Hello all:
I love it when I am searching for information about scripture through website sources that many in our churches wouldn’t touch with a ten foot poll, and then find little gems on those sites from scholars within Churches of Christ.
I was searching for information about the exclusion of the apocrypha from the Protestant Cannon when I found this quote, which is attributed to a book that Everette Ferguson edited, entitled “The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity.”
“The Septuagint was the Bible of the earliest church. The parting of the church from the synagogue was a bitter one. The Septuagint had been regarded as the inspired Word of God; . . . the synagogue rejected the Septuagint [c. 90-100] . . . the Church spread the Septuagint, together with its own writings contained in the New Testament, throughout the world in its missionary activities. The Greek Bible was translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic and other languages. . . Until the Protestant Reformation, the canon of the Church was the larger canon of the Septuagint. The Septuagint has traditionally been used to restore the text of the Hebrew Bible where the latter is corrupt.”
The thread and post can be found here, it is post #18.
Enjoy
-Clarke
Daniel and the Dragon, circa 1372
Hello all:
Northwest Christian College has revealed their line-up for the second annual Stone-Campbell Symposium. The docket includes four women and one man (Paul Blowers). D’Esta Love, the Chaplain at Pepperdine University, is one of the speakers at the symposium. She is scheduled to preach at the 1st Christian Church of Eugene during the symposium.
The symposium is March 19-21, 2007. I’d like to go, but I’m not sure I will make it this year, as our anniversary occurs during the symposium. Last years symposium was great, and I have a feeling this year’s will be good as well.
Let me know if you are going to be in the area for the symposium.
-Clarke
So, we knew we had to do something but we weren’t’ sure what…
During my websurfing, I found the website of a local Christian Church that started with about 50 members and was regularly attracting 2500-3000. We had been hovering around having 50 in attendance, and I figured that if they could grow that large, we could too. I mentioned this congregation to some of our friends at church, and that I thought we should visit it sometime and see how they did things. Our more conservative friends sounded interested, but cautious.
As things deteriorated more and more around us, with less people coming, and worse attitudes emerging, we joked more and more about going to that Christian Church. Finally, we got so frustrated that our good friends (their entire family) and my family would go check this congregation out. We sent an email to our minister letting him know we wouldn’t be at church on a certain Sunday, and why, and then we went.
Going into a congregation that had 2500 people from 50 was a bit of a culture shock, but it was good. We took a lot of what they did, their attitudes, and their look, and decided that we wanted to incorporate those things into our church.
We came up with a list of small changes that no one could biblically argue with. The first was to remove the pulpit. Several people freaked out. Some argued even though there was no biblical basis for it. Our minister, who at first was supportive, decided this was his time to bail, making the changes we had made the reason for his departure, and he left.
We’ve made-over part of our building, fixed our roof, created a vision statement that included welcoming people of all types and situations, changed the bulletin, created a nice self-serve coffee bar, and hired a couple of interns from Cascade - one to preach and the other to improve worship.
We’ve had a couple of spurts of visitors, but this Sunday we were down where we were before.
Unfortunatly, I still see much of the same attitude….but out of different people now. People leave and create a hole, and someone else fills it.
Yesterday and today my wife and I had some good friends of ours treat us horribly… part of that “filling the hole.” It started a while ago and has gotten worse. We almost decided to leave and find another congregation today…it was so painful. Another good friend showed us that that would be a mistake.
Its been crazy. I am swamped in school…I’m taking History of the New Testament this quarter along with Astronomy…and it is killing me. I’m working full time as usual….and I’m lead/supervisor/program developer for my special little work unit….and its killing me. I’m going through Structural Fire Academy for work so that I can take care of fire stuff better…and its killing me.
Prayers will be gratefully accepted.
I apologize for taking so long for part 2. So many things have happened…so many frustrations…so many little things have kept me from sharing the story. The words above don’t communicate 5% of what has happened.
I’ve had a lot of thoughts, a lot I’ve wanted to get on here and talk about, but I didn’t want to do that without finishing this story.
I’m glad this story is written. I’ll probably write more about it later. I have many other things I want to talk about right now though.
I’ll see you all soon.
-Clarke