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As Southern Baptists prepare to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Cooperative Program, an added facet of co-operation is emerging as a cause for celebration.
Southern Baptist Convention agencies have heightened their sharing of resources and services in seeking to fulfill Christ's Great Commission for evangelizing and discipling the world's masses, at a time when Southern Baptists' giving through the Cooperative Program has set yearly records in support of the convention's worldwide endeavors.
The inter-agency cooperation stems from a recognition that some of an agency's assignments from the SBC dovetail with another agency's assignment. A number of the North American Mission Board's evangelistic concerns, for example, may best be administered through Sunday school ministries, to which the SBC has assigned LifeWay Christian Resources (formerly the Sunday School Board) responsibility in assisting churches.
The new FAITH initiative, thus, ties o...
"By almost any standard of measurement, America is in trouble. ... And many people do not understand that God has the answers they so desperately need."
Well-known author, financial planner, and Christian businessman Larry Burkett spoke to the needs of Christian families, especially regarding their stewardship before God, at the February Executive Committee meeting in Nashville, Tenn. Burkett teamed with officials of Church Stewardship Services of LifeWay Christian Resources in announcing a new stewardship emphasis: How Much Is Enough? 30 Days to Personal Revival.
The emphasis is designed to "capture the attention and imagination of thousands of believers during the first quarter of the year 2000," Gary L. Aylor, program director for the LifeWay group, told the Executive Committee in introducing Burkett, president and founder of Christian Financial Concepts, Atlanta.
"In the areas of identity, priorities, personal financial management,...
Sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table didn't seem the same without the smell of fried chicken and hot biscuits in the air. But I knew I wouldn't enjoy that inviting fragrance and warm feeling again, at least not there. We had attended Grandmother's funeral that morning, and now sat at her kitchen table going through an old trunk that had rested in her bedroom for years.
It was an emotional time for me on more than one level. Just a few days earlier, I had received an invitation to come to the newly formed North American Mission Board and join Southern Baptists in the work of evangelism and church planting. Though I was a bivocational church planter and a Director of Missions' son, I was struggling with the thought of moving away from my loving parents, my exciting new church, and my rewarding career in the Chicago suburbs. Georgia, missions, the task of reaching the peoples of North America - all seemed very far away.
As if she knew what I was thinking, my mom s...
While the Cooperative Program is now well-known and well-established among Southern Baptist churches, there was a day when cooperative giving was a bold, new idea.
From 1919 to 1924, Southern Baptists participated in an unprecedented giving campaign that became the foundation for today's ongoing Cooperative Program. Prior to that time, special fund drives were common twice a year, one for Southern Baptist Convention causes and the other for needs in the states.
But by 1918, the pressing physical and spiritual needs of post-World War I Europe, as well as other missions, education, and benevolence causes led the Convention to look for new models of cooperative funding. In the face of worsening financial difficulties, SBC President J.B. Gambrell challenged Southern Baptists at the 1919 Convention "to adopt a program of work commensurate with reasonable demands upon us." (SBC Annual, 1919). The 4,200 messengers voted, without dissent, the undertaking of the Baptist 75 Million Campaign, where members in every church were asked to sign pledge cards and give over a five-year period.
Leaders such as George W. Truett, pasto...
More than ever, North Korea stands alone.
It looks out over Northern Asia - proud, defiant, solitary-like the statue of its late "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung, towering over Pyongyang, North Korea's capital.
But Kim's statue has an outstretched arm. After generations of self-imposed communist isolation, North Korea also is beginning to reach out. The nation is cracking open under the pressure of changing times and the enormous human suffering caused by recent natural calamities.
A look at the current context of North Korea reveals a communist state with virtually no access to the gospel of Christ. Pyongyang once was known as the "Jerusalem of the East;" more than 1,000 churches thrived in the north. Today, only two Protestant churches - both in the capital - operate openly. Atheism is official doctrine, and North Koreans are taught to revere the late leader Kim Il Sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, as all-knowing national fathers....
8:00 - Inspirational Music - Revival Choir and Sunday Celebration Orchestra, First Baptist Church, Snellville, GA, Rick Forbus, director
8:15 - Congregational Praise and Worship - Rick Forbus, minister of music, First Baptist Church, Snellville, GA
8:20 - Call to Order - Paige Patterson, president, Southern Baptist Convention, president, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC
Registration Report and Constitution of the Convention - Lee Porter, SBC registration secretary, retired, Lawrenceville, GA
8:30 - Prayer - Jerry Fortune, pastor, Mother Holmes Baptist Church, Sheffield, TX
8:35 - Committee on Order of Business (First Report) - Ken Whitten, chairman, pastor, Idlewild Baptist Church, Tampa, FL
8:40 - Welcome - Tru...
Pastors' Conference
June 13-14, 1999
Georgia Dome, Atlanta, Georgia
Empowered for Tomorrow
Sunday • June 13, 1999
Session I • 2:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Dr. Kie Bowman, pastor, Hyde Park Baptist Church, Austin, TX
Dr. Fred Lowery, pastor, First Baptist Church, Bossier City, LA
Dr. Morris H. Chapman, president and chief executive officer, Executive Committee of the SBC
Larry Burkett, president and founder, Christian Financial Concepts
Session II • 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Dr. Bob Record, president, North American Mission Board of the SBC
Dr. Jay Strack, evangelist, Jay Strack Evangelistic Association
Dr. John Maxwel...
New leadership in the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists advanced initiatives in ethics and accountability, and announced the creation of an emergency financial aid fund during their February national congress at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The evangelism offices of the North American Mission Board and New Orleans Seminary cosponsored this year's congress.
Issuing calls for both a code of ethics and a means of accountability during the business session, COSBE President Jerry Drace of Humboldt, Tenn., presented rough drafts for ten "Affirmations of Accountability," for the establishment of a council on accountability, and for a set of guidelines for denominational endorsement.
Calling the ten affirmations "our code of ethics," Drace said the proposed affirmations would affirm "before the Lord and each other" their accountability as vocational evangelists. Seeking integrity in all areas of an evangelist's life, Dr...
Poorly funded public schools, expensive private schools or the challenge of homeschooling - parents in inner-city Youngstown, Ohio, had few options for their children's education - until now.
This year, 624 students in urban Youngstown are attending their first year at Eagle Heights Academy, a public charter school privately run by Christians.
"We just wanted to give parents another choice for their children," said Gary Frost, pastor of Rising Star Baptist Church and member of the Greater Youngstown Coalition of Christians, a group of area churches which have united to provide educational, social, economic and urban renewal programs to the community.
"GYCC felt that education was the key to permanent community renewal in Youngstown," said Frost, a former president of the State Convention of Baptists in Ohio, former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and current Executive Committee member.
Charter schools, also calle...
U.S. News and World Report spent the past two years working with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to develop a reliable method for evaluating high schools. The research reveals that outstanding schools share several key traits. Conspicuously absent from that list of traits are strong extracurricular activities, detailed college advising, state-of-the-art facilities, or teachers with doctorate degrees. Instead, the research cites "partnerships between parents and schools that enhance the academic offerings of the school" as a key trait of top high schools. Principals from 80 percent of the outstanding high schools say parents are involved and supportive, compared with 68 percent at other schools.1
The study clearly indicates parental involvement has a positive effect on students' academic performance. The 1998 Metropolitan Life Survey of the American Teacher found that 87 percent of students who earn A's and B...
The Princeton Religion Research Center recently published statistics demonstrating the connection between religious faith and a person's character, health, and productivity. According to their findings, attending church services is the most significant factor in predicting a person's charitable giving habits and volunteer activity. They conclude:
• Young people (grades six through twelve) who attend church services at least once a month are half as likely as young people who do not attend church to engage in at-risk behaviors, such as substance abuse, sexual excess, truancy, vandalism, and drunk driving.
• Persons who attend church are more likely to help neighbors in need than non-churchgoers.
• A strong majority of Americans, 75 percent, say religious practice has strengthened their family relationships.
• Church attendance lowers the rate of suicide.
• The presence of active churches and synagogues reduces violent cri...
She came before you, not in prominence but in time. Yet in every way she readied me to love you. To say this woman's image would be stamped upon your being may seem a monstrous strike against your uniqueness. Yet here I must begin. I knew her first: not just before I knew you, but before I knew anyone. First knowledge emerges unsteady in the haze of infamy. It is umbilical, inseparate. What is it I remember of her? Some husky alto lullaby? Perhaps. I remember and yet do not. Life is dim and distant when it emerges from the womb. It is separate from motherhood, yet too amniotic to be very separate ... an embryonic reverie of gray amnesia ... a thereness not yet there. Remembering is not the issue; it is life. Being was her gift. Still, being has to wait to understand, to know itself. Being comes from the shadows and moves ever gradually toward the light. Without a sense of being, my knowledge of myself was not "mine" but "ours." The two of us were there as far back as it is possib...
Like most families, when we go on vacation we drive 500 miles to look for a place that serves home-cooked meals. One time we stopped to get our fix of southern cooking. The waiter who waited on us was service industry challenged. He couldn't get anything right. I thought, "If he gets minimum wage, he's overpaid." They say that an average person only uses 10 percent of their brain. In this case, the kid was way below average. His IQ was so low I thought he would stumble on it just walking out to help us. He needed some industrial strength counseling on customer service.
The worse the service, the more irritated I became. When I'm irritated, I use humor to make sure people understand I'm irritated. The waiter came by and I said, "You've been gone so long, I expected a much older guy to come back." My wife and daughters were getting irritated with me because they knew I was irritated with him. So they kicked me under the table and said, "Act like a C...
More Internet Insanity
The Internet censoring software, Cyber Patrol is now blocking access to the web site of the American Family Association (AFA). In 1995, Cyber Patrol decided to remove blocking from sites run by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). After protests from the organization, Cyber Patrol removed the block, and a representative from GLAAD joined the board. Shortly thereafter, the board voted to ban the AFA website, saying that the AFA uses harsh language toward homosexuality. For example, referring to homosexuality as "repulsive to Christians."
Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, charges that the AFA site has been blocked because gay rights groups "are attempting to win the public debate on homosexuality by suppressing information." He argues that while AFA's views are depicted as out of the mainstream, a New York Times poll found that a majority of Americans believ...


text: It has become a customary thing in the winter to read about people and their dogs being electrocuted by stray voltage in New York City. I advise my walkers to avoid anything at all with electricity on the streets and even to avoid the grates on the street because they can receive the stray voltage too. Please click the following link to read about a past occurrence where a woman and dog were electrocuted in the East Village.

subset: commoncrawl


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Simplicity 3236; ca. 1959; Misses' and Women's Set of Aprons: Transfer for applique included. Aprons gather into a waistband, have large patch pockets and tie ends. V. 1 & 2 have bib with square neckline and back button closing. V. 1 features gathered eyelet shoulder ruffles and contrasting bias tape. V. 2 features lace edging and lace insertion trim. V. 3 has contrasting pocket bands, waistband and tie ends with rick rack trim. V. 4 features embroidery and applique on pockets and matching pot holder and bias binding detail.
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'Rebels' Argues for Freedom As Pop Culture
Rebels is the book I was waiting for Brian Wood to attempt. Since long before Local, since before Northlanders since even before DMZ. It's the story of the American Revolution, told in a way that only Brian Wood can.
They shouldn't have been statesmen.
They shouldn't have been warriors, leaders, founders of not only a new political economy but new political thinking that would light the world for the next two centuries and beyond.
They shouldn't have been these things, the odds were stacked against them in a way that almost no odds were stacked against a single group. Not for any time in living memory before, and really not for at least 17 decades hence (well not quite 17 decades, when was Operation Overlord?).
They were dilettantes, winemakers and tobacco farmers, thinkers, merchants, dreamers, locked far away across an ocean in a place where their occasional rumblings would never tilt the balance of world powers, never disrupt the global economy of he 18th century. Well, all these farmers and merchants did was invent the global economy for the decades and centuries to come. All they gave the world was the idea that freedom should be popular culture.
Everything that can be said about the nation's Founding Fathers, it's never going to be enough. You'd run out server space before you run out of words to describe the full ramifications of their impact on human history. And that's really what makes the territory that writer Brian Wood, artist Andrea Mutti and colorist Jordie Bellaire cover in their new Dark Horse series, Rebels, so exceedingly difficult. The men who animate our nation's founding aren't really men, they're ideas, or more yet, they're ideals. Their faces appear on money, how much more mythological can you get? And rightly so.
But one of the first and smartest moves Wood makes as a storyteller is to remind us that unlike with Old World history, primarily the history of individuals (conquerors and kings like Alexander of Macedon or socially discounted artists who eventually rise up in the pecking order like Geoffrey Chaucer or Leonardo Da Vinci, Old World history's still primarily the history of the star-studded for the starstruck) is to evolve the story of Rebels to be the story of the ordinary masses.
The story of Washingtons and Jeffersons and Franklins make for great world history, but their story isn't the story of what makes America America. That latter story is the story of how quickly an idea can catch fire and spread throughout a land and then the entire world. It's a story that can be summed up in just two words, "Self Evident," the same words that appear on the original contract between a people and their government. It's the story, in other words, of the ordinary people who at first find themselves swept up in and then actively participate in the grandeur of human events.
One of the great cultural shifts with the birth of US history was the idea that history can be the story of us—of the ordinary and everyday people who find themselves caught up in and moved by and eventually come to participate directly in great events. And that's where Rebels begins, with the ordinary farmers of Vermont, battered and bullied by, in equal measure, the British war machine and the British Imperial government.
The work of telling the story, of actually framing the grand historical events and ideas and personages is fraught with difficulty. Focus too much on the ideals and the story bleeds into the mythological. Focus too much on the individual narratives that comprise the broader story and the story of the ideals are marginalized to the point of becoming nothing more than a history textbook. For Wood then, it's not only a matter of finding that one story that's best to not only describe but animate historical events, but also a question of finding those moments in that tale that bring out the best version of ideal and personal narrative blended together.
It's this aspect of Wood's and Mutti's storytelling that makes the opening sequence so poignant and so incredibly powerful. You'd think that maybe beginning with 1776 would be the right move, in terms of narrative. Why not? It's exactly when the starter pistol went of for the Revolution. Or maybe, if you were a little more far-reaching in your narrative view, you'd want to start the story a few months earlier or maybe even as early as 1775. This is after all the big show, the spectacle, the very thing people are paying for to get in to see.
But Wood doesn't make that obvious choice. Instead, just for a few pages, he dials things all the way back to 1768, to protagonist Seth Abbott as a young child (14 maybe, but no older than 16) learning to shoot for the first time. For the two pages prior we're treated to six panels that perfectly map Seth's day-to-day life on a farm in the Vermont land grants. A cabin in the woods close to nature, a taciturn, stern but also kind father. A mother who teaches Seth to read by way of candlelit bedtime stories. Chopping wood, carrying water, tracking through forest. An ordinary life in the 18th century, but also a good one. There's a Walt Whitman-esque beauty to Wood's prose.
We enter the story properly when Seth is learning to master the rifle, perhaps even taking his first shot. But already the stakes are high. This isn't an ordinary father-son bonding ritual where missing a shot simply means no deer for dinner. This is young Seth in a gillie suit, his father by his side, guiding him to take the shot. It's a tense moment. The Redcoats are here to enforce the illegal forced vacating of privately owned land in the New Hampshire grants. Seth's father leads a small band of farmers, and if Seth should miss this shot, there'll reinforcements called for, there'll be raids, there'll farmers throughout Vermont paying the price.
What Wood encapsulates beautifully is the idea of personal growth, even amid the most trying of circumstances. This is really the story at the heart of Rebels as much as it is the story at the heart of the American Revolution.
It would have been easy enough to tell the same story eight years later in 1776, with Seth aged in his early 20's. But think of what narrative impact would have been lost. As a young boy lining up his first shot, when the stakes are far higher than just meat for the dinner table, Seth's story becomes America's story. They shouldn't have been statesmen, but they became statesmen, and they mastered their world, and gave us ours. And in the same way, Seth doesn't completely understand the dynamics of the adult relationships at play, and the real risk of not making the shot.
But that tale of early mastery, of forgiveness and of consequence at an age where you're too young to understand the finer points but old to enough to grasp the ramifications of your action, that tale is the heart of Brian Wood's craft, and it's what makes Rebels so completely special—the tale of a young boy mastering a fraught political landscape, is also the tale of a fledging nation standing up for universal human rights. Standing up for the idea that human freedom should be popular culture.
There are other great literary trends in Wood and Mutti's Rebels. This isn't the "empty" landscape of writers from a time when America was already an established idea, writers like Fenimore Cooper or Emerson or Thoreau or even Whitman. Wood and Mutti's Revolutionary-era American landscape is inscribed with political violence. What Wood is able to communicate beautifully and render almost at a visceral level is the idea that the situation the farmers of the New Hampshire grants finds themselves in is not one that developed by chance. It is a landscape constructed by British political violence.
Shift your thinking, this isn't so much the beauty of the natural landscape you might find in a Western, this is closer to the blinking, uneasy, savage wilderness you'd expect to find in a work like Apocalypse Now. That's the beauty and the power of Wood's writing. And as a corollary of that, the political violence is both the root of and the cause of the Redcoats to enact military violence against the people of New Hampshire and Vermont. And against this, Wood moves the ordinary farmers like Seth Abbott, who fight, even more than with their muskets, with ideas. That all men are equal under law, that the truth of these rights are self-evident.
But arguably the most poignant technique Wood offers as a storytelling is one that's almost uniquely adapted for the historical romance—a style of prophetic storytelling. Here's the most cogent example of that technique from the first issue. It's the first moment of Seth and Mercy Tucker's blossoming romance. They touch hands for the first time, and walk a ways through the woods to farm where Mercy will hide Seth. And we see this play out in images and in dialog.
But in the captions, in the "voiceover," is where Wood really evolves the technique. This really is Walt Whitman territory, or mid-phase Scorsese from around Goodfellas through Casino, and now, the kind of movie storytelling Scorsese returned to with The Wolf of Wall Street. In the voiceover captions, even as we see Seth and Mercy hold hands for the very first time, Seth narrates the future that will unfurl just as sure as it has already happened. They do fall in love, they have a small ceremony to mark the occasion, "done quick but proper," as Seth narrates, and after that, the war for Independence.
Imagine this same technique used a different way. Imagine Seth were to encounter George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, to encounter them before their glories and before the grandeur history will impart to them. To see them as they are in the present moment, and at the same moment, unfurl in captions the historical grandeur we all know will come. Can you think of a more perfect way to tell a tale we all already know, and yet now, need to be made to experience?
In our time, over the course really of the last seven years or so, we've grown accustomed to the idea of small scale economy in comics. It isn't the 1970s anymore. We're not a generation that finds itself crawling from the wreckage of Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, hearings that nearly banned comics as a medium entirely. But we're also not a generation that faces flagging ambitions for comics becoming a mass medium, the way it was during wartime. Instead, we've come to accept our status as fans. That as fans we gather around certain works, and that if we're lucky these works might "transcend" they might reach other media, and eventually burst onto the big screen or make it big as a TV show on HBO. But Rebels leads us back to a very different kind of popular culture. To the kind of world where comics can immediately enter on an equal footing with other mediums, and, can enter honestly as art.
* * *
Rebels is published by Dark Horse and release on April 8th. Please enjoy a sneak peek which includes covers and some interior and promo art.


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'90210': The 'Beverly Hills' Cast Reunite for the New Summer Reboot
Seven of the original Beverly Hills, 90210 cast members reunite for Fox's tongue-in-cheek summer series, playing scripted versions of themselves trying to revive the '90s megahit that made them famous. Yes, really.
Also in this issue: a refresher course in last season's twistiest shows, including Grey's Anatomy and This Is Us; a first look at the new Inside the Actors Studio; a night on the set of The Terror: Infamy with George Takei; Elementary signs off; The Conners' John Goodman moonlights on The Righteous Gemstones; and the best of movies, streaming, sports and more.
Pick up a copy on newsstands now!


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Set of six dark galvanised pots
9.5cm x 11.5cm
shipped within 2 weeks
- Rust-resistant steel
- Durable and robust
- Includes drainage holes
Practical, traditional and made from heavier gauge dark galvanised steel, these robust pots make a useful and attractive addition to any garden.
Their simple, rustic styling is perfect for showcasing the natural beauty of colourful flowers, herbs and plants.
Supplied as a set of six, all pre-drilled with a 12mm drainage hole in the base.
Ø9.5cm x 11.5cm
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