Notes From Jon

I got a message a few days ago about a friend in Birmingham who passed away, and it’s just now begun to dawn on me what has happened.  Dewayne was a good friend, a frequent study partner, and a very skilled and thoughtful minister.  He had begun work with a counseling center in the Birmingham area – a job I feel he was perfectly suited for.  He was about my age, and last week he had a completely unexpected seizure that took his life.  He leaves a wife behind.

A little more than a year ago, I heard on the news that a Beeson grad in Virginia was murdered.  I checked, and sure enough, she had graduated with me.  Nancy Copin was a Christian Church (Disciples) pastor in our area while she was in seminary, and we had a common link to the Mexico trip we both loved taking every summer.  I had hoped to contact her, since she was close by, about going to Mexico with us sometime.  But on Ash Wednesday last year, she didn’t show up at church for a special service.  Church members found her in the parsonage – she had been murdered, apparently in a failed robbery attempt.

There’s a part of me – and I imagine there’s a part of you, too – that wonders, “how could God let this happen?”  These were two very sensitive and compassionate friends, servants of God much better qualified and suited to ministry than I will ever be.  Their absences have left a hole that cannot be filled, and like most everyone, I have to wonder what their deaths might have accomplished – if anything.

I may never know, this side of heaven.  But their examples of service and faith remind me of the many things I learned from them, and I am surely better for having counted them as friends for a part of my life.

I wish I could say I encountered these tidbits in their original context.  I’ve yet to read anything by Dorothy Sayers, but after finding these, I think I’d like to soon…

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, “ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.” One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

- Dorothy L. Sayers

This one especially made me think:

The sixth deadly sin is named by the Church acedia or sloth. In the world it calls itself tolerance, but in hell it is called despair. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for.

- The Six Other Deadly Sins (Dorothy L. Sayers)

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend of ours from Birmingham passed away – Alan Roper.  I was asked to speak at the funeral, but since I had other commitments, I wasn’t able to go.  Instead, I sent a video.  This is a transcript of that video, plus some content I had to edit out to make the video shorter.

If you don’t know Alan, this won’t mean a thing to you, and you can wait for the next post.  This is my tribute to a good friend who loved music, loved his church, and loved being a Baptist.  Read the rest of this entry »

I usually wait to post my Speaking of Faith articles after they’ve been published, but I’ve come to realize that most folks who will read this blog will probably not read the paper, and vise-versa.  So I guess it’s OK to pre-post this article… it will likely appear in next week’s Kenbridge-Victoria Dispatch.

An Angry Email

In the last couple of weeks, my inbox has seen a flood of patriotic forwards.  Perhaps they were sparked by a combination of Memorial Day, increased tensions in the Middle East, and the approaching final leg of the presidential contest.  Whatever the reason, political fervor is at an all-time high – and you can tell by the kinds of things that are going around on the internet.

One email in particular has caught my attention.  I’ve gotten it three times now, from three very different people.  It’s supposedly written by a ticked-off housewife in New Jersey… who, by the way, chose to remain anonymous.  The writer rants and raves against anyone who has criticized the many scandals that have plagued the US military in Iraq – the Abu Ghraib scandal, treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, mishandling of the Quran, and various extreme torture tactics.  She calls Muslims and Iraqis cowards, thugs, and fanatics. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m long overdue for quite a few posts, and now that I’m on “vacation” of sorts, I’m glad to be able to get some up!

This first one includes some documents I wrote in the first part of 2007 regarding baptism by immersion.  For those of you who aren’t Baptist (and maybe even for some who are), it has been a long-standing Baptist practice to require anyone who wants to join a Baptist church to be baptized by immersion.  Most will still accept someone who was immersed somewhere else – though there are a few who want you to be baptized in THEIR particular church.  If you were baptized by other methods – sprinkling, pouring, etc. – then you have to be re-baptized in the “proper” way.

I had long disagreed with this practice, but never had a chance to figure out why.  Then in late 2006, when the church began discussing changes to our bylaws, a few other church members asked if we would consider changing this policy.  It led me to do a LOT of research on the practice, and to draw some conclusions of my own.

The documents are linked here in two PDF files – one is a LONG version, that goes into detail of the history of baptism, original words used to describe baptism in the New Testament, and argument based on other biblical principles.  The other is a shortened version that uses that research to answer some of the common defenses given for the practice of re-baptism.

Feel free to use these for your own study – and I look forward to your comments!

baptism-and-immersion-long-version (PDF)

baptism-and-immersion-question-answer (PDF)