New Philadelphia News Across the Pastor’s Desk Tonight is our Quadrennial Review with the Provincial Elder’s Conference. I wish I could delay this column until tomorrow, but the deadline is today. So… I thought I would make a few suggestions for your summer reading. As always, you can start reading through the Bible any day of the year. You don’t have to wait for January 1. Alternately, I dare you to read one of the gospels, or Romans, or Revelation, ten times through over the course of the summer. Any takers? Not long ago I read Revelation multiple times over the course of three months. Needless to say I had a much better grasp of it after that effort, which turned out to be not much effort at all, but a pure pleasure. Next, I would highly suggest you read our church bulletin, every Sunday, in worship. You can read it on-line in PDF form, but it is not the same. We all miss you when you are not here. Bored with church? Remember that you must prime the pump---you must put something in before you can get something out. Other reading? I am really enjoying the new biography, The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. Wilbur and Orville’s father was a bishop in the Unity of the Brethren Church in Dayton, Ohio where the brothers owned a bicycle shop. The brothers never attended college---but gave us powered flight. Interestingly, in 1901, just two years before they flew, Wilbur suggested that powered flight was fifty years in the future. He was a better aviator than prophet. The description of Kitty Hawk at the turn of the last century is worth the price of the book to a North Carolinian. Clyde Manning recently recommended to me, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. It is the story of how the University of Washington rowing crew took Olympic Gold from the Nazis---and everyone else in the world, at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. This is a truly remarkable story of teamwork. At that time, the leading shell builder in the world, George Pocock had his workshop on the campus of the university. He made a comment to Joe Rantz, one of the crew members, that makes rowing sound almost
like a mystical experience saying: Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys (in the boat), you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you have ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars. Of course, faith played a roll in the boat, too. A great read. By the by, Clyde has mentioned to me that she would be interested in starting a book club. She is especially interested in reading southern authors. I know that she just finished Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. Speak to her if you are interested. I have long felt that the task of a Christian is to make the sacred secular and the secular, where possible, sacred. That is, we must take our Sunday religion into the workaday world, and we must look for those things in the workaday world that can help us become better servants of Christ. I recently profited from rereading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. Gerber does a good job of defining the various rolls a real entrepreneur must play in careful balance---the Technician, Entrepreneur, and Manager. All I can say is that I wish I had read this book---or something like it, at the start of my ministry. I would have been a more effective pastor. Some would ask, “Why would a pastor recommend anything other than the Bible or some religious work?” The answer is simple: Because the Holy Spirit inspires a thirst for knowledge in us, and it is not limited to the so-called “religious” sphere of life. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement, called himself “a man of one book, the Bible,” yet he read widely in almost every field, everything he read further informing his faith, and often illuminating the Bible. Zinzendorf, the 18th century patron of the renewed Moravian Church read widely, too. He even told his preachers to “read the opposition.” He wanted to hear what the naysayers were saying, the better to present his own faith. God Bless and Good Reading! The Pastor