"Gilead" a novel of grace and love

I just finished reading the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It is the story of an elderly Congregationalist pastor in Gilead, Iowa, who was widowed but late in life he married again and had a small son. He knows he will die soon, so he writes to his little boy his life story. It's about life in the midwestern United States in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. Simple yet complex, humorous yet sad, scandalous yet full of God's grace. A story of true love. My favorite line: "Grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways."

Hearbreak over death of pastor

This is a picture of Dr. Fred Winters, the late pastor of First Baptist Church, Maryville, Illinois, his wife Cindy and their daughters, taken from their church website.
Winters was shot to death this morning by a gunman at his church.
My heart breaks for this family in this time of loss. What a senseless tragedy. Winters served the church for over 20 years and saw it grow from 32 to over 1,200 in attendance. Pray for strength for the Winters family, the church family in Maryville, and for God to be glorified through this faithful pastor's death as he was through his life.
It is part of the Christian gospel message that God is able to take death and bring life and forgiveness from it. May our nation turn to the only real hope we have in Jesus Christ.

And the Shofar Blew

I just finished reading And the Shofar Blew by Francine Rivers.
In the Old Testament, the prophets called people to repentance by blowing the shofar, or ram's horn, and calling for a sacred assembly. In Rivers's novel, the shofar is the horn on a semi truck that almost hits a man head-on, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
All Christians can fall into the ways of the world, and in this story, it's a pastor of a fast-growing church who falls into the ways of the world, blinded by ambition, and eventually he...well, I'll let you read the book and find out. The book was written in 2004, before the famous fall of Ted Haggard, yet in some ways reminds me of Haggard. In other ways, the pastor reminds me of the watered-down Christianity of Joel Osteen, although Osteen has not fallen as far as the Pastor Paul Hudson, the main character in the book.
Interestingly, a pastor named "David" has an adulterous affair, and a pastor named "Paul" has a Damascus Road experience, and a church elder named "Samuel" tries to warn him before his fall, and a faithful church member named "Steven" is hurt and in affect martyred because of the pastor's ambition. Francine Rivers knows how to use Biblical names with great symbolism in her novels. It reminds me of her use of Hosea in her novel, Redeeming Love.
This book is truly a wake-up call for pastors and church leaders. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad my wife, who had already read the book, said to me, "You're not like that jerk." But I'm still glad I read the book as a reminder of the pitfalls to avoid.

Faster Pastor

I'm competing in the annual "Faster Pastor" race at Oglethorpe Speedway Park in Pooler, Georgia on Friday, June 13.

Here's a picture of me getting a feel for the stock car that I will be driving, which belongs to church member David Smith.

Tickets are $12, available at the church office and also on Sundays at the Welcome Center of the church. Our church gets 50% of the ticket sale, and I'm donating the proceeds to the building fund for our church's new children's building.

Posts worth reading around the blogosphere

John Piper, famous author and pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, reflects on the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Joe McKeever in New Orleans tells it like it is to a church leader who wants to get rid of the pastor because the leader has lost control.

World magazine reports and World magazine readers discuss the news that teenagers in the church are more sexually immoral than those outside the church.

Blogger Kevin Bussey, who runs a blog called "Confessions of a Recovering Pharisee," is having a contest kind of like the Regional NCAA Basketball playoffs, only he is having bloggers vote for their favorite Baptist blogger in regions of the country, which he names the "Billy Graham Region," "Paige Patterson Region," "Adrian Rogers Region," and "Lottie Moon Region."

"Get Religion" discusses how the American news media (which doesn't get religion) has failed to report on the story of the Korean Christian missionaries taken captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan.