The Secret Small Churches Know Best; France's anti-Semitic attack problem...more

The Secret Small Churches Know Best
...We have another, better way to respond to our small church’s manifest weakness and fragility. Yes, prayerfully improve what we can. Yes, plead with God for conversions. And then receive — as a gift from God — the manifest weakness of our small church in our small place.

Every church, big or little, urban or rural, is utterly dependent upon its Head. Without Christ’s sustaining grace, no church will last, or have any lasting impact. Every church must receive and reckon with this knowledge. But the particular gift God gives to small churches in small places is that their weakness is so very evident.

Your weakness cannot hide behind an excellent band, or a beautiful new building, or the excitement generated by packing 1,000+ people into a big room. It can’t hide behind a large budget surplus, or big cash reserves. And if your small, unimpressive church is plopped down in the middle of an equally small, unimpressive town, you will also be denied the pleasures of what E.B. White once called (in his 1949 essay “Here Is New York”) “the excitement of participation” — the sense of belonging to something “unique, cosmopolitan, mighty, and unparalleled.” As a small church in a small place, you won’t have access to the illusion of greatness through proximity. Your church’s weakness will be evident to you and to all – and this is God’s gift...

No, We’re Not All Doomed by Earth’s Magnetic Field Flip
Many times over our planet’s history, Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed, meaning that sometimes a compass pointing north will be aimed at Antarctica rather than the Arctic. This might sound strange, but it’s a relatively predictable quirk. Powered by the machinations of the planet’s spinning iron core, this process of geomagnetic reversal has been doing its thing without much fanfare for eons.

That is, until this week, when a book excerpt describing the phenomenon appeared online. Shortly afterward, numerous websites began trumpeting the doomsday around the corner, a geomagnetic apocalypse in which tumors run rampant, satellites fall from the sky, and life on Earth will cease to exist as we know it.

True, life on Earth almost certainly will be different than it is today in multiple thousands of years. But will these polar acrobatics have much to do with that?...

Exploring France's anti-Semitic attack problem
The attack on Monday against a Jewish schoolboy indicates France's growing problem with anti-Semitism. In the latest incident, an 8-year-old boy was walking to an evening class just outside Paris when he was set upon by two teenagers.

It’s far from an exceptional case. Earlier this month, a Jewish store in Paris was targeted by arsonists and a 15-year-old Jewish girl had her face slashed around the same neighborhood as where this boy has now been attacked. In another incident last September, a Jewish family was held hostage as a gang ransacked their home looking for hidden jewelry and money (a typical anti-Semitic trope is that Jews horde expensive items)...