autumn of the year(in the northern hemisphere) as the most likely time of Jesus’ birth, based on details of the conception and birth of John the Baptist.

Since Elizabeth (John’s mother) was in her sixth month of pregnancy when Jesus was conceived (Luke 1:24-36), we can determine the approximate time of year Jesus was born if we know when John was born. John’s father, Zacharias, was a priest serving in the Jerusalem temple during the course of Abijah (Luke 1:5). There is an old tradition (I believe Jerome records this) that his service was in the early summer.

It was during this time of temple service that Zacharias learned that he and his wife, Elizabeth, would have a child (Luke 1:8-13). After he completed his service and traveled home, Elizabeth conceived (verses 23-24). Assuming John’s conception took place near the end of June, adding nine months brings us to the end of March as the most likely time for John’s birth. Adding another six months (the difference in ages between John and Jesus) brings us to the end of September as the likely time of Jesus’ birth.

Although it is difficult to determine the first time anyone celebrated Dec. 25 as Christmas, historians are in general agreement that it was sometime during the fourth century. This is an amazingly late date. Christmas was not observed in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, until about 300 years after Christ’s death. Its origins cannot be traced back to either the teachings or practices of the earliest Christians.

Further, we know that Herod died in what we would call February of 4 BC. Since his decree was against little boys age 2 and under, and that was based on information from the Magi, Jesus was most likely born in the fall of 6 BC.

Rehabilitating Herod

A group of revisionist historians have formed the King Herod Appreciation Society in efforts to revamp the king's reputation. They say he should not be judged too harshly and that his actions should be evaluated in the context of the brutality of the Roman Empire. Nice try, guys. The denial of the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem on the basis that Herod killed his own sons is as logical as saying that since Sadaam Hussein gassed Kurds, he couldn't have also killed Marsh Arabs at the end of the Gulf War. I guess next we'll see the Nero Admiration Guild.


Historians, Fans Defend the 'Real' King Herod
By Nicole Neroulias
Religion News Service


He ruled over the ancient Jews for 37 years, and when it comes to bad publicity, King Herod has reigned supreme ever since.

Annually vilified in Christmas pageants as the tyrant responsible for the slaughter of Bethlehem's baby boys and for chasing Mary, Joseph and Jesus into Egypt, Herod the Great should receive more balanced treatment, some historians and academics argue.

Like most biblical villains -- Judas, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, take your pick -- Herod has simply gotten a bad rap, some say.

For example, historians say Herod probably never ordered the Massacre of the Innocents that Christians commemorate in late December.

The account from the Gospel of Matthew may be derived from the execution of three of the king's own sons and the author's desire to convey that even as an infant, Jesus was an acknowledged threat to the establishment.

"Dramatically, it's a story with tremendous power, but there's a kind of irony that the one thing that most people know about Herod is probably wrong," said Peter Richardson, author of "Herod: King of the Jews, Friend of the Romans" and a professor at the University of Toronto.

Basing their views on recorded history and continuing archaeological discoveries, Richardson and other academic experts contend that Herod's brutality and heavy taxation should be taken in the context of the violent Roman Empire and his skills as a diplomat, master builder and enlightened economist.

Herod was born in 74 B.C. to an Arabian princess and a politically active father whose family had converted to Judaism. As a young man, Herod was appointed governor of Galilee. When his father was poisoned in 43 B.C., Herod had the murderer executed, launching a lifelong reputation as a ruler to be reckoned with.

The Roman Senate named Herod "King of the Jews" in 40 B.C., despite controversy at home over his religious lineage. But Herod always claimed to be an observant Jew, evidenced by the discovery of ritual baths in his palaces and records of a joke told by Emperor Caesar Augustus that he'd rather be one of Herod's swine -- safe from slaughter because the king kept kosher -- than one of his sons.

Convinced by their research, members of the Progressive Jewish Bet Tikvah Synagogue in England formed a King Herod Appreciation Society in 2001. Rigid concepts of Jewish identity were used to downplay Herod's accomplishments, they argue, which included rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple, building the largest harbor in the Roman world, alleviating a famine by lowering grain prices and supporting the cash-strapped Olympic Games.

"He was not just a paranoid tyrant, but an idealist and financial genius, way ahead of his time," said Anthony Kerstein, a co-founder of the group. "I believe if he would have been regarded as fully Jewish, his reign would have been regarded as a golden age."

Herod's commitment to Judaism and his positive relationship with Rome meant his subjects were allowed to worship freely. They were granted a rare exemption from the imperial requirements of offering incense to the emperor's statue, serving in the army and swearing oaths in court, Richardson said.

But plenty of historical material depicts Herod as a ruthless man as well as a visionary. Of his 10 wives, he had one executed for accused unfaithfulness; of at least 14 children, three were executed for allegedly conspiring against him. He imposed high taxes on his subjects, in part to finance his grandiose construction projects, and he employed secret police to report on their activities.

He acted brutally to put down dissent. In 4 B.C., Torah students smashed a golden eagle at the Temple -- probably placed for Roman visitors but viewed by opponents as idolatrous -- and he had them burned alive to set an example.

Even though scholars can't find any historical basis for the Bethlehem massacre, they concede it would not have been out of character, and say perhaps the village's tiny size would have kept the act undocumented in the scheme of larger crimes.

At the time of Jesus' birth, Herod would have been an old man in poor health, but in the new film "The Nativity Story," he is portrayed as a vibrant middle-aged ruler overseeing a construction project that had actually been completed decades earlier. Screenwriter Mike Rich explained that he had opted against complete historical accuracy in favor of showing "a composite of his reign." He added scenes showing the building site and Herod's participation in Temple rituals after his first draft to convey more of the character's complexity.

When Herod died of a long, debilitating illness between 4 and 1 B.C.the exact years of both Christ's birth and Herod's death are up for debate -- it seems few mourned him. His kingdom was divided among three of his sons, including Herod Antipas, who is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke's account of Jesus' trial.

Despite the notorious legacy, Herod the Great experts say his misdeeds are simply consistent with despotic behavior across the ages.

They point to England's King Henry VIII -- also fond of executing family members -- Joseph Stalin, and Third World dictators who use force to unite and modernize their countries.

"He wasn't necessarily a nice guy, but he actually did a pretty good job and he lived during a pretty tumultuous political period and both he and Judea survived," said Shaye J.D. Cohen, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.

"When you have powerful leaders that are in power for a long time, inevitably you're going to have pluses and minuses," he added. "Even Mussolini made the trains run on time."

Trans-Siberian Madness

My wife has her little obsessions. A trip to the music-sampling section of Borders earlier this month led to her seasonal musical obsession with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (an obsession shared by radio's Sean Hannity).

A man with obviously too much time on his hands in Ohio also loves TSO. See below:



For the full story on his outrageous (and very fun) display, see here.

Jack Bauer's Secret Identity

24th (Christmas parody of

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Christmas Eve Countdown

It's early Christmas morning as I write. Not a creature is strirring except for some silly blogger at the keyboard.

Yesterday was both a Sunday and a Christmas Eve. What was that like?

5:50 AM

Alarm goes off. I punch it once for 8 more minutes. Then shower and dress in the bathroom (to avoid waking my wife, Lynann).

6:30

Check email.

7:00

Breakfast. Cereal, no toast.

7:15

Wake up Lynann.

7:20

Out the door. I arrive at 7:25 (I'm blessed to live nearby). I park at Long Dragon Realty, with whom we have a parking arraingment. Ironically, I actually walk a few steps through the parking lot of the Nazarene church on the way to the Baptist Church. Well, we needed the parking more than they did, and we asked first.

First, I do the "wallk through" of my office. Hmm, no red light on my phone. No surprises this morning. Pick up the digital camera we use to take snaps of guests, the new member certificates and a letter I need to give to a member of the church.

Over to the sanctuary. Stash the camera, put the member certs in place. OK, screen is already down. Turn on the computer and the projector. Yoko Mizuno, our accompanist, is already practicing (she's sure intent--she doesn't even notice I'm here). A couple of updates on the Welcome to Worship PowerPoint we have running when people come in. Later, our worship Director, Matt Cooper will bring up the song program.

OK, things here are fine.

7:45

Out in the courtyard I have a brief chat with Pastor Sam. A couple of details (he's doing annoucements) and some shooting the breeze. Somehow we get on to the difference between Menorahs and Hannahkiahs.

7:50

Some people are already in the Pacesetter class, so I go and visit for a while. A member tells how a grandchild in New York is getting better medical treatment, an answer to prayer. Mostly chitchat and hugs and "Merry Christmas."

8:00

A teacher comes with his wife and sister-in-law. They're celebrating an unlikely joy: the sister-in-law came off probation that week. Jail was the best thing that ever happened to her faith.

His classroom had been painted the day before, and looks great. (It had been the ugliest room on campus.)

8:15

I visit around to other classes. I also stop by the gym where Rock Mountain Baptist Church (Mandarin-speaking) is setting up. I chat with Pastor Calvin Hsu for a few minutes about the service tonight.

8:30

A few minutes of prayer.

8:45

Back in the courtyard. The California chill is coming off. The high on Christmas Eve will be 75F. (Last year is was a bizarre 90F on Christmas Eve). I drop off the letter I mentioned earlier.

8:55

I run into the lady I'm baptizing today. She clutches her bag of items to use for the baptism. Today she is actually finishing her membership class.

9:00

She's the only one in the class, and we don't have much to finish. We meet in my office and finish with what I jokingly call "the grand tour" of the campus. She'd never been in the gym and was amazed at how large it is. We finish in the hall behind the santuary and I show her where we'll be for baptisms.

9:45

I check in with Matt. Everything's OK. Ismael sets me with with my wireless mike and tests me on my miniscule knowledge of Spanish, which is part of his Sunday routine. We do sound checks. I realize we need another mike for the communion table. (The new Indonesian family is doing the last advent candle.) Ish takes care of it.

10:00

A few classes are getting out. I visit with some people in the courtyard, and then head to the men's changing room to get ready for baptisms. I don't like wearing those baptismal waders, so I change into a swimsuit and over that the big black baptismal robe.

10:15

Pastor Angela and I meet with those being baptized. She has four kids and youth, I have the one adult. And Pastor Calvin has one adult being baptized.

10:30

We're all in place. Sam does announcements. I baptize my lady, a woman who had done everything spiritually: from Mormon to Jehovah's Witnesses to New Age and now, she's found her rest in Jesus.

Dash to the changing room, back into the suit. Out in time for the Sulistios doing the "Peace Candle." Singing, prayer, choir, preach. "What Time is Christmas?" is my topic. The offering, more singing, receive new members. We end with everyone, a packed house, standing as we sing "The Hallelujah Chorus."

11:45

I help Brendan put some things in place for tonight. We wheel over the cart with the candles.

12:10

Go home. I change, veg out for a while watching the Patriots take down the Jags in Jacksonville. Lynann and my son dash out to get Chinese food and a crown roast (for tomorrow) from Von's.

1:00

Lunch.

2:00

Nap. Don't nap too well. Excited about tonight. And then a "pastor call" ends the nap.

3:00

Check email. Yes, again.

4:00

Back at the church. The Christmas eve service is at 5:30. We hit a few "tecno-burps" in preparation, but get it resolved. Lotsa of unfamiliar faces.

5:40

After the brass and piano trio finishes, we're off. A song partly in Spanish: "Que Nino este es?" Traditional Christmas eve fair, but "O Holy Night" in Mandarin (Rock Mountain Choir) and a Kachin Christmas song (complete with cymbal and dance!) (We are also home of the Kachin Baptist Church, a Burmese ethnic group.)

My message: "The Purpose of Christmas." Jesus cames to erase misconceptions about God, to show the love of God and to enable us to have a relationship with God. Our choir sings a real show stopper: "Joy, Joy" and Matt has a great solo in it. Silent Night and candles held high. Merry Christmas!

7:15

Home to pick up ham and scalloped potatoes. Oh, and a plate of cookies. Take off the jacket and tie, put on a sweater. Over to my son's girlfiend's house for a Christmas eve dinner. We bow out a little before 9. Lynann sees that both her husband and daughter seem beat.

9:15

We all open one present. Lynann wants to watch "Scrooge" (the 1951 version with Alistair Sim, the best). We have it on DVD, but by 10:15, I'm out before the Ghost of Christmas past can ever show up.



Merry Christmas to all.

Zuzu's Petals

At 66, 'Zuzu' Thinks Life Is Wonderful

By MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press Writer


AP Photo/DAVID DUPREY


At 66, 'Zuzu' Thinks Life Is Wonderful

'Zuzu' Visits Town That Inspired Bedford Falls



SENECA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) -- Zuzu has a cold again. She sniffles and sucks on a cold pill as she signs autographs for fans lined up to the door in a coffee shop.

Karolyn Grimes jokes that she left her coat open, like her character Zuzu Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." A more likely culprit is the holiday crunch of appearances by the former child actress - from a Victorian festival in Puyallup, Wash., to the Colorado Country Christmas Show and now to Seneca Falls, which claims to be the inspiration for director Frank Capra's mythical Bedford Falls.

Around Christmas, this Finger Lakes village is gussied up like the snowy movie town with white lights and wreaths strung across the main street. And the 66-year-old Grimes has come for a weekend celebration.

Everyone who saw the movie remembers Zuzu. She gets to say, "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings." And the petals from Zuzu's rose - stuffed into a pants pocket by Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey as he comforts his sickly daughter - become a symbol of life.

Grimes laughs about the petals getting more screentime than she did. But she has parlayed her six minutes in the beloved 1946 film into a late-life career. After enduring heartaches that make George Bailey's troubles look small, she has become a feel-good ambassador for the film and one of its last living links.

"I'm that little girl and I stand for something those people love," she says. "... For some reason or other, that little girl embodies the image, or maybe the power to make them happy."

People tell her as much all afternoon at the Zuzu Cafe, where she sits with a Sharpie at a table laid out with "It's a Wonderful Life" stuff: DVDs, ceramic ornaments, memory books, her own "Zuzu Bailey's It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook" and scattered rose petals.

"Do you know what a thrill this is? "

"This is my favorite movie!"

"Thank you for giving us so much joy!"

For each person, Grimes neatly signs her name with "Zuzu" in quotes and a little doodle of a bell. She usually adds a message like, "Enjoy life, it's wonderful."

Grimes lives near Seattle, but retains a Midwestern cheeriness. She holds her smile for hours and laughs as she pops up for snapshots. She has a gold "Z" pinned to her blue velveteen jacket.

She lost her nest egg in the 2001 economic downturn and relies on these appearances. As she signs, her husband sits beside her and asks, "Cash or credit card?" It's a job, but she clearly loves being Zuzu. After signing autographs all afternoon, she bumps into a fan at a diner who talks on her cell phone to her father.

Grimes happily accepts the phone.

"Do you know who you're talking to?" she says to woman's father. "You're talking to Zuzu!"

Grimes had already worked with Bing Crosby and Fred MacMurray when she appeared in "It's a Wonderful Life." She grew up in Hollywood and was nudged into the business by her mother. Capra picked her to play Zuzu.

Grimes retains kid-centric memories of the movie: Capra kindly squatted to give her directions. "Mr. Stewart" held her in his arms, take after take, for the end scene and always put her down gently. She loved the Baileys' big Christmas tree.

At the time though, even to a 5-year-old, "it was just another job."

Grimes' movie career waned as her mother became ill. She lost her at age 14. Her father died in a car accident a year later. A court shipped the teenage orphan to Osceola, Mo., to live in a "bad home" with an aunt and uncle.

She liked meeting people outside hyper-competitive Hollywood. She went to college, married, raised kids, became a medical technologist. Zuzu was the past. Her box of clips and pics stayed in the basement until 1980, when a reporter came to her door in Stilwell, Kan., and asked her a question:

"Did you play that little girl in the movie, 'It's a Wonderful Life?'"

Now Grimes stands watching herself on a big-screen TV as a curly-haired pixie from 60 years ago. The little girl asks her dad to fix her flower, and he sneaks the wilted petals into his pocket.

"What do you think? Did I see it?" she asks the audience. Grimes is giving a crowd at the community center a tour of the movie with bits of trivia.

Zuzu's name was inspired by an old brand of ginger snaps, she says. The snow coating Bedford Falls was made of soap flakes and chemicals; that's why it looks sudsy sometimes. Reviewing the flower scene, she suggests Zuzu saw through her father's heartfelt ruse and loves him all the more for it.

"I think what Frank Capra is trying to say is she knows her father isn't perfect," she said.

The film about a suicidal, small-town money lender was a bit of a dud after its December 1946 release. "Wonderful Life" got a second life in the mid-'70s when a lapsed copyright allowed television stations to show the movie for free. The movie gathered iconic status through constant showings.

After the reporter's story, Grimes did local Zuzu events in the '80s and branched out by the '90s.

This was a difficult stretch personally; she knows angels don't always save people. Her 18-year-old son killed himself in 1989 and her second husband died of cancer in 1994 (her first husband was killed in a hunting accident). She kept on.

"You have a choice," she says. "You can drown in your sorrows, be the grumpy old Mr. Potter and be hurt and be in pain ... but I think you need to put that behind you because, my gosh, life is a wonderful gift."

Grimes, one of about seven surviving actors from the movie, says she's had troubled souls approach her sobbing at her appearances. She inspires smiles when she passes out a rose petal.

"I really feel like Zuzu is kind of a mission maybe, I don't know," Grimes says. "I think that there is a higher power at work and that I had to go through a lot of adverse situations in my life to understand other people's pain."

If it sounds like a corny sentiment out of a Capra movie, consider that after a day of "It's a Wonderful Life" autographs and interviews she becomes excited by a small cutout of a bell stuck to a linoleum floor by her chair.

It has meaning, she explains as she walks out to the snowy sidewalks of Seneca Falls, past the decorated windows, the old-fashioned street lights and the wreaths hanging overhead.

"I really feel at home here," she says.

People here argue about the Bedford Falls connection, though it's a circumstantial case. Both places have a "Falls" suffix, and characters in the film mention nearby cities like Rochester and Elmira. Both places have classic American main streets, and the bridge here resembles the one where George Bailey pondered his mortality.

Capra, whose movie village was a set built near Los Angeles, left no evidence to rule out other candidates, like Bedford, N.Y.

And yet the director could have passed through Seneca Falls while visiting an aunt in nearby Auburn. Retired local barber Tommy Bellissima even claims he cut Capra's hair before the movie came out. Bellissima recalls a friendly guy whose name stuck in his head: capra means goat in Italian.

"Sometimes Christmas is what you believe," says county tourism director Maureen Koch at the Zuzu Cafe, "and don't make me prove it."

---

On the Net:

http://www.zuzu.net/

http://www.therealbedfordfalls.com/

Rudloph Meets the ACLU

Rudolph, the pigmentally nose-challenged reindeer
had a very shiny facial appendage.
And if you ever saw him,
you would even say that is is part of his unique and special attributes.

All of the other reindeer
used to laugh and ccommit verbal hate crimes against him.
They never let poor Rudolph
join in any reindeer games, leaving him with self-esteem issues.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
"Rudolph, under court order to redress your greivances
And bearing in mind your special attributes,
won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

Then all the reindeer loved him (it was part of the settlement)
as they shouted out with glee,
Rudolph the nose-challenged reindeer,
you'll go down in revisionist history!

A Christmas Note from C.S. Lewis

CS Lewis on "Xmas and Christmas"

Some Lessons from the Barbarian Mists of Niatirb

More than fifty years ago C.S. Lewis published a little essay called, "Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." In it, he reverses the letters of his home country, “Britain.” One mark of Lewis the sense that he wrote what you read just yesterday, even here in Acirema!

Lewis writes about the strange winter customs of a barbarian nation called Niatirb:

"In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound, (the Niatirbians) have a great festival called Exmas, and for 50 days they prepare for it (in the manner which is called,) in their barbarian speech, the Exmas Rush.

"When the day of the festival comes, most of the citizens, being exhausted from the (frenzies of the) Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much as on other days, and crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated. And on the day after Exmas, they are very grave, being internally disordered by the supper and the drinking and the reckoning of how much they have spent on gifts and on the wine.

"(Now a) few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas, which is on the same day as Exmas. And those who keep Crissmas, doing the opposite to the majority of Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast.

"But (as for) what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, (this) is not credible. It is not likely that men, even being barbarians, should suffer so many and so great things (as those involved in the Exmas Rush), in honor of a god they do not believe in."

What Lewis wrote about in Britain half a century ago is increasingly true about our own country today. The world has an ingenious ability to attach itself to what Christians believe; tame it, subvert it, and then turn it against the very people who continue to believe. Too many Americans don’t really celebrate Christmas. They may think they do, but they don’t. They celebrate Exmas. The world—left to its own devices — has no room and no use for the birth of Jesus Christ. It has contempt for Christians who seriously strive to be His disciples. So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being the Jesus-followers God intended us to be. We can at least seek to be holy by tithing our time to sit quietly with God; by allowing Him to fill our actions and our choices with His Son; and by letting Him shape us into the men and women He needs. We can get up and experience the Christmas dawn in silence as a reminder of what Christmas means. We can prepare ourselves to be alert for the voice of God and to receive God’s word afresh and proclaim it anew.

We need to understand that in many ways America is no longer a Christian culture. But if people really understood and acted on the meaning of Christmas, the world would be a different place.

Advent means “coming.” What’s coming in the reality of Christmas is as an invasion. The world needs the invasion but doesn’t want it. It’s an invasion of human flesh and all creation by the Son of God; by the holiness of the Creator Himself.

All of us in the Church were enlisted to be part of that invasion as well. The doubts, the failures, the mistakes of the past don’t matter. Only our choices now matter. How will we live our Christian faith from this day forward? How will we make our witness an expression of Christ’s coming? For our own sake, and the sake of the people we love, we need to pray that our yearning for God will truly reflect God’s yearning for us. And when it does, then the world will be a different place.

Temple Mount Ramp in Danger of Collaspe

Jerusalem Engineer: Temple Mount Ramp May Collapse 13:30 Dec 15, '06 / 24 Kislev 5767

(IsraelNN.com)

A Jerusalem city engineer warned this week that the ramp leading to the main tourist entrance of the Temple Mount is in danger of total collapse.Part of the ramp, which leads to the Mograbi Gate, collapsed in the winter of 2004. A wooden bridge which was built over the ramp after the mishap is now also in danger of falling apart.Within a few months, said engineers from the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the bridge will become totally unsafe.Plans for a permanent bridge have been stuck in endless red tape for more than two years.

The Crypto-Jews of New Mexico

You can often find the most fascinating stories at www.ynetnews.com, based in Israel. Such as this unexpected discovery...

'Crypto-Jews' call New Mexico home
They observe Shabbat, defined as Jews, but are they really? Journey into modern research on New Mexico's Crypto-Jews

Associated Press
Published:
12.13.06

Stanley Hordes had only assumed the job of New Mexico state historian for a few weeks when he started receiving some odd visitors. They would enter his Santa Fe office, close the door - and gossip about their neighbors.

"So-and-so lights candles on Friday nights," they would whisper. "So-and-so doesn't eat pork," they would say.

Hordes wasn't the first scholar who had ever heard such things. But as a curious new arrival from Louisiana, the young historian was intrigued. So he began visiting rural villages to interview the "viejitos," Hispanic old-timers whose families had lived in the state for generations, sometimes since the original Spanish settlers came up from Mexico.

He was astounded by what they told him. Though the people Hordes spoke with were clearly Catholic, they reported following an array of Jewish customs. They talked about leaving pebbles on cemetery headstones, lighting candles on Friday nights, abstaining from pork and circumcising male infants.

When Hordes asked why they did such things, some said they were simply following family tradition. Others gave a more straightforward explanation. "Somos judios," they said. "We are Jews."

What was that supposed to mean? Their villages were built around old Catholic mission chapels, not synagogues. The Hebrew scrolls of the Torah were Greek to them. They didn't really know anything about the Jewish faith - and yet, they called themselves Jews.

A quarter-century later, Mr. Hordes has a stirring explanation of how Judaism got to New Mexico.

In the spring of 1492, Jews in Spain were given two choices: Convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Many left, scattering as far afield as Istanbul, London and Cairo. Many others simply abandoned their religion for Catholicism.

But a few of those who converted did so only publicly, continuing to practice Judaism in secret. The Spanish Inquisition sought to identify and punish such false converts.

Modern scholars have found a few communities of so-called "crypto-Jews" that survived in both Iberia and the New World for centuries, hiding their true religious identity from their neighbors and the Catholic Church.

In his 2005 book "To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico," Hordes suggests that many crypto-Jews found their way to the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial empire, where evading the authority of both church and state was an easier proposition.
There, they continued to observe their religion behind locked doors, blending publicly into the monolithic Catholic culture and teaching their children that revealing their true identities could mean death by the Inquisition. "They were invisible," Hordes said.

But the very same secrecy that protected Judaism in the Spanish Southwest eventually doomed it. The people had no synagogue, no Torah, no connection to global Jewish culture. They were immersed in a Catholic culture with its own rich traditions. By the 20th century, Hordes concludes, all that was left were a few suggestive customs and a vague sense among a few viejitos that somehow, they were Jewish.

For Sonya Loya, there's nothing vague about it. She has always felt Jewish. Growing up Catholic in Ruidoso, N.M., Loya was intensely spiritual. But she never identified with Jesus or Christianity. "I never felt whatever I was supposed to feel when I was Catholic," Loya said.

Loya began observing the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat, six years ago, about the same time that she learned about the secret Jewish past that was being uncovered by Hordes and other scholars. She was thrilled at the possibility that she might actually have Jewish heritage.

"I believe that what drew me back home to who I am is my Jewish soul," Miss Loya said.

In 2004, she went to her parents, asking them to bless her conversion to Judaism, but expecting the worst. Perplexed by their daughter's rejection of Catholicism, they had often reacted badly to such pronouncements.

But this time, it was her turn to be perplexed. Not only did her father give his blessing, Loya said, but he revealed that he had known since childhood that he had Jewish ancestry.

The Rev. Bill Sanchez always felt Jewish, too. But not that Jewish; he's a Catholic priest.

Father Sanchez discovered his own Jewish roots after watching a television documentary on genetics. The show inspired him to have his own genes tested by a Houston-based company called Family Tree DNA. The company determined that he has a set of genetic markers on his Y-chromosome that is also found in about 30 percent of Jewish men.

Since then Father Sanchez has embraced his Jewish heritage. He wears a Star of David around his neck on the same chain that holds his crucifix, and keeps a menorah in his office at St. Edwin Parish in Albuquerque, N.M.

Like Hordes, folklorist Judith Neulander was fascinated by the story of the Southwestern crypto-Jews when she first encountered it as a graduate student in the early 1990s. An American Jew who grew up in Mexico City, she felt like she was the perfect person to write the definitive book on the subject.

"I really in my heart wanted to curate the crypto-Judaic exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York," said Neulander, who is now co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Neulander went to New Mexico in the summer of 1992 and began doing interviews. At first, she talked with people who were referred to her by Hordes or other researchers, and then with people she identified herself.

"All of it just doesn't really hold up when you examine it carefully," Neulander said. Aside from the cultural evidence, all Hordes had was a handful of prosecutions against suspected Jews in the records of the Mexican Inquisition and genealogical arguments linking individual New Mexicans back generations to pre-expulsion Spanish Jews.

Neulander wasn't buying it. But if they weren't Jewish, she still had to explain why so many people in the Southwest thought they were.

In 1994, Neulander wrote a paper in the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review that offered an explanation. During the 1940s an anthropologist named Raphael Patai had discovered a church outside Mexico City whose members considered themselves Jewish, even though they believed in Jesus and knew very little about Judaism.

He concluded that the church must have been founded by evangelical Protestant missionaries from one of several small sects who considered themselves descendants of a lost tribe of Israel.
Though rare today, such Christian groups follow many Jewish traditions while believing in Jesus, and consider themselves the world's only truly chosen people. "There were probably many more sects like this in the early part of the 20th century," Neulander said.

She can't prove it. But Neulander believes Protestant evangelicals, possibly from a group that splintered off the Seventh-day Adventist church, inspired the belief in a Southwestern Jewish past less than a century ago.

Hordes dismisses her theory as outrageous. "Do you think they would have forgotten that they were Seventh-day Adventists?" he asked.

The only serious genetic study that has attempted to find Jewish ancestry among Hispanics in the Southwest reached a different conclusion.

"We just couldn't wait to find all these Jews," said Alec Knight, who was working in an anthropological genetics lab at Stanford University when he saw the crypto-Jew story in an in-flight magazine.

Knight recruited a handful of colleagues for a simple study. They took DNA samples from 139 men in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, most of whom could trace their family trees in the region back to the 17th century.

The results? To use a Yiddish expression, bubkes - almost nothing.

As the 139 DNA profiles came back, it became clear to Knight that the population he had sampled was genetically indistinguishable from the modern population of Spain. There were a few individuals who did have typically "Jewish" profiles, but no more than you would find in Spain, owing to the presence of Jews there before 1492.

Who is that White-Bearded Man?

Let your imagination roam...but that's me with. C.S., not S.C. That's Chuck Souder, the local Santa and part-time politician.

Merry Christmas.

The Gospel at the Mall

The Real Talent

Matt Cooper

Yours Truly, Mouth Open as Usual

A special thank you to all our singers and musicians who participated in the presentation "Christmas 2006" both at the 10:30 AM worship and at the Westfield Santa Anita Mall this last Sunday. It was an amazing experience to go to the town square of 21st century America and present the gospel in this form. All I had to do was talk (narration that border on preaching), so all the credit goes to the singers and our wonderful worship director, Matt Cooper.

How the Spirit of God Changes a Person

Well, it's not very "Christmas-y" but here's my column for Temple City Life for January. More "Christmas-y" things will be posted over the next few days.

How the Spirit Changes People

By nature, I am not a gentle man.

Note that I didn’t day “gentleman.” When it comes to manners and so on, yes, I know how to be a gentleman. But that’s not the same thing as being a gentle man.

Not mean so much as not gentle. Opinionated. Focused. Goal-oriented. Type A personality. Not a gentle man. I admit it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about gentleness of late. Paul declared the gentleness is part of the fruit (the natural outgrowth) of the Spirit of God. Galatians 5:22-23 says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

I was thinking deeply about this passage the other day as I was walking out the door of my home. By the door, kind of like a mezuzah, we have a little stone placard with the Ten Commandments. I paused for a moment and asked myself, “Under which of the Ten Commandments does the call for gentleness fall?” My eyes lit upon the Sixth Commandment: “You shall not kill.”

Harshness, the opposite of gentleness, kills. On rare occasion, it kills outright, but most harshness kills the joy, openness, and optimism of others. It kills the spirit. Against such things, God’s law stands.

Gentleness gives life. It creates space for others. It provides room for the other person to heal and grow. Gentleness withdraws from providing an opinion for everything. It listens. It stirs up joy in others. Against such things there is no law.

Real gentleness cannot be ginned up, like taking up golf or getting good at Suduko. While some are naturally gentler than others, the kind of gentleness Paul refers to has nothing to do with nature. It has to do with the Spirit of God.

Actually, much of that section of Galatians has to do with that very thing: what it means to live a Spirit-guided, inspired life. They key verse may well be Galatians 5:25: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.”

How does “keeping in step with the Spirit” operate in real life? Let me try to explain in a few sentences.

When a person becomes part of the family of God, the Spirit of God takes up residence within him. The Spirit uses external tools such as reading the Word of God, worship, prayer and fellowship to place the “raw materials” of the Spirit-filled life in our grasp. Then He prompts us in and through and beyond those tools. Yes, He prompts us to do certain things and not to do certain other things. We are called to “keep in step” with His constant promptings. And insofar as we listen to and obey His promptings, we are in step with the Spirit—we are filled with the Spirit.

This is how all spiritual growth occurs: as we respond to the promptings of the Spirit. Real spirituality cannot be achieved by external effort. As a matter of fact, that can be toxic. Richard Dunagin tells this story:

At their school carnival, our kids won four free goldfish (lucky us!), so out I went Saturday morning to find an aquarium. The first few I priced ranged from $40 to $70. Then I spotted it—right in the aisle: a discarded 10-gallon display tank, complete with gravel and filter—for a mere five bucks. Sold! Of course, it was nasty dirty, but the savings made the two hours of clean-up a breeze. Those four new fish looked great in their new home, at least for the first day. But by Sunday one had died. Too bad, but three remained. Monday morning revealed a second casualty, and by Monday night a third goldfish had gone belly up. We called in an expert, a member of our church who has a 30-gallon tank. It didn’t take him long to discover the problem: I had washed the tank with soap, an absolute no-no. My uninformed efforts had destroyed the very lives I was trying to protect.

Sometimes in our zeal to clean up our own lives or the lives of others, we unfortunately use “killer soaps”—condemnation, criticism, nagging, fits of temper. We think we’re doing right, but our harsh, self-righteous treatment is more than they can bear.

The Spirit does not use “soap” on us. He uses the wind of His promptings. You can’t beat gentleness into someone anymore than you can stuff people with love or joy or peace. So the Spirit does something entirely different: He blows upon us. And we merely raise the sails, and go where He wills. Yes, God is good.

How the Theological Grinches Stole Christmas

Before someone emails me to tell me, yes I know that J. Grant Swank is something of a crank. But this is on target. What a fascinting cast of characters at Harvard. Sometime I'll write of my brief brushes with Hawvad. (Yes, that's how they say it there.)

Harvard Divinity School Stole My Christmas. But It Didn't Work.

By J. Grant Swank Jr. (12/14/06)

Professor Krister Stendahl, New Testament, taught us in our first class that fall that the virgin birth was a myth; therefore, there was no need studying it seriously. Stendahl, ordained Lutheran pastor, eventually became Dean of HDS. He is still alive, living in Cambridge with his wife, I believe. The two became quite famous among theological liberals, he for his religious writing and speaking and she for her outstanding drama work. That was my introduction to earning a Masters of Divinity Degree from HDS.

We were in the midst of demythologizing the Bible, the latter made popular by Rudolf Bultmann. The craze was to find that mentioned in the Bible to be but legendary, that is, manufactured rather than historically accurate. Therefore, one could start with the virgin birth, obviously, since that was indeed at the New Testament start.

I learned early on at HDS to keep my mouth shut. I was, after all, a theological conservative having been reared in a conservative Christian home and attended a conservative congregation. Conservatism at HDS was and still is regarded as backwater provincialism. Therefore, those of us like myself at HDS learned how to be savvy, which was in short to be quiet most of the time.

I remember attending a seminar series in HDS chapel. The theme was the resurrection. I was anticipating learning more about the Christian hope — the detail provided by seasoned theologian speakers. However, the upshot of the seminar was that nothing was certain, mainly what there was after the last breath.

One day I walked into my Greek professor’s office. I asked: "What is your idea of God?" He answered: "She’s green." And he meant it. So that was that.

I listened to Paul Tillich for wherever he spoke the lecture halls were overflowing — actually. When it was a pleasant temperature day where Tillich spoke, the students crammed every space, including the windowsills. He was a little fellow who walked meekly about campus with his French beret tilted atop his knowledgeable head. His German accent made him a two-legged charm.

Tillich was one of the most honored gurus. When I saw his picture on the front cover of TIME I felt inwardly quite proud of myself. After all, I was going to the same seminary where Tillich held forth, where I could make an appointment to speak with him in his office.

It was not until Ticllich died that his widow, Hannah, wrote her book, "From Time to Time." It told about her husband — the facts. He enjoyed, for instance, going to Manhattan to strip clubs, particularly taking in the black strippers. He had women walk into his own Cambridge living room, then up the stairs into his bedroom — all the while his wife was seated in the chair in their living room.

Tillich defined God as "the Ground of Being." For that phrase he became quite famous. I enjoyed reading his theology books, having kept them still on my study shelves. But every time I look at them, I am reminded of his devilish hypocrisy. However, in speaking with other seminary students, I was told that there were numerous famous theology instructors who lived double lives.

Then it was that in the late 1990s I read that the then Dean of HDS, Ronald F. Thiemann, was caught with pornography all over his home computer. Actually, it was located in his lavish home across from HDS campus, but it was a computer belonging to Harvard. Therefore, when computer technicians were called in to fix the computer, they came upon the computer history — pornography to the gills. They felt obligated to report that to Harvard officials because it was a computer not owned by the Dean but owned by the college.

That resulted in the Dean being expunged from HDS. However, in the last Harvard Divinity Bulletin — the HDS posh publication — there was the former Dean’s name alongside a very extensive article about Islam. So he made his way back on HDS faculty staff as Bussey Professor of Theology.

With Stendahl wiping out the virgin birth and my Greek professor believing that deity is feminine green, I went to the then Dean — Dr. Samuel Miller. He was a most sedate American Baptist fellow who spoke all over the world as well as held forth with grandeur at Harvard Yard.

As I walked into his office on a Tuesday morning at 9 o’clock, I asked him point blank what it was that I was to believe upon graduation from HDS. His answer was especially simple, that is, for a man of eloquent verbiage. He said: "Well, Grant, you’ve got to plunk yourself down somewhere."

That was it."Somewhere" then could be atheism or agnosticism. If that were indeed the case, then I envisioned myself being a life-long clergyman for the purpose of overseeing the grandest church day care center in America. There obviously was not much to preach on Sundays, given that HDS had robbed me of my Christian faith, so I may as well plan on the best-run church day care center.

There was one professor on staff who actually was a Christian. He taught Old Testament. His name was G. Earnest Wright, now deceased, as are the Greek professor and Dr. Miller. Wright was an ambitious believer who was not afraid to speak his biblical convictions. He stood out, obviously, for he actually believed in the Bible as divine revelation.

I am forever grateful to Dr. Wright for his witness to the biblical record.During my first year at HDS my faith was gradually eroded. It had to be. Biblical faith was practically non-existent. Friends ask me what it is like there now. I can only speak from the HDS mailings I get. They speak of feminism and goddess worship having prime place at HDS. From that I can extrapolate everything liberal maximum. In other words, it must be far worse now from a biblical authority point of view.

However, during that time at HDS there was one fellow who kept my Christmas for me. His name was C. S. Lewis, Irish author and scholar. His "Mere Christianity" and the "Abolition of Man" glued my biblical faith back together, no matter what the unbelieving seminary staff was doing in the classroom.

My wife also rebutted every liberal conclusion I presented at the supper table after classes. With her faith intact and Lewis preaching to me from his extremely popular writings, my Christmas returned. And with that, it has never left me.

I prize that time at HDS as being some of the most valuable days in my life. After all, who can say they’ve lived, talked with, been tested by, and ate lunch with the enemy — every weekday? I did. In coming to live with my theological enemy, I came to know more accurately my biblical compatriots in the faith — as well as how to spar with the enemy quite ably.

Merry Sukkoth?

It is widely agreed that Dec. 25 as Jesus' date of birth is somewhat arbitrary. Here's an interesting speculation. I would point out that the date of 1 BC can't be right: Herod the Great died in Feb. of 4 BC. I suggest 6 BC as the most likely year of Jesus' birth.

Is Dec. 25 really Jesus' birthday?
By Craig Harris HERALD-PRESS (PALESTINE, Texas)

We celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25 each year, but is that really Jesus’ birthday?

Probably not. We celebrate Christmas on that day because Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, declared it in the year A.D. 320. Scholars believe he did this because Christians were already celebrating Christ’s birthday on that date, the Roman holiday Saturnalia, to avoid persecution.

In fact, the Bible may teach that Jesus was born on the first day of the Jewish festival called The Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths). John 1:14 says Jesus came and “tabernacled” with us – literally “pitched his tent with us”. The Feast of Tabernacles was a Jewish holiday that celebrated “God coming and dwelling with us”. It begins on the Jewish date Tishri 15. It celebrates Moses’ building God a tent in the desert.

During this joyous, seven-day celebration, the Jews go outside and live in tents (booths) to remind them that God is with us and that this earth is not our true home.

The Feast of Tabernacles holiday is called the “Season of our Joy” and the Angel told the shepherds, “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy that will be to all people.” The holiday is also called “The Feast of Nations”, because it was to be celebrated by all peoples after the Messiah came.

In his book, The Birth of Yeshua During Sukkot, writer Eddie Chumney says the swaddling cloths that Mary wrapped Jesus in even give a clue. During the Feast of Tabernacles, strips of cloths were used to light the 16 vats of oil in the court of women. Even the word “manger” is the same word used for “booth” in the Old Testament. (Genesis 33:17)

The Bible says Jesus was circumcised on the “eighth day”. This was Jesus’ eighth day, yes, but it is also the name of a day on the calendar, called Shemini Atzeret, which is the day after the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles. That’s why Chumney believes Jesus was born on the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles.

But that’s not all. The Magi were probably Jews from Babylon who had remained there since Nebuchadnezzar captured them. They continued the Jewish traditions and during the Feast of Tabernacles would have stayed out in tents. The tents had a hole in the ceiling so you could see the star of the Messiah!

There’s even more evidence. The Bible says John the Baptist was six months older than Jesus. Zecheriah, John the Baptist’s father, was in the division of Abijah. Chumney says they were in the temple in the 10th week of each Jewish year. You can add nine months from then and see that John the Baptist was born in the spring – during Passover. To this day, the Jews put a plate out for Elijah during their Passover dinner because he is prophesied to return before the Messiah. Jesus said John was the return of Elijah and fulfilled that prophecy when he was born.
Also, shepherds slept out with their sheep during lambing season – spring and fall, not winter.
If all of this is true, Jesus was born on Tishri 15, 1 B.C. Why the year 1 B.C.? Because Luke says Jesus turned 30 15 years after the Coronation of Tiberius Caesar which was on August 19, of A.D. 14 (Luke 3:1). Further, new evidence has proven that Quirinus was governor in Syria until 1 B.C. When Ukranian Monk Dionysius Exignus set the calendar we still use, he used the January after Jesus’ birth as 1 A.D. (There is no year zero.)

Scholars have long stated that Jesus must have been born between 6 and 4 B.C. because of writings from Jewish historian Josephus stating that an eclipse occurred shortly before the death of Herod the Great. Now we know that another eclipse occurred on Dec. 29 of 1 B.C. Many scholars now believe Herod died sometime in 1 or 2 A.D.

When, then, is Jesus’ real birthday? According to a Jewish calendar conversion program, he was born on Saturday, Sept. 30, 1 B.C.

Craig Harris writes a weekly column for the Palestine (Texas) Herald Press. Contact him at www.apparentlyso.net.

Have The Remains of Paul Been Found?

St Paul's tomb unearthed in Rome
By Christian Fraser BBC News, Rome

St Paul's Outside the Walls is one of the largest churches in RomeArchaeologists working for the Vatican have unearthed a sarcophagus containing what they believe are the remains of St Paul the Apostle.

The tomb dates back to at least AD390 and was found in a crypt under a basilica in Rome.
It has long been thought that the crypt contained the tomb of St Paul but the altar had hidden it.
St Paul was an influential early Christian who travelled widely in the Mediterranean area in the 1st Century.

Excavations at the site began in 2002 and were completed last month.

For the past three years, archaeologists have been excavating underneath the altar to remove two huge slabs of marble and now, for the first time in almost 1,700 years, the sarcophagus of St Paul is on public view.

The original inscription on the top reads: Paulo Apostolo Mart - Latin for "Paul Apostle Martyr".
The holes through which the ancient pilgrims would have pushed pieces of cloth to touch the relic are clearly visible.

"What we can see at the moment through a grating, a new grating that's been put there, is the side of the sarcophagus of Paul which seems to be white marble-like material," said Father Edmund Power, abbot of the nearby Benedictine monastery.

St Paul travelled widely through Asia Minor, Greece and Rome in the 1st Century.

His letters to the early churches, found in the Bible's New Testament, are arguably some of the most influential on Christian thinking.

St Paul is said to have been beheaded in AD65 by the Roman Emperor Nero.

His sarcophagus will be on public view for the foreseeable future but the church is yet to rule out the possibility that one day the interior itself will be opened and examined.

Would This Rose Smell as Sweet?

There have been a spate of articles recently about church names...mostly Baptist churches. A church planter friend of mine surveyed people on the street about the name for the plant. Oddly enough, a name with "Baptist" in it did very well. So he began to ask people why they liked Baptist in the name. "That way," people said, "we'll be warned." OUCH! Note the bold section on the former ABC of the West.

What's in a Church Name?
By Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter
Sun, Dec. 10 2006 08:05 AM ET

Some evangelicals believe the drop of denominational labels from church names is a growing trend today. Others don't really take note of it since it has gone on for more than a decade. Either way, both groups say denominational titles are insignificant when it comes down to the bottom line of the church's mission.

Churches Drop 'Baptist' Label

(December 04, 2006)

The Rev. David Pickney pastors a nondenominational congregation of about 160 people in Concord, N.H. He originally planted the church four years ago and called it River Church under the Conservative Baptist Association of America label. After merging with another church, the name changed to River of Grace Church and became non-affiliated. Before that, Pickney had led a Baptist congregation just 15 miles away from his current church. Ten years into his pastorship at Contoocook Baptist Church, the congregation changed its name to Countryside Community Church.

The Baptist church that Pickney grew up in – Epsom Baptist Church – had also ended up dropping its Baptist title and is now called Epsom Bible Church. And just around the neighborhood, First Baptist Church was renamed Centerpoint Church earlier this month. It was only one of at least five other churches in the Concord region that changed their names.

Dropping denominational labels seems like a growing trend today but Pickney's life points to an evangelical movement that was sparked decades ago. Twenty-six years ago, Rick and Kay Warren moved to Southern California where they started a new Baptist church called Saddleback Valley Community Church. "There was a move among Christians in trying to reach the secular community that found denominational labels confusing or frustrating," Kay Warren told The Christian Post. "So we did not put 'Baptist' in the name. We used 'Community' because at the time, that was considered more generic." Being more generic, Warren explained, was telling the community "that we weren't about a denomination. We were about Church."

Brand loyalty has become a thing of the past. Younger generations are no longer following their parents to church or continuing worship in the same church they grew up in."I think people are tired of brand," Pickney commented. "I think they're looking for the authentic thing. They're looking for Jesus, for the authentic gospel, an experience with God, and they don't really care what label it's under."

Still, some people describe Baptists as "stodgy," Pickney said, so he decided to take off the label so as not to be identified in such a way just by name. But for the most part, people are indifferent to the label, especially the people in New Hampshire where less than 10 percent go to any kind of religious church, according to Pickney. "Most of the people we're supposed to be trying to reach really don't care about the label on the church," he said. On a similar note, Warren said denominational names are not that critical. But she and her husband had decided not to include the label and would do the same today in order to attract nonbelievers as well as people that were tired of denominational politics. Saddleback was one of many new church plants that chose to omit affiliation in the church name.

"I think [omitting denominational labels] is more important for new church plants than it is for established churches," said Pastor Lance Claggett, who took pastorship of Countryside Community Church three years after Pickney left. "If I were to be starting a new church in the community, I probably would be less inclined to have a denominational label on the name."

In a unique case, American Baptist Churches USA saw one of its 35 regions rename itself earlier this year. American Baptist Churches of the West was unofficially renamed Growing Healthy Churches in January.According to the executive minister of the region, Paul D. Borden, the name change was "to give churches the option of whether they want to use 'American Baptists' as the group they're identified with or 'GHC.'

"With controversies happening at the national level in different denominations, Borden explained, "some churches find that hurts their ability to do mission at the local level."

Outside the many Baptist denominations, leaving out denominational titles is a continuing trend more so than a growing trend."This was a bigger issue for us 10 years ago than it is now," said Dave Daubert, director for Renewal of Congregations for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. "But we have a significant subset of our churches who still think it's fairly important to leave it (denominational label) out."

Leaving out the label may initially attract the community, but surveys have shown that a large percentage of newcomers come to church on the arm of a friend.The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Louisville, Ky., conducted a U.S. Congregational Life Survey in April 2001 and found that new people are more likely to come if someone invited them with 48 percent saying they go to church because of an invitation.

Claggett highlighted an instance when one fairly new person said she would not have come if she knew Countryside was a Baptist church. When she discovered the church's Baptist affiliation, she was surprised. She continues to attend the church today."If there are people in the community who have a negative impression of what Baptists are, that's one thing to have a negative impression. But each individual local church still has to build its local reputation in the community," noted Claggett."I would ... hope that the reputation of the Church would precede the [denominational label]."

Seeing Christmas Clearly

Last night I shared a dinner table with the Catholic couple who are the prime movers in the local Pregnancy Help Center. Interesting times when I have more in common with them than with theo-left Protestants. Today, I heard excerpts from this message on the Hewitt show on KLRA. Chaput is the Catholic Archbishop of Denver; he was speaking at a Catholic prayer breakfast in Orange County, CA.

Shamelessly ripped off from Hugh Hewitt...

SEEING CLEARLY -- Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. - 12.7.06

Each year, as we move toward Christmas, a friend of mine puts together a list of his favorite Christmas songs. Every year it's the usual mix of Silent Night, The Shepherds ' Carol, 0 Little Town of Bethlehem - things like that. But every year he also includes Dr. Elmo's great Christmas classic, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

The lyrics go like this:

Grandma got run over by a reindeer,
Walking home from our house, Christmas Eve,
You can say you don't believe in Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa -- we believe.

I finally asked him why he puts this song on his list. He said, "For the pagans. A little belief is better than none at all."

I haven't been able to get this song out of my head - partly because it's so goofy, but also because it raises a couple of questions. Who really owns Christmas? The pagans? The Christians? Toys-R-Us? The ACLU? Why are we supposed to be happy this month? And what exactly are we celebrating?

Let me answer the questions this way.

The Louvre Museum in Paris holds about 35,000 pieces of art from the 14th to the 20th centuries. And one of the most beautiful collections in the Louvre is the paintings of the Middle Ages. Medieval art is Christian art. One reason for that is obvious. The Church had the influence and the resources to pay for great art. Another reason is that the political leaders of that age shared that same Christian faith. So did the people. And so did the artists. As a result, paintings from the Middle Ages combine beauty, simplicity and faith in a very powerful way.

Most Medieval art tried to do two things: touch the heart with its beauty and teach the mind with its story. It opened a window on the Bible to people who couldn't read. The recurring scenes in Medieval art are events like the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth of Christ, the Gift of the Magi, the Baptism in the Jordan, the Temptation in the Desert, Judas' Kiss, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

The paintings had power not just because they were ways of teaching the faith. They had power because theyconnected the human condition with Christian hope and Christian purpose.

We're born, we grow, we suffer, we die. So do the people we love. Do our lives mean anything? And if they do,what do they mean? These are the questions that really matter to all of us. They mattered even more urgently to people with shorter life spans 700 years ago. Medieval art is about birth, growth, suffering, death and the hope of new life, all viewed through the person of Jesus Christ. It's about God. But it's also about us as human beings --because Jesus Christ is not only God; he's also human.

When a Medieval artist painted Pilate showing a beaten and bloody Christ to the mob with the words ecce homo --"behold the man"- - he spoke to the suffering of every man and woman who viewed the painting. That's the genius of the Gospel and the art it inspires. Christian art is about the dignity of the human person loved and redeemed by God.

It's about meaning.

Some of you may be thinking, if Medieval art was such a big deal, how come nobody does it anymore? That's a fairquestion. I have a one-word answer: perspective. It's an interesting word, "perspective." It comes from the Latin verb perspicere, which means, "to see clearly."
In art, perspective is the technique of representing three dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.Medieval painters didn't know how to do this.

Starting in the 14th century, painters began figuring out how to put depth of field in their work. They learned how to create the illusion of a round apple on a flat piece of canvas. It's basically a math problem with horizon lines and vanishing points.

Within a hundred years, every painter used the new perspective techniques in his work. Nobody painted the old way. And very soon nobody looked at or experienced a painting the same way. There was a different perspective. Seven hundred years ago, a painter might take months or years to finish a scene like the Nativity. Seven hundred years later, a teen-ager of our time can do a three dimensional, photo-realistic image of the same scene in a few hours with a free piece of software called Blender 3D.

But their perspectives are not at all the same.

The word "perspective" has two different meanings. It's not just a technique in art. It also means our frame of reference. It's our basic way of looking at people, ideas and events. Our perspective not only shapes how we understand the world; it also reveals a lot about what we believe and who we choose to be.

Here's the point. As we finish 2006, we know a lot more than we did 700 years ago. We eat better. We live longer. We have nicer clothes. We own more stuff. But are we happier? Are we wiser? Do our lives have more beauty and harmony and meaning? Are we more humane with each other?

Our perspective on the world has changed in fundamental ways. But is the soul of modern life any deeper or holier? Given the wars and injustices of the last century, we'd better think very carefully before we answer.

I believe that Americans are a blessed people. Most of us believe in God. We go to church at higher rates than any other developed country. We still work hard. We still have a deep love of family and personal integrity. And most of the good things we have, we've labored honestly to earn.

Americans enjoy more freedom, more mobility, better education, better career choices and better medical care than any other country in history. We have more personal wealth. We have more leisure time. We have a society genuinely based on law that at least tries to ensure justice for everybody. And in science, technology, commerce and military power, the United States has no equal.

But Americans also have a growing inequality of wealth, education and opportunity. We face a decline of ideas and public service; growing moral ambiguity; a spirit of entitlement with rights exalted over responsibilities; a cult of personal consumption; and a civic vocabulary that seems to get more brutish and more confused every year.

This last point about our civic vocabulary is important.

The language we use in public discourse matters. Words are like a paintbrush. They're a very powerful tool. They can form or deform the human conscience.

Words like "tolerance" and "consensus" are important democratic working principles. But they aren't Christianvirtues, and they should never take priority over other words like charity, justice, faith and truth, either in our personal lives or in our public choices.

Here's another word: choice. Choice is usually a good thing. But it's never an end in itself. Choice is worthless -in fact, it's a form of idolatry - if all the choices are meaningless or bad.

Here's another word: pluralism. These days pluralism usually serves as a codeword for getting Christians to shut up in the public square out of some misguided sense of courtesy. But pluralism is just a demographic fact. It's not an ideology. And it's never a valid excuse for being quiet about our key moral convictions.

Here's another word: community. Community is more than a collection of persons. Community requires mutual respect, a shared future, and submission to each other's needs based on common beliefs and principles. It's not just an elegant name for an interest group. Talking about the "abortion-rights community" makes as much sense as talking about the "big tobacco community."

Here's another couple of words: the common good. The common good does not mean the sum of what most people want right now. The common good is that which constitutes the best source of justice and happiness for a community and its members in the light of truth. The common good is never served by killing the weakest members of a community. It's also not served when the appetites and behaviors of individual members get a license to undermine the life of the wider community.

Finally, let's take one more word: democracy. Democracy does not mean putting aside our religious and moral beliefs for the sake of public policy. In fact, it demands exactly the opposite. Democracy depends on people of character fighting for their beliefs in the public square - legally, ethically and non-violently, but forcefully and without apology. Democracy is not God. Only God is God. Even democracy stands under the judgment of God and God's truths about human purpose and dignity. The passengers ina car can democratically elect to go in the wrong direction. But they're still just as dead -- with or without a majorityopinion -- when they go over a cliff.

The fallout from this confusion in the language of American life can be summed up in five trends: first, therise of an unhealthy individualism among citizens; second, growing tribal warfare among interest groups; third, more and more cynicism toward public life and service; fourth, a decline in democratic involvement; and fifth, image over substance in public debate, which results in politics as a kind of cynical sound-bite management.

In recent years, some people in both political parties would like to blame the conflicts in American public life onreligious believers. The argument goes like this. Religion is so powerful and so personal that whenever it enters public life in an organized way, it divides people. It repels. It polarizes. It oversimplifies complex issues. It creates bitterness. It invites extremism. And finally it violates the spirit of the Constitution by muddling up the separation of Church and state that keeps Americans from sliding into intolerance.

The same argument goes on to claim that, once they're free from the burden of religious interference, mature citizens and leaders can engage in reasoned discourse, putting aside superstition and private obsessions to choose the best course for the widest public. Because the state is above moral and religious tribalism, it can best guarantee the rights of everyone. Therefore a fully secularized public square would be the adulthood of the American Experiment.
That's the hype. Here's the reality.

First of all, key differences exist between public institutions which are non-sectarian, and secularist ideology.

Everybody can live with the former. No Christian in his or her right mind should want to live with the latter.

Whenever you hear loud fretting about an irrational fear of an Established Church, somebody's trying to forcereligious believers and communities out of the public discussion of issues.

Second, the American Experiment -- more than any other modem state -- is the product of religiously shapedconcepts and tradition. It can't survive for long without respecting the source of that tradition. A fully secularized public life would mean policy by the powerful for the powerful because no permanent principles can exist in a morally neutral vacuum.

Finally, secularism isn't really morally neutral. It's actively destructive. It undermines community. It attacksthe heart of what it means to be human. It rejects the sacred while posturing itself as neutral to the sacred. Itignores the most basic questions of social purpose and personal meaning by writing them off as privateidiosyncrasies. It also just doesn 't work -- in fact, by its nature it can't work -- as a life-giving principle for society.

And despite its own propaganda, it's never been a natural, evolutionary, historical result of human progress.

Certain beliefs have always held Americans together as a people. Christianity and its Jewish roots have always provided the grounding for our most important national principles, like inalienable rights and equality under the law. But as a country, we're losing the Founders' perspective on the meaning of our shared public life. We have wealth and power and free time and choices and toys-- but we no longer see clearly who we are. Material thingsdon't give us meaning. We're in danger of becoming the "men without chests" that C.S. Lewis talked about in The Abolition of Man - people sapped of their heart, energy, courage and convictions by the machinery they helped to create. And if we can't find a way to heal that interior emptiness, then as an experiment in the best ideals of human freedom, America will fail.

I began by talking about Christmas. Who owns it? Why are we supposed to be happy? What are we really celebrating?

Good will, joy, peace, harmony, the giving of gifts - these are beautiful and holy things deeply linked to Christmas.

But not to Santa Claus. And especially not to a politically correct, secular Santa Claus. Joy is not generic. Good will needs a reason. We don't suddenly become generous because the radio plays Jingle Bells.

Christmas is about the birth of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is the messiah of Israel, the only Son of God, the Word of God made flesh. We believe that He was born in poverty in Bethlehem in order to grow and preach God's kingdom, and suffer, die and rise from the dead - all for the sake of our redemption, because God loves us. Christmas is a feast of love, but it's God's love first that makes it possible. Christmas begins our deliverance from sin and death. That's why St. Leo the Great called it the "birthday of joy." What begins in the stable ends in our salvation. That’s why we celebrate Christmas, and it's the best and only reason the human heart needs.

Catholics observe these last few weeks every year before Christmas as the season of Advent. It's a time when the Church asks us to prepare our lives to receive Jesus the child at Christmas, and Jesus the king at the end of time.

How can we best do that? The tradition of the Church tells us by vigil and by prayer.
The season of Advent is a vigil. The word "vigil" means to keep watch during normal sleeping hours, to pay attention when others are sleeping. It comes from a very old Indo- European word "weg", which means "be lively or active."

So to keep vigil or to be vigilant does not mean passive waiting but active, restless waiting, expectant waiting for the Lord. It means paying attention to what is going on in the world around us, and not being asleep. It means acting, living out our mission to be God's agents in the world.

Every truly Christian life is a kind of martyrdom, because what martyr means is witness. That's our task -- a life of conscious, deliberate witness for Jesus Christ and our Catholic faith, in our families, our friendships, our business dealings and our public actions. When Jesus said, "make disciples of all nations," and "you will be my witnesses,"

He didn't mean the guy down the road. He was speaking to you and to me.

The Advent tradition of the Church is vigil and prayer.

There are two places in the New Testament - lst Corinthians and Revelation - where we find a prayer in the Aramaic language, the Semitic dialect spoken by Jesus. Since this prayer is in Aramaic it must come from the veryearliest days of the Church. The prayer is "Marana tha"
and means "Lord, come!"

St. Augustine tells us that God is indebted to us, not because of anything we have done, but because of His promises. God always keeps His promises. So we call on Him to come again.

Our Advent prayer is "Lord, come!"

Lord, come - into our world!
Lord, come - into our lives!
Lord, come -- and purify our longings!
Lord, come - to free us from our compulsions and sins!
Lord, come - into our relationships!
Lord, come - into our work!
Lord, come - into our sufferings!
And into the darkness of our troubled world.

We speak these words - "Marana-than - with a real and confident urgency, not only for ourselves and our personal lives, but also for our Church and our nation.

Earlier I mentioned the power of perspective in painting, and the power of perspective in our lives. I hope the meaning of that word stays with you in the coming days of Advent -- perspicere, "to see clearly."

Twelve months ago, on Christmas Day, Pope Benedict XVI published his first encyclical. He called it Deus Caritas Est- "God is love." Here's a line from it that I want to sharewith you as I close: "The Christian program - the program of the Good Samaritan, the program of Jesus -- is 'a heart which sees.' This heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly" (31, b).

Being faithful to your spouse and family; defending the unborn child; helping the poor; visiting the sick; respecting the immigrant; protecting the dignity and meaning of marriage; working for justice; leading with character - this is the Christian program, the result of hearts which see.
What I ask God to give to you and to me, to our nation and to our Church this Christmas, is the one gift that really does matter: hearts that see, and see clearly.

God grant all of us a blessed Advent and a joyful Christmas.