Rainey Prays on Some Days

Introduction Modern technology enables churches to produce bulletins much faster than in the days of typewriters and white out.  Yet I am not so sure the quality is any better.  How can churches continue to produce low-quality bulletins?  It is easy—continue to apply the seven bad habits of highly ineffective church bulletins.  Habit One:  The law of all caps USE ALL CAPS ALL OVER THE BULLETIN.  IT WILL SLOW READING SPEED BY 14-20 PERCENT AND IRRITATE FIRST-TIME VISITORS. Habit Two: The Law of the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Font Use a small font, preferably smaller than size 10.  This will cause senior saints to shout, but they won’t be saying “Glory!”  Do this only if you intend to issue magnifying glasses with your bulletin. Habit Three: The Law of Centering Center all text. This makes the information harder to read than left-justified text.  Really, you should use centered text only for emphasis and place a box around it.  When writing the bulletin, this is one time

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City yesterday with my wife and several of her colleagues from Hawthorne Christian Academy . One exhibit that stood out to me was the Ishtar Gate exhibit , a brick wall that dates to ca. 600 BC in the city of Babylon. The wall has glazed figures of lions and the prophet Daniel would have walked by the walls frequently while living in Babylon. The lions depicted on the walls were associated with the goddess Ishtar, and people could follow the lions on the walls to her temple. Daniel's escape from the lions' den seems to show the powerlessness of Babylonian gods vs. Yahweh, the god of Israel. Nice kitty!

After the lengthy cultic interruption in Exodus 25-31, the narrative resumes in Exodus 32 with the people anxious because Moses has not returned from the mountaintop. This is subtly hinted at in the text, as the Torah commentary notes the transition in Exodus from “the man, Moses” in 11:3 to “this man Moses” in 32:1. People will not wait indefinitely when there is a leadership vacuum. This is why leadership transitions are so critical. Show me a church without a pastor, and I will show you a church at risk. In the absence of viable leadership, people will go back to what they know—to old habits and notions—and in this case the polytheism of Egypt. Despite their grand experience of deliverance under Moses' leadership, his absence up on the mountain with God leaves them vulnerable. It becomes obvious in this episode too that Aaron is certainly not a suitable understudy. Despite making a golden calf, Aaron clings to the notion that the calf represents God's throne. This is the

Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser lectured at Central Bible College --where I attended as an undergraduate-- around 1990. While there, he spoke on the Old Testament missions mandate and noted that there is no historical record of a spiritual revival in Egypt as predicted at the end of Isaiah 19 . This would be a good time to pray for it to happen.

In 1995, someone found Richard Foster 's book Prayer on a desk at the high school where I was a regular substitute teacher. I was also a pastor in town at the time, so the office assumed it was mine—it wasn’t—and insisted I take it since no one else claimed it. Like many of the books I have acquired over the years, it ended up on a bookshelf in my basement, unread. Over ten years later, I finally decided to start reading Foster’s book at a time when I needed to completely rebuild my spiritual life. When I got the book, the world was very different than it is now. I had never been on the Internet and had no idea what technological innovations were about to be let loose on the world. I grew up under the Cold War threat of nuclear bombs; fortunately, that threat never materialized. But I never suspected how we would soon be bombarded with something seemingly so innocuous and yet potentially so dangerous—information. All of that information is taking its toll as more and more peop