This week marks our seventh week in the Uncommon Truth for Common People project, a church-wide Bible reading project for the year 2012 through the Daily Companion Bible. This week’s theme is hospitality. This week’s reading schedule is:

• Mon., Feb. 13 – Matthew 25:31-46; 1 Peter 4:7-11
• Tues., Feb. 14 – Luke 14:1-24; 24:13-36; Hebrews 13:1-3
• Wed., Feb. 15 – Acts 2:42-47; 21:1-6; 28:1-10; 3 John
• Thur., Feb. 16 – Acts 16
• Fri., Feb. 17 – James 2:14-26; 1 John 3:16-24

This week’s memory verse is: “… provide for their journey in a way that honors God.” (3 John 6b)

Advice: Best Advice I Ever Got

“… we asked a host of influential leaders to share with us the wise words that changed their lives forever.”

Bible reading: Reading the Bible for Understanding and Not Just Information [quote]

“One enemy of good reading is confusion about which mode of attention is appropriate to a given book. I am certain that this very confusion makes it almost impossible for anyone to read—genuinely to read—the Bible. In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings. “Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.” (Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.99)

Churches of Christ: * 102,000 fewer people in the pews since ’03: Churches of Christ in decline * Why Should I Stay?

* “Another striking number: 708 fewer Churches of Christ in the U.S. in the last nine years. The nation’s 12,447 congregations represent a 5.4 percent decline since 2003.”

* “… this is an important question for any Christian Fellowship to answer: ‘why should I stay?”

Compassion: Seeing Her by Richard Beck

“Two weeks ago I was asked by our Psychology Club to share a few thoughts for their Club chapel. The theme for the chapel this semester is to share about characters in the Bible who have affected or inspired your spiritual walk. I selected the unnamed concubine from Judges 19. Judges 19 is, perhaps, the most horrific episode in the Bible. I expect this may be the first, last and only time the students hear a message from this text. I started by reading the whole chapter. When I ended it was pretty quiet in the room.”

Criticism: A Passing Thought on Receiving Criticism by Dane Ortlund

“Seems to me there are two wrong ways to receive criticism and one right way.”

Garbage/trash: What’s In Your Trash? [infographic]

“The average family of four throws out 880 pounds of food a year; that’s about the weight of an adult cow.”

Immaturity: “I’m Not Being Fed” (and other stupid things Christians say) by Brian Jones

“Show me someone who keeps whining about not singing enough worship songs, or “being fed,” or doesn’t want the church to focus on evangelism, or missions, or feeding the poor, or singing secular music on Sunday, and I’ll show you a freakishly immature Christian. The sad, and sometimes scary thing, is that 99 times out of 100 they simply don’t realize it.”

Men & women: On Jesus’ Choosing Twelve Males by J. Daniel Kirk

“According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near. And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.”

Politics & race: Race, Politics, and Christianity in the American South by Richard Beck

“… sociologist Bradley Wright cites statistics that show evangelical Christians to be one of the most racist groups in America. To be sure, only a minority of evangelicals fall into this category, but relative to other Christian groups as well as to non-Christians evangelical Christians are the most likely to hold a candidate’s race against them in a political election. And as most people know, evangelicals tend to vote Republican and are plentiful across the American South. This racist strain in southern Christianity greatly disturbs me as I encounter it frequently where I live. So what changed in the South? … The American Civil Rights Movement.”

Prayer: Six Ways to Help People Pray by Michael McKinley

“Pray big prayers. Think beyond the hospital visitation list. Pray prayers that reflect God’s sovereignty over the whole world. Pray for the spread of the gospel in foreign nations; pray for an end to human trafficking worldwide; pray for religious freedoms to spring up in oppressive regimes.”

Singing: Singing in Worship – Cause or Response? by Paul Smith

“You see, we teach that our songs and prayers and sermons and fellowship are all “worship.” We go to extravagant lengths to make the “worship” meaningful. But, if we have not prepared the gift long before we arrive, all we are doing is manipulating our fickle human emotions with gimmicks, whether we use instruments, praise teams or simple acappella singing.”

Singles: One’s a Crowd by Eric Klineberg

“More people live alone now than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant.”

Visitors: 6 Reasons Why I Do Not Attend Your Congregation by Chris Gallagher

“This is written from the perspective of a visitor. Last year, my family and I took the entire month of February away from local ministry and traveled to various congregations, both near and far, and enjoyed some time visiting. We learned much about the attitudes of congregations towards visitors and it is reflected in the words below.”

With our next post in this series (this coming Mon., Feb. 13), we’ll zoom into a close examination of the key words and concepts regarding elders as given in 1 Timothy 3.1-7; 5.17-22; Titus 1.5-9, and 1 Peter 5.1-5. However, with this post I’d like to pause one last moment with our wide-angle leans and note an ancient Christian description of the qualities of one fit to serve as an elder. It is a portion (6.1-3) of Polycarp‘s letter to the Philippians, written probably between 120-140 A.D. Polycarp, born about the time of the death of the apostle Paul, was an elder in the church at Smyrna and was martyred for his faith in Christ about 155 A.D. Smyrna is located just a few miles from Ephesus, where Timothy was ministering when Paul wrote to him the letter we now know as 1 Timothy.

I include this excerpt here for three reasons: (1) so we can notice the strong similarity between Polycarps’s words and the words of Paul in 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1, and elsewhere, (2) to shed additional light on how the church in its earliest years understood the qualities and role of elders, and (3) simply as additional food for thought. The translation that follows is that of Cyril C. Richardson in his work entitled Early Christian Fathers (p.133-134). Other translations are available elsewhere online.

“Also the presbyters must be compassionate, merciful to all, turning back those who have gone astray, looking after the sick, not neglecting widow or orphan or one that is poor; but ‘always taking thought for what is honorable in the sight of all men of God and of men,’ refraining from all anger, partiality, unjust judgment, keeping far from all love of money, not hastily believing evil of anyone, nor being severe in judgment, knowing that we all owe the debt of sin.

If, then, we pray the Lord to forgive us, we ourselves ought also to forgive; for we are before the eyes of the Lord and God, and ‘everyone shall stand before the judgment seat of Christ and each of us shall give an account of himself.’

So then let us ‘serve him with fear and all reverence, as he himself has commanded, and also the apostle who preached the gospel to us and the prophets who foretold the coming of the Lord. Let us be zealous for that which is good, refraining from occasions of scandal and from false brethren, and those who bear in hypocrisy the name of the Lord, who deceive empty-headed people.”