A Good Preacher...

I found this at Rev. K.C Wahe's blog:

I came across this story about Clarence Jordan, who was instrumental in founding
Habitat for Humanity. He visited an integrated church in the Deep South. He was
surprised to find such a large church so thoroughly integrated not only black and white,
but rich and poor. So he asked the old hillbilly preacher, “How did you get the church this
way?” The preacher said, “Well, when our preacher left our small church, I went to the
Deacons and said, ‘I’ll be the preacher.’ And the first Sunday, I opened the book and read, ‘As many of you as has been baptized into Jesus has put on Jesus, and there is no longer any Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, males or females, because you is all one in Jesus.’ “Then I closed the book and said, ‘If you one with Jesus, you one with all kinds of folks, and if you ain’t, you ain’t.”
So Jordan asked what happened after that and the preacher said, “Well, the Deacons took
me into the back room and told me they didn’t want to hear that kind of preaching any more.”
Jordan asked, “What’d you do?” He said, ‘I fired them Deacons. I preached that church down to four people. And not long after that it grew and grew and grew. And I found out that revivals sometimes don’t mean bringing people in, but getting people out who don’t love Jesus.’ (William H. Willimon, Eating and Drinking Among the Lost, Pulpit Resource, Vol. 35, No. 4, Year C, p. 24)

On Reading the Bible

Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned
scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of
professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically
involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
Thomas Merton

A Prayer on Service

Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest;
to give, and not to count the cost,
to fight, and not to heed the wounds,
to toil, and not to seek for rest,
to labor, and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do thy will.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1566)

Presbyterian (USA) Multicultural Congregations

To qualify as multicultural, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregation must have members from two or more racial-ethnic groups, with no more than 80 percent in any one racial-ethnic group. In 2006 we find that:

• 291 congregations are multicultural (less than 3 percent of the total, but up from 120–125 in 1996).
• Most are relatively small, with a median membership of 84, compared to a median of 105 for all congregations.
• Two-thirds have a white majority (187 or 64 percent). In 29 (10 percent) the majority is African American; in 14 (5 percent), Hispanic; in 13 (4 percent), Asian; in 9 (3 percent), Native American; and in 3 (1 percent), other.
• No one racial-ethnic group has a majority of the membership in 36 congregations; of these, 15 are located in the New York City area.
• Overall, 37 states and Washington, D.C., have one or more multicultural congregations, with concentrations in New York (44), California (39) and New Jersey (22).
• The largest percentages of congregations that are multicultural are in Massachusetts (8 of 36; 22 percent), Arizona (6 of 37; 14 percent) and Hawaii (1 of 7; 14 percent).

Press here to read more about the research

A Doxology...

"And now unto him who is able to keep us from falling and lift us from the dark valleys of despair to the mountains of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy; to him be power and authority, for ever and ever. Amen".
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Prayer as Uprising...

"To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."
Karl Barth

On Prayer and Service

"A Sister who does not pray cannot remain with us -- she might as well go. Through prayer you will believe and through belief you will love -- through love you will serve."
Mother Theresa

A Prayer by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you:
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness,
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me…
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before me.
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised.

Go and Plant Churches of All Peoples

An important insight about church planting as evangelism among the America's shifting population...

"Today's church plants often target immigrants, which means adjusting church traditions to diverse ethnic cultures. "Any denomination that has an aggressive church-planting program and doesn't have a bias toward the white community will be largely ethnic," says David Ripley, who leads ethnic ministries at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. "If we are challenging people to reach their neighbors, the reality is that the neighborhood is changing." As an example, he notes that 25 languages are spoken at Wheaton North High School, formerly dominated by WASP students".

For more insights read the entire Christianity Today article

Grad Student Etiquette

I identified with this cartoon...

Paul Hiebert...An amazing life!

Paul Gordon Hiebert, Distinguished Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, arguably the world's leading missiological anthropologist, died on March 11 of cancer. He was 74.

Paul combined attributes not easily combined: anthropologically—and theologically—informed scholarship and a passion for God's global missionary purposes. The story of how Paul fruitfully merged these commitments is worth telling.


Read the entire article here

Francis Bacon on Methods...

"If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must
expect to employ methods never before attempted".

Auditoire de Calvin

This was the place in Geneva where Calvin began expounding Reformed Theology in 1536. It was also used by the reformer John Knox, during his exile there in the 1550’s. Here Knox ministered to an English-speaking refugee congregation and developed many of the ideas that were to be influential in the Scottish Reformation. Later, it became a place used by numerous Protestant refugee groups including Italian Waldensians, Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterians. Will we be able to re-discover this multi-cultural /multi-lingual legacy of our Reformed identity?

Census Data: Diversity in the US

Number of Immigrants Hits Record 37.5M- By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly one in five people living in the United States speaks a language at home other than English, according to new Census data that illustrate the wide-ranging effects of immigration.

The number of immigrants nationwide reached an all-time high of 37.5 million in 2006, affecting incomes and education levels in many cities across the country. But the effects have not been uniform.

In most states, immigrants have added to the number of those lacking a high-school diploma, with almost half of those from Latin America falling into that category.

However, at the other end of the education spectrum, Asian immigrants are raising average education levels in many states, with nearly half of them holding at least a bachelor's degree.

"There is no one-size-fits-all policy that you could apply for all immigrant groups," said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau. "I think most of the attention has been on low-skilled workers coming from Mexico. But we have 10 million immigrants from Asia, a number that's growing."

The Census Bureau on Wednesday released a host of demographic data about the nation, including statistics on immigration, housing, education and employment.

The data come from the American Community Survey, an annual survey of 3 million households that has replaced the Census Bureau's long-form questionnaire from the once-a-decade census. It does not distinguish between illegal immigrants and those who are in the U.S. legally.

Mather analyzed the differences in education levels among immigrants from Asia and those from Latin America. Together, the groups account for about 80 percent of all immigrants.

About 48 percent of Asian immigrants held at least a bachelor's degree, compared with about 11 percent of immigrants from Latin America. Among people born in the U.S., about 27 percent were college graduates.

"Driving this are people coming from China and India," Mather said. "They are either coming with a bachelor's degree, or they are coming with visas and getting degrees once they arrive."

At the other end of the spectrum, 47 percent of adult immigrants from Latin America lacked a high school diploma, compared with 16 percent of Asian immigrants and 13 percent of people born in the U.S.

Those numbers are fueling overall increases in the number of high-school dropouts in four states: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Texas, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"It used to be the poor southern states that had low levels of education and income. Now it is the high-immigration states as well," Frey said. "But that isn't to say that the second or third generation won't do better, because they will," he added. "There is upward mobility."

Among the other highlights from the 2006 data released by the Census Bureau:

_Massachusetts led all states in college graduates, with 37 percent of adults 25 and older holding at least a bachelor's degree. West Virginia came in last with 16.5 percent.

_Mississippi led all states in high-school dropouts, with 22.1 percent of adults 25 and older not graduating from high school. Minnesota was at the other end, with only 9.3 percent.

_California led the nation in immigrants, at 27 percent of the state's population, and in people who spoke a foreign language at home, at 43 percent.

_West Virginia had the smallest share of immigrants, at 1.2 percent. It also had the smallest share of people speaking a foreign language at home, at 2.3 percent.

_New York residents had the longest average commuting time to work at nearly 31 minutes, while North Dakota had the shortest, at 15.5 minutes.

_More Americans are working later in life. In 2006, 23.2 percent of people age 65 to 74 were still in the labor force _either working or looking for work — up from 19.6 percent in 2000.

_Fewer households consist of a married couple with children — 21.6 percent in 2006, down from 23.5 percent in 2000.

What Does the Media Mean by "Presbyterian"

This is a Colorado journalist's attempt to answer that question...
A look at Presbyterian alphabet soup and what it means.

To follow Presbyterian news updates, outsiders need to learn a few key facts.

The Presbyterian Church in America is not the same thing as the American Presbyterian Church. Also, Orthodox Presbyterians are not to be confused with Bible Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians, Associate Reformed Presbyterians or Evangelical Presbyterians.
This Presbyterian alphabet soup became less complicated in 1983, when the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. joined with the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., the so-called Southern branch. This created the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which today has about 2.3 million members.

Is that clear? If so, take a deep breath because Presbyterian affairs are about to get more complicated as new divisions and unions reshape the churches that trace their roots to John Calvin and his Reformed branch of Protestantism.

Read the daily camera article

Will "Minorities" Change US. Television?

"Hispanics and Asians remain the fastest-growing segments of the national population, with TV households increasing by 4.4% among Hispanics and 3.9% among Asians over last year, according to data released by Nielsen Co. Thursday.

Nielsen’s latest National Universe Estimates, the estimates of U.S. television households, also show that the number of Black or African-American television households grew faster than the national U.S. average, 1.5% versus 1.3%, respectively.

In local markets, Nielsen estimates that Los Angeles will continue to remain the No. 1 Hispanic market, followed by New York, Miami, Houston and Chicago.

Los Angeles also has the country’s largest Asian community, followed by New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and Chicago, according to Nielsen".

Read the entire Multichannel News report

Are You Learned or a Learner?

"In the times of rapid change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer (American social writer, recipient of the presidential medal of Freedom under president Reagan)

Dead Sea Scrolls

Maricela and I had a chance to visit the exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the San Diego Museum of Natural History. It was an experience of a lifetime. We would highly recommend it to anybody.

Amigo...

Alfredo: When as teenagers we used to play baseball in Caracas I had no idea of the things God had for you in the future. But you have it in you, you are a child of Abraham! Congratulations on your new position as Director of Multicultural Ministries at Downey Presbyterian Church.

Alfredo Jose: Cuando jugabamos beisbol en Colinas de Bello Monte ni me imaginaba las cosas que Dios tenia para ti en el futuro. Pero "el futuro se te viene encima". A ti, hijo de Abraham te felicito por tu nueva funcion como Director de Ministerios Multiculturales en la Iglesia Presbiteriana de Downey.

Merton on Results...

In a letter to young activist Jim Forrest

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion. . .

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see."