Dunker Journal

GRACE BRETHREN PASTOR AND HISTORIAN David Plaster has died suddenly.  He was pastor of Columbus Grace Brethren Church, which I believe is one of the largest North American congregations of Schwarzenau Brethren descendants. He wrote Finding Our Focus, A History of the Grace Brethren Church.

IT IS SPRING REVIVAL SEASON again, and here is a list of some revival meetings that are in progress or will be soon. (Thanks to Alert Reader, Naomi Helman of the Falling Spring Congregation).

(Date, Congregations, Evangelist)
March 7-14, Shank’s Ch/Brethren (S. Pa. District),
Bro. Wilmer Horst, from Falling Spring (S. Pa.)

March 14-21, Heidelberg Ch/Brethren (ANE District),
Bro. Marvin Shenk, from White Oak (ANE)

March 19-28, Upton Ch/Brethren (S. Pa.),
Bro. Luther Patches, from White Oak

March 21-28, Cocalico Ch/Brethren (ANE),
Bro. Daniel Lehigh, from Upper Conewago (S. Pa.)

March 21-24, Chiques Ch/Brethren (ANE),
Bro. Harold Yeager, from Chambersburg (S. Pa.)

March 26-April 4, White Oak Ch/Brethren (ANE),
Bro. Glenn Miller, from Pleasant Hill (S.Pa.)

March 28-April 4, Pleasant Hill Ch/Brethren (S. Pa.),
Bro. Dan Miller, from Upper Conewago

March 28-30, Maple Grove Ch/Brethren (N. In.),
Bro. Harold S. Martin, from Pleasant Hill

March 28-31, Blue River Ch/Brethren (N. In.),
Bro. Craig Alan Myers, Bro. Travis Hartman (both from Blue River), and Bro. Harold S. Martin

March 28-31, Middle Creek Ch/Brethren (ANE),
Bro. Mike Hess

April 4-11, Welsh Run Ch/Brethren (Mid-Atlantic District),
Bro. Mark Bucher, from Brunswick, ME (ANE)

April 4-11, Mummert’s (Upper Conewago) Ch/Brethren,
Bro. Carl Groff, from White Oak

April 11-18, Hade’s/Falling Spring Ch/Brethren (S. Pa.),
Bro. Craig Alan Myers, from Blue River (N. In.)

April 18-21, Midway Ch/Brethren (ANE),
Bro. Robert DiSalvio, from Amwell (ANE)

If your congregation is having revival services soon, I’d be glad to mention them here.

THERE ARE SEVERAL E-MAIL DISCUSSION LISTS with the Church of the Brethren as their focus.

ChurchoftheBrethren (A BRF-oriented group)

COB-L (a broader Church of the Brethren group)

The discussion on both tends to be sporadic and uneven; however, they do provide a venue for some discussion on Brethren-related topics.

Here’s a story in anticipation of the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins.  I read it in John Piper’s The Pleasures of God.
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Once there was a land ruled by a wicked prince. He had come from a foreign country and enslaved all the people of the land and made them miserable with hard labor in his coal mines across the deep canyon. He had built a massive trestle for the trains that carried his slaves across the canyon to the mines each morning, and it was heavily guarded.

Two men were still free in this land—one old and the other young. They lived on an inaccessible cliff overlooking the trestle. They hated the trestle, and they resolved together to blow it up. They planned and they prayed and they reminded themselves of the reality of heaven.

The night for the deed came. Their hearts were pounding with joy. It was a hard plan. It would be possible to time the guard’s trek so that the explosive could be carried quickly to the vulnerable spot on the trestle. But it is certain that the man would be seen on the way back. To make sure the trestle blew up the young man would detonate it by hand on the trestle.

But they believed in heaven and they loved the people of the land. And so even this sacrifice made their hearts leap with joy. The hour came. They folded their map, stood from the table, and embraced each other. When the young man got to the door, he turned with the explosive on his back, looked at the old man, and said, “I love you, Father.” And the old man took a deep breath—with joy—and said, “I love you too, Son.”

HOW TO HANDLE unintended sudden acceleration in your vehicle.  Is it possible that the deaths attributed to this phenomenon are due to operator incompetence rather than manufacturer defect?

CLIMATEGATE: ‘The Science is Settled,’ They Told Copernicus. Indeed, doesn’t the whole global warming thing remind one of the situation with Galileo?

THE CHURCH OF THE BRETHREN PULPIT VACANCY LIST is updated.  May I put in a good word for Dunnings Creek (Middle PA), Conemaugh (Western PA), Purchase Line (Western PA), and Crab Orchard (Virlina), Pyrmont (S/C Indiana), and Wakeman’s Grove (Shenandoah) as congregations that would appreciate a Bible-preaching pastor?

INDIA PLACES a moratorium on approval of a genetically-modified source of nicotine.

BRIDGEWATER COLLEGE PROFESSOR HAS his book reviewed in The Wall Street Journal.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF HOMESCHOOLING is up.

IF YOU CAME HERE because of the recent Messenger article, note that this is Dunker Journal, not “Dunkard Journal.” But, in any case, welcome!

THE NANNY STATE STRIKES again.

HOW MILTON FRIEDMAN Saved Chile.

RESEARCH BY HURRICANE SCIENTISTS MAY FORCE the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.

FROM WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, who died two years ago this day, and written in 1962:

But, in the long view, we all stand sentenced to death, and whether it comes in 1995 or tomorrow makes no difference. That is why the morality of the last days always applies to what is “finally important in human experience.” All our techniques of social welfare, all our science, all our comfort, all our liberty, all our democracy and foreign aid and grandiloquent orations—all that means nothing to me and nothing to you in the moment when we go. At that moment we must put our souls in order, and the way to do that was lighted for us by Jesus, and since then we have had need of no other light. That is what is finally important; it has not changed; and it will not change. It is truth, which shall ever abide in the future. And if it is “reactionary” to hold a truth that will be valid for all future time, then words have lost their meaning, and men their reason.

HUNTER BAKER SAYS that the West should stop apologizing for the Crusades. I’ve always thought that the popular description of the Crusades leave out the crucial fact that they were defensive in nature.

A MAJORITY OF AMERICANS THINK the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

FROM CHARLES SPURGEON, September 14, 1856:

Remember how your fathers, in times gone by, defended God’s truth, and blush, ye cowards, who are afraid to maintain it!

Remember that our Bible is a blood-stained book; the blood of martyrs is on the Bible, the blood of translators and confessors. The pool of holy baptism, in which many of you have been baptized, is a blood-stained pool: full many have had to die for the vindication of that baptism which is “the answer of a good conscience toward God.”

The doctrines which we preach to you are doctrines that have been baptized in blood,—swords have been drawn to slay the confessors of them; and there is not a truth which has not been sealed by them at the stake, or the block, or far away on the lofty mountains, where they have been slain by hundreds. It is but a little duty we have to discharge compared with theirs. They were called to maintain the truth when they had to die for it; you only have to maintain the truth when taunt and jeer, ignominious names and contemptuous epithets are all you have to endure for it.

What! do you expect easy lives? While some have led through seas of blood, and have fought to win the prize, are you wearied with a slight skirmish on dry land? What would you do if God should suffer persecuting days to overtake you? O craven spirits, ye would flee away, and disown your profession!

Be ye the pillar and ground of the truth. Let the blood of martyrs, let the voices of confessors, speak to you. Remember how they held fast the truth, how they preserved it, and handed it down to us from generation to generation; and by their noble example, I beseech you, be steadfast and faithful, tread valiantly and firmly in their steps, acquit yourselves like men,—like men of God, I implore you!

Shall we not have some champions, in these times, who will deal sternly with heresies for the love of the truth,—men who will stand like rocks in the center of the sea, so that, when all others shake, they stand invulnerable and invincible? Thou who art tossed about by every wind of doctrine, farewell; I own thee not till God shall give thee grace to stand firm for his truth, and not to be ashamed of him nor of his words in this evil generation.

GEORGE WILL:

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

TODAY IS NATIONAL PANCAKE DAY at IHOP. In the Fort Wayne area, donations are being received for the local crisis pregnancy center.

THE OBAMACARE PLAN HAS to be one of the biggest anti-choice schemes around. As the premier of Newfoundland says, “It’s my health, it’s my choice,” when asked why he came to the United States for surgery he couldn’t receive at home.

SO, THE GLOBAL WARMING PEOPLE USE a whole lot of fuel, time, and other resources to attend a conference in Bali?  As Professor Reynolds says, I’ll take them seriously when they take it seriously. Haven’t they heard of Skype?

I’D RATHER BE a “global warming denier” than a “resurrection denier.”  For one, the increase in temperature is in the range of a few degrees; for the latter, the increase in temperation is, shall we say, more significant.

KEVIN DEYOUNG REVIEWS Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. He points out the problems with the book, and with McLaren, here.

McLaren’s actual approach to argumentation makes probing conversation more difficult. When he positions himself as a martyr (243) and equates attacks on him with attacks on the abolitionists (87), it hardly encourages disagreement.

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…it is hard to really believe he thinks evangelical theology is anything other than oppressive barbarism. People who read Genesis in the traditional way have been “brainwashed.”

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McLaren’s theology depends on cherrypicking the books and themes he likes best. Why develop your narrative of the Bible based on Genesis, Exodus, and Isaiah? Why not Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus? Is it because Leviticus is about laws and holiness? Why not Deuteronomy, 1 Kings, and Jeremiah? At the very least, don’t skip the second half of Exodus when it doesn’t fit the paradigm, or the parts in Isaiah that speak of God’s judgment and Christ’s atonement for sins. And why is 1 Corinthians the model for the purpose of the church? 1 Corinthians a fine book, but why not Ephesians or something from the Pastoral Epistles or Hebrews? It’s hard not to conclude that although McLaren makes an effort to find chapters to prove his points, he’s not terribly concerned to take the whole counsel of Scripture into account.

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For all the talk of being new (xi) and at the same time ancient (255), McLarenism is neither. It is old fashioned liberalism.

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McLaren’s Christianity is not new and certainly not improved. I don’t believe you can even call it Christianity. It is liberalism dressed up for the 21^st century. We can only hope this wave of liberalism fades as dramatically as did the last.

ATHEIST CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS GETS what some of our Brethren do not:

I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

KEN STARR, the esteemed constitutional scholar and law dean at Pepperdine University, has been named president of Baylor University in Texas.

I’M NOT USUALLY ONE to promote commercial outfits, but I have been impressed by the selection and value of the company, OnlineShoes.com.

HEH:  From the Beacon Heights Church of the Brethren, last Friday:

We are disappointed to announce that the Undoing Global Warming weekend event has been postponed due to the recent snow storms on the east coast.  Snow has caused cancellation of and re-routing of Amtrak service and made it impossible for Tom Benevento to travel to Fort Wayne from his home in Virginia.

Related: Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.

More here.  It appears that the Global Warming movement is looking more and more like Piltdown Man.

OPPONENTS OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE HAVE FACED persecution in California.

Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, passed easily.

The reaction of some Prop 8 opponents – the self-proclaimed champions of tolerance – was swift and fierce. They moved to harass and persecute Prop 8 supporters.

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