ClarkeComments.com

Hello all:

Well….its finally going to happen… I’m finally going to get to go back to school. Unfortunately, my wife didn’t find a job that allows me to quit mine and go back to school full time, so I’m going to be attending community college. However, they do offer religion courses there. So, I will be taking courses on the History of Christianity, and The Bible as Literature. I’ll probably also take a criminal justice course or something as well.

Also, I am going to be taking over the teaching of the teens in my congregation. They want to study World Religions, Denominational Doctrines, Apologetics, and the distinctive beliefs of the churches of Christ. I’m looking forward to it, it should be fun.

-Clarke

Hello all:

I am currently reading Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

This is the first church history book that I have read that focused on events outside the Restoration Movement. I’m at page 42 out of 370. I have a long way to go, but already I am stunned by the amount of violence the early Christians met. I was aware, as most of us probably are, that the early Christians were persecuted. We’ve all heard of the catacombs of Rome, we’ve all read the passage in Matthew where Jesus speaks about children turning against parents, brothers against brothers. But the contents of this book are beyond anything I ever imagined.

Already, its obvious in my reading of this book that there were persecutions and murders between factions in the Church. So far, the faction that has been responsible for those murders (The Aryans) are dead wrong and definite Apostates, but they are a faction none the less. This book reminds me of the need for us to love those who feel differently than we do. I’m not yet close to the violence against the protestant reformers, but the thoughts that come are that there would have been no violence at all if we practiced the love that we are supposed to be known for.

More on this book later.

-Clarke

Hello all:

Shortly after we moved into our home, we saw a sign pop up in storefront window at a shopping center down the street that said “The Church of Christ meets here.” I would assume everyone has seen this sign before…the old rickety wooden sign that looks like its about 40 or 50 years old…

So, once this sign popped up, I was curious who this group was. No one where we were going knew anything about them. I dropped by several times and didn’t find anyone around, but I did find some course outlines and such they kept in a box attached to the door.

I was looking online and found out they have a website. The congregation is listed in a non-institutional church web directory. Mystery solved, or so I thought.

I was talking to a friend the other day that we go to church with, who, like me, was once a member of a non-institutional church. He knew about the congregation up the street. Not only are they non-institutional, but they are a “one covenant” congregation. My friend explained to me that this congregation’s members had been a part of another congregation, but that they had been forced out because they taught that there is only one covenant, not two.

I’ve never heard of this split in the churches of Christ before, and I don’t see mention of it in the directory I have access to (although it is an old one…). Is anyone familiar with this group, and can you shed some light on them for me?

-Clarke

Hello all:

I transferred everything over to a new server last night and this morning.

The bad news first:

I haven’t had time to uploaded the MySQL databases for Restorationwiki, so it is currently down. Also, I haven’t uploaded the MySQL databse for phpBB either, so it is currently out of commission on Restorationmovement.org

I recently installed a classified ad server to use on Restorationmovement.org as well, but I haven’t given out the link, and its down, so I doubt anyone cares. That will be up soon though so that if you’re church is looking for a preacher, or if you want to advertise your business or service, for free, you’ll be able to. It seems like a nice little system.

Good News:

Our hosting services gives me six, count them, six, domain names. So, Restorationmovement.org is actually Restorationmovement.org, and not clarkecomments.com/restoration. That also means that there can be restorationmovement.org email addresses. I might offer some of these out if anyone is interested.

My wife finally has hosting space for her domain name that we bought a long time ago but didn’t.

I have three more spaces for domains, and my server will pay to register the names. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with those spaces, but it leaves lots of space for future projects.

I have 20 gigs of webspace. So we shouldn’t ever run out…

The new hosting service should be much more reliable, and they actually give refunds if they cause downtime issues.

Finally…thank you to all of you that recommended different web hosting ideas..I just had to go down with this one, it was too good to turn down.

Also, it looks like the notification emails aren’t really working. If you’ve gotten a whole bunch, let me know..but out of the several I sent, my test account only got one of them…

-Clarke