Let's raise up missionaries for Oregon and Maine

Recently my husband attended an afternoon meeting with a lovely couple from Campus Crusade who are raising support to help prostitutes in India get off the streets and into employment, and in the process hopefully bring them to Christ.

Christianity is experiencing quite a drop off in Maine and Oregon according to some recent figures. Perhaps we could shore up the churches here. It's not as dramatic, but it might be a lot less expensive to turn the trend here at home rather than to have to start over in 50 years.

A syllabus for American religion

I'm always complaining about the Jesus-lite books that are available in church libraries, book stores and public libraries (our UAPL is impoverished for anything Christian after the 1980s unless it's been on the best seller list). But, that's what people want to read--fluff, anecdote and feel-good. Today I was bouncing around the internet looking a stuff on Egeria, a 4th century Spanish nun who had gone on a pilgramage and kept a travel diary. Fascinating stuff. However, the problem with Google, and the OSUL catalog is you get far afield, and somehow I ended up in Wheaton, Il in Kathryn Long's course syllabus for Young Scholars on American religion, History 483, an overview of Christianity in North America from the colonial era to the present. Thinking maybe "young scholars" were junior high and therefore I could read it, I discovered they all have PhDs and the program runs for 3 years. The textbook is Mark Noll, History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992) plus course readings that are on sale at the college bookstore or on reserve in the Buswell Library. Whew. Well, it's a place to start.

Are we watching the end?

I caught a few minutes of the Obama celebrations last night, as he is the presumed candidate of the Democrats. John McCain, the unconservative interloper candidate of the Republicans looks mighty weak and frail, both in thought, word and deed against a young man with no history of doing anything except smoozing with the Chicago machine and various "social justice" think tanks. He's propped up by Move on dot org, George Soros and ACORN, to say nothing of the tenured radicals of the 60s, at least those whose brains have survived the haze of drugs of their youth. I've never cared for Hillary Clinton, but over these past few months I found myself wishing that Thompson or Huckabee or Romney had shown even a fraction of her determination and drive. She out campaigned and out talked Obama at every point, but his machine was stronger than hers, although I don't see a spider's web width difference in their policies and plans.

So I turned to the book of Acts, because none of this is new, it's all there. Nations and leaders rise and fall in God's plan. I am not a dispensationalist; the fascination that some Christians have with the Left Behind series and picking a verse here and there to match up with the newspaper headlines leaves me--well, left out. But the one question I always have, since it only seems to be Americans who get into this, just where is the United States in all the prophecy of end times? Paul probably has the answer, Acts 17:26-31.

He's in Athens and he proclaims the Gospel to a group that might be compared to a lunch bunch sitting around in the Faculty Club at OSU philosophizing over politics, history and biology--most likely they've even bought into man-made global warming and chuckle over Bushisms (the stammering of Obama doesn't bother them). By their own behavior and publications they are admitting they haven't found God, just like the guys Paul encountered that day. Most won't listen to Paul who begins with the announcement that God created the universe, that he is Lord of heaven and earth that they have descended from Adam and they won't find him or serve him with their man made efforts.

"From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being."(NIV)

If that's not clear enough, here it is in the New Living Translation, a paraphrase which reads like a sermon on the text:

"From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand which should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose in all of this was that the nations should seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him--though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist." (NLT)

In short, God is in control; we aren't. And it appears we have frittered away our inheritance and are settling for a false messiah.