Month: May 2006

Jenny and I are off to Annual Conference. Linda has our cell phone numbers and can reach us in case of an emergency. Also Stephen Ministers are on call.

Posted by John

From Rev. Susan Daniel-Brey,

Habitat for Humanity of Montgomery County is currently in the process of taking applications for our newest Partner Family. Construction will begin this summer in Cherryvale, once a family is selected. If you are interested in becoming involved in other ways, please contact us using my phone or the e-mail address shown above.

I don’t want to post Susan’s phone or email online, but if you get in touch with the church office, we’ll be glad to pass any information along.

Posted by John

A friendly reminder that our “Wednesday Casual Contemporary Service” begins not this Wednesday, but the next (June 7).

Posted by John

Because of Annual Conference this week, there will be no The Overload Syndrome book study this week on Tuesday or Thursday. We’ll pick up next week.

Posted by John

Annual Conference begins next Wednesday, May 31 and ends Saturday, June 3. John, Jenny and every other pastor in the Kansas East Conference will be at Baker University in Baldwin City. Linda will have our cell phone numbers in case of an emergency. We’ll be back for Sunday worship.

Posted by John

The second round of t-shirts have arrived and are available for pick-up in the church office. Just a reminder to wash them inside out in cold water.

Posted by John

All the thermostats are now hooked up and the AC is working throughout the building. These are programable thermostats. If you are too hot or too cold press the red up arrow to move the temperature up and the blue down arrow to move the temperature down. The thermostat will hold it at that temperature for 4 hours before reverting back to its program. I must say the office will be a much more pleasant place to work this summer.

Posted by John

The church library now has a copy of the movie version of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe available on DVD for checkout.

Posted by John

Yesterday evening the youth group planted five Easter Redbuds on the west side of the church building. Be sure to drive by and take a look.

Posted by John

Jenny and I have recently been alerted to the fact that some people would have real difficulty in attending a 9:00 am service because of health issues. We’re considering what The Book of Worship calls “A Midweek Service of Prayer and Testimony” or an “Evening/Night Service of Praise and Prayer” as supplements, but not complete replacements, for the Sunday Service. These would be brief services, possibly Wednesday evening in the chapel. We would appreciate any input you have to offer.

Posted by John

The following was published in the May 16 edition of The Christian Century. My own additions are in [brackets].

With the expected release this month of the film version of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, we offer these reminders of some of the more prominent errors and fanciful ideas that the novel presents as true or plausible:

• Parchments discovered in Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale contain information about the ancient Priory of Sion, a secret society that has been guarding the knowledge that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and that their descendants were later part of the Merovingian line of French kings. [Anyone who has read about the Merovingian line of French kings can appreicate the audacity of this claim.] Actually, these documents–and the Priory of Sion–have been exposed as a 20th-century hoax. [Nicely debunked by CBS’s 60 Minutes recently.] The documents were the subject of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, a book generally regarded as without scholarly merit. (Baigent and Leigh accused Brown of plagiarizing their book. In April a judge in London rejected their claim.)
• Publication of the secret “Q” document (which is being guarded by the Priory of Sion) would overturn the church’s account of Christian origins. Actually, the existence of the Q document is a scholarly hypothesis regarding the source of Gospel materials. This hypothetical document is well known to–indeed, it is posited by–Christian scholars.
• The emperor Constantine at the fourth-century Council of Nicea upgraded Jesus’ status to divinity in order to prop up his own political power. Actually, all parites at the council agreed that Jesus was divine; the issues was the nature of that divinity. [Quickly summarized: was Jesus of the same or similiar substance of the Father? The council’s answer: the same.]
• The early church adopted Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the canonical Gospels because they omit earthly aspects of Jesus’ life; the church rejected gnostic gospels for the canon because those writings speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. Actually, the opposite is more nearly the case. The Gospels present an at-times scandalously human Jesus, whereas the gnostic gospels assume a radical body-soul dualism and display an antagonism between God and all things material. [The gnostics were also convinced that they had secret knowledge about who Jesus really was, so one can see why Dan Brown would by sympathetic to them, he is, in effect, a modern day gnostic.]
• References to a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene “kept recurring in the gospels” and the marriage is a “matter of historical record.” No such reference or record exists.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper mural depicts John, the “beloved disciple,” as a woman. Actually, Renaissance conventions called for John to be depicted with long hair.