Fifteen Ways The World Has Changed

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time
— An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier

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Below are fifteen ways life in the United States—and the world—changed in the the twentieth century. It is a brief summary of the first and second chapters of this book. I do not want to suggest that it is all there is to say. The changes are only suggestive and intended to point toward where life has gone and is going. Your comments are welcome.

1. Advances in technology have changed our way of life - Our ability to communicate, share, store and retrieve data is increasing at exponential rates. Computers and the Internet are prime. Every aspect of life is now touched by them. We now have ability to communicate with one another and share data of all sorts and kinds never before known or imagined in all of human history.     
2. Communication technology has changed everything  - Our ability to communicate, share, store and retrieve data is increasing at exponential rates. Computers and the Internet are prime. Every aspect of life is now touched by them. We now have ability to communicate with one another and share data of all sorts and kinds never before known or imagined in all of human history.
   
3. We are empowered and engulfed by information - People who understand how to use and manipulate this information have power. They are able to influence and control others. However, so much information easily engulfs most people. They are left with uncertainty about what to believe and whom to trust.
4. Technological changes have increased the rich-poor gap - The new super-rich are those who provide and control the use of information technology. Examples abound. Meanwhile, those who do not understand the technology are less and less able to thrive or even survive in such a culture. The gap increases between the rich and the poor.
5. Pop-art replaced classical and folk-art - Classical and folk art, including music and graphic arts, are becoming far less significant than the ever-changing scene of pop-art, pop-music, movies and TV.
6. Clothing styles changed - Clothing reflects the emphasis upon novelty and change. People of all ages are influenced by a desire to be a part of the modern scene, to own and to wear what is new, to be accepted by the in-group.
   
7. Novelty is valued, even worshiped - Such an emphasis upon novelty presents a danger of becoming all important. Whatever is first in one’s life is that which is worshiped. Many are the new American Idols.
8. Old people, old ways are no longer trusted - Whereas other cultures, including that of the United States, formerly trusted seniors and the experience they bring, the emphasis now is upon the future. Those of the past with its outmoded thinking and ways must be rejected. Hope, promise and true value rest with young, innovative and experimental men and women who understand the new world. 
9. Traditional norms and principles are rejected - As a consequence of the emphasis upon novelty and experimentation, norms and principles handed down from the past are no longer trusted. New circumstances, new understandings, new discoveries and new ways of communicating require new norms.
10. Sexual and family mores have also changed - Changes in family and sexual mores are prime examples of the changes demanded. The definition of marriage has changed. There is now a strong push toward redefining marriage as a loving relationship between two humans, regardless of sex. Some suggest that the definition of marriage will eventually change even more than that. There are no longer any objective standards by which to decide what is right or wrong in human relationships.
11. Everything is now relative, constantly changing - In matters of right and wrong everything is open now to change, even as the world around us is constantly changing.  The emphasis upon evolution and the survival of the fittest seems to suggest that the weak, sick and feeble who have nothing more to contribute should be terminated, regardless of age.
12. Everything is now subjective; objective standards are gone - Since there are no objective standards like the Ten Commandments, etc. and since evrything is relative, we may argue that what is right for you may not be right for me. As long as you allow me to do what I want, I will not attempt to interfere with you doing what you want.
13. The supernatural origins of the Bible are rejected - Christians who once believed in the Divine authority of the Bible are left with uncertainty. The book once seen as the inspired Word of God is now viewed as a collection of writings by men influenced by the thinking and culture of their time. Little, if anything, can now be declared to be of Divine origin.
14. At the same time human intuition is lifted up as trustworthy - Since scholars have only scattered pieces of past Biblical writings—so it is claimed—they must rely upon educated guesses about what was and what was not given by God. Judgments about theological truths are now subjected to human intuitions.
15. The United States no longer has a master narrative - Since the United States is now a multi-cultural and multi-religious nation, there is no longer one story or one set of myths that unite and guide us. This is to say we have great difficulty looking back at our history in order to define ourselves as we move into the future.

As the 20th century began, advances in science, communication and transportation moved the people of the United States from a rural to an urban culture. We will never be able to return to a simpler way of life, even though many long for it.

So the question remains. Where do we go from here? The preposterous claim of this Blog and of this online book is that the Bible remains the inspired Word of God and the one and only, yes also infallible, guide to the future of life on this planet, of hope for eternity and for daily life. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions. Watch for the next chapter.

As I said above, your comments are invited.

The Day of Rest - Biblical Teaching About Time (continued)

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time
— An online book about rest and worship —

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Chapter 2

A World of Uncertainty

As I said before I was so abruptly interrupted by my personal technology, life is not like it was when I was a child. People of power have always run the world, but today there’s a different breed of power brokers. Today’s cultural elite includes information brokers. These upper class folks have access to information and the knowledge of how to apply it. Their control of information technology gives them power and money. The gap between this elite group and the little fish at the bottom of the food chain is growing.

A few years back the United Nations Development Program released some figures about how the rich in the United States are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Back in the early twentieth century really rich families like the Rockefellers, Asters, Blairs, Carnegies, Goulds, Morgans and Fisks controlled about 20 percent of our country’s total assets. As we entered the 21st century that small group had nearly doubled the assets they control. Now the super rich, men like Warren Buffett, the wealthiest man in the world and  Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft , the third wealthiest man in the world, control nearly 40 percent of U.S. assets. By the way, Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico, is the second wealthiest man in the world with $60 billion in assets.

What does this mean? Among other things, it means that our technological changes have not solved the problem of poverty. Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau tell us that during the past twenty-five years educated, information-savvy households became richer and richer while the poor and uneducated became poorer.  The income of information savvy technologists and managers rose dramatically while the poor consistently lost ground.

To make matters worse, more sudden changes hit us as the twentieth-first century began. Terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers and the stock market collapsed. That collapse hit the technology folks pretty hard—for a while. Many lost more than 30% of their invested assets. People went around moaning about that for six months. But things soon turned around for them and their wealth returned as the economy bounced back. With that return, their political power also returned.

That was all fine and good for the upper-class segment of our population, but people living below the poverty line were hurt. In the U.S, the numbers of the poor living below the poverty line increased to better than twenty percent of the population. What is this poverty line? Think food, shelter, clothing, health care, and transportation—the basic necessities of modern American living. Each year, the federal government calculates the minimum amount of money required by families to meet tbasic needs. The resulting calculation is commonly referred to as the poverty line.  In 2001, the year of the New York Twin Towers’ destruction, the government had set the poverty line for an average family of four at about $18,100.  Six years later that figure rose to $20, 650. The twenty percent folks who struggle to get along below this imaginary line poverty line are mostly members of black or Latino minorities. They are forced to exist on about one-fourth of our country’s average income. For them, ideas of rest and leisure are destroyed by the need to work long hours in order to fund basic needs. Technological changes have only aggravated their condition, not helped them.

This complicated picture will not easily change. Despite all our knowledge, no one has adequate answers to the persistent issue of poverty and the issues of immigration, health care and child abuse that accompany them.  Jesus said we would always have the poor with us. It remains so in our postmodern world. Technology has improved the lives of millions. The United States has the largest and the most robust economy in the world, but for the lower one fifth, things have become worse. Without information and the knowledge and skills to use it, the poor keep getting poorer even as the rich get richer.

Our consumer driven culture
Many other aspects of our culture shifted as we entered the 21st century. Along with the rise of technologies, the arts changed.  Pop art has largely replaced classical and folk art. Pop arts are arts-for-the-moment, constantly changing with the ever changing whims of people. Rock and roll, rap, hip-hop and country-western dominate both broadcast and Internet radio. Folk stations are still around, but most stations focus on pop music that by its very nature always changes. Rock songs from a decade ago are ‘golden oldies.’ Even last year’s hits are already on the way out.

The same thing holds for clothes and clothing styles. To be in style one does not wear two-year-old jeans or blouses. The current uniform for some teens may be low-rise blue jeans, baggy pants, huge belts, six inch soles and bright t-shirts, with rings on fingers and toes as well as in noses, ears, belly buttons and sometimes tongues— but this is all for the moment. Give us one more year and these styles will be out of date.

My real point is not that clothing or music tastes change. They always have. What must concern us is the worship of novelty. Whatever is not new, different, up-to-date, is considered worthless, insignificant, something to be scorned and despised.

Such attitudes spill over into popular thinking about people and institutions. Pop culture insists that it must be new to have value. Old ways are throwaways along with old clothes. What about throwaway people? It seems so. There is a strong tendency in our postmodern culture to leave behind the wisdom and the lessons older generations might teach us. The tendency is to ignore the guidance of those who have lived through at least some of that past. Supposedly, true wisdom lies in the future and the young who are daring enough to lead us into it. The past was full of failures. Only the future holds promise. Old people cling to old ways. Old thinking equals ignorance. Change, new ideas and new ways are what the future is about. Senior politicians, religious leaders, businessmen and teachers—the whole gang of old men and women—are not to be trusted.

The same is true for the disabled or uneducated. We assume they are useless people who have nothing to contribute. They too are throwaways. They are part of the past. We must move on to those who are new, fresh and truly useful. The past is past.

There was a time in the not too distant past when teachers, ministers, lawyers, political leaders and artists supported and promoted traditional standards by which we lived, norms based upon principles passed on from one generation to the next. No longer. We must now have new norms. Tomorrow we may have even newer ones.

Consider the issue of divorce. When I was young, people in our community frowned upon divorce. Divorce happened, of course, but not nearly as often as in this postmodern world. An injured party actually had to prove that one’s spouse was guilty of adultery or abuse in order to obtain a divorce. Now laws permit no fault divorce. All parties need do is work out the details.  Not often an easy task of course.

Where are the norms for making moral judgments in this postmodern world? Objective values are out of date. Traditional approaches to ethics are scorned. We live in a new time of enlightenment. Along the way family life suffers, but these are postmodern times.

More Cultural Changes
Sexual mores have also changed in this new world. An article in the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) reported on a 2001 New Jersey based Gallup poll. According to the report fifty years ago, two-thirds of American young adults believed premarital sex was immoral.  By the 1970s the number of young adults who still thought premarital sex was immoral had dropped to a little less than half, down twenty percentage points from the previous decade. By the middle of the 1980’s, over half said premarital sex was acceptable.  As we entered the 21st century the number accepting of premarital sex had climbed to over sixty percent. Today only thirty-eight percent of young adults say premarital sex is immoral. We have a whole new set of standards and norms, established and promoted by an ever-changing popular culture. Rules of conduct are no longer based upon established principles, but upon constantly changing whims. See also the NCR article on hookup sex.

Along with the new norms come new problems. News media report that researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Nearly half the black teens in one study had at least one sexually transmitted infection, versus twenty percent among whites and Mexican-American teens. The most common one is the virus that causes cervical cancer and the second most common can cause infertility.

The sad truth is that not only in America, but in western culture in general we have very few agreed upon objective norms for what is moral or immoral. We are adrift on a sea of confusion about moral and ethical questions. There are no universally agreed upon principles by which to judge our actions. Everything is relative. This is of the essence of postmodernism.

The hidden roots of relativity
How did all this happen within such a short period of time? Some want to blame scientists like Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Einstein published his great work, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, in 1920. His work introduced us to a whole universe of maybes. Einstein’s science taught us that time itself is relative. Matter and energy are also interchangeable. The speed of light remains the only constant in the entire universe. But now the constancy of the speed of light is also challenged. In the early moments after the Big Bang some suggest that light went faster than it does today. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to move beyond the speed of light. Science fiction has long ago predicted it.

Add to that confusion the introduction of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, to speak colloquially, describes light as a wave on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and as a particle or packet or something like that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On Sunday it may be both. This is, of course, a totally unscientific description. My point is that given one set of circumstances light acts one way and given another, it acts another. Can it be both? Who knows? Scientists continue to struggle to understand this strange, but natural phenomenon.

How does that affect our everyday world? The answer seems obvious. If science cannot tell us how the universe works, then maybe there are no answers to life in the universe, no real answers anyway. What works on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays won’t work on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. And who knows what works on Sundays? Everything is relative. Everything is in a constant state of change. Everything is evolving, just as it always has.

From evolutionary studies we are taught that billions of years ago our ancient ancestors were lizards and monkeys, but over the long, but steady progress of years various species evolved to new ones.

Today change continues. Everything inside us and around us is changing. Everything—everything—is  relative. What works for you won’t necessarily work for me. I come from a different family, a different culture. I see things in a different way than you do. So you decide what works for you, but do not judge me, especially since there are no commonly accepted standards, no big set of Ten Commandments. Everything is subjective. Everything is constantly changing. This is the postmodern mood.
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Next time: Chp. 2 continues with more information about uncertainty and doubt, leading to some now what questions.

THE DAY OF REST - Chapter One

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time

— An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter One - How The World Has Changed

Something called modernism flourished from the end of the nineteenth century to end of the World War II. It was an exciting time. Writers, teachers, philosophers, theologians and politicians proclaimed old ways at an end as new, modern, progressive ways opened up. The industrial, mechanized age was here to stay and it was good. Quantum and relativistic physics, analytical philosophy and the new number theory in mathematics appeared on the scene. Little did we realize at the time what implications were embedded in those breakthroughs. As the twentieth century progressed many thinkers rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions. Immutable laws no longer govern historical events, they insisted. Traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life became outdated. Modern industry changed our economics as well as the social and political aspects of our lives.

I draw on the experiences of my birth family to illustrate. We lived on a farm of about two hundred acres in the southern part of Minnesota. My father had inherited the farm when Grandpa died. Grandma continued to live with us until her nineties when she moved into a nursing home where she lived on to the ripe old age of one hundred one.

My uncles, aunts and other relatives lived on farms all around. In my early youth we used a team of workhorses to plow and plant the fields and harvest the hay, but then we got our first tractor. Eventually we sold off the horses.  We were traditional, old school type people, but times were changing. Our farms were becoming mechanized. These were modern times—also for farmers. Each spring Grandma and Mother planted a huge garden from which they harvested all of our vegetables for eating and canning. They watched over a flock of three hundred chickens and roosters that provided us with eggs and meat—and with a weekly mess to clean up, my job as a boy.

Farm life was like that. Everybody, including we children, had chores. We grew most of our food and took care of ourselves. When necessary, we bought staples like flour and salt from a local store. Since we were a dairy farm, we always had plenty of milk, butter and cheese, processed by a local co-op. But in the thirties we started milking our cows with machines and lighting our barn with electricity. These were modern times.

Telephones were very primitive in those days. Our family’s first was installed in my grandparents’ house. One turned a crank on the side of a wooden box to reach another party. A bell rang and sent a signal alerting the operator to connect us. We didn’t necessarily need her since each family on the party line was already assigned a unique ring. Our ring was three short bells and a long. To reach our neighbor we could simply pick up the earpiece, ring their signal and, when they answered, start talking. That also meant that any or all of us on the line could listen or join in the conversation as well. We were one big neighborhood, tied together by the magic of the telephone. These were modern times.

We also had radios. Mother had a small maroon, plastic one on top of the refrigerator in our kitchen. She won it at a raffle at the general store down the road. She loved to listen to soap operas, country music and news on her radio. I vividly recall how we clustered around Mother’s radio to hear reports of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that infamous first week in December, 1941.  The next week President Roosevelt shocked our nation by announcing over the same radio that we were at war with both Japan and Germany. The marvel of modern communications brought us immediate, but frightening news from the other side of the world. These were modern times.

The war changed our little rural community—as well as to our nation. A few years into that it the federal government began to build a munitions plant on hundreds of acres of former farmland adjoining the western boundaries of our farm. The Federal Government’s Department of Defense confiscated the land from families we all knew. Day after day we watched the plant’s huge smoke stacks go up. Farmers who formerly lived there were paid for their houses, barns and acreage, but had to find new farms or new ways of making a living. Some went to work in the plant. These were modern times.

In the tiny entryway of our country church we hung banners with stars representing our young men in the armed forces. A couple years into it, the war became personal. My cousin Godon, an air force bombardier, was killed in a raid over Germany when his B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was shot down. Gordon was about ten years older than I. I hardly knew him. My Aunt Grace never quite recovered from his death. He was her only child and she took it very hard. Our parents warned us children not to talk about Gordon in Aunt Grace’s presence. In World War II our nation lost over 175,000 soldiers and sailors with over 450,000 casualties. These were modern times.

When World War II ended, we could not go back to the way things were before. World War II was a defining moment for our community and in our nation’s history. The rural, agricultural way of life I knew as a child began to wan. The urbanizing, industrial age changed it all. Modern times were becoming postmodern.

After the war the world of technology moved in and the pace of life quickened.  Jet airplanes began to fly overhead. Black and white TV became a big hit. The Beatles and Elvis shook up the establishment with their wild music. The whole world began to rock and roll, but not only to the new music.  Sounds of change were everywhere. Month after month hundreds of changes dropped into our lives. Things were changing so fast we lost count. It was exciting and scary all at the same time. Modernism was ending. Postmodernism was beginning.

The postmodern bureaucratic, technological society

The burgeoning postmodern technology changed how and where we lived. Life on the family farm slipped away as big corporate farms sprang up, cultivating thousands of acres, milking hundreds of cows and feeding hundreds of pigs and beef cattle. My mother used to send me out to the chicken coop to collect a dozen eggs from our half-dozen hen nests. On these corporate farms chickens were now raised in air-conditioned barns by the thousands. Eggs, wings, legs and thighs were now processed, packaged and forwarded to supermarkets around the nation. Postmodern times brought relentless change.

Advances in communication technology were a large part of the change. Today we call our friends and relatives in New York, Wisconsin, south Texas or Idaho easier than we used to call neighbors on our party line a mile down the road. We make phone calls over the Internet, using VOIP (voice-over-Internet-provider) technology. Cell phones are ubiquitous, used not only for conversations, but also to access the Internet, monitor our schedules, send text messages and manage photo images.

I write these words on a computer. I do my banking and most of my correspondence on a computer. We can no longer function without computers. As a consequence, we’ve had to learn a new set of abbreviations like RUP, CD, DSL, DVD, HDTV, ISP, HTML and hundreds more. We’re supposed to know about power conditioners, broadband access, bitmapped images, cookies, dithering, compact flash drives, shock ratings, firewall flaming, page hosting, hypertext, ISA buses, wiki, JavaScript, log-in name, Lotus notes, boot sequences, RSS feeds, WiFi and spanning tree protocols. These are postmodern times.

In this new, postmodern world, information and data are big business, making twenty-five year olds into billionaires. We are both empowered and engulfed by information and information technologies. A while back I bought a nostalgic CD recording of Judy Garland’s hits from the 1930’s and 40’s, called ‘Over the Rainbow,’ from a store in London I found on eBay, the great online trading place. I paid for it on a secure site with my MasterCard. The CD arrived at my doorstep ten days later by United Parcel.

There’s nothing strange about that. We do it all the time. Yet who even buys CDs anymore? The music industry is scared. Now we download music directly from the Internet. These are postmodern times.

Needless to say, computers and the Internet have had a profound effect upon postmodern life, but the changes are not at an end. In ten years we’ll wonder how we ever got along with today’s primitive equipment. Some suggest that in a generation artificially intelligent computers will merge with humans to form a new species. Already we have moved beyond what a single computer can do, regardless of its size. Multiple independent computing clusters act over the Internet as a grid composed of resource nodes, located within many administrative domains. Thus the power of computing is increased manifold.

Who can adjust to the exponential rate of change in twenty-first century life? Who can even track it? Many in my generation no longer try. For several I know, even learning to operate computers is too challenging. On the other hand, our grandchildren grow up playing on and working with computers from their earliest years, to say nothing of cell phones, I-Pods, X-Boxes and who knows what else.  It’s all a part of our ever-changing lives.

Oh, excuse me. My cell phone is ringing. I see also on my phone’s readout that my son is calling from Denmark. He’s over there on business for his globally based company. I had better answer him. I also see I have a couple text messages. Interesting. My wife expects me for dinner in ten minutes. Here’s another note reminding me of an appointment with my dentist tomorrow morning.

We can pick up this conversation later when I post the second chapter.

We Are Not Alone

The Christmas season is upon us. It starts here in Texas immediately after Thanksgiving Day, but that's the same all over the U.S. now. The merchants push hard to sell whatever and we'll all be wondering how we're going to get everything done before Christmas Day. Like so many others, Sylvia and I have yet to complete our Christmas shopping and the annual Christmas letter to friends and relatives. Not so for everyone. I received one letter by email yesterday, the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

All this reminds me of that terribly busy first Christmas when Caesar Augustus had ordered a census throughout the Roman Empire. Interesting guy, that Augustus. He was born with the given name Gaius Octavius on September 23, 63 B.C. He took the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Octavian) in 44 B.C. after the murder of his great uncle, Julius Caesar. In his will Caesar had adopted Octavian and made him his heir. The rest, as they say, is history.

By the time Jesus was born this first Roman Emperor had been in power for over 20 years and the great Pax Romana was in place. It was a time of peace. You could travel most of the empire in relative safety. So it was possible for the unknown peasants, Mary and Joseph, to travel a hundred miles south to Bethlehem where Jesus was born.

If you're concerned about this census business and the extra-Biblical allusions to it, you might refer to any number of explanations. One that I found useful is by Dr. Richard Bucher. The main point he makes is that according to the best available records, it really did happen as Luke wrote in his Gospel.

In our country this is also a time of change. President Bush is stepping down to be replaced by President Obama, a most historical time. These days you can be certain that tons of records will be available by for future generations, taking apart a multitude of thoughts and comments about the presidency of the first black man in U.S. history.

It is also a time of severe financial testing, both here and throughout the world. That's another reason why the Christmas season is being pushed by the retail merchants. However, no one expects to make much money this year.

But in all of this I am comforted to know that the words of Psalm 31 remain true:

But I trust in you, O LORD;
I say, "You are my God."

My times are in your hands;
deliver me from my enemies
and from those who pursue me.

Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.

The Christmas story reminds us so powerfully that our Lord did not leave us alone to be tossed this way and that by the changes of history, the power plays of politicians, the hatred between religious groups, the prejudices between races and troubles with finances. Greed, hatred, lust for power and all the other sins of mankind remain with us, but we are not alone. He is with us. Our Lord Jesus came to take up our infirmities and carry our sorrows. Before us stands a wonderfully strange future.

So in the midst of this busy, busy season of change, kneel again with the shepherds at the manger where lies the Prince of Peace and let the song of the angels re-echo in your heart: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests." We are not alone. He is with us.

Things Are Changing

A few of you have been following my blogging over these past three years. Up to now I've always posted my thoughts, research and comments on my own personal website. But that's changing, as I've noted in several earlier postings. Here's what's going on.

I'm changing the entire website. It will have the same title as this Blog, BUT it will be the depository of a new monthly e-zine, once James and I get it up and going. Oh, the 360+ Blogs that I've posted will still be there, but they will be archived. I'll not be adding any more Blogs to that list. Everything else in terms of blogging will happen here. I know, I know. I said I was going to use another service, but I've changed my mind. I like Blogger.com much better. It is easier to set up and easier to use.

In the past week I've been doing a ton of surfing and research. I'm looking for e-zines that do what I and my friends propose. We want to post a monthly e-zine that will provide ministry resources to Christians who live and work in local communities. We don't want to become another theological journal. We want to be a down-to-earth resource, based upon the Word of God and available in language a high schooler can understand. Oh, another thing. We want to speak from the perspective of Lutherans, people who believe in the wondrous grace of God, the supreme authority of the Bible and with faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, there's a whole lot more to being Lutheran, but you get the idea for now. So far I have not found any e-zine that does this, so perhaps in the vast world of cyberspace, there's room for our voice.

There are tons of challenges we Christians face every day. So I'm inviting pastors and lay leaders alike to send me contributions on family life, worship, Bible study, current events, challenges for other faiths, e.g. Muslims, sharing the Good News, personal stories and on and on. The only caveat is this: it must be readable.

I'll wait to hear from you. Hopefully, in God's good time we'll get this e-zine up and going sometime in September.