Servants and Servanthood
by Foy Valentine

Servants.

It’s a word straight out of yesterday.

Like shepherds and slaves, kings and princes, concubines and burnt offerings, chariots and cherubim, the word “servant” is so much a concept out of the past that it requires translation. For people living in an age of personal computers, remote controls, automated teller machines, fast foods, instant coffee, and jet air travel (I’m writing this at 30,000 feet going nearly 600 miles an hour), the word “servant” needs to be pondered, thought about, considered. After all, not many people in today’s world would tell you that they have servants. Certainly none in our acquaintance would admit to being a servant. How demeaning. How un­American. How humiliating. How common.

Still and nevertheless, let’s think for a little bit about servants and servanthood.
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Going Public: A Bold Church in Changing Culture
Molly T Marshall

Ephesians 2:11-22 (NRSV)

I am grateful to be here especially at this tender time in the life of your church. The transition from one pastor to another is a tender time. I am grateful to be here, especially as one of Dr. Browning Ware’s final invitations in his distinguished pastorate. (I am also grateful that he announced his plans to retire before I came—I have been blamed for such things!)

The favorite designation for the church given by the earliest Baptists was simply the “gathered community.” Our forebears had a sense of the church’s particular role responsibility both within its membership and to the world. It was to celebrate and support; it was to challenge, even resist. It was to forgive and heal. They understood with all the people of God the call to witness our inward sense of unity in outward ways: the life of the church and the experience people have within it are to manifest the one­ness we find in the Spirit. They understood and now call to our remembrance the reality that the church is to go public.
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What Does it Cost to Build a Memory?
Hal Haralson

I  lay on my back and stared in the darkness at the ceiling of the Holiday Inn motel room in Colorado Springs.

In the other bed lay my ten year old son Brad.

The question that kept pounding in my head was, how much is “too much” money to spend on a three day fishing and camping trip with my son?

My mental adding machine came up with: Plane fare, car rental, meals, and lodging.

The total was a staggering amount for just three days and I felt guilty about the extravagance, partially because I didn’t have the money and partially because I had enjoyed the trip as much as Brad.
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Where Are You, Adam?
Marc Gellman

An Angel came to me and told me that all the great questions short. There are more guarded ways of saying this, but that is the way it happened. I asked the angel, “What do you mean, all the great questions are short!” and the angel said, “Look in the Torah.” That was it.

Now every year, in anticipation of the High Holy Days, I read the Torah again anyway to see which of the words I have read a thousand times still speak to me with an urgency worthy of the season, but this year I returned to collect the questions in the Torah. On doing so, I realized how few questions there really are. There is, after all, not much dialogue in the Torah, and questions come only from dialogue. As I searched these relatively few questions, I came to the further realization that the best questions in the Torah are the shortest ones. In fact, the shortest questions are, I believe, the greatest not just in that text but in life.
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Updated Friday, December 28, 2001

Don’t Vouch for Vouchers

An ill wind is blowing. It is an old wind, of course, for LX Roman Catholics with their extensive parochial school presence have long sought public money for their private schools. Now, there is an added thrust to the old storm because (1) many in the Radical Religious Right would like to abolish the public schools altogether and (2) the elite who are sending their own children to private schools anyway are joining the chorus who are singing out for vouchers. The following statements raise important and compelling rea­sons against them. The first is by the staff of Americans United for Separation of Church and State with Joseph L. Coon and Rob Boston being primarily responsible for it: and the second is by the Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Dr. James M. Dunn.

• PRIVATE SCHOOL VOUCHERS: MYTH vs. FACT
• REFLECTIONS BY JAMES M. DUNN

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Countering the Language of Assault Without Compromising the First Amendment

This is a statement made by participants in the Maston Colloquium convened by the Center for Christian Ethics on May 7,1996 in Dallas, Texas. The name honors Dr. T. B. Maston for his pioneering work in Christian ethics as a teacher, writer, and prophetic leader. The names of the participants responsible for drafting this statement are affixed.

We are a company of concerned Christians deeply disturbed by  the rising tide of hate talk now permeating America s air­waves and public discourse.

With blatant disregard for truth and decency, these practitioners of the language of assault cultivate contempt for basic American institutions and values and constitute a significant danger to our national well-being.
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Lest We Forget
Franklin H Littell

• Contempt for History
  College teachers are generally agreed that one of the most dismaying things about today’s incoming students is their lack of a consciousness of history. One former student, a high school teacher himself, has suggested that this vacuum exists because many high school courses in history are taught by former coaches with fallen arches who can no longer do the work they were hired for.

• The Mysterious “Taggant”
  Few readers will remember, but the Anti-Terrorism Bill that recently cleared Congress included one arcane but highly important clause. That clause was the requirement that ammunition carry identification (“finger-prints”).

• Vulgarity and Civility in Politics
  Following the State of the Union Address of the President of the United States, the watching public had an appalling demonstration of incivility. It was also a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, of disrespect for the highest office in the land.

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Book Reviews
by Darold H. Morgan

• The Trivialization of God by  Donald M. McCullough
• Dictatorship of Virtue “Multiculturism and the Battle for Americas Future” by Richard Berstein
• Burden of a Secret by Jimmy Allen

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Ethics Quotes Worth Saving

Let me tell you about Leonard C. Broughton. It was my privilege to be with him a week at Frederick, Maryland, within less than a year of his death. I do not know how many of you knew Leonard G. Broughton, the founder of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta. I did love to hear him preach in evan­gelistic services. I was the Bible expositor in the morning sessions. We slept in the same room. About the end of the week he said, “Adams, I have been listening to you; you are right.”

I had been talking about Jesus among men. He said, “I have a story to tell you out of my own life that gathers up all you have taught.
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