Church Membership

Here's a really good article by Matt Chandler on the biblical nature of church membership. What's the big deal about church membership, you may ask? Well, Chandler makes a good case from scripture that church membership exists in order to accomplish the following:

1. Encourage and enable Christians to submit to spiritual authority.
2. Receive spiritual care and encouragement from people in spiritually authoritative positions.
3. Keep each other accountable and restore fallen brothers through church disciplinary procedures.
4. Use church discipline and accountability to keep the church pure and undefiled.
5. Track growth - both physical and spiritual.
6. Creates a means for addressing physical and spiritual concerns within the church.
7. Creates an avenue for providing for and ministering to church members in need.
8. Keeps the body spiritually accountable to one another.

The list could go on quite a bit further, but that's pretty much what Chandler covers. Good stuff. If you're at a church and not a member, join up! It'll be good for you, both as a person and as a follower of Jesus.

Road to the World Series

Haha. I was putting together the children's bulletin for this week at Riverview and came across this maze. Each week we include a maze in the bulletin which I usually pull off of Google. I trim down any outward components to the maze to make it pretty generic. I got this one, cropped it down, and then realized that there was no solution to the maze. Hence the joke about going through the maze to get the cubs to a world series title. Haha.

Psalm 127

Here's the latest installment of our Genevan Psalms at Riverview this summer. Actually it's not the latest installment, as we've used two others since my last "Psalms" post. But it's the latest one that I've had an influence on, anyway.

For this Psalm, the idea was to have a men's group sing it. Kerry Glewwe and I worked on some syncopation and parts that deviated a bit from the original, mostly just to jazz the arrangement up and give it some life. Kerry came up with most of the parts. Then we included Eric Moteberg in the mix, and this is how it came out.

Psalm 127 by fatsjoel

We toyed around with a bunch of different ways of singing the psalm: a round, phrase extensions, modulations, etc., but in the end, time constraints forced us to keep it relatively simple. We ended up taking turns with the melody on the first verse, breaking it up into parts for verses 2 and 3, and then going back to the first verse again in unison, but also raising the melody up a step. I'm beginning to get an appreciation for the language of the psalms (ever tried to sing the word "quiver"? It ain't easy!). As is usually the case with live recordings, I thought it sounded better when we sang it than the recording makes it sound, but oh well.

The lyrics are below, and you can compare our arrangement to the original here.

UPDATE: You can also see a video of the rendition here.

Unless the Lord will build the house
It's builders toil in useless pain
The city's keepers watch in vain
Unless the Lord, it's cause espouse
No enterprise shall have success
Unless the Lord decides to bless

'Tis vain to waken in the dark
To start one's daily enterprise
And slave till night to realize
One's sustenance by endless work
For God, his gifts on us, will heap
To his beloved he gives sleep

Lo, sons are precious gifts from him
The body's fruit is his reward
The sons of youth like arrows guard
The man whose quiver's full of them
He shall be mighty in the gate
No foes shall enter his estate

Too Loud

I really dig this picture.

I took it during the Kaposia Days parade, which goes right down our street. Jamie was on the curb with a bunch of other kids from church, trying to collect as much candy as he could from the people in the parade. At one point, a group of guys on motorcycles came driving by in circles. They were pretty loud, and Ferg seems to have an aversion to even semi-loud noises recently. He thought the motorcycles were cool, but he wasn't much of a fan of the loud exhaust.

Potato Gun

Grr. This is one of those things I wish they had when I was a kid. Or maybe they did, but if they did I have never seen one before.

I bought two of these today at the Kaposia Days carnival. It's a potato gun. A little hand held piece of plastic that, when shoved into a potato, removes a small piece of the potato as a projectile and uses air pressure to shoot the "small fry" at whom or whatever you wish. I love it. It's incredibly fun and addicting to use. On the walk home from the carnival I just kept shoving it into the potato and shooting it at the kids. They loved it. It doesn't hurt at all, and it's a lot of fun. All one needs to use the thing is a potato, or other hard vegetable (like carrots, although I haven't tried anything but a potato yet). It probably shoots 20 feet or so. I had the whole potato pretty much done by the time we got home.