ClarkeComments.com

Hello all:

On Tuesday, my wife and I attended a funeral. A dear friend of mine that I went to High School with had called me up over the weekend….his mother had died.

Dan’s mother always welcomed me into their home, and it was if I was at my home when I was there. She always took an interest in stopping and talking with me. We knew many of the same people…. she had worked for the county Sheriff’s office where I volunteered, and so we often talked about what I was experiencing in my volunteer work there. She was a person who went out of her way to extend a kind hand to others. She defended the helpless, spending thousands of hours of her own time protecting the rights of sexual assualt and domestic violence victims. Not only did she personally help those victims, she faught for their rights in the legislature as well, helping to pass numerous bills protecting those people. She was a wonderful person.

Listening to her Eulogy, I heard how she had made many more people feel as welcome in her home as she had made me feel.

However… it was a sad funeral. For her entire family and for me, for the same, but different, reasons.

She was Jewish, and non-practicing. While the final judgement indeed belongs to the Father, I felt a deep sadness because I never shared my faith with her. Her son was the first person I ever tried to evangelize…. that effort failed miserably. I haven’t talked with Dan much, we live on opposite sides of the Tri-County area…. and we both have families. But he said he’d like to get together more. Maybe its another chance… I don’t know. But I can’t help but feel somewhat guilty when I think about it.

-Clarke

Hello all:

Every member of a congregation of the Church of Christ should read this book. In fact, I think every member of every Restoration Movement congregation should read this book.

I know that this book probably won’t have alot of effect on those who are ultra-conservative, however, it has some great information broken down into plain English, that would do many of our members good, no matter what their level of knowledge is about our beliefs and history.

This book is short…46 pages is all. However, it articulates our history, our initial focus on unity, and how that focus was shifted towards uniformity. It is a must read, and a book that should be on every Christian’s bookself.

This book is The Restoration Movement Sidetracked by Olan Hicks.

Hello all:

I’m ticked. Very unhappy. I was reading an email from Bobby Ross this afternoon, and saw that someone had labeled the Church of Christ a cult on national television…on CNN, during the Nancy Grace show. I went to the link he provided and read the transcript and saw that a Baptist Minister had indeed called the Church a cult while he was talking about the Winkler murder case.

I remembered seeing something on Travis’
pop up on my aggregator about Nancy Grace, so I went by there and found a good conversation going on about this accusation.

So, I was a little annoyed about this whole thing, but not totally surprised to hear it come out of the mouth of a baptist, as they have a history of not liking us here over in the Restoration Movement. Bob L. Ross (not to be mistaken with Bobby Ross of the Christian Chronicle) has written some nasty things about us, and so has Way of Life, which is a Baptist Fundamentalist publication.

I was just a little annoyed, but not to ticked….until my Father-in-Law called.

My wife grew up in the Assemblies of God churches. Her father was a minister there for many years. He isn’t involved with the ministry anymore, and rarely goes to church, though he still believes and tries hard to walk the path of Christ. We’ve taken him to church with us several times, and he liked it… he especially liked the a capella music, and made the comment on one occasion (not knowing our history, even) how it somewhat reminded him of what the early church must have been like.

So…he called, and asked his daughter about our status as a cult. A friend of his saw the Nancy Grace show and the Baptist minister calling us a cult, and made him a copy of the transcript….

My wife assured him that we aren’t cult members, but now he has a whole bunch of questions that he wants answered. I’m more than happy to answer them for him, and I’m sure that our minister and the elders will be happy to as well…. but it ticks me off…. we seemed to be making progress with him to get him to go back to church on a regular basis…and then this.

It just makes me wonder how many other people out there have been visiting our congregations, and will stop because of some misguided baptist taking a swipe at us.

If anyone would like to tell “Pastor” Tom Rahkula that we aren’t a cult, you can email him.

-Clarke

Hello all:

The Notification Email Function has finally been fixed….I’m not sure how, but it has. Since I made the move to a new server, I’ve been having to use a list serve type function to get notification emails out. I am now using the Wordpress Plugin again…which means you can subscribe yourself to email notifications.

So, if you haven’t in the past and want to, please feel free. You can also unsubscribe yourself again as well if you’d like.

-Clarke