Friday, August 11, 2006

Yesterday I was blessed to be able to go with Amy (my girlfriend) to serve at Forest Avenue Family Shelter, a women's homeless shelter in inner-city Kansas City, MO. Amy and I hung out with Bryan Peters, a recent Jewell graduate, current summer intern at the shelter, and future student at Palmer Theological Semenary. After a brief time of worship in song, Bryan did a message on Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 and the "new heaven and new earth" that will be created at the end of this world. The message particularly resonated with these ladies, who are poor and homeless. After the message, Amy and I served dinner to the women having come to the shelter for the night. Tuna casserole, green beans, fruit cocktail, and doughnuts: a good meal. After the meal, the ladies did their mandatory chores. Amy and I sat in the shelter office with Bryan, who did the intake for the ladies who were new at the shelter. What a glorious thing it was seeing the gospel being lived at Forest Avenue and in the work of the shelter's staff and seeing it confronting and comforting the poor, the opressed, the downtrodden, the meek, and the lowly! Praise God through the Lord Jesus Christ that by his perfectly obedient life, substitutionary atoning death, and life-giving resurrection I and all Christians should--by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ along--be freely given a perfect imputed righteousness; so that, having all things in Christ, we may, then, because of our great gratitude, be all things to all people in serving others in love. Truly, Christ is being magnified in the ministry of Forest Avenue Baptist Church, and I thank God that Amy and I were able to participate. Indeed, the experience was encouraging, and it reminded me that such a life of serving Christ and glorifying and magnifying and proclaiming his name should be the kind of life of all Christians. No matter by what means, every Christian's primary and ultimate goal in life should be that he glorify God. Tonight is the first friday of the official beginning of my ministry internship and the first time to go evangelizing as part of the internship. I will meet with Darin and whoever else comes in the Pleasant Valley Baptist Church east parking lot at 8:00 before we head out to Westport. I've invited all of Northland Reformed Church; however, this being the first week, in reality I expect that no one will show up from the church. I plan to have the pastor make an announcement again tomorrow (Sunday) during the worship services, and I will be there this week to talk to people after church about it. In addition, I may see if the church would allow Darin Smith to address the congregation tomorrow during the service at Northland, that he might exhort and encourage them to come evangelizing. Last Tuesday, I met with my "mentor" for my internship, Rev. George Syms, to discuss both baptism and conversion in general and his conversion and baptism. Just before the meeting, I listened to a John Piper sermon on Romans 4:11 ff. titled "How Do Circumcision and Baptism Correspond?" In the sermon, Piper examined Romans 4:11, a text that has been called the "lynchpin" in the argument for infant baptism. Piper was not persuaded by the arguments for infant baptism, and in the sermon he argued that, because of certain fundamental differences between God's people in the Old Testament--Israel--under the Old Covenant, and God's people in the New Testament--the Church--under the New Covenant, it is not appropriate to baptize infants as a ritual directly connected to the Old Testament ritual of circumcision. I agree with Piper (and Paul): from what I see in the New Testament, baptism was from the beginning something done by adults as a public proclamation of their conversion and as a dramatic reenactment of their death and resurrection with and in Christ. Unfortunately, the Reformed tradition, along with the Catholic church and the reformers themselves, blew it on this issue. My favorite theologians--John Calvin, Martin Luther, Theodore Beza, and many others--were wrong on this issue. I intend to do some research soon on the movements during the 16th century Reformation that did advocate adult baptism, the Anabaptist movements, and why the practice of adult and believers' baptism was so controversial, such that the Anabaptists were opposed not only by the Catholic church but also by all of the magisterial reformers (i.e., Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et. al.). I also talked to Rev. Syms about his own conversion and baptism. Rev. Syms was baptized as an infant, being in a (theologically liberal) PC-USA church. At 18 years old, his Christian life truly began after he (with his family) moved to Florida (Miami, I think) and he began going to an excellent church having an excellent pastor. At the church, he was greatly influenced and encouraged by his Sunday school teacher who took Rev. Syms under his wing. But even more influential and decisive was his job at a Christian radio station in Miami. Working there, Rev. Syms was greatly encouraged by the radio station's staff of committed Christians, and he was convicted by God that he might commit to and follow Christ. He did. With his resonant bass speaking voice, Rev. Syms actually spent a summer as a missionary in Liberia working as a DJ for a Christian radio station there. In other news, I am nearly finished with my third semester of (Classical) Greek, which I've been taking as an independent study this semester. I have two more weeks of work to finish and one more quiz before I take the final exam the final week of August. I'm actually excited about this week's work, for I get to translate (among many other things) a passage adapted from the Gospel of John: John 11:1, 3-5, 17, 19-27, and 38-44 (in my textbook, the verses omitted in Greek are given in English). What a cool assignment! Studying at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK, next year, I will be taking a fourth semester (acutually, a trimester) of Greek, whence I will begin reading real Greek from (one of) the Ancient Greek writers--Plato, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Hesiod, etc. That will be interesting and challenging, and I eagerly anticipate it.